tothedistantsky - Tumblr blog

[tothedistantsky]

i'll strangle you or i'll kiss you on the mouth

[tothedistantsky]

kabru dunmeshi is basically a chernobyl survivor who was adopted by an eternally young hot white woman who was going to pamper him for his entire life but instead of wanting to be pampered he was like "mom, i need to become a stalker. i need to return to the Zone" and his elf mom was like "nooo the Zone sucks you'll be shot by a bandit" and he was like "no mom i need to go to the Zone and find out what happened" and she was like "fine" and pulled out a machinegun from her days in the Suicide Squad and trained him to kill while firing on him with live ammunition. Then he went to the Zone and immediately got killed by a pack of wild dogs because elf mom only taught him how to shoot other humans

[tothedistantsky]

This is the latest Sketch-a-Wish voted by my lovely Patreon members for March! Featuring Jacks head-bonking gently encouraging Evangeline, hoping she'll remember *something*. One of my favorite scenes from A Curse For True Love! There are two very subtle symbolism I threw in here (one is the title referencing the scene in the book, the other, in the bg for its cultural meaning) to fuel more angst. ✨fireElmo.gif ✨ ----- Stephanie has graciously allowed me to add this artwork to my shop collection of licensed prints, already up via the links in my bio! ----- Hope you all have a pleasant week! :)

[tothedistantsky]

ba dum ksh

[tothedistantsky]

imagination (1963) - harold ordway rugg

"chekhovs cat / schrödingers razor / occams gun"

[tothedistantsky]

The Archies (2023) dir. Zoya Akhtar

[tothedistantsky]

The Archies (2023), dir. Zoya Akhtar

[tothedistantsky]

My other fun addition to the Hbomberguy video stuff is not just that you need to start checking everyone's sources just to make sure you aren't being duped, but to not use them as a stand in for media consumption/experiences either. Like I'm not gonna lecture you on reading sources cause I am the first one to not and that's my laziness, but like sometimes more important than checking the original analysis of something is just to... see tge thing being analyzed yourself. That's not even about misinformation or lying, sometimes people's opinions just SUCK ASS.

Like there are youtube video essayists I overall kinda respect but they have dogshit opinions on things. I used to love Jack Saint's bad faith overly critical analyses of throwaway kids films, until I realized he also saw films that in my opinion had a lot of merit, and it turned me off from him. Big Joel is cool as hell, but anytime he gives his opinion on animation save like a few points, I completely glaze over and find him annoying. The other day I watched a video essay about the "Magical Negro" trope, and the first movie sourced interested me, so I watched it and I hardly understand why they put that in, it framed the movie as something it wasn't.

Just in general, it's good practice to make sure your opinions on media are your own and experience it yourself. MY biggest takeaway from the Hbomn video wasn't to throw rocks at Somerton or start obsessively fact-checking every essayist I watch, but to make sure I have a baseline of what they talking about myself and not letting anyone throw around media examples without reckless abandon. The Celluloid Closet and Tinkerbelles and Evil Queens is on my watxh/read list now, but the first thing I did from the words he stole from Celluoid Closet was watch Rebels Without A Cause out of curiosity of this gay subtext in a 50s blockbuster. And it was a super interesting experience that has given me my own unrelated opinions. Not to discount whatever important queer reading and historical importance the film has, but I'm happy I also have more than just that cause I Watched It Myself, not someone's specific and unavoidably biased reading of it.

The video isn't about cultivating suspicion but cultivating appreciation for the skills of analytical/informative/opinion writing. So even when people aren't being lying grifters, it's just good to be your own critic and media analyst. Maybe you'll even contribute to that world yourself, or maybe you'll keep all your cool opinions in your heart and die, who cares. The point is that unlike some people, your opinions and words are your own. It's a beautiful thing to have your own creative voice.

[tothedistantsky]

In case you missed the earlier announcement… to keep the gremlins fed during the wait for Holy Terrors, I will be releasing The Fallow Year, a series of ten short stories that take place in the months between the end of Painted Devils and the beginning of Holy Terrors. They will alternate between Vanja and Emeric’s POVs as they spend some time… working on themselves. 🥲 I will be releasing one for every 100 preorders of Holy Terrors at independent bookstores, or 200 preorders of HT total, whichever comes first.

Each story will be published on AO3, because why not! I finished writing them back in March—so they’re ready to go when you are 😘

International and special edition orders will count as long as the campaign’s still running; don’t stress if the version you want isn’t available yet, because we’ll need your preorder for later stories!

The google form to submit your preorder receipt will go live on Small Business Saturday, November 25. If you have any further questions, please check the FAQ video/comments there before asking here!

[tothedistantsky]

the older I get, the more the technological changes I've lived through as a millennial feel bizarre to me. we had computers in my primary school classroom; I first learned to type on a typewriter. I had a cellphone as a teenager, but still needed a physical train timetable. my parents listened to LP records when I was growing up; meanwhile, my childhood cassette tape collection became a CD collection, until I started downloading mp3s on kazaa over our 56k modem internet connection to play in winamp on my desktop computer, and now my laptop doesn't even have a disc tray. I used to save my word documents on floppy discs. I grew up using the rotary phone at my grandparents' house and our wall-connected landline; my mother's first cellphone was so big, we called it The Brick. I once took my desktop computer - monitor, tower and all - on the train to attend a LAN party at a friend's house where we had to connect to the internet with physical cables to play together, and where one friend's massive CRT monitor wouldn't fit on any available table. as kids, we used to make concertina caterpillars in class with the punctured and perforated paper strips that were left over whenever anything was printed on the room's dot matrix printer, which was outdated by the time I was in high school. VHS tapes became DVDs, and you could still rent both at the local video store when I was first married, but those shops all died out within the next six years. my facebook account predates the iphone camera - I used to carry around a separate digital camera and manually upload photos to the computer in order to post them; there are rolls of undeveloped film from my childhood still in envelopes from the chemist's in my childhood photo albums. I have a photo album from my wedding, but no physical albums of my child; by then, we were all posting online, and now that's a decade's worth of pictures I'd have to sort through manually in order to create one. there are video games I tell my son about but can't ever show him because the consoles they used to run on are all obsolete and the games were never remastered for the new ones that don't have the requisite backwards compatibility. I used to have a walkman for car trips as a kid; then I had a discman and a plastic hardshell case of CDs to carry around as a teenager; later, a friend gave my husband and I engraved matching ipods as a wedding present, and we used them both until they stopped working; now they're obsolete. today I texted my mother, who was born in 1950, a tiktok upload of an instructional video for girls from 1956 on how to look after their hair and nails and fold their clothes. my father was born four years after the invention of colour televison; he worked in radio and print journalism, and in the years before his health declined, even though he logically understood that newspapers existed online, he would clip out articles from the physical paper, put them in an envelope and mail them to me overseas if he wanted me to read them. and now I hold the world in a glass-faced rectangle, and I have access to everything and ownership of nothing, and everything I write online can potentially be wiped out at the drop of a hat by the ego of an idiot manchild billionaire. as a child, I wore a watch, but like most of my generation, I stopped when cellphones started telling us the time and they became redundant. now, my son wears a smartwatch so we can call him home from playing in the neighbourhood park, and there's a tanline on his wrist ike the one I haven't had since the age of fifteen. and I wonder: what will 2030 look like?

[tothedistantsky]

[tothedistantsky]

very rarely do i finish a book and have an 'i'm going to think about this for an eternity' moment, but little thieves! an absolute menace of a main character! the nerd she fell in love with! and they're both demi! and the exploration of class and gender! and family and forgiveness and redemption! the fact that none of it is a straight road! that there's constant relapses and questioning and it is not easy to change but it was worth it! and she didn't have to fundamentally change herself to do it! vanja was allowed to be her troublemaking self and none of her trauma was invalidated because of her reactions! in fact people supported her more when she was honest! they learnt how to see her and she learnt how to see other people and—

[tothedistantsky]

I think I've now illustrated/papercraft every corner of this scene now. But it's such a great contrast to Night-Glimmer (shown side-by-side on the last slide). In Night-Glimmer, we're in Evangeline's perspective as Jacks carries her to a warm and safe tree-house. But turn the camera around, and from Jacks's POV, we see a dark void behind him, surrounded by the snow-tipped pine trees, a trapped feeling, stars hanging out of reach. It's still touches on the magical aspects of this scene, but frames a very different perspective! This piece is officially licensed and available in both shops (link in bio!)

[tothedistantsky]

help me hold on to you 🦊🏹

[tothedistantsky]

Toodles, Riverdale (2017-2023)

“This is cuckoo bananas... But I'm also kinda feeling it.”

[tothedistantsky]

Alphonse is one of the characters of all time I think about him constantly. He’s a 14 year old boy’s soul stuck in a giant scary suit of armor. He’s a gentleman and he’s kind and he has good conflict deescalation skills but his body is a giant scary suit of armor. He befriends every evil henchman he comes across. He loves kittens. He’s a little shit to his older brother sometimes, as all younger brothers are. But his body is a giant scary suit of armor. Arakawa really popped off with Alphonse

[tothedistantsky]

Dropping a very special Sketch-a-wish, voted on by my lovely Patreon members for August! The winning request was to illustrate an off-page scene from The Folk of the Air series, when Cardan was writing his letters to Jude. I countered that Cardan went through the five stages of grief writing those letters, and each deserved it's own illustration. (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance) You'll also notice some familiar outfits throughout! Have a great weekend. :)