#gotta keep spirits up

[scary-lasagna]

A new discord is being created! Super excited to share it with everyone!!

It's going to complete within a couple days or so, and then maybe if there's enough people we can host game/movie nights.

The old discord will stay up since it's heavy with so many memories I wouldn't dare delete it.

But with the way it's coming, it might be available to join tonight!

There are channels for sharing & critiquing writing, playing with bots, and a bot that the Creeps can communicate through. And I'm totally open to suggestions on how to make the server more fun and friendly! :]

[quins-makeshift-menagerie]

Gentle reminder that my kofi link is in my pinned post. While The Other Q’s ER trip won’t financially destroy us it’s still going to be a big hit on top of having to get some major repairs done on the car before winter hits

[puppetmaster13u]

Thinkin' of WOF Au for DC, but like, it's a Gothamite and Fawcett thing. (And Amity Park if crossover)

Like those are the most magical areas in the world, even if Gotham is cursed as fuck. An unspoken secret of sorts that while they present themselves as human to outsiders, they are all Very Much Not.

Which means hilariously in the league, when everyone expects Batman to be suspicious and short with the new guy- even made bets on it- they are then shooketh when both visibly relax and start talking. And half the shared complaints don't make sense!

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Now Gotham technically has no Queen, nor does Fawcett, but Batman and Captain Marvel are the closest things. Not in the traditional sense of back when they were in separate tribes (& maybe from a different dimension but shh that was millennia ago) but in the sense of, they're the ones patrolling and protecting the cities along with calling the shots in disasters.

Which does sort of change the dynamic they both have in their city. If one of them calls to arms, the city would follow them. They could declare war, and their cities (begrudgingly in Gotham's underbelly's case of strongest is in charge) would follow. And while Billy is oblivious, both Marvel-the-not-hivemind and Batman are. They know they have to be very careful.

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I'm sure we all want Nightwing Bruce but no. Bruce, like both his mother and father and father's father and so on before him, is actually an Icewing. The Waynes however, have a case of melanism running in their bloodline. Thomas Wayne? Only his quills and part of his back were darker, but Bruce? Practically pitch black scales that shadow his eyes.

Now Alfred on the other hand, is a Nightwing. No special powers there, though you would hear many a child protest with how he seems to know everything.

Commissioner Gordon is a Mudwing, big stocky and very tired, which translates to his human disguise as a large trenchcoat. He finds this very amusing. Barbara similarly, is half Mudwing. Her mother was a Hivewing, making her a hybrid between both. Which does ironically mean that Batgirl does in fact have insectoid wings. Though that does ponder the question on if they'd all go by their original vigilante names.

Dick is a Silkwing. Wingless as he watches his parents fall and unable to do anything despite this place supposedly being safe for beings like them. He grows into his own, and his wings, when they come in, are dark Gotham colors through and through, with the deep blue of the sky he's come to crave.

Jason is a hybrid between a Mudwing and a Skywing. He's also an animus- not that he knew that. He doesn't find out until he's dying, telling himself to not die, to get back to Gotham, to his dad, his family- And then he wakes up in his Coffin, alive.

Now Cass, raised to be the perfect killer, is also a hybrid, just one between a Nightwing and a Rainwing, egg set out under the moon. Which succeeds, partially. She can't straight up read minds, but combined with her talent in reading body language on both human and inhuman bodies, it's a near thing.

Tim is a Seawing, borderline abandoned by his parents who seek treasures and more wealth as he's trapped back in a city where the water is dark and poisoned. But he's Gothamite, through and through, and he adapts. Scales darker than the original blues he was born with, and glow shifting to that sickly white of the Gotham's Bats.

Now Steph, is a full-blooded Rainwing, and can in fact change her scales, but can mostly be found in purples and golds. Though for a short time she was in another set of colors, thought dead before she slithered out of the shadows older and wiser than before.

Damian is his father's son, but he's also an Al-Ghul. The not-quite dragonet is half Icewing, and half Sandwing. And struggled to adjust at first, to a place so different from his first home where the only other dragons were blood related. But like any Wayne before him, he adjusts, and he adapts.

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Billy wasn't a Beetlewing originally, and perhaps he would have hesitated if he'd known it would change him, would change his body and the last thing he had of his parents. But his friends, his Team and new family help. And he can pass as a Silkwing like their sort-of foster mother. All six of them can do so now, even if the others look more like hybrids themselves thanks to not being the Champion. They might not be, but they're his family. And that's enough.

[clintismoved]

Strangehawk playlist

Since I am quite proud of how these are coming along, I thought I'd share more of the playlists. This one is inspired by my ship with @strxngetimes (I love them so much).

[moinsbienquekaworu]

Housemate is letting one of her rabbits walk around at night again :/

[quaranmine]

hoping tomorrow with the combination of day off + snow + cold weather blanket coziness that i can magically bang out some serious firewatch au progress

[un-pearable]

i keep forgetting i actually did apply for and get accepted to a zine…. i gotta manually activate this fixation somehow i need to sit down and Get Obsessed so i can make some cool ass art

[ekho-ekho-ekho]

Broke: Tarot is bullshit. It's like the zodiac: the symbols are way too open to interpretation and anything can mean anything. It's all a big grift.

Woke: Tarot may or may not be a legitimate tool for accessing forces beyond our understanding . . . and that's assuming such forces exist in any way we would recognize! But the cards do evoke a lot of common themes, as well as different stages in several types of spiritual journey. Since art imitates life (and vice-versa), tarot can still be useful as a framing device to gain perspective on your own journey of personal growth. Mostly though, it's just fun to mess around and see what comes up!

Bespoke: I consulted my deck for advice yesterday and all it did was bully me :/

[noirandchocolate]

Me: Maybe this December will be better than some recent ones because I won’t sustain an injury to a key body part! :D

Refrigerator: *stops working and can’t be repaired, necessitating that I buy a new one immediately*

Washing Machine: *starts tearing itself apart on the inside and can’t be repaired, necessitating that I buy a new one ASAP*

My Supervisor Who is the Best Boss I’ve Ever Had: I’m leaving for another job!

Other Supervisor Who Doesn’t Like to Listen When I Explain Things to Her: *keeps questioning me about the same damn thing* *gets appointed Director of our unit*

Me:

[twstchaos]

Chapter 4, all your kids

Ahh, Chapter Four, “The Schemer/Tactician of the Scalding Sands”, the Scarabia chapter, the saddest chapter of them all—till ch6 and 7 rivaled that title—the chapter that NONE of my characters are involved with at all…unless in a certain au but we don’t talk about that.

Every single one of my ocs went on Winter Break. Missy back to Harveston, Bouquette back to the Queendom of Roses, the kitty cat twins to Paithoon, Tama to Nuti Tâvani.

Missy and Epel are chilling and sledding around the mountain gotta prepare for Kelkkarotu if it ever comes to EN sob.

Bouquette is hanging out with Riddle—sneaking him out—Trey, and Chenya.

Meihui and Sumana are doing princess things.

And Tama is chilling with his little sister.

[sapphos-tooth]

you know i hit rock bottom when i joined facebook dating….😭

[brassandblue]

Seeing the doctor tomorrow about potential surgery to get this benign t*mor out of me. Please send good vibes that things go smoothly and with as little bullshit as possible.

I feel like it’s sucking the life out of me and it’s begun to hurt nonstop so I’m ready to get this done with.

[homunculus-argument]

A professional exorcist, but with the attitude of a professional pet handler. A demon whisperer, if you will. Just showing up to places that have a ghost problem, figuring out what the creature's problem is, and then just... give them chew toys, usually. The girl whose soul is trapped in your cellar is scared and bored in there, of course she'll rush at you and shriek every time you try to go in there. Ease her into human interaction, leave the door open sometimes and talk to her until she gets used to you.

Yeah the thing clawing on your walls is a bear spirit. Yeah a bear was slaughtered on the spot of this house incorrectly in the 1800s or something. Yeah performing the proper rites now won't make it go away, it's already used to your trash - bears are creatures of habit. Just do these little rituals to appease it every once in a while. In the good news, the ghost bear will keep the living bears off your trash. Yeah bears have a lot of reverence to their dead.

Oh, "poltergeist" is an outdated term, we don't use it anymore. It was used as a kind of a blanket explanation for a whole bunch of different phenomena that couldn't be explained otherwise. What you have here is an undiagnosed autistic child who's also on psychic spectrum. Yeah no there's actually significant overlap between the two. Here's where to find resources on how to better accomodate your kid, the furniture should stop exploding on its own once you've figured out a better way to communicate so they don't get overstimulated.

This house right here is just build on a demon area. No yeah the mysterious scripts you found carved in the stone that your house's foundation was built on literally just say "DEMON AREA DO NOT BUILD". They don't live here, it's just like an ant road. Except the ants are the size of a truck and immaterial. No you can't redirect the demon highway, you gotta move. You built a house on top of a stone that literally says "DO NOT BUILD". I get that you didn't know it at the time, but you do know now, so if you choose to stay, that's a you problem.

[benoits-neckerchieves]

k am i tripping from staring at screens too long or did i just write onions in my dissertation 🧅

[avatar-aaang]

mf wants me here til 4.

first off. No... its Friday for one and for two I finished literally everything I was told to do by 1 oclock. And I got to go to the dmv and now im just sitting here

[waffled0g]

Everyone gets “The 90s” look wrong and I hate it

Couple years ago I saw these two board games at the store back to back. Well, not saw them per se, but ya know. Spied them out of the corner of my eye. And for a moment without reading the text, I couldn’t tell you which was which decade at first. Funny. Either they were in a rush to get these out the door or they wanted their throwback trivia game boxes to look uniform. I didn’t think too much of it.

Only, from then on I started seeing it MORE. Every time someone markets a 90s or 80s throwback...

Goddammit they’re identical! What??! How did we let this happen? As a 90s survivor and a designer, this drives me up a wall.

Look, I know I’m late to the party to complain about “the 90s look” when we’re just starting to get sick of the Y2K nostalgia train. But c’mon, the 90s were not The 80s: Part Two™ 

Trust me when I say that we weren’t all wearing neon trapezoids up until the year 2000. The 90s look being peddled is so specific to the tail end of the 80s and an early early part of the 90s - a part of the 90s when it wouldn’t stop being the 80s. This is Memphis design being conflated with the wrong decade.

Keep reading for a long ass graphic design history lesson and pictures of old soda and fast food.

Specifically, the look is Memphis Milano, self-named by the Italian design house Memphis Group. Starting in the early to mid 80s, they made all sorts of furniture, fabrics and sculptures that were like a Piet Mondrian grid painting under heavy radiation. Their whole deal was defying the standards of existing industrial design up to that point on purpose. Chairs had weird arches, bookcases would be in strange alien colors, unusual materials like plastic or elastic were used in place of metal or wood, that sorta thing.

Memphis quickly became the signature look for the decade. You can tell something’s influenced by Memphis design from it’s telltale trademarks:

Clashing, neon colors.

Use of diametric shapes.

Contrasting patterns like zebra print stripes, confetti squiggles and checkerboards.

It wasn’t long before Memphis Milano-inspired design was everywhere in 80s pop culture:

It was a special time, yes.

I was a kindergartener at the tail end of the 80s, so I knew Memphis mostly through the lens of kids media. Toys, clothes, games, tv shows used it like candy colored catnip. Cable channel Nickelodeon more or less adopted the Memphis aesthetic as their signature in-house style and practically built a monument to it at a Florida theme park:

I think this is why folks mistake what decade Memphis is representative of - 90s staples like Nick, Saved By The Bell, Fresh Prince - they all stayed around much longer than the design trend’s expiration date. 

Couple that notion with the fact that companies are slow followers to design trends. Something gets popular and they want to get on the bandwagon? Gotta wait for the ink to dry, gotta wait for the production molds to be made. It would take a few years for them to completely work Memphis outta their system.

Now, this is not to say Memphis is bad! Personally I’m a fan of the aesthetic, if my neon-drenched artwork wasn’t a tip-off already. But it is a trend, and trends never last forever.

So what took the Memphis Milano look down for good? This part’s up for debate, but I personally think it had something to do with this dude:

It’s that grunge music from Seattle that’s so popular with the kids these days dontchaknow.

Once Smells Like Teen Spirit hit in 1991, the Nirvana tone drove the rest of the decade. Clean geometry became weathered, grainy and organic. Bright neon pastels became more bold. Bubblegum pop music sounded fake and manufactured. Attitude and apathy was authentic. Whatever.

Things got grungy. Things got grimy. Olestra was invented.

I think the best way to visualize this transition is how Cherry Coke entered the decade and how it left it:

1992 Memphis on the left, 1998 grunge junkie on the right. Fitting that the 90s would end with a design that looked like Darth Maul’s lungs.

Okay, so what should 90s retro design look like?

Continue on to PART TWO! Spoilers: No VHS filters or vaporwave needed, but maybe bring an antacid.