#it still could use some work

[squarebracket-trickster]

Heads Up Seven Up (June 25th Edition)

Okay, first tag game:

Thank you @unstablewifiaccess with this post for the boop!

On June 25th, the last lines I wrote were:

I nearly scream in fright. We had been silent for so long, committing everything we saw to memory—lest we need to trace our steps—and racing against the dying torch. “I know this place,” he says, pointing to a large crack in the cobblestone. “We use that crack as a boundary. Don’t go past it and you can’t get lost. We are almost there!” The torch dies on us. We seize each other’s hands and break into a sprint. My feet start to bleed again but I don’t stop. At least I am getting my exercise from that hefty meal. We stop in front of a trap door and I my body sags in relief. I relax so much I vomit. I guess my body is not used to eating and mad at me for exercising. Will I ever keep anything down again? I am going to waste away like this. My vision goes blurry and I topple over.

Sending the boop gently onwards to: @rbbess110, @mjparkerwriting, @macabremoons, and @zmwrites

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[nerdpoe]

Young Justice is always a little...concerned. With Phantom's living situation. Now they're outright afraid for him, and Bart has decided it's time to Ask An Adult.

It was the little quips. The tiny little things. Stuff that didn't seem to matter to Phantom at all, or appeared to be normal for him, that he didn't realize weren't normal at all.

"Oh, better not hope my mom catches me." "Doing what, staying out past bedtime?" "Nah, using my powers; she'd vivisect me!"

"Another stab wound. Great." "Don't worry Phantom, I've got the med kit-" "Oh, I'm not a baby or anything, I can handle it just fine. Just gimme a sec to take it out."

"My dad has better aim than that." "...Like, when he's hunting, right?" "...At what other times would he be shooting at me?"

"Huh. Not as bad as my parents place. Look; they have a decontamination shower!" "Phantom, this lab has been vandalized to the point of needing a hazmat suit." "Did I stutter?"

Finding out each others identities did nothing to soothe the worry. Tim quietly told the others that every time he tried to run facial recognition, he kept hitting a government firewall he couldn't breach. Phantom never told them his last name, just his first, and 'Danny' is super common.

The thing that really did it though, the thing that made Bart snap and run off to ask Max, was when Danny had a nightmare.

He was talking in his sleep.

"No. Don't-stop. Stoooop. I need...my skin. Mom, no. You can't...peel off...my skin..."

Bart didn't even wait for them to wake Danny up before he was standing in front of Max, talking a mile a minute as he tried to figure out what to do, with Wally staring in horror over a plate of waffles as he computed everything that Bart was saying.

~~~~~~

Danny had a dream about his mom and Skulker arguing about how to skin him. He wouldn't really call it a nightmare, because it was just Skulker, but the scariest thing was Skulker insisting to his mom that it was possible to skin him with a potato peeler. Dream mom was arguing that it was not, and that from a scientific standpoint that was a really piss poor way to preserve a specimen.

He hadn't been begging them to stop hurting him, he'd been whining at them to knock it off.

But when he wakes up, it's to a room full of worried friends and an old man who calls himself Max.

"Kid, I think we need to talk."

[artharakka]

Beautiful, But Broken

[andy-clutterbuck]

Rick Grimes in The Ones Who Live | 1x03 - Bye

[beatriceportinari]

Origami jellyfish, one square sheet of elephant hide paper. Colors are inspired by Thysanostoma loriferum. Zoom in to see the glitter!

[1alchemistart]

braided his hair 👍

[sysig]

You're still standing off to the side. Somehow, center stage has shifted from under your feet without you realizing, and you're standing in the wings, performing to no one.

Starring Role (Patreon)

[aspiringhorrorauthor]

As is tradition with Dracula Daily, let me give you today’s Cultural Lesson Based On Today’s Entry. Let’s talk about money.

See, if you’re thinking Dracula and the characters are handling what we see today as British money, don’t be fooled! Dracula is set in the 1890s, and they use an entirely different money system to what we use now, it just seems on the surface that it’s the same.

For context, if you didn’t know, Britain uses pounds (£) and pence (p) as the currency now, with 100p to £1. This is called decimalisation, and has been in practice since the 1970s. Before then, we were the last country in the world to still use the Roman monetary system.

In the Victorian era, there were 3 used measurements of currency: Pounds (L), Shillings (s) and pence (d), which was written in that order: l.s.d, so a sink in a shop may list the price as 1.7.2, which would be 1 pound, 7 shillings and 2 pence.

Now lets break those down a little more. There are 240 pennies to the pound, and 12 pence to the shilling. That makes 20 shillings to the pound. Most working class laborers would be using shillings as their highest coin in day-to-day living. You could get a pint of beer for a couple of pence. A pound was an incredible amount of money to your average person (maybe less so to the fancy characters of Dracula).

But I want to talk about the coins.

See, a penny was not the lowest coin in circulation. That was a farthing, which was worth ¼ (a quarter) of a penny. Then next was a half penny (or ha’penny if you prefer). Of course there was the penny. Then there was a two pence (tuppence) and a three pence (thrupence) piece. Then you had your half shilling (sixpence, pronounced more like sixpunce, with a ‘u’ rather than an ‘e’), and the shilling itself (twelve pence, remember? Also known colloquially as ‘bob’). Then you had the florin, which was 2 shillings exactly (24 pence). From there you had your half crown, which was worth 2 shillings and six pence, for a total of 30 pence (though you’d never call it that), and then a crown, which was 5 shillings. From there the next step is the half-sovereign, worth half a pound (120 pence, or 10 shillings), and finally the gold sovereign coin, worth £1, or 240 pennys, or 20 shillings.

Yes, that’s genuinely the method of money these characters are using. Some old people insist it was easier than the current system.

Here’s some more fun money facts in case they come up later!

A guinea is a pound and a shilling (1.1.0, or 252 pence), and was used to make things seem a little cheaper to wealthy buyers. It’s used from time to time in Victorian books so it’s worth knowing.

The correct way to read out prices is ‘[x] and [y]’, so say you were selling something and wanted a shilling and fivepence for it, you’d ask for “1 and 5”. This is often used for the stereotypical cost of a half a crown, so when someone in a period drama asks for “2 and 6”, what they’re asking for is 2 shillings and sixpence.

There is a fairly obscure coin that I’m not sure was in circulation at this time which was nicknamed ‘The Barmaid’s grief’, it was only used for a few years. This was worth 4 shillings and was the same shape and (very nearly) size as a crown (5 shillings). So people would buy a pint of beer, the barmaid would pick up the coin in a hurry and not realise that it wasn’t a crown, and give 4 shillings back along with change from a shilling for the beer. So people made money from buying beer. It was not a good time to be a barmaid.

[ink-the-artist]

forgive me if you've been asked this before or if its annoying, but how did you learn to use colored pencils like that? your art is so special to me.

ty :) I took an art class for a few years where our teacher had us buy prismacolor pencils as one of the art supplies and had us use them kinda like paints, pressing down hard right away and blending the colors together. its not how youre supposed to use them she was just trying to teach us to use color and ig this was more to the point. I picked them up again years after i stopped going to that class just bc they were there and i wanted to play around w them a bit and ended up actually enjoying it when doing it on my own terms lol

[midnightclover]

Summon Night: Swordcraft Story (ATLUS, 2003)

[rainbowinbeigeboots]

do you ever just cry while thinking about how tender creature is with lisa or are you normal?

[ne-spivay-ranenko]

every so often i get an idea and then obsessively work on it for hours and hours and sometimes it turns out good.

anyway the other day @follivora made a post with joker out as mucha art and that sparked this:

[sergle]

have you ever thought about making a cicadas skirt?

LITERALLY THAT IS SOMETHING I'VE BEEN THINKING ABT!!!!!

[theimpossiblescheme]

Staging concept: Ophelia carries around a book that she uses to press different flowers and plants. At one point we see her actually pressing one of the flowers Hamlet's given her before, and we get the impression that she wouldn't part with this book for the world. During the "Get thee to a nunnery" scene, Hamlet rips the book out of her hands, and she goes diving after it to make sure he didn't damage it. And during her final "mad scene", she starts tearing out the relevant pages (rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines, etc.) to give to everyone present. Laertes is the only one to get the significance of his sister giving away parts of her prized possession, and it adds an extra layer to his grief.

[bobbinalong]

all the fake impulse covers i've done so far