Hey, just wanted to send you some applause and kudos for Supergirl's Family Vacation -- just loved this book. The world you and Brandon Snider have created is delightful — really fun and touching, making a unique version of Kara and the Superman family, and other DC characters.
And your artwork really gives the characters life and individuality; IMO, you brought out the humor and the emotion perfectly.
(And your Batman looks like he really, really needs a vacation. 😁)
I checked it out from the library, and enjoyed it so much I went out and bought it the next day.
If there’s any chance that you’re involved in a sequel to this book, I will pre-order it in a heartbeat.
Oh, thank you so much! :D For both the kind comment and supporting the book (at the library as well as picking up a copy!) Always so glad to hear folks have enjoyed it—I agree that Brandon wrote such a fun version of the Superfam/DCU to explore, was so glad to have the opportunity to help him bring it to life! (I’d like to think Bruce’s time watching Krypto and the fortress could give him a bit of a staycation? Maybe? XD)
“So... We got the exploding diarrhea. Here's my advice for anyone who doesn't have it yet:
It's going to take a minute for the government to pin down where this is coming from, and then issue a recall, because the FDA has been gutted. But, I can tell you, without a shadow of a doubt : this is coming from Taylor Farms produce, and you will see them recalled.
You'll want to avoid all Taylor Farms produce in the grocery store. They supply McDonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut, about any fast food place you can think of.
Raspberries, watermelons, cilantro, and the veggies you're hearing about are not causing this many people to get sick. It's the shredded lettuce, specifically, that's the problem. But, you'll want to stay away from every type of produce this company puts out, because one strand of shredded lettuce is all it takes to contaminate bushels.
Taylor Farms is the source. Taco Bell proactively pulled their produce from their restaurants. You're going to see other fast food places doing this, and probably will see that before the government names a source. The FDA knows this, but they can't come out and tell us all until there's proof, which takes resources and research, which takes manpower, but the FDA has been cut by about 20-30%
During the Biden term, onions at McDonald's had ecoli. We knew this because DNA testing was done quickly and they were able to narrow it down to one place that caused the outbreak. And, it was traced back to Taylor Farms. This isn't going to be solved as quickly though.
When you get this, make a virtual appointment to your PCP - a "same day sick" appointment. Tell them someone in your family just tested for this and was positive and was prescribed Bactrim. If you go in person, they're probably going to make you poop in a cup and wait until results come back to prescribe.
You'll know when you get this. Trust me on all of this.
You'll want to stay hydrated because this parasite damages the lining of the small intestine. Your small intestine, in turn, secretes more water into the gut, and less nutrients and liquid are able to remain in the body. So no matter how much you shit, you're going to want to drink. A day of this leads to dehydration if you don't increase your fluid intake, and a few days will land you in the hospital.
If you have headaches, weakness, muscle cramps, dizziness, or an increase heart rate - hydrate, hydrate, hydrate. Go to the ER for fluids if you can't drink enough.
Thank you for coming to my Ted talk. Brought to you by America's 250 birthday celebrations, workforce reduction in the FDA and CDC, and viewers like you.
Please feel free to share this.
And, MAGA - don't blow up the comment section. I argued with y'all on COVID bc I was afraid y'all would die, but I really don't care if you get explosive diarrhea.
I saw this on insta and someone commented asking her how she knew they were in there and she said that she saw the mama duck with only one duckling and thought it was suspicious so she stopped to check and hear them quacking down there... :') <3
For when you need a reminder that there really is goodness in the world
And for whenever someone mistakenly tells you that humans can only hurt nature -
We are part of nature. And we are uniquely equipped, in many ways, to help heal the planet we are part of - so long as we keep choosing to help, and to heal, this planet of which we are a part
OceanGate, the deep-sea exploration company that created the Titan submersible, has removed its Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn a
poor things, well we should definitely make this easier on them by never repeatedly mentioning their name and deeds on the "reblog things forever" website
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is “Martin and Bosco Day”. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
Marakuji's Volume 3 collection, titled Masquerade, finally comin' at you hot off the scanners of feste and I, who once again worked together to get you the whole fleet of miserably expensive blind swaps! (The first volume, Tea Time, and the second, Birdcage, are of course also available there!)
What's different this time?? Well, the gallery systems on ohtori.nu no longer work in the backend. The time has finally come for me to retire the effort of maintaining a decades old gallery program and begin migrating the existing structure into a static website that I can hopefully keep up indefinitely. That will be a huge personal clusterfuck and miserable undertaking, but I'm currently working with some more modernly savvy Utena fans to make that happen! In the meantime, I certainly have no plans whatsoever to stop hosting new Utena artwork, and so that these new scans have a happy little landing site (more chibis on the way!) I uploaded them to the gallery system within the Something Eternal forum, which will now be the main space I add new scans.
Because chibis are something there aren't actually that many of to document, I went back and organized them by release, and added context about the merchandises they're attached to and more specific release information! So go visit these adorable new chibis and their full acrylic plates here, along with all their friends, in The Chibi Gallery!
Thanks again to feste for helping getting these scans collected up! I hope y'all enjoy them, and wish us all luck as we try to figure out how the fuck to make a static site out of galleries that are tens of thousands of imagesewhfuiywegfduyewgfdew
It terrifies me that there’s so much raging passion in the lgbt+ community that insist on marginalizing asexuals and implying that asexuals don’t deserve to have safe spaces. There’s still so much acephobia so I just wanna know which blogs are genuinely supportive and a safe space for asexuals
I cannot stop thinking about the fact that Vulcan and Erid are both in the 40 Eridani system and how things might go if they exist in the same universe. Like, what if the Vulcans noticed and intercepted the Hail Mary when it entered their system? Come, walk with me...
(Longish read, spoilers for Project Hail Mary under the cut)
The events of PHM start in the late 2010s or early 2020s and have Grace and Rocky getting to 40 Eridani in the late 2030s. Vulcan's first contact with Earth takes place in Star Trek canon in April 2063, and by that point they had been quietly monitoring Earth for some time. They definitely knew a LOT about humans by the 2030s - physiology and disease conditions, human languages, Terran technology, probably a general grasp of Earth geopolitics and cultures too. They would have known about the Petrova line in our system and may have even known about PHM to some extent.
Generally speaking, though, Vulcans are arrogant dicks about pre-warp cultures in a "white man's burden" kind of way, and they do not interfere with pre-warp civilizations, even technologically advanced ones facing a world-ending crisis. They wouldn't have gotten involved with Stratt et al. or tried to help us in any way, even though Earth and Vulcan were dealing with the exact same crisis. They would detect us launching the Hail Mary, make note of it, and set some kind of unmanned probe or attach a device to the hull to track it and see where it's headed.
However, I don't think any Vulcans monitoring Earth would believe we'd have even a slight chance of pulling off a manned interstellar mission with the resources we had available, even with cutting edge Earth tech powered by astrophage fuel. Hell, they might have even tracked Grace all the way to Tau Ceti but assumed the ship and remaining crew was lost during the fishing trip, like if their sensors were destroyed or detached when Grace was trying to pull the ship out of the atmosphere.
As for Erid, Vulcan may not have even noticed the Eridians. They're pre-spaceflight right up until they launch Blip-A, don't use light- or radio-based communication, are silicon-based and subterranean, and live on a planet completely inhospitable for carbon-based life. As far as the Vulcans know, Erid is a barren planet in their home system with an intensely hot, high-pressure ammonia-based atmosphere that can't support any form of life as they know it.
For that matter, even Blip-A could have gone mostly unnoticed when it was launched. Eridian tech is made out of xenonite, an exotic material they either a) have never seen or thought possible, as with Grace, or b) have possibly seen before but don't know how to synthesize or use. Rocky's ship would most likely appear on their scanners as a big pocket of xenon gas surrounding some chunks of rocky material and a quantity of astrophage, which exits a barren planet's atmosphere and then leaves their system. They'd for sure want to study it and would likely send an exploratory mission to investigate and track it - to them, it looks like a barren planet in their system just ejected a plume of astrophage, planetary atmosphere, xenon gas, and rocky debris, so logically they're going to follow up on it.
Once they get a visual on it and see it's a construction clearly made by some kind of sentient life, though, non-interference principles kick in. Their scanners won't pick up any life signs or breathable atmosphere on board, so it will look like it's an unmanned probe propelling itself somewhere. This, of course, would be its own mystery for the Vulcans and they will still keep tracking and studying it. Nonetheless, it still wouldn't point to there being life on board or native life on Erid, since the Vulcans otherwise wouldn't learn about silicon-based life until the crew of the USS Enterprise discovers it in the 23rd Century, and thus wouldn't think to look for it.
With all that said, I'm imagining the Vulcans' absolute shock when their sensors pick up something entering their system, only to discover it's that same primitive Earth spaceship they started tracking almost 20 years earlier, the one they thought was lost at Tau Ceti. It's battered all to hell but still working - not only that, it's got A HUMAN LIFE SIGN ON BOARD. It can't be hailed so they tractor it in, and inside they find one human scientist, alive and mostly lucid but also very unwell, who goes bug-eyed when he sees them. He goes to speak but can't get his words past his astonished stammering. He shakily holds out an odd-looking Earth device, and finally manages to get out,
"Grace. *points at self*
Friend Rocky. *points to the enclosure behind him*
Taumeba. *points to a door across the room*
Translator."
He hands them the device and flashes a delirious, wide-eyed grin before hitting them with the LLAP 🖖🏼 and collapsing. After the Vulcans rush Grace to medical and get him examined, stabilized, nourished, and rested, they are able to debrief them via Grace and Rocky's homebrew English-Eridian translator and the English-Vulcan translator they've developed during their years surveying Earth.
The Vulcan Science Academy is buzzing with excitement (in their subdued Vulcan way) once the findings are published, and they all find themselves marveling at the extremely improbable story of Dr. Ryland Grace, Earth scientist, who:
survived 18 continuous years in space against all odds with no other humans on board (including extended time in an unsupervised medically-induced coma, and multiple dangerous spacewalks) on a ship they believed to have likely been destroyed years ago.
never trained for space flight before he was shanghaied into space and then lost his pilot and engineer before he even woke up.
successfully collected biological samples from another planet in a risky upper-atmosphere maneuver that nearly killed him, and then used them to develop a cure for the astrophage that's also killing Vulcan's star (in a small lab on his ship and with only the resources he had available).
had no means of rapid communication with Earth, zero chance of rescue if anything went wrong, and had initially understood he was going to die in space whether or not his mission was a success.
was the first human in Earth's history to make first contact with a sentient alien species of any kind.
learns to communicate with said alien, and, when they discover their common goal, immediately starts working together as a team to complete their mission, forming a profoundly deep friendship in the process.
might have actually made it back to Earth after all, had he not sacrificed his chance at going home by going back to rescue the alien friend he made and make sure he gets home with his batch of the astrophage cure, saving both Sol and 40 Eridani.
And his friend 🎶🎵Rocky 🎶🎵:
Who comes from a neighboring planet in Vulcan's system that they always thought to be completely uninhabitable and devoid of life
Who belongs to a technologically advanced race of silicon-based lifeforms, which they had never seen before and thought was theoretical at best
Whose species learned to synthesize a previously-unknown metallic alloy of a noble gas into an extremely versatile building material and can spin filaments of this material into objects manually like a Terran spider spinning a web.
Whose species has no innate or learned concept of relativity, no concept of light and radiation and no sense of sight, and navigates using a highly developed form of echolocation...
...and, despite all of that, achieved interstellar travel, in a ship so alien to the Vulcans that they first mistook it for a giant pocket of gas and then tracked it for years believing it was unmanned and constructed by another space-faring civilization.
like Grace, was the first member of HIS species to make first contact with a sentient alien species and immediately befriends him.
Engineered an entire system so he and his new friend could work and live together despite their drastically different atmospheric needs.
Risked his life by leaving his atmosphere bubble to save his friend's life at Tau Ceti, severely injuring himself in the process.
Gives Grace some of his fuel to get back to Earth because he loves him and cannot bear the thought of him dying in space, knowing that doing so will add another six years until he finally gets home to his people and his mate.
Grace still takes all the time he wants to decide what he's going to do with the rest of his life. Vulcan, having warp technology and faster-than-light travel, develops a plan to seek out and inoculate affected stars with Taumeba. The science academy acknowledges that they owe their existence to members of two species who successfully traveled to distant stars without FTL travel, leading them to rethink their approach to encounters with pre-warp civilizations.
Grace has a standing invite to study, research, and teach at the science academy. Sometimes he does, and he'll be the first to admit that it's still a trip to know that Vulcans exist and they actually do the 🖖🏼 thing in real life.
Ultimately though, Erid, along with Rocky and Adrian and all their pebbles, becomes his real home.
Feel free to reblog for other people to vote. DO NOT SEND HATE TO ANYONE FOR WHAT THEY VOTED. This is merely for fun and to see what people genuinely think.
I started in 1992 with the worst fanfiction ever. It had the trifecta of Bad Stuff by being 1) my first fanfiction, 2) script format, and 3) one of a flood of Ranma fanfiction at the time. I am not mentioning the name.
I like to think that I've gotten better. Just a little.
Care and Feeding of Your Artist, Convention Edition
The following is from my old LJ, which may vanish at any particular time due to the whims of Whomever. And since convention season is in full swing, I present to you a somewhat edited version of it here for Tumblr prosperity (whatever that means):
I find that artists will prefer working with you if you are prepared, polite, and professional. What does this mean?
Being prepared means getting things in order before the convention. I usually print out a list of descriptions relating to the image I have in mind. For simplicity's sake (and for the sake of my wallet) I never go more than two characters. I'm specific enough to point the artist in the right direction, but with enough leeway for them to express themselves in their own style. Furthermore, have references printed out for their use. You will not believe how many fans I've wanted to strangle in the artist's place when they go all vague and meandering. Once you've reached an agreement as to how the commission should turn out (pencils? Inks? Color?), state a timeline for when you would like the work finished. Finally, be prepared to pay them upfront. Nobody ever likes being cheated out of their hard work.
Being polite sounds so simple and yet I see it exercised so very rarely. If you're not going to commission an artist's services, don't say that their work sucks--and especially not to their face! If their big thing is, for example, watercolor images of mecha and its not your thing, don't say anything negative. Believe it or not, some people may actually like that sort of thing. If you do commission an artist, I've found that an ounce of politeness combined with a paycheck works better than just the paycheck alone. Thank them for their time.
Being professional means that you understand certain boundaries. You are hiring the artist for their creativity and skills in bringing your image to life. They are not, however, your best buddy from day one. So, if you see them at another convention, don't go all hyper and call them your best friend. They're not. However, if you do become friends with the author, do not use that relationship as leverage in any way, shape or form.
Now here are some miscellaneous tips that work for me:
1. Match the artist's style to the image you want. In fact, feel free to show the artist your commission sheet to see what they would like to do. You may be surprised at what some artists are capable of doing.
2. Keep in mind that the artist is not your personal drawing machine. They draw because they enjoy being creative, and being creative means that they need a little leeway to exercise their style. So if a commission does not adhere absolutely to the model sheet, don't worry too much about it. If, however, there is something wrong, point it out politely. If it's early enough, the artist can make corrections--but it's not likely if the piece is already inked. Remember, you are paying for their interpretation of your vision.
(2026 edit: This is why I will never use AI generated images. AI doesn't have a vision. It just works in parameters. Oh, and it also steals.)
3. Check in with the artist occasionally, but don't hover over them. And don't rant about how the pinky is off or the number of buttons is wrong. Micromanaging isn't fun for anyone, especially an artist.
4. Be specific enough so that the artist doesn't interpret things the wrong way. I've had one commission go from G to NC-17 in no time flat when the artist decided to add in an extra character and subtract some clothing. Fortunately, I caught him just in time and told them to please re-do it.
5. If the commission didn't turn out how you'd hoped, or if it was an unmitigated disaster, DO NOT BADMOUTH THE ARTIST. Yes, this justifies the bold and all capitals. The artist is human and they may have had any number of things go wrong. There's also the fact that this was still work for hire.
(2026 edit: I am aware that Artists Beware is a resource for artist/client issues. I have not used it.)
6. Being polite and professional doesn't mean that you can't be friendly. In fact, I find that a few minutes of shooting the breeze about their work helps them loosen up. However, keep this kind of conversation short. The more time you talk to them, the less time they actually have to work on your commission.
7. Make the commission something fun! Any commission that is exacting and torturous is the stuff of nightmares--and that doesn't lend well to repeat business.
I've never had an artist cheat me of a commission. I will admit to knowing several individuals who took a long time in getting the work done. Still, I enjoy spending money on these unique offerings.
(2026 edit: I have had at least one artist do an initial sketch, go silent for months, then decide that they just could not work on it any further. To their credit, they refunded me. And then there was one artist who was enamored with the idea, ghosted me for months, then did a quick and dirty ink to conclude the transaction. Not the best experience.)
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