#tangentally related

[the-acid-pear]

You know i've come to realize the guy i keep calling Joe most likely ISN'T Joe but until the real Joe shows up i'll keep pretending that's him because IT LITERALLY LOOKS JUST LIKE HIM. THAT'S MY MAN I KNOW IT'S HIM

[bloobydabloob]

Holy shit I love your Dirk interpretations, it's so true and I could talk about this shit forever. I feel like another part of his character that people seem to forget (along with Roxy for some reason) is that he's from the future in solitude in an apocalyptic wasteland. I just see that part of his character always removed which is disappointing because I feel like that's a pretty big part, especially regarding his themes around technology, his brother's theme of Time, his own isolation, and how he plays in the vastness of the universe and spacetime.

Art I drew related to the subject because I like to respond to asks with art.

But absolutely. I certainly understand where the lack of discussion over his isolation + upbringing comes from, considering a majority of the fanbase that I have seen builds their ideas based on their own version of postcanon. I’m not entirely sure how that would be fixed, but certainly even in the somewhat recent past I would see a lot more content regarding his upbringing both literally and symbolically. I don’t have much to add regarding the things you’ve mentioned, because they just are what they are. Dirk being confined to a singular room left to him by a father figure he never met, in a future where the only other person left on the planet is someone he cannot pursue a relationship of because of himself, with purely 3 robots to keep him companion, one being an exact replica of his own brain who is *also* trapped inside a pair of glasses, is about as literal as it gets to me.

The contrast to me involving the flooded, organic world in comparison to the little speckle of Dirk’s apartment packed with the dude and his technics is not only a representation of his isolation and entrapment within himself, but also of his lack of control. I think his obsession with & themes of control are a direct product in the case of Dirk specifically *of* this kind of upbringing. His themes of technology are also related to his themes around control. So much of his character is actually revolved around this to me like so much. Dirk is so deeply disconnected from humanity in every way and so much of his character + symbolism is based around that.

It doesn’t even have to be about the symbolism or anything though. It’s just pretty *interesting* in the literal sense that he lives in the middle of the ocean in the future. There’s not only a lot to theorise on to do with his young life there, but on how it might affect him in the way he acts for the rest of his life. The latter part is probably what I see mentioned the most by people talking about Dirk regarding this, I’m surprised I don’t see more discussion on the former too though. I really ought to actually talk more about Homestuck stuff on here. I will do it myself.

Roxy & Dirk’s relationship is largely ignored though because there is a narrative a certain demographic spreads that Dirk resented and blamed Roxy for her interest in him, and thus too many people believe that their relationship was or would continue to be an abusive one. Realistically, I believe it’s important to acknowledge that the way Roxy treated Dirk regarding his homosexuality wasn’t right while still acknowledging the obvious amount of respect and admiration Dirk had for Roxy. I mean we have a huge piece of dialogue from their post trickster mode conversations on the quest beds from Dirk purely stating how he feels about Roxy that people completely ignore somehow. I think this usually happens to characters that are women though. I know everyone says it, but it is true. Jane gets the exact same treatment of boiling her down to solely her negative aspects. The things I see completely mischaracterising both of them are horrific.

I mean how much more explicit can it get that their relationship is obviously very important to Dirk? But I digress. I think the best or I should say “most interesting” interpretations of their relationship usually come from DirkRoxy shippers actually.

I would be interested to hear about Dirk’s relation to his brother’s theme of time though. I don’t have any thoughts on this and I don’t recall ever hearing anyone talk about it before. If you or anyone else would be willing to enlighten me I’d be thrilled.

[alphaketoglutaricacid]

The bell shuro gives laios is such an elegant piece of symbolism. Laios immediatly stows it away but it's jingling at the bottom of his bag (and mind) the whole time as the crew enters the most isolated section of the story.

Rescuing Falin was the first thing shuros ever wanted or asked for and Laios return pushes him to be more and more proactive abt his desires. On Shuros side, its constantly ringing, out of his control, and annoying to him and everyone around him. Despite being mortified w intruding on other people, he keeps it on him even when he sleeps. They both almost throw it away several times.

Thru the story its a little ambiguous what shuro feels about laios. IMO the dead giveaway is where he puts that bell:

At his heart!

[official-time-loop-posts]

Um, actually any game can be read as a timeloop if you savescum hard enough 🤓

you’re so real for that actually

also most games (especially rpgs) can be time loops if there’s a grinding element to it. just repeat the same activity over and over and over again until you’re finally strong enough. you can finally leave. but can you? you’ll have to do it again once you find another enemy that’s just a bit too strong for you to beat. then you’ll have to grind again. and again. and again.

[loveelizabeths]

i think the word “settling” is often given a bad wrap in relationships.

to settle with someone - i don’t think it has to mean something boring, or mundane. to love someone so profusely you are ready to lay down and spend the rest of your life with them, it’s saying: “i don’t care who or what else is out there, i am choosing you. there is enough love, wonder, and warmth here, i do not need to seek anything else.”

you fell in love with them, and like falling, it was natural, passive, spontaneous, it happened to you. you stood there, you were engulfed in love.

but we don’t just want to fall in love with someone, we don’t just want the falling. we want the love even after the euphoria fades. we want the natural cycle, the mundane, the domesticated routine, the living beside each other. because we didn’t just love our partner then, we love them now, and tomorrow. it’s not about finding the right person—we learn to love the person we have found.

and why are we as a society so obsessed with finding the “right” person? we live in a culture that is obsessed with perfect compatibility and optimisation and it often leads to disappointment and unfair comparison.

instead of looking for the perfect partner, the perfectly right partner, what if we could shift our focus to being with someone who isn’t overly wrong for us?

someone who is kind, patient, respectful, compassionate and who is willing to work through challenges with you.

perfect compatibility isn’t a preset, it’s something you build through trust. there is no perfect person for you, because you yourself are not perfect. there is no immediate compatibility, and even if there was, it doesn’t stay that way forever.

you find something better than perfect, you can find something real.

sustaining love through time, effort, energy, willingness, and the constant demand of wisdom and patience. it is as beautiful as the falling in love. it is what keeps the love long through the years.

falling in love with our person is a happenstance, but loving them is a decision. and there is so much beauty in that.

[yeah-thats-probably-it]

We often talk about how romantic the Joy in the Morning garden scene is, with very good reason, but it REALLY jumps out at you if you listen to the audiobooks. Jonathan Cecil’s Jeeves voice is very consistent, so when he reads “The cool air. The scent of growing things. That is tobacco plant which you can smell, sir,” you can HEAR how there’s really no way to deliver that line in a way that isn’t noticeably more expressive than Jeeves’ normal baseline. It’s the punctuation. The full stop between “the cool air” and “the scent of growing things” tells you that a certain amount of inflection is required.

Man is flirting so hard it’s disrupting his normal speech patterns

[mentallyillcaterpillar]

Maturing is realizing that listening to the Wicked soundtrack on a regular basis as a child is what led to you becoming the disaster lesbian obsessed with enemies to lovers that you are today.

[elizabethwydevilles]

I think that 'you're like a father too me' vs 'you were my brother' is crucial in understanding the Anakin and Obi-Wan dynamic and their particular brand of dysfunctional communication.

[ardentpoop]

If you're still doing the opinions thing. What are your thoughts on the take that Sam is just as bad as or even worse than Dean in terms of how possessive they are over each other?

~~Not my personal opinion, just a comparison I saw on a wincest blog that I didn't agree with~~

total garbage. also unfortunately a very common bad take. the narrative likes to go “heehee hoohoo they are just as bad as one another” in the late seasons based on Extremely Questionable or even outright fabricated evidence and I love that the fans who are predisposed to this view of the brothers eat it the fuck up even tho it’s full of giant holes.

s10 is the most egregious example of this. not gonna get into it in depth rn bc it’s tiring but truly just grit your teeth and rewatch s10 while paying attention to what dean is telling the audience about sam and think about whether you actually believe him based on what we’ve seen sam do in s10 and previous seasons. there could not be a more screamingly obvious red flag than dean describing sam working with charlie on a cure for the mark of cain as “when you bullied charlie into getting herself killed.”

I diverted this away from “possessiveness” and into general Harmful Behavior bc it is their overall patterns of behavior that the narrative itself is dishonest about to the viewer. but to be extra clear - there is no world in which sam could be equally or more “possessive” over dean than dean is over sam because sam is not entitled to dean’s body and dean’s life in the way that dean is to sam’s. and furthermore, because sam is so accustomed to having his power of choice stripped away while being told that it’s what’s Best For Him, when he has the option of enforcing another character’s right to choose (usually a child or a woman or other vulnerable person) he almost always makes a point of explaining to them that the choice is theirs. see his interactions with jesse (s5), claire, and jack for very clear examples of this.

my personal favorite parallel however is what dean did to sam with the panic room in s4 vs dean’s comparatively brief and non-dehumanizing experience with the panic room when he was first on the verge of saying yes to michael in s5. samndean’s conversations in “point of no return” are so crucial to understanding their series-spanning power imbalance. like come on. dean’s “I’d let you rot in here. hell, I have let you rot in here.” followed by sam’s “I guess I’m not that smart.”

shouldn’t need to spell it out any clearer than that!!!!

[aeb-art]

scribbled clip, fool, and y/n from gitm by @venomous-qwille o7

[rragnaroks]

hello. it is i, your friendly neighbourhood goblin that pops up every now and then to scream about something new.

i love damien haas.

this has been a psa.

[iztea]

hello iz ik it's such a cliche question and idk if you've already answered that but- how do you learnt drawing humans??? like everyone says practice but i don't know how and i struggle so much :( thanks already for answering!! i really really love your art

hi!

the very regulated, academic, objectively correct bs answer: learn the fundamentals, study and practice!

the unhinged, off-the-counter, cool uncle from your dad's side of the family answer:

Imo, the best way to learn how to draw on your own is to reference and study other people's art. There is no need for you to reinvent the wheel, and if you are a beginner and have no idea what you're doing, tackling multiple fundamentals at once can overwhelm and demotivate you quite a lot. So, for your morale and motivation, I think it is totally okay to just observe multiple artworks from multiple artists and engage with them critically ( * N.B. : artistS - plural; by referencing multiple works, you lower the risk of accidentally becoming a copycat or locking yourself into an art style that will never be as good as the original because it was not yours)

What I mean by critically engaging with an artwork is to analyze how they're tackling difficult body parts that you struggle with. For example, let's say you can't/don't know how to draw legs. Look at a picture of a real human leg, observe how someone else has simplified that leg form and anatomy, and then try to recreate it. Don't just copy their linework 1 to 1. That is not the point. Do it your own way, incorporate aspects of others' art that you like, and make them yours. You should have 5++ references of that leg from 5++ different artists. There are maany people out there who post their studies online, raw sketches or structural drawings (TB Choi comes to mind for example). Look for people like them, and if you can't find someone, then Pinterest is your bff. When learning how to draw, hunting the internet for how people sketch >>> rendered art. If speedpaints are more your thing, then youtube has you covered. Personally, I've learned more from a 20 min speedpaint with nightcore bgm and zero annotations from some guy that doesnt even speak english that has 300 views than I've learned from 10 min long art tutorials from fluent english speakers with 1 mil views. At the end of the day, we can yap and theorise as much as we want, but it's the act of drawing that brings results and seeing how other people draw is sometimes worth a thousand words.

> References in general also help a lot. I can't tell you how many times I was too lazy to look something up and spent 14235 hours trying to draw it off the top of my head only to have it done in 10 minutes once I finally gave in and pulled up a reference. So yeah, always use references. Don't be like me this is actually a bad habit

Okay, but how to /use/ that reference if you're a beginner? Very simple: draw on top of it ( *Do Not trace the outlines, that's pointless if you actually want to learn something). Draw guidelines over the body parts, deconstruct and simplify the ref into just boxes and lines ( always think in 3D ). This will help a lot with keeping the proportions in check. You can start by drawing those guidelines first and then get into details. Kinda like in sculpture: you start with a big block of a rock, and then you slowly carve and build form and then detail. The more you draw, the less you will need those guidelines as you get a feeling for the proportions yourself and will no longer need this step.

Once you become more confident in your skills or have a "sense" for drawing and you are in too deep to just give up after hitting your first wall, then you can tackle the scary intimidating stuff that is art fundamentals ( or you can do them simultaneously, all I'm trying to say is to never forget that you are not the only drawer in the world; looking in your neighbor's yard is totally okay within the reasons of common sense ). You don't have to raise and milk a cow it to make butter, you can just buy it from the store. If you want to bake a cake, a beginner chef will use store-bought cake mix because they have no idea how to cook. Once they learn the science behind baking (because it really is a science) they will buy their own ingredients and then improve or personalize the cake with better, well-researched ingredients, they will add their own twist, flavours, adjust the macros, perfect the technique and so on.

This is how I've personally learned how to draw by myself bc I'm self-taught and didn't care for formalities as it's just a hobby of mine that I do for fun. If you want proper advice you should probably listen to more qualified people but I can only preach what I practice.. Anywayssss hope it helped!!

[curemoonliite]

the funniest youtube comments are always the ones where the people try to sound tough but wind up making themselves sound like actual precure villains instead, change my mind

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

cough hack wheeze who wants a teeny tiny fantasy au snippet with uhhhh laughingstock Tension. it's like... half a scene! unedited & out of context As Is Tradition

~

“Nothin’ much. I think I’ll poke around nearby towns, shake down some travelers - see what falls into my paws.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea, Barn,” Howdy says. He sweeps aggressively, spreading dirt more than gathering it into the usual neat piles. “Who knows if those ne'er-do-wells are still roaming around the woods - if you and Ed couldn’t take them, what makes you think you could alone? Or- or! What if you stumble across those cultists? I hate to think of you stuck in an ambush with no help coming, knowing fully well that-”

A large paw slips the broom out of his grip and sets it to the side, and Howdy stammers to a stop as Barnaby crowds him against the bar with a soft, “Howdy.”

Howdy swallows hard, bracketed on each side by strong blue arms. The look Barnaby fixes him with dries up his well of words and bristles his fuzz. Howdy’s heart hammers against his ribs. He can feel Barnaby’s body heat, and it’s lighting his blood on fire. 

“I’m not gonna be reckless, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Barnaby says. He barely needs to speak louder than a whisper for Howdy to hear him loud and clear. He smells like sweet smoke. “The other day was a one time deal, cross my heart. But, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll take someone with me. I’m sure Jules is itchin’ to get outta town.”

“What would really make me feel better is if you stay,” Howdy blurts, just barely reining in the with me. He tenses, knowing that he’s toeing a dangerous line. One wrong word, and he’ll make the unspoken spoken - but the stress drains out of him as Barn’s eyes go soft. Perhaps that wouldn’t be so bad. Of course there’s no reason to worry, not about this, not with him. There never has been.

“You know I can’t do that,” Barnaby murmurs. “Not yet.”

Howdy doesn’t need to say that he knows. Not for the first time and with any luck, not for the last, it clicks in his mind that they’re on the same page - he doesn’t need to be a telepath to understand the thoughts behind Barnaby’s dark eyes. 

Barnaby says it anyway. “I gotta get him back. I can’t… there’s no room for anythin’ else right now.”

Howdy sighs through his nose and slumps against the counter digging into the small of his back. He nods and adjusts the lapels of Barnaby’s vest. His fingers ghost over soft blue, and Barnaby doesn’t flinch at the contact. If anything, he leans the barest millimeter into it. His gaze burns into Howdy’s, even if they aren’t meeting at the moment, but it isn’t a bad feeling. Quite the opposite, actually.

“Well,” Howdy says in a low voice, “if you find a good lead, send for the rest of us. I’ll be there as fast as my four legs can scamper.”

Barnaby smirks. “Even if you need to take a boat?”

“Even so, Barn.”

The smirk slides into something that isn’t a frown, but isn’t a smile. It’s too soft for a grimace, but too intense for simple recognition. Barnaby seems to sway forward, and Howdy is sorely tempted to meet him halfway.  

But Barnaby’s claw taps the counter, and he pulls away before anyone’s mind can be made up. Howdy’s hands slip from his lapels, brushing against fur as they fall and knuckles skimming over the smooth, fresh scar cutting across Barnaby’s belly. 

“I’ll be back before you know it,” Barnaby says, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He squeezes Howdy’s shoulder and then his back is turned, and he’s leaving. All Howdy can do is watch. 

And call out after him, “Your table will be open and waiting for you.”

Barnaby pauses in the doorway and looks over his shoulder at Howdy, and his grin is so full of affection that Howdy may just burst. 

“With a free pint?” he asks.

“Hey now, don’t push your luck pal.”

Barnaby bursts out laughing, and Howdy can hear it even after the door thuds closed.

[whyisstarkidfollowingmeshoo]

Get a room! You....three? Jeff Blim, Jon Matteson , and corporate america

#ultimatethreesomebromanceofthecenturyherefolks

I dont know if Jon gifted those shoes and those shades or Jeff is just borrowing them from Jon like siblings sometimes do. I know they're not siblings. Just that in my personal life, i do this all the time with my sisters. Like that one time I wore a few of my sister's jeans in the past like boy did I ruin a couple of them and I was so scared she'd find out about it but one time she's the worst cause she had the audacity to borrow my under...oh I forgot to point out, but Im sure you already did, I think Jeff got a new haircut or he combed it in a weird way.

[celebration-of-the-ordinary-life]

if u. follow me for my art. i am very sorry. because 90% of the time, if i did not spend 3 hours doing it, it will probably be nothing more than a snip tool screenshot & not a properly saved .png file

anyways i pizazzed up the watermark from astral duo euri. i thought the flowers would be cute n funny. now every drawing will be given flowers against their will ✿. here is a peek into some of the headcanons i want on quincy