The agonising feel when a character tag is full of shipping that you Simply Do Not Vibe With. The solution is, naturally, to keep scrolling. But the wince, the WINCE.

"We need more complex female characters!" Y'all can't even handle Mel Medarda.

And not to pull your halo down

Around your neck and tug you off your cloud

But I'm more than just a little curious

How you're planning to go about making your amends

To the dead

you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me

.

Late Night with the Devil (2023) dir. Cameron Cairnes, Colin Cairnes

in my opinion we need more christine daaes who are portrayed as viciously insane. discuss

Why do only my most typo ridden posts get reblogged?

I think the Office of Incident Assessment and Response (OIAR) exists as a sublevel of an organization that is intentionally feeding The Dread Powers--but in a way to keep them all as equally balanced as possible, so that no one can preform a successful rituals.

I think they intentionally giving targets to Mr. Bonzo as a way to keep him from randomly attacking.

Okay, y'all.

Busy season at work has ended and I've just finished catching up on The Magnus Protocol.

What blogs or discord servers do you recommend for someone who is there for the plot-ier elements--all the intricate story threads and crossover theories? I'm more on the gen side of things than shipping for this fandom.

I know people with keener ears than me have likely already uncovered aspects I've missed--I want to hear their takes and compelling meta.

Chewed her down into bits

If gazebo deaths are so widespread, why does anyone ever perform at one? Are they forced? Does the siren song of the gazebo lure them closer until standing under it's awning seems like a good idea? Do they simply not know of the danger, the whole gazebo-eating-peoole thing only known to a few select people? Many questions

I mean.......how do you know that the elevator you step onto won't plummet to earth? How do you know that the salad you order at a restaurant won't give you salmonella? That your car's brakes will go on working, even when you're about to crash into the highway's concrete divider?

How do you know that any part of the world you move through won't kill you?

And then, more troubling---if the people who are tasked with reviewing elevator safety, food safety, car safety, chose to occasionally (occasionally! not all the time, of course not, they're reasonable) look the other way, and let someone hurtle towards their doom....would it be so bad? With that one terrible sacrifice, the inspector ensures that the elevator never breaks, the salad is never rotted, the car will work every. single. time. Or at least, every other time but the first.

This becomes even less clear-cut when the elevator has preferences, when the salad revolts against being eaten with a fork, when the car contents itself with gas every day except the one where it wants blood. Gallons of it.

It's an important precept to remember, in the keeper community. Not every offering laid across a gazebo's wooden planks or iron latticework is accepted. Sometimes, a jazz quartet performs---and despite the keeper waiting with baited breath for the moment of reckoning, the quartet ends their set, packs up their instruments, and leaves. Sometimes, the keeper will find small animals strewn around instead, hallmarks of a gazebo perfectly uninterested in its human audience. (It's uncommon, certainly, but see Leeman et al. 2018 for a longitudinal study on USian gazebo feeding habits.) Not every gazebo wants to swallow a dance troupe whole; some of them prefer stalking prey like loiterers and the homeless, while others will opt for a marching band over a Shakespeare in the Park, for reasons unknown.

Per American Association of Canopy Keepers guidance, unaware victims seem to satiate gazebos for an average period of 2.4 years, compared with knowing victims' 1.87 years; therefore, best practices recommend ignorance. Fortunately for them, at the end of the day, "will this kill me?" is a numbers game, and to borrow a phrase---

Boy, are we bad at math.

A cozy morning💖

hi, i ireally love your work and i don't know if you've answered this before but, what kinds of studies do you do or how did you learn color theory? i wanna get better at rendering and anatomy but im having trouble TT TT

Hi! Long answer alert. Once a chatterbox, always a chatterbox.

When I started actively learning how to draw about 10 1/2 years ago, I exclusively did graphite studies in sketchbooks. Here's a few examples—I mostly stuck to doing line drawings to drill basic shapes/contours and proportions into my brain. The more rendered sketches helped me practice edge control & basic values, and they were REALLY good for learning the actual 3D structure behind what I was drawing.

I'd use reference images that I grabbed from fitness forums, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and some NSFW places, but you could find adequate ref material from figure drawing sites like Line of Action. LoA has refs for people (you can filter by clothed/unclothed, age, & gender), animals, expressions, hands/feet, and a few other useful things as well. Love them.

Learning how to render digitally was a similar story; it helped a lot that I had a pretty strong foundation for value/anatomy going in. I basically didn't touch color at all for ~2 years (except for a few attempts at bad digital or acrylic paint studies), which may not have been the best idea. I learned color from a lot of trial and error, honestly, and I'm pretty sure this process involved a lot of imitation—there were a number of digital/traditional painters whose styles I really wanted to emulate (notably their edge control, color choices, value distributions, and shape design), so I kiiind of did a mixture of that + my own experimentation.

For example, I really found Benjamin Björklund's style appealing, especially his softened/lost edges & vibrant pops of saturated color, so here's a study I did from some photograph that I'm *pretty* sure was painted with him in mind.

Learning how to detail was definitely a slow process, and like all the aforementioned things (anatomy/color/edge control/values/etc.) I'm still figuring it out. Focusing on edge control first (that is, deciding on where to place hard/soft edges for emphasizing/de-emphasizing certain areas of the image) is super useful, because you can honestly fool a viewer into thinking there's more detail in a piece than there actually is if you're very economical about where you place your hard edges.

The most important part, to me, is probably just doing this stuff over and over again. You're likely not going to see improvement in a few weeks or even a few months, so don't fret about not getting the exact results you want and just keep studying + making art. I like to think about learning art as a process where you *need* to fail and make crappy art/studies—there's literally no way around it—so you might as well fail right now. See, by making bad art you're actually moving forward—isn't that a fun prospect!!

It's useful to have a folder with art you admire, especially if you can dissect the pieces and understand why you like them so much. You can study those aspects (like, you can redraw or repaint that person's work) and break down whether this is art that you just like to look at, or if it's the kind of art that you want to *make.* There's a LOT of art out there that I love looking at, probably tens of thousands of styles/mediums, but there's a very narrow range that I want to make myself.

I've mentioned it in some ask reply in the past, but I really do think looking at other artist's work is such a cheat code for improving your own skills—the other artist does the work to filter reality/ideas for you, and this sort of allows you to contact the subject matter more directly. I can think of so many examples where an artist I admired exaggerated, like, the way sunlight rested on a face and created that orange fringe around its edge, or the greys/dull blues in a wheat field, or the bright indigo in a cast shadow, or the red along the outside of a person's eye, and it just clicked for me that this was a very available & observable aspect of reality, which had up until that point gone completely unnoticed! If you're really perceptive about the art you look at, it's shocking how much it can teach you about how to see the world (in this particular case I mean this literally, in that the art I looked at fully changed the way I visually processed the world, but of course it has had a strong effect on my worldviews/relationships/beliefs).

Thanks so much for sending in a question (& for reading, if you got this far)! I read every single ask I receive, including the kind words & compliments, which I genuinely always appreciate. Best of luck with learning, my friend :)