needlesandnilbogs

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“A trans man owning an IKEA blahaj is cultural appropriation” chat we used to throw bricks at cops

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add yours!

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Friends to lovers --> boo, basic, everyone's seen it before

Lovers to best friends with an even stronger bond because they both realized they were aromantic -> new, way cooler, yay, i would pay all i have (2 pennies and a button) to see it

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has YOUR favorite fictional woman over the age of 30 experienced fandom misogyny from people who are mad at Their Mom From Real Life? call our offices, toll-free, day or night. we're the nation's #1 law firm that specializes in defending adult women who make choices and have character traits. if the prosecution has started calling her a selfish bitch, pick up the phone today!!!

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don’t abandon joy because it is brief. don’t commit to solitude because happiness is fleeting. it’s okay that good things do not last forever. it’s okay to simply enjoy a thing for as long as you have it.

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I'm beginning to think that making visibly corrupt weapons contractors a load baring pillar of our economy might not have been a great idea.

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you have to be able to defend people who are receiving unjust treatment even if they annoy you even if you personally find them extremely annoying you still have to be able to stand up and say "well thats fucked up"

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What are your thoughts on commenting with a goal to motivate author to write more?

I know there are not thought-crimes but I'm kinda feeling unsure about myself rn. There is a fic that I really liked and I think about rereading it. It also wasn't updated in quite some time and I know that generally authors are often motivated by comments

I'm thinking about making comments as I reread and the put them into the chapters. The thing is, my biggest motivation with it is to encourage author to write more and it makes me feel, idk, slimy? Like, they wouldn't know that that's why I commented and they would be just normal comments (+ I never ever even put anything vagueing about updates like "I can't wait to see how it will turn out!" or something, so I'd certainly not be pushy about it) but still I feel bad like I'm manipulating the author :/

So, yeah. Basically, do feel like underlying motivations matter if there is no discernible difference between the comments?

If you do a good thing for a selfish reason, is the thing still good?

From that author's perspective, I'd say probably.

If I received a slew of comments on one of my fics, I'd be elated. Depending on how many spoons I had, I'd even reply to them all.

It might or might not motivate me to continue writing, though. If I don't have an idea for where to go next then receiving a comment likely won't get me past that block.

As long as you're content with just brightening someone's day without a guarantee that it'll get you what you want in the end, then I say have at it. To paraphrase a post I saw on my dash recently, a rich man who builds an orphanage because of his own selfish reasons has still given orphans a place to go.

That's how I see it, but let's see what the rest of the blog thinks.

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Ask game: 5, 8 and 32!

ask game:

5. What’s the fic you’re most proud of?

not necessarily for writing purposes but I'm probably most proud of the city spies fic i wrote the night before book 4 came out that correctly predicted an event in book 6 and got a frankly scary number of details correct. that is my crowning achievement in fandom ever lol

8. Which character(s) do you find easiest to write?

Kat (she thinks like me canonically so i don't need to think as much about getting the tone right), arada (i basically just write her like me too lol), and mb (its narration is surprisingly easy to mimic with a little practice)

32. Summarize a random fic of yours in 10 words or less.

uhhhhhh i picked up mirrorverse again today so most recent mirrorverse fic (future): mirror amena goes to school. mirror arada and ratthi suffer.

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the collection *should* be open for posting tho if you already know how to post to an ao3 collection. it will be unrevealed till whenever in july i said i was doing reveals

not going on exchange blog rn to post this cause i'm both lazy and not interested in perma-archiving my failures but for any of the ppl writing for the city spies exchange i WILL make a post before wednesday night with info about posting and i'm sorry that hasn't happened yet

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not going on exchange blog rn to post this cause i'm both lazy and not interested in perma-archiving my failures but for any of the ppl writing for the city spies exchange i WILL make a post before wednesday night with info about posting and i'm sorry that hasn't happened yet

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There’s being queer/lgbt+ and there’s not being that and then there’s a grey area in between the two and I’m still inviting those people to the party tbh

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Yuma, Past & Future

Some more versions of the art I made for this ask game prompt! On the left is Yuma in the earlier part of her timeline, and on the right is her future self.

This took me a full week because I drew it paper doll style, with fully drawn bodies under the clothes, and in two separate versions!

I've been wanting to do a before/after version of Yuma for a while, because of the potential it has for her story. Elaboration under the cut since it got long!

At the start of her story, Yuma is living on a backwater asteroid in a particularly dismal corner of the Corporation Rim, eking out a living as a mechanic, deep in debt. She's trapped and just trying to survive, without much of a future to look forward to.

But then an act of kindness comes back around, and Crowbar, the SecUnit she freed and secretly shipped off the asteroid to give it a chance at a better life, returns to offer her a future in return! And she leaves her life behind to travel with it to Preservation, where she doesn't have to work herself to death, and has time to rest and get medical care and be healthier than she has in years.

An important part of that for me is that she gains some weight, now that she is in a place where everyone is provided with enough food to eat! And also starts using a cane, because she's been living on a low-gravity asteroid for a decade or so and the transition back to what is considered "standard" gravity is hard on her joints. Because weight gain and mobility aids being symbols of growth & being in a better place is fun and cool!

(On a personal note: I have the experience of gaining weight and watching my body change and celebrating it as a marker of progress towards better health, but also having the complicated feelings of perceiving my body differently now that it's less thin. So this is something I want to see more often, and to put into my own art.)

Hence the paper dolls—so I could show the changes in her body as well as in the way she dresses herself. And it was totally worth the time it took to draw the same character basically 4 separate times lol.

While I'm here, a list of things I am very proud of in this drawing:

Finishing it at all! it was a big project and I got pretty stuck in the middle, but I stuck it out!

Possibly the best pair of feet I have ever drawn (and TWO good looking pairs of shoes!)

Drawing the plaid on that flannel BY HAND

The anatomy and the fabric folds!! Shoutout to the Morpho books I finally pulled off my shelf and looked at (Fat & Skin Folds and Clothing Folds & Creases), which helped me so much with realistic body shapes and how to drape clothing over them. I feel like I really leveled up my drawing skills with the effort I put into doing this well!

Also, Yuma & Crowbar's story in fic form can be found here on AO3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/50659984

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I dunno man. I found out today that a subway sandwich is $14 now. A shitty subway footlong sandwich that isn't actually 12 inches long and is occasionally made with expired ingredients and was never a great option to start with. I ate those in high school because I was broke and at the mall a lot.

There are poke bowls in my city from a local place for $16. Super fresh fish and veg, warm rice, more than I can eat in one sitting, for the price of a sandwich and a drink at america's most mid-tier sandwich shop.

Someone in another post said (paraphrased) you used to be able to get something mediocre for cheap, but now the mediocre things cost as much as the nice things so why would you?

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YUMA YUMA YUMA YUMA YUMA I LOVE HER I LOVE HER I LOVE HER

🦺 for Yuma and Crowbar!

🦺 - character’s work uniform or work outfit (OC drawing studies ask game)

Thank you for the prompt, this was so fun! I spent a full week drawing two different versions of Yuma, so Crowbar is going to get left out of this one for now lol.

Left: Yuma's old work clothes are pretty worn down. She can't afford new ones often, so most of them are a bit scuffed or stained and have been mended where they can be to get a little more life out of them. That jacket has been with her for many, many years before she gives it to Crowbar to help it to disguise itself as human.

Right: After leaving with Crowbar for Preservation, Yuma has the support she needs to take better care of herself, and that includes nicer clothes that fit her better! She also gets a cane, to help with joint pain caused by higher gravity than she'd gotten used to.

I always picture her with her hair tied back in some kind of bun, or just pulled away from her face by a bandana or scarf. On Preservation she might have time to make it look a little nicer, though. (Although I think she's still the type to tie it back as quickly and messily as possible when there's work to be done, lol.)

Btw, Crowbar still has that jacket and if I do ever draw its version of this prompt, it'll be wearing it :)

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“You don’t know whether people relate to the breakfast program, because you’ve never fed anybody. You don’t know anything about the free health clinic because you never asked anybody. You don’t know anything about the good that a gun does you, because you never tried one. And we say that if you was born and if you said you didn’t like pears and you never tasted pears, you’d have to be a liar. You don’t know whether you like pears, but you can’t claim that you don’t like pears. The only way that anybody can tell you the taste of a pear is if he himself has tasted it. That’s the only way. That’s the objective reality. That’s what the Black Panther Party deals with. We’re not metaphysicians, we’re not idealists, we’re dialectical materialists. And we deal with what reality is, whether we like it or not.”

— Fred Hampton speaking about how you must practice your theory, or else it’s irrelevant, 1969.

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went to the cleveland art museum & they have a maghreb exhibit that was entirely jewish + amazigh art :-) i was really pleasantly surprised

these mitpachat and the b'niqa are 19th century algerian jewish crafted + were my favorites