#Personal Origin Story

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[thebookinheritance]

My Origin Story

The "why" behind this blog.

Preface: One of the elective courses of the Kellogg-Schulich Executive MBA is “Selling Yourself and Your Ideas”. I expected it to be a class on Sales, with a heavy emphasis on communication. Instead, it turned out to be a weeklong study in the art of storytelling. On our last day (February 23, 2024), each student was called to give a 3-minute story presentation. This was mine. I chose my…

[write-it-motherfuckers]

Person A: "How can you not know that you're dating a fucking deity?!"

Person B: "...I mean, to be fair, before the accident they never really acted like a deity around me. Our life together had been mostly domestic and sappy up until that point."

Person A: "And now?"

Person B: "...Honestly, it's still pretty domestic and sappy, they just don't bother hiding their inhuman nature around me anymore."

[golyadkin]

I cannot express enough that if your reaction, as a hobby artist, to not getting that many notes on your art is to say "maybe I should just stop doing art altogether" you need to stop posting art to tumblr

not necessarily forever, not even for long, but just stop putting your art on here and start doing it for you again, remember why you enjoyed doing art in the first place and stop relying on the attention of faceless people on the internet for your enjoyment of your hard work

believe me, I get it, nothing crushes the artistic soul quite like labouring for hours on a piece only for it to get like 10 notes, so you need to find your own source of joy in the act of creation and a lot of the time that means making art and not showing it to anybody

[shepscapades]

Souls in the Sand: Concept Art

As I’ve mentioned here and there, I’ve spent the last two years developing an original story inspired by a small Origins+Empires server a few friends and I started planning. The more I developed plans for my empire to be a sprawling overgrown cityscape of ruins and stone framework inspired by the nether, the more I built up this backstory for the character I wanted to play, a small deerfolk boy named Esra. From there, and over months of working and reworking the story and its characters, I’m proud to say I’m coming up on a 100 piece gallery for my Masters Exhibition to display this story in the form of a song-inspired comic, titled: Souls in the Sand.

Over the next month and beyond the date of my exhibition in April, I wanted to start sharing my work here! I thought it would be fitting to first share all of the concept work I did for the characters last semester as I took each character from their old lineup and reworked them from scratch to see if there were any designs I could make more unique or appropriate for the story. This process consisted of four stages: silhouettes, full-body mock-ups, face and head shapes/designs, and experimenting with the final characters’ designs with a set of unique expressions that best fit their personalities and narrative role.

Since each character was reworked separately, the “new” concept lineup is a little disjointed (and some of the characters’ faces actually ended up different from their full-body designs), but I thought it would be fun to line them up to compare the overall cast to their old designs. With each character(s) I post the concept process for, I may share little bits of the work I’m doing or talk a little about their narrative roles as I go, but for now, have Esra!

I know I don’t post original work here often, but I wanted to share parts of this journey with you guys because it’s been very meaningful to me! And I hope all of the work I’ve been doing may at the very least serve as a bit of inspiration or encouragement for us to keep making silly minecraft stories, to keep drawing the characters we love, and to keep being creative in whatever way is meaningful! <3

[juniperhillpatient]

I know poor little meow meows are so often men but gosh do I love a little guy (who is a girl) that just has everything in the book wrong with her & also she’s got the most pathetically sad backstory ever. yes she’s capable of atrocities but have you seen her big sad eyes & her over the top depressing sob story? ignore the blood magic & grave robbing did you know her life was already so bad & then it got insurmountably worse because everyone around her couldn’t resist the urge to kick the shit out of her when she was already down 🥺

[bixels]

I'm not getting into The Giving Tree discourse...

[pythosblathers]

Nine again. She’s been on the mind for uhhh reasons

Godfrey got kicked out on a quest to kill a clone of his toxic mother in law and definitely not develop fatherly feelings about this living weapon who is also a clone of his mother in law

[seeminglydark]

An exercise in facial expressions and also a tiny little behind the scenes comic that expands on John and Caro’s meetcute in my webcomic Seemingly Dark, but is also pretty cute on its own. All you need to know is they haven’t seen eachother in 7 years, Caro’s back in town, John is avoiding them cuz World Famous Celeb he has a crush on, until they get possessed and puke on him. He’s kind enough to take them back to his flat, clean them up and face the fact that there was a time this cute person was his highschool sweetheart.

✨And it’s a little bit awkward.✨ Read the original scene here on Webtoon or Read Mil-Liminal which is just about their romance and ghosts here!

Caro and Johnny are from my webcomics Seemingly Dark and Mil-Liminal!

[incorrectbatfam]

If you could create and add a new DC character, what would they be like?

I'm going to tell you about David, and knowing you guys, you'll agree with me when I say he should have his own comic.

David has been my best friend literally since we were 8. He is the only constant I've had through my life. He introduced me to the drums and helped me get a motorcycle after I got my license. We are each other's platonic ride or die. If he asked me to bury a body, I'd do it no question, and I know he'd do the same for me.

That said, I clearly have the braincell in this friendship.

Don't get me wrong, he's smart in certain aspects. He's a talented musician, good athlete, taught himself to fix most plumbing issues, speaks decent Japanese, easily clicks socially, and is super empathetic. But in others, he's like a plate in a knife drawer.

Some highlights from over the years:

He ate the brown paper bag his lunch came in on a field trip

He thought hot chocolate was just cocoa powder (no milk or water) in a mug and the microwave would melt it. His sister had to call the fire department

He gave a stray dog his scarf for warmth and never saw that scarf again

He licked the dust off an XBox controller

He got a speeding ticket outside the DMV literally five minutes after getting his license

He made gender reveal cupcakes to come out to the rest of our friend group when we were 17, but he threw them into a Ziploc and they jostled around his backpack for half a day before lunch

He thought closing a browser tab would get rid of a computer virus

He tried hotboxing his own car while driving

He almost seasoned his food with pepper spray before someone stopped him

He had a tire swing on a tree in his backyard. He decided to stand on it while swinging and smacked his forehead against a branch in front of him. It was literally the most hollow thwock ever, as if confirming his lack of braincells. He then proceeded to get pissed off and punch the tree. He said it was his most gender-affirming experience

He brought me along on a family road trip and used me as a footrest in the car

He frequently writes drum tabs the way he'd write guitar ones (in short the two are very different kinds of sheet music and I'd need three hands to play them). He absolutely knows better. I think he's messing with me at this point

He mistook wasabi powder for matcha

He once got drunk at a frat party, crawled out the lawn of the house, and began eating grass like a cow

I wanted to know what kissing a dude was like out of curiosity and this was before he started physically transitioning, so to make it a more "authentic" experience, he gargled Gatorade beforehand

He tried to make his first battle jacket with washable Crayola markers

He also tried to dye his hair with his sister's watercolors

He's worn the same sweatshirt since he was 14 and I think I can count on one hand how many times I've seen him wash it (I was over at his house a lot)

He's the motherfucker that wears running shorts in the snow

He thought his area code would automatically change when we moved to a new state

He once kicked a soccer ball into an oncoming train

BONUS: when he came out to his parents, they were accepting and while he was at school, his dad mounted a fish on David's bedroom door because men I guess

So yeah, if I worked at DC, I'd insert David in the background of every comic just being his chaotic himbo self. David is beyond space and time. There could be a battle on fucking Oa and David would just be there doing a kickflip. That's who I'd choose.

[starrysharks]

hotel manager

[canisalbus]

If I remember correctly you created Machete around 2007-2008. But when did you create Vasco? (I'm sorry of this has been asked before, I couldn't find anything)

First finished pictures of Vasco are from 2018, but even before that I had been thinking it would be interesting if Machete had had one (1) romantic relationship in his youth before he was ordained. I just didn't have a name and design for him yet.

In the earliest sketches of Vasco, he first looked a little bit like a bordercollie, then like a spaniel or a setter. He had a darker color palette as well, sort of chestnut brown with white markings, but combined with the overpowering whiteness of Machete he looked kind of impassionate and drab, so I kept making him warmer and lighter until he became the golden boy he is today. The name came later, I just thought Vasco sounded friendly and charismatic. (Also the old finnish word 'vaski' means brass and bronze, and even if it's a tedious connection and doesn't factor into their canon at all, it felt too fitting to me personally and I had to go with it).

[reorientation]

I want an accomplice. I want an eager traitor, a willing piece of bait. I don't care if they say they're a lesbian, or bi, or a "straight man" - as long as they have a fertile pussy, and a sweet little girlfriend to offer me.

I want to lure their girlfriend over one day - with a picture of their wet, needy cunt, and a text begging for her to come fuck it. And then have the girlfriend find them lying on their bed, bound and gagged, helplessly pleading with their eyes - and me hiding behind the door.

It would be so fucking satisfying to force her down on top of my bound-up bait so that I could rape her from behind. To have that wet pussy she'd come over to taste rubbing against hers every time my hips hit her ass. To see my cum leak out of my victim's cunt and right into my little helper's.

I don't even know which one I'd rather knock up. If my seed took root in the girlfriend, my accomplice could try to convince her to keep it, could tell that they loved her so much that any baby she gave birth to would be a blessing. But if it was the bait who conceived for me, they wouldn't need any convincing - they could just tell their girlfriend that no matter what had happened, they couldn't blame it on their baby-to-be. And she would just have to watch them grow, knowing that every drop of the cum that had bred her beloved had leaked out of her own pussy.

And all the while, my little traitor would be rubbing their pussy frantically beneath the covers every time their girlfriend fell asleep - knowing that they'd carefully framed the picture which drew her over to be raped, and chosen every word that pulled her in.

[write-it-motherfuckers]

Person A: "Are you... flirting with me?"

Person B: "Gods no! What on earth gave you that idea?"

Person A: "I mean... Have you heard yourself talk?"

[wheretheresawyll]

still boggles my mind that in the year 2024 most players still ignore anora's character just to reduce her to a lying backstabber, when she only goes against you if:

you reveal her identity to ser cautherine and howe's soldiers, defeating the entire purpose of her disguise and also ignoring what she told you literally one minute before about how they can't know she's escaping with you - thereby betraying her first

you ignore her completely in denerim after she asks you to come talk to her, and only show up to the landsmeet

you bring up loghain's fate, and when she tells you that she would rather him be spared if possible, you tell her to her face that her father has to die

[mogoce-nocoj]

nothing's funnier than miha guštin waxing poetics about how much kris changed when he saw apokalipsa and decided to get into music and meanwhile kris is just standing there nodding along and saying “I finally found a focal point” like you can just say witnessing bojan on stage will do that to you, i think you're not the only one lbr