My wife pointed out to me the other day that apparently most people were literally only taught how to say Sorry and not how to Apologize or even that they are different things so here.
If all you ever do is step 1, not only did you not apologize, but people will rightfully stop believing you and start getting pissed or hurt.
If you learn about apologies in psychology, this is something they emphasize.
An apology that is meant is not just spoken; it is shown in actions.
So when you apologize but don't change, you prove you aren't sorry for your actions; you were sorry they had consequences. And then people don't trust you because of it.
telecom service providers in india are getting orders from government to shutdown our internet. they might also mass delete the posts and videos online. i know this is not the content you followed me for but please raise voice for the people in india if you can. if you find any posts about the brutality that the police inflicted upon protesters, people seeking legal or medical attention, people needing donation for sanitary pads, food, water, masks, etc. on twitter or instagram, please share it. it's my humble request. this is our last day. they're applying emergency alerts and new rules from tomorrow but today we are standing here in rain raising our voices and we will continue to do so.
digital selfharm is real. do NOT check up on that ex-partner/ex-friend. do NOT reread those old messages/conversations that you know will hurt your feelings all over again or that will otherwise make you feel like shit. do NOT block evade to see if you’re being talked about. inhale. exhale. let it pass and you’ll be better for it.
it’s nice seeing other people starting to open their eyes to what i’ve been saying for a while in that the current use and proliferation of the term “gooning” is an outright tool of fascism
the second “gooning” stopped referring to a specific sexual practice and started to be used as a replacement for “masturbation” we needed to kill it immediately and sadly we didn’t
if you call someone a “masturbator” in a derisive way you sound like a fucking mormon but suddenly you switch to calling them a “gooner” and you’ve created a way to express the same puritanical beliefs around masturbation that is not only palatable to the average person but the attached underlying implications of the term make people way more susceptible to adopting those beliefs themselves
leftists need to fucking stop using the term “gooner” right fucking now
demonizing human sexuality and treating masturbation and sexual activity as deviant and disgusting are straight up fascist tools and it’s startling how successful this aspect of it has been the last few years
My Favorite Cheap Art Trick: Gradient Maps and Blending Modes
i get questions on occasion regarding my coloring process, so i thought i would do a bit of a write up on my "secret technique." i don't think it really is that much of a secret, but i hope it can be helpful to someone. to that end:
this is one of my favorite tags ive ever gotten on my art. i think of it often. the pieces in question are all monochrome - sort of.
the left version is the final version, the right version is technically the original. in the final version, to me, the blues are pretty stark, while the greens and magentas are less so. there is some color theory thing going on here that i dont have a good cerebral understanding of and i wont pretend otherwise. i think i watched a youtube video on it once but it went in one ear and out the other. i just pick whatever colors look nicest based on whatever vibe im going for.
this one is more subtle, i think. can you tell the difference? there's nothing wrong with 100% greyscale art, but i like the depth that adding just a hint of color can bring.
i'll note that the examples i'll be using in this post all began as purely greyscale, but this is a process i use for just about every piece of art i make, including the full color ones. i'll use the recent mithrun art i made to demonstrate. additionally, i use clip studio paint, but the general concept should be transferable to other art programs.
for fun let's just start with Making The Picture. i've been thinking of making this writeup for a while and had it in mind while drawing this piece. beyond that, i didn't really have much of a plan for this outside of "mithrun looks down and hair goes woosh." i also really like all of the vertical lines in the canary uniform so i wanted to include those too but like. gone a little hog wild. that is the extent of my "concept." i do not remember why i had the thought of integrating a shattered mirror type of theme. i think i wanted to distract a bit from the awkward pose and cover it up some LOL but anyway. this lack of planning or thought will come into play later.
note 1: the textured marker brush i specifically use is the "bordered light marker" from daub. it is one of my favorite brushes in the history of forever and the daub mega brush pack is one of the best purchases ive ever made. highly recommend!!!
note 2: "what do you mean by exclusion and difference?" they are layer blending modes and not important to the overall lesson of this post but for transparency i wanted to say how i got these "effects." anyway!
with the background figured out, this is the point at which i generally merge all of my layers, duplicate said merged layer, and Then i begin experimenting with gradient maps. what are gradient maps?
the basic gist is that gradient maps replace the colors of an image based on their value.
so, with this particular gradient map, black will be replaced with that orangey red tone, white will be replaced with the seafoamy green tone, etc. this particular gradient map i'm using as an example is very bright and saturated, but the colors can be literally anything.
these two sets are the ones i use most. they can be downloaded for free here and here if you have csp. there are many gradient map sets out there. and you can make your own!
you can apply a gradient map directly onto a specific layer in csp by going to edit>tonal correction>gradient map. to apply one indirectly, you can use a correction layer through layer>new correction layer>gradient map. honestly, correction layers are probably the better way to go, because you can adjust your gradient map whenever you want after creating the layer, whereas if you directly apply a gradient map to a layer thats like. it. it's done. if you want to make changes to the applied gradient map, you have to undo it and then reapply it. i don't use correction layers because i am old and stuck in my ways, but it's good to know what your options are.
this is what a correction layer looks like. it sits on top and applies the gradient map to the layers underneath it, so you can also change the layers beneath however and whenever you want. you can adjust the gradient map by double clicking the layer. there are also correction layers for tone curves, brightness/contrast, etc. many such useful things in this program.
let's see how mithrun looks when we apply that first gradient map we looked at.
gadzooks. apologies for eyestrain. we have turned mithrun into a neon hellscape, which might work for some pieces, but not this one. we can fix that by changing the layer blending mode, aka this laundry list of words:
some of them are self explanatory, like darken and lighten, while some of them i genuinely don't understand how they are meant to work and couldn't explain them to you, even if i do use them. i'm sure someone out there has written out an explanation for each and every one of them, but i've learned primarily by clicking on them to see what they do.
for the topic of this post, the blending mode of interest is soft light. so let's take hotline miamithrun and change the layer blending mode to soft light.
here it is at 100% opacity. this is the point at which i'd like to explain why i like using textured brushes so much - it makes it very easy to get subtle color variation when i use this Secret Technique. look at the striation in the upper right background! so tasty. however, to me, these colors are still a bit "much." so let's lower the opacity.
i think thats a lot nicer to look at, personally, but i dont really like these colors together. how about we try some other ones?
i like both of these a lot more. the palettes give the piece different vibes, at which point i have to ask myself: What Are The Vibes, Actually? well, to be honest i didn't really have a great answer because again, i didn't plan this out very much at all. however. i knew in my heart that there was too much color contrast going on and it was detracting from the two other contrasts in here: the light and dark values and the sharp and soft shapes. i wanted mithrun's head to be the main focal point. for a different illustration, colors like this might work great, but this is not that hypothetical illustration, so let's bring the opacity down again.
yippee!! that's getting closer to what my heart wants. for fun, let's see what this looks like if we change the blending mode to color.
i do like how these look but in the end they do not align with my heart. oh well. fun to experiment with though! good to keep in mind for a different piece, maybe! i often change blending modes just to see what happens, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. i very much cannot stress enough that much of my artistic process is clicking buttons i only sort of understand. for fun.
i ended up choosing the gradient map on the right because i liked that it was close to the actual canary uniform colors (sorta). it's at an even lower opacity though because there was Still too much color for my dear heart.
the actual process for this looks like me setting my merged layer to soft light at around 20% opacity and then clicking every single gradient map in my collection and seeing which one Works. sometimes i will do this multiple times and have multiple soft light and/or color layers combined.
typically at this point i merge everything again and do minor contrast adjustments using tone curves, which is another tool i find very fun to play around with. then for this piece in particular i did some finishing touches and decided that the white border was distracting so i cropped it. and then it's done!!! yay!!!!!
this process is a very simple and "fast" way to add more depth and visual interest to a piece without being overbearing. well, it's fast if you aren't indecisive like me, or if you are better at planning.
let's do another comparison. personally i feel that the hint of color on the left version makes mithrun look just a bit more unwell (this is a positive thing) and it makes the contrast on his arm a lot more pleasing to look at. someone who understands color theory better than i do might have more to say on the specifics, but that's honestly all i got.
Your artstyle is like your gut microbiome in the way its everything you consume and like and it also has all your bacteria up in it. Thats probably how that works
“The Shonen Protagonist joins The Organization” is such a cheap and easy hack for framing a narrative because the author never has to come up with a reason why the protagonist gets involved in each arc. It’s just that The Organization has a new Mission for the protagonist every time and the protagonist gets to say, “Righteo, thanks plot for telling me what to go do.”
Which makes Fullmetal Alchemist so much funnier because Edward Elric very very much does join The Organization. He’s in fact quite famous for joining The Organization. Where The Organization is a hostile fascist dictatorship with immense military power which is good at both giving orders and punishing defectors.
And yet over the course of the series Edward is so allergic to ever being told what to do that he in fact never ever goes on an Organization-Ordered Mission. And the exactly one time The Organization DID try to tell him what to do Edward hated it so much he fucked off and impaled himself at the bottom of a mineshaft about it.
Ozempic scares the shit out of me. You're telling me there's a drug that takes away both the craving side of hunger and targets the brain's rewards center for eating. You're telling me it takes the joy out of eating and it turns you into a skeleton. Why did we turn The Curse of the Black Pearl into a drug. What the fuck.
I actually want to thank the diabetics coming on this post like "actually it genuinely is a great treatment for diabetes and it hasn't affected my mood or my enjoyment of food. The real issue is it's getting abused as a weight loss drug which also makes it scarce and more expensive for those who can genuinely benefit from it." Kind of reminds me of the time my brother got permission from our family psychiatrist to try my ADHD medication and his reaction to it was "what the fuck are you on. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ON. WHY DO I FEEL LIKE CRYING. YOU'RE ON THIS EVERY DAY!?!"
Body chemistry! It makes a big difference in how your body processes a drug! What can be genuinely helpful for some folks is The Curse of the Black Pearl for others!
The typical dosage used for reducing blood sugar is significantly lower than what usually being prescribed for weight loss. Just FYI on why the weight loss usage is making it scarce for actual diabetic people.
Not getting a ton of reporting in US news, but the Trump administration is going after donors to Palestine, including going as far as international extradition under the guide of "counterterrorism"
maybe y'all didn't notice but fat people who don't hate ourselves sure did notice that people were obsessed with shitting on fat people in the late 90s and early 2000s (conservative political time) and now are again (fascist political time), coincidentally while the market for weight loss has become a 90 billion dollar industry due to glp1s.
you are not immune to propaganda. it makes some people a whole hell of a lot of money for you to hate fat people and fear becoming (or staying, I think like 70% or something of the US is fat) one of us.
a lot of the fearmongering over fatness comes from studies directly funded by the weight loss industry...i think people don't really realize or think about the fact that research can absolutely be influenced and skewed by its funding. there is also research that shows that an amount of the negative health outcomes for fat people come from anti-fat bias. if you go to the doctor with concerns and the doctor simply tells you to lose weight, your problem is neglected and you may not even bother going to the doctor with the next problem.
every fat person you know for the most part probably has a story like this, of medical neglect. many of the stories i've heard personally are when the complaint or the doctor wasn't related at all, like being told to lose weight at the ear nose and throat doctor or at the dentist. it's straight up just bias. it's such a thing that in the show Shrill it's portrayed, when Aidy Bryant goes to the gynecologist and her doctor suggests she get gastric bypass.
the studies on health and fatness are simply not that black and white and there is basically no research that shows that more than an incredibly tiny minority of people can lose weight and keep it off for more than like 2 years. bodies have set points that they gravitate towards, it's not a personal failure. this also is how the weight loss industry succeeds so well - repeat customers.
some of the harm associated with fatness is also due to weight cycling, which is very hard on your body and is even worse if you get off a GLP1, which according to a recent study causes weight to be regained at a rate that is 4x faster than without taking a GLP1.
you don't have to hate yourself. you don't have to hate other people for their body type either. it makes me so sad to see the thinspo tag going around again in 2026 a lot like it was back in the day.
A study spanning almost four decades and involving more than 100,000 adults in Denmark found that those with an 'overweight' body mass index
there's so much crazy shit once you go down the rabbit hole. for example, BMI was not invented by anyone with a medical background. it was never meant to measure individual health.
