#thank you again for checking in though!

[sheryl-lee]

hey Sameera, how are you feeling? does it hurt much? did you routine changed significantly? 😢

hi, thank you so much for asking! my jaw joints have basically degraded to the point where they're bone-on-bone, so yeah it does a hurt a lot. the pain has reached a point where it's now excruciating and debilitating (and i consider myself to have a high pain tolerance). it severely impacts my ability to function and my overall quality of life.

eating is quite difficult now, my sleep quality is poor/non-existent because my airway is slowly collapsing, exercising is impossible because i can't breathe properly and my energy levels are low. i have near-constant pain and creaking (crepitus) in my jaw joints and shooting nerve pain to boot. it hurts to talk, smile, laugh, express anything beyond a neutral face (😐). it's hard to concentrate on anything, especially schoolwork, because my cognitive capabilities are impaired. i have chronic pain, a face that changes bit by bit everyday as it recedes, near-daily migraines, discomfort, tinnitus, gastrointestinal issues, neck/back pain, fatigue, depression, anxiety.... all of which can be traced back to this one disease. it has upended my entire life and it's only gonna get worse from here until i get surgery :)))

maybe the hardest thing to accept about all of it is that the only solution is to cut the joints in my face out and permanently replace them with metal prosthetics. so the stress of having to accept that, prepare for a major surgery, and navigate everything that comes with the process has been overwhelmingly difficult :/// i'm trying to hang in there but it's tough. to say the least.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Ooh, you want to know what happens at the gay bar run by ex-pirates, ooh...You'll just have to read Tiger Tiger to find out...

(Inspired by this Disco Elysium comic)

[wildstar25]

MiqoMarch Day 6 - Secret

The jealousy that began to bubble up, though likely pointless to hide from her of all people, Arsay desperately tried to keep a secret from her dear friend Krile.

[hellcifrogs]

Any chance on you doing artfight next month? I would LOVE to draw some of your fusion ocs!!!

Honestly I've never tried it, every year I think abt joining it and chiken out in the last minute 😅

[worldcleansingdragon]

do you think dan heng lets march and stelle get away with most of the things they do so he can remember how it feels to be free and unburdened again

yes. yes he definitely does.

he barely (before the luofu arc) got the chance to feel free as he was living in constant stress and anxiety. march's and stelle's spontaneous ideas are, in fact, reckless, maybe even dangerous, but they make him feel free, like he's not hiding a power strong enough to destroy masses but just a nameless, who has nothing more to do than to freely explore the universe.

dan heng is the type of person to sigh, roll his eyes at them but engage in all their ideas nonetheless.

[vaguely-concerned]

one thing I have to keep reremembering every time I'm playing a soulslike/similar kind of difficult game -- and that I wish I could internalize elsewhere in my life as well -- is that you always, always have to suffer through the long dark of an inexplicable failcringe era before you can emerge into a fresh new dawn of competence. faceplanting into humiliating failure in ways you hadn't even conceived of before on a loop can sometimes be the herald of great and wondrous things to come soon. don't be so quick to abandon yourself in the early murk of daybreak because you think you just suck!!!

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

soulbonded myself to van gogh (fgo) last night i swear i saw her in my dreams post-crashout

[azadrithaanatheme]

Can I just say I LOVE the upgrades that you gave N and V? They look so freakin’ cool and you should be INCREDIBLY proud of yourself! Well done! I’m going to go and fawn over those designs more haha.

Sweet merciful robo-god and all of Her daemons in Linux Heaven, the ladydaybreaker of Ad Astra fame in my inbox frickin' what!? Excuse me a moment while I combust in transcendent joy.

Thank you so much AAAAAAAAAAAAAA, I'm so glad people are enjoying the upgraded designs for N and V... even though I still need to put together the full reference sheet for upgraded N because I'm retooling some minor details in the design because I wasn't happy with how they were working (the Perfectionists Curse has harmed me once more lol).

And really that's just the tip of the iceberg on ideas I'm cooking - I know there's the beginnings of a crow-based deviant solver form for Uzi kicking around somewhere on my blog, and I have ideas for upgraded J, other unique designs for workers and disassemblers, an entire new evolution of weird Solver space majyks based on flowers and fungus as well as flesh, bone, and metal (kind of aiming for a "new life blooming from rot and gore"-type vibe/aspect with that one), and so much more... when I said I was going to get weird with building on the lore of the silly robot show, I absolutely meant it.

I just hope y'all have as much fun getting to see what I create as I have in bringing it to life.

[callizinc]

Ok so I do want to make a genuinely thought out question about something that might mean anything at all. but I don't have anything like that yet so I would instead like to ask what your thoughts on The Witches are. Bc I never see anyone talking abt them at all even though I think they're one of the NPCs that like... approximate decency toward ENA. Like the main one says ENA 'looks like someone who likes overworking themselves' and that taking their request is 'a horrible idea, but precise'. Those aren't really insults-- shit, they call her Ms. ENA and boss lady and acknowledge her as a witch. Even assuming that they were going to deliberately not pay her (which, as a biased fan, I think could've been a genuine mistake but again I'm biased I'm biased) like the main witch is still. Pretty consistently respectful. The other 2 not as much but they seem like jerks on principle. And the witch you retrieve is downright nice, like uncontestably! Actually, typing this out, I wonder if there's supposed to be any parallelism between the witches and the ENAs-- a combined 4 'persons' that communicate internally (the psychic thing) but don't always cooperate great. Shit, you could probably draw direct parallels between the nervous one (blue) the main one who handles the 'transaction' (salesman) the jerkass one (meanie) and the lost one (yellow?) maybe. They're also the NPCs that make the main allusions to BOTH routes if I remember correctly, both about the purge event and about taking another route to the Bathroom. They're so closely tied to death, and where ENA can go either route and always lives via mannequining, after suffering a ton, they end up choosing neither route and die without issue. IDK I feel like theres something they might point to as part of the bigger picture (maybe future chapters will contextualize some themes a bit more) and it drives me CRAZY that nobody ever seems to talk about them!!!

HELLO HELLO!!! FIrst of all. Oh my goodness gracious A long thoughtful dbbq ask about Themes and Theories in my inbox MAKES THIS SUCH A BEAUTIFUL DAY. PLEASE ALWAYS DO THIS. THANK. YOU. :D Secondly, I am going to do what has maybe never been done before at this point and refer to them by their names so this isn't incredibly confusing:

I am so glad you asked All of this, first of all i'll say my thoughts on the witches are. 😭😭Well I am sorry witches but I don't know if i ever thought of them like. at all. before now. They're very silly and i enjoy them but besides that. DHFHSSGSHJSG I am part of the problem I'm sorry. What did they ever do besides be cunt serving old ladies.......

So! I'm surprised and interested to see how charitably you read their behavior towards Ena—or, actually, rather just Laurel i mean cause really they're all either chill af or just don't seem to gaf about ena personally LOL 😭.

For me, i suppose no one can say for certain whether she genuinely forgot to pay her or was sneakily trying to get out of paying her, which is fine it ultimately doesn't matter that much, BUT I do think it's both funny and a really dick move for her payment to just be. Some random bullshit that only turned out to be useful for ena out of pure coincidence 😭 Not to mention the "I found this in a faraway land. Actually I think it was Ena who gave it to me" Which???? What????????????????????????

BUT NEVERMIND ALL THAT. I think your point that they might add onto or contextualize things in a later chapter is really cool and i could totally see that being the case. Cube-cumb3r (HUGE SHOUT OUT) pointed out to me once not too long ago that the way death is handled in Ena world is. needless to say Very Weird.

Nobody really gives a shit when anybody (ex Alex) dies—the flavor text even goes so far as to refer to what happened to him not as "death" but "uninterruptible sleep" which, Is that just a joke? Maybe, but it's very strange, Also needless to say the fact that there's an entire illegal party just about people turning into weird beasts and fucking killing each other through eating each other is. Something. And people are just going to this thing and doing it On Purpose

A key part of this element of the story, imo, is also how there seems to be SOME sort of... reincarnation or afterlife cycle in Ena's world? The npc at the Purge who says (paraphrased) "I don't want to have to wait until my next life [to meet the Genie]" Sticks Out To Me. What did you mean by that. also the slime guy who says "Hangovers in the afterlife can make you real thirsty", which maybe implies that The afterlife is just like, a thing that people know for a fact exists, which, combined with the existence of the Angel things and theodora's words and blah blah blah We've perhaps already seen...?

And of course, Ena's thing with the mannequins, But you already knew that. (......Am I going insane if I say maybe there's something significant here irt: Ena being unable to enter an afterlife and being forced to be recycled through the mannequins instead of truly dying....?)

ALL THIS IS TO SAY: The way the witches just fucking die seems to also be a part of this, and I feel so red string conspiracy board rn I don't know if I can say anything intelligent in regards to it all LOL. But hopefully i've like... Laid the pieces out in a way that makes sense?

Linda literally says something about hoping Maude was dead too. Like okay girl. Like maybe they're exceptions LOL but all of this is definitely a part of how No One Gives A Shit about death and that's perhaps kind of just a fact of this world... (so what would that mean for someone who can't die like others can?)

And to finish this incomprehensible ramblefest, I do think the "I think it was Ena who gave it to me" is the craziest fucking thing here, and, Dare i say, I wonder if we'll actually SEE that happen in a later chapter? There's already very plausible suggestions that time in this world isn't later, so maybe we'll straight up get another Motherboard and run into Laurel at some point later???? Idk. I'm throwing shit at the wall but like that'd be cool right

[seaofreverie]

GUUUYYUYSSSD !!!!!

‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️

KIMONO MY HOUSE VINYL!!!!!!

Also funny story which is that when my brother took these to the cashier he said something like "oh... Sparks... they were here one year ago"

[pushing500]

I realize now that Mechi would be the weird baron with a robot court, without any gossip or anything

reminds me : you should look into getting one of these mechanitor command range extender to be totally a single guy commanding his mechs while meditating on his throne

one is that "observer mech" adds a mechanoid that acts as another circle of the mechanitor's range

another is "more mechanoid towers" adds a bunch of new mechanoid beacons, one of which is a range extender

the difference between the two I think is that the observer eats bandwidth while the tower eats power

Perhaps Mechi and Kwahu wouldn't have much to gossip about in their own home, but do you think the identical reclusive mechanitors who keep themselves very private and raised rapidly through the royal ranks for no apparent reason would garner gossip in the central imperial settlements? I think, at the very least, that Komnenos who visited a while back would have a thing or two to say to her buddies back home about her experiences at Sparks~

As for increasing mechanitor command range, I think it's a good idea, but also... Are Mechi and Kwahu really the types to pass up an opportunity to watch their enemies fleeing in person?

[kitteecassee]

</3

[sancta-seraphina]

okay so i just found your blog and all i have to say is wow. you are such a wildly talented artist and writer, and you deserve all the recognition and more. your art style is gorgeous and detailed and the attention to detail is so so so incredible. and that's not even including the research that you put into all of your work! heretic is my favorite piece of art, by any artist, ever. of all time. and that includes pieces i've seen in museums and in galleries. it's truly jaw-dropping and i don't think i can put into words how it makes me feel. you are such an incredible creative force, and i can't wait to see more of your work!

oh gosh this was such a lovely thing to open up in my inbox just now c': thank you so much for all of the kind words! reading them somehow felt like a warm hug <3

unfortunately algorithms and social media in general have never blessed me with visibility the same way other artists get viral attention. sometimes it really gets me down, but most of the time i'm just happy to be drawing my angels anyway

and 'heretic' is honestly my favorite piece too... i'm so pleased with the wings. it makes me extra happy when people like that one in particular <3

i have much more art planned, but right now i'm focusing a lot of my effort on finishing & editing & preparing my novel for its release this summer. so if things are a little quiet, that's the only reason! it's because there's a lot more coming...

[xxplastic-cubexx]

Thank you as always for your wonderful art. Good luck with midterms and your classes!

of course, thank you for the good wishes !!! i can't wait until i can find more time to draw though: its painful having so much i want to draw but needing to be """"responsible"""" or whatever and waiting...

honestly i always thought i was a part of . Sizable fandoms and that i just had niche favorites, but the actual. AMOUNT of wonderful art and fics and discussions when it comes to cherik is amlost overwhelming i wanna throw up <- this is a good thing

[astralcurses]

you good bestie?

im trying to be

[kalosian-woods]

everyday i thank chespie for helping squishy escape (and have a life-changing experience with a bunch of children /affectionate) because i'd be scared for how things would've turned out if neither of the cores escaped

We should always thank Chespie for his brave sacrifice in service of the Legendary Blob o7 Your countless days lost under a neverending sleep will not be forgotten and I hope you get to make them up by having the most fun ever (off-screen and without worries for the rest of your days) <33

It really was a meaningful interaction, no matter how short it was, and I'm sure Squishy still remembers the little fella. I love how Chespie, even after experiencing So Much in the specials alone, after being sent away by Mairin after having a argument with Alain, still went to help someone. Even if he couldn't help his friends, he could still help Squishy, right? Even in such terrifying circumstances his moral compass was pointed straight to the exit, even after getting hit by the energy, even after being left behind by Squishy themselves (by his own urging, of course). We barely get to see much of Chespie, but it's such a shining trait that leads him in every situation and it's so beautiful. Even though Mairin got fridged by association (:/), I've got to hand it to the Chespin - he reached my heart all the same <33 (in literally 4 eps lol).

But also ahhh you're putting some evil thought in my head, anon >:0 /nm. Tbf Team Flare only got Z2 after Squish talking to them, so if Squish was still with the bad guys it would be hard for them to track the other one down. But also damn, did you see how they were forcing the blob to merge with the cells against it's own will? The way those scientists barely blinked as they watched the scenes? There would absolutely be atrocities commited if they got both on hand for sure: now that they have the set (and no one else wiser to stop them, because this is a Legendary that is largely unknown and unseen), Team Flare have carte blanche to do whatever they want, and their methods are not pretty or soft. And Alain wouldn't know because he is focused on strength, and Mairin wouldn't have known because she was too busy trying to get Alain to see her stick around be safe and Chespie is usually never away from her. But one small fight got the small Pokemon seeing a different path and setting a weaker being (to his mind at least) free, even at the cost of his own freedom, and that set up the domino effect for the rest of Kalos at large.

And in a way, Chespie is protected in a way that Squishy wasn't, even in his sleeping state. Because he's with Mairin, and Mairin is with Alain, and Lysandre needs Alain for his plans. And so, even if Lysandre knows that Chespie set one of the Zygarde Cores free (I think he does know??), he can't really do anything to them. There really are a lot of layers to the TSME that I can peel away, but yeah, Chespie really was the instigator for the good change. After all, it was he who showed kindness to Squishy first, and softened him enough to maybe, just maybe, trust Bonnie afterwards. And so the snowball effect rolls on.