WORKING ON A REWRITE

No donation asks here, please send them to @icannotgetoverbirds (my main) instead. Any blogs sending donation requests here will be blocked from this blog only. I HEREFORE DECLARE THAT ON THIS BLOG HALLOWEEN IS CELEBRATED FROM AUGUST 1ST TO NOVEMBER 30TH. CHRISTMAS NEEDS TO GET BACK IN THE DECEMBER BOX.

[gracklekeyer2000]

fic drop!

here y'all go~

[gracklekeyer2000]

The Incident (Parts 1 and 2)

[anticsofafox]

Hey @queenannabellamq Do you still celebrate your birthday? or do any of your friends to it for you? I have to imagine at that age and between the meditations it starts to lose meaning. But fox would still like to make you some queffler if that day comes out ^-^ The calendar system is the same as when you were born right? that might make it a bit harder to track..

[queenannabellamq]

Hey there sweets!

One of the downsides'a bein' immortal is the dang number systems keep changin'

Base 10 right? Fingers and toes? No no. Let's go with base 7 because a farmer everybody liked noticed how every 7 weeks the mountain goats would appear up the side of his favorite rock 🙄

I mean it was a bit of an oddity that they were up there like clockwork, and that numbering system did give us some'a the best engineering Abelia's ever had

But whaddaya do when the goats stop comin'?

I know what they did. They panicked and came to me. What do I know about numbering systems? Why do they need to change? Even if the goats weren't there everyone knew they were supposed to be... but noooo....I had to convene a whole... wait that's part of... I'm sure you'll hear about that soon enough

Point is, I don't know how many gimbs (goat climbs) I am, I'll tell ya that much

What system do you use in this reality again? Some kinda spinny thing with 30s and 31s and somehow you get 365? Eh, no weirder than anything else I guess 😅

[anticsofafox]

oh no ours is definitly worse, I'd far prefer gimbs, base 7 rules. but yeah we got months that range from 28-31 days and twelve months a year, meanwhile we *could* have 13 months with half and change of a gimb in each but no, that'd be to simple... anyway, yeah. numbering systems are *rough*. You just do so much I think you deserve some days of the year where you can just be Annibella and not queen of Abella yknow? A simple day where you're friends come together and join you on your favorite activities and having your favorite foods. Yknow what, if you dont have a system for that why not make it every gimb, you're one of the only people around who remember that system anyways. Every gimb is Annibella day, how ya like that idea?

[queen-mihai]

Well there was that festival they had around the time of the Battle of the Brotherhood

I'd say that was pretty close to what we would consider a yearly thing, Annie

Hmmm... and that's coming up too

How about we celebrate the festival of the Heather? Could do early autumn?

[queenannabellamq]

Ahhhh the TATS system! Okay! I gotcha! (Trips Around the Star)

Yknow I wouldn't mind the festival of the Heather! Then we can honor my sisters! We can celebrate for a whole gimblet! (Here ya call it a week!)

[queen-mihai]

@anticsofafox maybe we can do like a mini "Festival of the Heather" once book 3 comes out? That'll be about the right time 🥰 (we'll celebrate by.... reading about Annabella's adventures!)

[queen-mihai]

Probably worth noting that there's no such thing as England in Abelia so whatever we do in English wouldn't really transfer to an Abelian citizen

But since the author of the series couldn't be bothered to invent an entire conlang, we're just going with "translation happens automatically in the authors mind and it's totally a different language you guys"

[gracklekeyer2000]

creature is doing fic research, trust

[icannotgetoverbirds]

THEY GAVE ME FUCKIGN GLUTEN BEER TvT

[icannotgetoverbirds]

beer research results (i bought my own gluten free beer later). taste: genuinely not as bad as i expected. kind of grew on me. drunkenness level: much more than i expected, but that's on me for not considering the abv. Still fairly manageable, but i didn't even finish the can.

drunkenness quality: i ended up kinda miserable and i never want to drink beer again. like. it tasted nice enough that i might try an alcohol-free one but genuinely it just seemed like turbo depression juice in comparison to the other alcohols I've tried. i read in a fanfic once that different alcohols make the drunkenness feel different, and i thought that was just a clever if contrived plot device. still not convinced that I'm not just built different (wrong) but it would go a long way to explain why Shane is so goddamn miserable, dude only drinks beer???? like obviously the constant alcohol intake and other shit going on is the majority of the issue but the fact that it's beer is definitely not helping

conclusion: when elliott buys jay a beer, he's going to get sad and sappy and say some really embarrassing shit and cry a lot before Gus cuts him off (before he even finishes his drink) and sends him to bed. except i just remembered he's gonna have (probably undiagnosed and therefore untreated) POTS at the time so. dude is 100% gonna pass the fuck out.

Elliott doesn't come to the Saloon if it's raining, Harvey only comes to the Saloon (in spring) if it's raining, so it could be a fun call for him to get that hey, Jay just drank three sips of beer and promptly passed out, will you make sure he's not dying? Great opportunity for Jay and Harvey to get way too personal with each other, for Harvey to worry himself half to death, and for Elliott to feel SO bad about the whole thing.

I also could have Jay mildly injure himself on the way down in a way that draws blood, which would be really fun because I'm going to have Elliott deal with vasovagal syncope wrt medical stuff and blood, which would have Harvey needing to deal with two unconscious goofballs instead of just one :) yaaaaaaaaaaay!!!! yippeeeeee!!! hooray!!!!

we'll have to wait and see if that's when the diagnosis (or diagnoses) happens as well

maybe i should just start writing these scenes and connecting them and posting them before i tie it all into a fic 🤔 it'll all be canon-adjacent until the fic happens but it could be fun!

Additional notes: My lovely wife also bought me ale, so I'm going to try that at some point and report back. After the beer, tho, I'm going to be a lot more cautious about when i drink it to ensure best odds of not having An Bad Time

[yossyislandd]

when the characters you like get beat the fuck up

[batafterdark2]

this but in a pervert way

[yossyislandd]

i promise you it was

[yossyislandd]

i can't wait for the characters i like to suffer even more!

[scribeherself]

There is no drug on earth that can replicate the absolute euphoria of hitting a writing flow state at 2:00 AM. You aren’t even typing anymore. You are a vessel. You are a channel for the gods. The characters are speaking directly into your brain and you’re just the stenographer trying to keep up. You feel like you could fight a bear. You feel like you invented the alphabet

[vicvsvir]

can grass block join the shitty eridian club

[beargirl2]

[stuck-in-hawkins]

You know what’s some crazy $hit?

This fabulous bitch

She makes a shit ton of poses (like 16,000 or some crazy nonsense).  I used this lovely lady to draw so much as a teen.  Whether it was some nerdy pose for my Mary Sue as fuck OCs

or for full on fight sequences

or for tragic deaths of my OCs in the arms of a totally OOC main protagonist.  

this bitch hooked me up.  

And with the wildest, craziest stuff that you could see in your head but had no way or resources to reasonably draw like

or this

or this

DUDE!  INASNE SHIT!!  So I was using her for a pose reference and decided, you know what, I owe this bitch some cash.  Lemme dole it out for her.  BUT then, I looked and saw she only has 286 fucking patrons!!  This chick gives out free shit and spends countless hours arranging these shoots and setting this stuff up.  

I’ll fork up the cash, SenshiStock.  You’re worth it.  

Check out this amazing woman’s stuff, and get knowledged:  https://www.deviantart.com/senshistock

[brainmuncher]

I have been following her for years on deviantart.

Highly reccomend checking her out. She’s the best. If I had any money to throw I’d throw it at her for providing such a big help in my life.

[sanders-sides-uncorrect-quotes]

This hero doesn’t wear capes, she instead wears (and looks utterly flawless) in tank tops(?)

[anstarwar]

Interrupting my regular Star Wars BS to reblog this because @senshistock is amazing and beyond worth the follow and support!  I first started using her refs gosh I want to say back in maybe 2008, and I’m happy to be a supporter of her over on Patreon.  If you’re an artist please go find her stuff on all the platforms, you will not regret it!

[cacodaemonia]

Yessss, she is so awesome! Been following her for years. My favorite stock artist is jademacalla, who is, incidentally, in the last two images above. He has a lot of great angles, costumes, gear, etc! I love his hands, too.

[steppingonshatteredglass-deacti]

rb to save an artists life

[thatdisasterauthor]

Just so everyone knows, she recently stopped using the name SenshiStock and switched to AdorkaStock! All her links and socials have switched to that. Also she has a TikTok of her doing the poses live, which is stupid useful because you can pause it at any point in the pose for just the right reference.

[laterkiss]

“hey did you kiss the brick before you threw it” “prev so true” “EXACTLY!!!” “I am always saying this” “op im gonna kill myself” “dont talk to me im unwell about this” “agskhksj!!!"

[sea-salted-wolverine]

Nothing like browsing hurt/comfort on ao3 to really drive home that no one fucking knows how hypothermia works. Jesus guys. Get it together. Don't make me do a psa. It'll be embarrassing for everyone.

[sea-salted-wolverine]

If you're getting the bulk of your emergency preparedness from archive of our own or heaven forbid Tumblr dot com on the world wide web, the problem is several steps upstream. I can't help you much with that one. But I can make a helpful critique on writing effective whump because that's what we're here for! Should hypothermia be your plot agent of choice you should recognize that the true horror and tragedy is that you have more time than you think you do and all your mistakes are easily fixable but you can't do a damn thing about them.

Give your character with agency and control issues hypothermia. They will have nightmares about the slow paralysis and lethargy of cold until the day they die. The physical and mental symptoms creep in by degrees that you can easily monitor and recognize but are powerless to stop. The dissolution of initiative and the loss of rationality is terrifying when it happens and it's actually worse after warming up because you can remember being dead certain that striping out of your clothes in the snow was the right thing to do.

The psychology of the situation is as close as reality can get to the frog boiling experiment, where everything slowly gets worse and worse and the only thing that could stop it is getting out of the scenario and since that's an impossibility there's nothing that can solve anything. Bash your whumpee with utter hopelessness while giving them nerve damage, buy one get one style.

If you must get nitpickety about the physics and medical details, hypothermia is when the human body can not maintain internal temperature warmer than the surrounding environment. Homeostasis is maintained by - wait no, too many big words. Drink water, eat food, body needs to keep the guts warm. Food and water are the fuel to keep the guts warm. Guts are 90(ish) degrees, air is usually cooler than that and you can go hypothermic in weather as warm as 60 if you haven't been drinking or eating. The water drinking part is more important than the eating part. Hypothermia at 60 is not gonna be the same as hypothermia in below freezing weather. The nerve damage part is from the equivalent of freezer burn happening in living flesh, so that won't happen if the ambient air temp is above freezing, niether will the frostbite or gangrene. You also dont need to be hypothermic for frostbite to occur on skin and extremities since your core can be perfectly toasty while your toes freeze solid, but it does tend to happen together.

As for your rescuer/caretaker/comfortgiver. This shit is fucking terrifying. The whole cuddle for warmth thing can be actively dangerous since you are also a human being with guts that need to stay warm and a finite amount of body heat to donate. If you're still out in the cold, cuddling with a person sized ice pack is a good way to end up with 2 person sized ice packs. Even if you are in a safe place to get them warm, ouch, frostbite hurts and it only starts hurting when you warm up enough to not be numb, so you can save your person and then forcibly subject them to creeping searing pain that you cannot soothe.

Not to mention the heart attacks. A rush of cold blood from the extremities back to the heart can be enough to cause the cardiac muscle to go wtf and freak out. (Super scientific terminology right there for ya) What would cause a sudden rush of cold blood like that? A bruise. Even a little one. Your patient also happens to be numb, disoriented, and clumsy at the moment. Good luck. Pray for decent baseline cardiac health.

So here's the thing. I dont actually care if the whump is accurate. I want it to be interesting. Go sort through your blorbos for the one who would have the worst time in the above situations. Fly my scarabs. I want those characters tired and chilled, wet and weather beaten. Get after it. On to thermodynamically improbable scenarios we go!

[sea-salted-wolverine]

From an allegorical standpoint, being numb means it is really easy to hurt yourself. Go get a hold of your repression princess who shrugs everything off because they're fine guys and have them burn the shit out of their hands trying to warm up. Numb fingers and fire is not a great combo. Numb fingers and boiling water is also not great. All sorts of juicy parallels to be drawn.

Fun tidbit about frostbite specifically, when you freeze a body part the water in that body part expands into nasty little ice crystals that tear up the cell walls and organ tissues. That's where the damage comes from. Once its frozen though, its not as if the ice crystals can do anything else, but if things thaw and refreeze without medical attention or time to heal in between, that's how you lose fingers. The water refreezes into crystals and then there are more more sharp edges on the inside of cells and tissues. Meat turns to goo, meat that is goo doesn't do anything but rot and that's gangrene. Point being, if you're going to warm someone up, make sure you can keep them warm. This is where you put fun metaphors about backsliding and relapses.

Like most situations, everything can be made worse by being drunk. Alcohol acts as a vasodialator and opens up all the capillaries which will bleed heat. Do not get drunk and take a nap in a snowberm, you only feel sweaty and warm, you ain't. Legions of homeless alcoholics have discovered this the hard way.

As for the bit about having more time than you think you do, hypothermia and associated motor skill loss can definitely creep up on you if you aren't familiar with the progression, but it is a progressive problem. Your hands will get stiff and the way you measure how cold you're getting is to touch your thumb to your fingers. Thumb to pinky will be the first to go and as you lose range of motion in your hands it will progress to ring finger. When you can't make your thumb meet your index finger that's the sign that you need to drop whatever you're doing and go get warm because if it gets much worse you won't be able to use your hands. Not having use of your hands make the whole 'getting out of the cold and getting warm' bit that much harder.

[changelingchilde9]

Thinking that stripping is a good idea is probably the last idea you will ever have, because that's the point where your body gives up on conserving heat and it all gets dumped back into the extremities. Or at least we think that's what happens, people don't survive that shit often enough for us to actually check.

[arsonist-chicken]

@goth-automaton seems like a post for you ✨

And to add on and give you another way to torture your characters: Pick the one who is most miserable when they have to sit still and wait. Now give them moderate to severe hypothermia.

OP already explained that a rush of cold blood from the extremities to the heart can cause a heart attack, and you know what else can cause the blood to rush back? Moving. Literally just moving. If your character is found outside acting confused, breathing slowly, shivering or worse, not shivering anymore and all they want is to walk back to where it's warm? Sucks to be them. Every second they do anything but lay down (on a sled, a rescue blanket, a damn tree log, whatever the rescuer has or finds) and don't move a single muscle and just let themselves be transported to safety is a second more for their body to decide that If We Are Moving, We Need Warm Feet And Hands Too, and send that cold blood away from the extremities back to the heart and give itself a heart attack from the cold shock.

So. Sorry whumpee no. 3 but no matter how much you hate getting taken care of or saved or how much trauma you have from someone dragging you around or being unable to move – if you want to survive, you will. not. move. a single muscle.

(Also for the rescuers, if they absolutely have to transport whumpee up or down a hill or stairs or any other incline, they need to keep their body as horizontal as possible, do not make it easier for the body to rush blood up or down the body – even if that means that whumpee who hates touch or physical proximity now needs to be lifted by several people. And if horizontal is really not possible, the rescuers absolutely have to keep whumpee's head above the heart, don't let that cold leg blood fall down towards the heart, the head is the highest point at all times – even if that means that whumpee who has trust issues from the seventh circle of hell and half an aneurysm at the thought of not being able to control everything at all times now needs to be transported head-first and thus can't see ahead where they are going.)

[johannestevans]

Also, consider. A magical version of the bends. Whenever someone from a non- or low-magical land has to go into a very magic rich forest or land or dimension, having to take breaks to let their bodies adjust to the new magic exposure or else their blood will boil in their veins or they'll Transform

[wormtoxin]

actually the bends only kicks in when you try to LEAVE the high pressure area. or in this case, magic rich area?

Getting deeper and deeper into feywilds and knowing that however deep you get, it’s gonna take twice as long to escape without magic tearing its way out of you

[amalgamezz]

since the concept of "romance as horror" keeps getting misinterpreted, id like to propose a much clearer alternative: romance as an instrument of torture

[icannotgetoverbirds]

incredibly upsetting to find out that my first ever successfully completed animation was made based on a genai image but i worked on this shit with my own creature claws so fuck it I'm posting it anyways

id under the cut

a 4-frame, doodled, colored, and looped animation of a barn owl bonking its head against a non-existent ground/surface. It squeezes its eyes shut on impact, opens them as it squishes down and bounces back up from the force of the motion. In the end, it looks at the viewer from between its legs, under its body. in the top-right corner is my signature, which is just the name "byrd" in cursive.

[achilleanauthor]

It is morally okay to steal a concept from ai if you're redrawing it yourself. I would even encourage it

[icannotgetoverbirds]

real but also i try to avoid it bc i am still learning and it fucks up the anatomy all the time 😔 but this time im going to let it slide because otherwise I'll literally never do animation again

[icannotgetoverbirds]

also i might improve on this one at some point, we'll see

[midwinterhunt]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

[tofupixel]

MapCrunch. Environment artists rejoice. Random locations, filter by indoor or outdoor, rural or urban, specific country. Great for realistic/authentic building ref.

[ghostpainters]

You're awsome OP

[midwinterhunt]

jumpscare when someone i follow puts my own post on my dash

[icannotgetoverbirds]

incredibly upsetting to find out that my first ever successfully completed animation was made based on a genai image but i worked on this shit with my own creature claws so fuck it I'm posting it anyways

id under the cut

a 4-frame, doodled, colored, and looped animation of a barn owl bonking its head against a non-existent ground/surface. It squeezes its eyes shut on impact, opens them as it squishes down and bounces back up from the force of the motion. In the end, it looks at the viewer from between its legs, under its body. in the top-right corner is my signature, which is just the name "byrd" in cursive.

[obelisart]

Nobody:

Absolutely nobody:

A writer, getting stabbed: This is gonna be so useful omg

Read The Recloseted Lesbian on:

Webtoon

Tapas

Namicomi

Patreon

Kindle