#then i can post more consistently again

[sunkly]

[c0rinarii]

Doodle dump

[camzverse]

im normal about them btw <-liar

(zoom in for a closer look at everything)

[fairyofshampgyu]

he’s literally so beautiful and handsome

[ixkhor-and-ambroxia]

Hey #GreekMythology tumblr, I want ya’lls help on something :).

So, I’ve been thinking about starting this massive project. Like, would take years and years work of writing and research and sheerly finding the time and motivation for. And as I was thinking about the specifics, I thought: why not bring others into it as well? Because as much as I am interested in a lot of Greek Mythology, there are things that are simply not my interests and might cause writers block and my goal for the project would to be as fun as possible. So, here we are.

What is the project exactly? Well, hopefully, it’ll be a long Ao3 series/fic focusing on the individual perspectives of various figures/events in Greek Mythology arranged in (semi/good enough) chronological order. I personally intend to write for Poseidon in his/my version of the Titanomachy and (maybe) some events that follow, if you want a little bit of an idea on what I’m talking about.

The limits on this are almost completely free, all that I ask are that each of your submissions are one POV only (and by that I mean your main subject’s POV). Why do I say this? I say this because that is what I want this project to look like. It doesn’t matter if it’s First, Second, or Third POV along with all the other variants of those three, my main focus is on the individual experiences of these individuals. Kind of like character studies, if you know what I mean. I’m intending for it to be mostly formal but I will absolutely accept crack admissions that I will probably put into its own series to Separate the Vibes for whoever comes by :).

Ultimately, this is a completely open-ended project that has absolutely no deadline. I’m about to go to bed so I can’t go into too much detail, but if you want to DM me or send any asks, I am completely okay with that and we’ll all flesh out the specifics we go :).

What is my overall purpose? Not only is this project made for my own individual purposes of learning more about the gods and other Greek Mythology writers, but it’s also the chance to spread the word of other writers. I know how hard it is to get specific audiences, especially when you’re shy, so this is a chance for your work to be stumbled upon. Each post on the eventual Ao3 fic will include your socials, how to find you, and your other general works on either ao3, tumblr, wattpad, or other :)

Can you participate even without socials or a tumblr page? Yes you absolutely can :). My asks will always be open to anons and I will do my best to give credit when I eventually post everything :). If you want to post multiple submissions or simply just want a trackable (between works) name to your writing, just sign something at the end. It could be a name, it could be a potential username, I don’t mind at all :)).

How do I submit things? Well, the best way would be to DM me :). I have a personal writing email separate from most things that would be perfect to either share a google docs with or to just send a copy-and-pasted copy of it. Otherwise, I take asks. None of them will be posted unless asked or we’re ready to so it’ll be safe to just drop them off in! It’s also where I take questions :).

Any other things to note? I’d really appreciate some other moderators and editors :). There’d only be like two or three of each and we’d have to know each other decently well before officially starting, but some help would be appreciated! Also, I’d like to keep a working ‘spreadsheet’ of who’s working on what just for people to see what’s going on :). Maybe some people can collaborate or it’ll encourage those niche writers to write :). A third thing is that most questionable stuff is accepted. I’d personally rather not handle all those things other than posting it so it might be a while until I can officially accept (consensual and/or graphic) ✨spicy stuff✨ but, other than that, I’ll take any of it (also, it’s Greek Mythology, almost all of it already happened). If someone’s willing to take over the ✨spicy stuff✨ then please DM me so we can work out the details and see if it’s a nice fit :)

Honestly, that all should be it. The main point is that I’m trying to start up a long-term project on Tumblr and Ao3 about what is essentially Greek Mythology character studies that not only allows for mass communication across a wide audience, but also (hopefully) gets some recognition for the smaller writers :). Feel free to DM me or send me asks with questions but for now, I shall sleep

Tagging: @bluebellstudio @thirteen-deaths-later @0lympian-c0uncil @happyk44 @h0bg0blin-meat @sworeontheriverstyx @deathlessathanasia @gotstabbedbyapen. Sorry if I tagged you and you want nothing to do with it, I just wanted to get it out there /pos /gen

[pastelcl0udy]

hi, i'm back again (after an another year)

have this camo ranger (i'm now trying to draw zombies more zombie-like, hehe)

[the-somwthing]

Welcome to my little meta analysis essay called

Why do we misremember Flower Husbands as being “nicer” than it was?

Disclaimer: I’m not here to talk about whether or not FH is “toxic” or anything like that. It’s just a fact that many old fans rewatching FH POV and new fans who are watching it for the first time after seeing fan content tend to be surprised at how they actually behaved in the series compared to how everyone remembered them being back in the day. This will NOT go over whether or not I think FH is unhealthy or whatever and instead just discuss why I believe this phenomenon has happened.

So, if I try to make this a fancy well written essay, I’ll be here all day, so I’ll just get to the point. 3rd Life came out during the DSMP era of mcyt. MCRP has been around for ages, but the DSMP style of RP (which I’ll be calling “smp rp”) was pretty much popularized by DSMP, mostly towards the end of 2020. For reference, 3rd Life started early 2021, so there’s about a half a year between these two events, and DSMP kept going for years so 3rd Life was absolutely happening during the golden era of DSMP.

But what does DSMP have to do with this? Well, it sort of created this idea of “lore” and only specific things being “canon”. You can make fun of me for the way I worded that, but you know what I mean, DSMP was weird about that stuff. I don’t really blame them as it was kind of a new style of RP they accidentally spawned, but still, it was a confusing time for SMPs.

3rd Life was actually less like DSMP and more like the modern SMP RPs, where there’s no (known, lol) scripted events and the fandom itself deciphers what is or isn’t “canon” rather than it being told to them, with mostly everything being considered canon. HOWEVER, I do believe that DSMP’s style did still affect the fandom, specifically with the topic of this essay, Flower Husbands.

But why would it only really affect Flower Husbands? Now we get into a rough topic: shipping discourse. Back in those days, shipping in the mcyt fandom was heavily frowned upon. Moreso than it is today (I know it’s still around, but it was a lot worse the earlier we go lol). I’ve even seen old relics of ppl saying flower husbands should only be portrayed as platonic cuz it’s wrong to ship them, despite their team name literally being husbands. But more importantly, for A LOT of people, flower husbands was the One Ship people felt “allowed” to ship, BECAUSE it was canon. So they would allow FH and shun every other ship.

My point isn’t actually that, with it being the only “acceptable” ship everyone tried to make it more wholesome, though I suppose that could be a contributor. But my ACTUAL point is where all the things I laid out finally close in on each other:

Ships were a Dangerous territory in mcyt fandom, and ships being “canon” was something a lot of people weren’t prepared to deal with. People don’t want to get too close to RPF territory, but back in the day their ideas of c! vs cc! wasn’t as great, so they default to the DSMP Rule of “if it’s stated to be roleplay, then it’s canon to the characters, if not, it’s noncanon and just the CCs hanging out”.

You see where I’m going with this? When trying to follow this rule for a character relationship where they don’t explicitly state what is or isn’t RP, they hear “we’re married” and instantly mark that as canon to the characters since it clearly isn’t true to the CCs, and tend to block out anything else, otherwise you’re risking it not actually being true to the characters. Especially when it’s things like Scott saying something mean about Jimmy; that directly contradicts the “these characters are in love” thing, so it must not be canon, right?

But wouldn’t people still remember that these things happened, or did they actually straight up not process any of it? My answer to that is: of course everyone was paying attention, but with the context that it’s the CCs playing a video game, all of the teasing and other behavior seems WAY less serious. It just looks like average friends playing a hunger games smp together. And as I explained earlier, the fandom was ONLY processing this as a CC thing, so Scott’s treatment of Jimmy never stood out because that’s just how it is playing games.

Back to DSMP, I’m not active in that fandom anymore but I’ll see snippets sometimes, and I’ve seen the claim that beeduo was actually boring in canon and the fandom was the one that made it interesting. I feel like this is exactly what happened with FH. Nobody was actually expecting anyone to go hard into romantic roleplay, so the fans just take whichever pair says they’re getting married and fill in the blanks themselves. And that was normal back then, it wasn’t fans making stuff up for no reason, it was kind of expected of us.

So yeah, I personally believe that this whole confusion about FH is a result of its time. Whether you want to finally look at the actual substance of the relationship rather than following weird rules about what is or isn’t “canon”, or you believe that since FH was from a time where romantic RP was confusing and weird it would make the most sense to take into account the time period it came from and ignore the less appealing bits in favor of the fanon, I don’t really care honestly. But man isn’t this an interesting situation.

[afrenomes]

It feels like I’ve forgotten how to make art

which sucks because I’m supposed to be, like, making a career out of this

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 7: A. A. Dixon

"'Collins' Clear-Type Press, let me ask you a question.'"

This is a very long post.

This week's edition has, in my research, become quite the edition.

Sadly, this image is the best source for the cover wrapper illustration that I could find.

You are likely familiar with Arthur Augustus Dixon's illustrations for the 1905 Collins Pocket Edition of A Tale of Two Cities. Several of them are very common to find in Internet searches and articles about the book, if not other editions of the book itself.

But the question raised by my research for this week's edition is: Are you familiar with all of them?

Thing is, as the source above states (read the whole article if you have the time, it's very interesting!), Dixon created twelve illustrations for this novel.

And sure enough, this source from the Internet Archive and this source from @oldillustrations (hello!) both have eleven of the same illustrations - with the twelfth presumably being for the wrapper, as seen in this source (previously cited) from the Victorian Web.

Alright, so that's three separate sources, all with (effectively) the same set of elaborate illustrations from 1905. Neat!

...

...but if you start counting...

...you'll notice that this seems...

...like a lot more than twelve!

Basically, there are five illustrations by A. A. Dixon that are completely unaccounted for in any of the three sources previously cited.

For the purposes of this post, the cover wrapper is considered #0 and is not pictured in these banners.

In full-size set of illustrations in this post, this source from Google Books is the source of four of those mystery illustrations:

#3: "'He stared at her with a fearful look.'" #6: "'Drive him fast to his tomb.'" #7: "He said, 'Farewell!'" #12: "'She appeared with folded arms.'" #9 ("'Patriots and friends, we are ready!'") and #11 ("'You are consigned to La Force.'") are sourced from Google Books in the full-size versions in this post simply because the Internet Archive versions of those two illustrations had cropping issues.

To me, this is mystery enough on its own. Why would another version of the book suddenly have more than the originally-stated number of illustrations by this artist? Especially considering that the Google Books source does not have #13 ("''I know you, Evremonde!''") - why would it be missing one of the "main" set?

It gets even more interesting.

As you'll notice in the banner, we're still one off: Keen-eyed observers of the full-size set of illustrations might have already noticed that #14 ("'Carton and the spy returned.'") looks a bit different than the rest of them - a bit like what happened in the previous edition of this series!

That's because that Dixon illustration comes from this completely random source - a post from a blog called the Paperback Palette dating back to 2018 - that I happened across on Google Images of all places while sitting on an airplane trying to set up this post last week!

And to top it all off, that source is missing #6!

At this point, if your first instinct is, reasonably, that perhaps Dixon didn't actually illustrate these extra five and that it was someone imitating him for later editions, then know that that was my instinct too - until I (dare I say it again) checked those signatures!!!

(I edited the colors to prevent flashing.)

All five of those illustrations bear Dixon's signature, so it's safe to assume that they are A. A. Dixon originals - from 1905, even.

Interestingly, #s 1, 10, 13, 15, and 16 don't have signatures! Does this mean anything? Probably not - as an artist myself, I often forget to put my own signature - but still, I can't resist mentioning it!

So the most likely explanation here is simply that the publishing house originally commissioned A. A. Dixon for more than twelve illustrations and then held on to some of them, eventually choosing to publish them in other editions. Still, we can't say for sure.

And as to why some are missing from the more "complete" sets - human error, most likely!

If you scrub through the Google Books source, you'll notice that #s 11 and 12 actually repeat (one even changes color, which I have no explanation for) - it's most likely either that the book was accidentally printed with repeats of #s 11 and 12 where 13 and 14 were supposed to go or that the person scanning this edition made a similar error.

As an aside, it's so interesting that the illustrations are evenly spaced throughout the book - I had not noticed that until now!

And as for the Paperback Palette source, it's most likely that the blogger accidentally skipped over an image while combing through their edition or just glossed over it when posting the batch (I understand that from experience!) We can see this by adding up the letters in some of the illustrations' captions - doing so reveals that the letters are meant to go to P, the sixteenth letter of the alphabet.

Thus, one must be missing! Case closed!

Except... It's actually (going by both the chronology of the book and the order in which this set was found in Google Books) missing the wrong letter! Here, it seems that In the Google Books source, #7 in the full set is given the seventh letter in the alphabet, G - whereas in the Paperback Palette source, "#7" is labeled as the sixth, F:

This implies not only that #6 is absent from the Paperback Palette source but also that there is a missing mystery illustration located between this source's H and K - that is to say, before or after #9!

EXCEPT... For one, this isn't the only inconsistency I've noticed - there are several places where the letters seem shifted in a strange way. I've seen #2 listed as "C" and #9 listed both as "H" and "I2i" (???), just as two examples. (My theory is that the cover wrapper and the frontispiece may be at play here, but who knows?)

More importantly, though, it seems that, for some mysterious reason, all of the sources with relatively consistent use of these letters (i.e. all but the Victorian Web) - even the sources with only eleven interior illustrations - still give #15 in the full set the fifteenth letter, O. Which, of course, may make all of this pretty moot anyway.

Dare I say..."Oh."

Suffice it to say, just as much as major sources like the Internet Archive and Google Books are vital to this sort of research and preservation work, so are smaller websites and bloggers! After all, without the Victorian Web and the Paperback Palette, we as collective netizens likely wouldn't have ever known about the cover wrapper or illustration #14 (not to mention that the versions of the illustrations from the set posted by @oldillustrations have by far the best image quality and standardization that I've found! Please go check them out if you haven't yet!).

As for the reasons behind Collins' Clear-Type Press not publishing all of the illustrations from the beginning (if that's the explanation we're to go with here), I suppose the question I'd like to ask is:

why? why would you put us through this?

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[faaun]

pls i need to provide updates

[dungeons-and-dragon-age]

uhh i thiink i havent kept anything spoilery untagged but sorry for not tagging my tevinter night posting properly! been sloppy with tagging since i'm doing those on the go while reading but i'll do my best to tag em with "tevinter nights" (or tevinter nights spoilers if it's Actual Spoiler Material) from now on o7

[you-have-made-a-fatal-error]

once upon a time, in about 2016, someone wrote HeR to find out where they sourced the images used to decorate Abby's room in MHM and were told that the art came from the Corel library.

this... was not true. obvs I don't think the HeR employee who answered that email was intentionally misleading/lying to this person, but it's bad info nevertheless. basically all the in game art from MHM/the early games came from the Mary Evans/Pictures Now collection, which I know because I've spent a buttload of time trying to id all the irl art used in the games.

so why bring up the Corel thing? because as it turns out that there is an ND game that almost exclusively* used art from Corel, but it's not MHM, or any of the early games. that game is in fact Warnings at Waverly Academy. seriously. easiest time I've ever had tracking down in-game art. (the corel art collection is waaay smaller than the mary evans/pictures now collection. like two orders of magnitude smaller. like 500 images vs 60,000 images. you get the picture.)

*and by almost exclusively I mean there is seriously one painting in wac that isn't on any of the corel art disks. and that painting? pictures now collection. why? why not any of the 450+ corel paintings that didn't make it into wac? the mind boggles.

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

This is absolutely appalling.

[mymelodyisme]

Is this a repost? Yes. Do I care? Yes. Will this get 🚩? MAYBE.

*dabs violently*

[catcactusoww]

quitting art aside from what I want to do for myself. ai has destroyed any market, and I do not want to have to be an influencer or internet personality for attention. I sincerely just want to paint whatever I want and live my life with more regular income and less stress. Thanks for the support.

[yukipri]

I feel like over the month+, I have like 1-2 hours a day max where I feel relatively awake, and every other hour I'm fighting bone-deep exhaustion. I'll bring it up with my doc at my check up on monday, but tbh i know the solution so idk if she can help

And I can work-work when I feel half-dead, or rather I force myself to because I don't want my cats to starve, but when it comes to creative stuff, it's like my mind is slippery sludge dribbling out my eyes...

The Solution, of course: just stop working 3~10 AM every day (and then taking a short nap, working during the day, and then taking another short nap, hours vary but repeat), and maybe get at least 6, ideally 8 uninterrupted hours of sleep at least every other day, ideally every day.

But do I see that happening? No.

Like rn I know I desperately need to edit fic and reply to comments and do several arts but I'm nodding off at my desk after boss DMing me work at 5 AM and dealing with repair people since 8:30 AM...