recovering twitter user

jesse / 33 / philadelphia / artist / trans guy / he/him only pls / art blog is @SVELTTE

[slimmeroo]

it feels like every day substack is showing me new evidence that white women are truly deeply cooked. turns out having a site that lets fascists post engenders a fascist culture-at-large, who could possibly have foreseen this

[slimmeroo]

literally begging anyone on the internet to have any class-consciousness at all, this has been my bugbear for my entire life

there is so much pathetic anti-intellectual shit online even tho we are all also always-already putting on airs as The True Knowers Of Things exactly like academics do, we just don't have credentials to back it up.

i'm sorry that everyone thinks that reading is like eating vegetables but every time i see some post that's like "sometimes people are simply not capable of learning things" i'm like ok you are not an impoverished inner-city black person who was set up to fail at learning how to read, you are not caring for seven orphaned children who take up all of your time with washing and feeding, you are a teenager/college kid/adult child with a pathological aversion to anything that remotely resembles "homework." you just think scrolling your phone after your shift at the cappucino factory is more interesting than Learning Things, and you want to think of this as anything other than a skill issue.

personally i got most of my political education from scrolling tumblr 10-15yrs ago, but it was back when social media was new and half of the takes i saw were from Gen X feminists and black radicals-- people who had already lived in the world, who actually had a broad lived-experience context on how it actually works. then i grew up and decided i wanted to know where those takes had come from, so i googled & wikipedia'd around until i could see what queers & anarchists & bipoc were saying 10-50yrs ago, the takes-which-informed-the-takes before they made it online. it took a long time but now i know, and i am better for it.

but nobody in the modern era recognizes the correlation between education and community. i have spent several years trying to write essays where i chew-and-spew the knowledge for the audience like i'm a fucking mama bird, and most of what i have learned is that the vast majority of people (including self-declared "queers" and "radicals" and whatever) just do not want to know. they are too chickenshit to fuck around and find out the things that might give them a perspective which makes their local friend group (online or off) ~feel challenged.~ they have a lovecraftian terror of "forbidden knowledge," even when no one forbids it but themselves and the people who (supposedly) love them. its abandonment-terror as a way-of-intellectual-life.

and like its to a point where i'm like, there is nothing i can do for you people, either you Want To Learn enough that you will make time for it and not regret the investment, or you just form your entire personality around whatever is rewarded by the people who already like you. my door is always open for sharing what i have but like it takes two to tango my dudes

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[midwinterhunt]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

[slur-sayer]

[shinesurge]

my longest yea boy ever

[shinesurge]

thinking about what manner of man today: I've brought up before how much I personally liked it for its anti-catholic perspective, which I think might appeal to some of y'all here more than the reviews lol. It's good vampire romance you should give it a shot!!

[godlessondheimite]

jeff goldblum is the type of guy who gets mistaken for gay because he’s jewish. nathan lane is the type of guy who gets mistaken for jewish because he’s gay. stanley tucci is the type of guy who gets mistaken for gay because he’s a mild-mannered italian, which is jewish. seth meyers gets mistaken for jewish because of everything about him. zachary levi gets mistaken for jewish because everyone wants him dead. tom cruise gets mistaken for gay because he is.

[dead-weight-collective]

Trying to nail down Spider's tattoos and outfits, his hairstyle has been settled from day one though! The same with his cleft lip scar. He's much more expressive both facially and with his clothing.

His outfits have changed, to match the time period better, but there's a special place for these early versions.

art by sveltte

[slimmeroo]

spider is so fucking cute it makes me angry, i love drawing him

[dead-weight-collective]

Some possible alternate hairstyles! And a little affection.

art by sretann

[phantomrose96]

When you meet Edward Elric he gives off the impression that he's the short-tempered hot-headed "violence is the answer to all life's questions" kind of protagonist, and it's in fact incredible character craft that he's actually the character who ends the series with a negative-3 kill count.

[phantomrose96]

people killed: 0

direct orders of "you really really need to kill this guy" ignored: 1

ongoing murders being committed by Ed's own friends/colleagues that Ed got in the way of to specifically stop that murder from happening: 2

[phantomrose96]

God's worst soldier Edward Elric. Showed up as the youngest member of the Amestrian army, took millions of dollars from them, never followed a single order, helped dismantle their fascist regime, left with a lower kill count than he arrived with, then fucked off to go be a house-husband. Character of all time.

[slimmeroo]

pedantic-ass punkass bitch (me) logs on, instantly sees some well-intentioned-but-ign'ant shit, cracks knuckles, etc etc

[voidscreamingformillenials]

There was a massive shift in how our culture understood morality when, after World War II, the general public realized “just following orders” was not an excuse for crimes against humanity. Now we need another moral shift in which we decide, as a culture, that “for the benefit of the stockholders” is not an excuse for anything.

[speciesofleastconcern]

We kind of need to relearn the “just following orders” part again

[slimmeroo]

not quite, the nuremburg trials kind of did the opposite. the idea that US culture changed course after WW2 and realized some things is just not true.

sorry to be pedantic but like i think its important to understand where these ideas actually did come from, & the difference between a """cultural problem""" and a political problem. what we really need is widespread education on what the fuck is going on and how we got here. that is the only way we might do some politics about it and thus maybe change things for the better in our lifetimes, instead of just posting thru the crisis.

the bad things that happen today are not a diversion from the good morals of the past they are the natural progression of Never Learning Our Lesson. maybe this will help:

tl;dr: US culture learned basically nothing from WW2 bc our ancestors were so guilty/defensive about being late to the war + bombing japan + having been all pro-eugenics-and-slavery before the holocaust. so they just sort of told several generations of kids "nazis bad ok? dont b nazi nooo swastika bad bad bad :/" and left it at that.

we also learned basically nothing from the cold war, we just declared "industry" the new hotness bc we were mad at/scared of russia, mostly for also having lots of land & thus lots of room for factories. its how we became such a rich country in the present but also how we got so evil about it. "just following orders" is the normative expectation if you work any job in a (literal or metaphorical) factory that makes evil shit like bombs or pollution or credit card debt.

so that's why that "just following orders" stuck around, its so people who work for a living don't feel personally responsible for the evil shit their employer does. this is part of what marx called "alienated labor" -- you do a job but dont entirely understand or care about how it fits into some greater whole.

also: the idea of a "cultural problem," which makes our politics bad, is itself a descendant of the 1990s tough-on-crime era attitude that black people do crimes/are poor because "their culture is bad." politically its a line of thinking that is used to justify censorship/criminalization of black arts & culture. naturally a cultural genocide is still a literal genocide when "entertainment" is one of the few job-categories that can pay extremely well (sports, music, filmmaking, etc) even when black entertainers are surrounded by racist colleagues & audiences.

we just don't notice the connection there between "literal violent racist eugenics" and "imprisoning people at large scale by criminalizing their culture" type thinking but like the logic just isn't sound, that is not how culture works. cultures only become a problem when they reach enough critical mass that they are backed up by unrepentant and unstoppable violence. that violence is most often done via politics & the law, the police and prisons, but also via social exclusion & economic abandonment and exclusion-from-infrastructure-you-need-to-live, etc.

anyway sorry if my typing style comes off as rude i just think this stuff is important to know so i'm trying to explain it as briefly as i can. its literally not our fault nobody taught us this stuff & i know ppl don't like watching long video essays, but i promise watching professional (jewish!) cutie-pie-smarty-pants jacob geller explain nuremburg will take significantly less time & effort than reading political philosopher max weber or literally any WW2 history book

[sveltte]

I AM FULL OF LIGHT // I AM FILLED WITH JOY // I AM FULL OF PEACE // I HAD THIS DREAM // THAT I FORGAVE // MY ENEMIES

[song] 🎵 "I" by Perfect Pussy

[dead-weight-collective]

Some Vince and Spider kisses! There's a lot of drawings from both of us of these two kissing. We know what we are about.

art by sretann

[slimmeroo]

rowan is better at drawing kisses than me :/

[slimmeroo]

is it uncool of me to ~violate copyright and normative ethical standards of being an online artist~ to repost tumblr art (with credit) on substack so that the mean-stupid art-critic girlies on the orange hellsite can learn what contemporary art actually looks like.

the level of pretentiousness over there is truly staggering, i feel like im literally watching covergent-evolution of fascism & "degenerate art" critique (re)develop in realtime. like oooo she mad that prestige culture-critic journals don't hire her so she's writing about adorno and "standards" as if its not obvious she hasn't cracked open an art history book or held a paintbrush/camera in her entire life. maybe they'd hire you as a critic if you knew anything else *as well as* various forms of critical theory, eh??

weimar ass motherfuckers would rather die than like a post about black art from the 70s-90s and its just bold-facedly cultural eugenicist shit by way of self-interested ignorance

[sretann]

idk how many people who follow me actually see my posts, but i've been working on a visual novel with my best friend @slimmeroo and if you are interested at least in some of the development art, and on the actual chapters when we can get them together, then mosey over to @dead-weight-collective

thank u.... i don't use tumblr like i used to but maybe i'll try to change that

[slimmeroo]

thats right :^)

[rainbowryland]

dr. ryland grace + being brave

PROJECT HAIL MARY (2026) dir. by Phil Lord & Christopher Miller for @crikeyoryland ♡