#mixed methods

[hey-howsitgoin]

Miscellaneous little patches/mends I did to switch things up while doing my “big” embroidery/mending project.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

The Wizard Cowboy War (Wizboys VS Cowards) continues on.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[sincerelywhistler]

🍷 Monroe Rebane🍷

Seductive Nightclub Owner

He’s a messy eater ;)

You’ve already met Alioth, but his boyfriend surely finds it lovely to meet your acquaintance as well. Maybe too lovely… keep an eye on that one.

PLAYLIST:

PINTEREST BOARD:

[untitled-tmnt-blog]

I was messing around with mod podge yesterday. My brain had this image of @dandylovesturtles's writing as physical art, and I wanted to give it a try!

The text is all taken from Part 1 of the Emotional Support Water Bottles ("room fic") series.

[cosmic-spectre]

what a peculiar drone...

[iwritenarrativesandstuff]

Hi! I just stumbled onto your blog and saw that you do analogies! And I’ve just been dying to talk about this lol,

I’ve always wanted to talk about Dazai and Akutagawa, and how Dazai ignoring him and never actually apologizing to him is actually helping him in some sick way.

think about it this way, Dazai knows that Akutagawa wants his approval, he needs his approval, even if Dazai abused him.

Dazai knows that if he were to give Akutagawa the attention and approval he wants Akutagawa is going to continue to see Dazai as his savior, however if Dazai continues to ignore him and purposely puts the tiger guy(I can’t spell his name 💔) in front of him multiple times akutagawa is going to eventually have character development and growth and eventually he’s going to grow out of Dazai, In a way Dazai is helping him, because of the strong attachment Akutagawa has to Dazai is a weakness, it’s a weakness that has no place in the port mafia. im sure there’s more to back up this claim but still.

or I’m just talking out of my ass and Dazai just uses him for his selfish purposes(most likely)

thank you for listening to my Ted talk 😓

Hi anon! Thank you for inviting me to your Ted talk!

The Dazai and Akutagawa dynamic is one of the more complicated dynamics in BSD, and certainly one of the hardest to discuss. There are a lot of facets that I couldn't possibly cover all in one post, so I'll just address the question you brought up: Is Dazai, in his own twisted way, trying to help Akutagawa?

Well... I think, sort of, yes. But calling it "help" is generous.

BSD has a running theme of abuse narratives that sit on this uncomfortable fence - neither particularly apologetic nor condemning of them, but simply showing the characters' complicated reactions as they are. Personally, it's something I appreciate as a reader. Atsushi's struggle against the ghost of the orphanage director is one of my favourite parts of the story. The director is dead, but Atsushi spent much of the early story acting specifically to prove him wrong - as if to measure his life's worth against the words he'd been assaulted with. He knows the orphanage director was needlessly cruel and does not forgive him, but he also learns the reason why he did it. He hates him, but he's still allowed to have messy feelings of grief for the man who was the closest thing he ever had to a caregiver.

These narratives crop up again and again. The Orphanage Director and Atsushi. Akutagawa and Kyouka. Kouyou and Kyouka. In all of these, the through line is the initial intent: each one of the people who enacted these cruelties intended to help. However, they're limited and blinded by the cruelties they themselves underwent. As such, they do what they think is best without any regard for whether that is actually what the other person needs. The Orphanage Director thought he was toughening Atsushi up to prepare for the outside world. Kouyou thought she could shield Kyouka in the shadows since her experience was that having hope and losing it is worse than having none at all.

Akutagawa tried to help Kyouka too, in his own way, by emulating what he thought Dazai wanted from him - he tried to forcibly fashion her into a weapon, into someone strong, because that's the only way he thought her life could have meaning.

But the Dazai and Akutagawa dynamic, though it bears similarities to many of these, is much more complex. For one, Akutagawa misinterpreted what Dazai wanted from him. He thought if he fashioned himself into a strong enough weapon, he could prove his worth and be acknowledged. But that's not the case. Here's a few passages from Dark Era:

Dazai wasn't trying to make a sharper blade, he was trying to make him more well-rounded - to learn to shield as well as attack. All this for the purpose of making a new Double Black to face off against Fyodor's plans. Note that it is Atsushi with the claws - the weapon - and Akutagawa as the reinforcer and shield in their team ups.

So, is that it? He just wanted a powerful duo?

There's a little more to it. In the Heartless Cur, which describes their first meeting, we have this pivotal moment:

It's the question which runs through the entire series, and it's the question through which our characters all struggle with. What reason is there to live in a cruel world? How best to navigate it?

Dazai at this point doesn't have the faintest clue. It's blind leading the blind. Dazai says he can give him a reason while being unable to deliver in any reasonable way, but I don't think he was necessarily lying - not out of goodwill or anything like that, but because Dazai has always been invested in observing people's convictions to live and the reasons they come to. He's invested in the human struggle.

But at this point in his life, his attempts to warp and control Akutagawa are met with failure, because he does not impart any good reason to Akutagawa why he should value anything. Even though he recognized that a more patient approach like one Odasaku would take might work, he dismisses it for himself because "righteousness doesn't take" to him. Again, we see this ongoing commonality of people doing what they think is best for another while actually acting on their own biased viewpoints, as opposed to really seeing what is best for the person in their charge.

So, while the idea that Dazai wanted to help Akutagawa by putting him in contact with Atsushi is nice... I believe it is and has always been more strategic than anything. Moreover, Dazai has this weird moment of pettiness where he does the exact same thing to Akutagawa by comparing him with Odasaku.

It's not really "help" so much as it is "hey why don't you go interact with this person I know who values life, maybe you'll learn something"... instead of, you know, actually helping him find things to value. And Akutagawa's later interactions with Atsushi are a continuation of his initial plan to create a new powerful partnership - which is a strategic choice first and foremost. But it can't be overlooked that the only way sskk would work well together is if they come to understand each other - and that sort of necessarily involves them both coming to some kind of reason.

So, in carrying on with similar patterns from other dynamics, and in his intent for the duo, I do honestly think that Dazai wants Akutagawa to find his reason. As always, Dazai has multiple explanations for his actions, and honestly, I do think one such explanation is that Atsushi and Akutagawa would be able to help each other. I don't know that I would call this Dazai "helping", per se, but it is a form of investment.

[quirkle2]

space/saturn imagery ritsu i love you

[theinfinitedivides]

it's so much fun to me to see how Jacob and Assad approach their respective character playlists bc you've got Jacob literally using the 'copy to new playlist' option from his private library (and ik bc that's the only way all of those songs from all those artists will be added at the exact same time. for cohesiveness) slapping an image on that bad boy and releasing it into the world meanwhile Assad's like hmmm. i add these songs. i come back and add new ones. ooooh look here's another. finally i will make this public no image just the autogenerated cover made from the album art of the first four unique tracks you are actively seeing the process. let the 'date added' label seduce you this is what makes you fascinating

[monikahmakes]

I love your paper stone landscapes! Would you mind sharing more about the process for constructing the stones or what they look like before you carve into them?

Took me long enough, but I'm finally going to answer this!

I start with a piece of thin cardboard (behold my fine local Microcenter advertisement!) and a big pile of scrap paper torn into small pieces. I mix up my paint- usually acrylic with added white glue or gel medium to get it to stick more firmly, but I've used latex paint, other glues and mediums, or basically whatever's around.

I brush on a thick layer of paint, then lay down a small piece of paper, then brush on more paint, taking care to smooth and adhere it firmly without bubbles. I use my crappiest old paintbrushes, because you really have to mash it down and ruin your bristles. Then I just keep layering, overlapping pieces of paper and changing colors of paint when I feel like it, until I have a rough lump maybe half an inch high at its highest point.

I let the lump dry overnight, then trim the edges and cut the lump into carving-sized pieces with a utility knife while it's still pretty soft inside. I let the pieces dry for another few days, until they aren't palpably squishy any more- the paint needs to be dry all the way through, or it won't carve neatly.

I carve my chunks down using a sharp knife, a little chunk of wood as a platform, and a cutproof glove, because I'm clumsy. I have to sharpen my knife CONSTANTLY because of how badly the dense paper dulls it. Sometimes, if the piece is thick or I hit a spot that isn't fully dry, I'll do a rough carve and let it dry longer before finishing.

I make organic shapes with both curves and angular facets, trying to highlight the best patterns inside it, and I figure I'm done when all the surfaces are smooth and I like the way it looks.

As I'm carving, I produce these beautiful little curls of stripy paper-composite. The nicer pieces that don't fall apart are carefully set aside to make things like this. The messier ones get recycled into paper pulp for sculptural projects.

There should probably be another step- sealing the surface of the carved item to protect it from damage and moisture- but I haven't yet found a sealant that doesn't darken the color and change the finish in ways I really don't like. It's a shame, because I think these would make lovely jewelry, but they're just too delicate to be worn casually. But my experiments are still ongoing, when I get around to them- I'm always trying to do too many things at once.

Thanks for asking!

[muninnhuginn]

Ngl definitely thinking back to the cartoon-making chapter now we know that Twilight doesn't realise studying/pursuit of knowledge can be fun. No wonder the cartoon he made sucked. He was approaching it purely from the educational angle with zero idea of the entertainment aspect that makes edutainment programming effective.

It's not that he was really bad at writing the fun parts. He plain didn't realise there were meant to be any in the first place for it to work.

Copying the aesthetics with no understanding of what was underneath.

[unteriors-in-house-flipper-2]

how do you get the angle & fov so close to the original!! is it just trial & error or do you superimpose the photo atop the game somehow

recently ive been tracing the outlines of the rooms in Clip Studio Paint, and then capturing both CSP and the game in OBS and changing the blending mode for CSP to multiply!

i use CSP's perspective ruler tool to find the horizon in the reference picture and then compare it with any doors in the image (theyre very consistently 2m tall) to find the height at which the photo was taken, and then make a little platform in the game so the pov is at the same height

i then trial and error the approximate position by putting down square tiles and lining it up with the floor in the picture. i'll then build up the walls (theyre usually around 2.5m tall, so i just make them 13 blocks/2.5m tall and use the resizable cube to get the ceiling to the right height). then i do even more trial and error to find the FOV, focusing on matching the angle of vertical lines near the sides of the screen.

i use a kitchen cabinet inner corner piece to "save" my position, i'll back into it to get to the exact same spot every single time. i'll also place a small item (usually a clothing hook) on the wall on the spot my cursor needs to be so i can always face the right way!

often the images have to be rotated very slightly for the horizon to be perfectly horizontal. i'll always note down by how many degrees, and when i'm cropping the final screenshot to the correct aspect ratio i'll also rotate it to match :)

[picklesthenonbeanary]

Everyone on here has such cool click clack ideas! like omg!!! I think it’s time that I share the one that I’ve made for an au idea I have, had them for about a week and I love them but I’m still trying to get details down for the au and all, still in the planning stage and like this is my first time really actually doing this.

Anyways, click clack design be upon you!

I turned him into a plushie guys and I love him!

More info/rant undercut

This au is gonna be on the more body horror side and I would love to info dump about it once my brain gives me more ideas to write down but honestly I think his design for the au turned out good, their modeled after a teddy bear and I tried to make the face and eyes similar to one as much as I could for just concept sketches

Anyways lemme know if anyone wants an info dump on the au,

been trying to get as much down as I can for it but obviously having your attention split while brain storming isn’t the best. Probably gonna make an info dump either way just the get the brain juices pumping but how much I share in an actual post is gonna depend on how willing I think people are to hear about it tbh. I don’t wanna talk about something nobodies gonna care much about

Um anyways new au idea underways, gonna try and write a story about it but I currently only have a beginning and vague concept of how I want it to end and nothing in between so far so we will see. Would love to trouble shoot with someone but I currently don’t have anyone to do that with so… feel free to reach out if you wanna try helping tho, i've got like litterally no friends in/into the comunitiy so it would be kinda nice

Probably gonna turn out sloppy but so is the ways of life, better to make sthat is bad then nothing at all

[arbellaart]

Emotes for my discord server! LOOK AT THE BBY!!