#ive had the sketch for this for like 8 months

[falmerbrook]

@tes-summer-fest Day 2: Ritual

Every year, the Tribunal has to make the journey to Red Mountain to perform a ritual to recharge their powers batteries.

[cherry-shipping]

HAD A DREAM ABT SANS!!!!!!!! i dreamt that i did something i thoughtd make him happy (i think clean his room?) but he ended up getting really upset with me. then he felt bad about getting mad at me and apologized ^_^

[drawnfamiliarfaces]

How much time do you usually spend on drawing 1 piece of art/page of a comic book?

Well, it really depends on my energy levels and motivation, but on average I would say 1 piece takes me about uuuuh 5-8 hours give or take? I can finish a simple one (maybe even two) in a day, if conditions are perfect. xD But more often than not I waffle about, so it takes about 1-3 days. On bad days it takes a week or more to finish anything. ;(

With comics its a little bit harder to calculate, since I've never done them before! All comics Ive done last year were done in batches, and not page by page like a normal person lol. Initial sketching took a long time (I try to rough draft the whole thing in advance, so to see how the pacing of the comic is, before actually starting it, so sometimes they were chilling in my files for months), but when its done I spend like 2-3 days doing proper draft of 'Parts' (7-9 pages), 2-3 days for lineart, 2-3 days for colors and etc.

I know its a bit of a weird system, but it helps me to sort of keep in the same mindset and keep some sort of consistency when I do all pages in stages like that. Especially when it comes to backgrounds and shading! I just open all pages and color them one by one in one/two sitting, while the images of how i want them to look are fresh on my mind.

If I have a ready to go draft/sketch, time and motivation, I can do 7-9 pages in a week-ish time. That's basically what I did in October with Torn Pages Parts 2-4 and December when I went insane and speed-drew HoM Act 1 Parts 2-6 in a month. It was like uh 35 pages in total, + a couple of Extra art in between. (Wow, ye, December was a fruitful month for me haha). But that was possible because I had rough drafts ready for months. Literally, 3 months, since I initially drafted it and drew part 1 in September.

So. uh as you can see its a bit hard to calculate for one page haha

[statueofeden]

Eras of L4D2!CATS Art (and Nellis Cats)

(CW: badly drawn blood, gore (its a zombie game haha), mental health briefly mentioned (minimal!).

Hello, I'm Eden. (They/them) I'm 22 years old and been playing L4D2 since it came out for xbox 360 in 2009 (I was 8 - going on 9). I started shipping Nellis when I was about 11. It was in fact my first ship ever.

I decided to make this lil thing because i've seen some interest in my recent post with my Nellis!cats :P.

In 2013, I hated my human art so I decided to design and make as cats so I could draw them easier. I use to use drawcast on my ipod touch.

I would finally get a more stable style and made more of my fav ship.

Later on that year, my mom gave me her old laptop and I got heavily into animation memes and computer digital art.

my first computer drawing:

My first animation:

I was hooked. A few months later, Little kid me decided to play around with an AU.

Heres more info about the AU before we move on:

(AU animation Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLsesYjlm_htaAxclwRcBg6uhhjtQEN3OY )

I dropped my first banger of the AU on Dec 14, 2013.

2014-2015:

I was obsessed with drawing Nick and Ellis as cats still. I had made many animations and drawings of them.

Before I was diagnose with BPD, I had an episode and created this gem it like to mention :

I had also dropped this banger way before that (important later, I promise)

I ended the year off with a remake of an old Nellis drawing I made in 2013.

^(2015)

^(2013)

2016 - 2017:

At the end of 2015, I got a graphics tablet for Christmas. Legit my second drawing was Ellis!cat.

Sadly in 2016-2017 I was going through alot and also developed a new hyperfixation on fallout 4. I kinda forgot about l4d2 otherthan a few mentions of it here and there. Honorable mentions of art:

2018-2019:

I was going through alot during this time in my life.

I would redesign my most of l4d2!cats completely. I highly preferred natural colors over the other designs.

L4D2!Cats:

L4D!cats:

Honorable mentions of animations:

2019 - now:

Im still making l4d2!cats content. I adore them still and still plan on drawing them until I cant draw no more.

2021 art:

2022 art:

2023 art:

Remember when I told you to keep the "get out alive" video in your mind. Well, Ive very recently have sketched out a remake of it. (Come see the improvement!)

^(2015)

^(2023)

Welp, I think that's all! I hope you've enjoyed this post! Any questions, feel free to ask! I may or may not have answers.

Some of you may know me, some of you may not. Either way, thanks for reading and sharing the love for left 4 dead with me! I hope to share more soon! <3

[ryemackerel]

HALLO i was wondering how you get out of art block?? your art is very expressive and i absolutely adore all your colour choices and designs. ive been having trouble with art block for a very long time now so i’m just trying to ask other artists how they get outta it <3 i hope u have a niceday yesyes

OUGHH HELLO!!! holy crap, art block is the WORST. everytime i encounter it, its always hard to beat it D: theres days where i feel like i WANT to draw something so badly but my brain just. cant function

i dont have a definitive solution for art block, but whenever i do, i have a few ways to cope with it. sometimes they work, sometimes they dont? but whenever the time comes and im just sitting at a brick wall, i got some survival tips

1. come up with random silly ideas,, it could be anything: random words, phrases, scenarios. they can be as nonsensical as you want them to be. during art blocks, my mind is completely dry with ideas, so i always try to compile a list of ideas from the past so i can come back to them later on. i try to come up with random duos or something as simple as “mcdonalds date”. i might not work on these now, but maybe some random lil word can spark that creativity in me

heres my art ideas list… i have some ideas that are like 8 months old in there BGAHSGA, but i save em there till i feel like working on them

2. STRUGGLE DOODLES!! i like to make a bunch of doodles of random scenes that i think about in my head. doodle practically anything. your favorite person, favorite animal, something you see outside your window, frogs?

heres a few of mine. most of the time, i NEVER get to finishing them. however, during art blocks sometimes i like to go back to really old, incomplete guidelines and add some new, random addition to it. sometimes i forget what my sketches were exactly meant to be? and i guess thats the fun about interpreting stuff and giving things a new spin to them. during art blocks, i HATE trying to come up with new drawings from a blank canvas (since i dont even have any ideas to begin with). but working on old wips, or completely revising them? sometimes these can be super fun :]

[and bonus tip!! and this is like, a golden tip that everyone loves: going back to super old drawings and redrawing them!! its my favorite. i absolutely love seeing the improvement ive made over the years. its also pretty easy to work with since you dont have to stress about coming up with completely new ideas from a blank slate! GAHH i should do that more often.]

3. search up your favorite fanart, go on pinterest, anything. i love this one.

search up some really cool photos of outfits, aesthetic backgrounds?? i find myself searching up a lot of fanart of fandoms im in, any word with “aesthetic” at the end, casino aesthetic, anything! pinterest has always been my go-to platform to find ideas. i go on the app and not even a second in, im blown with all of this cool art n character designs. i have a problem saving almost everything i find into my boards, but at least i saved a chock-full of ideas i can work with. :)

a thing about me: ive never been the type to try and force my art block out. whenever im facing a block, its extremely difficult for me to come up with things on my own. sometimes i let it wait for a while, but that tends to take a REALLY long time. D: if i dont feel like drawing, or doodling, or really doing anything? i always like scrolling through really pretty photos. that tends to spark a small idea in me i can work with, and sometimes i manage to get out of art block from there. it starts out small, then over time it gets even better.

these photos especially gave me WAY more motivation than i ever had to draw wilbur during an art block moment. i started off making small random doodles of him in a neon city and over time it kinda turned into a fixation for neon cities. i LOVE imagining characters in random photos i find on pinterest.

wishing you the bestest in your art journey!! this crap’s tough but i know you can break it yo. thank you so much for the ask!

feel free to reblog and add your own ideas below :] i was only able to come up with a few, but if youd like to add on, go right ahead! /noforce

[companionsofusall]

I appreciate you adding img description to my sketch with kaylin and Markus, I'm still kinda new to doing that myself but I wanna get more used to doing it!!

Also thank u for being a coe fan in general coz I am desperate to see what other fans think of it, i only know 2 other ppl who even know what it is plus my spouse but they arent caught up so I'm frothing with lovw for this series hhgdghs I literally finished cast in atonement a few days ago and am now devastated that I've run out of coe books lol

Aw yeah no problem!!! I LOVED your markus design!!! Ive never been great at animals and i love the expression you put on his face!!!!

Dude I KNOW i need to do another reread of the series!!!! I didnt realize how much i had forgotten- i have like the first 8-9 books down pat but the more recent stuff is more hazy- i definitely shouldve reread eternity before atonement LMAO.

And thank YOU for being a fan!!!! The fanart is so limited 😭it was so nice to go in the tag and see so much art!!! ive done a couple small things- one of my long term art projects is to rebind the books and make my own covers for the series. I’ve never been drawn to the covers - they dont match whats in my head LMAO. I dont have it with me at the moment but if i remember next month ill post a picture of the cover! I still need to do the back but i waver between a city of elantra picture (not good at city landscapes) or a scene from the book!

Do you have a favorite book? Ive always loved cast in chaos myself- im a little sappy but i really liked the devourer/the maker and i thought the moment with severn was amazing and UGH. Also cast in oblivion!!! The high halls!! The cohort!! Terrano/sedarias!!!! Amazing!!!

[moonylilies]

2023 Art Summary!!

so here's a single piece from each month i did!! i really wish i did more art this year, so hopefully (and most likely) next year i will!!

below under the cut are links to the ones i managed to post along with my art goals and some thoughts for the next year

thank you so much for those who have been following me this year and i hope we can continue to grow doing what we desire in the next year :3

yall can skip reading this if you just wanna go see the links; most of you probably know i went back to college in january, which unfortunately caused me to gain major art block (ew) when my depression creeped up. i also had like no time this semester with the large ammt of courses i took (i took 6 classes and it killed me with the course load since most of them were online. never again i will be making that mistake). when i go back to classes in january, i hopefully will not be as dying as i was this semester since i am taking a majority art course load. im even taking a printmaking class which means yall will be gettin some goodies posted hopefully

my art goal for next year besides getting more commissions lol (which if you are interested can see about here) is to be able to draw full bodies - i still can't and ive been drawing humans as my main thing for at least 6 years now. i will def be practicing next year by doing many figure studies lol. i also hope i can manage to figure out how to do backgrounds besides the basic ones i tend to do i also hope that with my shop i can break some of my records like getting new states i haven't shipped to yet so that my state ammt goes up from 8 to maybe 10, having my total ammt going up to around 50 sales from 35, getting more fans for my art who love the stickers and prints i am making, ect ect i wasn't able to this year. while i am on winter break, i am trying to set up a shop update for before classes start again which i will be updating on here about when i remember to do so (honestly the hardest thing for me while having an art acct to promote my art and shop is making content besides just posting my art online and hoping people like it)

links for art + what the ones that don't have links are lol: january: lunar new year rabbits feburary: ft ferris bueller's day off au (this one is the one i am the most proud of) march: lucy redesign april: team shadowgear hehehe (this one's my favourite i did this year) may: yuki got hit by a car june: sketch of my oc alyss july: levy for part of my colour wheel challenge that is still a wip (tiktok one two ; reels one two) august: wally ice cream (aka a future sticker) september: art of my oc adora october: the sun tarot card feat sting eucliffe (wip portion is linked) november: bisca icon december: ramen sticker (a sticker soon to drop in my shop once i do a shop update soon)

[somer-writes]

Hi there! I didn't know you had a tumblr. I've been reading most of your lu fics for the last couple of months. Love how you write Twilight and Warriors. They're such brothers the way you write them. I genuinely don't know how you write so much in such a short amount of time, but I've been enjoying it!

Thank you for reading!! it brings me so much joy to share my work <3 i love writing them so so much XD i really thought when i first started writing lu fic that i would focus on twi & wild or twi & time a lot more but twi & warriors have stolen my heart

the tumblr is new as i am a Dedicated Lurker so bare with me as i figure out this god forsaken website beyond likes/reblogs.

i have a bad habit of hobby fixating XD so this has been nearly all my free time outside of Responsibilities bc im having so much fun with it! seeing lovely people like you in the fandom and having people interact with my work is just *chefs kiss*. i am a glutton for praise <3

ive been writing creatively since i was 8 or so and over time have gotten into the habit of editing myself in real time. i call it the Fucking Send It philosophy (usually) bc I know if it hesitate that i'll never be content with my work

i also save time by refusing to plot/outline anything :D i do not recommend this as i am usually along for the ride as much as the reader or working off a vague mental sketch

ty so much for the ask bestie!! made my day <3

[avtracker]

friday, march 29, 2024

woke up at 9:30 am

shower at 9:45

i have work at 12, so im leaving around 11

10:08 in starting to get dressed and i’m thinking about what i want to do with my life, what i wanna create. i have a couple ideas (and one is in progress!) but all i know for sure is i feel like im born to be some kind of entertainer, in one way or another. thinking about the people i look (or looked) up to and recognizing that they’re like digital renaissance men; music, comedy, sketches, even podcasts or talk shows. i feel like i have a lot to say, but idk how to start or what to start with, which sounds weird to say but it’s how i feel. i should probably finish getting dressed now, i have work today.

i skipped class once again—it started at 10:10, lol. just no energy with the whole “school thing” ig. c’est la vie

(i just don’t like traditional school or traditional jobs; i wanna do something new and exciting and unique. i want to MAKE something of myself)

10:32 i just cleaned the kitchen and took out the trash. turns out the dish soap dispenser got knocked over and spilled all over the counter so i cleaned that. currently running the dishwasher and the dryer, too. there’s still some dishes in/next to the sink, so i hope my dad isn’t too upset. it’s just a couple cutting boards and knives (from all the cheese i’ve been eating) and a pan i haven’t washed yet lol

5:47p just got on discord with em, summarizing work rn: i felt very faint and almost passed out many times, due to not eating and only consuming a monster in the morning. but i had a lemon loaf and then got Cookout with my tip money otw home. chicken strips there are D-tier on god. i listened to Ride’s new album 2x already, going for listen #3 while we play civ v lol. it’s awesome

8:25p played some civ v with em and liam. i’m actually kinda sweating (from fear). liam’s trad/lib strat is going surprisingly well and im afraid he’ll nuke me lol. i think em has been playing strong too, overall im p worried. i did war liam briefly (didn’t kill anything) bc he converted Wittenberg to taoism (the fuck 😡 /j), so i hope he doesn’t harbor any resentment in this game. victory isn’t quite as close as id have hoped and there’s a lot of opposition (em and liam are genuinely good and capable players). i feel way better now that ive eaten; i have to remember to make breakfast tomorrow morning!!!

i have work tomorrow morning (9am). i’m gonna try to go to bed at a reasonable time (10p).

overall today has felt kinda good, apart from almost blacking out a bunch due to no food (lol). i didn’t feel very much sadness, just stress/dread about classes that i’m avoiding (which ik makes things worse but i can’t help it 😭). i’ll see my dad after work tomorrow so that’ll be refreshing; it’s been 2.5 weeks since he went abroad. having good food will be nice too, since he cooks at lot and i don’t cook well (cooking is stressful! i do like baking tho :D) i think i’m gonna try to track what i eat, too, in the new month

tomorrow i’m probably gonna play some terraria after spending time with my dad and then i want to work on some projects: my semi-secret infomercial-based project and maybe some music. i wanna finish the demo for this song about justin, and im gonna go visit my friend sam this summer and hopefully record a split with him and he’s gonna help me with the instrumentals for this song. i’ve been thinking about justin a lot,,, i miss him, or at least who he used to be. it sucks having a friend that totally betrays you and everything you are, yk? oh well, ig. cest la vie lol

i’d also like to do some reading this year. i wanna read Scythe (Neil Shusterman), Interesting Facts About Space (Emily Austin) i’ve been really wanting to read, as well as the classic Fallout: Equestria (Kkat)

- 8:40pm

[bigben-810]

every fucking time i get into something new and it later becomes a hyperfixation , i get a art block . no matter how much i want to draw the characters from the media im into i cant just . pour out an art piece , putting all my dedication and love for this new found interest that will alter and change me forever , giving me a long lasting impact that ill most likely never forget . even a quick sketch of one of my favourites would make me so happy , why xant i jsut do it then ? i cant just keep consuming others media and the offical media forever , so I have to make my own to feed and gnaw off on . this is going to be the next thing that im going to be ONLY thinking about for the next months . all videos / songs related will play endlessly on loop as loud as possible , but not enough to the point I get annoyed . little scenarios of the characters included will play on a little mental projector 25 / 8 . everything will become a reference to it , and will be related to it aswell , even if its extremely farfetched and strange . i will shut about it , and itll be my main topic when it comes to conversinf with others , and if it isnt , then ill zone and tune out , even if i dont want to . my main focus is only that , so why can draw it kn thd beginning ?! i need to let my feelings out , but unfortunately due to fears that pressure me into a corner . what if i mischaracterize ? what if it doesnt look like / similar to canon ? what if it doesnr look likd their most common fanon portrayal / how most other fanartist draw them ? what if it doesnt meet how I see thdm in my head ? and a fuckton more . i already burn myself out before ive even created the drawing , why am i likd this ?!?! i just need to put my index finger onto that cracked 4 year old screen , or my stolen mechanical pencil from afew months onto that cheap , 2 year old paper , turn my eyes and most of my brain onto autopilot , leaving only the creative parts and the side thats producing all my thoughts revolving arounf my fixation , and let my brain guide my finger , not letting my eyes fully comprehend what in the fucking world im even creating .

but i cant because i already had an art block in my last hyperfixation : """""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""""" )

[sumbreon]

just going over this whole past year, you know how it is

self harm and family death below so that gives you an idea of how its gone i guess

so january started on a nice high, i felt better than i had in a long time and then one week into january it took a complete nosedive to the lowest id felt in years. like i went from starting to talk and managing to push myself to do some stuff i wanted to/would be good for me to wanting to self harm for the first time in seven years. i was sat at work completely dissociated and got jolted out of it by an extremely vivid image of blood pouring out of my arm.

it was a double edged sword because it pushed me to finally reduce my hours at work which i really needed but like it meant i was doing real bad which really fucking sucked with how id been doing the past month. it was agreed with my boss that id start my reduced hours in april so we wouldnt have to mess around with annual leave calculation bullshit and just knowing it was coming helped but i was definitely pretty out of it for those months.

march rolls around, i have a week and a half booked off. im gonna decide on some things i want to do with my extra time after i recover mentally and then my grandmother is in hospital with some dark spot on her bladder and the care home she was in cant look after her anymore and she may have contracted covid in the hospital but its fine she didnt then michael tells me theres gonna be a band 4 coming up in pathology IT but i cant process that right now but its there in the back of my mind constantly then she gets bounced around a few care homes then shes back in hospital then it settles and shes in a care home 5 minutes away from our house but i still havent seen her in like a year and a half at this point and im wracked with guilt because what do i remember about her really? not much it feels like, i worry if shed even recognise me, what would i even say to her? but it doesnt matter because visitors are still limited and id rather my mum and aunties see her cause theyd get more out of it

then its april and my mum just snaps under her own job, i have this extra time at home but i gotta walk on eggshells cause march happened and now this and i have no idea how shes doing mentally because this family is so emotionally repressed so i just hide in my room, basically feeling kinda catatonic and just straight up lying at work like 'yeah its great!'

then may comes around and i do actually start to recover. the band 4 jobs still in the background of my mind but nothing mores been said about it but i cant not think about it. the time goes by so much faster than you think it would but i start drawing again. small canvas size just sketches nothing fancy at all just a minimum something once a week no pressure its okay

june is much the same, the plan had been recover mentally then start applying for jobs elsewhere but then the band 4 was there looming so the plan became wait and see what comes of that, i dont manage to get back to where i was at this time last year but i do my best to not hold it against myself, im getting better thats what matters

july. the band 4 goes up its all thats in my brain. i want to recind my application so i can stop worrying about it. i get the job its full time and day time hours as opposed to the 12-8 ive been doing for years but its too good an opportunity for me to pass up. its means i can get on paper IT experience

august comes around and im due to start my new job on the 8th. its the 7th i go downstairs see my mum and ask her how its going. my grandmother is dead. i start my new job and i say nothing about that, its a struggle though i dont show it im shown a few things but theyre done quickly and easy to stay on top of, i only know one person in this room, my desk is the first one you see when you come into the room so im on edge every time the door opens, i dont want to be doing this right now but sitting at home wont do me any good either so i bear it silently, the funeral is the 26th, i only mention this to my new boss because i need the day off, theres a moment of pity that i cant really deal with. i hate being pitied i know people mean well by it but it makes me bristle. its the 26th my mum starts crying as we get to the crematorium shes gripping my hand tightly and i wont let her go either, i sit there and feel the guilt about not remembering but then my great uncle starts to read her eulogy and its like 'oh. there you are. i do remember you. i remember so much of you' and then im crying too

september and october i mostly just continue to adjust to how things are, this new normal, the new job is good, my new boss is kind, i want to cry

november, the birthday month, the start of self reflection. what do i want out of life, how can i get it, who do i want to be. i never really know, i remind myself that this year has been a struggle and i do my best to be kind to myself, its birthday week and ive kept up the weekly sketching for 6 months now, i only missed one week and i dont feel bad about it. a band 5 has gone up in pathology IT, explicitly for me

its december and its come around so fucking fast, its over already. i get the band 5 we have a nice christmas. i survive. this year had such extreme highs and lows and i honestly have no idea how to like rank this year

i have come to the unfortunate conclusion that working in pathology IT will be temporary, my boss is set to retire july this year, working full time takes too much out of me so i dont have the energy to do things that i want, i miss my hours of 12-8. the plan was always stick it out for a year and see where im at but the hope was that id stay. maybe im not done adjusting but thats for the eden of june to decide.

thank you for reading i love you i hope things go well for you be kind to yourself - eden :] <3

[two-calicos-in-a-trenchcoat]

I may have never been able to figure out how to use calligraphy pens or markers

But fuck if im gonna let that stop me from using calligraphy fonts

Who needs calligraphy pens when you got a pencil and some microns

[tsubasaclones]

coming up with a caption is almost as hard as making the drawing itself

[antiloreolympus]

10 Anti LO Asks

1. I kinda hate how Hades has only had 2 relationships before Persephone and one being his brother’s brother and the other being toxic on both ends. I sorta wish Leuce was in there as like an ex with no drama like the two just didnt work out or something chill (break ups are hard but there’s less dramatic break ups). Idk I just feel like a little internal conflict like that would have some spice to the story but also make me root for the couple a bit more.

Going deeper into it, as a reader we know Minthe as his evil gf whose never gonna work out and Hera and Hades are toxic secret affair, but what if Hades did have a functional relationship with someone who wasn’t toxic but they didn’t work out and she didn’t want to stay in the underworld/be queen. I just feel like that would add a complex layer to the story, not making it all black and white.

With Persephone having more dating experience it’s kinda hard because everyone wants her BUT they aren’t allowed to date her to keep her pure/her mother would kill them/TOGEM. But if RS ever wrote more Persphone and Hermes I’d just want them together like forget hades. 

2. Ive seen some LO fans say "NOW the actual myth will begin" and it's like??? Wasn't that already done in the first three episodes? Why would you RESTART IT? More so, it is objectively awful writing to publish nearly every week for FOUR YEARS to actually get to the main point of the story, which even then will probably take month at best to even start. This is just such a train-wreck in terms of planning, writing, development, and even basic story creation yet the fan will insist it's genius!

3. What I find so aggravating about LO and its fans is they are convinced it's the most unique, groundbreaking work ever, when it's anything but that. Modern settings, Technicolor skintones, "humanizing" the gods, etc have all been a Thing for decades, sometimes even centuries before LO even existed. Even the idea it "deals with heavy topics' is false since the original myths already did so and didn't treat it as haphazardly like Rachel does. They want it to be anything but what it really is.

4. I see so many of the fans excuse Rachel making it just modern NYC as "it's a fictional world so she can do what she wants"  begs the question: do they think Ancient Greece is a fantasy land that never existed? It very much did, and had cultural and social differences from modern day. Even modern Greece is different from America. She does't even try to keep any of it intact despite it being set in that exact time and place. At some point we have to admit the "Greek" part is lip service at best.

5. the "anti" community for LO is overwhelmingly queer, BIPOC women and NBs who used to like the series who where in turn forced out of the fandom because of the almost entirely cishet, white fanbase who refused to even court the idea of differing opinions. The idea all of us marginalized people are "oppressing" a privileged white woman and her entitled fanbase because we critique how she' butchered countless real issue and a real country's stories for her white "feminism" fantasy is laughable.

6. i do not get why all the new book covers we're getting for lo are so boring?? like at least the first normal cover was visually grabbing (even if just lie about what the comic is actually about and has some questionable symbolism in it) but the newer ones are so boring. they don't even have backgrounds now and the logo is so randomly placed and I don't get why. they have book cover artists on staff surely they could help her do it? or work off her sketches and make something better?

7. rachel retweeting a single old picture from cyprus: see! i can about greece! anyway let's ignore that while I retweet 20 pictures in a row about how eris is literally an apple and how hades just needs so many babies RIGHT NOW.

8. rachel spends more time posting about her nails on twitter than even bothering to retweet even one post from her co-workers to give them a needed promo to her massive audience. it's just off putting to me how every other webtoons creators minus her, mongie, and snailords will do anything to support and promo each other while they refuse to do the bare minimum even as the webtoon company bends over backwards to make sure they get them everything they want while ignoring the rest.

9. Even ignoring the issues Rachel added into the story for her own weird reasons, how naive are her and her fans to think whitewashing and romanticizing perhaps the most infamous of all Greek myths into an idealized romance aimed towards pre-teens at the youngest wouldn't come with built in criticism? Like there's a reason the myth is so hotly debated, and it's not because of "misogyny", it's because of how misogyny is used to demonize a mother for the sake of a romanticizing a male abuser..

10. I love how LO fans say "hera only cheated with one person! so that's different from zeus's many affairs!" like no it's not lmao. a person who killed one person and serial killer both get life in prison regardless of how many victims they have. rachel also seems to be implying hera is having an emotional affair with echo which by her own in comic logic is just as bad as a physical affair, so wouldn't that be at least two people? regardless two wrongs do not make a right, hera is also bad here.

[d-criss-news]

The Glee star and Emmy winner for The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story, Darren Criss, 34, will be releasing his first album of Christmas songs, titled A Very Darren Crissmas (October 8). It includes duets with Adam Lambert, Evan Rachel Wood and an original song, “Drunk on Christmas,” featuring Lainey Wilson.

What was your goal with this Christmas album?

To reintroduce familiar songs in a new way. But I also wanted to take lesser-known songs and make those feel more familiar. And, most importantly, I wanted to take songs that people don’t associate with Christmas but I do—like Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”—and try to make them feel like Christmas songs.

What inspired you to write “Drunk on Christmas”?

It’s about the end of Christmas when everything’s been done. There’s wrapping on the floor, you’ve cleaned things, the in-laws have left and there’s nothing else to do. It’s two people having a sit-on-the couch moment, sipping a glass of cocoa with some SoCo [Southern Comfort] in it.

What is it about Christmas music? Why did you want to do the Christmas album?

Christmas or the holiday season is something that, whether we like it or not, we experience every year, and that comes with a litany of wonderful songs and music that again, whether you have been proactive about listening to it or not, it’s pretty hard to avoid. It’s permeated our cultural consciousness for our entire lives. So if you happen to be someone like me who consumes music at a hyperactive level, I’ve always adored Christmas music.

People say this because of the way that it makes them feel and the things that it reminds them of. There are so many layers to why people enjoy Christmas music. It’s nostalgic, it is very romantic, at least in the true dictionary meaning of the word romantic. And to me, I’ve always loved it for a much more anthropological reason, which is for one month or several weeks out of the year we suddenly subscribe to a certain sentiment that the other 11 we don’t really dial into. We want it all, then we want it to just go away.

What makes Christmas songs different?

As a musician I’ve always loved that Christmas music can employ certain musical elements that otherwise aren’t very popular. To me, it’s incredible that without a doubt the estates of many artists are guaranteed placement on the radio even though many of them have been deceased for many years. The pop charts are dominated by whatever contemporary, awesome artists there are nowadays, but in December you can guarantee that Burl Ives and Dean Martin will be on the radio with the best of them. I find that so charming. It’s because people really, really love this music.

And those songs don’t sound like the sounds that we’re hearing on the radio, sonically, harmonically, rhythmically. They employ a lot of “classic” sounds that evoke the feeling of Christmas. I’m a self-proclaimed genrephile—this is a term I use for myself throughout all the stuff that I do. I can’t help but be so enchanted by this idea that artists have license, and by license I mean an excuse to do things that you ordinarily wouldn’t be encouraged to do, or that audiences wouldn’t necessarily be as quick to absorb.

So, when you’re talking about classic Christmas writing, for lack of a better word, you use clichéd Christmas terminology, you use certain chords, and harmonies, and instrumentations that you just wouldn’t do throughout the year. It leans on the slightly more sophisticated, slightly more musical, and that is really exciting for someone like me.

How much does the fact that your last name is Criss play into this?

If you play music and your last name is Criss, every year someone says, “You know what you should do?” as if they’re the first person who’s ever thought of this idea. So I’ve always wanted to do this; it was just a matter of time. And I also didn’t want it to be phoned in, I didn’t want it to seem like, “Oh, here’s some songs that you know already.”

I wrote this in my liner notes that my favorite thing to do with art, but particularly music, is curate, interpolate, create and personalize. That’s my main thing. I’m an OK singer, I’m an OK musician, but what I really think I have a yen for is trying to interpolate something new that people didn’t know before.

If you think about a song like “Jingle Bells,” it was not written for Christmas. It was a song from 200-something years ago that bears no mention of Christmas whatsoever, but we associate it so heavily with Christmas. Lately I hear Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” come up on Christmas playlists. I think it must have something to do with the Christian angle of the song and the reverence of the word “hallelujah,” but there’s no mention of Christmas.

So there’s a lot of different things that can make people feel like Christmas if you arrange it a certain way, and that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted this cocktail of songs that people didn’t know and I might be able to introduce to them in a really new, interesting way.

You duet with Adam Lambert, Evan Rachel Wood and Lainey Wilson. These people couldn’t be more different. How did you select your song partners for this?

Honestly, people are busy, so I leaned on friends of mine. The album is called A Very Darren Crissmas, and I wanted to make it just that. Songs that are very, very me, doing things that are very me, and using the talents of people who are legitimately in my life. Adam has been a pal for a long time. We’ve known each other from just adventures in Hollywood, but he, of course, was on Glee with me. Evan Rachel is a dear pal of mine; we’ve done some things together. She’s played my festival, and I’ve done comedy sketches with her and stuff. These are all extraordinarily talented singers. As I told them when I asked them to be a part of it, “I’d be very lucky to have you on this record.”

I had not met Lainey Wilson before I started this. But when you’re in Nashville, you are in the Olympic tent of USDA certified prime country singers. And that’s a bit of a blind spot for me as far as who’s on the up and up, who’s somebody that can really give a level of authenticity, legitimacy to a more classic ’50s Nashville sound, which is the song that I wrote called “Drunk on Christmas.” My producer Ron Fair, who has been living in Nashville for a while, suggested Lainey and we got on like a house on fire. She’s an extraordinary talent and I was happy to have her. These were all people that were part of this grassroots friend to friend thing. That’s how I got them and I’m very lucky that they’re on the record.

There are hundreds of Christmas songs. How did you choose what to include?

Choosing was extremely hard. I had a list of about 100 songs. I’m not done; this record is only phase one in my mind. There are so many songs that it will make your head spin. If you go, “Did you think about this song?” The answer is yes, and I absolutely had to deliberate which ones I had to triage out of the sequence.

I even said no to “The Christmas Song,” which is on the album. I didn’t want to do it because I was like, “Everybody knows it; it’s perfect by Nat King Cole,” and Mel Tormé [who wrote it] is one of my favorite artists of all time, much less songwriters and musicians. So I was like, “I don’t want to have to do that.” And on the day when we were there, we just had a guitar and said, “Let’s just do it for fun,” because I love singing that song. But I was like, “It’s been done perfectly too many times, I really don’t want to have to put myself up against that.” But we had a nice take, it’s live in the room. And hey, come on, it’s Christmas. So I left it on there.

If we were to come to your house during the holidays, what would you be listening to?

I’d probably sit you down and play you my favorite songs that you’ve never heard that I think are great Christmas songs. But what’s nice is I’ve now put those songs on this album, hopefully, in a perhaps delusional effort to standardize these songs in the Christmas pantheon. There has to be an air of delusion to being an artist in the first place. If one of these songs that no one’s ever heard before catches on with a family or a person and becomes part of their Christmas playlist every year, then I will have succeeded in my efforts.

What did the Emmy you won for The Assassination of Gianni Versace do for your career?

Although the Emmy has just my name on it, the number one thing that I’m most proud of is it’s more symbolic and representative of the work of the whole team. It is a validation and celebration of the really hard work of people that I spent a lot of time and energy with creating this role.

You have a couple voice roles coming up—in Trese and Yasuke—but what are we going to see you in next, not just hear you?

I don’t know. Let me know if there’s any opportunities. A huge reason for why this album was made was because I had the time. Making records takes a lot of time, and I’m envious of people who are just singers. I don’t know how people do that, that’s just not who I am. I’m a producer, I’m a writer, I’m a musician. It takes so much out of me to make a body of music because someone doesn’t say, “OK, here are the songs, show up on a Tuesday, you sing it and then you leave.” Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Some of my favorite artists can do that and are blessed enough to be able to just do that. I can’t.

It takes so much time for me to really get in the weeds, arrange, edit vocals, edit instrumentation, mix tracks, really getting in the jungle of music production. I can’t function any other way and that takes an extraordinary amount of time. Even when there was a global pandemic, I still had deadlines that we could barely make to finish this album because that’s just how my brain works.

So I haven’t been able to act. I haven’t had an acting job in almost two years. That’s not entirely true. I’ve had little bit things during the pandemic, but no big series or films or anything like that. It’s just been mostly working from home and being as proactive as I can be. I started a weekly podcast with a friend of mine, I put out an EP. I’ve been extremely busy with high output and low visibility. I’m waiting for the next thing, but I’m not one to sit still. If you give me time, I’m going to fill all the spaces out. So I did that with music this past two years.

Are you going to go back to Broadway now that it’s opening again?

I don’t want to say anything that is not perhaps confirmed 100 percent, but I will say with full confidence that I have always had the intention of going back exactly where we started. I’ll let them announce what’s happening because every show is in its own unique holding pattern. But, yes, right before the shutdown I was doing American Buffalo in New York, and talk about the actor’s dream, that is right up there. Doing a great American play that I’ve always wanted to do. I’ve had a long history with that show, and I finally get to do it for real with two of my favorite actors—Sam Rockwell and Laurence Fishburne. They are two acting heroes of mine.

So I was in rehearsals for that. We were about to go into tech, and things got shut down. But we’re in a very fortunate position where you’ve got two huge movie stars, you have a very well-known play and you have a fixed set and just three guys. There are musicals that have orchestras, big choruses and huge set pieces, and the overhead and upkeep of these productions is quite complicated. And a lot of them, for that reason, fell by the wayside during the pandemic, and it’s an awful tragedy. But our set and our billboard and our posters are exactly where we left them. It’s kind of a trip. If you go to Circle in the Square, I keep telling people it’s the longest I’ve ever been on Broadway because it’s just sitting there dormant, waiting to be resurrected.

I think all of us are planning on going back. I think the show is scheduled to reopen almost to the day that it was supposed to open in 2020. We’ll see how the schedule ends up, but you have three guys whose heart and soul is the theater. I don’t want to speak for the other two guys, but I’m almost positive that all three of us would rather be doing that play on Broadway than anything else. So when I say I haven’t had an acting gig in two years, it’s been a comfort to know that that was waiting for me on the other end. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we’ll be able to do it. We’ll have to make sure that everything is hunky-dory with theater audiences, et cetera, et cetera, but that’s the idea.

How did Ryan Murphy casting you in Glee change your life?

I said during my Emmy speech that actors are only as good as the moments they get. I used to say actors are only as good as the parts they get. Take that with a huge grain of salt, obviously, it’s not entirely true. But in context of that moment, certainly you can understand what I meant. Acting is a proactive craft, but in many respects it’s a passive career, where you have to hope and wait for a benefactor, a patron, a supporter to say, “OK, all right, kid, you’re up. I think you can do it.”

I think any artist’s life is a constant compromise between knowing what you can do and what you want to do, and having other people, audiences and creative authorities alike, have an idea of what you can do. You have to have that balance of somewhere in the middle, where hopefully you can rise to an occasion that you know you can do, that somebody’s going to give you the opportunity to do. But you’re not in control of that relationship, and so you have to sit and hope and pray that someone is going to give you that moment and that opportunity. That was something that I’m fully indebted to with Ryan.

Because he did say, “All right, kid, you’re up,” and gave me that shot. We talked about the The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story series for years before we did it. I didn’t think he was ever going to do it. By the time we started shooting, he probably mentioned it to me three or four years prior. And I kept asking about it like, “Hey, you still want to do this thing?” I think he was just always obsessed with the fact that I was half Filipino and that I bore a certain resemblance to the guy. Age and everything, it seems pretty spot-on. But he was a man of his word, and he really did end up making it. So I’m incredibly indebted to him and I’ve always been very effusive about that.

Now that you have this modicum of fame, what would you like to use it to accomplish?

For me, there are so many things that I love in this world that I don’t think other people are familiar with. One of the things about having a modicum of a platform is hopefully embracing that to use it as a gateway drug for stuff that people might not be familiar with. I don’t know if they’re going to like it as much as I do, but I’m looking at this track list and there are songs that I guarantee that you don’t know.

These are all things where I go, “OK, I have this moment of people’s attention, hopefully, this is a fun way to have them have eyes on something that I think is deserving of eyes, and not because of me, but because of other people who have made something amazing.” And, hopefully, they have the same proactive curiosity that I had growing up where I look at the liner notes and see who wrote the songs and where they came from. But we’ll see. We’ll see if people have that reaction.

You’ve accomplished so much. What’s the dream going forward?

The dream is to keep doing me, really. I think all you can do is be as true to yourself and try and do as accessible and as valuable work as you can. And, hopefully, in so doing, represent people, giving them visibility and encouragement towards their own place in the cultural conversation.

[fremedon]

Brickclub 3.3.7, “A Bit of Skirt,” and 3.3.8, “Marble Versus Granite”

I feel like I don’t have much to say here that @everyonewasabird hasn’t said in his writeups of these two chapters, so I’m just going to stick a pin in Marius’s internalization of the word ‘ingrate’ and the recurring image of a character turned to stone and write up what else I’ve got, since tomorrow we hit Almost Historic. (And we’re spending the rest of the week, and the next two, on the six chapters of 3.4, “The Friends of the ABC.”

Observations, in no particular order:

--We’re revisiting the notion of destructive curiosity--rapacious curiosity, even, in the way Gillenormand and Aunt Gillenormand pry into Marius’s affairs here. And I’m struck by how well Théodule comes off despite also getting drawn personally into discovering Marius’s secrets: “And no longer acting for someone else but out of personal curiosity, like dogs that hunt on their own account, he started to follow Marius.”

He even gets a dog metaphor! Those are never good! He literally stalks Marius on tip-toe, which is a hilarious image. But, like Fauchelevent, he satisfies his curiosity and doesn’t use what he’s learned--he doesn’t inform on Marius, for money and favor or for scandal-mongering.

--Théodule deals much better than any other member of the Gillenormand family with being proved wrong. He jumps to the same conclusion Gillenormand does--Aunt G feels “her conviction grow irresistably from that word ‘sweetheart’ delivered in almost exactly the same way by great-uncle and great-nephew”--but when he actually sees that Marius’s rendezvous has been with a grave...it weirds him out, a lot, but he does actually take this new information on board and modify his behavior accordingly. Good job, Théodule.

--The narrator is lying, or misdirecting more than he usually he does here: “[Théodule] came to Paris rarely, so rarely that Marius had never seen him. The cousins knew each other only by name.” Marius has never seen Théodule, at least not to put a name to him and remember him, but Théodule recognizes Marius perfectly well.

(I assume that Marius met Théodule years ago, when he was a child and Théodule was a teenager, and remembers Théodule as being a foot taller than him with bad skin and mismatched features. He has never made the connection to the handsome man of middling height who sometimes visits his aunt. And no one’s thought to introduce them, because of course Marius has met Théodule!)

--Marius speaks “stiffly, with eyes downcast.” Like Fantine, he noticeably avoids eye contact when under stress.

--Just before that:

Marius reddened slightly and replied, “It means I’m my father’s son.” Monsieur Gillenormand stopped laughing and said harshly, “I'm your father.”

The contrast between Gillenormand’s insistence on paternity and Valjean’s attempts to disavow his is sure...something.

--Priest imagery alert: “[Marius] was the priest who sees all his holy wafers thrown to the wind, the fakir who sees a passer-by spit on his idol.”

--Fatalité alert: “There are always these little accidents of fate that complicate domestic dramas. As a result, resentments increase although no additional wrongs may have been done.” In this case, Nicolette drops Marius’s locket on the dark staircase, and Marius assumes it’s been destroyed.

--T/V variation alert: Gillenormand, “[l]eft with a vast reserve of fury to expend and not knowing how to vent it,” addresses his daughter as vous for more than three months.

--I am fascinated by the convoluted entry we get into Volume III, the Paris half of the book, and its characters. We’ve taken our time getting into Volumes I and II, but our introduction to the characters was mostly packaged up into pretty discrete chunks: We had one book on the bishop, one on Valjean, a digression of one short chapter, and then followed Fantine as as our viewpoint character for the next three books. In Volume II, we had one book of Waterloo, ending with a glimpse of Thénardier and Pontmercy; then a brief, outside-POV look at Valjean; and then book III sketches Cosette’s world in two quick chapters on Montfermeil and the Thénardiers and stays in her POV until Valjean arrives, whereupon we rejoin him.

In Book III, I’ve been trying to follow what you would actually know of the characters when, on a first reading with no knowledge of the plot, and it’s wild. 

We get most of a book on gamins in general; one chapter of Gavroche’s intro, which is completely at odds with the character we’ll eventually get to know; a mention that the family that kicked him out (of their room in the Gorbeau House) is named Jondrette and that his mother loves his sisters, which is the first and so far the only clue we have to the Jondrettes’ identity; and, as the last two lines of book 1, “The cell next door was occupied by a very poor young man called Monsieur Marius. Let us explain who this Monsieur Marius was.”

...and then we jump into a whole book of eight chapters on Gillenormand. The last few lines of chapter 8 establishes that he has a grandson, still unnamed, and says “We shall return to this child”--which we do only after meeting the Ultra salons, then Georges, and then only toward the end of Georges’s chapter do we learn that his son is the aforementioned Marius. (And it takes all of Book IV, and the introductions of all of the Amis, to get Marius into the Gorbeau House.)

We talked a lot in Book I about the time it took us to properly meet Valjean, and all the outside viewpoints we get before we really get into his head, but compared to Marius’s introduction the book is *really direct* about Valjean. The narrative sneaks up on him as if he’s a cat we’re trying to pill, and I’m not sure why.