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my sweet boy got 2nd place in his species in last week's bc

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aaaaa I'm so happy with how this is turning out!! I think I'm gonna use this drawing to practice traditional inking again, so wish me and my shaky hands luck!

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@paper-mario-wiki lol *hamhams your fursona*

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huh... I posted my reference sheet for Aspen on cara about 2 months ago and woke up this morning to a ton of people liking it! It makes me happy to see that a character so personal to me has a wider appeal d=(*^^*)=b

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somebody gave me a decora girlz doll recently and I got posessed by the idea of a decora usuki

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he's educating himself

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This kills me because I feel like I keep seeing the same kind of things related to this over and over in writing advice spaces, where there are people who seem to have this idea that there is a "right" and "wrong" way to do everything, and you need to religiously avoid the wrong things at all costs.

Here's my issue with that mindset, I have always thought that in any creative endeavor, there aren't actually "rules" to any of it. There are, instead, tools that one can use to accomplish whatever specific goal they have in mind for creating that thing in particular. It frustrates me that I see this all the time in both writing advice and advice for visual art, that you should NEVER do x y or z, because it's just not good.

There's hardly any explanation as to why these techniques are supposedly bad, and if there is, it's even rarer to see it acknowledged that using those techniques can undermine your efforts to accomplish certain goals with your work in particular if you even have them.

The techniques people have found and named are tools for you to use, that's it! You wouldn't use a can opener to hammer a nail in. It would probably be a pain in the ass! But that's not to say that can openers are useless and you should never use them ever or you're committing a grave sin! If I'm opening a can and you look at me with disgust for reaching for the can opener, I'm going to realize you don't know anything about what I'm trying to do or what the tool I'm using is for. So much of the artistic process is learning what tools you can use and how to use them best! It's not as simple as being told, "Do this, not that." It's so important to learn how to assess for yourself what you're using and why!

Blindly sticking to supposed rules without knowing what they're actually for and why is a deeply insecure place to create from imo, and it's such a shame because it hinders creators in expressing their visions in more ways than they realize.

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

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I'm considering making more dream diary entry comics whenever i have the time just because it would be cool to have a collection of em

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I meant to upload this for draw a terrible comic day

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Integrating this into my beliefs

so do the gorillas know theyre backed by silver like was that their choice

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so do the gorillas know theyre backed by silver like was that their choice

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Recent commission! I had a lot of fun working on this <3

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I genuinely thought the cartoon heart boxers joke thing was about how the dude fucks but is a corny romantic about it or something what

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been playing content warning recently and started picking up the habit of making yoshi dying noises when i get scared

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consider my vision

looking up Metal Slug Attack characters in the Martian army hoping to find really cute little weird dudes only to find that despite being an army of aliens from mars theyre all fucKING UNORIGINAL ANIME WOMEN AGAIN RAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

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:o whoa... hold on, gotta go watch videos of this thing...

Hey, it's probably a long shot, but any of you guys on here know what these flying wormies are maybe based on? Hebikera from Nausicaa and the centipede flies from Magician's quest both resemble a thing I'm trying to find that I'm CERTAIN I've seen elsewhere.

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NEVERMIND! I found what I was looking for! They're called Sky Fish or Air rods/flying rods! (They're also in dungeon meshi I can't believe I forgot about that) God I wish they were real!!!

Hey, it's probably a long shot, but any of you guys on here know what these flying wormies are maybe based on? Hebikera from Nausicaa and the centipede flies from Magician's quest both resemble a thing I'm trying to find that I'm CERTAIN I've seen elsewhere.