styofa doing anything
Jules of Nature
Sweet Seals For You, Always
we're not kids anymore.
JBB: An Artblog!
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
šŖ¼
Misplaced Lens Cap
taylor price
almost home
Game of Thrones Daily
pixel skylines
NASA
JVL
dirt enthusiast
ā£ Chile in a Photography ā£
trying on a metaphor
h
todays bird
blake kathryn
seen from Malaysia
seen from Vietnam
seen from Israel
seen from Singapore
seen from South Africa
seen from Switzerland
seen from Italy
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Sri Lanka
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Austria
seen from Spain
seen from Malaysia
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
@librarymaxxing
"How do I plot a book" You don't. You start writing. You make notes about ideas you have while writing. When you're finished, you bring everything together like a puzzle. You fix potholes, you delete dead scenes, you bring in funky dialogue. You let someone else read it and put some patches on it. Tada! There's your book.
guess who is in Empyrea yet again
Hey, look at me. Look at me. Iāve said it once and Iāll say it again: you need to condition yourself to being okay with being inconvenienced by things. The first time I spoke about this I meant it in a mental health way- it is good to go out to the store and see people versus just ordering alone at home- but there is another more pressing societal issue you should be more concerned about as well.
Any service you rely on for convenience can be weaponized against you the moment you begin to rely on it. Streaming used to be a cheap and convenient way to see movies at home. It is now exorbitantly expensive, you need multiple accounts just to get what you want, and any of those movies can be taken from you at any time. And unless you have gotten used to going through the āinconvenienceā of owning physical media, you can do nothing about it. Same goes for buying things on Amazon. Same goes for any service like DoorDash etc. These companies WANT you to be reliant on them for convenience so they can do whatever they want to you because, well, what else are you gonna do?
Same thing goes for the uptick in AI. If you train yourself to become reliant on AI for doing basic things, you will be taken advantage of. It is only a matter of a couple years before there are no free AI services. Not only that, but in the usage of AIās case, it is robbing you of valuable skills that you need to curate that you will be helpless without the moment the AI companies drive in the knife the way they have done with streaming. Delivery. Cable. Internet. Etc. It will happen to AI too. And if you are not practicing skills such as. Writing. You are not only going to be at the mercy of AI companies in the digital world, but you are going to be extremely easy to take advantage of in real life too.
I am begging you to let go of learned helplessness. I am begging you to stop letting these companies TEACH you helplessness. Do something like learn to pirate. It is way more inconvenient at the beginning, but once you know how, it is one less way companies can take advantage of you. Garden. Go to the thrift store (older clothes hold up better anyway). These things take more time and effort, yes, but using time and effort are muscles you need to stretch to keep yourself from being flattened under the weight of our capitalist hellscape.
Inconvenience yourself. Please. Start with only the ways you are able. Do a little bit at a time. But do something.
when i was a kid, a new family moved into our neighborhood. my parents wanted to welcome them, so my dad made a bowl of salsa and went over with my mom to introduce themselves. the husband of the new family was very excited when he got the salsaāhe was a professional chef and as such no one ever made food for him because they always assumed heād think it was bad, just because he was a good cook.
the moral of the story: give your artist friends art! give your writing friends writing! and give your chef friends food! even if theyāre ābetterā at it than you. i can assure you that theyāll love it regardless because it came from you.
I agree with this so much, I love getting stories and art. I still think about everything people have sent me, everyone is amazing
Your first mistake in art is thinking you draw men and women inherently differently
I'm serious, this is genuinely not a joke. There's no wrong way to do art but you do make a mistake when you think that you draw men and women differently without any overlap or gray area, like they're two opposites and that's how they'll always be FOREVER. Treating two genders as vastly different is absolutely the incorrect way to think about things and considering how anatomy is one of the first things you practice when you start drawing human or human adjacent characters, it becomes harder and harder to unlearn as time goes on
When learning to draw, you need to understand that there's more body types for ALL genders than just "flat as a board with no hips" and "slightly thinner waist with larger chest"
And you don't have to use harder lines and sharper angles for men and softer, more sensitive lines for women.
Being in fandom spaces is so surreal-
Bc once your age hits a 'serious' number, you start to think - "damn, I should probably stop geeking and get more serious." But then you scroll and see a 34y/o woman writing fics after driving her kids to school, a 40y/o dude making fanart of his fav super heroes and you realize - "nah, I'm actually good"
Listen.
Iām very serious here.
NEVER
NEVER EVER stop being nerdy about shit that you love.
If someone thinks itās dumb, who the fuck cares. THEYāRE dumb. They can go fuck off with their dumb fucking faces.
There is NO age at which you have to stop loving what you love and become a āreal adult.ā
Fuck outta here with that nonsense.
Love what you love, and love it unapologetically.
Life is too short to give a shit what other people think. Life is too short to give up on something you love for the sake of appearances or āmaturityā or any other such bullshit.
Weāre the adults now. We get to decide what that means.
And in my house, that means weāre fucking nerds. We love stories and imagination and creativity and badass fucking swords yo. We love heroesā journeys and visions of utopian scifi futures and fairy tales and video games. We love excellent writing and bombastic storytelling and gentle explorations of human nature couched in fantastical worlds. We have an annual board game weekend where we host upwards of fifty people whom we have collected over the years.
Do not resign yourself to cookie cutter mediocrity. You know what you enjoy. No one can take that away from you.
Tips from a Beta Reading Writer
This one's for the scenes with multiple characters, and you're not sure how to keep everyone involved.
Writing group scenes is chaos. Someoneās talking, someoneās interrupting, someoneās zoning out thinking about breadsticks. And if youāre not careful, half your cast fades into the background like NPCs in a video game. I used to struggle with this so muchāmy characters would just exist in the scene without actually affecting it. But hereās what I've learned and have started implementing:
āØ Give everyone a job in the scene āØ
Not their literal jobālike, not everyone needs to be solving a crime or casting spells. I mean: Why are they in this moment? Whatās their role in the conversation?
My favourite examples are:
The Driver: Moves the convo forward. They have an agenda, theyāre pushing the action.
The Instigator: Pokes the bear. Asks the messy questions. Stirring the pot like a chef on a mission.
The Voice of Reason: "Guys, maybe we donāt commit arson today?"
The Distracted One: Completely in their own world. Tuning out, doodling on a napkin, thinking about their ex.
The Observer: Not saying much, but noticing everything. (Quiet characters still have presence!)
The Wild Card: Who knows what theyāll do? Certainly not them. Probably about to make things worse.
If a character has no function, theyāll disappear. Give them somethingāeven if itās just a side comment, a reaction, or stealing fries off someoneās plate. Keep them interesting, and your readers will stay interested too.
The "Get Loud" TTRPG Bundle
About a month ago Charlie Hall, editor of tabletop games over at Polygon wrote an odd opinion piece. The gist of it was that since Wizards of the Coast is fumbling the bag with the release of the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, now would be a great time for indie TTRPG makers to step up.
Above all, I feel it is imperative that indie designers realize that their window is rapidly closing. Rather than sitting in their own little corners of the internet and wringing their hands, creatives who want to thrive in the TTRPG space need to come together and fight for the recognition that they deserve. The dragon is knocked out for now, but it wonāt be at rest forever. Only by building out a solid party, filled with individual contributors each possessing powerful skills, can they hope to one day face that dragon ā or at least earn a place in the lair beside them.
This pissed off a lot of people. Including me. We aren't wringing our fucking hands out here, Chuck. We are loud about our games every hour of the goddamn day, and each time we encourage big media outlets like you to help, we see you wringing your hands about reader retention and clicks and all that horseshit.
We are not the cowards in this arrangement.
So as is my habit these days, I did some organizing about it.
I went through my list of games I've bought off itch and found my favourites, and my favourite designers. I contacted the ones I could (some of them didn't respond, said no, or I couldn't find ways to contact them) and put them together in a bundle. My friend Em did some art. I launched it on the 1st of February.
So far it has raised over $6,000. That's about $300 for each designer, depending on how they divvy up their cuts to itch, taxes, etc. That's money in the hands of indie TTRPG makers who aren't Wizards of the Coast. That's people being able to pay their bills and keep making games.
And not to mention it's 36 of my favourite games and 20 of my favourite game makers all in one place for the low low price of $20.
Being an indie creator is hard and thankless. We make things because we cannot help but be artists, and we are met largely with silence. We are expected to compete with companies who pay salaries to public relations people, who have marketing budgets and teams of artists, when all we have is a social media account, a mailing list, and the occasional crowdfunding campaign.Ā
We are not saved by these companies, but by other small indie groups. By sites likeĀ RascalĀ who make game announcements easy, and the people who makeĀ YouTube channels and podcasts who play and read our games and let their fans know we exist. We are saved by people, not companies.
So if you buy the bundle, if you post about it on social media, or your workās Slack channel, or write the link on the wall of the bathroom in that cool queer dive bar you like, thank you.
We canāt keep doing this without you.Ā
I think they would've been friends
Iām fifty papers in to this round of grading. Please enjoy a selection of out-of-context comments Iāve left on studentsā papers so far:
Further updates as warranted.
Important update as we hit paper 70.Ā
Memo to all college writers. If youāre going to write a paper on country music for a born-and-raised Texan professor, make sure youāve got your facts straight.Ā
And with this, I conclude my first round of freshman grading. Hallelujah. In general, Iām quite proud of the work they turned in. Importantly: not a single person failed.
had a fascinating english class that resulted in the notes header āthe forcefeminization of victor frankensteinā
what the people want, the people get
you see
my professorās take is that mary shelley is feminizing victor throughout the novel, as a way of flipping gender roles and putting a male character through female experiences.
evidence as explained:
victor is creating life. he is putting his health at risk (spends two years with little sleep or socialization) to bring life forth into this world
his illness after he is shocked by the creature coming to life is akin to both āhysteriaā and postpartum depression
he pretty much swoons, letās be honest
henry clerval, a man who has been characterized as manly and heroic, has to chase after damsel-in-distress victor and care for him as he convalescesĀ
afterward, he hides what he did and went through, for fear that others will label him crazy and emotional and not believe him. sound familiar?
Victor in general is more emotional than the other characters and is constantly tempering his reactions to not be seen as irrationalĀ
the book does not otherwise have central female charactersĀ
Also, Shelleyās mother died in childbirth. Itās interesting, then, that Shelley presents the creation of life as something horrific and damaging. She parallels Victor with her mother.
in conclusion, Frankenstein (1818) by MaryĀ Ā Wollstonecraft Shelley is one of the first examples of mpreg in English literatureĀ
did you guys know that when you are in bed at night time, you can turn on a lamp, put a really soft blanket around your shoulders and read your book?? and sometimes it will rain??? did you know that???? the wonders of this life do not cease!
Do you know what HARPG stand for?
Yes, I was/am a participant!
Yes, but I never participated.
No, I don't know what it is.
I think I might know/unsure.
Feeling seen.
hi yes hello what the fuck is metrosexual lmfao
It's hard to explain to zoomers just how insanely homophobic the early 2000s were. If you were male, and like, washed your hair regularly, people would call you a faggot.
So, dudes who washed their hair and wore button ups developed the term "metrosexual" which meant "I care about my appearance but I am attracted to women and don't have sex with men."
And not just "oh people called you gay to be mean" like they literally thought you were homosexual and hiding it. Women would literally be like "damn, I was super attracted to him, but I heard he wore shorts more than twice in a week, so I guess he must like men."
you couldn't even wear a scarf. the scarf made you gay.
