Hungry; lost in the woods

writing gremlin. she/her. i make web serials: katalepsis, necroepilogos, maidens of the fall

[solreefs]

“oh I’m too old for stuffed animals” skill issue. sorry you can’t appreciate little creatures made to hang out with you, I on the other hand am full of joyous whimsy and therefore vastly superior.

[batshaped]

Unrequited

bsky mirror

[charl0ttan]

do u think ragatha fucks like a plushie or like a beanbag

[mint-swirl]

two things which famously do not fuck

[minttttttttttttttttttttttttttt]

what you don't know could fill a library

[yuriartillery]

convincing this wandering swordmaster (loser, woman) to keep demonstrating her flawless technique to cleave a man from his life for me because her tits bounce really lewdly whenever she does it and she hasn't noticed yet

[enith-derogatory]

Just kiss already

[writerswritecompany]

[darthcontusion]

i think the thing i like most about the demon girl next door is that it's about a chronically ill supervillain and a retired magical girl working through their traumas and learning to love each other and that is a story that begs to be told with the gravity of an urobuchi drama like madoka, but the author chose to tell it as a series of 4koma gag strips running in manga time kirara, and i think that's absolutely the correct decision

[touhoumangaedits]

[fairycosmos]

cradling the em dash in my hands what the fuck have they done to you

[akumeoy]

there should be a backrooms but for lesbian sex

[elevnth-hr]

#otherside picnic

[lady-of-vitreous-sight]

let me try to word this better.

Right now you might be thinking things like "I need to change myself, I need to change how I think, I need to change who I am".

And the solutions you reach for (that you have been taught to reach for) will be things like "try harder, lock in, focus more, think better, do things better".

That shit doesn't work.

If a problem exists "inside your head", sometimes you can solve it in house, but a lot of the time you cannot and such attempts are wasting energy.

Instead, you need to change what's "outside your head".

Change what clothes you're wearing, take a shower, eat food, dress up nice, change who you're talking to, change what you're eating, put posters on your walls, change your phone wallpaper, change what name people call you, change how you talk about yourself, change how you sleep.

It feels like because it's indirect it'll be less effective, that's not true. That's not how this works.

A lot of the time you'll try to justify like "I need to change what's inside so that I can change what's outside", but this causality is wrong. Changing what's outside will change what's inside much more effectively.

In fact, your "mind" is not this magical special thing, and all that shit around you is part of you. The people around you shape your environment, your environment shapes your behaviors, your behaviors shape your body, your body shapes your mind. It's all continuous.

Aim up the stream of causality and shoot right and you'll minimize the effort needed to achieve the desired result. Practice and you'll get better at doing that. Do it right now and you'll get results fastest.

Be lazy about this. Don't spend eight weeks meditating to slowly change "how you feel" about something, spend ten minutes scheduling a coffee date, or dressing up nice and looking in the mirror, or taking a shower and laying down after, or cooking something tasty and taking a picture and sending it in a group chat, and you'll get the same results easier and faster.

[brackgiraffe]

[ammnontet]

the haunted game

[beebfreeb]

[artisimpossible]

I genuinely wonder if people realize how many projects get abandoned because the readership "wasn't there", when in reality, the readership just stayed silent. It's a big thing in trad pub that book series get discontinued because readers pirate the books or wait until the series is finished to buy a copy, leading the publisher to think that nobody actually wants the book enough to continue the series, but it happens with indie creators too.

I've discontinued a lot of free, online series because it's not worth putting 3-5 hours a week into posting a project for no readers. Sometimes I finish the series for me but just never post it again, other times I don't finish it at all because it feels more worthwhile to put my time into other things. Sometimes I hear from readers who are sad or upset that I didn't finish something they were liking, but the *reason* it never got finished is because I didn't know anyone liked it. If you like something, tell the creator, tell your friends, make some noise about it. If you would be sad if a story never finished, make that interest known because one of my biggest considerations before discontinuing a series is "will people miss this? Will I be letting people down" and 9/10 times, I come to the conclusion of "no, it doesn't even seem like anyone's reading this" only to learn after I've moved on that apparently someone was.

[healerqueen]

I've said this before in a different way, and this post said it so well. With real examples. If you like something, tell people.

If you want more content from an artist or author, if you like their stuff, tell them. It will give them creative fuel to keep going. And often it gives them other resources as well. Recommend a work to other people. Leave a comment or a review. It doesn't have to be long, just genuine, a sentence or two. Not many people know that a book's success is judged by book reviews as well as sales. Review the book on Amazon or another site to help it pass the metric of success and be recognized by publishers and retailers.

[lanaflowerz]

[palant1r]

the virgin loss.jpg versus the chad xkcd Seven Years

[palant1r]

[ms-demeanor]

[a-real-human-person-not-fake]

Don’t forget the latest version, Ten Years

[a-real-human-person-not-fake]

@vividaway​ Randall Munroe is an internet cartoonist who runs the ‘xkcd’ online comic series, which has run from 2006 up to today, with new comics every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Xkcd isn’t an ongoing story, just a series of funny, wholesome, depressing, or oddly scientifically informative comics.

In 2010, Randall’s fiance was diagnosed with stage III breast cancer. He didn’t share too many details at first, but things tended to bleed into his comics: sometimes funny, sometimes sad.

Often in this time, other cartoonists would write in guest comics for Randall, or he’d put in short filler pieces, to try and fill space while nonstop cancer treatments took up most of his time.

In 2012, he posted a comic called ‘Two Years’, about the time since the diagnosis. It’s the one that hasn’t yet been posted here (although parts of it are included in the other comics), and it commemorates some of the things that had happened in the two years since the diagnosis.

There are representations of Randall and his fiance being together for her treatment, worrying together, traveling the world, and getting married. It’s still depressing, but it’s a lot more hopeful, showing how they’ve still managed to have happy moments together, and things will still get better.

Themes of cancer continued in xkcd, but they increasingly became less about fear and nihilism, and more about hope, or just cool facts related to cancer.

At the top of this post is the comic posted in 2017: Seven Years. In it, Randall and his wife are traveling more, trying to have fun and continue old and new hobbies, with cancer ever-present in the background of it all. At the end, the two of them observe the 2017 solar eclipse, and despite all the uncertainty that comes with the thought of another seven years, agree to watch the 2024 eclipse together too.

There are just about no cancer comics between that one and the most recent comic, the one I posted: Ten Years, written in 2020. It’s by far the most hopeful of the three in the little series: the two of them are happy, they’re playing with rabbits and riding on handcarts and going out hiking and stargazing, together. At the end, Ten Years breaks the format with a conversation in which they talk about how unbelievable it is that it’s been so long, and share their worries as well as their hopes. It even ends on a much more lighthearted joke about immortality.

It’s a good comic. Definitely in my top two comics wherein internet cartoonists express emotions about an illness suffered by their wife.

“The ten-year cancerversary is traditionally the Cursed Artifact Granting Immortality anniversary.” -Randall Munroe.

[a-real-human-person-not-fake]

And now, at long last, Fifteen Years:

[ms-demeanor]

The first time I reblogged this it was three years after large bastard's heart attack and quad bypass and one year after his transplant.

Now it has been five years since his transplant, and seven years since his bypass.

We went to see the eclipses and drove to see the aurora too.

[the-haiku-bot]

We went to see the

eclipses and drove to see

the aurora too.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[demilypyro]

i like that they never let you forget that bocchi is gross. she canonically smells like mold

[demilypyro]

she's weird she's gross. if she goes outside too long she gets nauseous and throws up on herself. she's got a good figure but has no idea how to show it off. she wears the same dirty tracksuit all day every day. if you compliment her she gets carried away and ruins it immediately. if she thinks about the future she panics, if she thinks about the past she's depressed. she's just so uncomfortable to be around. intensely awkward in the REAL way broken people are. love my fucked up daughter she's just like me. i hope she never changes