#give me more details…please…

[yeoroot]

Wouldn’t it be rlly funny if we met Ace’s ex girlfriend first before meeting his brother

[stil-lindigo]

lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)

if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.

--

no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.

I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.

I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.

If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.

[fishofthewoods]

Oh my god I woke up this morning and my Stardew Valley meta post had almost 150 notes????? Hello?????????? Anyways I started writing this last night because @moon-is-pretty-tonight left nice tags on the original so thank you so much!!

We know from the starting scenes of the game that the farmer's grandfather loved Stardew Valley. So why did he leave? Pelican Town is a good place to grow old; George and Evelyn are just fine. It's a fine place to raise a kid, but maybe he just wanted to raise his child closer to real schools and other children.

Or maybe, just maybe, he understood.

Was there a day when he was in his thirties where he looked at his friends and realized they weren't like him? That he could run faster than them, work longer, explore deeper into the hidden places of the valley?

Was there a day when he went to the wizard to ask him for help, for knowledge if nothing else? Did he learn then that his family was different? Special? Chosen? And how did he react? He couldn't possibly raise a child in the valley if they would be as strange and fey as him. He had to leave. There was no other way.

But years later, on his deathbed, did he regret that choice?

Is that why he gave the farmer the letter?

Is that why they went back home?

When the farmer steps off the bus that first day, the valley is still on the cusp of winter, just barely tipping over into spring. The flowers are starting to bloom, but a chill still hangs in the air. As soon as the farmer's boots touch the soil there's a change. The air gets warmer. The trees get greener. Not by too much, not all at once, but it changes.

The junimos watch the farmer as they do their work. They're new to farming, but take to it with frightening speed; their first batch of crops is perfect. None of the townsfolk tell them that parsnips don't normally grow in less than a week, that cauliflowers don't grow to be ten feet tall, that fairies don't visit when the sun goes down and grow potatoes and beans and tulips overnight. The junimos talk amongst themselves in their strange, wild language, and agree: this is the one. They're back. The valley recognizes its own, even when they've left for a generation. The farmers have come home.

Things change fast in the valley. The community center, empty and decrepit for so many years, is rejuvenated. (Lewis says it was abandoned only a few weeks after the farmer's grandfather left. Strange coincidence, he says, that it both came and went with the farmer's family.) The mines and the quarry, similarly abandoned, are explored for the first time in ages. The town becomes cleaner, brighter, more vibrant, happier.

And it is happier. Not just the environment, but the people. It's the talk of the town for weeks when Haley does her first closet purge. Leah's art show in the town square is a huge success. Shane's smiling for the first time since he moved to the valley. All of them, when asked, say it's all thanks to the farmer.

People love to ask why Lewis didn't fix the community center on his own. Why Willy never repaired the boat to ginger island. Why Abigail or Marlon never went down to fix the elevator in the mines, or why Clint didn't fix the minecarts.

But isn't it so much more interesting to ask how those things were there in the first place? How they got so broken down? If the stories the townspeople tell are true, the valley was once a beautiful place, flourishing and full of life; why did that change? When did it change?

Was it when the farmer's grandfather, the locus of the valley, its chosen representative, left town?

And if so, what happens when the farmer comes back?

[dragons-in-spaceee]

[ID: newt from pacific rim with the tumblr post: “if I wasn’t trembling like a leaf I would kick your ass” /End ID]

hes so textpostable

[the-agent-of-blight]

Aromanticism in Academic papers (day 1)

A few days ago, I posted wondering about aromanticism in academic research. Well after a search through google scholar and some institutional access (thank you wikipedia <2) I've found some papers. Since it's Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week this week, I'm gonna try posting about one paper I found each day this week.

So today's paper is The stability of singlehood: Limitations of the relationship status paradigm and a new theoretical framework for reimagining singlehood By Dr. Hannah Tessler (2022) [stable link]

To give a summary, this paper focuses on the idea that the general conceptualization of the term single is extremely limited within the standard definition of a person without a romantic partner. This assumes that a given person's relationship status is binary, that the individual is willing to be in a romantic partnership, that singlehood is a transitory state and not one that some people prefer to be in long term. Obviously, the implications of the term single does not accurately reflect the experiences of many people without romantic partners (like many aromantic people). The paper instead proposes a new framework for classifying singles on a graph of two axes, one for Openness to romance and one for desire for romance. This framework not only allows for the term single to encapsulate more than the normative assumption, but also shows how singlehood can be stable.

Tessler identifies seven populations of singles that subvert the standard assumption:

Singles that perfer singlehood

Aromantic and/or asexual singles

Heterosexual single women who elect to opt out of heteronormative relationships

MGTOWs and to an extent some incels

Singles committed to religion

People satisfied with single life but facing social pressure

and Single people after divorce/widowhood

The section on aromanticism itself is well written and accurate. It describes the state of many of us very well, while acknowledging that there are partnering aromantics out there. For future considerations, Tessler writes: "There is currently scant research on aromanticism, but more scholarship is necessary in order to better understand the intersections and boundaries between sex, romance, and relationships."

All in all, this paper is a wonderful insight that I hope future researchers in the area of romance take a look at and use ideas from. There's a lot of research out there on romance, but not as much on the lack of it. Tessler challenges the scientific community to help fill that gap.

[link to day 2]

[jamiethebeeart]

Lineart by me! (extra info for colorists in og tags) I couldn't resist a dappled light variant on this. @green-with-envy-phandom-event

fun fact: this lineart originally had the actual lunch/picnic table ridges and then i realized that was too much, especially without access to the layers of lineart (personally, I would color the lineart for the table and then the support bars would be colored and the layer moved underneath the table top. I decided not to put colorists in a position to try to color it with one layer of lineart, but I did get quite far before making that decision)

[skitskatdacat63]

For @sansebastinae and @boisinnot, my fellow saint seb truthers :)

+ the usual

Yayyyy finished a drawing! Haha only took me...2 weeks. I kept going back and forth on whether I could finish it tonight, and I really wasn't going to. But then I looked at the unfinished version on a different screen and was like oh? Not too bad actually?? So I finished it :) First of all, ofc, here is the process. Kinda weird seeing it for smth like this, it makes me feel like I'm the painter in rennaisance au, not Mark dhjfkf

Ah I was gonna draw a silly renaissance au comic to accompany this(read: lighten the mood), but it's 5 am and I've still not really drafted it well, so! I'd like to finish it at some point bcs I wanna draw more chibi comics, but when I finish smth, I can't help but immediately want to post it, so part 2 will have to wait. I'll show you the outline though so you can at least imagine 😭

^ So many renaissance and beyond paintings of Saint Sebastian are always the most horny thing ever. Like pre/early rennaisance, yeah he was naked and all that, but they were pretty chaste, and uhhhhh suffering?? Well the newer paintings are suffering, but in a different way, if you know what I mean.

So I feel like Mark's the type to be overly pedantic about it, and refuses to make borderline porn of a saint, I mean, god forbid, Seb!!! But then he just. Does anyways. Because he can't control his lust for Seb even when drawing him half dead. I just imagine him holding the paintbrush in a death grip like "must not be horny. Must not draw him sexy. Must make him chaste." And then he ends up with the one seen above. Seb is all smug about it. "Wow you'd wanna fuck me even while I'm all bloody and dying? 🥺"

Mark: "oh I'll make you bloody, alright."

But god so funny to imagine Seb doing all these different slutty poses, like arching his back as much as possible, the cloth nearly falling off at all times, etc etc. And Mark finally lands on this pose bcs he hopes the suffering will outweigh the horny. It doesn't. Also Seb is genuinely serious once he actually gets into the pose, focus mode on. And honestly that's even worse for Mark, bcs it's so much more arousing to see Seb in his element, focused. Tbf I think Seb could be drinking water, and Mark would still find some way to sexualize it. Don't look at his sketches!! They're just filled with Seb doing all kinds of random activities.

Also! Here is the painting I referenced this off of, must give credit where credit is due ofc

The Dying St. Sebastian by François Fabre

Also this isn't really relevant in the context of this drawing specifically. But I looked thru a bunch of Saint Sebastian paintings while trying to find one I could reference, and I came across this middle ages one that actually looks so much like boy king seb 😭 I guess it really is meant to be!

St Sebastian between St Roch and St Peter by Pietro Perugino

Lmao but do you see the difference between early rennaisance and later work???

[saitamastamaticsoup]

Not to be dramatic but since hiori is blasian in canon I need black x readers asap🗣️ like we are DEF not getting any cultural background on this kid (because they just slid it in there like we weren’t gonna recognize in the first place)not that we have any background on any of these children’s parents but I think he should explain how he feels being mixed in Japan because it’s just really funny having these two in the exact same anime, and they are both black 

This is ABSOLUTELY hilarious 😭

Edit: so I’ve noticed a pattern of EVERY character looking like their mother and barely sharing any resemblance to their fathers so ig he gets a pass for being pale BUT there’s even more melaninated characters so let’s give him some sun too!!🥺

Respectfully; come the fuck on

[time-is-restored]

im seeing so many people say that sophietexas said shit she unequivocably Did Not Say so like. just for my own peace of mind.

when dream asked what she'd said about him/george, she explained that she had tweeted a friend's misogynistic experience with george (without details), which she took down because it 'caused more harm than good' and 'it was becoming more about me [than the victim]'.

they shared a screenshot of the tweet with him

dream, assuming there was more to the story (apparently he'd been told she was talking shit about him?) asked what else she'd said. he also asked why he/george wouldn't know what incident she was referring to if it was 'that bad'

sophie clarified they only tweeted about george, and said the interaction in question was not assault, and they wasn't accusing george of that

dream asked for more details, accusing them of not wanting to 'hear another perspective'. basically saying it wasn't fair that they'd say this shit when it could be a 'miscommunication' or not true

sophie said again she wasn't going to say anything else because it wasn't her story to tell

dream said that was ridiculous, and asked why they'd had positive interactions in the past if she was so negative towards them now

sophie explained george had ignored them + therefore been rude, didn't mention the context, and DREAM said it 'probably happened' in an among us lobby. made a comment about how he'll 'never know' why they don't like him

sophie said she didn't like his attitude. dream said it was hard to have a nice attitude when he was getting texts from people asking why everyone on twitter thinks he's a 'serial rapist'

sophie said that the conversation was getting unproductive, and that she wasn't going to expose her friend. she said she doesn't wish for dreams downfall, and she just wants the creator space to be safer

now, about what she DIDN'T say/do:

she did not accuse george of 'being a misogynist because he ignored her in an among us lobby'. she mentioned that they had been in among us lobbies when dream said he didn't remember her. separately to that, she said that george had ignored her when they'd spoken. seperately to that, the misogynistic behaviour accusation was her sharing a friend's personal experience. all she ever said was that george was rude to her.

they did not accuse george of assaulting anyone (aside from expressing support for caiti), and they clarified that their friend's negative experience was Specifically Not Assault before they deleted all related tweets.

she did not accuse dream of literally anything. i cannot emphasise this enough. dream clearly thought/was told that she said something abt him, and kept asking what 'else' she said apart from the tweet (which she willingly showed). again, all she said about dream was that she thought he was nice, and now thinks he has a bad attitude.

sophie did not share her friend's story in detail because that wasn't what the friend wanted. if you think that's shady, please consider that dream went public in order to accuse connor + sophie of saying shit about him/george without having proof. if sophie had named her friend, or given details, that knowledge would've become public too. then please consider the reaction that caiti has received these past few weeks, after accusing george of something george admitted to. consider the ways people are still calling her a liar, or a clout chaser, or of exaggerating/changing her mind and calling it assault after the fact, after george has agreed that what she said happened happened. would you, knowing that context, want to expose your friend (who already didn't want to come forward personally!) to that level of scrutiny and judgement?

leave sophie the fuck alone come on guys. their 'crime' is not liking george or dream and expressing that to dream's face. they made a tweet on behalf of a friend which they took down bc they felt it was detracting from caiti's story. that's literally it.

[aq2003]

alexa play venom by icon for hire

[bleue-flora]

if a therapist came to the dsmp to treat the characthers they would need therapy after doing it probably

[context]

You and @piscespixiewastaken think alike it seems.

Indeed they would. In fact, this point actually pushed me to ask my sister-in-law, who is a therapist/counselor about it just out of curiosity. 

Here’s what I learned:

Despite what my counselor said, not all therapists were required in school to do counseling themselves to get certified. Some counselors have actually never even been to therapy themselves (not sure how I feel about that to be honest… not to deter people from going to therapy - please do if you are able) something my sister-in-law didn’t seem to be a big fan of.

When asked if she felt like she needed counseling after/because of a specific client she said that yes that can definitely be the case. She noted that empathy fatigue is often common after listening to people all day, which makes sense and that would be a common reason for some needed personal counseling. As expected, while she hasn’t had to deal with a lot of it, she did note that dealing with people with antisocial behavior disorders (ie narcissistic, histrionic… think sociopath disorders) can be especially taxing.

Given that the dsmp is a group of povs of the same story and events, I was curious on whether she often found herself taking sides when she does couples counseling. She said that there can be an initial bias at first when the base facts are presented to her, which is something she often has to check herself on, but that actually she finds that usually there is truth and wrongdoing on both sides and there is no true ‘bad guy.’ Though she did add that she has not dealt with any relationships involving more intense abuse especially relating to antisocial behavior disorders. In other words, the couples she sees likely came willingly and are sound enough in mind on both sides to want to fix the problems, if that makes sense.

So in other words, there are, much to my surprise, counselors who do not go (may not have gone) to therapy themselves, but that doesn’t make it healthy and considering the characters in the dsmp it would likely be recommended that this counselor also see someone. I will say though the implication that people in the dsmp are more problematic then real world people are is perhaps an underestimation of irl mental illness. Just because the dsmp members wear armor and carry around weapons doesn't make them more troublesome than people irl, though perhaps that is me viewing it from their world standards which I assume the therapist would be from. In either case, whether the therapist was from the realm of Minecraft world circumstances or more irl, I do imagine they being either inhumanly sane and not need a therapist of their own, or they get together with another therapist and perhaps drink over all the dsmp insanity. And whether they would be inclined to take sides I think is hard to say since there are definitely some characters who need a psych ward. Anyways… hope you enjoyed my info dump. :)

[reasonsforhope]

Crowdsourcing a question

Okay totally personal post here because, now that search engines suck, my research is failing me. So I'm crowdsourcing my question about the residential care work industry!

Hoping at least some of my followers have experience in/with the industry and some intel on this:

Actual question: How common is it for jobs in residential care work (residential centers, btw, not home care) to actually have two people on the night shift? vs. just saying they always have two people on the night shift in interviews and their official policies, and actually it's not true?

Because my current job was, it turns out, apparently totally lying about "you'll never be on shift alone with clients" at orientation (when it comes to the night shift, anyway). Which, holy fucking safety issues, Batman!

Suffice to say this was a very fun thing to find out like three days before my first regular shift

So, I'm thinking realllll hard about switching companies, and I'm trying to figure out if I could expect to actually have a coworker at a different company, or if it's like an open secret in the field that actually, basically all the night shifts end up being solo shifts, because the industry is so chronically understaffed or w/e

[signed-sapphire]

Hi Bo! I wanted to practice for a while with my ocs and I remembered that you really liked the last one I showed in that post soooo this turned out (sorry if it's a little deformed, I'm still practicing how to draw faces in profile lol)

Owhehwhehehhhhhhheeeee

I. I am.

Not deformed at all. Just staring. Chin hands

Need to draw them I’m going to go crazy

Ah didn’t draw the top properly

Idc I’m just staring at their face

Staring very respectfully THAT SHIRT AND WAIST AHHHH

My face is very like that— open mouthed and smiling

Ahhhhhhhhh

🫠

Love you Aled

Love them more

PLEASE GIVE ME MORE DETAILS ABT THEM I NEED TO KNOW IF ITS OKAY TO SIMP FOR THEM

[arom-antix]

My feral little man

[sysig]

The most fun you can have, barring the pain and torture (Patreon)

[adventuresingingerland]

💔 THE DEVIL (Upright) 💔 oppression, addiction, obsession, dependency, excess, powerlessness, limitations HAPPY OFMD S2 DAY EVERYONE!! I am beyond excited to see the new season and wanted to get this piece done before I embarked on that journey. OFMD has been very inspiring to me and really helped me push my art this past year, leading to some really lovely/cool pieces. I look forward to seeing where the next season will take me <3 This piece is inspired/referenced from those gorgeous Dragon Age tarot cards, mainly The Devil one here, because boy does it fit that end-of-season-one Ed mood.