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Mellifluous Loquacity:

Mellifluous: honey-like, sweet

Loquacity: using way too many words, gabbing excessively…

I think this is an Oxymoron, because after a certain amount of time, even if your voice and eloquent speaking is excessive, over time too much becomes annoying, and you either run away screaming or selectively can’t hear the droning sound…

Or it could be a back-handed compliment wherein you’re saying something nice but simultaneously indicating it is too much of something nice…

why the fuck does english have a word for

but not for “the day after tomorrow”

???

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I’m sorry NOT sorry these are the funniest tags I’ve seen…

My 11-month male cat lets my foster kittens nurse on him.

(Source)

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I just solve this whole trouble by being time blind.

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OK everyone

I plan to keep my IronStrange/Iron Man/Dr.Strange shrine going here, but it’s not making me money. I will try to get back to it once I get used to doing my (hopefully) money-making venture with @hyperdigifocus.art across social media…

So head’s up, I’m making a separate blog/profile with my Hyperdigifocus.Art (hopefully) business. Links to follow soon.

I hope you can visit me and support me! I’m jumping in with both feet, holding on for dear life to a giant boulder, with intentions of monetizing social media and maybe getting paid for some commissions…

It’s been 2 years since I dragged my ass out of a dark hole, so wish me luck!

❤️❤️❤️ I LOVE YOU ALL! Thanks for being here for me, when I was here…

Here is my (technically 2nd, but) 1st official promotion of a 3-minute music video I’ve been collaborating on with @ digitalsodamusic. I’ve done a total of two instructional/promo videos for the song and my accompanying video. The video has my original animations, and some photo/video-editing. The song is “Alley Kat” by digitalsodamusic. I hope you can subscribe to my YouTube channel! Did I mention this video is all cats, feline, kitteh, etc?

P.S.: Almost completed the 3-minute music video, just some minor editing and credits for those whose cats I video/photo-edited. Let me know what you think of the Part 1 and Part 2 of my instructional/promotional mini-videos. They are no more than 2 minutes long.

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Sadly, I understand completely.

i’m all sex positive and shit but i’m begging you. do not make your characters over 30 fuck on the floor. please. think of their lower backs. their knees. have some empathy 🙏

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I think of this. I’ve been away for a while. Slowly coming back. Working on things, although sadly not much IronStrange material. I’m drawing for a living. Starting to. Have had a few successes.

I don’t know who still knows me out there, I know I’ve lost a lot of people’s interest since I left. It’s hard to come back because it seemed like I had so many followers and then I lost them. Then I came back again for a while and then disappeared. I can’t keep up. Mental Health issues, mostly.

I think I’m going to start a new blog. I’ll leave this one here, and hope to get back to my OTP and my favourite shipping at some point! 😆😆😆 But for now, the new blog will just be my non-related art I’ve been working on.

Terrified as heck but gaining a bit of confidence now that I’ve sold a couple things. I’ve got my hands full with 3 projects: illustrations for a children’s book, a video for some music, and someone wants a portrait of a beloved dog that’s gone over the Rainbow Bridge…. And then there’s my own stuff…

lol I stayed up all night! It’s almost 6am! lol

online communities are so strange because people slip away so easily. you can be on here for years, folding people you've never met into the fabric of your daily life, and then they disappear, leaving only ghost posts scattered across tumblr behind. or their blog stays dormant, for weeks, months, years, until you're only still following them because you remember that they love sunflowers or they were kind to you when they didn't have to be or the last thing they posted was sad and raw and you still worry about them sometimes.

and sometimes they come back when you least expect it, years later, even, and there's this sudden rush of relief like there you are, there you are, even though you barely knew each other.

there's a strange kind of love to it. i don't know you and i want to hold your hand across miles and time zones and oceans. i can still see the imprint of you in this community you left. you don't anyone will notice or care when you're gone, but we notice and we care and we wish you well.

i hope you're all okay out there. i hope the sun is shining on your face and you are breathing deeply. i miss you.

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On ai- I think one of the main distinctions between editing something and having ai produce it is one requires. Effort, and actual time/thought behind it. Spending a minute feeding a database prompts until you get something you want is nothing compared to the countless hours put into a piece, be it writing/art/etc

You could argue that by virtue of posting something online, people sort of sign away on what people do with their art, but even in such cases you cannot deny that ai companies went about collecting data in malicious and deceptive ways- often without any time to genuinely revoke consent.

With ai art, people can replicate someone's style, which can then threaten their own personal brand/livelihood. This becomes more apparent when you know that a major part of the actors strike was specifically against ai owning the rights to people's image/voice indefinitely. An actors entire workplace existence hinges upon the fact that they will be paid to be somewhere and say and do something- this gives them the security of an income, but it also gives them the right to turn down any works they don't agree with/don't want to be a part of. By removing the actual *actor* from acting, the company can get away with not having to actually pay someone, let alone pay someone a living wage

I think the biggest reason I, and many others, are against ai, is for the same exact reason people would be against reposting art instead of reblogging, or the reason we used to get all the warnings against online piracy: it will directly hurt the creators that spent countless hours working on something. The difference between piracy and ai, however, is ai hurts creators that are just like you, and your community, and it will continue to do so if left unchecked

It is a very big win that ai generated works cannot be copywrited, bc it means that people will not be able to profit off of something they did not truly make. It would be unreasonable for someone to launch a TV show where the premise was ai, or the script itself, or the actors, and then try to claim ownership over it, and insist that they make a profit off of it, that no one else can use it, when in truth they had no part in the actual creating of the show

This is kinda a mess, and im open to more discussion/providing links to stuff mentioned later, but hopefully this is kind of an insight into why ai isn't. The best

Yes! Thanks for the discussion!

I think you’re responding to my previous post: https://www.tumblr.com/oo0-will-of-the-wisp-0oo/748487000957550592/any-of-my-people-interested-in-discussing-ai

If I were to use AI, I would be 100% honest about. Also I would charge less in most cases.

The reason being is it feels to me like it is providing me with images/information, and therefore helps me save time. I prefer to use it as a tool, though rather than use it as a means to an end. At least with the few AI I’ve experimented with, I’ve noticed that the program/algorithm kind of does a half-ass job on it’s own and the final piece would need to be edited to my satisfaction - especially text prompts. Using only text-prompts produces pretty substandard results. I find whatever the AI spits out usually needs to be edited, sometimes rather extensively, or else it’s unusable. And it takes up more time than I like for the program to process. I don’t just want to text-prompt and keep whatever gets developed.

There are some AI that you can use a photo or drawing of your own as reference. AI Arta is one of these. I’m playing around with Bing and Picsart, too. And of course EVERY app seems to be providing its users with its own AI (although usually using original products such as Dall-E or Midjourney, is what I find)…

Also, my original link on my blog said AI can’t be copyrighted… However I’ve found at least Dall-E allows you to make a profit: “Subject to the Content Policy and Terms, you own the images you create with DALL·E, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise — regardless of whether an image was generated through a free or paid credit. Oct 29, 2023” - although perhaps this still doesn’t mean it’s under your own copyright… I’m not sure about that.

I’ll just finish this reply to you saying I think everyone should keep discussing AI. Thanks again for your own input. I figure the more it’s talked about, the more we’ll figure out how to use it. I don’t want to snub people who are completely for or against it. I WANT to hear what people think about it. If I learn something I didn’t know before because of keeping an open mind, that’s a good thing.

Hope what I’m writing is comprehensible, it’s after 5am. I should get to sleep! lol

Here’s a website where the opinion is that AI won’t “take over” people’s jobs/artistry, but it will make their jobs more efficient for them.

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Any of my people interested in discussing AI ethics/legalities?

Here’s a link for interest: https://zapier.com/blog/ai-ethics/

I wasn’t aware that AI-created images cannot be copyrighted… Which, I believe, would imply that AI images cannot be bought and sold legally? The reason being that AI pulls everything it uses from the internet, and some internet images are copyrighted.

There are some AI companies/apps being sued. I’ve been researching and experimenting with AI, and it seems confusing sometimes.

Is it not just a tool to be used? If one heavily re-edits something, does that make it “new” and therefore make it original and copyrighted??? 🤔🤔🤔

I mean, Duchamp and a bunch of other artists took some original art, changed it, and then displayed it as their own. Even Andy Warhol made prints of images that were copyrighted and made them his.

Is AI not helping us do the same?? I feel like AI is going to bring us right round to the question of “What is Art?” again…

Thoughts? Opinions? Facts?

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I love the Ode to Robot Chicken vibes… ❤️😆❤️

Photographs That Show Action Figures Interacting with Everyday Objects

Japan, Osaka-based photographer Hotkenobi stages action figures in real life settings to create a series of quirky photographers.

Keep reading

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Suddenly I feel a little less guilty. To be honest, I didn’t mind doing a majority of the cooking at first. But my husband would get sick often and get hospitalized quite often.

Also I’m isolated from my immediate and extended family a province away. I was estranged from my parents for a while (until my mom passed away, then I could actually have normal conversations with my dad without her in control all the time - long story, let’s just say being in my family was a lot like being water trying to put out an oil fire)… Same with my husband. No familial support,

So, overall, I’m slowly coming out of this burnout and starting to make simple meals again, and so is my husband. We still order out a lot, maybe too much. But we’re slowly starting to eat more healthy.

lol Both of us having ADHD doesn’t help, either! 😂😝😝

So thanks, OP, hearing all that makes me feel so much better. ❤️❤️❤️

For those who have overactive guilt complexes like me…

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👏👏👏 Aha! Well, damn! This was an amazing perspective! Thank you @tryslora ❤️❤️❤️

On Writing Combat and Sex Scenes

Today I want to talk about writing sex and combat (and no, I do not mean combative sex). This post is inspired by a few recent events:

Once, a long time ago, I read a blog post that said “if you can write a combat scene, you can write a sex scene” and that was mind-blowing for me because while I was well-versed in writing erotica, I couldn’t write combat to save my life.

More recently, at Boskone, I participated on a panel about writing combat, and the research involved there-in.

Even more recently, I had someone look at me say, “You’re not a gay guy. How do you write gay sex scenes?”

So. Let’s begin.

I get it—sex and combat aren’t interchangeable. But at their core, they have some strong similarities which can be leveraged while writing. Both are intense, high drama, and can involve a lot of anxiety and quick thought. Both tend to narrow focus down to the moment and the current feeling and action. Both are heightened emotion and physical reaction. Both can involve actions that lie outside the author’s personal experience.

I started writing erotica when I was a freshman in college. I posted it online (does anyone remember rec.arts.erotica?) and was surprised (and pleased) by the compliments I received. Turned out my readers were not expecting the idea of emotion being entangled in their erotica. They were invested emotionally in how the stories went, and how my characters felt. Since I was writing from the point of view that made sense to me at the time, they were het stories from a female perspective, and they were very focused on the emotional connections and how the physical events heightened those emotions.

Male readers were surprised by the intensity of the feelings that these stories gave them (as opposed to pure arousal). It got me thinking about how I wrote, and why I wrote, and I tried to talk about it some at the time. I was eighteen. I was still a new writer. The internet itself was new. I wasn’t entirely certain how to frame it, but I remember getting one comment where a guy was surprised at how struck he’d been by the moment in the scene where everything shuddered to a halt due to an event in the story that interrupted the action, and I replied that that was because I wasn’t writing about the sex. I was writing about the character’s reaction to the sex.

Which has always been how I write. At the time, that was my only tool: put myself in the character’s mind, and write what they feel. If that’s affection and attraction and physical reaction, write that. Tangle it up, and hope the reader feels that entanglement.

Now, fast forward several years, and take a little side trip onto a tangent wherein I learned something very important about writing craft.

I was reading Syne Mitchell’s End in Fire, I think it was, and I kept having panic attacks. Now, I did most of my reading late, often when I woke in the middle of the night due to stress, or just because my brain refused to rest. I was in a rough place in life in general, with a lot of external work stuff going on and very small children. I wasn’t sleeping well. And it took me some time to figure out why I was struggling to read a book which I actually loved (and when I read it later in life, I enjoyed it greatly).

It was the sentence structure.

In order to induce the emotion of the scene, the sentences were short. Sharp. Quick. There was no time for the reader to breathe, much like there was no time for the heroine to do anything but act. The reader was caught up in the rising tension, to the point where my anxious, sleep-deprived brain, caught a panic attack from it.

The technique was brilliant.

Now back to our original timeline, wherein I read a post about how if you can write combat, you can write sex scenes. This post assumed that more people felt comfortable writing violence than sex. I was the reverse. I’d been writing about sex for over a decade when I saw this post, and it made a light bulb go off in my brain.

If writing sex was like writing combat… was the reverse also true? Could I improve my skills at writing battles by analyzing what worked when I wrote erotica?

So I tried doing just that. Back then, I found combat overwhelming. There was so much going on, and I was trying so hard to write good description that I lost all of the intensity. I was focusing on everything that was going on at the same time.

Thinking about how sex scenes were all intense emotion and narrowed focus, I applied that to my combat scenes. I wrote only what the point of view character experienced, and tied everything to their actions and reactions. I thought about how they breathed, how they moved, how they thought. I used those short, sharp sentences as they processed the scene. 

That doesn’t mean I forgot about everything else going on in the scene. That’s impossible. After all, in any story the things the character doesn’t pay attention to might be as important as the things they do focus on. Stuff still happens, and there is still fallout. I needed to know what else was happening so that if the character moved from one place to another, or did something that put them in the path of a different part of the action, I could have them start processing it.

But it also meant that on the page, out of sight was out of mind. Everything narrowed down to the now. The immediacy. Suddenly my combat scenes snapped into focus.

During the panel at Boskone, all of the panelists had experience with different fighting styles (fencing, street combat, and of course, me with taekwondo). I spoke about how for me, that narrow focus is very real when I spar. I know there are some people who naturally see a move or two ahead while fighting; I don’t. I am stuck in act and react mode. Can I kick them now? Can I attempt a head shot? Oh, no, circle back and away or they’re going to hit me… that’s how my brain works during a sparring match.

It’s not like a total blackout—there should be a vague awareness of things around the character. Sounds in particular, or sometimes flashes of movement. Something distracting can catch the attention of the fighter, but the personal fight will always pull the character back.

Combat feels easy when I’m writing like that.

Of course, there’s still the question of writing about something if I’ve never experienced it. As someone did point out to me: I am not a gay man, so how does that affect writing sex scenes? I’ve also never fought with a sword. Brawled. Fought from horseback. I have, however, held a blade, shot a gun, shot an arrow, rode a horse. I have a vague idea of how these things work, much like I have a working knowledge of sex in general.

So yes, research gets involved. Sometimes research is observational, sometimes it’s reading (there’s so much good stuff out there). I highly recommend video for combat scenes—find things that have the feel that you’re going for, then put yourself in the place of the character you want to write about. Practice. Work through the ideas of how things fit together, and what your character will (and will not!) know during the fight.

If you need to, stand up and block the scene by thinking about how you would experience it. What can you see, and what is out of sight? If someone is coming at you with a blade, what are your options? How do height differences affect you? Yes, I have asked friends and husband to help me block scenes. 

“Stand right there and show me what it looks like if you punch me. Okay, so if I do this then…” Yeah. It’s a thing. But it works.

When doing your research, remember that movie fighting (and hell, movie sex scenes) isn’t realistic. It’s meant to look good. For combat, if you can find re-enactments, or sparring videos, I highly recommend taking a look at those. 

Anyway, the point is: I don’t have to have shot someone, and I don’t have to have had gay sex in order to write about them. What I do need to know is how it feels emotionally to do those things, and I can extrapolate that from what I do know. I need to know enough about the details so I can get it right, and that’s where research will help me. Also, use language to create emotion. Because emotions are where we grab the reader, and how we pull them into the scene.

Combat and sex aren’t so different when it comes to writing, and the personal experience. Now, go forth and write!

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Wow, beautiful!!! ❤️❤️❤️

Pressed Flower Wings

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My husband does NOT have f⛎cking cancer (again) !!!! 👏👏👏

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Um…. Over 50…

Reblog if you’re over 20 and still read/write fan fiction.

I’m curious!

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Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!👏👏👏😃❤️😆❤️🎈

Ironstrange prompt: reincarnation or isekai?

I went with reincarnation because, considering everything Tony and Stephen have been through, isekai felt a bit like Just Another Tuesday. LOL. Although maybe if I could think of a different enough world, maybe with another version of them in it to meet… hmmm…

Well, reincarnation this time.

-

Tony spent most of his life assuming that reincarnation was bullshit. He also spent most of his life believing that magic was bullshit, and now he’s met what feels like half a dozen wizards of one type or another. Most of them he avoids as much as he can, no matter how often he’s told they’ve “changed”.

But Stephen… 

From the moment they meet, Stephen feels familiar. Tony finds himself trusting him despite the fact that he’s a wizard. Despite the fact that he’s a stranger. Despite the fact that experience has taught Tony that other heroes are only going to abandon him, one way or another. Despite all of that, being around Stephen feels like being around Rhodey. Solid, like there’s years of trust and history there. 

It niggles at him until he bursts into the Sanctum one day and, finding Stephen in the library, says, “Okay, level with me. Did we know each other in another life or what?”

Stephen almost drops the book he’d been taking off a shelf. He turns and stares at Tony. “How did you know?”

Vindication rushes through Tony. “Gut feeling,” he says smugly. “So? What were we to each other?”

“If I tell you—” he starts.

“It might not happen?” Tony finishes. “Bullshit. Besides, that reaction already tells me we were probably lovers.”

Stephen actually looks flustered now, which is kind of awesome because he’s normally as cool as a cucumber. “I don’t expect anything,” he says. “Our past lives don’t have to define this one.” He drops his gaze to the book he’s holding, his shoulders slumping slightly.

Tony sighs. Stephen is a thinker, like Tony is. But where Tony jumps six or seven steps ahead and sometimes regrets it, Stephen follows every little twist and turn and sometimes gets lost there. “You’ve got it all mixed up in your head, don’t you?” Tony says. “Here. Let me simplify things.”

He pulls Stephen into a kiss. The book falls with a thump and Stephen’s arms are sliding around him, his lips parting for a deeper caress. Tony can feel their hearts pounding in sync. This kiss feels right in a way that nothing ever has before.

When they part, Stephen smiles at him. “Somehow, despite all our previous lives, you still surprise me.”

Tony chuckles. “Well, a cheat sheet only gets you so far,” he says. “Previous work is there to be built upon.”

“We best get started, then,” Stephen murmurs, and pulls him into another kiss.

-

Me starting: This one is going to be under 300 words! I can feel it!

Me finishing: Whoops…

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*draws like nobody’s watching*

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I know, I know!!! THE TRAGEDY of it all!!! 😭😭😭

Avengers: Infinity War Unused Official Concept Art Iron Man & Doctor Strange Costume Swap! "When iron man goes to save dr strange on the qship, iron man puts his suit around dr strange to create . . . iron strange!"

Never getting over the fact that they deleted the costume swap from Infinity War, my shipping heart mourns for the loss!