trying to erase the trace of...

i am once again banishing the idea that bruce was never affectionate with tim/was mean to him/was a cold, distant mentor to him. begone.

writing sassy damian rocks!!!!!

This Is What Makes Us Girls ~ Lana Del Rey

You ever come up with a story concept and think oh this is brilliant, this is so good, this is so clever, I'm a genius, people will love this, and you brainstorm and you outline and you create a whole host of details about it, but also you... don't want to write it, not in a "I dislike writing" or "I want someone/something else to write this" type way, but in a "I love and enjoy this concept and want to be the one to execute it if it ever comes to pass, and yet this story/genre just isn't really me" way, like this is good but I'm not the one to do it, but also I'm the only one to do it, it's mine

LAS CHICAS SUPERPODEROSAS //

Más aquí / More here

Old Town Road (AKA The "Hob is a Horse Girl" Fic)

By @arialerendeair and all art by @amielot (Art Masterpost!!)

Chapter: 1/?

Pairing: Dream/Hob

Rating: Explicit

Art featured in this Chapter: The Circus Posters

Summary: Hob helps to rescue Dream - a rare Unicorn Centaur from a decade of captivity at the hands of Roderick Burgess.

Dream is injured, and severely malnourished, and over the next few weeks as he heals and grows stronger - he and Hob grow closer.

When Dream sets off to return to his home, Hob accompanies him, and the two of them grow closer and closer, until they find themselves unwilling to let each other go.

Will they manage to find their happily ever after together?

(It's me, of course they will - just an adventure or seven first!)

~!~!~!~

(Chapter Preview!)

Hob had done his fair share of odd jobs over the years (and far more that he wasn't willing to admit to in polite company), especially in the last five or so, but working for a Circus was a new one.  Had a hell of a lot of benefits though.  Burgess, the man running the place - hadn't asked anything about his background or where he'd come from, had asked if he was willing to work hard, keep his mouth shut, and shovel shit, and had hired him on the spot when he'd said yes.  

(He'd done far worse jobs for far less money.  Nothing was bad if you could find the bright sides in it.  Even shoveling shit.)  

Now, of course, he'd done the smart thing and set about making friends.  There were all sorts that worked for Burgess.  Some that he kept his distance from (having a few vicious friends wasn't a reason to hate a man, but it meant Hob kept his head down and away from the Ringmaster and owner of the place), but many others he made friends with by virtue of conversation.  It'd always been something he was good at, making friends, and relaxing people as they chatted together.  Made even easier by the fact that he'd traveled a lot and was open to traveling more and working long hours.  

Within a few weeks, he was picking up additional jobs and working in several different areas of the circus.  He didn't sleep much, but the additional money he made under the table helping out each of the different bosses was worth it.  Something he stuffed in his shoes and kept close to his chest when he wanted whiskey that burned his soul on certain days of the year.  Especially if one of the other cleaners or security wasn't quick enough to get away from their... curiosities, as Burgess called them.  

Read the rest on Ao3!

What started out as a little doodle ended up being so much more, as to be expected when I put pencil to paper

Breaking in my new sketchbook with some quick sketches when I can’t sleep, but I liked the sketch of this one too much to not do anything abt it. Turns out this paper handles inks better than i thought too! So here’s a quick Jester, my fave of the Chaos Crew 🥺💙

Sketch + process under the cut!

You guys ever think about Gerald messing with Shadow’s memories of Maria? How we have nothing other than Shadow’s memories of Maria to know her by. Do you think he changed more than her final wish? Was she really a force of pure good like she is in his memories? Were the blemishes smoothed over, the happy times emphasized just to make Shadow feel her loss all the more sharply? A girl who’s nothing more than a ghost constructed of memories we know are faulty.

Who was Maria?

Holy fuck

Part 1. Of my super minimal redesigns for the 2023 cast :P overall I didn’t change a whole lot with this bunch! If it’s not broke don’t fix it as they say o7 I think this season actually did rlly great w the characters designs, there’s def gonna be a lot more to redesign with the rest of the lineup though

Critiques and suggestions for the rest of the cast is appreciated :]

Hero & Partner Week 2023: Day 7- Free Day

@heropartnerweek

Continuation of the previous day. All good <3

heads up and fair warning, I'm 20K words deep writing an enemies-to-lovers Cal x Dagan fanfic and if this site lasts til New years I WILL be making it everyone's problem for the entirety of 2024.

new amv dropped!! this one isn't particularly involved, but you know i had to make something focused on my girl nanami

an assignment from last semester! it was a "style emulation" project, where you pick three shows from a list the professor provides, as well as two from a list of:

objects (one handheld size, one person-sized); animals (one small, one large); and celebrities (one male-presenting, one female-presenting)

i'm happy with how these turned out!! 😄

You know Mandarin??

sometime in the spring of this year i kept encountering the idea on other social media that chinese is impossible to learn for europeans, that it's too difficult, that no westerner can learn or truly understand it, and in combination with a mainland friend visiting and telling me the ancient chinese etymology of some basic characters (and the 白人饭 Lunch of Suffering meme) i got fed up/enchanted and did the extremely mentally healthy thing of teaching myself basic mandarin, through about ~april to july. at some points in may i remember coming home from work, scribbling characters in my mandarin notebook over and over, doing chores, going to sleep, and repeating the cycle. a taiwanese friend on here helped out with a lot (it's much, much easier if you have chinese friends to help you, however, i am really not about traditional, although i admit it's more beautiful) and baptized me with a chinese name.

i don't know mandarin, and at this point a lot of the characters i'd learned have faded from memory, but i insist that it's not actually difficult to learn chinese (up to a point— maybe HSK 3 or 4 is where it gets really difficult). in fact, learning chinese is really, really fun.

the difficulty lies in the fact that you have to do it every single day for at least an hour, probably for more (i spent pretty much all my free time on it, but there was something not normal going on with me then). you'd think, isn't that the case for every language? yet i don't remember doing daily french like that, and i consider some aspects of french conjugation/russian grammar much more difficult than what chinese throws at you at similar difficulty levels (good luck with motion verbs, non-slavic speakers). i found learning characters to be very, very easy. they're all distinct. if you learn them together with their etymology, looking at ancient chinese and how they developed along with associated idioms, it's endlessly rewarding. at least in the early levels, there's a bit of a system to how characters and words come together and increase in complexity—sometimes it's funny, sometimes it's cute. it's a breath of fresh air to start reading even basic sentences and idioms in a language so entirely different from anything you've experienced before. many people say speaking chinese is easier than reading/writing: in my experience, that's false. i barely started getting a grasp on the tonal system (my goal was to get to HSK 1 solely through written chinese); i remember listening to the same 2 minute audio clip of two people exchanging phone numbers for half an hour or something once before getting everything right. people say "chinese doesn't have grammar" but that's not true, because otherwise it won't be a language at all, though you don't have to learn any conjugations, declensions, etc. at HSK 1-2 you just throw a modifier/particle into a sentence and you're good to go.

the other main difficulty besides tones is that imo chinese culture is borderline impenetrable if you want to have a genuine stab at it (but for this you don't, necessarily, need to learn mandarin). you can learn HSK 1-2 in a few months or a semester, but it will take you years to genuinely understand the cultural context—there truly is no context clue or familiar idea you can latch on to, as opposed to when learning a european language/history, or even turkish, arabic, persian; there is nothing in common here, and if you guess, you'll probably wind up wrong. it all makes me think of how many journalists/experts get russia wrong: i now firmly do not believe a word of what people write about asia unless i find the author knows the language

anyway