Rikun's Workshop

Sketchblog of Richard Jao. Original material and fanart progress all in it's rough, dirty glory!

[writingwithfolklore]

Writing Resources to use instead of AI

For coming up with character names:

Behind the name (my absolute fav)

Allows you to choose the origin of where you want the name to be from, whether you want a more feminine vs masculine vs androgenous name (as voted by users), random surname generator, and clicking on the name gives you important info like if there are any famous people with the same name, where it’s from, how common it is, and how people tend to see it, etc.

You can also search their name database by letter or meaning or origin, so if you know you want a character who has a name/surname that starts with an A from Ireland, there’s a whole list for you to choose from.

Census sites

Especially useful if you’re looking for a name from a specific place and/or time period. Just search “(country) census (year)” and you’ll find a database of real people who lived in that place at that time. No one can ever call your names unrealistic again.

For coming up with place names:

Fantasy name generator

This site can basically come up with any name for any person, place, or thing you might ever need. There are also specific generators for different fandoms if you’re looking to make an OC in an established world.

For finding that one word on the tip of your tongue:

One Look Thesaurus

This is my go-to. Not only can you find synonyms like a regular thesaurus, but you can also describe words like “unhappy smile” or “quiet laugh” to find the more specific word you’re looking for.

For coming up with ideas:

Word cloud

When I need to inspire a new idea, I write down all the things I’m interested in (hauntings, academia, lesbians, etc.) and put them into a word cloud to shuffle them next to each other. Sometimes seeing a concept in a new context can spark new ideas!

WWF Discord

This is my discord channel (shameless plug) for when you need to brainstorm off other people but don’t have anyone irl to talk to. We’re also happy to read and give feedback on writing, answer writing questions, or just chat!

For visualizing places and characters:

Pinterest

Pinterest can at times be a bit too sterile for my tastes, but if you use the right words, you can find more realistic photos of places. For example, adding “aesthetic” after basically any word will bring up a more broad collection of photos to help you flesh out places.

This is also a great way to find photos of people and fashion to help visualize characters. I’m bad at describing clothes, so I usually collect photos of outfits to help me know what my characters are wearing. Searching up “character inspiration” will collect more interesting photos and drawings of people who might not exactly be of our world.

(However, to make Pinterest not show you AI results, you have to go into your settings and check the “reduce AI” box. Luckily, it does mostly work.)

Death to Stock

Like pinterest but completely AI free (hooray!) Only drawback is that you have to pay a monthly subscription (about $20 CAD).

Cosmos

Very similar to pinterest but slightly more "artsy". I'm not super familiar with this one but I believe all the photos are human and you can save them and create collections with a free account.

Dupe Photos

Royalty-free stock image site with very Pinterest-core photos!

Minecraft

If you haven’t built your entire fictional city in Minecraft instead of writing, why not? It’s fun.

The Sims

This one is dual purpose because you can not only create your characters in Create a Sim, but you can design their houses. If you really want to go for it, you can bulldoze all the lots in your town and build your world from scratch.

For checking grammar:

Grammar Girl

Easy to follow definitions and examples, and if you learn better by listening, every article comes with a podcast to follow along with instead.

Grammar Monster

This one is my favourite for checking grammar rules because there’s tons of examples in graphics that helps for any situation.

Reedsy

Among other things, reedsy can connect you to professional editors within your budget.

For writing advice:

One Stop for Writers

This one was recommended from my discord channel and has all sorts of tutorials and resources for the writing craft.

My Blog Directory

Another shameless plug, but if you need writing advice on something specific, you can search through my directory to see if it’s there. If it isn’t, you can always send me an ask about it!

For an alternative to Google Docs:

Ellipsus

Think google docs but without AI. Yay!

(will update this list with any more suggestions or resources I discover 😊)

[just-a-readthrough]

A great resource

[gothwineaunts]

hi!!! i came here to say that i’ve been a fan of nevermore for forever (poe is my favorite author and you somehow managed to incorporate like all of my favorite works into it?!?! and make it sapphic??? what more could i ever ask for in a webtoon???) ‼️

as for anything to ask, i wanted to know a little bit of how your process is for creating the webtoon, as someone who wants to get into it but isn’t exactly sure where to start. would you suggest planning out the story, making a script, and then drafting the drawings and then finalizing?? or do you have a different system that you would recommend??

my apologies if you’ve answered such a question before, i don’t mean to waste your time!! you are a huge inspiration to me and i aspire to be even half as good as you are someday!!!

thank you so much for your time, it is greatly appreciated!! :) 🖤🖤

I'm so glad you're enjoying it!! And thank you, please don't apologize, you're so sweet and I love this question! I could blab about comics all day. So for making a series, the first place you need to start is with a process many people call "pre-production." This is where you refine the concept (or "elevator pitch"), nail down the setting, art style, and themes, work on the main characters, do design concepts, nail down how you want the paneling to look, what color the gutters (spaces in between panels) should be, how you want to do visual things like speech bubbles and flashback sequences, and most importantly: loosely how you want to start and end the series. The rest you can find along the way. You should really aim to figure most of this out before you start on your first episode or else it can be very overwhelming trying to make it up as you go! Pre-production is really fun! Keep lots of sketches and sticky notes and outlines. This is the phase where everything is open and you get to play around a lot. But one thing I do caution against is getting into pre-production limbo. I'd say give yourself a time window, where at the end, you start on your episodes. This is because SINCE pre-production is so fun, I think a lot of series stay there forever. Your concept doesn't have to be polished and perfect. You'll learn so much along the way. Don't aim for perfection. Think of it like building a road. What you're doing is clearing out the trees and leveling the land, that's all. Just so that building the road is easier for you later. Don't try to build the road while you're still in pre-production. Once you're done with your outlines and sketches and all manner of scheming, then you can start on a script. And even then, I wouldn't start on it until you do a real quick outline for both the arc you're starting on and then for the ep you're working on. Outlines are your biggest friend! Then go crazy with the script, and from there you can get into storyboarding (also called thumbnailing), and once you're satisfied with that, inking, flatting, and rendering. Your first few eps will probably take you WEEKS, even if they're not very long. Our first five eps for Nevermore took us a few months, because we scrapped and restarted like, twice? I think? And we have been working on webcomics for YEARS. Be kind to yourself, and try to have fun with it. Don't burn yourself out too early, and just know that it WILL get faster as you settle into a story and learn the characters, both in design and in their voices/motivations. Try not to feel discouraged early on because it's NOT EASY to start a new series, no matter who you are or how many times you've done it before. Good luck!! ✨

[neurotypicalabusesurvivor]

This is a friendly reminder that none disabled people often do benefit from the same accommodations disabled people benefit from.

[yeahokayillreblogthat]

Yeah okay I'll reblog that!!

[multishipperpirateking]

My dad used to work for Vodafone and likes to tell a story about when he was working on a voicemail transcription service.

And there was a woman there who was some form of disability advocate (it was the 90s so her existence in the company was a minor miracle) and apparently she completely blew his mind on that project.

See, he'd imagined that this service was exclusively gonna be for deaf people. Obviously very useful for the very small number of people who couldn't hear their phone, but why would you even own a mobile phone if you couldn't hear?

But she described to him all the times he might want to read a message instead of listen to it. Maybe he was in a loud football crowd. Maybe there was important info that he needed to copy down that was spoken too fast. Maybe he was holding his sleeping newborn (me) and didn't want his phone to be loud and wake them up.

This doesn't feel as revolutionary as all that to those of us that have only ever known phones with the ability 'send text message', but given the timing and placement of this conversation I wonder if this woman and this project is *part of the reason text messaging exists*. The first text (SMS) message was sent by Vodafone UK in 1992 - where + when this conversation was happening - and then for a long time it was supported exclusively for 'messages from the carrier', and this project was an early potential extra use of the SMS protocol.

So Yeh, building for disability is kinda handy..

[complainblogforthevoid]

I've finally figured out an argument that convinces coding tech-bros that AI art is bad.

Got into a discussion today (actually a discussion, we were both very reasonable and calm even through I felt like committing violence) with a tech-bro-coded lady who claimed that people use AI in coding all the time so she didn't see why it mattered if people used AI in art.

Obviously I repressed the surge of violence because that would accomplish nothing. Plus, this lady is very articulate, the type who makes claims and you sit there thinking no that's wrong it must be but she said it so well you're kind of just waffling going but, no, wait-- so I knew I had to get this right if I was gonna come out of this unscathed.

The usual arguments about it being about the soul of it and creation fell flat, in fact she was adamant that anyone who believed that was in fact looking down at coding as an art form as she insisted it is. Which, sure, you can totally express yourself through coding. There's a lot more nuance as to the differences but clearly I was not going to win this one.

The other people I was with (literally 8 people anti-ai against her, but you can't change the mind of someone who doesn't want to listen and she just kept accusing us of devaluing coding as an art) took over for I kid you not 15 minutes while I tried desperately to come up with a clear and articulate way to explain the difference to her. They tried so many reasonable arguments, coding being for a function ("what, art doesn't serve a function?") coding being many discrete building blocks that you put together differently, and the AI simply provides the blocks and you put it together yourself ("isn't that what prompt building is") that it's bad for the environment ("but not if it's used for capitalism, hm?" "Yeah literally that's how capitalism works it doesn't care about the environment" she didn't like that response)

But I finally got it.

And the answer is: It's not about what you do, it's about what you claim to be.

Imagine that someone asks an AI to write a code and, by some miracle, it works perfectly without them having to tweak it---which is great because they couldn't tell you what a single solitary thing in that code means.

Now imagine this person, with their code that they don't know how it works, goes and applies to be a coder somewhere, presenting this AI code as proof that they're qualified.

Should they be hired?

She was horrified, of course. Of course they shouldn't be. They're not qualified. They can't actually code, and even if by some miracle they did have an AI successfully write a flawless code for every issue they came across that wouldn't be their code, you could hire any shmuck on the street to do that, no reason to pay someone like they're creating something.

When actual engineers use AI what they do is get some kind of base, which they then go though and check for problems and then if they find any they fix them, and add on to the base code with their own knowledge instead of just trying different prompt after prompt until they randomly come across one that works.

People who generate code like this don't usually call themselves engineers. They're people who needed a bit of code and didn't have the knowledge to generate it, and so used a resource.

And there you go. There are people who have none of the skills of artists, they don't practice, they don't create for themselves. When they feed the prompt to the AI they then don't just use the resulting image as a reference point for their own personal masterpiece, and if they don't like it they don't have the skills to change it---they simply try another prompt, and do that until they get something they like.

These people are calling themselves artists.

Not only that, these people are bringing the AI generated thing to interviews, and they are getting hired, leaving people who slave over their craft out of the job.

And that is the difference, for the tech bros who think AI art isn't a big deal.

[skelleste]

Scatterbrain went to Glasgow.

[manga-and-stuff]

Source: Eniale & Dewiela | Enidewi | エニデヴィ

by Shirahama Kamome

[whispyart]

Sage of Lightning - Riju

[murmurlilies]

NEW LOOK FOR MY GIRL ✨

[soyalexnajera]

FUCK DISCOVERY HERE'S THE 4 SEASONS OF INFINITY TRAIN

[givemeinternet]

This is a theater stage for a play

[tenofswords618-deactivated20140]

no thats a boss battle

[dexthorn]

[catgifsinthesenate]

This is the Bregenzer Festspiele opera house, and it’s worth noting that this is not a one-off. Every single one of their productions looks like a boss battle and/or smash bros stage

[whatsajulian]

These are all horrifying. Thanks for sharing

[thewisemankey]

Someone should make a fighting video game with ALL these bgs.

[jebiwonkenobi]

Once upon a time I worked in this little burger/coffee/ice cream shop and a lady came in one winter and asked if we had a caramel apple drink and we were like ‘well we have cider’ and she was like ‘no I don’t remember what it’s called but this place made a drink that was chai tea, apple cider, and caramel’ and Breezy offered to try and make something for her but she changed her mind and left so Breezy and I were like ‘alright let’s try this’ because we had chai tea, instant cider mix, a shit ton of caramel, instant hot water from the espresso and too much free time. 

And let me tell you it was delightful. It tastes like watching the leaves changing color and dancing in the wind. It tastes like picking out pumpkins and gourds and fresh apples at the farm up north. It tastes like witches and freedom.

I make it every year now and this year I walked in the house on the morning of October first with all the ingredients and shouted ‘FALL DRINK’ and my roommates were like ‘????’ so I made them Fall Drink and now every time they get home from work they’re like ‘Fall Drink pls?????’

Anyway I remember literally nothing else about that woman but I’m very grateful to her. 

[lightrises]

for anyone wondering about proportions/etc here’s op’s answer from the repiles:

[not-rude-ginger]

@gaslightgallows I feel this would be relevant to your interests. 

[gaslightgallows]

I don’t like caramel but I can vouch for hot chaider being amazing.

[scifrey]

Deareat @simonalkenmayer I feel like this is relevant to your interests.

Also, I do something like this in the crock pot with the overly sweet Growers Pumpkin Apple Cider, chai spices, cloves, a bit of orange juice, and some super dry Pinot Grigio.

Mix, heat, and serve on a nippy night best spent cuddled under blankets with a book.

[simonalkenmayer]

My friend, you have essentially backward engineered a wonderful winter drink from the Stuart period.

White sack wine, cider, spices (clove, cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, ginger) tea, sugar, and if you want it authentic, a bit of cream or whipped egg. All this is brought together in a low temperature and then stewed for a time. It can also be “pulled”, a process in which one “stirs” the concoction by using a ladle and pouring it repeatedly from high in the air. Makes it foamy and frothy. 

Serve warm.

On a cold night, this is a delightful thing. Believe it or not, we also used to make it with a stout beer instead of wine. For a darker richer flavor.

[ms-demeanor]

One Black Tea Bag, One Cup Apple Juice, 2tsp butter, 2tsp brown sugar, cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger to taste will also accomplish something similar (just melt the butter and brown sugar together and whisk them around a pan a bit - don’t bother making proper caramel) Make your faux-caramel then you add the apple juice and then the rest; heat it up to a boil then turn off the heat, drop the tea bag in and let it steep for 3 minutes, serve with gingersnaps.

[oblivious-chaos]

Nothing better than tumblr recipe posts

[aintsaintsanti]

Saving this for later when it’s colder

[pumpkster-deactivated20250205]

ayo i found 2 pages with head angles of humans and animals, could be useful to anyone reading this

hoomans

animals

[netheritenugget]

Holy FUCK, this is an amazing tool.

[scrabbleknight]

Reblogging for my artist fellows.

[i-imade-a-thing]

Reblog this!

[datpiranha]

colored Jurassic Express ~

[memewhore]

[bananahomo]

I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said “might as well see if it works.” I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if you’re a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.

dude.

$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.

[thewisemankey]

Story time.

One day after eating Little Caesar's pizza around January of 2010, I ended up getting gastroenteritis. Now I had no concept of what that was, because after how terrible my body was feeling, I remember looking in the mirror and seeing my face degrade in a way I hadn't seen before to the point where I thought I was dying. So I go to the hospital to NOT die. What I didn't realize at the time that my health insurance literally expired that day because my asshole of a dad canceled it without my knowledge.

So I was stuck with a pretty hefty hospital bill that I had no way of paying, and I wasn't getting money from Little Caesar's since my condition was legally not their fault. And despite working at a pharmacy, my pay was nowhere near the amount that could possibly pay it off. Especially since the hours and days I work aren't set. So what do I do? I did exactly what was mentioned in this video. Requested financial aid with the hospital I went to, and all of it vanished into thin air.

Learn from my experience and don't panic, help is always there for you even if it doesn't always seem like it.

Also, never eat Little Caesar's. Ever.

[rikun85]

Reblogging to save a life.

[video320]

Josie Rizal from Tekken

[rikun85]

I’m a sucker for Filipino rep in fighting games!

[rikun85]

An adventuring trio consisting of a dragonborn, a barbarian, and a halfling.

Look familiar don’t they?

[whencartoonsruletheworld]

why you should watch lindsay ellis’s “into the omegaverse: how a fanfic trope landed in federal court”: 

she has to explain a/b/o to her audience 

she managed to get TWELVE other youtubers to voice act for reenactments, including hbomberguy, jenny nicholson, todd in the shadows, sarah z, princess weekes, and an entire legality segment with legaleagle 

every time she has to explain knotting she just blows up a balloon that, unfortunately, has sonic the hedgehog on it,

she says the word “superwholock” about four and a half minutes in 

absolutely insane amounts of legal fights over het a/b/o including perjury

within the first 24 hours after upload lindsay was already sued for it