Heinrich - Tired AF (sketches)

the missile is very tired, he is eepy -- Not deep, just some mood sketches from Thursday night when I, too, had hit critical levels of Done. Fun fact: Heinrich is too heckin' tall for his bed. Instead he has a tendency to fall asleep in an even more uncomfortable position on an even more uncomfortable piece of furniture, usually after reading until his brain doesn't work anymore. Y'know. A logical choice. (I keep saying that his animal symbology is all lone wolf, but sometimes he reminds me that there's a lot of cat in there too - he can pretzel and he can sprawl; he can sleep just about anywhere)

Adding this as a library goblin that is constantly telling people about these services:

WE BUDGET FOR THIS!!! Seriously, we spend the money because we can get the money. We get the money because we have it in the budget we present to the people in the government who decide our funding. Use the damn services. This is like someone saying the groceries that you already bought and are offering me for free were expensive. I'm going to steal food from my local market instead because fuck the big box stores! The budget that we have for this has already paid for the service and you will be able to get them for free so just use them already!

"Don't use Libby because it costs libraries too much, pirate instead" is such a weird, anti-patron, anti-author take that somehow manages to also be anti-library, in my professional librarian-ass opinion.

It's well documented that pirating books negatively affects authors directly* in a way that pirating movies or TV shows doesn't affect actors or writers, so I will likely always be anti-book piracy unless there's absolutely, positively no other option (i.e. the book simply doesn't exist outside of online archives at all, or in a particular language).

Also, yeah, Libby and Hoopla licenses are really expensive, but libraries buy them SO THAT PATRONS CAN USE THEM. If you're gonna be pissed at anybody about this shitty state of affairs, be pissed at publishing companies and continue to use Libby or Hoopla at your library so we can continue to justify having it to our funding bodies.

One of the best ways to support your library having services you like is to USE THOSE SERVICES. Yes, even if they are expensive.

*Yes, this is a blog post, but it's a blog post filled with links to news articles. If you can click one link, you can click another.

I'm either Jekyll and Hyde or Franknstein. Reblog to tag yourself!

Join us!!

Me @ everyone rn:

Dracula daily starts in just a couple weeks!

oh uh. scuse me. just a lil snail crossing your dash

My additional two cents that are backing onto the point about supporting artists:

I'll be the first to say that the roll out for their new venture was a misstep and probably needed a bit more warning before they launched into such an ambitious venture, but it was, at best, a mistake. This wasn't a major scam. This wasn't a horrible scheme that was going to extort billions by fucking over vulnerable people. This was an ill planned roll out where artists tried their hand at expanding into something bigger than the audience was prepared for. All that established, they are allowed to have aspirations beyond what they've done or what they are doing.

So many people who got angry started whining that they didn't care about the production values, but that clearly didn't stop them from watching the new content, because they all had opinions on it. And let's talk about those sour grapes opinions that read so much like the "you weren't hot anyway" kinds of comments that we've all collectively decided are shitty things to do. (Don't even get me started on how quickly it got racist in that commentary because some people got a shit load more personal hate messages thrown their way than one of their counterparts. You don't have to go far to see how disproportionate the vitriol was in certain directions.) The thing is that their content isn't about necessarily pleasing the audience and most art shouldn't be. We watch because this isn't shit that we can or would produce ourselves. We like what they do and the fact that we come back means that we want to see how they do it next. And that is, unto itself, a production that will cost something.

Most artists you know make art that pleases them first. Most people who create something want to feel excited about it in ways that aren't just copy paste of things they've done forever. Sometimes that means their art isn't for you right now or anymore and that's fine. Don't make it their issue because that is entirely a you problem. Artists don't owe you art. Content creators don't owe you anything, if we are being honest. If we look at how people acted in this regard and with the amount of bullshit that three people had to put up with over the weekend, we might just want to say a quick thank you for them not deciding that they were going to pull the plug all together, because given that shit storm, they probably thought about it.

my two cents on the "the show was better when it was low production value" is that people dont respect unscripted videos as an artistic medium and dont understand that someones desire for high production might be a creative vision and not based purely on profit, because if they did they wouldnt be saying that. you would never tell someone who works with oil paintings that it would be much cheaper if they went digital.

or maybe they would say that. it is the internet and people pay a lot of lip service to supporting artists and creators and whathaveyou but when they get asked to put their money where their mouth is their response boils down to "greedy capitalist pig wants money?"

No notes. You summed up exactly how i feel about people saying "remember buzzfeed quality? Wow give us that again," not even paying mind that those days Ryan was overworked, barely eating and Buzzfeed saw season 1 and tried to sell it to Netflix before he fought that and he's still fighting to keep it his work his own in the ever ongoing tide of corporate greed. But you know, what's a few ads for temu, mistplay, betterhelp; what's a few scams and mass produced under slave labor ads so long as we and the sponsors get to hold hands to control what Ryan makes.

Wizard worm just emerged from a wizarding hole! Lucky you!!!✨🪱🪄🍀

general relativity for babies

Again, mostly for an audience of one, but for my other writers out there, if someone's gonna get hurt, you should probably know not only how, but what it would do and how to write it effectively. But mostly, this is for @talonserena for reasons.

Ref Recs for Whump Writers

Violence: A Writer’s Guide:  This is not about writing technique. It is an introduction to the world of violence. To the parts that people don’t understand. The parts that books and movies get wrong. Not just the mechanics, but how people who live in a violent world think and feel about what they do and what they see done.

Hurting Your Characters: HURTING YOUR CHARACTERS discusses the immediate effect of trauma on the body, its physiologic response, including the types of nerve fibers and the sensations they convey, and how injuries feel to the character. This book also presents a simplified overview of the expected recovery times for the injuries discussed in young, otherwise healthy individuals.

Body Trauma: A writer’s guide to wounds and injuries. Body Trauma explains what happens to body organs and bones maimed by accident or intent and the small window of opportunity for emergency treatment. Research what happens in a hospital operating room and the personnel who initiate treatment. Use these facts to bring added realism to your stories and novels.

10 B.S. Medical Tropes that Need to Die TODAY…and What to Do Instead: Written by a paramedic and writer with a decade of experience, 10 BS Medical Tropes covers exactly that: clichéd and inaccurate tropes that not only ruin books, they have the potential to hurt real people in the real world. 

Maim Your Characters: How Injuries Work in Fiction: Increase Realism. Raise the Stakes. Tell Better Stories. Maim Your Characters is the definitive guide to using wounds and injuries to their greatest effect in your story. Learn not only the six critical parts of an injury plot, but more importantly, how to make sure that the injury you’re inflicting matters. 

Blood on the Page: This handy resource is a must-have guide for writers whose characters live on the edge of danger. If you like easy-to-follow tools, expert opinions from someone with firsthand knowledge, and you don’t mind a bit of fictional bodily harm, then you’ll love Samantha Keel’s invaluable handbook

POV: Ethel brings you a leaf

Pack those bags!

I love how in the Dracula Daily fandom, we don’t say that we are beginning once again on May 3rd.

Rather, we say “my dear friend Johnathan is preparing for his upcoming trip. I hope he has such a wonderful time and that he brings back some delicious recipes :)”

And I think that’s beautiful

This is for an audience of one: @talonserena

"Remember that time you got turned into Cthulhu?"

"Keep yapping, Rincewind."

Blank bloodweave gifs for your imagination!! Let me know what you think they're saying here :)

Putting this on my own timeline so I can remind myself to look for it later.

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

He has a lot to say