Jump Into The Ball Pit

The place for me to stuff everything so I can make my main blog more aesthetic

[monkeyislandtwo]

fonts will be named shit like viscera antique, 16 bit dreams, doctor's orders, bingo condensed, googly, wish you were here

[equos-bipes]

for your consideration

[pangur-and-grim]

I think some of the loneliness of autism is that you feel like you hurt people just by Interacting Wrong, but you don’t know how to Interact Right, and the more effort you put into it, the more exhausted you are and the more artificial it comes across (with the end result of people still being upset with you). and it’s not anyone’s fault for not liking Being Interacted With Wrong, and it’s not your fault for doing it so wrong, but it is very, very lonely.

[animentality]

[quasi-normalcy]

The strongest guy in the Magnus Archives is that one guy who was so obsessed with his dog that he just walked right out of the Spiral because it was her dinnertime

[discopiranha]

This is one of my favorite episodes. Fears can't hurt you if you're chill enough. The guy who walked in a spiral for four hours and then just left because he remembered he had somewhere to be is, to me, the avatar of the entities' fear

[strangehorse]

strongest people in the magnus archives:

guy who kept the coffin of the buried in his living room and used it as a coffee table

walked out of the spiral because his dog needed dinner

the plumber who was so inattentive that the stranger put on a whole spectacle for him and he straight-up missed it all

the guy whose primary concern with the evil taxidermists was whether or not they were money laundering (they weren't)

[ace-scientist]

AND he didn’t even realize evil taxidermy was at play for the longest time because he came in like “I love and respect autistic people, of course I’m not judging eye contact”

[wizardarchetypes]

we CANNOT forget the woman that was actively being swallowed by the buried and when there was nothing she could possibly do she lied down on the ground and accepted her fate so thoroughly and with such calm that it had to barf her back up.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

And if my memory is correct she KEPT TAKING THE UNDERGROUND TO WORK

[sabertoothwalrus]

Someone has probably already asked you this but do you have any tips on studying/understanding perspective? I keep trying to find resources to learn but none of them really stick or are actually useful

so I'm hoping that your issue isn't just figuring out the difference between 1-point, 2-point, and 3-point perspective and how it works, because there are tons and tons of resources available for that, and I'm guessing what people tend to get tripped up on is what you're supposed to be doing with your grid.

I'm definitely far from being an expert on understanding perspective, but I'll share some of the things that helped ME finally Get It.

Things like eye level and different camera angles can be a GREAT tool to use when doing a comic or storyboard between multiple characters of different heights!! I actually drew an example of this exact thing for a friend about a month ago (I used adventure time characters bc they're easy to draw and have a good height variety):

You can use camera angles like this to add variety to your shots, and even use it to help convey something emotional (using a down-shot on a character to show that they FEEL small, use an up-shot on a character to make them look more intimidating, etc etc)

hope this helps!

[anonbeadraws]

Look, taako might not be good with the words, but you know, i think ango gets that Mr From Tee-vee shows love in other ways, if he cooks for you, you probably have a bit of his heart.  Angus just also wants it in writing 💜

From this post, but i had to go a step further and make it sappy, sure me ✨commission info in source link below✨

[notaplaceofhonour]

Ryan Gosling’s career has just been one long quest to climb the Warner Bros water tower

[notaplaceofhonour]

that man has been trying to climb this tower since he was 16. he has asked multiple times, and every time they said no, but now he’s famous enough & variety was able to convince them to do a shoot on the tower. it all led here. it was all for this.

[notaplaceofhonour]

I’m obsessed with the implication that this was a coming-of-age ritual where a boy becomes a man, like a bar mitzvah

[setulose]

The one thing about gender is that frankly my ideal gender situation has very little to do with me and infinitely more to do with everyone else on the earth who cannot be fuuuuuuuuucking cool about anything ever

[setulose]

As in, the ideas of social transition becomes completely meaningless when your preferred state would be to operate outside of the confines of sex and gender entirely, but no one else can get with the program so you are constantly put in some variety of box. I can wear whatever pronoun pin I want and change my presentation however I want but all it impacts is what box I'm categorized into. It does grate I must admit

[setulose]

All that said if I'm going to be in a box regardless I'm glad I have my trans siblings in it with me 🥂 I may be irritated by my circumstances, but I will never be alone

[bodhranwriting]

(Fantasy novel pitch, rough, rough literal first blurb draft)

The Last Stychos Expedition

Far away, under a different sun and where the stars sometimes speak through dreams, a pregnant queen is dying. Her husband, the king of many kingdoms, will not lose her or their unborn child. There is only one antidote for her disease in the known world: an elixir made from the rare and deadly Stychos flower.

It is for many an impossible task. For the plant will only reveal itself to those who need it – and will kill or enthrall those who don’t. Great knights, explorers, and alchemists have tried and failed, and the Queen is getting weaker. Out of desperation, the King orders one final attempt with a party who cannot be touched by the plant’s power: those dying themselves.

Faro Fellbane, a disgraced polar explorer and cartographer, stricken with an incurable wasting sickness from his last, failed expedition.

Laertes Wrightshod, a temple oracle, born to die from the burden of his gifts.

And, finally, Morla Swann, a convicted poisoner whose death sentence has already been injected into her veins.

They have thirty days to cross the cursed mountains fabled to hold their goal and not lose their lives – or minds – in the process.

[bodhranwriting]

Opening to each introductory chapter:

When the message arrived for Faro, it came with a polite knock on the door and a warm handshake.

He’d still been holding his bowl of broth as the messenger had invited herself inside, the heat cradled against his chest and precariously balanced on swollen fingers.

When the message arrived for Laertes, it came with the chiming of the temple assembly bell and a poorly disguised look of horror.

He’d been conducting morning prayers for the younger members of the cloth: twelve small oracles in their pale-yellow robes and big serious eyes all turning to him in confusion.

When the message arrived for Morla, it came with a slam of a baton on her cell bars and a peacocked messenger standing as far back from her as he could.

Her criminal brand was still weeping a clear liquid down her throat and shoulders, but Morla had lifted her chin anyway and let them see.

[creature-wizard]

So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?

I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.

[penrosesun]

OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.

A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.

Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.

…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.

I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:

Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)

Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?

Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?

Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?

Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?

These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.

In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”

[livebloggingmydescentintomadness]

this is a pdf detailing the BITE model of authoritarian control, a method for determining whether or not you're in a cult.

even if you feel confident you are not and have never been in a cult, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the signs, just in case one begins to sneak up on you in the future.

[penrosesun]

Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.

Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.

This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.

People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.

Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.

Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!

It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.

One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…

This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.

If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.

“This can’t possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and there’s never been a single instance where it suddenly changed” is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.

[fashion-runways]

ROBERT WUN Couture Fall/Winter 2027 pls help me get out of debt donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways or dinahlance-shop.fourthwall.com

[fashion-runways]

ROBERT WUN Couture Fall/Winter 2027 pls help me get out of debt donating to: ko-fi.com/fashionrunways or dinahlance-shop.fourthwall.com

[madmonksandmaenads]

I wish I could make white people(and not just white Americans) understand how diverse the pre-columbian Americas were. The history, religion, culture, politics was at least as complex as Europe's. There was the full gamut of religions, from monotheists to animists to ancestral religions. There were city building empires, village farmers, nomadic traders, and so many other ways to live. This is all just based on what we know, the fragments left behind and the stories of survivors of an apocalyptic plague. All this before the most extended campaign of genocide in history was waged in an attempt to wipe out those survivors.

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

Do you understand how much poorer our whole species is because of it? Can you imagine where art, religion, and science would be if we still had these vast bodies of knowledge? The stain of the colonial project will never be fully washed clean. We owe more than just the land to those we stole from. We owe them a whole future, a future that could have been brighter for all of us. If only greed and fear weren't allowed to rule this land.

[salukipop-old]

i literally love how your color and shade if it’s ok do you have any tips on digital coloring? you don’t have to answer this if you don’t feel like it :) thanks!!

hello friend!! i have a tutorial i made on twitter a while ago which is more or less how i make my colours more interesting. i still use the technique and in general it’s just a lot of colour adjustment nothing too special LOL here!!

[dredsina]

Ive said this before but swear the biggest skill to learn as an adult is how to resist high-pressure sales tactics. You do NOT have to answer questions with anything other than "Sorry I'm not interested." No matter how nice they are or no matter how many follow up questions they ask or even how agitated they get when you stand your ground. Just keep saying I'm not interested. Don't answer their questions. Don't give them an opening to try to push back on your reasons. Be a fucking brick wall of I'm not interested.

[sweaterkittensahoy]

When we bought our car, I told Sean to let me handle it. I walked in and said "We have X for a down payment and cannot pay more than Y in monthly payments." My Y number had some leeway, but I didn't mention that.

First thing the sales guy did after I laid down the rules was turn to Sean and go, "What's your number?" And Sean said. "Oh, no, you negotiate with Gayle."

So, strike one for the sales guy. Could not divide and conquer us by implying THE MAN would not surprised at what I laid down.

Sales guy then had to confer with his manager and left us at his desk for several minutes. I have a vague recollection (this was 16 years ago) of Sean and I amusing ourselves doing bits about the other people there to look at cars. I am sure we did not give off the stressed or nervous energy they were hoping for.

Guy comes back. His first offer is fifty dollars a month more than I told him we could pay. I looked at him and said "I gave you our upper limit."

"Well, but what's another 50 bucks a month?"

"Something I can't afford."

He didn't know what to do with my open and unashamed admittal that I had a budget because my money was finite.

He went back to talk to the manager again.

It took two more rounds of "I told you what I can afford" before he finally came back 20 bucks under what I'd stated as my max.

The trick to resisting high-stress sales tactics is doing the math at home, knowing exactly what you can afford, and then walking into the room and stating that number minus 15%. Then refusing to budge from that number. Never, ever, meet then where they want. Always meet them where you want. Because at the end of the day, you can walk away and go somewhere else and say "I told the people at Z what my terms were, and they refused to work with me. Here are my terms. Meet them, and you make a sale today."

[librarycards]

people on here who have been on 10-15+ years like myself...i don't know how they claim that there were never any Black bloggers on here, or that it was always such a white website. trudy gradientlair was on here. thisiswhiteprivilege was on here. there was a feminist citation project sara ahmed was involved in on here. there was someone on here whose username was wretchedoftheearth and that was how i learned who fanon was when i was 12, by googling those words. tumblr was the only place i knew i could go to get accurate & compassionate info about what happened to trayvon martin, when everyone around me irl was rabidly racist. the amount of reportage and scholarship that happened on here before the first big wave of bans was so huge and so much has been lost. where were you when it was happening??? why weren't you paying attention??

[dumbtrannybitch]

it's cause they never engaged with non white bloggers so they never noticed them disappearing. they got the tumblr they wanted, and those of us who aren't liberal/conservative fandom bloggers were robbed of our black and brown friends, and worst of all black and brown bloggers were robbed of a dpace that once was a legitimate vector for talking about black issues. at least some members of staff know what they are doing, it's like the war on drugs in this website the way they crush black people on this website.

[nyokoko]

I literally published an essay several years ago about how a lot of people stole the intellectual work that Black feminist bloggers on here published regularly to build this website and its reputation as we know it. White people love them some revisionist history.

The reason Tumblr became the bastion of intellectual discourse that it was known for--the reason the term "social justice warrior" even EXISTS as a derogatory descriptor--is because of the work of the Black bloggers who migrated to this site from 2009-2014 from LJ and Jezebel's forums. Myself included.

[goldensunset]

>‘this thing is too generic and tropey’

>look inside

>forefather of that genre

[firestorm09890]

[frankbelloriley]