#I usually draw so much pastely stuff it's fun to try something new ^^

[submastrain]

I wanted to imitate 'official' Pokemon style in Jun's Magma event! ^^ ⚡

[factual-fantasy]

30 Asks! Thank you! :)) 🐮

I was able to replace my tablet chord and download a brand new/fresh FireAlpaca file and so far things seem to be all better. But if my problems come back then I will be drawing in traditional yes <XDD

Also thank you so much!! :DDD

Bella my NPC cat? :0 She would accept the pats :))

@artistiemi

Awwwwwww 🥹🥹 This drawing is so cute and soft 😭😭💞💞💞 Thank you! :)))

@chickenmilk120 (Referencing this post)

Yeah 😔😔 hoping they change it someday soon 🙏🙏🙏

(Link in question)

Oh yeah! Its right here :)

@sc3n3mo-t3to

XDDD Thank you!! :))))

@candyglumboy (Sent after this post)

Not a crush, he's in love! :0 And so is Pomni but neither of them really realize that/understand it and thus aren't really doing anything about it <XD

@rockandtoon

SOBBBSSS THANOYIYUUU SO MCUCHYHH 😭😭💞💞💞

@fandomcenteral

Aw! Cute kitty!! :DD

And thank you, currently I feel not the best 💀 but hopefully this next doctors appointment will give me some answers <:))

@kwaziis-eyepatch-real

Thank you! :) But also sorry, no.. I wouldn't be comfortable with my art being used as pfps <:(

Ehhh,, I wouldn't <:( That probably wouldn't sit well with me..

Thank you very much for checking first though! Not everyone does <:)))

WAHAGG THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! :DD Sucks that you found me offsite but glad you're here none the less! :)

And don't worry, you'll find stuff for Kinger XDDD

@captain-skyler1987

Hello! And are those guys from Dandy's world.? XD

I don't like what you're implying by turning Jangles into a werewolf and then putting chocolate on the table <XDDD

@natewithcake (Post in question)

AAAAA THANK YOU!! :DDDD

MEEHEHEEEEHEHEEEEEEEEE🎶

@bellanova137

Maybe they'll come out and make it official someday! :0 But for now having them be in love and trying to hide it from each other is fun to draw and mess with XDD

I feel like having a wolf centaur body would mostly just be incontinent and very uncomfortable.😅

Typically, wolves display crepuscular behavior, meaning they prefer times of low light and are most active around twilight, dawn, and dusk. Imagine how that would clash with your human body which is supposed to sleep at night and stay awake all day..

You'd have to change your diet to give both your human AND wolf half the nutrients they need. It would be MUCH harder to clean yourself and wipe your own bum. You'd have to pay loads for pet shampoo and grooming products PLUS the human ones you already use.. You'd spend hours trying to groom your fur and not damage your wolf skin when you try to clean your human skin with other products and vice versa. All clothes have to be custom made, you cant sit or walk comfortably in any public spaces.. You'd have to go to human doctors AND special vets to care for both of your halves...

The list just goes on <XDD being a wolf centaur would just suck in my opinion.

Ah sorry- nono you weren't being rude. I just forgot to comment back that I don't actually know what laptop I have 😅

@ink-machine-kidd

She probably snuck past whoever was in charge of her and put on the headset even though she was told not to😔

(Recent post) (Queenie and Kinger comic)

Oh nono, I just hadn't made everyone's ref sheets yet at that time. But different outfits is something Caine would try to manage! :0

Man you really had pirates on the mind huh XDD

Ohh, I see. I might not do that.. but I get the idea now <:D Thank you!

Vibes received 🤩 Thank you! :)))

Thank you!! :DD

Big wolf! :D

@samcat71470558

Thank you for the kind words <:))) So far it seems like the new tablet chord and downloading a fresh FireAlpaca has fixed all my problems. Hopefully it stays that way! 🙏

XD I think I just have a pattern with medias I'm into. If the story is mostly wholesome it feels bland. So I add a bunch of angst to it. (Octonauts is a good example)

Or alternatively, if the story is super angsty or has types of angst that I don't take well, (like character deaths) then I usually make a fix-it AU that brings everyone back to life and changes/removes a lot of the angst. (TADC and my Undertale AU: RefinedTale being good examples)

Also in my AU, Kaufmo hasn't abstracted. So she bonded with the other humans in other ways overtime. 👍

@wolfie-777

At first I assumed these were obviously fake. But a quick Google search shows that they seem to be real! :0 Although the peeled banana is clearly photoshopped <XDD

Ngl, a vanilla-like custard taste is exactly what I hoped/expected those bananas to taste like XDD

@theintroverse

La Chancla translated to "the flip flop".? <:0 I'm sorry but I don't understand..

Also is he based on a Pinata? :0 I hadn't realized- perhaps I will have to consider giving him some candy powers <XDD

[meanbossart]

ASK COMPILATION: LORE, CHARACTERIZATION, AND THE ONE IN WHICH I RUIN A BUNCH OF PEOPLE'S FUN

As usual, this is far from all of the asks in my inbox but I'm trying to catch up 😩thank you everyone for your patience!

For the record, if your ask isn't being answered, that most likely means one of three things:

I am saving it as a possible art prompt.

I sincerely don't have a very interesting or good reply for it yet!

It's a question I have been asked multiple times/the answer is in my pinned post.

Glad you like them!!

As much as I don't limit what I draw to canonical events, vampirism is so antithetical to DU drow's character journey that I couldn't really envision it, to be honest, but who knows! Maybe I'll cook up some Ascended Astarion scenario someday that is kind of a role-reversal of the Bhaalist DU Drow AU I have going on in tandem to the story.

I'll be honest, this is one of the rare times where I'm really not sure which aspect of DU drow's weirdness this is in reference to. Do you know something I don't? 😅

His masochism is very... Classic, I guess? He's in it for the pain and for the emotional connection, and the process of being pierced wouldn't cut it whatsoever, it's too subtle. The body modifications he has are an incidental result of it, but they were never really the goal.

Also having stuff dangling off his face or body would just irritate him, he specifically only does rings because all other types of jewellery get in the way too much. Pre-tadpole Bhaalist drow obviously wore them by the ton, but only as a symbol of status and because he had a permanent new-money complex🤷 so yeah not a piercing-type of character at all, sorry!

He's smooth from the eyelashes-down and profoundly weirded out by body hair LOL

I don't personally think that whatever Astarion had for a home before would bear my resemblance to it after 200 years - having probably gone through several owners, remodeled, if not completely lost to the destruction of the end-game. I do HC that he used to visit it whenever he could as an enthralled spawn to read his mail, but he stopped after his father passed.

THANK YOU, I THINK? I can't say that isn't a passionate description at least!

I'm honestly surprised that this comes up as often as it does LOL but it's just an stylistic choice on my end!

The latter - for sure. He figured that them dying at each other's hands at the end was a given and took that assumption entirely for granted (and I'm sure daydreamed about it often while Gortash went on and on about political strategy during their dinner meetings.)

;))) way ahead of you and by "way ahead" I mean "eventually and whenever I can figure out when to do it alongside the other 30 ideas I am currently juggling" (but I really do want to make a little comic out of it!)

He used them! Not immediately, but he grew to trust the guardian after some initial suspicion and happily gobbled up those squirmy little things alongside Astarion. Because I made his character on a whim and without any planned backstory, I didn't really put any thought into his Guardian's appearance either, so she's just a human woman with a Joan of Arc look going on who's of no significance to him or his past.

But DU drow did trust her, again not immediately but eventually. It was honestly a big kick in the gut to him when the Emperor revealed himself and it definitely set their relationship up to fail from the get-go.

This is also why he didn't ascend to the next stage of Ilithid power, he just stomped the thing dead right on the spot LOL

LMAO I think Gortash is too proud to chase a tail he can't catch like that

He was probably very overwhelmed by the sudden realization that OH, THIS IS ALL HAPPENING BECAUSE OF ME which naturally didn't come across whatsoever to anyone present since he immediately bottled it up and tucked it away out of sight. However, as the story progressed and DU drow helped his friends get out of their respective pickles he was probably able to justify it to himself as it having been for the greater good - since it led to Astarion being freed from his master and Shadowheart to defying the Sharrans.

As for all of the rest of the ensued destruction and death that resulted from it? Well you can't make an omelette without cracking some eggs, or whatever is the wizard version of that saying. He has essentially turned the entire situation into a net-positive in his mind and sleeps great at night because of it.

[alexanderwales]

do you have thoughts on marination as a worldbuilding process?

you know the saying that about having a lifetime to write your first novel, but a few years the second. works like Worm or your own Worth the Candle could only take the shape they did because they're drawing a deep well of past endeavors and (inadvertent) preparatory work

often, it seems, authors won't, can't, spend nearly as much time sitting on their next ideas. and, arguably, they shouldn't.

cook up enough worlds and plots, and you learn which questions are interesting to ask, you develop a repertoire of favorite themes to vary and truck around cuttings to give new homes. so much of initial "marination" is spent in blind alleys and skill-building

i don't want to write a blogpost in your inbox (sorry), so i guess to hone in on what i want to ask: how highly do you value marinating on ideas? how much is it something you try to leave slack for, or occasionally sacrifice? do you have general recommendations for or against the approach?

this is one of those topics where the simple, sure, and unsatisfying answer is "it depends" or "balance the extremes", but maybe there's personal notes to add - or toss out the framing?

I tried to answer this three times and threw away those replies, so let's hope this fourth time is the charm.

I guess if the question is "how much does giant amounts of upfront work that you simply throw away or distill down to almost nothing help" then my feeling is that there are a lot better ways to get virtually the same result. If you're going to spend 100 hours getting ready for a story, then I think you can do that in ways that are much more effective (but maybe less fun) than writing test chapters for different characters.

So how important is spending those hundred hours, or however much time it is? Assuming that we're talking about just worldbuilding, or characterbuilding, getting lots of ideas lined up and ready to go, rotating them in our head to make the connections with each other and spark inspiration ... eh? Kind of not really that important?

That is to say, I think that there are really incredibly heavy diminishing returns on worldbuilding, and it's usually not that hard to pluck the low-hanging fruit, especially if you've had some practice with that.

Two caveats to that.

First, I think the thing that web serials do is kind of different in some significant ways from what a novel does. They tend to have lots of characters, and they tend to switch locations. If you're putting out two chapters a week, it actually is important than you have a lot of stuff ready to go, because otherwise you can find yourself creatively tapped when you find yourself in need of a new superhero team, or a new nation to come in for their story arc. It's great to have things in your back pocket, a stack of ideas that you can mine out, old works you can cannibalize, etc. This is much different from writing a short novel, where you're not constantly pushing to new frontiers.

Second, there's a difference between spending a lot of time-at-desk, and spending a lot of time-in-days. If you're spending time-at-desk, I think you start hitting the diminishing returns fairly quickly: if I spent a 40 hour workweek bashing out a world, I actually kind of doubt that it would be all that much better than a world I'd spent 10 hours on, there would just be ... more of it, I guess? It would be fleshed out in ways that are good, but not vital to the story, and which wouldn't reflect themselves too much in the narrative, maybe mostly being things that I would come up with during writing anyway given a solid base?

But if you spend time-in-days where you have this idea and it's sitting there in your headspace, I think that can be extremely valuable. You're just going about your normal life, reading fics, watching TV, doing dishes, cooking, etc., and something sparks a connection, or you just deliberately contextualize a topic within the context of your world, and that gets jotted down somewhere so you don't forget it. Eventually, if you do that enough, your world develops and deepens and gets richer, just from being kept around.

So these are very different, I think. One is "put in a bunch of work" and the other is "don't put in a bunch of work, just keep this background process running". And it is very valuable to have time-in-days, because you get this trickle of associations and more depth that can only come from new connections forming. (Note: probably there are other ways to get this, probably you could substitute some amount of time-at-desk, or do deliberate exercises)

But I don't even think time-in-days is that valuable, either! One of my maxims is that "you won't have all the ideas you're ever going to have when you sit down to write the story", and that's true no matter how much you prep, unless it's a pretty short single-sitting story. All that time-in-days, you're still getting that while you write the serial, and you're probably getting more of it than you would if you weren't writing the serial, so it's just a matter of leaving yourself enough room to plop in the good ideas as you have them, and not be completely locked in with nowhere for the ideas to go. (This is one of the reasons that endings are hard, because you stop being able to introduce new cool things, and you're left only using the cool things you already set up.)

Fuck, I don't know if this was helpful or even what you were asking.

tl;dr: it depends, balance the extremes

[amuseoffyre]

"I don't even know who I am"

What I have loved about the show from day one is that it has been an unflinching examination of identity and what makes it: the things that shape people into who they are and how that impacts on how they act and react to the world around them.

The exploration of Ed’s sense of self has been so beautifully handled and I know that if/when we get a third season, they’re going to do even more with it.

This is a character who has been raised with violence and cruelty his whole life, who was told “we’re just not those kind of people” when he yearns for something better, who killed to protect his mother, who ended up under the heel of a brutal tyrant of a captain who used sadistic punishments and death to keep his crew in line.

It’s the only life he knew and it’s the only option he sees himself as having. He has no concept of any other alternative until along comes Stede “there’s always another way” Bonnet and he’s fascinated. He even tells Stede as much the first time they met – “do you have any idea how hard it is to find someone doing something original out here? It’s impossible, man.”

Ned Lowe cements that fact in 2x06, describing Ed as a generic pirate and Ed immediately calls him out on the fact that he’s as messy as the rest of them even if he’s trying to act like he’s not, observing “It’s usually family stuff”. Stede even observes “A lot of your friends are troubled” and Ed fully admits “Yeah. Well. They’re pirates.”

There’s so much juicy meta to be had about the fact that Stede wants to desperately be a pirate and Ed doesn’t even catch that not only is Stede fully troubled but that it’s got Family Stuff etched all over it. He even says “you’ve got it all figured out”, but the Stede meta is for another day.

In S1, Ed’s in a pretty depressed space and finds a bit of a respite from it in Stede’s company. It lets him try out new things, things he didn’t think he was allowed/able to do, but he still follows a lot of the patterns of behaviour and actions that are standard in the pirate lifestyle that has been 80% of his lived experience.

He can switch violence on and off when he needs it (“next one goes through your fucking eye”), he doesn’t see anything wrong in talking about the violence he’s inflicted (“Well, this one time I was gouging an eye out of this lad’s skull”), he has a deep well of punishments that he can draw from (force-feeding body parts, mutilation, skinning, maiming) and all of these things are just so normalised for him that he’s desensitised to how horrific they are.

He’s still doing all those things while also telling stories, having fun, teaching people about fuckeries and generally being “more open and available than I’ve ever seen him”. He hasn’t wanted or needed to shed that side of his life because he’s getting the best of both worlds.

Only then Calico Jack pays a visit and ramps Ed’s behaviour up to 11 and this is the first time Stede – who is dealing with his own issues at the same time – says that there’s something wrong with the way he’s behaving.

Ed says to Stede, confused and stung, “This is who I am. This is me” when Stede points out all the behaviour he isn’t enjoying. And for him, at this point, this is him. This is what he’s grown up knowing and being. This is his lifestyle and part of the culture of the pirate community. We see it repeatedly when we see Ed encountering people from his past or in the Republic. It’s the frog-in-the-pot scenario. He’s been in the pot so long, he doesn’t know it’s been boiling the whole time.

Only the very next episode, at the academy, pared back to just be Edward Teach, born on a beach, he admits “I don’t know if I want to go back to the old days, drinking all day and forcing some bloke to eat his own toes for a laugh”. He’s been played and double-crossed by people who trusted him and he sees an alternative in Stede – “I’m your friend” Stede told him, and he wants that. He wants a friend he can trust. They can go off together, away from all that and everything’ll be fixed, right? That’ll make it all good.

And then…

And then we all know how that goes.

Briefly, very briefly he thinks he might be able to hold on to that different kind of thing, that softer, brighter world, but Izzy reminds him of the reality of their situation. That people he considers allies and friends can and will warn him to “watch his fucking step” and that this is not a world where he can let his guard down.

Either you’re part of that world or you die. Izzy said it as far back as episode 4. The only retirement they get is death. And so that’s the option Ed takes: either watch the world burn or die trying. Not like he can have anything else. For ever and ever, trapped in his life and world he has come to hate.

He sinks him into the worst of it to try and end things faster. He’s crueller. Relentless. Brutal. And no one seems to care that he’s shattering under the weight of it, until he forces their hand and goads them into killing him or letting him kill all of them.

Izzy says “we did this to him” to Stede, but neither of them seem to realise how much deeper Ed’s hurts go. Yes, they both had an impact on Ed, knocking away his sense of place and self and acceptance, but the wounds are far older and far deeper than they know.

It’s only when Ed is first forced to confront himself in the unsettling not-reality of the gravy basket that he takes the first step in understanding himself better. He’s forced to face the stuff he’s done and the worst parts of himself. He even tries to kill them, over and over again, until he realises.

I find it especially interesting that Buttons describes getting out of purgatory as “escaping”. That this is a place where you’re flayed down to the bones and forced to face the worst parts of yourself.

It’s so vital that he – and Stede – have the encounter with Anne and Mary. He’s reminded of the world that he was part of and the casual brutality that came with it. He’s shown that he and Stede could easily fall into those patterns, but instead Stede offers him honesty, comfort and the assurance that he is loved.

“A lot of your friends are troubled” Stede observes after and Ed admits that yeah, they’re pirates. He recognises that this is part of the social culture he grew up in and that it’s still impacting on him now.

But what happens next is so sweet and important. Buttons talks to him of learning to change, that nothing is fixed and that if you want to, you can change your path. And then Buttons shows him it’s possible and Ed’s face just lights up. Yes, brother. Fly. You can change things. You can choose another way.

Only it’s not simple. It’s not straightforward. With the probation period, Ed looks for quick fixes – offers to let Lucius push him overboard to get it over with and the like – but part of him still doesn’t quite get why some of the stuff he did was wrong because it was so normalised to him.

It takes Fang saying “I was terrified” to make him see it and coming from someone who has been with him for 20 years, realising someone else from within his own world was terrorised by him brings things into focus for him. That the things he thought were games weren’t. That the stuff he told himself was normal in context absolutely wasn’t normal.

And this is where Ed’s entire world view pivots. Fang shows him how to sit with himself, how to reflect. Ed takes this lesson to heart and he’s still working through it, gazing out to sea and thinking about it at the beginning of episode 6. He goes from never apologising for anything as a captain to telling both Fang and Izzy quiet, but meaningfully, “I’m sorry”.

He’s known for a long time that he’s tired of piracy, but the Ned Lowe situation is the thing to put the final nail in the coffin: this man hunted him down because of his pirating. This man hurt them all because of it. And worst of all, Ned took the man Ed loves and pushed and provoked him until Stede killed him. This was Ed’s “you defile beautiful things” moment. His face in those scenes, when he said “don’t do it, you can’t come back from this” is a call from his own experience. Stede is taking that step onto a path that Ed desperately wants to get off.

That night makes the decision for him.

The next morning, his leathers go overboard, a symbolic end to Blackbeard (and I will yell another day about him putting the proverbial beast back under the waves. Ed and his sea metaphors are gnawing me alive) and he’s happy about it, humming and hurrying back down to join Stede in their bed.

Stede doesn’t notice, though. Stede never would notice something like that being important because for him, Ed is Ed. Whatever he wears, whatever he does, he is Ed. A change of clothes doesn’t change him in Stede’s eyes.

But other people notice. Hell other people not noticing Blackbeard and only seeing some hobo dude is such a change. There’s something so significant that the people he chooses to talk to about it are the old guard in his field. He tells Jackie “it’s not a phase” and Izzy that it felt “fucking great” and both of them get it. Both of them have been there, seen it, experienced it.

Only it happens as he’s seeing Stede become what he used to be, stepping into the space he’s willingly leaving, and Stede is so happy about it. And he’s happy for Stede to have his moment and be appreciated, but it just throws into stark relief that this is absolutely not what he wants or needs right now. He still has a lot of figuring out to do and unfortunately, they’re both highly-emotional people and when they’re emotional, their communication goes down the toilet.

Once upon a time Ed said “this is who I am, this is me” to Stede, when he was acting exactly like Stede is now: raucous, drinking, chaotic and loud. Only time and reflection has let him see that wasn’t necessarily him but the environment and his circumstances shaping him to be like that, just as it's now making Stede act that way.

“I don’t even know who I am,” he admits in this argument. “I’m not ready for whatever this is”. He knows he has a lot more to figure out and because he’s latched on so hard to fishing as a place to be quiet and contemplate, that’s why he runs there. He wants to work himself out without the weight and pressure of the pirate world breathing down his neck.

Only he doesn’t talk about it, he doesn’t explain, he just tells Stede he’s leaving and Stede immediately sees it as something he’s said/done, rather than something that Ed is trying to figure out. They both hurt each other because Ed has always worried that Ed isn’t enough – the loss of the beard still weighs on them both – and that Stede is only humouring him to get Blackbeard, while Stede is so convinced that being a great pirate will mean he and Ed can be together as equals instead of him being a bumbling amateur who isn’t worthy of the man he loves, only to see it slip through his fingers.

They both need to talk to each other, but they don’t know how. Ed’s made quick, rash decisions, but they’ve come on the back of a lot of reflection and he just didn’t explain it. He’s right that he doesn’t know who he is himself. He’s never had the chance to just… take the time and figure it out. He needs that time, but they just don’t have it right now and they end up hurting each other more because of it.

I’ve said from the beginning that both of them are coming from opposite ends of the spectrum and that they’re destined to meet somewhere in the middle. Ed got his fantasies of a fancy life shattered in season one and now, Stede is seeing the impact of his pirate fantasies on the life he made for himself in season two.

Both of them are on the edge of a catastrophe curve, misunderstanding each other’s motivations and totally at odds with who they are versus who they have been told they need to be. They will get there, but two little lost boys finally taking off the rose-tinted glasses and dealing with the mess that they have carried with them their entire lives isn’t easy.

And I will fully admit I am loving it.

[pyjamaart]

Year 4 of submitting art for the SiIvaGunner Art Gallery!! >:]

For the fourth time now, I can proudly present my entry for this years SiIvaGunner Birthday Gallery! I had to put up with a lot of obstacles this year, like starting in June when I normally always started in early May, my parents and my brother visiting during the exact time frame I wanted to work on this, a crippling addiction to playing Dragon Quest Monsters and many more.

But as you can see, I really locked in at the end and finished it exactly one day before the deadline (17th June).

Now to explain my vision for this piece: I'll have to admit, since starting my new job in February, I didn't have any time to keep up with the loads of SiIvaGunner rips that are uploaded each day, since I always listened to them at my old workplace while I took care of my mountains of scientific journals. At my new job, I don't have anything to do with journals anymore. I mostly talk to students at the counter all day. Can't really listen to YouTube videos when someone wants something from you every minute. I also do a lot of things related to facility management in between (our library buildings are practically falling apart in some places...), so even when I'm not at the counter, I have way too much stuff to do to listen to rips. Sigh. Sometimes, I miss my old job.........

But I'll try my best to catch up some time in the future. At the very latest in September. My first vacation days in 7 months... Anyway, let's get back to the image at hand:

In the foreground, there's obviously my beloved dynamic duo of besties: Woodman and Nozomi. Woodman has been missing from the channel for 1 and a half years. Please bring him back. I miss my wife, Tails...

For this piece, my theme was centered around my favorite SiIvaGunner joke from the past few months (or has it been years?): The raft ride. I wanted something fun and summer-y, so I decided to put all the characters I drew in cute little sailor outfits. For Woodman, I just drew him in something simple that I thought of myself, which complimented and incorporated his usual armor.

Next we have Nozomi, who dons her outfit from μ's fifth single "Wonderful Rush". I had a few water themed outfits to chose from with her (and Honoka, for that matter), but I chose Wonderful Rush for Nozomi since it just fit with the aesthetic I was going for.

Next to those two is Coraline from the 3DS street pass game "Ultimate Angler", which is also prominently featured on the channel. For her outfit, I just modified her usual attire a little to fit in with the sailor vibe. I also turned her sun visor around because I could for the life of me not figure out how to draw it properly at this angle. Uhhh... I mean, I turned it around because I thought it looked cool.

I hope you can see that I had an absolute breakthrough in Gimp. I think I already talked about it on my Buck fanart, but I finally discovered layer modes. After 4 years of working with Gimp. Spectacular, I know. If you don't notice it here, you'll definitely notice it on the next image in queue for the robot master quest I have going on. I can already spoil you who it's gonna be this time: Tornadoman! I honestly couldn't believe what I was drawing. I think I was possessed by something for a few hours. It was honestly a little scary. But I think you'll see what I mean once you see the actual image, it's really different from the usual stuff I draw.

Getting back to the topic of this picture, let's talk about the background now. I decided to draw a little ship with lots of familiar faces making up the crew.

The ships captain is Honoka, who is standing on the very left of the deck. I took her outfit from μ's single "Heart to Heart!", which also fit into the aquatic theme quite nicely.

Right next to her, under a rainbow flag that's fluttering in the wind above them, is Aquaman. My beloved. Since I drew him into last years birthday gallery image, I decided to do the same this year. I also put a little starfish on his hat because I think it looked cute ;)

Standing epicly and mysteriously on the top of the boat is Meta Knight. I don't know if you can see it when it's zoomed out so far, but he's holding some kind of folded map in his right hand. Maybe they're looking for treasure??

And on the very right of the ship are Tito Dick and Robbie Rotten, reenacting that one famous scene from the Titanic movie.

After that, we shift our focus to the left of the image, where we can see Fluttershy flying over the island from Tomodachi Life.

And that's it for this image folks. I hope I'll finish my Mega Man Fully Charged art before the weekend ends, so stay tuned for that next! And after that, we're going right back to the robot master grind. ;)

Until then, this has been Jenny Pyjamakama, signing off. ;)

[augustameretrix]

arcane abstinence so acute i stumbled into The Council Archives, a little point-and-click style game released in the league client in november 2021 where you you get to sift through some form of in-universe files relating in some respects to jayce, vi, caitlyn and jinx

btw the promotional video for jayce's collection is also where the 'i discovered discovered sextech' template comes from I think which is great news to me personally because god knows how much i like that stupid meme

anyways, they're an interesting short read, the epistolary form is always great for immersion and there's some interesting stuff going on.

both jayce's and jinx's collections consist primarily of their own writings, his work journal and her diary respectively. as for jayce, there's some details on the practical workings of hextech, followed by his disdain for the other piltie inventors - a bunch of glorified toymakers, almost, according to him - vs his self-confidence that his invention is Good and Noble. then there's a cute little section dedicated to his partnership with viktor and you can tell just how much that rocks his professional and personal world

jinx's diary is the least revealing: it's super short and almost everything she says is either repeated or can be easily inferred by watching arcane. it makes sense as these are just her personal thoughts in written form, plain and simple. but there's some painfully concise musings about herself and vi that didn't make it in the show quite in the same form. it retrodates her suicidal ideation by a lot. plus we get a little drawing of small ekko

now, cait's and especially vi's collections get into aspects the show didn't go into in depth, as in both cases we're dealing with official enforcers/wardens documentation

vi's for me is the absolute standout out of these collections. her files consist of the various internal reports of her misbehaviour in stillwater throughout the years, which document a devastating picture of her progressive decline under the watchful yet utterly uncaring, if not a bit unnerved, eyes of the wardens. there's a whole (small) character arc in there that arcane only hints at.

we learn that she goes from trying to escape, to beating information about powder out of newly arrived detainees, and finally to seemingly resign herself to a cycle of increasingly dangerous violence with other zaunite prisoners: provoke people, foil murder attempts, retaliate, rinse and repeat. any fight against the wardens she might've had in the past now she takes out on fellow inmates, recognizing the futility in trying to punch up. her reputation with the prisoners is so bad the wardens imply she sometimes relies on the guards interrogating her for some human contact - by making fun of them (one of the very first interactions between vi and cait is vi cracking a joke)

another killer thread in the collection is the guards systematically misunderstand vi's search for powder, which they interpret as drug addiction. at some point vi stops uttering her sister's name altogether, and the guard's report simply notes: "addiction to substance is cured". ain't that something

the formal and dehumanizing linguistic style of the prison wardens does wonders for this little character arc. the last file, a dismissal of a transfer request, contains a play on the words "foster" and "fester", which is just *chef's kiss*

finally, cait's collection is made up of the murder/missing person reports and autopsies she pilfered from the police station as a junior officer to conduct her private investigation on grayson's murder and on zaun's shimmer ring, as well as to whom among the enforcers is covering it up + interviews with suspects, most of which she conducted herself + one disciplinary action against her from marcus. as is usually the case for cait, we don't get a lot of direct personal info, instead we see her methodically connecting the dots while ignoring direct orders from her superior, and going deeper, deeper, and always forward. a nice little touch is the trial-and-error nature of her system: every time she gets a lead she needs to confirm or deny it, and sometimes that means suspects will laugh in her face because she submits to them an assumption that might very well be wrong. this in - apparent - contrast with her marksman (markswoman?) status. but as always, she remains unphased and keeps marching on... and ends up closing in on the target anyways.

then of course from her files you can gaze at the typically league-esque depiction of a zaun ravaged by the chem-barons' cynical endeavors, in particular by silco's (and singed's) shimmer-bloated brutes roaming the streets, or his kidnapping children for experimentation.

also of note and somewhat confusing, among caitlyn's objects in her collection there's a photograph of vi laughing (!) taken.... i'm not sure when, actually? the game mentions her "self-inked tattoos" (how, btw?), so it has to be after her arrest, but since it's unlikely vi had anything to smile about in stillwater, not to mention the description (which does NOT match the illustration btw) which reads "former inmate #516", so it must've been taken after she got out... which is weird, because the rest of cait's collection refers to events taking place up until she leaves for stillwater near the end of episode 4 aka before she gets vi released. but the photograph is described as "pinned" (to the board...? the board is treated as another object entirely), and visually depicted as one of the files in a folder, so it's a piece of evidence which would imply cait already had it. damningly, there is a camera on cait's desk, which could mean nothing, considering she likely uses it to collect clues from crime scenes. but then....

...to make things even weirder the tone in which the game goes on to describe the photo is so cheesy... dare I say romantic in a trite way. get this:

"[...] an image captured from reality, a moment frozen in time with this Zaunite urchin. In all you've researched, there was no indication that the criminal was even capable of smiling. But in this picture… she's laughing."

what is happening here?? did cait take this picture after vi's release? when? is this one of those not-so-subtle hints at cait and vi's relatonship riot likes to sprinkle in league and in the lore site? it would match the style and would explain the discrepancy between text and image, but it's so out of place and time here. oh well!

[maoam]

Ramblings stemming from frustration with this fandom sometimes. ( Naruto. )

I know Naruto fandom has always been a tad toxic ever since it started becoming popular and such, but something about these newer fans who are so comfortable with d3ath threats, body shaming, sa threats, and d0xxing other people for the sake of a character. Fandom discourse is truly never that serious and the fact that they’ve become so obsessed with “ratioing” or “owning” other people that they’re willing to say absolutely vile things all for what… some likes? Validation from other gross people?

And then for these people to still say they’re the “good part of the fandom” or “the sane part”. It’s almost narcissistic for lack of a better word at the moment. ( not diagnosing anyone or speaking as if I’m some sort of mental health expert. Just can’t think of another word right now because of the headache this phenomenon is causing me as it is becoming much too common. )

They have this obsession with demonizing “the other side.” To the point of making false claims, which is insane. Or maybe they actually believe them? I can’t tell. They just spread whatever makes them feel good about what they like and don’t care about the source.

This is mainly a lame annoyed rant about the Hinata fanbase which have become somehow even worse within the past few days with their weird obsession with trying to get the Boruto artist (I think he works for sp? Unsure as he says most of his art is fanart but he made a like two or three official pieces that were on the official boruto/naruto page.) fired and sending him death threats for I guess just not drawing Hinata as much as they want? Like to the point where they were literally saying she was being “oppressed and bullied” by this artists. It was insane to see in person because you really would like to believe people WOULDNT compare a character not being drawn in a way they approve of to the oppression the people of Palestine are facing but hey, I suppose it’s a competition now to see how much of a bad person you can be for the sake of a character.

Also I know this is not just an issue in the hinata fandom, although the recent need to fetishize how “Asian Hinata is compared to that white girl sakura.” Is irking me a lot more than what other fandoms have done as of recent that I’m aware of. The Sakus seem to be their usual level of delusion and crappy attitude. Which is easy to ignore for me.

Does it sound like I’m making stuff up at this point? Because as I’m writing this I’m seeing just how insane this really is. This *shouldn’t* be real. This *shouldn’t* be things people say without shame. And yet, people just throw their morals for… what, internet points? The self validation that they defended to their favorite character? Who knows.

You might not even read this, I wouldn’t blame you lol. Just me being annoyed with how comfortable people within the naruto fandom have become so comfortable with being bad people.

My only real question is have you noticed an increase of toxicity within the fandom? Do you think this behavior has gotten worse with the ending of Naruto and beginning of Boruto?

I kinda get what you mean. I remember even before the manga ended there was apparently aggressive fights between Narusaku/Naruhina shippers, like the body shaming towards the other ship's girl and so on. And SS also were aggressive. But nowadays it indeed seems worse. I'm not sure if it's because we have new big platforms? Twitter and Tiktok I mean, both have really cancerous fandom spaces.

SS/NH harass official staff all the time, as well as other parts of the fandom. And then they act like victims because some people think Sakura and Hinata are shitty characters lol. Meanwhile they treat real people like shit. I think it might be because everyone makes fun of their ships/girls all the time, because it's so easy, so they become even crazier in trying to compensate, they try to harass the staff for more content for their ship, to get back at the people who say their ships suck. Also because so many popular content creators keep making content on Naruto and Sasuke being gay and Sakura/Hinata being their beards it's also humiliating to them.

Of course, they also need to fight which girl is the best girl. Which girl is less of a single mother for example. XD

"Or maybe they actually believe them?" Considering how many SS have convinced themselves that some moments that happened between Naruto and Sasuke actually happened between Sasuke and Sakura, I can believe them being that delusional.

"Does it sound like I’m making stuff up at this point?" No because I have witnessed it myself, plenty Sakura and Hinata stans on twitter have that toxic "bad bitch" attitude that they think makes them queens or whatever, they harass people and are extremely aggressive and think female character doing the bare minimun = queen behaviour. It comes off as very childish and narcissistic. No wonder Sakura and Hinata as characters appeal to them.

[missholoska]

hi I don't know how to word this at all so apologies if it's a mess to read. I had hoped to spend this month drawing cute winter art but irl stuff happened and at this point I've been stuck in a numb limbo for days and need to get out of my brain

I'm not the type to be super open about real life, especially not on my art blog rather than my main, but where my mental state suffers obviously my productivity goes with it, and I guess I want to clarify that this isn't like my usual bouts of inactivity

so without going into much detail: basically a family member has had a lot of health issues for the past 2 years, and earlier this year some new problems started up on top of those. appointments looking into it have been months apart, so I've spent most of the year desperately hoping they wouldn't receive the diagnosis we were fearing. I'm not gonna say what it is, but there is no recovering from it and we already know exactly how bad it gets from past experience with other family members who had the same thing

then we finally had another appointment last tuesday, and I think that might've been the worst day of my life. I can't overstate how bleak and terrifying the rest of my life looks now

anyway I'm not saying I won't be drawing at all because god I need something to do to keep myself sane, but suffice to say art is probably going to be a struggle with everything going on. right now I just want to not worry about whatever I said I'd draw or feel like I have to make and just draw anything that seems fun, even if it only makes me happy for 5 seconds. hopefully that's understandable

at the very least I'm gonna try to carry on as normal and not be an emotional wreck on the internet, but I'm sorry if I'm not my usual self for a while

[joannaliangart]

Here; (is the only place) (2025) 2 x 10.5” (closed), 16.5 x 10.5” (fully open), 1.375 x 16.5” (pop-out accordion segment) 16 page accordion-fold book (+23 page pop-out accordion). Risograph-printed, ink and coloured pencil illustrations and poetry.

Here; (is the only place) features riso-printed ink illustrations and poems. The book connects childhood grief with climate grief through their shared experience of losing home and being swept into a future that threatens unbelonging. Depending on how the book is held, the openings cut into the pages become doorways to frame the past (pages) or only empty space— regardless, something has disappeared.

---

My last crit at ECU was for this piece!! im graduating this May my god it still hasn't really sunken in yet

I got a lot of positive feedback for this work and my live reading of it and the colours turned out even better than I could’ve hoped :']

I’ve applied to a few zine fairs including VABF, so hopefully I’ll be able to sell these there! Otherwise I’ll look into maybe an online store or smth like that (spooky but exciting)

Oughh I don't know about new favourite (There Are Good Things Yet To Bury still pops off to me lol) BUT I think it's definitely been one of my favs to work on!! in terms of process n all that C: BECAUSE!! I got to try out my new dip pens and finally use those acrylic inks (that i got in 1st year cause they were on the class materials list and then we never fuckin used em. rip but hey now here we are full circle) and do some traditional illustration!!! New territory for me and it was really fun!!

I usually stick with digital illustration for all my finished illustration work (vs my traditional sketchbook is only rlly for studies or sketches/thumbnails) but oughhh my god this might change me. this might do it LOL

Maquettes / Ideation phase

I knew I wanted to do more cool stuff with windows after TAGTYTB + at the time I recently had a dream about my childhood home again. It's something I noticed a long time ago, and all poetic metaphor aside I do literally just. only really dream about my childhood house lol, or rather do sometimes dream of other imaginary places but I NEVER dream of the current house I live in (maybe like 1-2 times that I can remember in the 8+ years I've been living here). I also wanted to do a long skinny accordion fold guy. No particular reason than it was an idea that kept sticking to me lol; + I hadn't done anything with accordion fold+windows and AH there's so much potential there because of how every single page overlaps each other with that folding method!!!

So! That was the basis for my concept, and I started to fold n scribble on scrap paper to make these maquettes. I also started numbering them which was SO helpful thank god because I think I ended up with TWENTY OR MORE maquettes by the end wagh!! But oh my god these were so helpful to make so many of I really hit on something with this one below, 1 big rectangle and 2 circle windows... It wasn't even intentional, I just cut them into the paper and then started drawing/writing, and once I reached the flipside realized that you could see the words "this is my home" on one page, above the drawing of the house which was on ANOTHER page. WHAT!! literally so cool I'm so happy that happened it literally dazzled me:

Midterm / printed maquettes aka poem writing in affinity publisher

In my final crit, one of my profs asked if 'this is what I saw in my head the whole time' in a 'wow I can't believe it looks this good congrats' kind of way LOL which is like so oof but so fair because this is what my midterm presentation looked like LMAO:

I have a LOT of analysis-type notes I wrote down in my google doc so I can remember in the future all my intentions with the poems and its a pretty LONG list. One of the main ones is how the semicolon ; operates as the symbol of being inbetween a continuation, barrier, threshold, stop, doorway... ALSO it kinda looks like a lock+door handle (!!)

Also this might've been before my midterm, but I went back to my childhood home area and ough. I'm glad I did cause I got inspiration for the illustration imagery when I saw how big the trees had gotten. I literally said out loud "oh!" aough my god. I don't know I just hadn't expected it... I think I had even noticed it a few years ago when I visited but forgot and I just. augh. Included the experience in one of the poems in this book "I looked for my grief / I looked / for disappointment [...] and still i was / startled / by the / bigness of the / trees [...] it's just such a relief / to know that something grew / up with me"

ILLUSTRATION TIME BABEY

this whole process was FULL of stress but like GOOD stress. I was on my fuckin grind dude All my text/poems/windows layout was all formatted in affinity publisher, and then I printed that out (at staples, I was gonna use the library but they couldn't print tabloid size paper rip) and just pencil sketched right on those. I COULD NOT HAVE DONE THIS DIGITALLY I DON'T THINK. Because it involved cutting out the windows so I could PHYSICALLY take the paper and see where the images would line up on other side. which was fun as hell

Then I took to staples again and made photocopies (so I didn't fuck up the original pencil sketch), and then traced the tabloid size + windows onto my nice paper. Also look at my setup !! We have this glass table in my house, and I had the kickass idea to put a bright light underneath as a DIY lightbox yippee!! It is however a very low table and while I had a lil stool it prob wasn't great for my back or legs lol (sidenote why are lightboxes so expensive its just a box with a light in it man)

inking time! dip pens ouh my goodness... Still trying to get used to them but they give such nice results.. I'm surprised at how much I like how the illustrations turned out tbh but I am really enjoying this kind of weaving, vignette/snapshot/overlapping almost collagey kind of vibe it has, especially with the text. Similar to the poems I also have a list of all my illustration symbolism/analysis kind of thoughts. it's a shorter list, but one of the main things on there is how I kinda in the moment ended up creating these visual rhymes: The door hinge = rollerskate wheels = moth (plucked wing) = pine cone scale; representing how things follow you from past to present in different forms, things changing but into what? I did separate layers for lines and colour, main book and pop-out accordion. The colours were fun because the acrylic inks came with a dropper and I'd drip bits of ink from real high up to get a lovely splatter !! and also used a straw to blow wet ink around all around a good time I used a sheet of plastic to protect the paper with the lineart on it from the wet ink/water going onto the colours layer. The lightbox was good but defo less effective with the colours layer because the water would warp the paper and lift it away from the table surface (so I couldn't see the lines below rip) Oh my gosh and I used pencil crayons for more texture!! forgot about that lol but it really really helped, and I did some frottage of my childhood house's key+traced its outline; I really wanted the key to be as "real"/"connected to reality" as possible (+yes once again that is a truth in the poems, I do still have it because before it was sold someone broke in and completely destroyed the door handle/lock. we assume with a crowbar.)

also my cat would sit behind me on the couch while I worked sweet creature... (ouh and I know there's Himi Gouache in that one image but I didn't use gouache lol I was considering it but didn't) I worked on the illustration every day of reading week from morning to night to get it done in time for risograph printing hoowheeee

Scanning and Prepping for Risograph Printing

I scanned my lineart and colours with my school's fancy scanner (which I'm gonna miss once i graduate augh it scans soo nicely staples scanners dont do shit for detailed scans)

I knew how to do it in photoshop already, but Managed to figure out how to split my colours so I had files for just blue, just yellow, etc. Ended up with SO MANY FILES!! i love you risograph printer even if I had to prep and print 16 files and redo 2 masters lol

I checked how all the colours looked digitally but you really can't exactly predict how risograph will look until you print it, and I was trying to extrapolate and imagine how the prints would look based on these digital mockups lol.

Lucky for me, they actually turned out BETTER and brighter than I was imagining!! Except for pop-out accordion side A, which looked wayy too busy and forest-green for my liking lol. So I had to redo the master and ended up doing NO blue colours, only blue lines which I think turned out ooo yummy tasty speaking of redoing masters, I also had to re-do the teal in the main book too because it was WAY darker than I was expecting and making the text too hard to read waaagh but I'm so very glad I fixed it because it made a world of difference in legibility. In total ended having to buy 4 new masters to redo orz

Trimming folding binding

This was kinda irritating lol .. I didn't realize I guess the stack cutter in the comd studio cuts at a bit of an angle or smth cause the size was slightly smaller than I wanted. which is a problem because I need my windows and folds to line up as precisely as possible and the slight size difference kinda fucked that up :(( but ah well. it doesn't get super in the way of experiencing the work but I'm a little miffed lol I also had to score and trim all the pop-out accordions one by one waghhhh Look at this pile orz

I'm SO glad I scored all the fold lines for these though that was so smart of me thank god because I could not have folded them without those guides holy shit it would've gotten so misaligned. AND it made it soooo satisfying to fold along a score line, like with the gentlest pressure it folds perfectly right where you need ouh chefs kiss cutting the windows is tedious sigh but!! I'm very happy with the circle cutter I bought just for this project (and for future window cutting in future projects ofc). I actually bought 2 circle cutters but the first kinda fuckin sucked when I tested it out rip. You can't see where you're cutting and it's fine for Cutting A Circle but not for when you need to cut a circle in a SPECIFIC spot like I do lol. Olfa Compass Circle Cutter for the win babey (not sponsored. is that even a thing on tumblr posts. lol) also when you grab a handful of the folded pop-out accordions it makes me feel like I'm grabbin a bunch o fun caterpillars C:

Final crit!

I was really strugling with figuring out where or how to install this thing, but thankfully my profs had booked a space that once I took a look (I'd never been in that room before lol there's still so many rooms I probably don't even know exist at ECU) ended up working really well ! I borrowed a blanket/tablecloth from my supervisor at my workplace when I was talking about my project and wanting to find a fitting tablecloth, and the pic they showed me of it was p much perfect very colourful !! yaaay thank goodness I was able to haul a plinth over to the room and set it up by the window C: natural light and near the rooftop garden, very good! And set up a bunch o chairs so people could sit while I did my reading.

The reading went very well!! I actually lol its soo funny I had practiced a bit at home and had always held the book out to my right, but on the day of I held the book to my left n as I started reading realized "oh no. unexpected flip I can't see some of the words as good" LOL but once I got to the pop-out accordion I kinda had an excuse to switch to holding it out to my right haha and it went smooth The class really liked my performance and the work overall which I'm awaughhh :'] like TAGTYTB people were really into the "choreography/architecture" of the windows, as one person described which is SUCH a good word for it o my goodness

And 5 people bought a copy!!!!!! oh my god!! tbh I thought maybe 1 or 2 ppl might but 5!! I'm not particularly close with any of them either, I'd consider like 2-3 I'm more familiar with but even then oh my gosh. awaa ;;w;; was so so lovely and gave me a lot of confidence in the piece I printed 100 copies! don't know if i should print more or not seeing as it was so successful... my energy is pretty spent now and I wanna take a while to recover lol now that the semester is winding down. But I'm gonna lose studio access to the comd risograph printer soon so i dunno... ah sigh

Now the grad show is my next big thing. my application is submitted and the due dates gone n passed, but this crit gave me the confidence n idea to do a reading of the book(s) I'm showing...... I sent an email if there's any way I could add some kind of scheduled event to my application but idk it's been a week since the due date so it might be too late to make changes rip

other fun stuff

It's now in the ECU artist book collection!!! I was so spooked by it but my profs recommended I look into it and the process was way easier and the person I emailed had the vibe like they did this all the time lol???

🎶 Music I was listening to while writing the poems to try and catch the vibes I needed:

Virgina - Boys Go To Jupiter

Claw Machine - Sloppy Jane ft. Phoebe Bridgers

Death Throes Of A Struggling Romance - (formerly Maryknoll)

Copacabana - Harvard Dn & Tonics acapella with Soloists Elio Kennedy-Yoon and Andrew Courtney

No More Birthdays - Sophie May

Anthems For A Seventeen Year-Old Girl - yeule

wish u were here - Boys Go To Jupiter

Lovers Always Lose - Boys Go To Jupiter

Ankles - Lucy Dacus

+like the whole Meet Me After Practice album - Boys Go To Jupiter LOL i love it soooooo fuckin much

[freebooter4ever]

Despite my continued stomach/digestive issues that is making it damn hard to eat, the increased exercise has almost entirely lifted my intense depressive episode and im almost feeling 'normal' again (which is definitely helping with this letter that im spending two days writing lmao). But i keep going back to that idea of people seeing me happy vs when i am truly 'happy'. For the past year that's mostly revolved around three things: 1) voluntering at the museum - usually interacting with guests, answering questions, getting to talk at length about this history i love, seeing guests get equally as excited and enthusiastic about the place as i do. 2) hockey. I know. This is still weird to me too that i ended up liking sports. But this summer i have definitely missed that vicarious high of watching things play out live good or bad. The charity games were cute and fun to watch but without the suspense and thrill of rooting for something with thousands of others at the same time it didn't quite cut it. On the other hand i've been using hockey as a carrot like 'i need to get a job so i can afford hockey tickets!' which is silly but its better than...imagining the painful reality of what will happen if i dont have a new job by this fall. I work better by thoughts of reward than under threat. If i do manage to land something soon i promise i'll end up in pittsburgh for a game at some point - that and visiting grandma are equal priority. 3) staring at geno's face and drawing or sculpting him. Im trying not to think too hard about this one.

And now another. 4) walking around the studio's manufacturing warehouse. I promised myself on sunday that i would play it cool, be professional, dont geek out over everything. I did not do that. I was grinning the entire time, i literally could not stop myself from smiling i was so excited. I think i said 'wow' and 'that's so cool!' a lot, too much maybe. At the end of the very in depth tour during which i asked so many questions i felt like a kid, the guy told me he was going to go back inside and 'work on some programming' before he left. And pushing my luck i was all 'i know with NDA stuff this might not be possible but could i just watch???'. And he tried to insist it would be boring but i promised him i absolutely would find it fascinating. Partially because i knew he wasn't talking about my kind of programming - scripted languages, machine code instruction - he was talking about some kind of interface programming. And sure enough he showed me the sine waves and explained a little how to generate them from data or how to create them from scratch, all as he was working on the model. And i was just sitting there enraptured.

so that was sunday. Supposed to be last tuesday, then moved to saturday, then finally sunday...but well worth the wait.

[shelandsorcery]

some left-handed gouache studies from the past week, after taking a couple months off thanks to the arm surgery and a deep fear that being bad at it would take all the fun out of it for me. painted on 12x16 paper, so I can get less mad about my wobbly left hand and focus more on larger marks and color and composition. good news! I'm not quite as bad at it as I had worried I would be, and it is mostly still very fun. bad news: not being able to draw a straight line continues to be a legit problem.

I don't know if this arm recovery stuff is interesting to anybody besides myself, but not talking about it would make me crazy, so allow me to update you on all of the weird side effects of being able to partially but largely mostly not use my dominant hand:

- as expected, I continue to attempt to use my dominant hand for things despite the fact that it: cannot hold any weight, it cannot get my fingers out of the way when I go to grab something, portions of the back of my hand and fingers are completely numb and don't notice when they bump against things, and despite the fact that I get weird nerve pain if I attempt to manipulate anything smaller than a tennis ball for any length of time

- I am most likely to thoughtlessly switch to my dominant hand in the middle of drawing or painting, in the middle of brushing my teeth, and while eating. apparently these are the three things I do where I get into a flow state.

- I am starting to confuse right and left, not so much as absolute directions, but as used to determine which way to tighten or loosen the lid on a jar or similar rotational acts that it turns out I absolutely do not have a logical structure for solving for anymore.

- I am starting to think of using my dominant hand for any purpose as "cheating", which is definitely counterproductive, but that's the ol' internalized ableism for you.

- I am more convinced than ever that our entire society has been designed to be subtly infuriating to deal with using your left hand, and there is no way anyone who is left hand dominant needs to hear my opinions on the matter, but wow. gosh. geeze.

- I oscillate wildly between being deeply deeply grateful for adaptive tools and being deeply deeply angry about their limits. again, there is nobody out there who has been using any of these adaptive tools for more than 2 months who needs to hear my thoughts on the matter, so this message is just for able-bodied people: you cannot call a tool a successful replacement for abled usage methods if it does not allow self-determination in how you use it. Microsoft, I'm looking at you and the many useful swearwords you censor when i try using your speech to text tools.

I do still really love painting, and drawing, and writing, even though they are all now very much new challenges all over again. I suspect mostly I'm just speed running the same experience many people will go through as they age of having to modify and realign their approach to their usual modes of expression and interaction and creation, which is something people have been doing for as long as society has existed, which just means I'm going to be better at it, obviously, thanks to getting this Head start

and maybe a year from now I will have the ability to hold things in my dominant right hand for more than 30 seconds, and definitely a year from now I will have a lot more precise control over my left hand, so I guess there's lots to look forward to 👍

in the meantime I will continue to paint my favorite things!

[buddhaamitabha]

Don't worry about the break, either. We are all human. Life happens. it's understandable, and it needs no justification. that's simply the way it goes.

I've been taking breaks from directly talking to mutuals as well since speaking to anyone has been draining my battery a lot more lately, especially because of the doctor visits about my hands lately so time has just been fickle. Lately since I haven't been doodling I've simple escaped into writing and such to distraction and entertain myself.

Yo, Frieren is the shit, I wanna get all the manga it's so relaxed and subtle. It's a deep story about the simple harmony in humane connections.

As for Tokyo Ghoul, I can't say it hits too well, but that could be a simple bias from me since I personally grow tired of "monster" trying to blend in human society troupe, as it's often the same exact story. I've mostly watched it for the animation, and as predictable as I find the main plot, it is undeniably beautiful to look at. I'd recommend it solely for passing time, it's gone off the deep end a few times in the show, but I wouldn't say it's bad, just nothing new.

I will say, though, I've not been watching a lot of shows lately. Sadly. As I've mostly invested in reading and playing my beloved gachas and listening to playthroughs of Hades Game and Nine Sols on the side (Arknights is a total pleasure and mad fun, I shall say.) When I get my hands back in order, I hope to draw the super interesting characters, so much to do, so much to do.

What have you been watching or reading lately? Anything new your looking forward to on the horizon? If you don't mind me being nosy, of course!

UGH but I feel the urge to explain everything, honestly I think it's the tism taking the reigns and word-vomitting stuff that's unnecessary

BUT THANK YOU for the reassurance!

Doctor visits sound like a hell of an (un)fun time, I'm sorry they've been taking up so much of your energy and free time, what did you end up writing while in mandatory rest? Can I get a sneak peek? 👀

IT WAS SO GOOD I finished it a while ago (like months, my notion of time is shit), it was soooo good for the soul. Like Frieren's own time blindness spoke to me on a deep level but the way she slowly understands how precious it is to spend what time she has with those she cares about? It's something I think we all gotta learn. (cough, hypocrite take on my part, I know I KNOW)

NOT GOING TO LIE I've tried even binge-watching it and it just didn't stick, didn't hold my attention for more than 5 minutes and that's saying something from someone who rewatched Grey's Anatomy three times. I DO appreciate the incentive though, I agree with it for other people who might be interested in giving it a chance like we did?

I've heard so much good shit of this Hades Game, I hope someday I can pull on my big boy pants and actually get into gaming stuff properly, cuz it feels like a whole other realm of fandom opportunities hehe

Did you end up drawing the charas and the OCs and everything else in between that sweet little noggin' o' yours Weir?

BE NOSY ALL YOU WANT LOVELY, I'll answer whatever I can!

I have been watching, unapologetically, child cartoons lately. YEAH you heard me, Ultimate Spiderman has been my bread and jam for the past few weeks, legit best fucking kids show ever!

The animations are wonky in just the right way, makes my inner child all bubbly since TVs didn't use to pass those on the usual channels? As for something I am looking forward, hmmmm....

I guess I've been looking forward to finishing college for once and for all? Honestly I wish I had given up on it on the first year and transferred, but god why is there always ONE motherfucker to tell us "no, just get it done since you already started it! Are you sure of that?"

Fuck them. But I know it was still my choice, so fuck me too. /NSRS

HABSHBAHASBBDS sorry, getting back on track tho, TELL ME what you've been up to as well, if you'd like to ofc! Please?

[recurring-polynya]

Writing/Art Update 4.30.2024

I'm tired!!

That's not related to anything, I just wanted to get that out there: I'm do not have a lot of energy right now.

I am taking requests right now, and I thought it would be good to post an update on how that's going, because I'm worried that people will think I am not working on them, but I am very much working on them. I think that's because a lot of times in the past, when I do requests, it's been for a specific event, like Renji's birthday, where I have a deadline and a lot of pressure to get things done. In this case, it's just that I have a list of prompts in my inbox to work on, where at least someone will be happy to read it when I post (hopefully 😂) I have posted one already, and I am at work on the second. It's about 1200 words right now, and I'd say it's 1/3-1/2 done. It's going kinda slow. That's not to say it's going bad--I have good direction on it and I've been making progress on it, it's just not, like, flowing from my fingertips. It's a set of characters I don't usually work with, which is fun for a change, but also it takes me like 9 times longer to write anything that doesn't have Renji in it. The way I figure, if I can do about one of these per week, that should be reasonable.

People are still welcome to send in requests! I will say: - I have gotten lots so far, so please don't feel like you need to send me a pity request, but if there's something you'd like to see from me, hmu, who knows, worst case is I don't write it - Quite a few (like, at least 3???) are things that I already have planned as part of larger works, and I'm not quite sure what to do with that 😂 I guess I'll just say that if you feel like you sent in a really good one and I ignored it, just be patient, it may come up eventually. - Lot of funny/cute type ideas, which is fine and it's like, the main thing I do, but also please don't be afraid to send in something more serious or angsty, I do like to do that kinda stuff, I just don't always have ideas (they never seem to get as many stats, so maybe other people just don't like my serious stuff as much, but let me have fun 😂) - Maybe b/c I turned anon asks back on, I've been getting a fair number of (what seem like) regular asks, rather than fanfic requests, but tbh, sometimes I am not sure, so please try to be clear if you want a fanfic about it, or you just want me to answer your question, otherwise you get what you get.

In art news, I keep meaning to draw and then not drawing!! I need to fix this! May is tomorrow, so there is a new set of art prompts, which I am more excited about than the April art prompts. Also, we watched the Halloween episode last week and my daughter really wants us to draw Pumpkin Ghost Orihimes and I would like that too. I will try to get my shit together! We'll see!

[tonakuma]

2024 Creative Wrapup and Look Ahead

This ended up very long and rambly but. I just wanted to get it out. Say my piece out to the world on my tumblr where most of my usual followers don't know I even am x3 Look Back

2024 was a hard year. I have no idea how 2024 started. But what I know is the moment I got unexpectedly terminated from my employment in early 2024, everything changed.

I think I was, in many ways, lost, for most of 2024 as a result of not having a job. But it was more than that. I was creatively aimless. I was struggling artistically and didn't have a purpose.

What originally started off as an attempt to learn more human anatomy to better draw furry stuff ended up snowballing into loving art more and once again. I stopped trying to be something and someone else. I stopped trying to fit into a box to appease a certain group, where many didn't even care anyways. And god everyone noticed. The amount of people who were commenting about my art glow up and how much better I was doing. That motivated me so much. And for the first time in a long time. I could see they were right. I Knew they were right. I understood the power of doing something I loved and how much that reflected in what I did.

That shift ended up cascading. It evolved and carried forward. It multiplied exponentially. It ended up culminating in me just locking up and moving on from something for my own mental health. While it was the catalyst for my artistic creativity, while I met many amazing people from it... there was also some truly awful things that happened to me. I cannot ignore the scars, regardless of how situations and myself as a person have improved. So it was time I parted ways and I am better of for it. Whether my departure from that part of my life will be for now or forever, only time will tell. For now I am happy it's locked in a box and out of sight. And my happiness matters most.

In the last months of 2024, by a series of chances I rediscovered by love of writing too. A realization I was driving a rare-pair ship for a large fandom, combined with a release for a game started it all. I focused on those fics with a renewed sense of purpose in October to November. The best month to do so given history and the writing events during it. In December, the last month of the year. A simple desire to say "thank you" - to someone who I had seen being so helpful to writers and creatives, helping in moderating and running events in a server - blossomed into something amazing. I made plans to watch She-Ra and the Princesses of Power with the express intent of writing a fanfic as a gift for that mod. I'd watch the series over November into December. Write the fic in December and then go back to my own fandoms. None of that happened. I binged the series in less than a week. I started writing the fic and I also started drawing art for it. I actually had Spop fanart BEFORE the fic was finished. A quick sketch of Catra as a trucker, roughly coloured based on conversation from my gift target. (How he didn't sense something was up at that point was beyond me lmao). I fell wholeheartedly into this lovely series and have a long fic completely outlined that I've already been picking away at. It's probably gonna be my big 2025 project. On top of fanart sketches and other fun things. Also on the note of binging, I just finished binging said gift targets 300k word fanfic in about 6 days. Because apparently when I fall into something I just fall whole heartedly into it. Full send out for a rip bud. Peak Canadian hours I guess. Go read Defiance by TheNotebookWizard xD.

I picked up things old and new and with a renewed sense of how I creatively work best as a writer and artist. I've published more written words in the last two months of 2024, than I did in the past 2 years combined. I have a new canvas to work on for words (Scrivener), and the same trusty canvas (ClipStudio) I've come to love for art. My art growth has never been better and the 2024 wrapup shows that wonderfully: (Also Frith-rah I drew alot of Lisbeth/Rika in 2024 lmao)

Most importantly. I found the joy in creating both words and art again. I re-discovered fully the love of creating something.

Look Ahead

As I look ahead to 2025 I'm still scared and anxious. I've taken the first steps already into a career shift courtesy of a fully funded education to employment program. It's in a completely new field for me too. Scary. I wonder how much time I will have for creativity. If I can balance being a student and also being a creative. I want to keep creating but I fear school will eat all that.

Who knows that will come however.

All I can hope for is that I will ride the momentum I have built up creatively at the end of this year and carry it forward to 2025. I am going to try my best to do just that. If i will it into existence, it should happen. If I tell myself to do it. I will do it. I have a whole new large fanfic story to start sending out to the world. Old fanfics to wrap up on. I have creative artistic ideas that I just want to get fufilled. Some of these are wombo-combo in tandem things. Art for these fanfics. It's gonna be fun. I am excited as much as I am nervous and anxious. I got this.

[deathofnessus]

Reposting my tg channel posts here so i dont lose them, a lot of words so its under cut:

1. All characters i have for the space setting so far and short descriptions of each(similar to the ones in my pinned, but a bit more detailed for my followers there ^_^):

-Rodion Melnikov, he/him

Definition of a burn out kid except hes like 40 now. A very ambitious academically man in the past, he grew more secluded with each year, as he began to worry that its too late for him to succeed now (although his definition of success is very twisted). Joins the expedition in hopes to finally find some new amazing discovery and get the recognition he believes he deserves. Dated David Ross for 5+ years when they were in their late 20s-early 30s, met through the academic field. An only child btw

-David Ross, he/him

David is an engineer, working in the field of rocket science. He is very passionate about his craft but overall a very laid back person, not prone to conflict. Knows everything about the Nessus, treats it like his child of sorts 😭 Kind of became the captain due to all of this knowledge. And people trust him a lot. Dated Rodion Melnikov in the past.

-Carwyn Morgan, she/her (he/him for most 💔)

The oldest member of the crew. Joined the expedition out of deep academic intrest, although was unsure about it at first. Technically has a role of an assistant to Mariana Renea. Passionate about her work, which is one of tthe biggest reason her and rodya got along so well. Had a long wild life before this expedition. Also shes an egg ... girl your gender.!!!!...

-Mariana Renea, she/her

Technically the captain, more so the leader of the expedition, the one that got everyone together. Shes been best friends with Morgan for years, their families were close for years. Shes obviously a very responsible person, also extremely passionate about her work. Has done a lot of things for her field of science (dont know which one yet. Sorry), shes well known and respected. This expedition is another big step in her career. Also had a family.

2. Answering moots questions, both rus and eng:

more thoughts on the expedition itself 🔽

3. Big answer to a big set of questions about the free timeon the ship, the character dynamics and fun facts about morgan:

I was gonna answer this with doodles but im impatient so i might come back to that later... First of all thanks for such detailed message i rlly appreciate it! I think the dynamics in the crew are definitely a little tense, especially bcuz of rodya and davey, but they usually try to stay chill. I dont think they would have big arguments or anything, at least not before the accident™ They definitely have a lot of respect for one another, but i think at least for rodya especially theres a bit of academic rivalry in this all, although the rest i think are kind of the opposite in thay way, feeling more unitied due to their goals and passions and stuff. So yeah rodya is definitely the one most likely to get "infatuated with the unknown", but i do think Morgan is similar in that way, maybe not as intense though. Mariana would be cautious but definitely intrested and i think Davey is the least likely, he'd definitely say nope and go the other way.

As for passing the free time on the ship, thats definitely something they do yeah! I never thought about it that much, and now thats definitely something id like to draw once i have the time so thanks for the suggegstion :D i think theyd have some pretentious ass board games along with some silly ones, but considering how long theyre on this ship i think at some point they'd get bored of all of them, which would lead to them hanging out all together less fkr sure. Maybe someone would suggest their own made up games and i think that person would be the fifth character™ that i dont have any story for, but their general function in the story in my mind rn is the younger guy that breaks the tension between all of these old serious people >< So work is important, yes, and they do spend a lot of time on it, but i think theyre all smart enough to understand that rest and hanging out together is important. Except maybe rodya. I think theyd have to drag him to these games by force most of the time. And every time they definitely regret it bcuz he always wins, which pisses everyone off. And he probably havent played any of these games before, hes just naturally good at them. I do think mariana at some point learned his stragidies and was able to sometimes win over him lol. Morgan and Davey love to team up together to try to beat "the try-hards". AS FOR MORGAN PRE EXPEDITION!! I thought a lot during the summer about how i imagine her when she was younger participating a lot in her local queer spaces(which is how she meets mariana), helping organise events and stuff, which is especially funny bcuz i imagine a lot of people clocked her as transfem but she just didn't have a clue 😭😭 she thought she was just a quirky gay man her entire life... I also imagine she tried many hobbies in her life, especially the ones that require handy work like drawing, pottery, knitting ect ect, i think she ended up enjoying these the most. I think shes the type of gal that loves the cycle actually now that i think of it. I dont think she's super sporty or anything but cycling sounds like something she'd enjoy. Anyways, thank you also for the recs!!! I've been planning to watching scavenger's reign for sooooo looong but never got to it, despite watching the first ep and really enjoying it. This is a sign to finally do it.... Never heard of harold halibut though, ill make sure to check it out, thank you!! Sending lots of love to you anon you're very sweet