#robot yapping

[sadchristianrobots]

every time someone starts to use ricardo as an argument as to why the Middle isn't That Bad, or that Vespa and Moses are wrong for saying Matthias is actually kinda typical of the Middle, and how it really is just a wholesome found family, i just wanna start pointing out that Queequeg literally chose a lobotomy over staying in the Middle

[spacecaptcha]

Kicking My Feet With Joy

[sadchristianrobots]

small criticism for people writing Don Quixote: a lot of people don't know how thee/thou/thy/thine work when writing her. this is to be expected. they're archaic pronouns that aren't used often.

i've got a link here about Shakespeare's use of the pronouns that might be helpful. but the basics are to remember that they're basically just different conjugations of "you."

"I saw you at the store" would be "I saw thee at the store."

"You are at the store" would be "Thou art at the store."

"This is your sleeve" would be "This is thy sleeve."

"This is your object" would be "This is thine object."

You can grasp the rules, right? Thee is for when something is happening to "you," thou is for when "you" are doing something, and thy/thine is a standin for "your," with the ending determined by whether or not the thing that "your" owns starts with a consonant or a vowel.

Definitely recommend reading some Shakespeare or the King James bible if you really want some vocabulary and sentence structure that would sound pretty apt coming from Don Quixote's mouth.

[sadchristianrobots]

sinner music headcanons

aka "what's getting played on the bus"

Long post.

Yi Sang: Honestly just happy to hear music. His music collection is eclectic, so who knows what he's playing that day? He has some genres he won't venture into, notably with a bias against metal, and tends to favor folk music, but he's not against anything the other Sinners like. Probably the only person besides Meursault that likes Ryoshu's choices.

Faust: Hyperpop and just-on-the-edge-of-mainstream stuff. Knows the history of pop music to an insane degree and loves her fringe pop girlies. Thinks SOPHIE is overrated but will still blast Oil of Every Pearl's Un-Insides whenever she gets a chance. The most likely to play 100 Gecs. Likes music that is loud and in-your-face.

Don Quixote: Passionate metalhead. Loves her speed metal, thrash metal, and power metal. Would 100% want to be in a mosh pit. Also has a soft spot for ska. Her music is LOUD and she likes it that way. She and Ryoshu share a deep love for Death Grips.

Ryoshu: Extremely weird, experimental music. The sort of deep cuts you only find from music nerds. The kinda shit you have to buy in-person because you were at their show. you gotta have an appreciation for the art of music to get into the sort of shit Ryoshu plays. Think The Shaggs. The most normal thing she plays is probably shit like Lene Lovich and Nina Hagen and Frank Zappa.

Meursault: Literal roulette of genres, sounds, songs. He picks whatever he was thinking about that day, and he never lets on to what he's thinking about. Sometimes it's awesome. Sometimes it's dogshit. Truly an "I listen to everything" type. Might not even like what he picks, but he's just here for the experience.

Hong Lu: Pre-Canto 8, only plays extremely safe shit. Comes across as a pop girlie, playing whatever's safe on the radio. Coworker music core. Starts getting more into music after Canto 8, and thus starts pulling from other Sinners' collections and doing more deep dives as she tries to figure out her taste. Might have a soft spot for goth industrial?

Heathcliff: Rodion dubs him "Baby Einstein" after he starts sharing his records, which are mostly recordings of various classical composers. He also has a huge soft spot for big band jazz and lo-fi instrumentals. The sort of man to listen to the Minecraft OST as a main form of music. Misophonia means he's the most picky Sinner when it comes to music.

Ishmael: Claims to have an extremely wide and varied music taste. In reality, she just puts the same album by American Football on the bus radio over and over again. She has the autism habit of listening to the same song on loop for hours if allowed.

Rodion: Top 40 girlie that never had much access to music that wasn't on the radio. Her tastes tend to be very mainstream, but she's quite interested in everyone else's music. She gets annoyed when people talk down to her about not knowing artists. Hates Ryoshu's days.

Dante: Doesn't pick music, but will defend anyone else's music tastes and mediate conflicts. Bought Heathcliff some noise-cancelling headphones to get him to stop complaining so much about other Sinners' music. Trying to get Ryoshu to pick more palatable music. Secretly likes Rodion's days the best because they're the safest.

Sinclair: Her tastes are also relatively mainstream, but they tend to be the "sophisticated" mainstream tastes. Shit like Ben Folds Five, Dave Matthews Band, Florence + The Machine, that sort of thing. She has some music knowledge, so she's the most likely Sinner to enjoy Heathcliff's days.

Outis: Picks her music and then goes "What the FUCK do you mean this album is 25 years old?" and stares out the window for an hour. Her tastes are pretty good, if you're into classic rap and rock, and she WILL get upset if you call it that. On the Tupac side of the beef.

Gregor: Voted most likely coworker to listen to Imagine Dragons. Also likely to play the City equivalent of 80s pop. Never complains about anyone else's music, though doesn't really get why everyone likes what they like.

[sadchristianrobots]

i cannot emphasize how much i believe martin's canon ending is the happiest possible ending for him

knowing what we know about the rise of the Thalmor and the Leyawiin-Elsweyr Conflict and the eventual invasion of Morrowind by Black Marsh, i do not think Martin would have had a good time as Emperor.

Jauffre even implies that the Elder Council wants an Emperor to take the heat off their handling of the Oblivion Crisis. like. there are so many implications that Martin's going to be Fucking Miserable. he would find that he doesn't have the power to help people as much as he thinks he does. no decision he could make would save everyone.

i think it would fucking kill him, if not literally than emotionally.

becoming a martyr and ascending to godhood pretty much means he can go out doing a universal good for the world and live with the knowledge that he's done something meaningful with his life. that he existed with purpose. that he's a Good Person.

every time i sit down to write the "martin lives" AU, i live with the knowledge that i am kicking him in the teeth much harder than i would by just letting him have his canon ending.

[sadchristianrobots]

lineart tips for messy sketchers

so i'm someone with a messy sketch process, but I produce relatively clean and fluid lineart. i think my lineart is actually quite good, and here's some of my advice for it:

Don't detail everything in your sketch. I often only draw suggestions of things in my sketches, and the actual process details everything properly. Sketches should be for ideation, not so much perfecting everything.

Do it a lot. Honestly it sounds like a no brainer, but you really, really need to let go of perfectionism. Do it a lot. You'll naturally get better as you go.

Clean up your sketches more before doing lineart. I liken my process of sketching to sculpting: I'll often do multiple lines and then go back over with a transparent brush and "carve out" the line I want. This makes the lineart process significantly easier. I do it slightly less these days b/c the more you line stuff, the more you get an idea of how you really want your lines, but cleaning up parts of the sketch that need more ideation is a good tip for lineart.

View your lineart less as tracing and more as redrawing with a guide. You should move your hand fluidly. You should line at a similar speed as you sketch. Try not to focus on copying your sketch exactly. You'll get what I mean as you line more.

While it's ok to draw with searching lines, try to avoid eensy little scratches that make the lines look feathery. Messy lines are different from eensy little lines, and lemme show you what I mean.

Recent sketch in its planning phase. I'm still figuring things out, deciding where the lines go, carving them out, but you can notice i do use long strokes, just multiple ones.

meanwhile old art on a "clean sketch" phase. brother ew. there's no confidence in these lines, and i'm not planning line width for lineart. for reference, my "clean sketches" now look like below:

also proof that i'm not bullshitting: my lineart vs sketching.

When people say "don't chickenscratch," I feel there's always a response of "well isn't sketching supposed to be messy????" but uh now that I no longer "chickenscratch," I can tell you: there's a difference.

Lineart is as much of an art as anything else you do, and honestly #1 has been my best move towards lineart so far. Viewing the sketch more as a means of planning rather than an echo of the final piece has really helped. I actually only do "clean sketches" now when I am doing it for stylistic reasons, or doing character design that I want to ideate on further. When I first started, I'd have a rough sketch, clean sketch, and lineart phase. Now it's just rough sketch to lineart, and it saves so much time.

Final edit: so we're clear, the chicken scratch art is my old art. I'm not bashing some random beginner. That's smth I drew. It's a matter of practice and improvement. I actually think the lineart phase is now my strongest part of my drawing process, when I used to constantly be like those tumblr posts about how lineart is the devil. You can get there, too. If you're committed to lineart, you'll eventually hit my point where it's actually easier to just line things instead of clean up your sketches.

[sadchristianrobots]

crash course to writing SANGRIA

basically this is how i tend to approach writing Ryoshu in fanfic.

90% of SANGRIA is bullshit. Ryoshu will accept most translations if it means she can bait people with it. If you don't have a precise SANGRIA translation, that's fine. You can also tell that she sometimes comes up with her meanings after speaking them. You do NOT need to have a perfect translation of every SANGRIA phrase she uses, and you can get a li'l poetic and artsy with the phrasing. In fact, I encourage you to be the sort of annoying Ryoshu Writer that I am and provide Zero Translations unless she's giving them herself.

SANGRIA is often used with wordplay, memes, and jokes. "Coming for that ASS (annoying, stupid stache)" is something she has used. I can probably make this post a little more full of actual references to her dialogue, but I'm a bit sun-baked and just kinda offering out my general rules to writing it. Either way, remember that Ryoshu's first and purest love is the Bit.

Ryoshu doesn't use it when she's upset or being serious or actually angry. A good way to think about Ryoshu is that she's a Heel by nature; either because she loves to fuck with people, or because by making herself seem more dangerous and frightening than she really is, she gets a little bit more safety from people who don't want to fuck with her, or a bit of both, honestly. But when Ryoshu is the person that's being fucked with, she doesn't drop SANGRIA.

Basically, just remember that Ryoshu is a character that is Very Obviously Fronting most of the time, and SANGRIA is just part of it.

[sadchristianrobots]

thinking abt heathmael and the concept of clinging to someone so like you because you desperately want to like yourself and you see yourself in their eyes. the concept of hating them so much because you do see yourself in them, and it's everything you hate about yourself, too. the concept of how you've always been told about your other half, except that other half is gone, and how the fuck are you supposed to just. move on. about how you can be someone's second choice and have to make peace with that. about want vs need. about how your first love isn't the last one. about competing with ghosts. about how she's gone and you're here and that's not good enough. can it ever be enough. about how something can be good even if it's transient. about how it matters even if it ends.

also about ishmael biting heathcliff a lot and how one of the songs on my heathmael playlist is called "naruto themed sexting."