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This year's christmas card!

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Today's bird is this Black Currawong.

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Posting on AO3 is like, I'm doing this for myself, but also immediately refreshing the page every 5 seconds to see if you get any hits comments or kudos. But totally only writing for me.

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nature heals when i draw my ocs

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A writer friend told me something that broke my heart a little bit today; they're going to quit publishing their fanfic.

My instant thought was that they had been trolled or attacked or that something terrible had happened in their life because this person is so passionate about their writing. It wasn't any of that. Engagement with their works has been going down, as it has for many of us. Comments are like gold dust a lot of the time, and just looking through the historical comment counts on old fics on ao3 demonstrates this trend very clearly. It was not simply the comments dropping off which caused them to decide to stop posting, however.

My friend came across a discord server for their fandom (I should point out here that their fandom interest and mine diverged a couple of years ago, we stay in touch but don't currently read each other's posts because I'm not into their fandom and they would rather gouge their eyes out with a wooden spoon than read anything Star Wars) and specifically to share fic in that fandom. They joined, because we all love a good fic rec, only to discover that their latest multichapter fic, which has almost no comments and very few kudos, is being hotly discussed in this server as one of the best stories ever. Not one of these people has bothered to say this to them on the fic. When they asked, none of participants could see the point in telling the author of the fic they apparently loved so much that they love it.

This discovery has absolutely destroyed my friend's love of sharing fic. They share because they love seeing other people's enjoyment, and fic writers do that through comments and kudos/reblogs/likes because we don't get paid. There is no literary critic writing a blog post/article about how amazing the story is for us to copy and keep/frame. There is no money from royalties. All we have are the words of the people reading our works.

Those people on that server could have taken five minutes of the time they spent gushing about how amazing my friend's story was to other people and used it to tell the one person guaranteed to want to hear that praise how much they loved it. They could have taken a moment to express their opinion to the person who spent hours upon hours plotting, writing, editing, and posting those chapters. Instead, they deprived my friend of thing that keeps them sharing their writing, and in the process have killed their love of it. My friend now feels used and unmotivated.

I won't be sharing a link to their fic, they said I could share their experience but not their identity. I know they plan to post one final chapter. I know they intend to express their hurt at being excluded from the praise for the thing they created, and I know they intend to announce that as a consequence they will not be posting for a long while, if at all.

So please, I beg you, don't hide your love of a story from the writer. It's just about the only thing we have.

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When someone else's art inspires you to redesign one of your OCs and draw them in their style (sort of). So then you draw one of their OCs in your weird lineless style as an awkward thank you. Uhh anyway blue magic guy is Lapis by @ramlightly

...and that gal is Draenen (Welsh, pronounced Dry-nen) whose original pitch was "Pan's only daughter", a half-satyr. Here are my original sketches of her.

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💫To Be A Man💫

Thrilled I get to post my part of @ghostsharkpress ‘s transology zine before pride month ends. Our prompt was to recontextualize a formative childhood cartoon through the lense of transness/gncness.

These are thoughts I’ve had spilling around in my head for a while and seeing how important Treasure Planet was for me as a kid I thought it would be perfect. I always struggled with the fact I don’t really have any older male guide or figure to learn myself from so as a kid I tried to mimic the masculinity of shows or my peers. Growing older and wanting to step out of boyhood has really been a journey of self discovery and self worth and I’m really proud of the person I’m becoming.

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mutuals you’d visit the cemetery with

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step aside Finn, you already have Nico the Catboy, give me a chance with heeerrrrr

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They found the corpse on a Sunday. So why was Danny Fenton still alive?

Ectoberweek 2024, day 1

probably my only contribution for this year because I’m busy with uni, but we’ll see

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being on tumblr for a long time but never reading homestuck like

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yeah i know it's not October but i think it would be great if he cosplayed as Phantom (of the Opera)

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Gender is a performance and I'm missing the whole show because i took a nap

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Okay but what if they were Pokemon Trainers…

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i want you all to know that today i saw someone with a tuba get into a subaru with the license plate "tubaru"

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yeah i know it's not October but i think it would be great if he cosplayed as Phantom (of the Opera)