richardgarfinkle

[richardgarfinkle]

Unmaker of Burdens

Friendship is the Unmaker of Burdens.

It does not take weariness upon it.

Rather in the currents of blending life

Does it dissolve each the tiring of the other.

Friendship is not found in dying for

Nor in assuming suffering as if

Harm were a conserved quantity

That must be borne by one or other

Or shouldered between.

Friendship is the universal solvent

Reminding life of life yet to live.

Weariness ending in ongoing time

Never fully alone.

[richardgarfinkle]

This is very well put.

Critique is something artists ask for from those they think can help them.

Criticism is something readers and critics do for their benefit and the benefit of other audience members.

Criticism and Critique are not the same thing.

Respectfully, as someone who also writes, I think the notion that authors aren't the targets of any critiques to their work is a little misguided. Constructive critiques can do a lot in helping writers learn and improve. Obviously you can't, and shouldn't, go back and change things being critiques that are already published, but it gives you something to watch out for in the future and learn from.

For sure, but then the other factor is that I take criticism from people I know whose artistic perspective I have reason to believe are helpful for the art I'm trying to create. I don't take unprompted critique from people I didn't ask, and correspondingly, when I write unprompted critique of my own, I never direct it to the supposed betterment of the author's skills - I write it so I can unravel why a piece of art isn't working for me.

With all the love in my heart, I don't publish my art online looking for constructive criticism. I get my constructive criticism well before it ever goes online. The value of that post-publishing critique is entirely for other readers and artists looking to learn from my mistakes and unravel why what I made didn't work for them. A critique aimed to "help" me directly is wasted type. I won't act on it, I won't go back and "fix" my work to follow its advice, and I honestly won't think super kindly of anyone who thinks it's their solemn and sworn duty to fix me as an artist. I know how to learn from critique and improve my skills over time. The process does not at any point involve digesting the collective opinion of an internet comment section.

[richardgarfinkle]

The Slow Droplets Cascade

Within our lives the slow water flows. Blood and cells carry seas to land. What are the we that is seen but Slow Droplets Cascading

From the Sea Foam She emerged. The water dripping down. In the slow shedding of Cells Does waterfall skin renew.

What else is surface beauty? All waterfalls are skin deep. But slowed enough That the land behind the falls Can quake and stretch, pull and gather So slow the skin of water. So fast the land of muscle, bone and nerve.

Slow water. Swift earth. What else is life but beauty made through Speeds entwined in dance and splash.

[richardgarfinkle]

I think you've (plural, Blue and you) said a few times that it "baffles" you that some people are using OSP in classrooms, but I think you're both underselling your charisma. Blue managed to make history fit into my head like no teacher could, and for a bit History was actually my highest graded class. And you convinced me to take a literature optative course last year, a decision I could not possibly be more glad to have done. It was wonderful, and worked a bit like a debate class, where we all talked about what could different things mean, what they could tell us about the author and their life, what was implied, what was in plain view and how those things interacted. I mentioned your channel to the teacher and she was in love, and now she both shows pieces of your trope talks in class and also gives them as reccomended watches for her students. You really have a knack for making solid points in engaging ways, and your videos make me feel like my mind is a dry garden receiving water for the first time in months. Thank you for what you do!

ah

[richardgarfinkle]

I figured something out about my neurodivergence.

I was listening to a podcast about a horror RPG

Part of it was talking about why people enjoy horror, and part of the reason was that “people feel better afterwards”

And I realized I don’t.

I don’t experience catharsis. My mind is not cleansed by feeling fear or anger or dread or confusion or cruelty or despair and then that feeling stopping.

Those feelings don’t wash bad stuff out of my mind, they don’t purify my thinking. They leave more garbage in my mind that I have to work to clear out.

Catharsis is an experience that Aristotle asserted was universal. And the idea of its universality is implicit in a lot of writing tropes and assumptions of what makes a good story. It seems to me that this is another error based in assumptions of neurotypicality.

[richardgarfinkle]

As someone from a more average family, I’ve always been fascinated by your anecdotes about your upbringing. What’s it like to have parents so deeply immersed in fandom, and when did you realize that most kids’ parents have zero familiarity with fandom stuff?

as soon as I brought up renfaires and D&D and filk songs and cthulhu carols at school and got bullied about it :/ made it pretty obvious nobody knew or cared what I was talking about

But it was nice! Being raised in fandom, a thing built entirely from open enthusiasm for things you love, taught me to pursue things not because they were popular or What Was Expected Of Me, but because I loved them. I think it laid some major foundations in my worldview that helped me avoid a lot of normative expectations that wouldn't have worked for me, just by teaching me from minute one that things that are weird and unpopular can be perfect for you, and things that seem to work for everyone else can not work for you, and that's okay.

Once you've internalized "this seems to be something everyone does/likes/wants, but the thing I want seems to be almost unheard of - and yet I still want it" it may be easier to apply this to things like recognizing one's orientation (in my case "this all seems boring and weird and extremely limiting, but everyone acts like it's normal and great, so I think I'm just gonna… not do it"), pursuing unorthodox careers, and just… trying the weird things and seeing what works.

Identifying the things you love doing is already a difficult exercise, and it's made much more difficult by artificial filters like "these things are Cool And Sexy while these other things are Cringe And Weird and Should Not Be Liked." Being able to decouple your brain from the high school popularity contest makes the search for your passions that much easier, and I think I started with a serious leg up thanks to the guidance and unconditional support of two absolute nerds.

[richardgarfinkle]

Handmade paints from medieval pigments, and those paints used on miniatures (pics of finished minis to follow) #flyingmonkeybonus #minipainting

[richardgarfinkle]

Helm Region Matchup 2 - Tahraim VS Theia

Propaganda

Tahraim: i have many weaknesses and one of them is a man with a ponytail. plus he's a blacksmith. and the stripes... gonejous. i want to kiss all the stripes. i know his voice is so hot too

Theia: her new hairstyle in interlude is so pretty and she has big beautiful brown eyes and her archivist outfit/uniform whatever is very nice

[richardgarfinkle]

gooooood morning everybody

[richardgarfinkle]

Artist Eyes and Ears show up in every art. As a writer, I often watch what people do and listen to how they talk and realize how weird and strange human actions and responses are and how different from how we imagine and depict them.

Real human conversations sound nothing like written dialogue. But we need to be aware of the real in order to cogently create the imaginary.

hi, you seem to be drawing a lot. can you please tell me, will drawing ever become easy? or is it always a struggle?

(because for me, drawing seems like a neverending fight against artblock, and at this point, i start wondering if it's not really artblock, but instead it's just the reality of art making)

It's not so much that it becomes easy. It's more that you'll find new things about it that are hard.

Art will never become effortless because you will start finding new challenges to wrangle with, but the act of wrangling them is a good part of the fun. Finding new visual effects you struggle to capture or comprehend the shape of, let alone put down on paper. You might start off struggling to render shadows on a figure, and then as you progress you start wondering how to do shadows of foliage, or caustics of light projected through water, or how glowing eyes would cast shadows on a face, etc. New complexities reveal themselves as old struggles are mastered.

If you're struggling with something that feels like artblock, the problem might not be in your hands, but in your eyes. What to draw is at least as much of a challenge as how to draw it. If you notice your eyes snagging on small details or vistas and you catch yourself trying to work out how to capture that effect, that's your artist eyes at work, and the better you get, the weirder your artist eyes will make you.

There's an exercise my mom recommends that she got from her old teacher: three life drawings a day. Of anything - a chair, a glass of water, a tree, someone's dog, your own hand. I think this is less about honing your techniques and more about honing your eyes, training them to snag on everyday things and observe their complexities, the nuances, the way they really look, not just the way you think of them looking.

When you're a kid and you're drawing your first landscape, it's probably a house and a tree under a yellow sun in a blue sky. The tree looks like a lollipop, the house looks like a box with a hat, the sun is an egg yolk surrounded by lines, the sky is the bluest crayon you have. Maybe it has fluffy clouds in it if you were thinking ahead, cuz it's hard to draw white crayon or pencil over already blue drawings. This hypothetical drawing is a pure manifestation of art without artist's eyes; it is made entirely of what you understand things to look like, not how you see them. No real tree looks like a green lollipop. The sun is a blazing white ball that shades half of the dome of the sky in painfully bright white, and the sky is only blue in the loosest sense - even without clouds or sunsets confusing things, the sky will always fade to a lighter shade closer to the horizon. It is never uniform blue. Clouds usually look like shredded cottonballs around the edges, not fluffy rounded boubas.

This awareness extends to more complicated things. We know glass is clear. When we draw something made of glass, how can we capture that clarity? Do we just draw the outline, maybe some token specular highlights to show that it's catching the light? Or do we render the way it bends and distorts the image passing through it? We know gold is yellow and shiny; do we draw it as a yellow sparkly thing, or do we capture how it reflects the space around it? We know that water is blue and reflective. Do we draw it like we would draw a shiny blue car? Do we render a glass of water like a blue raspberry icee?

Actively perceiving the world as it is takes work and practice, but it's a vital component in all art - even completely fantastical art that is not at all drawn from life references. Skin has a particular luminosity to it, subcutaneous scattering of light that is inobvious if you just know that Skin Looks Like A Color. Even if you're painting a goblin or a mermaid or a centaur, capturing how the light hits their skin can make the difference between them looking like an action figure and looking like a living thing. If you're painting a landscape that isn't earth, it helps to have observed what earth's clouds and atmosphere really look like, how they catch and scatter the light. You have to know the rules in order to break the rules.

I can honestly say it never gets easy, but it does become a lot of fun, and if you're currently struggling to find the fun of it, it will get better the more you hone your eyes.

[richardgarfinkle]

hey is that mermaid saying something

[richardgarfinkle]

Hello!

Hello, I am a moose. I walk through the mire it does not drag me down.

Hello, I am Ivy. I sing life out of the mire. Its water becomes my growth. It does not drag me down.

Hello, I am the water dragon. I dance the cycles that pass through the mire. I rain it into being. I evaporate it into clouds and rivers and oceans. it does not drag me down.

Hello, I can recall who I am. Hello, it is good to meet you.

[richardgarfinkle]

RPG.net bans support of Trump or his administration.

Link is the forum announcement with new policy outline and policy citations. Worth a read just for the collected citations.

[richardgarfinkle]

i keep seeing things about a physical aurora book, but i haven't seen anything concrete about it. was there something announced, or is it still in the nebulous in development phase? is there anywhere i should look to hear more about it? i just can't wait to hear more in either case, and i'm always looking forward to new pages! the art and the story are so awesome, and the lore of the world is so capturing.

It is open for preorder and hitting shelves at the end of July! Volume 2 (covering arc 1 chapters 12-22) is also in progress, slated hopefully for a few months after that!

[richardgarfinkle]

Hey all! I'm excited to announce that I'm going to be helping my friend ‪Sarah Z (@dingdongyouarewrong) with a charity stream she's hosting next Monday, January 27th, from 10 am PST to 10 pm PST. I'll be working the back end and guesting, all the while Sarah will be playing Slay the Spire, talking to a bunch of amazing people.

All proceeds will be going to the Transgender Law Center, the largest national trans-led organization in the U.S. They do absolutely critical work providing legal assistance, fighting for policy changes, and supporting trans folks across the country. From helping with name changes and employment issues to advocating for trans immigrants and incarcerated individuals, TLC has been at the forefront of the fight for trans rights.

More details coming soon!

[richardgarfinkle]

Hey all! I'm excited to announce that I'm going to be helping my friend ‪Sarah Z (@dingdongyouarewrong) with a charity stream she's hosting next Monday, January 27th, from 10 am PST to 10 pm PST. I'll be working the back end and guesting, all the while Sarah will be playing Slay the Spire, talking to a bunch of amazing people.

All proceeds will be going to the Transgender Law Center, the largest national trans-led organization in the U.S. They do absolutely critical work providing legal assistance, fighting for policy changes, and supporting trans folks across the country. From helping with name changes and employment issues to advocating for trans immigrants and incarcerated individuals, TLC has been at the forefront of the fight for trans rights.

More details coming soon!

[richardgarfinkle]

Found this on Pinterest, but count this screenshot as a reblog