#that's what i thought

[spocks-evil-godmother]

Why don't we talk about Yossarian more? He is like the most Tumblr user literary character of all time. He finds fun little ways (faking an illness) to get out of doing his job. He makes blackout posts using the outgoing letters of other soldiers. He hates war but finds everyone he knows oddly compelling. He has a weird homosocial thing going on with a chaplain. He likes hornyposting on main but still finds sex complicated. He's haunted by the horrors, even.

[quikyu]

I'm trying to get better at drawing this guy... Orkidorgy

[aidenlydia]

was just wondering how you chose if/when Riley wears his mask. Most of your pieces have the mask lifted off only his mouth but some have it dully on or fully off. I was wondering if there was a specific reason for that or just what you think looks good?

It's a mix of reasons.

The first is pretty simple: I like drawing expressions, faces and most importantly, intimacy. That's why my Ghost rarely ever wears glasses and usually has his mask lifted. It not only shows his vulnerability with MacTavish, but also allows them to kiss, have direct eye contact and be skin to skin. Speaking of, painting realistic skin is very satisfying to me and covering it up with cloth kills me a little. Same with drawing ears, I sacrificed so many good ears in favor of that mask..

Second, I get bored easily. Drawing the same mask/glasses/headset/jacket combo over and over again without any human features burns me out. I knew immediately I needed a face design and different outfits for Ghost, despite really loving his whole look and actually preferring him all covered up. Unfortunately that just isn't in the cards for me, so I switch between fully masked, half masked, bare faced and medical mask to keep him fresh and interesting for myself. Even his body type changes, he goes from twink to more sturdy builds depending on how bored I am with it.

(MacTavish is less of a problem but I do switch it up by changing his clothes, having him be shirtless or fluctuate his muscle mass.)

To put it into a bit more perspective: my art process is jumping between countless WIPs in various stages of completion and artstyles until something happens to get finished eventually - my SoapGhost WIP folder alone is currently at 339 pieces - and if a painting takes me longer than a day to complete, chances are I'll drop it and pick it back up again in anywhere between a week or a year (it's a miracle I get anything done at all).

So I'll do whatever it takes to actually help me continue drawing and manage my constant burnout. Being chronically ill and creative is the worst combo, I think about completely quitting art every other day :')

And third, well. Sometimes it really is simply about which one looks better.

[kaosanddestruction]

i don't even play for honor man i just thought it was funny

[assaahashi]

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Gods bless her heart

[marionsravenwoods]

LINUS ROACHE as E.A.D.A. MICHAEL CUTTER LAW & ORDER | 18.2 “Darkness” ↳ for @mccoy-kincaid

[gender-luster]

if you put gale in a new outfit other than his starting robe, but you DON'T DYE THE OUTFIT PURPLE you DISGUST ME

you can't take a purple bitch out of the purple!! that's like. cutting an angels wings off.

[theyoshimister]

Imagine that flower being a buttercup flower

Don't worry, he'll be fine! Toons respawn They're like gamers, but stinkier

[igotsnothing]

SLASHED A 12 Day Spooky Season CAS Challenge 🩸💀

How He Dies: Final Girl lures him into a room where the Hunter is waiting with his crossbow. Upon being hit with several arrows made of hawthorn, the monster thrashes in a final paroxysm of fury before the Hunter shoots the last arrow, right between his eyes. It's over. Our heroes live to see the dawn.

At least...until the sequel!

DUN DUN DUN!

Day 1- The Final Girl/ Day 2- The Jock/Day 3-The Bad Girl/Day 4-The Outcast/ Day 5-The Academic/Day 6- The Sacrifice/The Fool/Day 7- The Skeptic/Day 8- The Meddler/Day 9- The Harbinger/Day 10- The Detective/Day 11- The Hunter/Day 12- The Killer

[brainrotcharacters]

"I get it. Zeff was mean to you. Boo-hoo." Zoro you're such a bitch maybe he just misses his dad

[the-force-awakens]

firstly the fact that I had to read with my own two eyes that rey is a mary sue in the year of our lord 2023 is criminal. secondly, there's nothing wrong with mary sues. thirdly, keep it up and I'll start treating luke the same way y'all treat rey 🤨

[edensrose]

˚◞❀˳ once again begging writers to tag their fics accordingly and give your damn cws in the beginning. I don't want to be so into a fic only to see infidelity slapped dead in the middle with nothing in the tags or cws. please just be more mindful.

[thelifestoryofkara]

I know no one's really sure how the new neopets thing is going to work out, but I better get some damn clout from still having access to the account I made in 2004

[imyoursoftfuzzymann]

holden caulfield

[kradogsrats]

ANYWAY thinking about the optics thing, and just kinda speculating on the science-leaning nature of the human kingdoms vs. the role Dark magic plays culturally and politically:

On the optics thing specifically: we see vision correction lenses on both sides of the border, and the science for those likely predate the human expulsion. I’m betting Moonshadow elves pioneered most of lenscrafting and similar, but I would also bet that humans expanded on the science for things like astronomical telescopes pre- or post-expulsion (or both).

There’s definitely the implication of advanced farming techniques--land needs to produce many times over subsistence level in order to a) have population concentrated in cities with an educated middle class, and b) have warfare be the province of the common people as well as the nobility. If your farmland isn’t significantly overproducing already, sending a million people to fight and die who could otherwise be farming is setting yourself up to have everyone starve. The setting simply doesn’t work without farming being highly developed.

We know humans have explosives, and give it a decade or two and there will definitely be firearms. It’s actually kind of shocking that they don’t have cannons already, but I guess when your intent is to shoot a live, fast-moving creature out of the sky a ballista is a better (and more accurate) bet. Cannons are more useful against ground infantry or stationary structures, and with peace between the human kingdoms you’re not gonna see many sieges. That being said, with the high level of machining accuracy and understanding of physics (see the next point), firearms are going to get very accurate, very fast.

The fact that they have explosives indicates a definite culture of chemistry or alchemy somewhere. You don’t accidentally invent gunpowder unless you’re actively messing around mixing things together to see what happens.

Medicine, as well--there are doctors (for both humans and animals!) who are treated as educated experts, not just “the guy who happens to own a bone saw.” Evenere is known for production of advanced prosthetics, meaning people regularly survive traumatic amputations, and there is an advanced enough understanding of both the mechanics of human locomotion and precision craftsmanship of mechanical devices to produce functional, effective replacement limbs.

AND that also applies to the so-called “soft” sciences: the concept of sign language has to be explained to Janai by an expert, but it’s specified that the signs Amaya uses are probably uniquely Katolian. This is not just a language Janai is unfamiliar with, but an entire concept of communication generally unknown to elves that humans have advanced enough to have developed potentially up to 5 regional variations. (Side note: let’s not think too much right now about what both that and what appears in the final trailer to be a culture of punitive amputation says about Sunfire elves and disability lmaooooooooo)

Everyone is literate enough to mean there pretty much has to be printing presses and papermaking. That’s probably also an elven invention adopted during the Elarion era, but I thought I just throw it out there.

The other noteworthy thing is that precisely none of these developments are magical in any way. The explosives aren’t mysterious magical components triggered by a word or sigil--they’re good, old-fashioned, fire-activated gunpowder. The doctors treat patients with similarly mundane processes--splints and bandages, and presumably some degree of herbal/chemical pharmaceutical developments. The animal doctor doesn’t like... scry into Zym’s egg with an enchanted x-ray machine, or something.

So why, when the reason humanity was expelled from a rising golden era into a dark age is literally “they advanced too far with magic,” is the setting of the human kingdoms so emphatically low-magic? To elaborate: in a moderate- to high-magic setting, I would expect anywhere from “magic is a luxury convenience” to “magic is a fundamental fuel of society, which would collapse without it.” This could have been a setting where Dark magic flows like electricity to light cities, where it enables long-distance communication, powers engines and machinery, heals wounds with a poured potion. It could even just have been a setting where like... among the privileges of being king, Harrow has a lamp or fireplace that lights with a touch, or can speak with Amaya at the breach instantly instead of sending birds back and forth. But we don’t even have that. Even enchanted objects of convenience are restricted exclusively to use by Dark mage characters.

(Side note: what we see of Xadia is definitely a moderate- to high-magic setting, as is appropriate. Not even Lux Aurea is lit with flames sparked by flint and steel.)

Why, internally, are the human kingdoms so low-magic when their own magic was such a significant turning point in their history? Well, a couple theories:

Dark magic is a limited resource, which by the point of the series has basically run out in the west. I’m personally of the opinion that the western half of Xadia was originally comparable to the east in terms of magical resources, and the first couple hundred years of chaos put a big dent in it. Partly this would be due to escalating warfare between human subgroups, but also due to basically the large-scale societal collapse of the expulsion--you need to burn magic just to feed and warm people, to prevent very basic diseases and treat wounds. For the first year or more, you have no farms, you have no seed crops, you have literally nothing except thousands of mouths to feed who have grown unused to subsistence farming. It’s little wonder that mages became the de-facto leaders during that period--they were the only dang people who could keep anyone alive. That initial burst of fighting against extinction, followed by decades or centuries of magic-fuelled warfare, effectively depleted the west of natural magic with no way to replenish it.

Dark magic is actually frowned upon politically and/or morally. We know on some level that this is the case: a degree of stigma is attached to Dark magic at the time of the series, and that’s treated as normal. It reads like a cultural debate on something like nuclear power--no one’s getting burned at the stake over their opinion, but there are real ramifications of which side is currently politically dominant. Notably, even after a thousand years, the perception of Dark magic as “too easy (derogatory)” has persisted. I don’t think this is for the same reason as at Dark magic’s inception (that it’s a destructive shortcut for the much more difficult human adoption of primal magic), but possibly that it’s “easier” than doing things in a non-magical, science-based manner. A manner accessible to and shared by all humanity, that doesn’t have a negative history of (probably) war crimes. I’ve also discussed before how, as the Mage Wars wound down due to depletion of magical resource and people generally getting sick of the drama, everyone started looking askance at mixing magical power and political power too much. If Dark mages are meant to lean toward being inherently ambitious and power-hungry, it’s surprising that none of the Pentarchy rulers seem comfortable with a display of magic, and in fact are unnerved by Viren’s illusion at the summit. You’d think Dark mages would consistently be hanging around by the coattails of the powerful, showing off and looking to climb, but apparently not. Possibly whoever is currently on top kicks the rest down? Look, there’s definitely a reason Katolis appears to have exactly two Dark mages, and it’s probably “Viren does not tolerate professional competition,” just saying.

Dark mages prefer not sharing magic with the general populace, because they like being special and secretive. Which... well, just look at them. This is probably more of a symptom of the low-magic setting than a cause, but still.

SO ANYWAY that’s why the sciences are flourishing in the human kingdoms, thanks for coming to my TED Talk.

Also I had a brief tangent in the middle of writing this where I looked over at my spouse and said, “What the hell kind of linguistics did Kazi study when the entire world appears to speak a single shared language?”

[hudbannonarchive]

"don and betty's relationship was toxic and they clearly didn't belong together" oh yeah????? explain this.