#╰☆╮questions are always good {asks}

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[starspilli]

may i ask if you could draw cassie sandsmark? your art style is so gorgeous!!!!

yes of course!! ty 4 the request sorry it took me so long to get to

[deoidesign]

Thinking about vampires, death, life, and the space they occupy in between

[saryasy]

he only ever asked questions (and Aziraphale tried to answer them)

[aseon50]

Imo Tubbo and Fit are a very underrated dynamic (lore-wise atleast)

Every time they talked about lore stuff there was sm tension, i miss it so much. Fit wanting to help but not being able to tell the truth vs Tubbo knowing Fit is lying to him and being rightfully suspicious,, AARGH

They were so good at miscommunication… gone but not forgotten

I'm very sad they never got to make up in the end, Tubbo never knew the truth. ----- Fit: One day, you will understand everything. Tubbo: Do you mean that? Fit: Of course i do.

Fit: If he knew why I was really here, he'd fucking hate me. Everyone would.

[uncanny-tranny]

If somebody in your life offers to knit or crochet or, really, create anything for you, please be an active participant in the creation of the piece they are making. I adore making and gifting things, but nothing bums me out quicker than a person who passively just goes "okay," to my ideas about what I'm making them - it can send the message that they won't like it, or that they don't care, even if they're happy about my offering. The back-and-forth feedback is a great way to make sure that you are being gifted something that was truly worth the time, effort, expertise, and money that will inevitably go into the gift!

I know it's really hard to be an active participant, believe me, I'm an anxious ball of horror, but it will only do good for both parties to interact in this situation. It is a big deal to be offered a hand-crafted gift, but it's also something we want you to love and use, and that can only happen if you tell us what would make you fall in love with what we create.

[introspectivememories]

i think one of the reasons i really like bernard and darla is because they met him at a time when he wasn't robin. to me, tim drake has always felt like an amalgamation of robin and tim. and he's good at it y'know? being tim drake and robin but when bernard and darla meet him at grieves he can't be robin. he has to just be tim drake. and he's obviously struggling but he tries for his father. and that's so interesting to me because who is tim drake without robin? he obviously doesn't know either. and we see him explore this in urban legends. he even asks himself in urban legends, "who am i if i'm not robin?" and i don't think it's too much of a surprise that at the end of urban legends, when he's figured out what he wants, he chooses the boy who only ever knew him as tim drake.

[sysig]

Experimentation (Patreon)

[scatterbrainedbot]

Hello :D

You're so cool

Anyway have you thought that in your rat sons au Splinter might outlive the boys?

You're very cool :D love your stuff dude

(tw for some blood, light gore, implied overdose (kinda??))

hi copper!!! this is a fantastic question!

so obviously typical irl rats have far shorter lifespans than the average irl tortoise. according to google (yes, be awed by my spectacularly in-depth wealth of research) the average pet rat lives between 2-4 years ish, and the oldest on record lived to be about 7. meanwhile, an African spurred tortoise (Splinter's species) averages more around a 50ish year lifespan in captivity, tho is suspected to possibly exceed 75 or more in the wild.

Now, the mutation does give us a lot of wiggle room for playing with these numbers. For the rat sons boys, id say their natural lifespan probably clocks in at about 45-55 years old? definitely not old by human standards, but not young young either. (though, its also important to note that the boys were exposed to the mutagen just days after being born.)

For Splinter, meanwhile, aging is slightly more complicated. He lived the vast majority of his life as a regular normal African spurred tortoise (well, non-mutated at least. there were perhaps some shenanigans of a more mystical variety going on before he was mutated, but thats a separate matter) He was about 70ish i think? when the boys were born and they were all exposed to the mutagen. so he is already distinctly an old man turtle papa. id guess he'd probably still have another eh lets say 25-30 years after his mutation. he could probably push it a little farther even with some mystic nonsense, but when push comes to shove id say his 'natural' post-mutation lifespan would put his death like a solid decade or two before his sons.

of course, the tricky part of the matter is that theres no way for Splinter to know any of this. theres no way for him to know how the mutation affected them all, or if it even affected them all in the same way. especially since the boys dont show many physical signs of mutation for the first few years, and just kinda look like normal rats, (albeit with a more human sort of intelligence) — what sort of health standard do you hold them to? what if they simply dont show external signs of sickness or old age anymore? how do you actually know if something is wrong?

for a while there Splinter is very worried that one of his babies will just essentially reach the end of their normal rat lifespan, fall and not get up again.

so mostly, he just tries to live in the moment, enjoying whatever time he does have with his little ones, taking each day as a gift <3

still,

that fear

never

really

goes

away.....

[poreyneel]

gods have left their chosen ones

[bonefall]

i found a god awful doc about this one person (who, too, is a god awful being) trying to reason why mudClaw would be a bad leader. I'ma try to find the doc but meanwhile I'll submit this because someone could have the link, I'll need your honest thought about it bcs why are we defending oneWhiker now

Anon, buddy, I'm gonna have to sit you down and gently discourage you from casually calling random human people "god awful beings" in my inbox like this. Not when you're just talking about relatively basic media analysis. That isn't ok or normal.

I hope that when I speak harshly, it's coming from a place of condemning hurtful actions and the tangible harm that they cause. I don't appreciate people trying to get me to directly beef with other people directly by requesting I break down their individual posts or analysis documents (when I ask for people to share links, it's so I can see and prepare to counter the ideas because they usually "float downstream" if they get popular); but in a second ask, you linked this document and there's nothing harmful in it. In fact, it's got a far more neutral tone than I'd take if I was writing an analysis about Mudclaw.

If you couldn't tell the difference between a document like this and one that contains active abuse apologia rhetoric, I would be filled with concern. But I don't think you read it. I think you maybe skimmed it and stopped reading, or just heard the title.

Because this document literally says this;

and your takeaway, something you felt so strongly about that you came to me hoping I'd validate it, was "Why Are We Defending Onewhisker Now."

Art is a tool we can use to explore our own biases, and teach us something about ourselves. That overwhelming sense of anger and disgust that you probably felt when you saw "Mudclaw Would Be A Bad Leader" made you jump to an emotional conclusion and you assumed something that was not said. I know the feeling. You might have had a reactionary impulse.

You are not a bad person for doing that-- you're human. You can grow.

Why did it upset you this much, though? Is there something very personal about this that set you off? ...are you spending a lot of time in spaces online that keep you angry? These are questions for you to reflect with.

I do not know the owner of this document or "what they've done," if anything, so I will not link it, because their Discord is at the bottom of the doc. If they are truly a "god awful being", please do not engage, just block and move on. Nothing is accomplished by following around 'A Bad Guy' and boosting their cat takes.

But something VERY bad WOULD be accomplished if I indulged an anon for a situation I know nothing about and unwittingly became part of a harassment campaign. How do I know that you've got good intentions?

I usually just delete unsolicited links to docs and videos that are 'fightbaiting' like this-- trying to get me to beef publicly with a 3rd person. But I've seen more of these than usual lately so I would like to try and cool it down.

[fischlich]

what flower/plant would you associate with BSAR?

i did not. mean to take 10 thousand years to answer this. why did it take so long? i couldnt decide and it was Haunting me. what plant fits BSAR best... it kept me up at night

planty wise usually i just put misc moss and ferns and shrubs but i really wanted to play around with flower symbolism so i decided to choose gladiolus and asphodel! (chosen with the help of my friends bc i was hopeless at deciding on my own lol) Gladiolus because they (according to google) represent strength of character and moral integrity, which i thought would be fitting since the Nation frames BSARs as divine tools of liberation. Asphodel too however because (again according to google) they represent death and mourning, so i thought it would be fun to include them as a reference to BSAR actually being nothing more than tools of death and destruction in a senseless war. i put way too much thought into this. anyways heres a sketchy doodle of 777 my favorite bussard all plantied up with gladioluses and asphodels. dont look to hard at the gladioluses though i got really lazy

[baejax-the-great]

My brother died very suddenly yesterday.

He was the kind of person who always had dozens and dozens of friends everywhere he went because he was easy to talk to and funny and treated people with respect, and his friends ranged in class, race, age, social ability, introversion and extroversion--no matter who you were, he could and would befriend you.

He would scold me for not asking him for help when I needed it, and he would mean it. He taught me to tip well. He loved helping people. He played practical jokes on the new kids at work, including getting one guy to "chop flour" because the flour they had in the kitchen was "too coarse."

He introduced me to some of the best food I've ever eaten in my life. He would always help with a recipe that wasn't working. He would tell me what to buy my foodie friends for their birthdays, and he never got it wrong. He loved meat and whiskey but also wine and fruit and he got me to eat beets even because he knew how to make anything good.

Mostly, he thought that people were all deserving of respect and decency. He was outspoken on this. For all that his friends ranged across demographics, he didn't tolerate anyone being hateful around him. But even then, he was nice about it. He would try to get people to come around to his side. He saw the good in people.

And he was happy. He had finally quit chewing tobacco and managed to stay off it for three years. He had a girlfriend he really liked. The pandemic had put him out of work for over a year, but he was back at his job and doing well and he liked it. He was good at it. And it's complete bullshit that he's gone.

[jasperyourmutt]

zonked out on the dog bed snoring up a storm. you come over and rub the soft spot on the top of my nose. i let out the most contented sigh

[imperatorrrrr]

And as well as being a good dude, he has big brown eyes and flirts his way out of situations. No rivals, only lov…. [yanked off stage by a jealous someone]

I'm going to assume this is the same, Anon, and answer accordingly...

Anon, you have unlocked one of my favorite Nico Hischier subtopics - Nico Charms Opposing Players.

Let's highlight some of my favorite examples shall we?

Exhibit A - if you remember this sequence, Nico is all gotta go fast against the walls and slips past Lauzon and they end up kind of colliding and as they're getting up and catching their breath, Nico places this casual hand on Lauzon's thigh.

Exhibit B - Cernak tries to start some shit with Nico, and Nico just smiles at him. This shrug. This "come on now" facial expression. Zeal's tags in this are accurate "Nico used charm! it was very effective!"

Exhibit C - tenderly putting his arm around POJ's waist. like Nico, you are playing against that man.

Exhibit D - I'm sorry I don't know who this Ottawa man is who Nico is gently placing a hand on in front of the net, but another one, thank you.

Exhibit E - I'm including this GIFset of Nico v. Marchand even though it doesn't precisely fit the category, but I feel like it kind of does. Marchand wants to fight and Nico just smiles and pushes him away plus cheeky tongue.

There's definitely a lot more instances of Nico just charming opposing players. There's one from the most recent season, I just can't remember who they were playing, where someone ran into Nico and like Jesper and Johnny and some others came together to defend Nico's honor and Nico was skating off into the sunset with one of the opposing players. I wanna say it was a Carolina game and the player that Nico was draped all over was Orlov, but I genuinely can't remember any specifics.

P.S. Anon, I see your jealous someone and am very happy to discuss the particulars as I do have a jealous!insertplayerIbelieveyou'rereferencinghere manifesto that I'm happy to crack open at any time.

[shiresome]

I love the way you draw lex so bad. do u have any lex headcanons question mark….

THANK YOU THATS SO SWEET!! Yes I have one Lex headcanon: he is my best friend forever and ever