#after college today.

[alectology-archive]

Dear Aelia, your ask box reads "love letters only." In lieu of that, as I could not find any good templates online (although I was able to find a wonderful apology for stealing a girlfriend, an apology for apparently screaming in shock at a German Shepard named Otis on Monday, and two faux apologies promising that in the future, the sender will plagiarize/shoplift better, among others) and do not know you, I would like to suggest three poems about love by William Shakespeare.

The three poems in question are "Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all," "Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea," and "Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?" I find them all very enjoyable and hopefully you will too! My question is what are your (general) thoughts on Brandon Sanderson (Branderson Sandon)? I have heard a lot of very vague and conflicting information recently, which has left me quite confused. Hopefully you can clear things up for me!

You're the sweetest person to ever drop by my inbox and while the love letters only tag mostly exists to mess with people trying to be rude to me it's always lovely to get love poems in the mailbox - and I enjoyed those sonnets immensely, thank you! I do think it's incredibly romantic to suggest that you'll be a better thief to a prospective lover, though, but I hope Otis and the person who stole the girlfriend are having a very nice day, wherever they are.

I would've ordinarily linked you to the various other posts where I do vent about my feelings towards him, but I think I tend to express very passionate feelings in ways that don't necessarily convey my thoughts very well so this ask was certainly an exercise in attempting to do so. My thoughts on him broadly fall under two categories: the dismal quality of his writing and the questionable ethics of offering him any monetary support, and my thoughts will be accordingly organised.

I'm particularly irked by people dismissing my annoyance with his prose because anybody fairly familiar with a standard body of literature would find his sentences frankly a massive headache to get through (examples can be attached if you like, but I recently deleted all his ebooks from my devices because I thought that attempting to analyse his body of work was affording him more credit and effort than he deserved - it's very much like trying to analyse a seventh grader's creative writing assignment and I just don't have the energy to do that for a 50 year old guy. I don't think his worldbuilding is actually any good either, no). More specifically, I think his characterisations are shallow and that he's incapable of creating people with unique blueprints (I can never quite tell any two people apart) and that his writing of women is frankly misogynistic and designed to convey the more conservative feelings he really harbours in accordance with the faith he keeps. He repeatedly denies his women the opportunity to form sisterhoods while he goes out of his way to set up systems of friendship and support between men, forces them into marriages when they're barely past their teenhood, assigns them so-call "feminine hobbies" if he doesn't force them to undergo arcs of feminisation and has a bad habit of making his male characters insinuate that powerful women should go back to the kitchen whenever they clash in his books. It also particularly... irks me that he was reported as saying that western philosophy is more interesting to work with despite deriving inspiration from several asian cultures for his stories and it doesn't help matters that I don't agree with his politics - I just don't care for authors who can't critically deal with themes of class conflicts and the divine right to rule, who introduce race conflicts with racist undertones that seek to sermonise oppressed peoples to moderate their movement, and ultimately derides revolution and an overturning of oppressive and flawed systems of governance in favour of preserving them (it also certainly doesn't help that he fully chooses to assign moral, righteous, redemptive, religious weight in a positive sense to the side that actually misuses its power). As a whole, I think his books are representative of the kind of talentless white man the industry and reading community at large praises and upholds even if he isn't deserving of any of those commendations.

Coming to the ethical side of things, I think it's kind of ridiculous to say that his stance on queerness has improved (unless you mean like. in the sense that he's gone from being a raging queerphobe who proudly declared it to the internet multiple times in the past to a guy who "only" limits himself to continuing to associate with institutions that discriminate and hurt queer people and women). He's still an active member of the (racist, misogynistic and queerphobic) mormon church which means that he still donates 10% of his income to it, participated in mormon missionaries to seoul in the past, and still works for a college that has an appalling track record for the way it treats victims of sexual abuse and still bans various forms of queerness and advocation for lgbt rights on its campus. So I... actually loathe people who think sanderson's amiable nature makes him more deserving of more respect or kinder treatment - activism just doesn't work that way.

[anna-scribbles]

h-how do you ever finish any of your work? genuine question because you seem to be productive despite your agreste syndrome and I need to learn your ways. but also how do you ever finish any of your work

unclear. last night i stayed up and finished a report worth 25% of my grade at about 5am, arrived on time for my 9am lecture, and spent about half of it zoned out while thinking about seventeen year old emilie agreste. and i was one of the most active participants in the class discussion

[sorrcha]

my lovely gourami, mango

[dragonsdendoodles]

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Penguin Teen (@penguinteen)

SO GANG HOW WE FEELING ABOUT THIS ONE

[dreadnotau]

Happy three years everybody! As always, there’s a lot to say on the occasion, so pop in at the end of the post for the tl;dr if you don’t have time for my detailed diatribes, haha

Boy, time flies, huh? Feels like the second anniversary was just yesterday, but maybe that’s just the several long hiatuses getting to me. I’ve been scarce on uploading anything anywhere for a while now, even though I promised I’d actually pick up the slack this time around. What gives? Well…

For one, college hell, and for two, a lot of unfounded anxiety about putting my art out there. Allow me some theatrics for a moment and I’ll actually get back to the comic at hand… I’ve never had an exceptionally supportive environment for making art. It wasn’t suppressive, not in the slightest, but it also wasn’t… encouraging. It was always treated as a hobby or a distraction rather than something I was allowed to be fully proud of, especially because a lot of my art focused on more cartoon-y and fantasy ideas, rather than still life studies and painting (which people generally outside of the art sphere tend to value more, arbitrarily). Couple that with a childhood full of being bullied over minute shit you hadn’t even considered could be an issue before, and you get a teenager hellbent on never sharing his interests or ideas with anyone, mostly due to the fear of rejection.

I’ve grown, thankfully, but that paranoia and fear doesn’t go away overnight. As I’m sure you all know, Meowchela was the one who originally encouraged me to post this comic, and the only reason she succeeded was because she was the first person in a long time who listened and engaged with my interests and my art in a meaningful way. It’s kind of obvious her friendship had a profound impact on me, and I’d cite her as one of the reasons I was even hopeful enough to apply to an art college in the first place! This comic, and that bond with another person, proved that maybe these things I’m so passionate about weren’t duds, and weren’t something I had to keep to myself.

So, fast forward a few years. About three years, in fact.

During one of my classes, right before this hellish two weeks of exams started, one of the class assistants talked me into showing my comic pages to one of my professors. He’s generally a pretty open guy when it comes to new mediums, but I’m always… apprehensive about showing my less “traditional art”-y things to professors, but, he ended up being genuinely proud of it. Specifically, I showed him pages 85-87 (because they’re my favourites) and, he didn’t read the text, just the visuals were enough for him to say “good job, keep it up” (which is HIGH praise from that guy). When I mentioned I’ve been meaning to simplify the visuals because I didn’t have time to work on the comic very often because of college and classes, he dismissed it on principle. I was honestly caught off guard. Heavily paraphrasing, he suggested that worsening the visuals for an arbitrary deadline was counterproductive to making something that’s Good™.

That’s kinda stuck with me. For a good few years now I was more focused on optimisation rather than visual improvement for the comic, and though it HAS contributed to better visuals in some ways (cutting corners sometimes makes for a less pointy and jagged end result), it’s kind of weird I’m treating an art project that way, isn’t it? I set a lot of… arbitrary deadlines and standards for myself, in the form of expectations and what I “should” or “shouldn’t” be doing at certain stages in my life. I’ve thought of Dread Not as a passion project second and a stepping stone first, if I’m being honest. As if it was too… fandom-y and derivative to be treated with more gravity than that, like it’s an immature project because I was still a child when I came up with it. As if it was something I’m making to Build Up to Something Else, something Bigger and Cooler and More Important, and… the more I think about the future of Dread Not, and even my future career options, the more I realised that’s, ironically, a really immature way to think about it.

If there’s one thing going to this art college has taught me, is that there’s no “right” way to make art, and there’s no “right” way to success as an artist. There’s no clear-cut paths, just more commonly treaded roads, but even those are heavily overgrown. Why should I try to box myself into thinking I have to make things from complete scratch to be taken seriously? What’s so bad about Dread Not as a story and as a comic that’s caused me to vaguely keep it under wraps when conversing with people in my day-to-day life? Why wouldn’t I put all these skills I’ve acquired to improve and expand this project that’s Right There, WAITING for me to finally get off my ass and get pages out there again?

I wish I could say I’ve used all this time away in a particularly clever way, but I really haven’t - at least, it feels like I haven’t. My art has undoubtedly improved over time (though admittedly the art for this post was Very rushed, fuckin exams), and while I’ve been working on projects in the background, chipping away at them in a VERY disorganised way, I haven’t been posting that progress anywhere, and I haven’t made any good progress on my biggest project, Dread Not, because of the other ones. And, honestly? Admitting that kinda stings. This comic means a lot to me, and I wish I actually gave it the time and attention it deserves instead of letting it sit out hiatus after hiatus because I keep failing at structuring my time.

So, my new plan is a little more abstract: find a way to work Dread Not into my school schedule, and slowly build a habit of working on it more often. No clue how long that’ll take, but I think it’ll be worth it to consider it as an option, and hopefully finally end these long, drawn out hiatuses with short bursts of uploads in-between. HOPEFULLY. Building habits was never my strong suit, so please bear with me while I figure this out in what will probably be the most hectic upload schedule in this comics history, which is: no schedule at all.

From now on (until the end of Act 1), I’ll upload pages when they’re ready, and depending on how the weeks go and how complex the page is, they could be weeks or days apart from one another. Hell, some might even take a month to finish if school stuff gets REALLY hectic (god knows Hellish Exam Week number 1 and number 2 won’t be giving me much time to work on the comic), but I’m determined to do this. I want to be able to put my all into this project again!!

(And hopefully finish Act 1 by the end of this semester…)

TL;DR: College is giving me life lessons I didn’t expect, and because of them I’ve decided to give myself a non-existent upload schedule for Dread Not: Pages will be posted when they’re ready, and the spacing between pages could wildly vary depending on circumstances and the actual complexity of the page itself.

As always, thank you for being here, thank you for reading, and thank you for being patient!

If all goes well, there will be new content very, very soon.

[aubieinsanity]

Trigun Stampede

Episode 11 Preview | To The New World

[spookykestrel]

you make plans with your friends when youre growing up that you'll move in togehter and always stay near and go to each other's weddings and always talk and always call and then you get to the age you're supposed to start doing that kind of thing and realize all the friends you had hoped would stay by you forever have gone off to do things without you and you're just in the same spot and suddenly you have to do it all on your own

[magentagalaxies]

.

[reallifepotato]

me irl

[slashthrashandcrash]

how's your vacation going? are you having fun? :)X

I took an edible last night and it fucking destroyed me in a not fun way. so i'd give this trip a 6/10 right now.

[bluesidedown]

hnggghhggg

[gibbyslounge]

things im still not over (as someone who was mostly inactive since mid 2021):

mask and change my clothes!! i dont think i was active on tumblr when change my clothes was released, but the way i ascended when i heard his soft sweet singing voice <33 mask is my favorite song of his and it still makes me emotional to think about what the song meant to him. his creativity is one of his greatest strengths and i am endlessly happy that he found a way to share more of himself in a way that he really enjoys

DREAM TEAM MEETUP tbh i really did not know if these days would ever come. its so so so crazy to think that florida man dream texas cowboy sapnap and british george are really all living together and existing in the same space. seeing them be THEM irl is still very surreal and makes me pause for a second without fail. so so much of the community centered around them not having met each other irl

DREAM FACE REVEAL!!!! this one i REALLY HONESTLY didnt know if it would ever come, just because the courage it takes to face reveal after building one of the largest audiences is fucking crazy. i thought that even if they did end up living together, dream might’ve found that he is happy to just be with them and not want to face reveal anymore. ig never doubt dream- he’s such a “go big or go home” type of person. i love him regardless but now he is also a big bear who wears cat beanies and has the prettiest eyes and im emotionally attached

dream pics before his face reveal with a big emphasis on suit pics, swt halloween, and strawberry dream. his white hoodie posey pose and the ones with the blanket and patches have a permanent home in my heart but these had me convulsing and i didnt get to gush about them here </3

[i-am-a-fan]

pov. you’re the hw i have to finish before i can play minecraft

[spocksgotemotions]

I’m not gonna complain about my vacation, I am determined to have a lovely time. But I’m gonna say it. Airports are an exercise in humiliation and I’m not into it

[scuffedcd]

I’m gonna be pathetic real quick,

[pictureofdoriaaaaaangay]

god, I missed cafeteria coffee so much