#I'm not gonna pretend i have experience WORKING as an artist

[xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx]

"An ideal Sims game would have Sims 2's gameplay mechanics, Sims 3's open world, and Sims 4's graphics!"

I absolutely despise this take, and I want to explain why. This is a very long rant and it is full of piss and vinegar directed at everything in the Sims 4. I'm gonna try to keep everything kinda professional as much as I can but I can't guarantee an unbiased opinion.

If you'll let me talk your ears off for a moment, I'd like to explain, from my own experience as an artist and a casual player, my issues with the art style and direction of The Sims 4 compared to The Sims 2. (I'm not really going to comment on 3 because I've never played it.)

I want to start off by explaining the difference between better graphics and higher resolution. The Sims 4 absolutely blows Sims 2 out of the water when it comes to textures and polygon counts on sims, no contest. But I'd argue that the graphics themselves... aren't better. They're worse, even, so much fucking worse. The biggest problems come from the stylization and the animations, in my opinion, so I'll explain what I mean.

Have you ever felt like the Sims in 4 just look... weird? Not quirky, not kinda strange, but off. Distressing. Uncanny. Whatever the fuck the kids call it nowadays. When you strip away the packs and the CC and the shaders, the sims in the base game look bad. They're very close to being human; they walk like us, talk like us, have families like us, but they don't look like us, not exactly. There's always something off about them, no matter how close you try to get. Proportions will be a bit off, or your eyelashes will be like three polygons for some fucking reason, and the jig is up. The illusion is gone.

This is one of the instances where a higher resolution and more detailed models and meshes work against you. You aren't making believe. You are beyond the point of pretending that the pixelated shapes are real clothes and bodies and faces, because at this point, they're close enough that you don't need to. There's no gap to bridge. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're lifelike, at least, not enough to be completely human. In some ways, they're still tethered to being cartoony and plasticky and fake. Just enough to frighten you. Enough to put you off. They're not using it to their advantage anymore, and instead, it's holding them back.

When the Sims 2 came out in 2004, the developers knew that they weren't going to make a perfectly accurate life simulator. They physically couldn't render every wrinkle in the face or fold in the clothing. In some animations, things clip strangely or the facial expressions are sort of janky or there's just some form of roughness around the edges. But that's okay; your brain doesn't need a perfectly accurate representation this time. That's not what you're here for, anyway.

The Sims 4 is basically Icarus-ing itself into disaster. The entire game sacrifices style for complete realism, a goal that was unachievable ten years ago, and is unachievable now.

The Sims 2 never thought of itself as a completely realistic life sim, though. It has cartoony, low poly meshes and exaggerated proportions and wild, raunchy storylines that would never occur in real life. BECAUSE IT ISN'T REAL LIFE. And it isn't like real life, not because it's failing to be, but because it doesn't want to be!

The Sims 4 is not ever going to completely replicate human looks or interactions or dynamics. And if it's trying to, it's doing a shit job of it. That shouldn't be the goal in the first place. If I wanted to watch a lonely college student talk to himself in the mirror to try and get better at interacting with people, I'd close the computer and go look at myself. It somehow highlights the most mundane parts of life without any of the whimsy and goofiness that the earlier installments had. It takes itself too fucking seriously for its own good, and it's killing both the gameplay and the art style.

The other point I'd like to bring up is the animation. The Sims 4 allows for much more customization of both sim and environments, but at the cost of dynamic animations. How many times is that grab animation reused? How many times is the same set of animations used for sims with wildly different personalities? Your sims barely feel alive with how little they express themselves.

Now, look, I'm a digital artist. I've dabbled in animation, but only briefly, and only in 2D. I've got no clue how 3D animation works, much less how it worked 20 years ago, but I can see the passion in every single animation in the Sims 2. The more niche interactions allowed for more expressive animations than in 4. They could afford to have a distinct animation for mean sims throwing the football extra hard to be assholes, rather than every sim using the same generic football-throwing animation to save time and money. I get where they're coming from. I get the idea. But in one move, you've both made the art style stiffer and less expressive, and you've made the personalities of the sims seem meaningless. Everyone acts the same, regardless of what their moodlets or their traits say. It's hollow. It's stifled. It's a waste of potential.

But for what Sims 2 lacks in polygons, it makes up for in smaller animated details. Quality over quantity. The sims have hair physics, they open the door before they get in the car, they take utensils out of the counters when they cook, they jump on the couch and the cushions smush under their weight. When they dance, the weight is realistic, and when they smile, it tugs at every one of the few dozen shapes that make up their faces. The sims are lively. They dance and sing and love and hate just like humans, and rather than being some strange attempt at mimicry, it's almost a tribute. They were made with love. You can tell that they were drawn up and rigged and animated by a bunch of people working together, studying each other and making faces in the mirror for reference and watching their kids and neighbors and dogs and hands for reference. The sims are not human, and not trying to be, but they're taking the most human parts of us and making them their own.

You could never have a game with the Sims 4's graphics and the Sims 2's gameplay. The gameplay and graphics are inexorably connected, and the Sims 2 just has so much glorious detail baked into it, that you could never really make it work underneath the limitations of the later games. The developers of 2 knew what their limits were, and they worked tirelessly to make the game as full and complex as they could within those limits. The developers for the Sims 4 just did not have those guidelines, and thus, the drive to bend the rules was no longer there. They didn't go wild in rebellion because they were never told they couldn't in the first place. They spent the entire time chasing a goal they couldn't meet, and lost sight of what made the series fun to begin with.

It wasn't the realism you came for; you had realism already surrounding you. It was the caricature of it that made it interesting.

[fayeforrosie]

Blooming For You

Part 5

Karina x Fem! Reader

Today was finally the day Karina could confess her everlasting feelings for you, but there's always something in the way

Part 5 to The Only One I Want

Warnings- Swearing, angst if you read upside down with sunglasses

Word Count- like 3k maybe i forgor

“And when I’m with you, I almost feel like I’m a different person. It’s like I can just be myself without the worry of disappointing my audience and those who support me. I’ve never felt this way before, and before meeting you, I would have never guessed I would be able to experience such protruding feelings. So, Y/n... with all of this said... I would love it if I could take you out sometime, not as a friend, but as your girlfriend.” 

Karina stood tall, shoulders high as her chin pointed proudly. She took a breath as her gaze had yet to fall, the corners of her lips threatening to upturn against her better judgement. 

“Um no thanks”, Ningning glared back at Karina, her face conveying pure disgust as her eyebrows dipped lower than her rolled eyes. 

“Ning that’s not helping!” The leader shouted, reaching over to connect her two hands into the youngest member’s shoulders, pushing her back as she almost fell off of the side of the bed. 

Ningning laughed, wiping the fake tears that were apparently spilling from her eyes, pretending to hold her stomach as if her laughter was corrupting her airway. 

“I’m sorry I'm sorry... it sounds great Karina. I know you’ve been practicing so don’t worry about it, okay? Just be natural, who is she to say no to you if you’re just being yourself?” 

Karina took a breath, calming herself down and putting her mind at ease. Ning was right, she told herself, you’ve been nothing but welcoming of Karina ever since she met you. Everything you’ve done for her, from tutoring the idol and supporting her goal to become a fine artist like yourself, to becoming a friendly face in which Karina never had to wonder if you would be there for her as a friend, physically and emotionally. 

So why was she worried? 

Well for one, you are the only person Karina believed she could ever fall in love with. You were almost too perfect to be real, as if Karina were to rip a sheet of paper off of her undusted scrap journal and jot down a list of things that would make the ideal significant other.

Maybe in the past, Karina would leave the sheet blank, unable to come up with any feature or trait that could create the perfect person for her, as she believed that there could be nobody she would fall for, and she will never experience such a thing, but now, Karina is for certain that you are the very, and only, girl that she wishes for. 

“Ok... I’m gonna do it Ning”, Karina pumps her first in the air, lips sealed together in certainty. 

“I believe in you Rina! Go get ‘em!” 

- 

In your art room, sensing goosebumps arise on your skin as you walk over to clothes the blinds of the window, you hum to yourself the rhythm of the faint noise of one of Aespa’s song, Lucid Dream. 

Before ever meeting Jimin, you had seen her face plastered on every building, her smile persisting you in every makeup ad across the street, becoming exceedingly memorable. Nevertheless, you weren’t exactly familiar with who she was as a person, although fans necessarily haven’t a clue on who their idol is behind camera, you were antithetical to those who have her birth chart, shoe size, and coffee order memorized. 

Sure, you’ve seen people doing one of her group’s dance challenge out on the street, or the sound of her songs playing in a local café, however her music was not something you were exactly acquainted to. 

Now, Jimin has become a close friend of yours, visiting you nearly every day, to the best of her ability, and not only working hard to better her artistic capability, but even becoming comfortable enough to come in some days, too tired from work, and simply rest her fatigued body on your arm and make conversation with you for the remainder of your class.  

She had recently found out that you weren’t one to listen to her music, as you enjoyed more Western artists, with the exception of Twice, which she was a bit offended by, so she took it upon herself to introduce you to her entire discography, lasting longer than you’d be fond off. 

When Jimin played the song you were hearing at this moment, it instantly caught your attention, and when she observed the angelic and beautiful smile painted across your face, your eyes squinting in attentiveness, she promised herself she’d work on more songs that would have relevance to your taste. 

The song ended, along with your night, so you waltzed your way to your desk, readying yourself to head back home. Jimin was supposed to come over for a class today, but she cancelled only an hour ago as she was stuck wasting her time at work, her words not yours. 

It saddened you, because candidly you found pleasure in her presence, you enjoy when she is next to you, her soft voice carrying through the light atmosphere, soft music in the background as you soak yourself in the moment. It was something you found yourself looking forward to, and in fact, you sought Karina was only thing on your mind recently. 

You thought of her before you went to bed, snuggling yourself in the warmth of your blanket, wondering what it would feel like if her arms were to just slowly wrap themselves around your waist, pulling you closer to her body. 

You thought of her when you were driving, imagining her in the passenger seat, a smirk displayed on her mouth as she put on her own group’s music, laughing when you roll your eyes and tell her you’ve listened to it about a hundred times now. 

Maybe you were delusional, but you thought of her in ways that a friend, or a co-worker, or an art teacher should never feel for another someone. She haunted you, appearing in your dreams just when you thought you could finally go a few hours free of the girl running circles around your mind. 

And unbeknownst to you, Karina felt the exact same way, possibly in a more obsessive, delusional, love-sick way. 

So Jimin found herself ogling down at her feet as they swiftly moved across the pavement of the sidewalk, her cap atop her head, while her hood rested above it as well, and her mask pulled to the tip of her nose. The light patter of the rain played over in her muffled ears, masking the ringing voices of chatter throughout the street. Karina thought she had hope tonight, as it was raining and not many people would be out in the city, but that was evidently proved to be inaccurate, the constant shoving against her covered arm serving as more evidence. 

As she finally reaches the end of the street, glancing up to see the familiar building she has come to love only a few blocks down, she smiles and rushes over, only to see you walking out of the very door she was running to. 

Her stomach twisted into a bundle of nerves. She isn’t prepared, but it needs to be done, or she’ll go mad. 

“Y/n!” She yells, her hood falling with the intensity of her speed, her poster tucked under her hoodie, sheltering it from the rain that began to pour heavier. 

You turn at the sound of the neighborly voice, accustomed to the sound of it, and you flash a smile before you could even glance in her direction, thinking you weren’t going to see her today. 

“Jimin!” 

“I need to talk to y-” 

That’s when a few men revealed themselves from behind an empty alleyway, their cameras shown proudly in their hands as they hastily began taking shots of the idol running desperately to you. This wasn’t a good image for her, she couldn’t be seen like this. Jimin had always been seen as such an admirable adult by her company, abiding by the rules, doing as they asked, not as a girl who would sneak out often to chase around a girl she was in love with. 

And the public? What would they say when the rumors arise about her chasing a girl in the rain with a giant poster under her hoodie? And if the company releases a statement that she was not supposed to even be out at the moment, and she was disobeying the rules? The public would ruin her. 

It was all too many thoughts at once, Jimin felt a rush of anxiety wave over her body, freezing at the sight of the paparazzi and what they could do to her, so she allowed them to assume control over her, running in the opposite direction of you into the most secluded area she could find, loosing the paparazzi in the process. 

Your smile abruptly dropped, heart coming to a standstill while you thought of what had just happened. 

Jimin was racing over to meet you after hours, dressed silently and reserved so nobody could recognize her, but the camera men knew. She was caught in the act of only talking to you, so why was it such a problem that she had to run away from you? Was she embarrassed to be friends with you? Did she not want the public to see that she was with someone who wasn’t as famous as her? 

Your anger rose, but in spite of that, what got you the best was the overwhelming sadness consuming your emotions. Who were you to think someone so popular and loved would ever want to even be seen with you? And you thought of her in a romantic aspect? Hah! You’re embarresed for yourself more than anything. 

- 

“Fucking bitch, I fucking knew it. Who am I to even...”, you trail off in your thoughts on your way back to your apartment. It was a close enough distance to walk, and for all that it was raining, and you had yet to buy an umbrella for yourself over the years, so your stuck with your drenched hair swirling down bellow your eyes, blurring your vision. 

“Fuck!” You shout, kicking an innocent rock adjacent to your foot. Everything seemed to agitate you in the moment. You couldn’t focus when all you could think about was how the girl you liked was precisely unsettled with the thought of being seen with you in the public view. 

Your phone rang in your pocket once again, and you ignored her calls like the last fourteen times, rolling your eyes when your infuriating ringtone once again pervaded your ear drums. You seriously need some sleep. 

You feel another text from her come through, so you finally had enough and raised the phone from your jeans, entering your password and looking for her contact, and that’s when you notice the numerous texts sent over the past half hour you’ve been apart. 

Y/n i’m so sorry

I didn’t expect something like that to happen

I didn’t mean to run off on you like that I promise. 

It was exactly what you had expected her to send... you scroll further. 

Y/n? 

Please answer

I know you walk home and I didn’t see you holding an umbrella

Are you home safe? 

Please respond

I’m worried

I hope you aren’t mad at me

At least let me know your safe

Y/n? 

You could get really sick

Seriously please answer

I’m going to your house 

Eyes widening, you through your phone back into your pocket and speed down the sidewalk hastily. You didn’t understand why she’d act so worried about you as if she hadn’t entirely ran off on you in response to her own shame. Who does she even think she is? You seriously don’t understand this woman. 

You rush across the street when you finally see her tall figure standing underneath the sheltered doorway. She doesn’t notice your presence yet, so you fix your appearance slightly and walk sternly down to her, grabbing her shoulder and pulling her to face you. 

“What the fuck was that?” You yell. 

Jimin spins to you promptly against her will, flinching at your blaring tone at such a late time, especially when it was her first time hearing you raise your voice to that level. 

She doesn’t know what to say, suddenly caught off guard by your confrontation. It takes her a while to finally digest the scenery. Your clothes and hair thoroughly soaked head to toe, eyes red as she notices a single near fall down to your chin, or maybe she was mistaking it for the rain, it was hard to tell. 

She was saddened by the looks of you, her heart dropping entirely as she thought of how rigorous the walk home must have been. You must be so cold and hungry, if only she could provide you with such things to make you feel better, although you’ve probably already caught a cold by now, unfortunately. 

“I-” she stutters, “what do you mean?” 

You laugh in her face, almost mocking her. 

“What do you mean what do I mean? You completely ran off on me as soon as those guys came over!” 

Jimin notices you are still in the rain, so she pulls you under the small roof before she responded. 

“You must be so sick Y/n, can we go inside first please?” She begs. 

Your eyes squint, wondering if she was only playing with your feelings, acting as if she really cared for your well being. Well, maybe she did, but would she say the same thing with another presence around? 

“Like you care Karina.” 

Jimin flinches, not only at your tone, but the fact that you called you Karina after continuously calling her by her real name even before the two of you became friends. It was like you knew how to attack her hearts in the perfect place. 

“What are you talking about”, Jimin furrows her eyebrows, reaching to hold your arm but you pull away from her. 

Your gaze drops, and that is when Karina can finally differentiate your tears from the rain as you raise your head dismally. 

“You don’t even understand, do you? I was so excited to see you Karina! I always am! I always fucking look forward to when we can see each other! I look forward to our art classes, and being with you, and seeing your smile brighten when you learn something new! It makes me so happy, seriously! But who am I to even say these types of things to someone like you?” 

Jimin is hesitant on which words to focus on, possibly the beginning of a confession, or the last sentence you had dropped like a bomb on her, causing her to furrow her eyebrows in confusion, not understanding what you were getting at. Or maybe she did, and didn’t want to even believe you would think of such a thing. 

“Why’d you run away from me?” You cry. 

Jimins tears are now racing against yours, following them down to the gravel bellow the two of you. 

“Jimin are you embarrassed to be with me? Are you ashamed to be seen with someone like myself?” 

She shakes her head repeatedly but allows you to continue, sensing you weren’t done. 

“And I was so stupid to even think we had a chance together, how stupid of me to forget that you're an idol, and you’d do anything to protect that perfect fucking image, even running away from those who are close to you.” 

Jimin cuts you off before you can go on, sick of the lies spilling from your mouth. She couldn’t handle knowing you felt so wrongly about her feelings. 

“Y/n that’s not true! I’m sorry okay!" She shouts, “it took me by surprise, I always get so much anxiety when dealing with things like that! It doesn’t mean I’m ashamed of you, or I’m embarrassed to be seen around you! I...” 

Jimin is hesitant to finally show you the poster she’d been fostering on the steps, but she thinks back to what her members had told her, and determined this to be the best, and only time she could do this. 

“I wanted to meet you because I wanted to give you this”, she extends her hand out to you, and the poster is a bit wet and unfolded, but you take it in your grip and open it slowly, careful not to rip it. 

Your eyes fall on the work of art she created, a beautifully drawn Lillie draped against a similar Carnation. You noticed Jimin implemented every piece of advice you had given her to create such a preposing masterpiece, not missing how she used your favorite flower, as well as hers. 

And then you saw what was bellow it... a letter. 

Dear Y/n, 

Everything is all so sudden to me. I haven’t known you for too long, but that doesn’t matter, because in the time we’ve spent together, I’ve come to realize that the only thing I need in my life is you. I was so, incredibly attracted to you when I first saw you in that art museum, and you wouldn’t believe the things I did to find you (i hope that doesn’t sound weird, haha). You’ve been the only thing on my mind, and when I’m dreaming, I can still imagine your beautiful smile and soft skin. I’ve never been one for romance, but after meeting you, I know my perspective has changed. And when I’m with you, I almost feel like I’m a different person. It’s like I can just be myself without the worry of disappointing my audience and those who support me. I’ve never felt this way before, and before meeting you, I would have never guessed I would be able to experience such protruding feelings. So Y/n, with all of this said, I would love it if I could take you out sometime, not as a friend, but as your girlfriend.

You hadn’t noticed your tear stains dripping onto the paper until you finally raise your gaze to the awaiting beauty before you, biting her lips like an adorable puppy. 

“Jimin I..”, you’re at a loss for words. Out of everything that could have been on that poster, you certainly did not expect that. After the recent events that had happened previously, your hope for a future with the girl suddenly fled down the drain, nonetheless here you are with a written confession laying in the palm of your hands

You don’t know what to say, you want to start with an apology, expressing how sorry you were for misinterpreting her feelings and pronouncing her the bad guy. You want to tell her how you feel the same, and that you can’t think of anyone else you’d rather be with than her, but the way her lips pouted in anticipation pained you to no extent. 

You walked closer to the girl, reaching for her slippery hand and taking it in yours. Everything is telling you to kiss the worried look right off her face, diminish any negative thoughts she may be having, and so you pull her closer by her hand, now placing your other on her cheek. 

Even in the darkness of the night, you can nonetheless perceive the instant flush in the girl’s cheeks, and that’s the last thing you can see before you close your eyes and lean forward, connecting your lips to hers. 

Karina’s wintry hand rose to the back of your neck, pulling you impossibly closer to her body. You release your grip you had with her other hand, now placing it upon her waist to steady yourself. 

Her lips glide against yours with ease, its pillow-like feel easing the dampness of the rain droplets everlasting on her lips. You feel Karina smile as you continue to kiss her, and you do the same, appreciating such a moving moment between the two of you, admiring how it could be the possible start of something beautiful. 

It’s not until a while does Karina pull away from you reluctantly. 

“You're all wet and freezing babe”, you smile at the pet name, “let’s get you upstairs and into some comfy clothes.” 

You smile and nod, agreeing to follow her into your complex, trailing behind her back with your hand in hers as she opens the door to not only the entrance of your apartment, but hopefully the beginning of an irresistible, and beautiful bloom of a relationship. 

~

The long awaited last part ☹️

im rlly sorry for the delay guys, i know that it took a while :(( but i hope you all enjoyed❤️

[chrisgotitall]

HI LOVE

Your work is so sweet, I’m clinging to those oneshots for dear life🤞🤞🤞

I’m OBSESSED with the concept of makeup artists reader. She’s young and smart, has a degree but formal work feels dreadful, so she does make up instead. She meets him while working on west side story, and everyone behind the scenes is always dancing and joyful, and she’s Latina too so she just can’t help but join!! (Yes I am projecting 😒😒) like Rachel and Ariana are dancing to songs in Spanish and reader shows them some songs in Portuguese cus she is Brazilian. She teaches them how to dance to it and Mike it’s just watching from afar pretending he isn’t staring, while all the guys he knew before from the newsies cast are teasing him and maybe even flirting with her to spite him into finally making a move 👀👀 Idk it’s just a concept that lives rents free in my head and I thought you would enjoy

Take care💋💋💋

Your mornings start so well since you chose to work as a makeup artist on movie sets. You wake up, really early of course, but knowing you're going to the most beautiful job there is. You enjoy it so much. You like makeup first of all, then you like talking to people, you like getting to know them while preparing them for their scenes. It's amazing.

The movie you're working for right now is a movie musical, it's called West Side Story and it is by far your favorite working experience. Especially for the people. Most of the cast members are fellow Southern Americans so the atmosphere on set is like home.

They're always dancing and singing even before getting on set, they start from the makeup trailer.

They put music on: bachata, cumbia, salsa and they start a dancing party while getting ready for their scenes. It's truly awesome.

And they get in everybody, even the Jets, every crew member and makeup girls like you. And you dance with them, oh yes, you dance a lot with them. Ariana and Rachel just get you in cause they know you got it in you. The latino blood just floods in moments like these and it's beautiful to see, it's so joyful.

One time, tho, you decided to show them some songs from your native place specifically, just to throw in some portuguese jams. They enjoyed it so much and the party way even fuller.

It started cause the Sharks were the first that had to get ready, so they put some music up and then you put your music up.

But then it was the Jets' turn. While they were sitting in their seats you noticed that one of the Jets made Mike sit in the chair that's actually your place. You were dancing but then realized it's time to get back to work so you reach your place.

"Good morning" he says, smiling.

"Good morning" you tell him, smiling as well, "Ok, let's see what you need today" you say reaching for the paper that tells you what kind of makeup he'll need for his scenes.

"Oh this is gonna be fun, you can actually help me today" you say putting out a little package with black tint in it.

"Glad to" he says.

"You can take a bit of this and just smear it all over your hands" you say pointing at the package, "But before you do that you're gonna have to take the shirt off"

He looks up at you, "The tank top too?"

"No, just the shirt is fine" you say feeling your cheeks flaring up. He takes his shirt off and you start dirtying his face with the black paint since he's gonna shoot the scene where the first fight between Sharks and Jets happens.

You touch up his concealer, just now realizing how close to his face you are but luckily you made him look up.

"Okay, I'm done" you say.

"Thank you" he says, smiling again.

The way he looks at you makes you literally weak in the knees so you have to focus on tidying up the makeup desk to not look at him.

In the afternoon, another "party" started again and obviously you got in. This time you weirdly felt a heavy gaze on you, you looked around and saw Mike staring at you. You looked away and smiled to yourself, continuing to dance.

He was leaning against the wall, his arms crossed and he didn't seem to want to take his eyes off of you.

"Can I dance with you?" Kyle says. You accept and you dance with him. Of course he's a really good dancer even if this kind of rhythm isn't really his style.

You notice he has his head turned towards Mike and you shake your head to yourself.

"What's going on?" you ask him.

He smiles, "Just getting my boy Mike to make a move" he admits.

"Oh my god..." you laugh.

He makes you twirl and you laugh even harder.

"It's my job as a friend" he pulls you closer.

"I'm sorry, can I take a turn at a dance?"

It's Mike, standing between you two with his hand reaching out to you. Kyle smiles and holds his hands up.

"Sure... all yours"

Mike takes Kyle's place and makes you dance.

You smile at him and show him how samba is supposed to be danced. He learns really fast and you dance it together.

"You're wonderful" he says out of thought.

You look at him, very startled.

"When you dance... you're wonderful when you dance" he corrects himself.

"Oh... right"

"You're pretty wonderful too" you say, not really referring to his dancing.

He sighs, "I like you... I really like you, not just your dancing"

You smile at him, "I like you too, Mike"

[yurisorcerer]

I'm not gonna pretend I have anything super new or innovative to say about Mobile Suit Gundam. It's one of the most-analyzed anime ever, and I pale in comparison to some of the people who *have* analyzed it, but here I am, thinking about it regardless.

For context, I am watching this as part of a---as she called it---"comet swap" with my good friend @charaznablespeteevee, where I watch a mecha anime she is obsessed with (Gundam) and she watches one I am obsessed with (Code Geass). I'm not sure if I'm going to write a big long post like this about every episode (since I'm going to *try* to watch at least one per day, that would get quite exhausting), but I am liveblogging it more informally over on the worst website on Earth, if you're willing to put up with that Nazi-infested hellhole long enough to read some posts from yours truly.

In any case, Gundam and Code Geass. are many differences between these, the main ones being that Code Geass is more recent and also not widely hailed as a masterpiece of its form. It does *draw* notably from Gundam though despite having very different artistic aims and a different tone, so watching this makes sense in a way. I spent way too much of my teenagerhood obsessed with Lelouch, and now I'm watching the anime that his archetypal grandfather came from. (Goddess have mercy on my soul.)

My experience with Gundam as a franchise prior to this is very limited, but I do have some. For reference, I have seen all of:

Gundam 00, back when it aired on the SyFy channel when they had an anime block many years ago. I really liked this as a teenager but I don't remember it super well.

The Witch From Mercury, lesbian space combat, with a notable Code Geass staff connection. WFM was not perfect or anything but I loved it a lot and Suletta is very dear to me. I actually bought an Aerial gunpla a few months ago that is currently sitting unassembled in my closet.

the first Gundam 0079 compilation movie. Now, it might seem weird that I've seen this and am now going back to watch the TV series. But, while I remember the general outline of what happened, I was SUPER sick when I watched it, and I only remember what happened really, really vaguely. While I have some idea of the general outline of what's to come, I'm mostly going in genuinely blind.

like 4 or 5 episodes of Victory Gundam, which I liked but kind of fell off of. So we're giving the franchise a proper second go here.

I'm a mecha fan more generally, and I'll get into some of that as I write these, but for now that's the relevant stuff.

Anyway, my main impression of 0079's first episode is actually a structural one. It's REALLY well put together. We introduce the setting, we introduce our main characters, and we introduce the main conflict, all very economically and with a lot of style---more style than some shows with significantly less room to work with manage, in fact---and I'm immediately invested in the fate of our main character, Amuro Ray.

From what I gather here (and a little bit from outside information), my impression is that of a kid who loses his innocence very, very rapidly over the course of this story. Here, the space-hab-thing he lives on is attacked, and he ends up in the cockpit of an experimental superweapon called a Gundam (maybe you've heard of them?). I LOVE how the Gundam is framed here, like some kind of genuinely scary war machine. It's an intentionally othering effect i mostly associate with later mecha anime, especially those with outright monstrous mecha like Evangelion or even The Big O, so to see it here in such a comparatively early series in the genre is impressive.

The episode's climax sees him kill two soldiers from the enemy nation of Zeon, but it's not a triumphant thing, really. He's portrayed as kind of not really knowing what he's doing, flailing around inside this gigantic walking tank / mechanical war god. But then when he *does* figure things out, well, he has to deal with the fact that he just killed two dudes. Going by the cliffhangery ending here, it doesn't seem like his troubles are over, either.

[crazilust]

Astro notes (4)

Hi, I'm back once again with some observations. I wanna promise that I'll be back to being consistent, but huh. It's gonna be what it's gonna be. Please disregard anything that doesn't apply to you, this is just for fun.

For a sign that's so fond of freedom, Sagittarius are actually quite clingy when they actually love you. They probably won't admit it, but they'll pretend to miss their buses to see you, ask you to join their day-to-day activities, etc. Quite surprising, if I'm being 100% honest.

You will most likely never catch a Virgo mercury in a lie. Virgo placements in general keep track of things, and won't ever reveal too much of anything. I believe that's the reason why they get away with lying in general. They don't create these absurd, big lies out of nowhere. It's actually believable.

Aries wants to believe in something. Mix it with any sign, and it'll follow that other sign's needs. Mix it with Pisces ? It creates the biggest romantic that wants to believe in love at all cost. Mix it with Capricorn ? They believe in working hard, climbing the ladder of their work's hierarchy. Aries is, in general, very optimistic and they need to channel it somewhere.

I've noticed that people that don't believe in astrology, for the most part, can be the most stereotypical representation of their signs. I believe it's because because they choose to be blind of their birth chart's energy, they tend not to work on it and therefore just become the perfect stereotype of their signs. It's always so funny to me.

12th House synastry's relationship are so intense. You feel like you're doing something wrong, but at the same time, feel like you're growing exponentially faster than with anyone else ever before. It's a "beware before you enter" type of relationships. Definitely not for the weak.

It's so true: Aquarius placements, especially in Venus or 7th house tells you a lot about if someone is going to be queer or at least experiments with the same gender.

Talking about Aquarius, if you ever need advice and want your mind to be absolutely blown, I would talk to an Aquarius. They tend to have such a different way of perceiving the world that if you ever feel like you've explored all the options, talking to them can open up the most obscure and bizarre solutions (that work!)

The moon sign affects you way more than you would think. Your moon sign rules your emotions. For some signs, emotions are supposed to be completely private, for others they can let it out. Two persons of the same sign could have two different exterior reactions but feel the same internally. That's why your entire birth chart is important, people!

Jupiter really blesses with their natives with such an abundance of creativity. Look at Pisces and Sagittarius artists. Not every Sagittarius or Pisces you'll meet will be creative, though, but if they allow themselves to reach that side of them, they can really access depth that other signs might struggle a bit more.

The modality is such an interesting thing to take into consideration. Fixed signs are really self-righteous and the moment they think they're right, they will go pretty far simply because in their minds, it's the right thing to do. They might feel bad if other people mention to them that it's not right, but they won't change their minds. Their work ethic might be flawless because of it, but it can very well turn into a flaw.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

That's it for me, guys. I always love doing these. I'm currently drinking a matcha latte and life is ... good.

X,

Dolly.

[genericpuff]

LR is really, really good but I just wanted to say something- this is probably more about the readers than LR itself, but when it's said that LR is so much better than LO artistically (which it is!!), like say in terms of writing, pacing, and art - I think it's also not an apples to apples comparison, since LR has LO to draw inspiration from and a lot of external reactions to LO to learn from for what to do and not to, while LO is both time-constrained and (when it started out), didn't have much basis to compare to.

(The SA plotline is one example.. many criticize RS and say she shouldn't have written it in the first place but that's the thing - she actually didn't know. While I agree it's really shitty and RS has definitely ignored a lot of criticism she should take into consideration, the conclusion that she shouldn't have written it in the first place wasn't something that she knew about until after fans pointed it out. She definitely is mishandling it now, but I think writing that in at the start was born out of actual ignorance - different from her problems now, since she's now actively ignoring and shutting down the feedback she does need to get better. This blowing up educated a lot of people- probably not you specifically- and opened up a lot of dialogue for things that Rachel likely didn't have access to at the start of LO. and has no excuse for now.)

Anyway, yeah - Love Lore Rekindled, thank you for creating it! Genuinely, I do - this ask isn't meant to be a bad thing against you at all, nor do you need to reply to it.

Not a bad thing in the slightest, I honestly agree with you! The reality is that LR wouldn't exist without LO, so to try and compare them feels kind of like... it defeats the point?

Like obviously Rekindled was made with similar intentions, I'm not gonna sit here and pretend like Rekindled wasn't made out of spite over what could have been, but at the heart of it all, it doesn't exist to 'flex' on LO, really it's just to help recapture that joy and beauty that the original comic had that I fell in love with in the first place. It's only because I loved the original concept and foundation of LO so much that it exists. That's also why I call it an "AU" of sorts, as a sort of "alternate reality where LO didn't turn out the way it did" experiment lmao Mostly by maintaining the consistency in the original art style and paying off those earlier plot threads that didn't payoff the way we were anticipating or were dropped entirely. Sure, it's trying (and in some ways succeeding) to be "better" than LO, but that definition of "better" and how it's applied was what we were hoping to get out of LO in the first place.

So yeah, when people say "the art/writing is so much better than LO's!" part of me tries to take it as the compliment it's undoubtedly intended to be, but also I'm like "ack, that's not the point!! the art still doesn't look exactly like LO, I'm failing!!" LMAO I suppose that's part of the magic, but it doesn't fully align with my original goals or intentions. That's the struggle of art stylization, you can try and mimic another person's work as much as you want, but you can never mimic the them that's in their work, just like how you can't remove the you that's in yours. I want to be at peace with my own work and what I put into it, so I try not to compare them too much and just treat them as their own unique separate things (even if one of them is directly trying to resemble the other). It's okay that Rekindled doesn't look or read exactly the same as LO, but in saying that it's 'better' defeats the point of why Rekindled exists in the first place and diminishes LO's part in the process. LO has to exist - all of its best and worst parts - for Rekindled to exist, so putting LO down just to raise LR up... isn't that kind of what we criticize all the time within the comic, how it can't seem to hold up its best parts without putting down others? Why can't they both have their own things worth appreciating on their own exclusive of one another?

This is also why I generally ask people to not share Rekindled with the general Lore Olympus hashtags or post about it in the fan groups (and why I don't mirror it on Webtoons) because I just like... don't want it to come across as some "booo you like LO??? go read this instead!" type deal. I want people to be able to enjoy Rekindled as its own standalone story as an extension of LO, in the form of what could have been. There's a very thin line in the sand between Rekindled being just what it is and it being used against the fans as if it's a crime for them to still genuinely enjoy LO. I can't enjoy LO in good faith anymore, but that doesn't mean I make Rekindled for the sake of ruining that good faith in others. I was a fan too, once upon a time, so Rekindled is just as much for the fans as it is for the people like me who started off loving this comic just to be disappointed in the end and yearning for the "what if" that could have been.

And yeah, it's absolutely an advantage that I have in my court that I have the knowledge of knowing what LO started as and where it went wrong to work off of, an advantage that Rachel didn't have. It's like when I look back on my original pages in Time Gate: Reaper and think "man, I wish I had known xyz when I made these so they could be better!" but if I hadn't made them like that the first time, I wouldn't be able to reflect on them now knowing I've improved. In that same regard, Lore Olympus had to run so that Lore Rekindled could crawl. And I'm forever thankful to LO - and Rachel - for giving us something we could all connect over to such an extensive degree that Rekindled could exist at all.

[declawedwildcat]

ok gonna ramble my actual thoughts about yesterday's new screencap just to get it all out of my head onto a plate

As unlikely as it is that this is anything more than the artists playing around with making fighting game alt palettes of the characters, I want to pretend that the red-eyed Kuras is a timeline where he drank from the seaspring. We learn from Mhin that Ais hasn't forced anyone to drink yet, but maybe when things start heating up towards faction warfare he takes any power he can get his hands on, even from those he considered friends. Or, conversely, Kuras is just tired of his whole cycle, this endless quest for redemption, the divinity and power and mistakes. His resentment outweighs his trepidation about the seaspring, and he decides to try and get rid of it the only way that seems powerful enough to finally free him.

Of course this then also comes with the insinuation that people who join the groupmind get a thematically recolored evil-twin version of their everyday outfit courtesy of Ais, which is pretty hilarious 😌

it's definitely a strange choice for a placeholder though imo, generally a placeholder should be something that's eye-catchingly obvious so that even someone who's not familiar with what's supposed to be there can immediately catch it at a glance if it gets left in and let whoever is in charge of changing it out know. That's why you often see that eye-searing shade of magenta on placeholder assets. I would think a simple in-engine color layer (like the accidental green Leander) would be more useful for that purpose since black and white would blend with the normal sprites when left on "skip", so this feels like either an inside joke the team put in for their own amusement, or it's just staged for the screenshot lol

But! all theoreticals and wishlists aside, what this actually shows us is two things:

Kuras has a short hair asset, so he could potentially get a haircut at some point in the story. Of course, as anon pointed out this could be just part of how the model is divided, but in my experience modular parts don't usually have covered-up lineart at their division points, they just extend past the point that should be covered to fill any seams. It's a tiny detail, but to me that says they intend to have both hair variations accessible for them to use on finished sprites (whether this is one or not). I haven't worked on a professionally-produced VN though, so maybe their pipeline is different and I'm completely wrong!

Assuming this is not MCR Kuras being introduced here, that means we're seeing a different character's introduction, one that warrants a sprite but doesn't have one yet. Someone's monster form could make sense for MC to vaguely recognize without being able to immediately place them, but having anyone wander around the middle of the Wick in that state seems fairly unlikely. A smaller side character who happens to get an appearance? Or perhaps meeting Elyon? 👀

[dearmantis]

Does he know that I'm falling

Pairing: Aleksander Morozova/The Darkling x Durast!Reader

Summary: Tempted by knowledge and power you choose to experiment with forces you should know nothing about, hidden in the shadows of the early morning hours. What are you going to do when the General finally realizes something is not right?

Warnings: Aleksander is his own warning let's be honest here, this is not a nice man, but he doesn't really do anything here. The better warning is that I'm blatantly ignoring established rules of the magic system, not a native english speaker and that this isn't really proofread.

Word Count: 3.1k

Authors' Note: Yes, I've read the books. Yes, I'm gonna ignore canon. Yes, I'm especially ignoring the rules around merzost. It's magic, I can do whatever I want with it. Also title is from the lyrics of the fruits by Paris Paloma.

Part 1 | Series Masterlist

If Baghra knew what you're doing... she would eat you alive. No questions asked. Nobody knows that better than you since you have spent most of your youth training with her, your powers too weak for the Generals liking.

So you avoid her like the plague, deeply convinced that she would be able to feel what you have done, what you do every day, what you're planning to do.

First in the workshops in the morning, last to leave in the night. Kirigan and your fellow Fabrikators think you are simply a very hard worker, an obsessed artist some might say. And in a way you are an obsessed artist. Your paint is just less conventional than people assume.

If anyone finds out what you are doing they will execute you. This simple fact is buried deep inside of your mind, burning bright every time you move your hands to wake your powers, but you can't help yourself.

You have to keep trying. You have to. If you don't you might lose your mind and do something even worse, something even dumber.

And who can truly blame you? Materialki are supposed to seek knowledge, right? That's what everyone encourages you to do. Stay away from the battlefield, you're useless there anyways. Hide away in the libraries and laboratories of Ravka and collect the knowledge of the world. Satisfy your greedy mind and create new out of the materials available to you. Give your existence worth that way, because Saints know the General will never look at someone of the Order of Fabrikators unless they possess knowledge that he requires for one of his plans.

So you do what you do best. In the early morning hours you slip out of your bedroom, awake even before the servants of the night shift leave their positions, and disappear in the workshop, sneaking to your usual station, as far away from the Generals quarters, the door and the windows as possible. The guards know you by now, and if the guards do then so does the General, but lucky for you he has never come down to the workshops when you worked on your little experiments.

You're not stupid and naive enough to believe that it will stay that way. If you don't create a pretend project to present to him soon he will end up questioning what you're working on. Simply claiming that your work was still slow and that you required the extra hours of work to catch up with the progress of the other Durasts would lead to Training with Baghra again and that would be catastrophic, but it's hard enough to resist working on your side project during the day to make corecloth for new keftas already. You can't imagine using some of your limited alone time for some other side project you don't even really care about just to stay save from Kirigan.

Creating the bulletproof fabric is boring, simple work for you and if you tried a bit you could probably work on something new on the side during your day work, but the scolding you would receive if someone caught you would be quite bothersome to deal with. Shit, your team leader already believes you're too weak to even make corecloth, he would definitely report you to the General. You can basically already hear the shadow summoners voice booming.

So you think creating the cloth that keeps you, your fellow Grisha and my personal guard safe is not important enough work for a mighty Durast like you? Do you perhaps believe that you don't need a kefta? That your powers could stop a bullet from a Drüskelle in the air? Do you want to test that theory during a stay at the Fjerdan border?

You shake your head quickly, pushing the imagined scenario far away from your consciousness, and step over to the window furthest in the back of the room, kneeling down to lift the loose wooden board out of the floor. Below it hides a small space, filled with four different notebooks.

Today will be the day, you decide.

First you move the notebooks to your desk, then you close the empty space below the window again. Your hands are shaking and sweaty as you pull out a candle holder and a box of matches. Everything in you screams to keep light sources away from you, to hide in the darkness and let the shadows swallow you as you break another rule of the little palace, but the guards know you're here. Staying in darkness would be suspicious.

When you're done preparing your workstation you're surrounded by three burning candles and four open notebooks, a new, fifth quickly joining, formerly hidden in one of the many inside pockets of your kefta. You pull out a pen and ink bottle as well, dipping the tip of the pen in the dark ink before writing down the date at the top of the first page when you notice with confusion that the ink is black instead of the usual dark blue you tend to favour. Eyes flickering to the paper glued on the bottle you check again but the writing clearly says dark blue. The ink bottle is tinted in a dark blue as well, just like all the other ink bottles you bought before.

It was probably just a mistake from the shopkeeper you bought the bottle from, but you can't stop the paranoid thoughts from racing though your mind, too fast for your rationality to catch and neutralize them. Goosebumps begin to rise over your arms, back and neck.

What if this is an omen?

Stepping back towards the door, you strain your ears to listen, checking if anyone is coming your way, panic thick in your veins. If it is a sign, it either means that today will change you forever, or it's a warning. A warning of the man dressed in black, the one to summon shadows. Your general.

Promise or warning?

What if it's both?

When the fear becomes too much to bear you open the door slowly, leaning out of the room to check the hallway, but you see nothing other than a servant girl, quickly carrying a large, heavy laundry basket with her. You smile nervously at her while your eyes scan the corners for the unnatural darkness that hints that Kirigan is close by, but you see nothing suspicious.

You don't let go of the unease yet, instead choosing to close the door before quickly brushing your fingertips together, reaching out with your powers to look for a small piece of unique metal.

There.

Kirigans ring is in his quarters, moving a few centimetres every few seconds. He's unfortunately already awake, but probably working, distracted by documents and plans for the next few days.

Stepping back to your workstation you open the pages you need in your notebooks, calmness spreading in your body and softening your tense muscles again, smoothing the goosebumps on your skin easily.

You don't even bother sitting down, knowing fully well that you will be too nervous to sit still anyways. Instead you rub your hands together, trying to warm them up a bit since the cold air in the work station is slowly turning your hands stiff. You will need full and precise control over your hands if this is supposed to work without anyone getting hurt.

When you lick your lips and take another deep breath, you force the words out immediately afterwards, closing your eyes and pressing the palms of your hands together lightly while your tongue curls and moves to form the words you've made yourself familiar with over the past few months but never spoke out loud.

It begins with a humming-like feeling in the back of your throat and a tingling sensation in your hands, similar to a limb falling asleep. Then your body becomes warm while you try your hardest to clear your mind from any bad thought you've ever had, including the dread still quietly bubbling below your sternum. If your hypothesis is right then you should be able to do this without catastrophic consequences, as long as you balance yourself completely before you begin the next step.

Your breath hitches once, twice, and you can't help yourself and reach out to check on the location of the ring one more time, this time without moving your hands from the position they're in, before you finally manage to calm your thoughts entirely.

Forcing any happiness or relief down that tries to fight its way up into your heart you open your eyes and begin to pull your hands apart slowly.

It feels like your hands are stuck together with strong, stringy glue, but slowly you begin to make progress. It doesn't hurt, just like you predicted, but that does not mean that the whole act is not exhausting to an almost ridiculous degree.

When your hands are finally around half a metre apart you try to relax a bit, your gaze falling on what stuck your hands together in the first place. It's not black like you expected, like you had seen before. Instead it looks a bit more like an iridescent, melted metal and shimmers like moonlight on the surface of a calm lake. It's bizarre and you almost move your hands to write down what you're seeing. It shifts in shape, moving slowly through the air between your hands like a thick liquid of some kind, almost see-through in some parts.

In the back of your mind you ask yourself if this is the same thing Ilya Morozova saw before he defeated death and payed with his life in the process, because you simply can't imagine that a man worthy of becoming a saint would summon a material like the inky blackness of the fold and decide to use it on a person, fully believing that it could save a life.

No, the Magic, the Merzost, of the fold must be mixed with darkness, there is no other option.

You close your eyes again, relaxing your hands even more, muscle after muscle, while you try to soothe your powers into rest, into letting go.

This is phase 3 of your experiment. Seeing if you can let go of the Merzost, and most importantly: what will follow after it's let loose.

Your hypothesis is that it will stop existing. It was summoned with no purpose, no intention, no emotion, so it has no task to fulfil, no reason to exist, nothing to keep it hooked in this world except your powers that are slowly letting go of it to lay dormant in the core of your soul once more.

Slowly, your hands begin to shake, the muscles exhausted from holding pure magic in your reality, but seconds before you think your arms will give out your powers finally let go and the Merzost begins to break apart into thin strings, then into dust like particles that drop to the surface of your work station before disappearing entirely.

You almost fall to your knees when it's done, instead managing to drop into the chair you pushed aside minutes earlier.

There's a painful ache in your arms and your fingers suddenly feel cold like ice, all the warmth from the merzost gone as if it never existed in the first place.

For a few minutes you just sit and breathe, listening to the birds outside waking up and the servants chatting while they switch shifts, the night shift girls clearly happy to finally be allowed to sleep. The halls fill with yawns from fellow Grisha as well, tired giggling audible in the hallways as the Little Palace slowly wakes up. Breakfast will start in an hour.

When you finally feel like you regained just enough strength you blow out the candles before cleaning the ink off your pen and closing the little bottle. There is no way you will be able to write anything down today, not with how overly exhausted the muscles in your arms are, so instead you choose to hide the notebooks again and walk up to your room to hide under your thick blankets.

Your team leader will scold you but you just summoned pure Merzost without having to pay a price other than some pain and numbness. What he thinks of you doesn't matter right now.

The trip through the Little Palace back to your rooms is weird. You feel distant from the other Grisha surrounding you despite the fact that most of them are just as tired as you are and you can't really pay attention to your surroundings. You're getting more and more dizzy with every step, stopping a few times to take a small breather and press your back to a wall for stability, refusing to sit down and show how sick you feel.

In the back of your mind you know you should check for the position of the Generals ring and try to avoid him and his always watching, seemingly all-knowing eyes, but you're sure if you try to lift your arms now they're going to fall off, so you choose to stay ignorant instead, praying that some Saint will take pity on you and keep you safe.

You're two doors away from your quarters, desperate to feel your soft pillow under your head and the warm comfort of your mattress and blankets, when it suddenly gets eerily quiet in your hallway, but you barely even pick up on the shift in volume and atmosphere around you.

Too caught up in your own miserable physical state you don't notice what's wrong until you find yourself face to face with an Oprichniki, his stoic eyes starring you down. Your body might be exhausted but your mind is still sharp enough to know that what this means so you quickly scramble to the side, your body hitting the wall in the process but you don't dare to make a sound, gaze flickering around until you find the General standing a few steps away, his dark grey eyes trained on you and your pitiful appearance. His gaze moves down your shape to inspect your kefta before he finally speaks, voice clear and calm. You still hear the underlying sharpness, the suspicion, despite the smoothness in his words.

The paranoia you felt an hour ago is clearly justified. He noticed your workload and will most definitely request to see what you're working on, especially after seeing you stumble around the hallways of the Little Palace.

"Are you alright, Durast?" He asks and you're not even surprised that he doesn't know your name despite the distrust he clearly holds for you.

Quickly nodding you press your body harder against the wall, the skin covering your shoulder blades hurting awfully, trapped between unyielding bone and stone wall, barely protected by the purple kefta, more of use against singular bullets than for comfort and protection against pressure.

"Yes moi soverenyi, everything is fine." You say quickly, forcing stability into your voice before tying your hardest to straighten out your back. "I'm just really tired. I haven't slept much in the past few weeks. I think I might've overworked myself a bit."

In the back of your mind an old memory of Baghra chastising you wakes up, her old voice loudly echoing through your consciousness as she scolds you.

"If you're gonna lie to me at least do me a favour and do it well. Liars always over-explain too much. Only mention enough information to assure the other person that you're not actively hiding something from them you stupid child."

Kirigans eyes do not leave you, his gaze calculating as it traces over your face, the stitching of your kefta and finally your arms and hands, hanging heavy and cold at your sides.

"Your hands are shaking." He points out and suddenly he's moving towards you, his movements too fast and too unexpected for you to dodge quickly. An echo of the feeling you get with Baghra, of that deep conviction that he will know what you've done if he gets too close to you crashes through your body like a wave but it's too late, his hands grabbing yours and lifting them up to get a better view of them.

You attempt to pull yourself out of his grasp but you can barely move your fingers at this point, giving up seconds later, your heartbeat rushing loudly in your ears. His eyes are too focused for your liking, carefully scanning your hands as if he knows that there's something for him to find, something off about your story. He doesn't believe you, not even a little bit.

A silent prayer to Ilya in chains, the man who became a saint for experimenting with magic, is all you can muster, unable to free yourself. Shit, even if your arms didn't feel like they're going to fall off any second, ripping your hands out of your Generals grasp would not only be rude, it would be disrespectful. You could get disciplined for such misdemeanour and it would probably only make him more suspicious of you and your experiments.

The Generals dark grey eyes move back to your face, so many questions clearly visible in his eyes that it takes your breath away for a second.

Is he trying to manipulate you?

Look at me. I have so many questions only you can answer. Don't you want to please me? Don't you want to please your General?

You shake your head lightly and he seems to take it as an answer to one of his questions, a frown appearing on his face before he lets go of your hands.

"Go to sleep. After you're rested please come to my quarters. I would like to talk about whatever project is taking up so much of your time. Perhaps we can organise a small team to support you. We can't have Grisha stumbling around the halls of the Little Palace like this. The king is going to assume I can't lead my soldiers well enough if he hears of this."

Nodding quickly, not trusting your voice to be stable enough for the usually expected yes, moi soverenyi, you try to take a step back, bumping into the wall with a wince before lowering your gaze to the floor to show respect. He waves his with his hand, dismissing you in the process, before continuing his path down the hallway.

When you finally stand in front of your room you force your hands back into movement to pull your key out of one of your many pockets to unlock the door, while silently asking yourself how the Generals hands could possibly be cold enough for the feeling to still be noticeable for you, despite the numb state of your arms.

Maybe that's why he always wears those gloves? His hands are just really, really cold?

Minutes after you fall into your bed, prepared to sleep the weird effects of the Merzost off, the General stands silently in his own quarters, staring at his hands as he realises that he not only foolishly touched you with his bare hands, he also didn't feel your powers pull on his amplification. No, you hadn't noticed anything at all and neither did he. He didn't amplify you when he touched you.

Slowly turning back towards his door, the same frown from before appears on his face, his mind deep in thought. Something about you is not right. Something has changed.

A mystery has revealed itself in the halls of his very own palace and for the first time in decades he has no idea what to do about it.

Part 2 - I have no time for confession

[omegasmileyface]

The Foleys' Incredible Crisis

Chapter 1: Call It Stormy Monday

Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad) was written and performed in 1947 by T-Bone Walker. It is one of the most popular Blues songs ever, and has been performed and reiterated by countless other musicians. It has been credited with inspiring B.B. King to take up electric guitar, and it is included in the Library of Congress.

Happy Invisobang!!! This should have been posted earlier in the week but I couldn't make myself get to the computer to finalize/format it. Hehe. This year I had the INCREDIBLE experience of working with Shadow and Sharks, who were such wonderful artists— they have a whole smörgåsbord of art to please your eyes in this story! They have kept me on my toes— as I write this, the final, collaborated illustration is still a secret to me 👀 Lola is an OC I named once I realized Tucker absolutely feels like he has a little sister. Since then she's been in my heart and I can't let her go. My wonderful girl Lola. It's a treat whenever I get to see her in the wild— I almost had a heart attack when she appeared in Lex Luthor's Ascent from Supervillainy to Fatherhood by halfagone!

For a directory of all currently posted chapters and related content, check out the Table of Contents!

fic summary: After a whole week of vacation stuck together, the Foleys were more than happy to have some time apart. So when they each found themselves caught up in ghost business, that meant handling it alone. Angela wasn't planning on improvising a ghost conspiracy, Maurice was hoping to avoid working IT, Lola didn't think playing a hero would take her out of school, and Tucker would really have liked to focus on his own problems. But, really, what else did they expect from Amity Park? Home, sweet home.

words: 2269

AO3 link

next chapter [pending]

Tucker dropped his bag with a thunk. He was far beyond caring to be delicate, despite the electronics inside— he just wanted to shed his shoes and jacket and maybe the memories of the trip along with them.

"Ohhhh-kay," said his mom, grimacing at the trash can. Nobody had thought to empty it before they left. "What a vacation!" She laughed emptily. "I'm going to bed. You can fend for yourselves for dinner."

Tucker's dad popped back out from behind the bathroom door. "Before you go," he called over the rush of the faucet, "can we all just agree? Real quick, get in the den and then we can all ignore each other."

Lola sighed loudly and gave up untying her shoe, just kicking it off. Tucker agreed. He couldn't wait to wash his hands after the long trip.

His dad dried off his hands and joined them in the den, looking each of his family members in the eyes one by one. "I propose we never talk about this trip unless we have to."

Everyone agreed with as much fervor as they could muster after the fraught day.

"Also," said Lola, "I think we should try not to talk to each other for a whole day."

"Works for me," said Tucker.

His mom yawned. "Much as I love you all, I'm good with a day pretending you don't exist. Tucker, can you walk with Lola to and from school tomorrow?"

He looked at his little sister. She shrugged.

"As long as she plays nice, yeah."

His dad clapped. "Cool. Alright. So, unless one of us needs something, we all mind our own business tomorrow? Okay. I'm gonna order a pizza, and... I'll sleep in the guest room tonight. Pleasure doin' business with you all."

Tucker closed his eyes and sighed, pleased at imagining taking a shower and sleeping in his own bed in a few hours.

They had just wanted to see family in Chicago. What a disaster.

The library was quiet when Angela Foley came in. That made sense, she worked weekday mornings, so they usually only saw adults and the rare preschooler. As much as she liked helping the spread of knowledge, it was nice not to have too much to do at the front desk. Maybe she could get a crossword puzzle or two done.

She had made it about halfway through the puzzle (Angela knew a lot of things, but wordplay was never her specialty. What on Earth was she supposed to get from "gift for a blue lady"?) before someone walked in, paused, and went straight for the front desk.

She put on her smile. "Hi! Can I help ya with anything?"

The man was tall, wearing a clean white button-up shirt and jeans. His brassy skin and black hair caught strangely in the fluorescent lights, turning almost orange at their edges. She was pretty sure he was a ghost in disguise, but she had helped ghosts before. Usually, if one was asking for help using a library, they weren't intent on doing anything violent.

Usually. She still reserved a little caution.

"Yes, I'm looking for information on a very distant place. Where might I find something like that?"

"Well, what place is it?"

"It's called An Aghaidh Mhòr."

Angela blinked at the unfamiliar sounds. "I'm not familiar. Is that... Gaelic?"

The man fiddled with his sleeves. "Scottish, I believe, yes."

"Alright." Angela stood up and moved toward the computer monitor at the desk by the door. "I'm going to check in our catalog for books on Scotland."

The man watched silently as she searched. Angela hummed. "It looks like, in house, the only books we have on Scotland are travel guides covering the whole of the UK or Europe. I don't expect they'd have many details on smaller places— well, I'm assuming An Aghaidh Mhòr is small, since I haven't heard of it. If you'd like, you can check anyway, or I can contact another library in the system, and they can send over some more specialized books, but that might take a few days."

The man said nothing, but his eyebrows furrowed in thought. Angela recognized the face of a person with a wide, potent array of bad options.

"Or, if you're more pressed for time, we do have a few computers and Internet access here. I can help you find some web sites that might have what you're looking for."

"And this wouldn't take any longer than looking through a book?"

Angela smiled and headed toward the public computers. "Faster, even, if you know what you're doing. I can help you if you've never done it before."

They began their search, and the man caught on quickly to what Angela was doing and how. She helped him for a while, long enough to find out that An Aghaidh Mhòr was a place in the woody North of Scotland, usually called Aviemore, and was something of a tourist destination. Beyond that, she left him to do his own research and went back to her crossword.

She just had a pesky few clues left when the man started muttering curses in another language and walked back over to her desk.

With panicked eyes, he said "I have to be honest. What I'm looking for is, ah… evidence that An Aghaidh Mhòr has an open community of ghosts alongside its humans. I'm certain that it once did, and I know that it still must. But I have chased every tail of information I could find that led to pages on the computer, and none of them, regardless of detail or experience with the town, has mentioned it."

He looked down and seemed to weigh something in his head. "It must be some sort of secret. Whether to protect the ghosts or to protect themselves from ridicule, the living people of An Aghaidh Mhòr have hidden their ghost society. You have to help me find it."

The little hairs on Angela's body all stood up. Warning bells were going off in her head. There was nothing to do but remain calm. "If that's the case, I don't know about anything like that. I can send out a question to my colleagues to see if they know anything, but I'm afraid I can't–"

"No!" The man swung out a hand, and the inner doors swung shut, silvery light weaving across them like fishing nets to keep them in place. The lights dimmed and his skin faded to a deep, fiery orange, layered and complex like agate. His eyes glowed like the moon. The few library guests gasped and looked at him in shock.

"You are a keeper of information, from a city with a striking connection to ghosts. I need to know the truth about ghostly An Aghaidh Mhòr, and you must help me find it." His silver eyes were full of fear, but Angela couldn't bring herself to care how the ghost who just trapped and threatened her was feeling.

She had to think fast to get out of this safely. Something to keep his hopes up…

"Fine. Fine." Angela held up her hands. "I'm not confident in my own grasp of the situation, but I do know of some secrets like the one you're talking about. It'll take some time– say, a couple hours– to put together anything meaningful, and I'll need to call in an expert, but I can do it. I will do it."

She could only hope her friends were any good at improv.

Maurice was never one for early mornings, but he always made the best of his hour alone after the kids went off to school and Angela's shift started. That was his time to make coffee and goof around. He could prance around the kitchen in ways that would make Tucker gag if he were there, and as long as he couldn't see his neighbors, he could put them out of mind enough to sing as loud as he wanted.

Before work was the blues hour. Today he put on Lucille. Whole album, on tape, from the top.

If anybody asked why he started his days with the blues, he'd probably say something about the sad lyrics reminding him how lucky he was. How no matter how embarrassing the family vacations or boring the work or sleazy the boss, he still had a clean house around him and a faithful wife beside him.

In reality, though, he mostly just liked the beat.

Once he got into work, it was just the same as ever. Double-entries and journalizing. He didn't even get to mix up which accounts he dealt with. VLADCO was too big for that. It was Accounts Receivable, 140-180, day after day.

But at least it wasn't IT.

Then, after almost an hour of swimming through "Axiom Labs, Ltd. $1,300 Debit" and "Hey, Maurice, how was the weekend?" and "Nugreen Ectosuppliers, LLC $400 Credit" and "You get that last letter? Crazy what Masters is trying these days, yeah?", everything went dark.

(Or, at least darker than usual. The grainy white of every surface in the office never lent itself to anything deeper than a cloudy grey.)

After a few seconds of quiet shock, the lights came back. Now, however, there was a ghost floating in front of the door connecting the Finances and Supplies department to the rest of the facility.

He seemed to be well-muscled and of average height, though it was hard to tell exactly what a ghost looked like when they were putting off that much of an aura. His skin was dark green and rough-looking, like bark, and there was a reddish halo around his head like some sort of spectral hair. His blood-moon eyes looked over everyone in the room individually before anyone dared speak. Finally, he opened his mouth.

"This is the center of a company that arms humans againsts ghosts and similar threats. Yes?"

Shocked, a few people nodded.

"And you are all from the department keeping stock of supplies. I do not know where your weapons are kept, but I know that you do. Someone in here will retrieve them for me. I need them, if I am to bring my people, ghosts and humans, together again."

The tension finally broke the membrane freezing time, and several office workers started to move for phones.

"Don't bother trying to get help. I have severed all the lines of communication between you and the world outside this office. I will leave you alone, as soon as someone leads me to the armory."

Maurice glanced at the little LCD display on the phone on his desk. No signal. His computer, too, had nothing when he clicked over to the Internet settings.

No one said anything. Some kept trying with their phones, but not a single person offered to explain how scant and useless the actual in-house ecto-equipment supply was or show the path to it. Maurice imagined they were all thinking the same thing he was; yes, complying was generally the way to stay safe in a hostage situation, and panic was strong, but a ghost coming into town and getting their hands on even just half-assembled ecto-equipment never went well. And, maybe even more importantly, VLADCO had terrifyingly strict regulations on safe ecto-tech policy. Unless the immediate threat of being personally hurt for information increased, the consequences in the long run were the biggest monster here.

The ghost crossed his arms. "Fine. You have one hour to bring me to the weapons. I can wait. I have waited this long. If you take any longer, or if you attempt any trickery, then I will start going through with threats. Until then, you may have your time to panic and fantasize about ways out that don't involve giving up company supply. I will be standing here."

He leaned against the door, and his gaze stayed rock-hard on the workers and their cubicles.

Maurice caught the eye of his most tolerable coworker Jacob. Jacob widened his eyes in some silent look of panicked questioning. Maurice shrugged. He was scared out of his mind, but what was there to do? Freaking out wouldn't do anybody any good. He could wait here and see if any ghost hunter showed up, and once they got closer to the end of the hour, everybody could meet up and decide if it was worth giving up the ecto-tech.

For now... well, he certainly wasn't going to do more accounting. This was as good an excuse for a break as any.

He toyed around on his computer for a bit, fidgeting with whatever programs he had. Maybe if the ghost noticed him, he could say he was looking for office schematics explaining where the ecto-tech was held. Really, he couldn't think to do anything but let off stress.

He played around in the rudimentary E-mail client for a bit. Mimed sending goofy messages to his coworkers while he knew he couldn't accidentally send them. But there, at the top of his inbox, was the automated morning office update. It had just come in four minutes ago... after the communications were shut off.

Was there some kind of hole in the ghost's anti-communication measure? The intercoms weren't working, and normal E-mails weren't going through, even within just Finances & Supplies. But the daily updates worked on a different system than the normal E-mails, so nobody had to send them at a consistent time each day, just queue them up.

...Was there something about the different setup that made it immune to the ghost's blackout?

Maurice got to investigating.

[tarisilmarwen]

Rebels Rewatch: "Wings of the Master"

Hera focus this time 'round, let's go flying.

Technically not a Friendship Fetch Quest episode, at least in terms of allies specifically for the Ghost crew. We DO gain an ally, but he and his creation are really more useful to the wider Rebellion at large. That is also a major recurring theme of the show: Building up the Rebellion piece by piece, ship by ship, cell by cell, person by person.

Not entirely sure why Kallus is heading up an Imperial blockade, that doesn't usually seem his area of expertise.

I think we're supposed to understand that Empire learned about them trying to smuggle aid to Ibaar and enacted the blockade to capture/destroy them but... honestly they just seem really really petty about preventing this one planet in particular from getting food.

It's always weird when one of the background bit roles is clearly just Steve Blum or Freddie Prince Jr.

Hera taking control and barking orders at everyone one by one, a nice hint foreshadowing that she's our focal character for today.

Sad Hera makes the heart hurteth. :(

Oooh, really liking this 360 dolly shot around the briefing holodisplay and the way the harp notes almost seem like they're in time with Rex's steps.

Kanan volunteers Hera for the mission to retrieve the B-wing and booooooooy the bad takes I had to see about that. Fandom could not give the boys a break, always took some of the most reaching uncharitable interpretations of everything they did.

(Fortunately most of them went away after the Season Two finale, with occasional hiccups.)

All I'm gonna say is that it was clear from the action prologue and basically the entirety of how Hera'd been acting that she was tunnel visioning and needed to be broken out of that single-goal mindset, or at least redirected to go after the solution that would actively help.

I do wonder if the reason Hera was so unusually determined to blunt force her way past the blockade had anything to do with her Clone Wars experiences. Ryloth was blockaded and starved out as well.

You know, after the crap he dealt with last episode it's really kind of nice to see Ezra feeling and acting lighter, he seems much less stressed.

Also this whole exchange is hilarious. Love Ezra banging on Chopper's dome and then pretending he didn't do it.

A new cue starts up here, a bit akin to the "Victory" leitmotif, sounds like snare drums handling the beat there maybe. Makes it sound a bit more exotic.

This whole sequence has some great camerawork and blocking. Really makes you feel the speed and wind and hard turns.

I appreciate that they could have played Zeb's weight tilting the ship dangerously off the edge for laughs but didn't, they stayed very serious throughout.

Quarrie is obviously named after Ralph McQuarrie, one of the big concept artists for the Original Trilogy. A nice little homage.

There's this really pretty quality to how Quarrie's irises are painted. Rebels' eye models are always so detailed and vibrant and look like a lot of hard work to make so consistently lovely, I totally get why the animators sometimes went out of their way to avoid doing them lol.

I'm frankly still a little confused by Quarrie's initial refusal to let them take the B-wing. I guess he was doing a Secret Test Of Character and once he heard why Hera was motivated to fly he decided she was up to snuff?

The set design for Quarrie's shipyard is nice though.

A little bit of Hera backstory! Honestly, I never thought Hera as a character needed much explanation; What we get about her motivation and past in this episode is pretty much all we need. (We get more obviously when we meet her dad but that's kind of a bonus.) Hera is straightforward (passionate about flying, channeled her skills and passion into the Rebellion) and her character arc is nearly already complete by the time we meet her, only missing that reconciliation with her father.

She doesn't have as many character struggles but then she doesn't exactly need them. She knows who she is, what she wants, what motivates her, and there's something to be said for that kind of self-assuredness.

The show would shake up her foundations later, as things got more serious but for now this was just enough character exploration to satisfy.

Anyway, Hera's speech is what Quarrie was waiting for, apparently, and he lets her test fly the B-wing.

This beautiful sweeping cue I think might be Hera's theme. It first turns up in this episode and has played periodically throughout.

I know a lot of fans have praised this flying sequence so let me just add to the chorus, it's really good. You get a solid sense of the speed and maneuverability of the B-wing.

Lol Sabine and Quarrie spatting over who's going to modify and refine the B-Wing.

The Phantom gets a mid-season upgrade, now capable of hyperspace travel on its own, independent of the Ghost, a feature which gets puts to a LOT of use the rest of the season as Kanan and Ezra split off from the rest more and more.

Running a blockade stationed on one side of a planet might seem weird when there's a whole back half of the planet that's not blocked off but remember, hyperspace lanes are a thing, it takes more work and effort to chart new paths through hyperspace than it does to just use the existing lane, which will only let you out at a certain spot. All the Empire has to do is sit in front of that spot to prevent you from maneuvering around and outflanking them.

The new Rebel Alliance cue that we heard in the first season finale makes an appearance to herald Hera's arrival.

"Oh shit that's my wife, lol y'all screwed now."

And the B-wing takes out a huge chunk of one of the Imperial cruisers. This is why developing the TIE Defenders became so important, never underestimate the importance of fighter superiority.

The success of the mission prompts Sato to promote Hera officially to Phoenix Leader and everyone looks so proud of her. As they should lol.

This is one of my husband's favorite episodes. If we're consuming Rebels like comfort food it's one of the ones he tends to pick. The man likes starfighters and the B-wing is his favorite, what can I say?

It's not a very complicated episode but it's beautiful and leaves me feeling light and happy.

Sabine's turn for basic backstory and minor character development is next and... well I'll just comment about it when I get there.

[dearansur]

i don't have a therapist and i'm not gonna get one in the foreseeable future so instead i'll just talk to myself on my blog like a weirdo but anyways, stream of consciousness joyce style ahead

my fear of drawing (like. outright fear that grips me and makes me unable to do anything!) is probably (99% sure) connected with my own self and how close the identity of an 'artist' is tied to my identity as a person. i'm not scared of making Bad art because i'm well aware that i'm mid at best, i don't have much going for me and i'm already grateful for the people who are nice enough to be kind to me about it. but what scares me every time is that i see Nothing. that whatever i make is empty and boring and it says Nothing, and it brings nothing, means nothing. it's the same stale ugly thing that is okay but is never good and will never be good enough for me to be comfortable in my skin and proud of it enough to say 'yeah, i draw'. and with each year passing it becomes even more embarrassing to identify myself with anything artistic because clearly, i'm not. in those 10+ years of drawing i have reached nothing and god i have known people who have started the same time as me or later and who are thriving while i continued to stagnate after reaching my peak back in 2020. that was the last time i made anything that at least felt good.

surprisingly, i even miss the early days when i kept feeling like shit because i was dependent on my friends praising me but still could just make stuff that was fun and cringe back in 2013-2014. i was unhappy a lot of times but at least i let myself fail and be free and just do little stuff without the care in the world.

and then i had to rely on art to survive because i dropped out of university (being suicidal and depression is kinda tough when your family hates your guts for it and doesn't want to accommodate or help). i would later find an irl non-art job that would last me some months and then go back to live on commissions, and that was enough to live just above poverty line but at least i wasn't chained ot an office life or in retail. and now working this Normal Job for 7+ months i resigned from art once again completely, because well! i have no time! i'm not an artist anymore, it's over!

i still don't know how i got work in that project and still feel like they asked me to work with them because i didn't ask much in terms of pay and frankly, i do feel embarrassed of how badly i did that job, even if i tried really hard. but when i look at what i make, i feel like charging any money for it is absolutely obscene and i'm a fraud.

considering it's the only job i have ever done professionally art wise and never worked on any other projects, i'm more than sure that it was a lucky coincidence that shouldn't have happened to me but did nonetheless.

i keep making stupid ugly mistakes that a professional or at least a person with 10+ years of experience shouldn't be making and it infuriates me so much because it only fuels my belief that it's not for me, that i'm forcing it, that i should simply let it go and stop embarrassing myself at my big age by pretending to play an artist online. i have nothing to offer and it's pathetic to watch, especially 'competing' with teens who are simply having fun while i'm tearing my hair over not being good enough and not making anything worthwhile or that i can show to someone without regret or shame

it's simply. so fucking scary to look at what you built of yourself for years and what you relied on to prove that you have a place in this world and that you're not a waste of space who doesn't deserve to live, only to see that you have built absolutely nothing, and all that effort to prove you have worth means nothing too. i can't do anything well, even the things that i do best.

it all circles back to the people who are my complete opposite and who chewed me and spit me out with disgust and who are living their best lives while i'm struggling to not lose my mind, and it only makes me feel like they were in the right and they should have treated me worse and be even meaner and rub their superiority in my face harder so i would never dare to imagine we could be close or that i could be seen as a person to them. truth to be told, i should have just offed myself instead of whining so much but i have known i'm a coward for years so i will just pity myself and wallow in my missed opportunities and my inherent vices.

i used to want to be seen and understood and praised and validated for what i am and how i feel, but in the last years i simply don't care to be seen, i want to be gone and closed off and for no one to touch me or talk to me because i have Nothing to talk about, nothing to share, and i want no one to see or be close to me because it doesn't matter anymore. i don't believe it's possible for me to connect to anyone in a real way and i'm content with superficial surface level contacts with people (until i'm hit with a nasty realization that i'm no one's closest friend and no one considers me their first option and it should be fine because i put zero effort in being anyone's friend and yet it stings).

god i truly lost the thread of what i was rambling about. but what i can clearly see is that i'm losing whatever scraps i called 'self' and that with each passing day i become less a 'person' and more of a ghost i always thought i was and that i can't handle even people i like so i escaped from all online spaces that aren't tumblr (bc i don't talk to anyone here) and telegram (which i use to communicate at work and with my 3 irl friends). i'm ignoring people's messages and feel like shit and all i can say in my defense is that i'm scared and it sounds so stupid and pathetic. i fear getting older and still being nothing and meaning nothing and regretting not offing myself when i was depressed enough because now i have cats i take care of and i can't just leave them. for fuck's sake.

[peach-pot]

songs that’re in my aro playlist and why 😎

(I ❤️ misinterpreting lyrics for the sake of aromanticism. also I'm on the grayro spectrum and that influences this a lot.)

1. World of Two by CAKE

feels like being aromantic and two people in your life start dating and making a BIG show of it

"I don't want to / Live in your world / Of two / There's only room for you"

2. When by dodie

"I think I've been telling lies / 'Cause I've never been in love"

"I'd rather date an idea / Something I'll never find"

"They tell me I loved, teach me how to think"

"I'm waiting to live, and waiting to love / Oh, it'll be over, and I'll still be asking when"

come on.

3. don't quite belong by dodie

feels like knowing there's something up with you and romance, but not yet knowing what being aromantic is

"Holding hands like it's planned / How do they know what they mean? / I go up to a friend, grab his arm / "What's the code I should know? / Do you struggle like me?""

"Am I / Missing something vital here? / 'Cause I / Woke up feeling kind of weird / Guess I'll just pretend / Play along 'til they figure it out / I don't quite belong"

4. Beside Myself by The Escape Artist

"The way I love you is if I were someone else / And I'm sat here beside myself / God, I can't keep doing this"

"I guess I don't know what I want / Who knows better? / Oh, everyone / So this is why we're alive / To procreate, perform, pretend, prescribe / It's just the way things work"

"Now we're talking, and I know just what he wants / So I stop him / This time I'm honest for once / "Hey, man, this is really not something I do." / But he won't quit, just wants my number as "friends" / And I hate it"

"I know you see me as if there's something wrong / And it's hard not to play along"

come on. I mean come on.

5. I Wanna Keep Yr Dog by illuminati hotties

it's about getting out a relationship and missing the dog more than the person. very easy to make about being aro if you ask me.

"I felt very little for you, oh well / Thanks for taking care of ol' me"

"You’re alright, but I wanna keep your dog / This is the last night unless you let me keep your dog / I know you want me close / But when you're gone, it's her I miss the most / I'd rather keep your dog"

6. Happy Unhappy by The Beths

feels like being happy being aromantic and then having a crush for the first time and it being more of a bother than anything else. (describing being single as being "happy unhappy" feels like a very aro thing to me on its own.)

"'Cause I was fine on my own / Tolling steady like a dial tone / Couldn't you leave me? / I was happy unhappy / But now I'm overthrown / Wish my heart were really made of stone"

7. Too Soon by Liza Anne

I relate this a lot to my experience being grayromantic where every time I think I have a crush I overthink it, whether or not the feelings are real at the end of the day. feels like thinking you might have a crush and not wanting to overthink it so you can instead just try to have a bit of fun with the feelings for however long they last.

"I think that I am gonna try to / Be a little less in my mind to / Overthink a good thing / Under feel a real thing / I wanna lose my mind a little / I wanna love you"

8. I Think I Love You by The Partridge Family

"I think I love you so what am I so afraid of / I'm afraid that I'm not sure of a love there is no cure for"

"I don't know what I'm up against / I don't know what it's all about / I got so much to think about"

^^ what experiencing romantic attraction is like when you're me and you're grayro and every time it takes several weeks to figure out if what you're feeling is even romantic attraction in the first place.

[pinkopalina]

how covid unsocialized me.

it's hard for me to even wax poetic about my experiences because I saw how little anything mattered. so many of us died and even more wrote it off like god was thinning the herd or like the most vulnerable of us getting picked off was deserved because of what the most brutal and uncaring of us did. it made me form a stark contrast between who I thought "us" was and who I realized "they" are.

it made it really hard for me to live day to day without ruminating about our systems and how unhappy I am playing pretend doing stupid shit to make money for people who proved to me that they don't care about me. why am I doing this? why do I have to participate ? how are the rest of you happy and complacent this way, but how dare I say that? in what way have I proven myself a pure saint of a paragon? I have sinned with my apathy.

now I'm so completely disillusioned with any attempt to care about anything because I watched in real time as everything shifted. as covid broke us and rebuilt us for THEIR convenience. yes being gay is okay, to sell you stuff. but we'll take your rights away. yes we care about work life balance... but only if our job controls our access to healthcare and we have to be there more than enough to warrant the work we do.

and it's not like it was great before! it's not like something amazing was ruined and I'm just mad at covid for fucking it up. it was bad and it was a matter of time before something sparked change, and I feel like that was supposed to be covid. if it wasn't that, it was gonna be something else. we had this whole opportunity to actually change and heal the earth and ourselves but we FUCKED THAT UP. we're STILL FUCKED UP YEARS LATER. how many more years of this am I going to witness and bear apathy to because I have no better choice???

it feels with so much bad shit compounding on top of each other, like an unhealthy mind, our unhealthy society ruminating on their problems and blaming each other instead of getting up to help has just left me defeated. the fight goes on and I am no soldier. it's every day. it's always feeling stupid for feeling hopeful and then feeling regret for overcorrecting with rage. I feel like my words are so foreign and long winded to people now that expressing myself, like trying to be saved during COVID, was useless. I legitimately have thoughts like "well at least people who are dead now don't have to worry about what a shit world it's becoming lol" but I can't even EXPRESS that I feel that way because Tumblr police in my head from 16 years of being on the only website that hasn't died yet -- but only has a MILLION rules you have to abide by unless you want a callout post and to develop borderline personality disorder -- will remind me that thoughtcrimes are actually that serious like just as bad as the real shit that is happening with the people with guns and money and power and law making abilities and you should be killed for them too. even though the war is bad. like, these rules don't make any fucking sense but I still have to abide by them.

and then I go into these huge metaphors and assumptions about life and it's echo chambering in my own brain and I actually feel like I turned into the joker. except I'm not even allowed to relate to that because everyone in the ship tag you follow to try to alleviate some of the symptoms of the rot on your mental health that is Daily Life has become an expert on how you should think about them too and they will also kill and ostracize you for having a headcanon that maybe onions have layers sometimes and then you're just better off rambling in every text post you ever make and then deleting it because everything you've ever said has gotten a decreasing amount of notes until it's become 0 and every single one of your artist friends has followers in the thousands but still wants your pity because hating ourselves is too addictive to ever trying to be positive about anything.

like man I am BITTER!!!!!! 🤪😂🙂‍↕️🤝🥰🥴🤪☺️

[not-xpr-art]

Art deep dive #3 - How important are the "rules" of art?

Hi!

So it's been a longgg time since I did one of these, but I've recently noticed something in the way people talk about art online today, especially the idea of 'art rules', that I've found interesting so... let's talk about it!

(just fyi this is a series where I ramble about art-y things and pretend I know what I'm talking about lol)

How important are the "rules" of art? ~

If you're an artist you've probably heard some version of the phrase 'you need to learn the rules in art in order to break them'. Effectively this refers to learning the basics of art like anatomy, colour theory or perspective before you completely do away with them to create something stylised, deconstructive or even abstract! Even beyond this particular idea, I hear so many artists online (as well as in school) talk about the importance of learning the 'art rules'.

And to some extent, I agree with this sentiment! I think you need to have some understanding of how to draw things, and more specifically knowing why we draw things certain ways. An example of this is the 'don't use black in shadows' rule, which is referring to the fact that there are no true black shadows in nature, and using other colours as shadows can keep your work from looking too 'flat'. And despite me knowing this, I have definitely used black as shadows in my work, especially when I want to create some intense chiaroscuro or drama! But I know that when I want to create something realistic, using black in the shadows would probably be a bad idea lol!

But the thing is... What do I actually mean when I say 'art rules'?

Who decides what rules make up the way things should be drawn/painted/sculpted/etc and why should we follow them in the first place?

There's certainly a set of rules for how to draw things in particular styles (as in, if you want realism you probably need to follow some specific proportions lol), but those don't apply to all forms of art! Similarly when it comes to something like colour theory, there are colours that will help you create a harmonious work, but that isn't always relevant!

Abstract and conceptual art (amongst others) are forms that don't necessarily require a sense of balance or even artistic integrity. Much of the last century of art history was specifically about throwing away the old ideas of how art 'should' look and be made. The Dadaists and works like the 'Ready Mades' of people like Duchamp challenged the idea of 'art rules', and as chagrin as I am to agree with anything Duchamp has ever done, it WAS effective in completely reshaping the art world.

So we know that much of art doesn't have to rely on art rules. However, when I look at the online art community, and even my own experiences within art education, there seems to be a return to the idea of 'learn the rules first, break them later'. Those rules being the things I mentioned earlier (proportions, anatomy, perspective, colour theory, etc), things that make up the basic art education that's been taught in art schools for hundreds of years.

Except... I haven't really answered the who or why have I lol?

There's obviously no one individual guy who one day was like 'I'm gonna make up some art rules for people to follow until the end of time!', but rather the things we now consider the 'basics' of art can mostly be traced back to Antiquity (as in Ancient Greece). And I do consider it integral to say that the things that are globally seen as 'art rules' are things that have specific origins in Western countries of Art History.

It's no great secret that the History of Art has a racism problem, and the fact that the majority of artists considered part of the 'canon', and the ones who were venerated and taught as part of art education for many years are white men from western and central Europe...

Art from other continents don't always have the same ideas of 'art rules', and when these were first introduced to Europe, they were written off as 'naïve' and 'primitive' because they didn't conform to the European idea of 'art'. And in a way I think that this (obviously) racist ideology has fed into our current concept of 'art rules' pretty much entirely revolving around Western standards of art (which usually positions realism above all else, with the significance and symbolism of art become less important).

Let's next tackle the 'why' of art rules. I've already mentioned why you would follow rules in a practical sense, but beyond that is there any reason for following these 'art rules'? I think fundamentally it all comes down to what we consider the purpose of a particular work of art. If your goal with a piece is specifically about creating a realistic work, then it definitely makes sense that you would follow them. But art that is more instinctual or personal, or art that is abstract, or even art that is pattern/purely aesthetic based, all have very different intentions for their creation.

So why, in 2023, do so many artists (and art schools) still push this idea that art has a rigid set of rules that you have to learn, and only once you've learnt them can you then completely disregard them? Rules that we know stem from European art history and also only apply to a certain sort of art. I think in a way it all comes down to a way to quantify what 'good' and 'bad' art looks like. If there are really no rules, and you don't need to have basic understandings of anatomy or perspective in order to be an artist, then I think to some people it means that can no longer say that in order to be an artist you need to put in a certain amount of 'effort'.

In conclusion... Is there even a conclusion to this lol?

Personally, I think that there's definitely value in learning the Western ideas of art rules that we consider the 'basics' (things like anatomy, perspective, etc) if you want to improve your realistic drawing skills, but don't think you need to learn everything about art rules in order to become some accomplished or 'real' artist lol

Art is first and foremost about creativity and expression, so really just have fun with it!

~

I hope you enjoyed this mini (informal) essay! I actually haven't written one of these deep dives for over 2 years lol!

Btw, let me know your thoughts on this and whether you agree with it lol!

If you liked this feel free to check out those other one, or my art advice tag (where I attempt to give advice to beginner artists lol...)

[vodid]

my toxic trait is looking at your art and thinking that i could do that too. everytime i try drawing Transformers it ends up lookin like a pile of metal that got ran over by two semi trucks blasted to cybertron and back then got the shit beaten out of it by Optimus Prime himself 😭

but fr though, how do you do it? like what kinds of shapes are they made of? how do all their weird alien metal parts move?

what may work for my style might not for you, as i've unfortunately learned through my years of yearning for/trying out another artist's skill, and that's okay. but i am very honored to be that kind of artist to you 💗 beating yourself up for not being like me won't help you, though 🥹 your art is great, regardless of if it looks like mine or not. i'm going on 7 years of doing this after all! (also i started with bayverse of all things 😵)

and honestly, a lot of it is just experimenting and finding what's right for you, what you need to improve/improvise on, and what you want out of your art. for me, i found that i have a very difficult time actually getting that sharp, blocky industrial style of robots down and eventually opted for a more organic, squishier look. but i do maintain their proportions as they're wildly different from a human's ghsdfsjs

you're already off to a great start doing exactly what i did to learn: redrawing screenshots from the shows. i learned most of what i know from tfp, with a lot of bayverse and g1 mixed in there. it took me about two years of that before i felt confident enough to start making original art consistently. it takes time (and tbf, i was still learning how to art in general when i started. so you really are off to a great start)

this is the kind of art i made in 2017:

massively different from my art now, right? through all these screenshots, i'd test out new ways to draw and color. at one point, every piece i made was trying something new. and it was okay if it didn't work out. means i know what not to do next time lol generally though, i'd NEVER do lineart. i mostly focused on building up my sketching and coloring skills, as seen here in my 2018 art:

and that kind of fucked me over for life so now i am left with painting over the sketch 😂 i digress though

in all honesty i've spent my entire art career figuring out how the fuck all their weird alien metal parts move 💀 a lot of it is BSing, some is recycling the same poses to make things easier on yourself and the rest is studying studying studying. cannot tell you the amount of times i've rewatched certain bayverse scenes frame by frame to figure out how all their parts move in tandem — i still don't know! 😅 g1 was a nightmare to figure out because of its blocky simplicity and limited range of motion. it's still a struggle to this day haha

it's really difficult how to explain how exactly i draw transformers, as it's just... something i do nowadays. there's not a ridiculous amount of thought put into it since i've built up my skill. but here's generally how i sketch their bodies and what shapes i use:

the first is slightly different as its a more detailed approach than g1 so just imagine the arms are a little rounder — "marshmallow," as my brother would call it — like the sketches in the second (even if those are a little more advanced in the process than the first)

my best advice to you is to learn their proportions and articulation via redrawing screenshots — various ones! i chose the most dynamic poses for my megatron practices in 2018 to nail it in my head lol but yes shows like tfp and earthspark are great for that (you could probably even do with looking at the storyboard animations for earthspark to help!)

and remember, i'm still learning too! i'm not gonna pretend like i know what i'm doing. but i'm glad i inspire you :)

[wisyhana]

Hello,

I hope this is okay. This is something I want to finish, and I'm having a bit of trouble with developing style and with body proportions and depth. I want to take time to learn to draw again, since I haven't since I was in middle school.

Thank you if you choose to answer.

Hewoo!

Okay okay, there's a lot to grab here so I'll go with the three things you asked.

First of all, this is a great start! I love that you're trying to add details on the hair to create a sense of volume. A little bit of more practice and you'll start getting the shortcuts.

Don't give up and keep with the art. You have a wonderful path waiting for you.

Okay now for what you're trying to get: style, body proportions and depth. My biggest advice would be to keep an order in what to lear first and last.

First you gotta start with body proportions. The easy way to understand the body is by using shapes. All bodies are different so not all bodies are gonna respect the "7 heads proportion rule" (also rules exist to break them meheheh)

For anything body related, in my opinion, is to use your own body as reference. It doesn't matter if your body is not exactly the one you want to draw, but it will help you understand how it works. Take pictures of yourself and draw shapes on it. The body isn't always circles, it can be rectangles, squares and a giant etc. and the more you study your own body the easier will get to stablish a shape.

Once you get to translate a body into shapes, it's time for the depth. Depth comes from full observation. You're already observing your own body or a reference (please don't use pinterest, take pictures yourself) so you have to perceive how the shapes get volume.

Depth is all about volume. With volume comes distance. So your questions have to be: How far this shape goes? To which direction goes? How much the shadow bends in relation of the shape? How can translate this?

It's very difficult to have a good grasp on volumes, bc you have to translate a 3D image to a 2D medium. And you can only get it once you observe and try to replicate a ton of times. This part is all about try and error.

In my experience I couldn't get hands quiet right, so I used a lot of my own hands as references. But it wasn't until later that I understood some lines that immediately helped me to have a better idea of how to draw it. I learned that I need to understand what I'm seeing before knowing how to draw it.

Drawing is not about drawing things exactly as you see them. It's about creating shortcuts and giving the idea of something real.

We artist are the biggest liars of the world. We pretend we know in our drawings but do we really know? Ehehehe

And finale! Art Style. Look, in my opinion, Style is something that comes naturally. It's a mixed between the things you like and the things you learned. But you cannot force it.

Art Style is always evolving and sometimes will never look the same again. So as long as you put a lot into practice, your abilities will show up and with it your art style will glow up.

I'm an artist who thinks a lot before drawing, so I hope this type of advice can help you in a way or another.

Again, keep with the practice, is the most beautiful and frustrating part of being an artist.

Don't forget to have fun too.