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There wasn't enough room to include Gryll in the poll but you may write-in votes for our favorite Onion Witch if you would like!

Also, "Why Taranza?" you may ask?

...Because Kirby Clash put forth the theory that what we consider to be Taranza's "hair" may in fact be an elaborate hat.

(It's Japanese name was Taranzura, a pun with "zura" meaning wig. Later posts backed up the fact that Magolor indeed thinks/jokes that Taranza's wearing a wig. This would also be strangely in-line with his "haughty nobility" personality as white powdered wigs were massively in fashion in the 17th-18th centuries.)

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Phoneme Chart by TheEndIsNearUs

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Workout For Daily Life

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1. Ah Fai was a chief animator for McDull’s animated features. He’s super cool. Ultimate senpai. 

2. Previous post on breakdowns right here 

Some thoughts on acceleration and force

I presented this in the order of how I slowly understood the trick of delivering force - first an abstract concept of impact taught by Ah Fai, then a more complicated discovery on the acceleration pattern, last back to a more abstract concept of breakdowns. 

Like I’ve previously stressed, 2D animation is everything but one single approach. There’s no one rule that rules them all, but interchangeable ideas with math, or physics, or music, etc. There’s no “perfect” animation either, but what is perceived as organic and dynamic. E.g., using the Fibonacci numbers to animate didn’t bring me a perfect animation! On the other hand, a tiny change in the pattern could already make the feeling of force so much more powerful. 

Not so much of a tutorial than a personal experience. I hope you find this interesting hahaha 

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note that it works best with thin lineart (I used SAI2 for this, but I think you can use any art program  with a overlay layer mode)

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How does a woman know? She listens. She listens in. Like light on waves.

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Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!

The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.

This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.

Here is a short and easy video showing this in action

The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.

You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.

If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!

I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.

If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!

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Let's talk stitches!

While a sewing machine is super convenient, having access to one is not required for mending. Most mends can easily be done by hand. If you're really patient, you can even make entire garments by hand, just like they did in ye olden days.

So, let's take a look at a few basic hand sewing stitches to get you started.

(Image source) [ID: hand stitches for quilters: the running stitch, slipstitch, backstitch, whipstitch, and blanket stitch.]

The running stitch

The running stitch can be used for many purposes. It's popular in embroidery, and can be used to outline shapes or baste (temporarily secure) pieces together. It can also be used to ruffle fabric by hand, and I personally use it a lot to secure patches in place when covering up holes in garments. The running stitch is also the base stitch for sashiko, a popular style of visible mending.

Video tutorial for the running stitch

Text tutorial for the running stitch

The slipstitch

The slipstitch, also known as the ladder stitch, is my go-to stitch for closing tears and fixing torn seams. This stitch is frequently used to sew pieces of knitting together, too. You can also use it to make small size corrections in a garment, for example to add a quick dart or to make a side seam smaller. It's invisible on the outside, which makes it a great stitch to fix up things like plushies, duvet covers, or pillows.

Video tutorial for the slipstitch

Text tutorial for the slipstitch

The backstitch

The backstitch will likely be the stitch you'll be using the most when working on a project. It's a strong, clean stitch that can be used for almost anything: seams, hems, embroidery, attaching two pieces of fabric together, zippers,... This is also the best stitch to imitate machine sewing with. If you're only going to learn one hand sewing stitch, then make it the backstitch!

Video tutorial for the backstitch

Text tutorial for the backstitch

The whipstitch

The whipstitch, also known as the overcast stitch, can be used to stop fabric edges from fraying and is great to finish seams off with. It can also be used to quickly sew two pieces of fabric together, for appliqué, or as a decorative technique. I personally prefer the blanket stitch over the whipstitch because it's a little cleaner, but the whipstitch is faster than the blanket stitch.

Video tutorial for the whipstitch

Text tutorial for the whipstitch

The blanket stitch

The blanket stitch is great for finishing off seams and stopping fabric from fraying. It's also frequently used for appliqué and embroidery, and can be used to make button holes by hand. It looks neater than the whipstitch, but is also slower to get done.

Video tutorial for the blanket stitch

Text tutorial for the blanket stitch

Conclusion

Get yourself a spare piece of fabric and try these stitches out before attempting them on a real project. I promise you'll get the hang of them quickly!

If you're only going to learn one of these, then make it the backstitch as it's the most versatile hand stitch.

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Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

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Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

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art cheats

hello i am here today to not lose track of the art cheats i have discovered over the years. what i call art cheat is actually a cool filter/coloring style/way to shade/etc. that singlehandedly makes art like 20 times better

80’s anime style

glitch effect

glow effects

adding colors to grayscale paintings

foreshortening ( coil )

foreshortening ( perspective )

clipping group (lines)

clipping group (colors)

dramatic lighting ( GOOD )

shading metal

lighting faces

that is all for today, do stay tuned as i am always hunting for cool shit like this

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Exercises for all the homies who want to have a long career drawing.

The true problem with being an artist and drawing all day (as I wanted my whole life) is that human backs are not designed to hold that position, so it is very common for artists and designers to have really stiff shoulder blades, creating a chain of muscle strain towards the arm AND the back… and a lot of pain.

These are some physical exercises for artists and honestly anyone who works at a desk.

(all credit to my physiotherapist)

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I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

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Pancake’s Guide to Basic Handsewing (with pictures!)

Aka things you could find elsewhere on the internet but here’s my own take. Note that while the running and back stitches are historically accurate, my felling stitch is not done how you would find it taught to a Victorian schoolgirl.

Holding the needle and fabric:

Modern sewing guides often overlook this because it’s sort of intuitive if you’ve been doing this since childhood. For beginners it might not be so obvious. I hold the needle between my thumb and index finger of my dominant hand. For running and backstitch I keep the worked (already sewn) fabric pinched between my index and middle fingers of my dominant hand, and the working (to be sewn) fabric pinched between my thumb and index or index and middle fingers of my non-dominant. I leave only about an inch gap between my hands. This keeps the fabric nice and taut while I work, and helps me keep an even stitch tension as well.

Construction stitches:

Running stitch:

This is the *most* basic stitch. You poke the needle down, you poke the needle up, you pull the needle through. It is a very efficient stitch because you can poke in and out multiple times and pull the thread through all at once, as I have in the above photos. This is the stitch you use for most hand-gathers and for some seams. For seams, use it where there won’t be any strain, like a vertical skirt seam.

Backstitch:

Insert needle, come up as if doing a single running stitch. Insert the needle back towards your dominant hand, and come up past the end of the current stitch. A continuous backstitch will insert the needle in the same hole as the end of the previous stitch. A spaced backstitch will take up more fabric coming up and leave a gap between the current and previous stitch when inserting. The specific size of the gap is dependent on your needs. I typically insert halfway. This is your workhorse stitch for seams that need to be strong.

Finishing stitches:

Finishing stitches are usually for hems and seam allowances. These are also the stitches you might use to take up a skirt hem or shorten a sleeve. To start I usually anchor my thread by taking a tiny stitch through both the folded-up hem or seam allowance and the main fabric. Reinsert through the same spot and tighten. Depending on how slick your thread is, you may want to repeat this a couple times, shifting over a bit each time.

Felling (fold on the outside):

For felling where the fold is the only side that will be visible, take a long, slightly diagonal stitch across the back, barely catching the edge of the fold in the way up. Insert your needle next to the fold close to where you just came up and repeat. This is the fastest and easiest type of felling. This is also what I use for attaching lace.

Felling (fold on the inside):

When the fold will be on the inside and not visible, like a standard double-fold hem, you will want to take a tiny stitch across the “back”, either slightly diagonal or nearly vertical, catching the edge of the fold. You will end up with long stitches along the fold and tiny stitches on the other side. Note that the “back” in this case is actually the right side of the fabric.

Slip stitch:

This is for a finish that you want minimally visible on both sides. It is also the slowest finish. Insert your needle into the fold and exit the edge of the fold, catching a tiny bit of the outer fabric. Pull through. Insert your needle in the same spot or close to the same spot you exited the fold. Repeat. It’s called a slipstitch because you have to slip the needle inside the fold. You will have tiny stitches visible on both sides, which will be basically invisible if you match your thread to your fabric.

Decorative stitches:

Stem stitch:

This is basically the inverse of a backstitch. Like, in the most literal sense. It is worked toward the dominant hand, though you still insert the needle away from the dominant hand. You start by coming up from the wrong (back/under) side of the fabric then inserting the needle towards the dominant hand, about two backstitch lengths away from your start. Then you come up at the halfway point between where you started and where you just inserted the needle. Pull through. Insert the needle one back stitch length away from the end of the previous stitch, and come up in the same or close to the same spot as the end of the previous stitch. Pull through, repeat. This is my usual embroidery stitch for outlining.

(Reverse) Chain stitch:

I almost never use a regular chain stitch because it’s annoying and fiddly as hell. A reverse chain stitch is structurally identical but it worked completely differently. To start, make a single running stitch and come up one stitch-length away. Then slide your needle under the previous stitch and insert the needle into the same hole as the current stitch. Come up one stitch-length away. Continue sliding the needle under the previous stitch. I work it towards the body or away from my dominant hand, but I find working towards the body makes it easier to slide the needle under. It also does not matter from which direction you go under the previous stitch as long as it’s the same for every stitch in each continuous section. Make sure to catch both “legs” of each loop. I sometimes use this for decorative topstitching. It is very inefficient both in terms of time and thread, but it looks really nice when you get it right.

Those are all the basic stitches I use for my hand-sewing!

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i dont think i posted these but here i made a little frog pattern to make tiny frog toys with my grandma

this is the first lil guy I made while still learning how i should sew it

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Hello! do you have any tips on how you do your character/creature designs? I love all your designs so much their all so cool especially your jackalope/rabbit oc! Love them^^ I would love to hear how you come up with the designs! (I’m planning to make a game and big spooky animal creatures are a big aspect n I wanna do it as best as I can so uh yeah like I said you got any tips?👀✨)

Creature design masterpost

I have been making a BUNCH of tutorials and tips about this and many other topics so check them out!

Yeah! My biggest tip is understanding Splice vs Blend techniques, <- I go into a LOT of detail on getting a cohesive creature here.

It's pretty clear visually here, but splicing is cutting and pasting animal parts together with no or minimum blending at the edges. Classic and real life genetic chimeras are splices of two organisms, and their boundary is very clear. It looks really unnatural. Hybrid animals and mixed breeds shuffle traits all over, so learn from nature to make things natural.

and then consider what traits you add and ask "how did this manage to evolve?" why do they have glowing eyes? Is it for communication? intimidation? warning of poison content?

What adaptions did they develop to best take advantage of their niche/biome? What was the process like? What did the intermediate stages look like and how did they function?

Make something cohesive, give thought to "how is it going to hold up its own weight?" how does it fight? Even rabbits have tools for fighting, and they're built for running and fleeing above all else.

How does it communicate? How would its body adapt to that?

These are all important aspects of Worldbuilding

Don't forget that animals will have instincts and behaviors, while sentient creatures will have Culture. A HUGE thing I see is people giving sentient creatures normal paws but somehow using and building tools? You gotta adapt that sort of stuff dude. They dont needs hands if you can come up with an alternate method of fine motor skills (prehensile trunk, tail, tentacles, weird teeth, an extra set of limbs just for manipulating things, etc) if your creature physically cannot hold and build a knife, they have no business wielding it.

If you cant draw them crafting something, don't draw them using it unless they got it from someone else.

But don't get too carried away with fancy digits you forget the primary purpose of limbs: locomotion and weight bearing.

Here is an unfortunate dragon where I picked my favorite traits and put them together. I also added vestigial arms for some reason and now I have to explain why they're like that. The same goes for any other Just Cause trait you wanna slap on. His name is Dinkus

he's got some problems and you can kinda feel it just looking at him, but it will help you way more to name them. Every part of your creature should influence every other part. A horse has a strong neck and strong haunches because its a domino effect. Let's make this guy hefty

Though a biped would be Possible, it would just look like a t-rex, so I brought the wings down and reverted them to load-bearing legs. But because they used to be wings with long fingers, I'm having her walk on her knuckles because shortening the bat fingers takes a Long time and if evolution finds a shortcut, it will exploit it. But that's a flightless creature so is it really a dragon?

There's dinkus turned in the other direction. I wanted them to fly and so all their adaptions are for that. I also wanted that funky head and made up a reason for it to be that way. You might automatically have this small dragon hunting lizards and rats and such, but if you consider their physiology for a moment, their diet, you just expanded your world and filled out the vulture niche without even trying.

BE CAREFUL THOUGH!

While you cant worldbuild too much, you can infodump too much. So once you have everything built, you need to ask yourself what is appropriate for your project. If it's a dramatic story, you do not need to pause the battle to describe how the buzzard-dragons that are waiting to feast evolved. Just show them off, in writing or visually, and let the audience infer how they evolved and what their behavior is like form their anatomy.

Some people (me) want to engage in the worldbuilding details and get into the nitty gritty of biology/textiles/trade/politics/culture/etc but most audiences are here to be entertained. If you have dragons instead of vultures, a few people will go THAT'S SO COOL but most of them won't even notice... consciously.

Worldbuilding makes a world more believable and immersive. By having dragons eat the dead of war, you remind the reader that this is Not earth, but rather a place that is so whole and complete you know who is going to clean up the roadkilled jackalope stinking up the cobblestone.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuutt....

If you want to create a national geographic journal (which is what I'm doing) and your audience wants it too? (or if you dont care what your audience wants you do this for YOU) Go for it! roll around in details. daydream and doodle new ones. Go crazy go stupid go have fun

OH YEAH! And the biggest tip of all is study nature!

Try to guess what developed and why. How stuff is used, and then you can turn around and put both form and function into your own creatures.

Almost forgot: I clean, document, photograph, and assemble animal skeletons/skulls as a hobby. soooooo that helps me study Real Good.

Play games, make up challenges, and then make it harder

Studying what exists is the best way to create what doesn't. Study work you like, study my work and see what choices I made and ask yourself "why did he use THAT trait?"

Speaking of my work

I believe that in a perfect world, knowledge, especially art knowledge, should be free.

But it's not a perfect world and sadly I need money, so if you found this useful please consider pledging to my patreon or kofi!

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i dont consider myself a 'fashion guru' by any means but one thing i will say is guys you dont need to know the specific brand an item you like is - you need to know what the item is called. very rarely does a brand matter, but knowing that pair of pants is called 'cargo' vs 'boot cut' or the names of dress styles is going to help you find clothes you like WAAAYYYY faster than brand shopping

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Kids, we know how interest works, right? A while back I made a post about how credit card interest can screw you, but we know how interest can be good for you too, right?

I suspect we don't know about this because on one of the posts I made about it someone said something about how it is evil that money can make money, but you know that's not just for the ultrawealthy, right? That is legitimately something that you can and should take advantage of in some kind of retirement/savings/investment account.

Let us say that you are twenty years old, have no money to put into a savings account, but have a job that pays you well enough that you've got twenty dollars to spare from each paycheck.

Let us say that you put that into a normal savings account; normal savings accounts have an average interest rate of .56 APY. Let us say you are going to be working until you are sixty, and that you will add forty dollars to that account every month (twenty bucks from each paycheck) for a total of $480 per year.

At the end of 40 years you would have about $21.5k.

That's a pretty good chunk of change! twenty thousand dollars is a lifechanging amount of money. But look at the total interest. In forty years you would have accrued only $2300 in interest.

Now, instead, let us imagine that you are a member of a credit union that offers you a free, high-yield savings account with a decent APY. Everything else being the same, but putting that money in an account with a 4% return does this:

Your total contributions that you put in stay the same, but the amount of money you have at the end of forty years more than doubles.

Let's say you have a thousand dollars to put in the account at the beginning and run it again.

Low interest account: you add $1000 at the start and have an extra $1200 at the end.

High interest account: you add $1000 at the start and have an extra $4000 at the end.

There are many, many very stable opportunities for savings that will grow your money. Fifty thousand dollars isn't a retirement plan, but it's a hell of a lot better than what you would have if you just stuck cash in a savings account or if you didn't save any money at all.

I know how hard it can be to save. I know it feels impossible to put money aside, but even if you start with no money and can tuck away five dollars a week you can get a LOT out of that five dollars a week.

This certainly isn't "you can't buy a house because you get coffee at the cafe," but it something that can HELP.

Now, let's suppose you're not twenty. Let's suppose you're in my boat, and you're (almost) forty and you're going to be saving for twenty years. You still don't have a lot of cash, but you know it has less time to grow interest, so you double your contribution and you put in forty dollars for each paycheck for a total of $960 a year.

That is extremely very much not the same thing as putting in forty bucks a month for twenty years. Instead of your interest being nearly one and a half times the amount of your contributions, it is around half.

If you are a young person (honestly even if you are not a young person) and it is in any way possible for you to start putting money into any kind of an investment account, you should do so as soon as humanly possible. The earlier you do it, the more interest you will have and the more money you will end up with when you are nearing retirement age.

This is how individual retirement plans work. This is what a 401K does, but sometimes it does that with matching contributions from your employer (so your employer matches whatever you put into the account up to a certain percentage of your pay). 401K accounts also often have higher APYs than high yield savings accounts, though they have more limitations on how and when the money can be pulled out.

If you are broke as fuck and never learned anything about investing or interest from your family because your family was broke as fuck too, now is the time to learn. r/PersonalFinance is a reasonable resource (and if you ever happen to have a windfall that's the first place I would point you for figuring out how to make the most of it) for learning about this stuff.

Thinking about money sucks! Being afraid you'll never be able to retire sucks! Having to figure out how to save sucks! But there are tools out there that even very fucking broke people can use to make that suck less.