platypan

[platypan]

Why is this heat so hot 😩

[platypan]

The bridge | RUFF Etienne

[platypan]

LAST DAY of the Faraway Dreaming Kickstarter campaign!

The main reward in the campaign is an offset printed hardcover copy of my new art book, Faraway Dreaming. The book will be printed in the US (during this summer) and ships worldwide! The campaign also offers a selection of lovely digital extras. Here's link to the Kickstarter campaign. ♥

Note: The campaign ends at 3:00 am UTC June 25, which will be Tuesday evening June 24th in the USA.

[platypan]

qilin

junicorn day 10

[platypan]

Happy pride month to my dad. When I came out as bi to him, this man googled what it ment, look at me and said "ohh. Yeah. You get that from me. You'd have far more siblings of I only shaged women." And went right back to his work emails.

[platypan]

Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner's roadblock to art isn't even technical skill it's frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach's capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That's how you build on the technical skill. Throw that "won't even start because I'm afraid it won't be perfect" shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck.

[platypan]

Lesser-known steps of the writing process:

Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once

Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards

Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop

Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere

Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off

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What

[platypan]

the mad max franchise really has human nature down to a T because literally day two of the apocalypse I'd be wearing my fetish gear in public 24/7 and insisting that people call me Dementus

[platypan]

Tired of stories where the author worldbuilds a whole religion only to chicken out at the last moment by making the main character a skeptic. You mean to tell me that there’s all this richness in lore and culture, but you’ve trapped me with the one person in this society who doesn’t care about it? So bland. I could meet an agnostic easily enough by walking down the street, but your story is my one chance to hear the perspective of someone who follows whatever religion you’ve contrived. You made this whole world; convince me that your character really is from there.

[platypan]

When you are used to the no-nonsense, no-context approach of medieval Irish stories, trying to read Old Norse saga literature does feel kind of like you're being told a medieval story by Uncle Colm from Derry Girls.

[platypan]

I'm not familiar with American geography, so the little thin threadlike patches of lands dividing the three lakes, are those accessible? Can people go across the lakes via those barely visible land bridges?

these?

those aren't land bridges, they're bridge bridges!

the southern one is the Mackinac Bridge, which is the longest suspension bridge in the western hemisphere.

it's fucking ENORMOUS. it's about 5 miles long and the deck is 200 feet over the water. the bridge towers are 550 feet tall.

it honestly breaks your brain a bit to look at it, but if you want to cross from Lower to Upper Michigan or vice versa, it's your only choice.

and the northern circle is the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge, which is just fine.

(it's pronounced "SOO saint marie")

it takes you to Canada from Upper Michigan if you want to go, so there's Customs at the end. bring your passport, and also your dog's passport.

and that's how we get around up here! if you need to go somewhere in the Great Lakes area and there's one of these big watery fucks in the way, you either take one of these bridges, hop onto a car or passenger ferry, or drive the long way round.

[platypan]

i wish i could remember who made the recommendation to "make a list of all the different ways someone could feel about a topic in your fictional setting and then make each of them a character" because it is a great technique and is also extremely fun

[platypan]

reblog to give writers the power to write 10k words of porn without plot

[platypan]

I know that some British people take umbrage at Americans calling the Great British Bake Off relaxing, but it's just because GBBO is such a different kind of stressful from American baking shows.

American baking shows will be called something like "Cupcake Knife Fight", there's horror movie lighting everywhere and dramatic stings every 5 seconds. All of the contestants are shit talking each other and fist fighting over the one single deep fryer provided by production. It will show the judges all whispering to each other at their super villain table overlooking the whole kitchen, and one will be like, "Oh my god. Everyone look at Brenda right now. She's straight tanking it." And it will cut to Brenda, who is running around covered in flour and crying and also bleeding for some reason. Then you get a clip from an interview with one of the contestants, and they're like, "I really need to win this. Without this award money, I'm gonna need to close my restaurant, sell my dad, and live out of my car. AGAIN." Then the giant digital doomsday clock overhead lets out a horrid klaxon, the judges tell half of them that their cupcakes taste disgusting, and one of them gets eliminated and sent to walk down the dramatically-lit shame hallway never to be seen again.

Meanwhile GBBO is in a lovely, brightly colored tent, there are delightful and friendly hosts/jesters there to keep everyone entertained, and all of the B Roll is of like... a bumblebee going into a flower, or a lamb running in a field. And yes, there will be moments where someone will mess up their timing or something, and they'll be looking at their bake through the oven door like, "oh gosh I don't think this will rise in time!" Then they stand up to find Paul Hollywood directly behind them ominously. His creepy whitewalker eyes will glow white, and he'll say something like "the 12th of June. 2035. Drowning." And his eyes will go back to normal and he'll walk away. Then the baker gives a playful grimace to the camera and says "that didnt sound great, did it?". Cut to a sweet looking older woman sipping tea on a stool and she says "oo I do hope that Prue enjoys the taste of my sugary, sticky baps!". Then, at the end, someone gets a gold star for doing good, and the loser of the episode gets in the middle of a giant group hug. You see all of them at the end of the series at a giant carnival with their families and the post credits informs you that all of the contestants have become a Partridge Family-style traveling band and stayed friends forever.

[platypan]

wild brass instruments running free in a field eating quater notes, which is the grass on music planet