vaguing a post that's on my dash that I don't want to engage with (as usual) but actually no CPTSD isn't a diagnosis for 'when things were a tiny bit bad a lot' or 'if you experienced relationships that were toxic but not abusive' it's a diagnosis describing the impacts of CONTINUOUS TRAUMA. not less significant but more frequent trauma; trauma which is ongoing/continuous/recurring in developmental years.

like I'm not trying to gatekeep here and I recognise the value of saying 'it doesn't have to be a Single Big Obvious Trauma' because one key thing about CPTSD is that generally it makes traumatic incidents Your Normal so you don't necessarily view them as unusual or concerning. but I often see people talk about CPTSD as if it implies smaller individual incidents than PTSD and that just is not the case.

most experiences I have seen people be diagnosed with CPTSD for (myself included) are not 'a little bit toxic'. they are things which, each incident taken separately, an outsider would still recognise as traumatic - medical emergencies, rape and sexual abuse, significant physical violence, emotional abuse and coercive control, homelessness, severe poverty, war, torture, etc - and the thing that makes the PTSD C is not the relative level of the trauma, but the fact that it's enough of a repeated and consistent pattern, at an early enough stage, and sufficiently embedded in everyday life, that it becomes a person's baseline for 'normal'.

CPTSD is not a synonym for emotional microtraumas or cumulative trauma or 'death by a thousand cuts'. It's specifically defining the psychological differences in response to long term formative trauma as opposed to traumatic events which you process as an aberration (eg the difference between regular violence against you from trusted adults in childhood vs being physically abused for the first time in adulthood with existing experience of healthy relationships). Traumas causing CPTSD tend to be pretty similar in type, scale and severity to traumas causing standard PTSD - they are just more embedded and normalised earlier in life.

all this to say there's nothing wrong with acknowledging that cumulative microtraumas can't affect us in traumatic ways. there's nothing wrong with pointing out that there's a broad range of types of trauma, and trauma can include stuff like growing up marginalised or ill as well as abuse, war, injury or immediate loss. there's nothing wrong, too, with acknowledging that a lot that is traumatic doesn't necessarily feel traumatic to you.

but like. no. CPTSD is not a diagnosis for people whose trauma wasn't 'big enough' for PTSD. CPTSD is not cumulative microtraumas. CPTSD is a response to formative macrotraumas or to a long term traumatic situation without hope of escape or change and if you want to talk about microtraumas then do that but it's not what CPTSD is!

Apparently much-needed reminder that reposting artists' art (by saving the images or screenshotting them and reuploading them yourself) on other platforms without the artists' expressed permission and without credit is theft and an insult to their passion and craft. You are profiting (in views, in attention, in feedback) from someone else's work and ideas, who do not get that feedback for sharing their creation.

If you are an art reposter, you are a thief and I have no respect for you.

"You're being entitled!" These bitches are asking us to fund their Hollywood-quality content dreams like Walt Disney pleading a bank he was in debt to to give him another loan to finish Bambi, a movie that did not see any monetary success until it rereleased seven years later. I have to pay so much big money in medical expenses every month that I don't have any "treats" (a starbucks coffee, a different subscription, etc) I can go without. I'm not the entitled one here.

@startistdoodles​ and I have been occupied, to say the least, and created our Magnum Opus that is Quidia 😂❤ (Quiver Knight and Sidia Knight)

This started off as a joke and a ‘haha if they were a couple they’d be cranky all the time’ and it just kind of. Torpedoed itself off the coast into a full-blown in-depth ship with development and we’re losing our minds.

So of course we threw this together, Star drew the many Sidias, the wedding drawing above and the adorable bonding moment in the post below, I drew Quivers and handled the graphic design portion. This was insanely fun to do aaaaa 💕💕💕

Here’s the blank for the 5 minute template!

I wish mental health services were more easily accessible and certain mental illnesses weren't still demonized in the field

Hey. Critter

WHHAHARRR

posting these to illustrate something because i love talking about stuff

So! The first image in this photoset was how I initially finished this drawing. and then i scaled it down (image 3) and suddenly a bunch of stuff stood out to me:

the space between its left eye and mouth is too small- they start to merge together when the image is shrunk

also on the left eye, the small bit of visible iris between the pupil and the eyesocket gets totally lost and the petpet’s eyes lose focus

the shine in the left eye especially becomes almost invisible at a distance

the shading on the foremost horns makes them look like they’re pointing backwards instead of forwards

to try to fix these issues, i painted some quick revisions on a layer over the top of the original drawing (image 2) and scaled that one down to check it (image 4)- these edits made the final 80x80px image read a lot clearer!

Anyway, I just wanted to share this in case its helpful to anyone else!! Because sometimes I scale a Neopets style drawing down that I thought looked pretty legit at full size, and then at 150 or 80 px it suddenly feels off. I think figuring out what isn’t working for you at the small scale and then doing quick edits on a new layer on top just to test things out can make a huge difference!! and also doesn’t require you to mess with all of your existing layers to make the fixes ‘properly’, which is time consuming and can feel discouraging if you’ve already ‘finished’ the picture

i truly think some folks on here would rly benefit from sitting with themselves and their willingness to dismiss posts / fics with low interaction count as "flops". like yes i love the Look At My Flop Posts Boy energy we have going but also i have quite frankly never posted a flop in my life bc all of my posts are bangers to ME

knnnnnnives. that I made a while ago and forgot to post.

Hm ok what's your favorite or a really cool worlbuilding thing you've done? For any fandom or original or even an unimplemented idea

Hmm well at least in the past decade, my big worldbuilding projects have mostly come down to three-ish stories: Other Side of the Gun, Adventures of Gæilo and Ethon, and Just Desserts

OSG was an Invader ZiM fancomic concept I started around 2013 to justify every single Irken headcanon I ever came up with lol - I never finished it, or even really started it, but I put a lot of time and energy into its roughs back in the day :)

^A stick figure recap of Ch. 1, inspired by - what else - the Vargas stick figure recaps lol

One that you can see over here is all the work I did for my DnD campaign, AGE! (Though its sideblog hasn't been updated in a while haha - the AGE tag over here works just as well) I basically homebrewed a pantheon and had an absolute blast designing all the gods and their forms before they became gods and even things like architectural differences in their churches and the BBEG and his motivations and just ah <3 Such a fun project :D

It also laid the groundwork for things like Pokemon Homestyle, specifically all my papercrafts! You can really see how I leveled up haha

And my latest has been Just Desserts! Even with less time under its belt, it's still pretty expansive, as evidenced by my icon and theme and the backlog lol, and it's the one I have the most AUs of! (Though OSG does come close actually haha) There are still some thorny details I'm trying to iron out, especially to do with the magic system, but all the characters and creatures and the fact that I made my own fighting minigame, ah, pleased! I've never been so happy with a sona before Charm! ♥ From the very beginning it's been so fun to work on and I still want to improve!

Tgcf is racist?? I've only read the manhua so I'm SUPPPER leery of the desert arc but I donno if there's. More

Just starting this off by acknowledging that I read tgcf very casually and mostly late at night, so my memory isn't really 100% on all the details in the books. As well as this, I'm Southeast/East Asian and cannot really speak about these issues, so my goal with this is to uplift the knowledge and opinions of Central Asian and MENA users who have spoken out on this.

The Banyue arc (what you're referencing) is widely regarded as the most openly insensitive part of tgcf, made worse by the visual adaptations. I'm sure there have been several thinkpieces written on this by more qualified tgcf mains, but my personal favorite posts on the subject are by @/geges here. I'd highly recommend checking out their entire "racism in inner Asia" tag! They're very thoughtful and eloquent in their posts, and have opened my eyes to many issues I wasn't aware of before.

As for the rest of TGCF, there are no particular scenes that stand out to me as being as blatantly awful as the Banyue arc, but again I am woefully underqualified to speak on this subject, so if any of my followers would like to pitch in additional warnings, I'd really appreciate it. Something which geges mentions as well is the overlying sense of colorism/racism that is present throughout all of the mxtx novels, and C/Asian media as a whole-- the focus on pale skin as the peak beauty standard for the main characters, braids typical of Asian minority cultures being used for stereotypically violent characters, etc. Of course this isn't meant as an excuse for mxtx or other cmedia creators in any way, but I do feel that it's important to note that these issues are in no way exclusive to single books or creators, but representative of broader racist ideals in Asian cultures as a whole.

I think they summarize this point and the one I wanted to use to conclude incredibly well in this post:

It's ok to still enjoy things that you know have serious flaws, it's ok to not skin your media looking for any form of problematic content before you let yourself like it, so long as you are always open to educating yourself and assessing how you can reflect on and prevent perpetuating harmful messages. Acknowledging that something you hold dear can be difficult, and oftentimes it's easier to just disavow it entirely, but instead of turning away from the issues and swearing that you would never be susceptible to them, it's always beneficial to become critically informed on the subject in order to combat the ignorance that stereotypes and racism proliferate in.

oh yeah heres that motivational art comic that i made for my class, in case anyone is interested:

^_^

i love reading shit in my second language in which i am not fluent. like do i know what all the words in this sentence mean? no. but do i know what the sentence means? basically, yeah. so it's all good. i'm not gonna be doing any amazing literary analysis here but i get the gist. i'm in the neighborhood. who needs to see the trees when i can see the forest? close enough.

Does anyone who washes their face with just water, not product cleansers, have any skincare routines they'd be up for sharing? What works for you?

i randomly recalled my ichikuu bangers post from a while back and i think we’ve gotten enough content between them to make another one actually???? idk whether to make it an add on to the original or to just make a new one entirely lol