#I've been giving your artless answers for a bit

[thegoldenshi-shi]

I am having an internal crisis. Outside influence is swaying me towards drawing Sides and Sunny in tuxes/suits/dresses, and I am very much itching to do so. This itch is also making me want to pull out my patterns and start making my cosplays again, one of which is a papillon inspired dress shirt and jacket. And I haven't drawn or tailored in a /hot/ minute, not to mention that my sizes have very much changed, and aren't particularly congruent enough to make a shirt, or any form of top other than a crop top, so I am FIGHTING not to do it

Also, working on cleaning my room still, stars above was it a mess, is a mess. I have however cleared out my desk area! And my computer is back to functional cause my friend is a saint and gave me his old graphics card (sly bastard, he didn't tell me that's what he was gonna do so I couldn't refuse) so now I just need to get the fans connected to the motherboard (frankencomputer isn't a joke, they were directly connected to the psu, wherein the old psu had the wires welded into the thing so I couldn't just transfer fan wire onto new psu, so fans are dead in the water as of right now. Cause new psu doesn't have the right thing, a male plug, to be able to connect them). But! It's functional again, blessed be, and so with a lot of external things factored in, including me generally keeping my room temp at almost 60°f and two external fans that I was able to clean and set up around it, me and two friends were able to play modded mc last night! Which was fun, first time playing co-op with my friends in a month.

On other news, my desk is tiny, so with computer back I physically do not have space to comfortably art, so I am gonna see about getting some stuff set up to scooch the moniter and keyboard so I can have desk space to use my pencils and sketchbooks. Largest issue with drawing Sides in a really frilly dress is my issue of not being able to draw humanoid things. I can't get proportions straight. (Damb my useless brain, not able to have images in my mind, remembered or imagined, kills my ability to art)

And work is. Fucking awful right now, actually. We have someone that has been here for almost two months, and he is a misogynistic dirtbag. Our warehouse is severely lacking in Y chromosomes, and I am unfortunately in the closet at work due to bigotry against queer identifying folk, so I count in his mind towards the *problem*, and he won't stop flirting with me. Which is gross, he's twelve years older than me, which were I older and twelve years weren't such a significant part of my lifespan I wouldn't take issue with. But I worked retail and fastfood in places that made me feel as if I was part of the product to be sold, so people older than me, especially men, flirting with me is a really yucky feeling. Not to mention there is this thing about him, I don't entirely know what, that has me feeling an awful mix of scared and angry about him? There's just something off about him, and maybe its that he insists on trying to talk to me alone, or maybe it's that I have disliked him from when he first started flirting with me, or maybe its him triggering ma and SV's gaydars, but whatever it is is gross and I don't like it. Oh, and apparently he drives the forklift smelling like alcohol, which I wouldn't know because I try to keep one me-height away from him at all times, at least.

Happier note, with summer coming around, I will get to enjoy having ladybugs randomly cropping up in my room and eating wasps again. Which was funny as all hell to discover the first time, cause I always forget they're carnivorous and predatory, as well at that thick exoskeleton and forewings they have meaning that actually stinging them is damn near impossible for the wasp

~Smooch

Hello again Smooch~ The urge to draw robots in clothes happens to every mecha artist at some point I think… And I don't care HOW good you think you are at art, trying to slap Fortress Maximus in an evening gown or Deathsaurus in a three-piece suit is going to break your brain. I can't help you with proportions I'm afraid, since that's just something you have to learn over time. (As they say: repetition is the mother of mastery). But, I can say that dresses are easier to draw on robots than suits. If you want to draw suits, brace yourself to give them weird cutouts and things to make room for kibble. Examples A and B (with your preferred boys hehe)

Since you can sew cosplays though, that wouldn't be an issue for you I'm sure. I'm trying to fight the urge to sew unnecessarily as well. I too am an odd size so I'm always having to get my mom to tailor and/or make me clothes. I'll have to send you some pictures of my finished pieces on discord sometime~

It's good that you were able to play with your friends, a functional computer is a blessing. 60 degree bedroom is less of a good thing, but I guess it's the price you have to pay for the computer blessing right now hehe. I'm not ashamed to say that everything you listed about your computer woes flew completely over my tech-retarded head, but it sounds like you've gone through a lot to fix your problems. I wish it was as easy as replacing parts to fix your work-place issues. If you're lucky, your problem dude will get fired for being intoxicated at work or for being a butt. Me wishing won't fix your problem of course, but I really do hope that it gets better for you. In the meantime, enjoy your ladybugs eating wasps??? I didn't know that ladybugs could or would eat wasps, so when I read your ask I was flabbergasted. It makes sense that they can since, as you said they're carnivorous and heavily armored, but still…wasps?!?!

[saintsenara]

If you’re still doing the ship game, what are your thoughts on Voldemort/Tonks? (Inspired mostly by the comparisons between Tonks and Bellatrix in the most recent chapter of One Year in Every Ten.)

anon, thank you so much for this ask - which has, to be quite honest, upended my world.

because i'd literally never thought about this ship before, but now i realise that i'm not only in line for a passport to vonks nation, i appear to be an accidental vonks sleeper cell...

i always write both bellatrix and andromeda as having personality types which map on very closely to the tonks we meet in order of the phoenix - funny, clumsy, cheeky, charismatic, bright, a bit naive, and possessed of an outrageous fashion sense.

there isn't a shipping reason behind this. it started way back when i was planning nor all that glisters gold and thinking about andromeda, and i realised i've never vibed with a fanon tendency to make her this incredibly haughty ice queen, and to suggest that all of tonks' vibrant or insincere personality traits are inherited from ted.

obviously - yes - andromeda doesn't come across as massively welcoming in her only canon appearance, but i think she can be forgiven this on the grounds that harry and hagrid have just destroyed half her garden, revealed that her daughter might have been murdered in a surprise death eater ambush, and shouted at her when harry mistakes her for bellatrix.

but nor, actually, does ted. and so i think it makes much more sense to imagine that they're both a bit curt because of the enormously dangerous situation they find themselves in, and that - outside of that context - andromeda is just as likely to be a great laugh as he is.

i should also say that i am really not a fan of the sort of "omg aristocrats are so brooding and mysterious" way of writing many of the pureblood characters in the series. and one of the things about this which i don't like is the way it reduces characters to gendered stereotypes, while rarely seeming to think critically about the actual gendered conventions which govern their lives we get a hint of in canon.

pureblood women are often reduced to descriptors such as "haughty", "mannered", "prim", "icy", and so on - and, yes, all of these are traits which are implied canonically about bellatrix and andromeda [and narcissa, sirius, and regulus as well...], but they are not traits which have to exist separately from ones we would associate with tonks.

because bellatrix is - canonically - both haughty and theatrical; both cruel and loyal; both in thrall to voldemort and willing to answer him back [it's always overlooked, i think, that, in half-blood prince she reveals that she's told the dark lord to his face that he's wrong to trust snape - that takes a pretty strong nerve!].

she's clever but not particularly cunning [she's a blunt instrument - subtlety is not her strong point]; incredibly charismatic [harry always notices her whenever she's in a room] but also quite artless interpersonally; entirely committed to her prejudiced beliefs and also clearly a little bit naive... her anger when harry says that voldemort's a half-blood in order of the phoenix is really striking when compared to the fact that lucius malfoy doesn't bat an eyelid - i have always thought that more of the death eaters are aware of voldemort's birth name and background than dumbledore believes, which malfoy basically confirms, and so i really like the insight this gives us into what bellatrix is unwilling to move beyond when it comes to the version of voldemort she has in her head.

and she's also someone who is clearly very affection-starved - and who can be written on the basis of her canon personality to be something of a hopeless romantic, and for the vision of romance she has to be quite idealistic and a bit girly. and this doesn't prevent her being a sadistic bigot who knows exactly what she's doing in the slightest - it just adds another layer to her character which i think is really interesting to explore.

i really like the complicated dissonance of her being proud to be the loyal lieutenant of a terrorist kingpin she believes is capable of magic beyond her wildest dreams and who rewards her for her service by not murdering her, and also her wishing to be wooed and sent roses and taken out dancing by a man who has never had the slightest intention of doing any such thing.

tonks also has that idealistic romantic streak - after all, she takes one look at the giant red flag lupin's waving and says "you son-of-a-bitch, i'm in" - and she also has the brains, charisma, bluntness, theatricality, loyalty, and ruthlessness of her aunt.

as an aside - i also really like these tonks-bellatrix comparisons because they undermine one of the series' lazier narrative conventions when it comes to writing women: that straightforwardly bad women can never have anything substantial in common with straightforwardly good ones. petunia has to be nothing like lily, for example, because lily is the series' central pinnacle of womanhood and petunia is a bitch.

the idea that tonks gets all the fun parts of her personality from her father is an offshoot of this. but i really like the fact that realising she is very like bellatrix would force harry et al. to actually reckon with the reality of what bellatrix did and to think critically, in contrast to the ministry's view that everything's fine with voldemort dead, about the conditions which enabled her radicalisation.

[i've written something touching briefly on this - everlasting ink - in which harry and ginny end up adopting delphini and discover she's both her mother's daughter and the reincarnation of a woman they adored.]

but to return, dazed and bleeding, to the vonks agenda...

it's an incontrovertible truth that voldemort mainly likes bellatrix because of her fanatical devotion to him, which enables him to use her freely as a tool for his own gain.

but this is not - i think it's reasonable to argue - the only reason he likes her. after all, she's not the only death eater who goes to azkaban rather than betray him, but he's not going around calling rabastan his favourite...

and her slight bolshiness evidently does contribute to his fondness for her.

the canonical voldemort clearly thinks of himself [even if, let's be real, he's wrong] as someone who doesn't like sycophants. he has no interest in hearing nott sr. gab at him following his resurrection; he is perfectly happy to be told by augustus rookwood that the way he's being going about trying to retrieve the prophecy is wrong; one of the things which drives his humiliation of lucius malfoy in the dark lord ascending is that he's fully aware that the malfoys hate having him squatting in their house, but that lucius would never have the backbone to tell him this. his trust in snape is implied, particularly in deathly hallows, to be connected to what he perceives as a frankness in the way snape speaks to him - him telling snape that he "sounds like lucius" just before he kills him is a way of him letting snape know that he thinks he's being shifty [which - of course - he thinks is because snape knows he's the true master of the elder wand].

he is also theatrical, charismatic, interpersonally offputting [in a context where you weren't afraid of him, think how annoying his tendency to witter would be], clever, strangely loyal [i talk about this a lot, but the fact that he berates wormtail for betraying james and lily - even though this is exactly what he wanted - is really striking], transcendentally attention-starved, and so on. and he clearly respects the idea of constructing one's own identity in defiance of social convention - his favour permits bellatrix to behave in a way which is clearly unusual for a woman of her social class and snape to be ranked higher than richer purebloods who should look down on him, for example.

and he's also - in his own way - a little bit of an idealist too. the elaborate fantasy he's shown to have constructed for himself as a child - that his father was a wizard [who, i presume, he imagines will reveal himself after dumbledore's visit, now that it's safe to do so], that his mother wouldn't have died if she'd mattered, that his father doesn't emerge because he's also dead [he doesn't realise he's alive until he visits morfin!] - is something he uses to self-soothe, and he's hugely rattled by anything which undermines his belief in this dreamscape. just as bellatrix is by any hint that he's not an almighty pureblood god.

and, above and beyond this - even though this is a much more controversial thing to say - he's also capable of being a hopeless romantic himself when he wants to be... it's astonishing to me that we as a fandom don't make more of the fact that he thinks that his parents were in love, that tom riddle sr. was responsible for naming him [even though he's shown in chamber of secrets to know that merope chose his names], and that his father only abandoned his mother because she revealed her magic to him. there is absolutely no chance that he heard this from either morfin or tom sr. - he just makes it up! - and yet he clearly believes, even as an adult, that there was a world of happy families he was denied by his father's lack of chivalry. and i think this adds a really interesting dimension to his obvious loneliness which is tremendous fun to explore.

in a context where the fact that she's an order member is insignificant to him, then, i think it's entirely plausible that he wouldn't hate tonks - which is, for him, essentially a proposal of marriage - on the basis of her similarity to his erstwhile fave.

and tonks, for her part, clearly has a horrible weakness for cruel, emotionally-unavailable, self-loathing men who are cheerfully capable of murder.

i don't not back it...

as a postscript, my two favourite tonks-voldemort moments in canon: the fact that, in the middle of planning a coup, he's taken time out of his day to learn that she's married lupin [it's giving xoxo gossip girl!]; and the fact that her wasting away from unrequited love in half-blood prince is exactly what happens to merope.

[lonelyroommp3]

What les mis translation do you recommend? I've never managed to read the entire book (only until fantine's death ish) but i am thinking of giving it another go😅 i have no idea which translation the version i downladed years ago is

god i wish i was answering this at my mum's house where my extensive teenage collection of brick copies lives. anyway my go to is the fahnestock/macafee (after wilbour) translation - this is in fact The copy i chose to bring with me when i moved out & it is also the copy that is dangerously close to splitting in half precisely at grantaire's introductory paragraph. my only major beef with it is exceedingly petty and personal: there is an extremely minor character called alix who appears for literally half a page in the convent digression and this translation localises her name to alice. i can't even be too mad though because my grandma's been calling me alice my whole life

the version i see most commonly floating around as an ebook is isabelle hapgood's translation - i've not read this in full bc i am not an ebook girlie, just dipped in where necessary to take screenshots for tumblr posts or whatever, but i've never heard anyone go on a massive moan about it so it's a good bet if you want to read for free

finally - and here's where i might be controversial - if you kind of struggled with les mis & the density of the prose on your last attempt and want a bit of an easier ride, i genuinely recommend the julie rose translation. she goes for more of a contemporary lean in her choices of words & phrasing, which some people really don't like (and there are some moments that are a bit uh, artless in how casually they're translated #ifitsalrightwithyou) but i do think it's a really good starter translation because of how easily it flows. it took me 6 months to read the brick on my first attempt (denny. do not ever recommend) and i have, with the help of hyperfocus, gotten through julie rose in five days. it's that much easier to get through

[mejomonster]

Chapter 140 is serious and hurting my heart sure. A lot. I'm scared cause I've seen a Tao ran spoiler so let's not talk about that.

On the lighter side of things, I do Love that hey. In canon? Luo Wenzhou actually calls himself "Dad" with fei du. They really went for a whole daddy scolding/caretaking kink together lol. Also I find it very soft that Luo Wenzhou holds fei dus hand for support. I haven't read many danmei so I don't know how often physical affection tends to be in them, I'm obviously only able to compare to Shows which even when explicit BL (like Thai shows) have often been reserved (with some exceptions recently). And like. It strikes me how naturally Luo wenzhou and fei du actually touch. They Are established relationship now, so it makes sense they'd gradually have gotten comfortable touching, but it's really just Present in the writing in a way that I feel like constant just familiarity touch to connect isn't always. I appreciate it.

Luo Wenzhou was silent too long. Fei Du lifted his chin and looked him over for a moment. “What’s wrong?”

 

Luo Wenzhou looked up at him and let his mind wander a little, thinking that Fei Du was unlike any other person he knew.

 

The young and artless were like clear plastic bottles; you could see at a glance whether there was juice or coke inside. The older ones with deeper thoughts meanwhile were like frosted glass bottles, most with dark liquid in them; without opening them up and smelling, it was hard to determine whether it was soy sauce or vinegar.

 

But Fei Du was neither. He was more like a kaleidoscope with a thousand linked-together little pieces of glass inside it, all placed at different angles; the light going through was refracted countless times. There was no way to trace it.

 

Even though he was squeezing this person’s hand, could touch every bit of his body without restraint, he still often didn’t know what Fei Du was thinking.

 

In all of Luo Wenzhou’s life, of all the individuals he had met who gave him headaches, Fei Du came out on top—both during the time they’d been mutually displeasing to each other, fighting as soon as they met, and now, when he wished he could hold him in his mouth, carry him over his head.

 

If a year ago someone had said to him that at the end of this year, he’d be this isolated and cut off from help in a world of ice and snow, only finding temporary comfort in holding Fei Du’s wrist, he definitely would have thought that a fuse had burned out in that person’s brain.

 

“It’s nothing.” Luo Wenzhou shook his head and smiled wryly. “Just feeling the grimness of an early midlife crisis.”

 

Fei Du blinked, then suddenly drew close to his ear with an evil smile. “What, shixiong, do you feel your abilities are unequal to your ambitions? Why didn’t you say so earlier? I’ll look after you.”

 

Luo Wenzhou: “…”

 

Then he pulled himself together and squeezed Fei Du’s waist. “Are you looking for trouble again? I haven’t settled the account with you yet after you were just playing around touching people’s hands.”

 

Fei Du’s eyes wouldn’t open fully. His gaze came languidly from between his eyelashes. He licked the corner of his mouth. “Oh? How do you want to settle this account?”

 

Luo Wenzhou didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “Darling, Dad’s already very sick at heart. Don’t do your little bit to help me on my way to my heart attack.”

 

Hearing that he could talk back, Fei Du slowly sat up straight and returned to the main subject. “What are you worried about?”

 

Luo Wenzhou let out a breath, his smile dimming. “Do you know what feeling this gives me?”

 

“Yes. Kong Weichen’s connection to Director Zhang and him calling him beforehand are both too easy to investigate and too obvious, like someone’s arranged the evidence,” Fei Du answered without so much as looking up. “Your own people suspecting each other, the critical witness dead without giving evidence, pieces of evidence appearing one after another in sequence—you’re thinking that this is too much like the miscarriage of justice fourteen years ago, just as though history were repeating.”