#this was a very fun experiment tho

[icecreambeach]

I have to rant about this part of A Study in Scarlet because... it seems to me that Holmes didn't just discover the hemoglobin test at the moment Stamford and Watson walked in. It seems more like he seized the first opportunity to tell ANYONE. Like he simply couldn't contain his joy and desperately needed to share it with an audience. He actually BOWS after giving Watson a demonstration.

Also... "I found it!" are the first words Watson hears from Holmes. He may as well mean "it" to be Watson. He's found IT: his audience, his best friend, his soul mate. His path in life.

This first interaction sets the pattern for their entire relationship: Holmes performing for the best and most high-value audience one could hope for while Watson gets front row tickets to the greatest show on earth. Five stars.

[sysig]

Experimentation (Patreon)

[hoofpeet]

you can tell me to hush but....i found out i am plural a week ago and several of your posts about dissociation really sound a lot like me. and really really identifying with my multiple sonas and Feeling Like Them before i realized why...idk. even if thats not your intention I really relate and its cool to see. maybe someone elses brain works similarly to mine.

I have seen a lot of plural folks relating to my dissociative. situation in the tags of those posts- which I haven't read into too much, but it's still nice to see a little comradery... It's always nice to visualize an experience so that someone potentially feels a little less weird- so I'm glad I can help a little regardless 👍

[hulloitsdani]

SHARENA WEEK DAY 6!!!!

SHES DONE!!!!! WHOOOO!!!!

Took me a minute to finally knock this one out and I'm honestly restraining myself from going crazy on the shading and background. But that's eight characters in a style I don't normally work in. I already over estimated the time this would take. I'm calling it here for my sanity.

But with that out of the way, I wanted to thank everyone for the support during Sharena Week!! And an even bigger thank you for the people who made stuff for it! I'm putting it all your art in my pocket. I am running away with it. I am intently staring at it once I have escaped the authorities.

This has been very fun! Big thank you for @sharenaweek / @sharenalovemail for hosting. Please please please go check out everything she's doing. Stare at 'em with your eyes!

And with that I'm gonna back into hibernation! See you once Kiran Fire Emblem inevitably takes over my brain again :D

[genericdragon]

I started this in January and I'm literally never going to finish it lmao

[spinnysocks]

i've had this idea for a while, to randomise two or more of the outlanders, put them into a platonic/found family prompt generator and see what comes out! sooo here we goooo :3

Outlanders interactions!! (based on a prompt generator)

Mzingo trying to teach Tunu some life skills, but all that ends up happening is the Outlands nearly being set on fire and Mzingo almost breaking a wing. Still, at least Tunu is so innocently unaware of the danger that he has fun hanging out with the vulture anyway :)

It's Kijana's birthday party! Mwoga checks in on the jackals to see what all the fuss is about so he can tell Mzingo the news of the Outlands for the day. Kijana tells him he's invited to the party. Mwoga asks “Isn't this just for your family?” and Kijana replies “You are family!” and invites the rest of the Outlanders so she can have the awesomest party :D

Njano drags Kenge along on his mission to find a supposedly very spicy herb that's a challenge to eat. When they find the plant, Njano dares Kenge to eat it too, and Kenge doesn't back down from a challenge (in the actual generator it said kenge and njano do the tipe pod challenge wtf help??)

Nne has an idea for how to get out of a bad situation. Sumu says it's the stupidest one he's ever heard, but they're going with it. (couldn't really think of what the idea or situation is for this one, but i'm gonna assume it involves violence lmao)

Nne and Tano are tasked with watching the jackal pups. They don't know how, they just are. They escort the pups on a walk, completely lost with the whole Taking Care Of Kids thing, when a rockslide traps Tano and Kijana. While they're stuck waiting for help, Tano learns how to be a nicer hyena and Kijana learns that maybe hyenas aren't so bad :3

The Wet Season is almost over, so Janja spends extra time hanging out with Kiburi before the crocs go into hibernation for the Dry Season :)

Kenge and Mwoga aren't friends yet, being very different with the monitor lizard going solo and the vulture part of a parliament. Encouraged by Jasiri to share experiences with other Outlanders, they talk about their very different lives and how going solo or being aligned with others helped them. (damn this wheel spin generator really favours these two, nne and kijana lol)

Sometimes, Goigoi likes to sing something randomly to pass the time. Janja appreciates his enthusiasm for the musical arts :3

Janja's Clan knows the ins and outs of the volcano's geysers and steam vents better than any animal. It's Cheezi's job to escort Jasiri through them today so she can get to the other side of the Outlands. You can imagine how that goes :]

if i do any more i will never stop lmaoo, maybe i'll turn this into a mini series if anyone likes it :] tho i am really disappointed that i could only find ONE platonic prompt generator like bffr, but whatever

bonus (human au) one i got for Nduli and Janja bcuz 😭😭

[t4t-dazai]

sowwy for not arts i have died. badly

[corviiids]

sparknotes for chapter 9 of as you like it because a very kind commenter asked for a breakdown and if theres one thing im good at it's breaking down

(spoilers for the fic obviously)

tihs chapter gave me so much trouble. i sat on it for so long i literally hated it by the time i posted it but im starting to forgive it now. it was, as ive said, originally way longer, and the next part of the fic was supposed to be the second half of this one... but it was starting to get absurd and i realised that neither part would have the weight i needed them to have if they were lumped in together. (with some relief, honestly, because i kind of had wanted them to be separate initially but didn't think they'd be long enough. i dont know myself very well.) anyway, the next chapter should be a bit of a doozy now although hopefully not SO absurdly long.

this chapter picks up where the previous cliff hung off, which is to say, after the 'shadow' akechi reveals that he's actually just the real ass guy. akechi in the palace what will he do. the chapter doesn't immediately kick off with ren's reaction though and that is because ren is the most repressed man alive and does not know how he feels about it.

so, akechi disguised himself to enter his palace, which is significant for a few reasons:

1. he's disguised as himself

which i think is ironic in a fun way, but it's also just a very basic nod to the fact that akechi pivots between which of his personae is his default. this isn't necessarily super meaningful, but he does later refer to the black mask suit as

a costume, instead of an outfit. i mean, don't read into it too much, he's just talking, but i did think that probably points to how he feels about his appearance generally.

2. more importantly, his disguise involves taking off his mask.

so he's disguised, yes, and he's disguised as himself, yes, but that disguise is a literal unmasking, which is also kind of ironic. in presenting himself this way he has literally and figuratively made himself vulnerable. they're inside his heart, and the entire time he's in the palace, he is exposed... again both literally and figuratively because he also starts sharing more with ren than he ever has. look, i just think it's fun to have a character who has so many layers that he has to lie so hard that he becomes himself again.

i only want to point this out because (this is also part of larger meta about mona lol) akechi knew about the metaverse, but there is no way to intuit the method of stealing hearts without guidance. it's such a specific and involved process. thje most akechi could work out on his own was that if you killed a shadow, that person would have a mental breakdown. no way to guess that if you send a calling card and then go in within the next 24 hours and take a physical manifestation of a thing that you didn't know existed (process) would lead to that person ahving a change of heart (result). so even if akechi had a palace and knew about it, even if he wanted to do something about it, he would have assumed there was nothing he could do about it - i also have no idea what the process would be for sending yourself a calling card, even if he DID know about the process. so basically in this fic akechi found his palace and just assumed that was it. he was like, fucked up lol. anyway

this just straight up isn't true HAHA so i put in the silly little dichotomy of akechi gently taking ren's arm to protect him from slipping on the ice while telling him that he lied about caring about him. i think in this chapter as akechi begins to openly explain more and more of his thought process, this is probably the first truly clear glimpse you get of exactly what akechi's distortion is and how deep it runs.

the things akechi says with total conviction in this chapter are just... not true, not a fair or founded way to view the world (or the art of performance haha), but he says them with total conviction, and hopefully it should show off how unreliable he is as a source of exposition. one commenter asked about this moment of akc's eyes going yellow and if it was somehting that happened in canon - not really, i was just thinking about those little moments in the game after you send a calling card where the game cuts from the person to their shadow to do a little oneliner about their distortion.

akechi's IN his own palace, so i thought it would be fun to kind of make it a physical thing that can happen to him where he sort of merges with his shadow for a brief second in the moments when the distortion is strongest.

OKAY this is one of my favourite bits of the chapter HAHA the deep soda lore. i dont expect anyone to remember all the way back to chapter 3 but:

literally nobody asked about this but i love the phantom thieves!!! i dream of all the little silly moments of being a team that they must have that we don't get to see in gameplay, for obvious reasons of it wouldn't really work in a game, but i can imagine them in my brain. i can imagine their trickshot contests that get their asses kicked. i can imagine them chanting at each other to chug while joker and oracle compete to down an entire bottle of brand neutral mountain dew baja blast. i can dream.

soda lore is gay.

i dont honestly think it's inherently a bad thing necessarily but this part does kind of set up like... you can see akechi very early on in life forming this worldview that the truth isn't always what you want, you know? this was a 'lie' he and his mother both bought into, they both knew what the truth actually was, so it wasn't real dishonesty, but they just had this little fantasy. i just thought it would be fun for akechi to have a way to bond with his mother and feel closer to her, and that way is by buying into this white lie. idk

akechi's mother isn't really a character and i don't want to form her into too much of one because i think it's very much the point that, like... he made this point in an earlier chapter but having lost her at a pretty young age i think it's quite crucial that akechi doesn't really have a fully formed image of who his mother is outside of what she was to him as a child. so i actively don't want her to feel too real or defined. im not interested in making an oc out of her because i think it defeats the purpose. that said, this line exists to maybe gesture very vaguely at the notion that akechi's mother was a very bright person who similarly was stuck in circumstances that didn't serve to foster her real potential. just the image in my mind of a person who's clever enough to get across algebraic notation in chess by flipping through a book in a few minutes, but was never exposed to the opportunity to learn chess until this moment in someone else's house, and also the particular situation of learning this skill WHILE at someone's place as a call girl, i dunno . i hope im treating this with the grace it deserves but i wanted to build just this particular image in vivid colour while also keeping the reality quite blurry and vague, just to give the reader a sense of where akechi came from while still preserving his limited pov.

my thoughts on the phantom thieves' methods (and how they compare to maruki) are definitely too long and involved to put into a post about this fic chapter specifically, but maybe one day. i also wanna stress im not like... strictly anti-phantom thief or anti-heartstealing lol but i do have thoughts about the philsophy of it and the thieves' hypocrisy WHATEVER that's not for this post. i bring this up only to crow about finding a way to bring up the experience machine (ie maruki's reality) in this fic without it being royal compliant and have it be... hoepfully... sufficiently relevant to the plot. wa hoo! the experience machine came up for the first time back in chapter 4 and im just delighted that i finally got to close that loop. by the way, that experiment is also called the lotus eater machine after the lotus eaters in the odyssey! i dunno that it's actively my favourite thought experiment but it's definitely up there and i think about it a lot.

TITLE DROP

i think i spoke once about what 'as you like it' means. it's obviously the name of the shakespeare play from where 'all the world's a stage' comes, but it has a couple more layers to it as well - akechi's palace is a place where he performs to what he believes other people want or need to see from him - so his appearance is as you like it. and his accusation of the thieves' heartstealing methods is that they twist a person's internal reality to suit their vision - that's the meaning he's taking here, claiming that joker is turning akechi into an unfamiliar new thing, as [joker] like[s] it. you get it.

this running joke of ren really hating vents wasn't something i planned but im attached to it now. prayer circle for his knees

ive basically given up on making sense of samerecarm, which is par for the course for any rpg or video game really where reduction to 0hp/revival are mechanics. like, im inclined to think 0hp is more equivalent to unconsciousness, because... well... otherwise it's pretty cold that they left akechi dead in the engine room without even looking for a way around the wall. lol. but one of mona's revival lines is 'being dead isnt easy!' or something like that, so i kind of just give up and assume it's video game logic you'r enot meant to look at too hard lol. the way i reconcile it for my purposes is to say it's a sort of metaverse-exclusive state of being which is not quite dead but sort of in a limbo state wher eyou can be brought back with specific revival magic, which i refer to as being down. that's uhhh, that's different from the battle status of down... which you get after being hit with a crit/technical/weak skill... look, don't think about it. joker in crow's arms.

this is literally meaningless i just wanted to include a cameo of my very favourite persona q2 battle theme.

[ejga-ostja]

Was talking to @cawcawbeech yesterday and accidentally came up w a Kylan parents AU so I wanted to draw the kid hehe More info abt this guy below the cut

He was an accidental and very unexpected pregnancy, the fact he was such an impossible odd is the main reason Kaz decided to keep him even though he was very uncertain about if he should be a dad at the time. He spent the second half of the pregnancy at Colm's farm in Novyi Zem where he also gave birth.

Johannus lives with Wylan and Jesper at the mansion. Wylan's staff believe that he was adopted from Novyi Zem and that Wylan is being a single father with Jesper's help.

Kaz visits as often as he can, which is usually once a day, to spend some time with him. He tries his best to be there for him, he's a bit distant and awkward at times, but Johannus can see that he is really trying his best and appreciates that.

Wylan is very excited to be a dad, especially given that he never thought he could be, but he's also very nervous of hurting his son the same way he'd been hurt. Initially he's a bit too gentle with his parenting, but over the years he learns how to be both kind and assertive. He's a very dedicated parent so he and Johannus are very close.

Jesper helped a great deal with helping raise him, Johannus sees him as a bit of a third parent and the two of them are very close.

Kaz, Wylan and Johannus often go on vacations together which is the only times they're really together as a family.

Johannus is probably the only person who got to know the real Kaz first and Dirtyhands second. As he grew up and slowly learned about Kaz's reputation he mostly just found it very strange because the Kaz Ketterdam seemed to know was nothing like the Kaz he knew.

Given that Kaz carried Johannus and took care of him as a newborn, Kaz finds physical affection with Johannus easier than with anybody else. He struggles to be emotionally open with his son so he finds it easier to show love through kissing and cuddling. But mostly he likes spending quality time with him, playing, reading books, etc.

Johannus and Kaz have a bit of a distant relationship at first. But when Johannus turns 13, Kaz lets him hang out with him in the Barrel (assuring his safety every step of the way ofc) and after finally seeing what his father's life is like and what he gets up to, Johannus finally feels closer to him and the two of them get along great after that (also bc the two of them are very similar personality-wise).

He has dyslexia just like Wylan, but his is less severe (he can still read, he just struggles with it). Initially Wylan has a hard time accepting it, terrified of his son suffering the same way as he had. But as he sees everyone accepting Johannus with ease and him never feeling ashamed of himself, he learns that his dyslexia was never the problem, his father was.

[lotus-lamps]

im not late YOU'RE late (man whats with me and niko related celebration art and being late with it)

this did not turn out the way i wanted to but. oh well.

HOWEVER. I GOT A NEW APPLE PEN FOR CHRISTMAS. SO. INCREASED ART MOTIVATION AND ART CAPABILITIES LETS GOOOOOOOOO

also yes i AM obnoxious enough to put my watermark in the middle of the drawing. yes new watermark. old one was boring lol. plus i rarely go by cozm now

okay bye bye enjoy your break!

[sainz100]

Max Verstappen | 2024 Belgian GP | 📸 via Verstappencom's Insta

[angelsdean]

it’s so fascinating seeing what metaphors and interpretations people will read into things, esp based on their own experiences. like I’ll see posts saying “spn is so clearly abt this” and well, it is so clearly Not to many other people but someone very much believes it is about that and has constructed a lens through which they view the entire show where it is about that specific theme / interpretation. And it’s like, okay! We are watching wildly different shows! But okay! Have fun with that, over there

[sysig]

You keep underestimating others and it’ll come back to bite you (Patreon)

[h0estar]

the dumpster battle was so intense, it felt like I was in the court with them

[allastoredeer]

Oh no, I hope all the folks annoyed about the influx of radioapple art with Lucifer in a dress aren’t talking about all the recent art of flapper!Lucifer. I've been seeing tons of radioapple art with Luci dressed in drag as a flapper girl and being all flirty towards an incredibly flustered Alastor, and I've loved every bit of it! No sign of any of the usual Manlyman!Alastor/UuU!Lucifer crap, just flapper!Luci teasing a VERY red-faced Alastor. I really hope that's not what people are talking about😟

I think I've seen pics of that floating around Twitter. Love the dress design, made me want to draw Alastor in one T.T Idk if that's the one any of the other Anon's were talking about specifically, but even if it is, don't let that take away you're enjoyment of it. You are 100% allowed to like things even if other people dislike it.

This is fandom. Curate it with people and fandom art/fics/edits etc... that you enjoy and ignore the rest 😊It can be irritating and disheartening to see people hating on something you really enjoy (I get the feeling, I've felt the same way about characters and shows I like) but at the end of the day, you loving it and them hating it doesn't actually hurt anyone. We're all here to have a good time, whether that's gushing about a ship/show with a like-minded community or ranting about it with a like-minded community. Both can be fun and cathartic.

I mean, even if you did like UwU Lucifer and Manlyman!Alastor, I'm not going to seek you out and tell you all the things I dislike about it and why you shouldn't like it, nor should anyone else. I'm not here to rain on anybody's parade. That's why I rant here, on my own blog, in my own little space, with fans who agree and understand my frustrations. That way anyone who doesn't want to see my posts can block and/or mute me and go about their day enjoying the content that makes them happy.

Make sure to give the flapper!Lucifer and flustered!Alastor art some love so the artists know you're enjoying it too! As an artist myself, that does wonders for our motivation to draw it more often LOL

[stealingyourbones]

Bones. Bones.

How have you NEVER HEARD of The X-Files before? Very popular 90s TV show. Very. Very. Very Popular. Next you'll tell me you haven't heard of Xena: Warrior Princess.

Yes Mulder/Sculley was a ship. it was Such a huge ship that the ship *coined the phrase shipping*.

that is all thank you for coming to my mini-talk, this has been a brief foray into Fandom History. o7

Simply said, I was born in the 2000s, I don’t think I’ve ever heard X files ever mentioned besides in passing.

When I replied saying I was offline as a kiddo I truly meant it, ya girl only had books, the outdoors, and art as things to do. I think X Files is some supernatural/alien type thing right? That’s why it’s “X Files” because it’s what would be in conspiracy theory type censored government documents???

With the “check back for bites” thing, like are the aliens like zombies?

And what it COINED THE PHRASE SHIPPING? That’s so rad I absolutely have to read the history of that, that’s so incredibly neat my dude holy hell