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a BNY teleco. poster!

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Im curious, what is it about your old art that bothers you when you look at it? Like, what sort of improvements have you made that makes you go "Past ashley, you rube, you churl, how could you even put this out"? I dont have art brain so im sorry i cant really figure it out.

Here's how I'd edit it, if I was one of those neurotic types who was always going back and redrawing

It's hard to explain to someone who isn't an artist, but part of the skill of drafting and illustrating is training yourself to look at your work and see the flaws. This is CRUCIAL so that you can then fix those flaws. But the effect of this is you can't enjoy your older work because you can't turn off your artist eyes. You will always see only the flaws.

When we artists bash our work or dismiss compliments we're not fishing for more or trying to appear humble. I know it's obnoxious, but most of us just can't see what you see. We only see the ways in which our work falls short of the ideal that we are always striving for. My instinct when I see my old work is to fix the shortcomings. I itch to do it. It pains me when I can't. And so I don't enjoy looking at old art.

Does that make sense? :)

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Maybe it's just me as a Filipino who has lived through a murderous dictatorship and oligarchies in a queerphobic country controlled by the rich who brutalize grassroots pro worker movements all under the military abuse of US imperialism but...

You just gotta keep showing up. Support each other. Don't just fight for yourself. The work is hard, but you just gotta keep doing it. You'll always see results, even if they're not always the ones you want, or as big as you want them to be.

All your work always matters. Even if it doesn't feel like it at first. It always matters.

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The person I reblogged this from is awesome as fuck.

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This is adorable

Contra Hard Corps (Konami - Genesis - 1994)

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im sure someone already made a post about it but i came across a ublock origin add-on that blacklists around 950 AI websites and disables AI overview ☝️ so u can be free from seeing AI in your search

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EVERYONE SHUT THE FUCK UP SCIENTISTS AT THE SCHMIDT OCEAN INSTITUTE HAVE FOOTAGE OF A LIVE COLOSSAL SQUID FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

🦑‼️🦑‼️🦑‼️🦑‼️🦑‼️🦑

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I've already said that my number one piece of writing advice is to read.

But my number two piece of advice is this: be deliberate.

Honestly this would fix so many pieces of bad writing advice. Don't forbid people from doing something, tell them to be conscious and deliberate about it. This could help stop people from falling into common mistakes without limiting their creativity. Black and white imperatives may stop a few annoying beginner habits, but ultimately they will restrict artistic expression.

Instead of "don't use epithets": "Know the effect epithets have and be deliberate about using them." Because yes, beginners often misuse them, but they can be useful when a character's name isn't known or when you want to reduce them to a particular trait they have.

Instead of "don't use 'said'" or "just use 'said'": "Be deliberate about your use of dialogue tags." Because sometimes you'll want "said" which fades into the background nicely, but sometimes you will need a more descriptive alternative to convey what a character is doing.

Instead of "don't use passive voice": "Be deliberate about when you use passive voice." Because using it when it's not needed can detract from your writing, but sometimes it can be useful to change the emphasis of a sentence or to portray a particular state of mind.

Instead of blindly following or ignorantly neglecting the rules of writing, familiarize yourself with them and their consequences so you can choose when and if breaking them would serve what you're trying to get across.

Your writing is yours. Take control of it.

It probably sounds like I'm preaching to the choir here because most of my mutuals are already great writers. But I'm hoping this will make it to the right people.

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That elderly couple who volunteers at the soup kitchen after church on Sundays and attends every town hall meeting has done more community direct action than 99% of internet leftists 🤷🏽‍♀️

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“It is said that, during the fantasy book in the late eighties, publishers would maybe get a box containing two or three runic alphabets, four maps of the major areas covered by the sweep of the narrative, a pronunciation guide to the names of the main characters and, at the bottom of the box, the manuscript. Please… there is no need to go that far. There is a term that readers have been known to apply to fantasy that is sometimes an unquestioning echo of better work gone before, with a static society, conveniently ugly ‘bad’ races, magic that works like electricity and horses that work like cars. It’s EFP, or Extruded Fantasy Product. It can be recognized by the fact that you can’t tell it apart form all the other EFP. Do not write it, and try not to read it. Read widely outside the genre. Read about the Old West (a fantasy in itself) or Georgian London or how Nelson’s navy was victualled or the history of alchemy or clock-making or the mail coach system. Read with the mindset of a carpenter looking at trees. Apply logic in places where it wasn’t intended to exist. If assured that the Queen of the Fairies has a necklace made of broken promises, ask yourself what it looks like. If there is magic, where does it come from? Why isn’t everyone using it? What rules will you have to give it to allow some tension in your story? How does society operate? Where does the food come from? You need to know how your world works. I can’t stress that last point enough. Fantasy works best when you take it seriously (it can also become a lot funnier, but that’s another story). Taking it seriously means that there must be rules. If anything can happen, then there is no real suspense. You are allowed to make pigs fly, but you must take into account the depredations on the local bird life and the need for people in heavily over-flown areas to carry stout umbrellas at all times. Joking aside, that sort of thinking is the motor that has kept the Discworld series moving for twenty-two years.”

— “Notes from a Successful Fantasy Author: Keep It Real” (2007), Terry Pratchett. (via the-library-and-step-on-it)

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simulacra for bootlickers

FYI, this post is a little more NSFW than usual with the language.

Usually I think McMansions are kind of funny. Sometimes, I even like them. If I didn't like them at least a little bit, I don't think I'd be running this blog for a solid eight years and counting. Some McMansions are so strange and so fascinating in their architectural languages (it's never just one language) that they test the boundaries of what residential architecture can do on an individual and often ad hoc level. Others so cogently and often whimsically express various cultural fascinations and deeply entrenched American ideas of what prosperity looks like (read: neuroticisms), that, as a sociological text they remain unrivaled.

But some (many!) McMansions are, to put it bluntly, evil. And it is these McMansions that reveal the ugly truth beneath the ugly architecture: that the McMansion is a manifestation of power and wealth meant to communicate that power and wealth to others as explicitly as possible, and that it does so in a country besieged by brutal and inescapable income inequality. In our present political moment characterized by extreme and deliberate cruelty, fear, and baleful destruction of all that is pro-social in nature (and nature itself), I figured it was my duty to show my readers a house that embodies these sentiments, one we can all use to assuage some of our perceived powerlessness by way of mocking the shit out of it.

There are a lot of fake White Houses in the US. Most of them can be found in or around the area of McLean, Virginia, the ground zero of DC blob sickos whose job it is to mete out the ratio of lethality and economy for weapons manufacturers. This one, however, is in Indiana, outside of Evansville. It was built at the apex of theme park mindset in architecture (1997) and is on the market for $4.9 million dollars. However, don't be fooled by this opening exterior shot. It takes literal drone footage to show how unhinged this house actually is. In reality, the White House facade is akin to the light dangling from an anglerfish, luring the unsuspecting victim in...

Completely NORMAL amount of money at play here!

There are some images historians (if there are any left) will look back upon and say, such a phenomenon truly would not be possible without an abundance of cheap oil and derivative products. Fortunately, in the immanent post-neoliberal chobani yogurt solarpunk utopia, this house will be converted into a half ruin garden (though this will take some time with all the plastic) half public spa complex. A better world is possible, but only if we imagine it.

Pro tip: there's a way of saying "wow it's so big" that can land as the most devastating insult in the rhetorical lexicon.

I'll be real, the armchair thing is a new one for me, too.

(Rise and grindset voice): Inside you are two lions. Both of them are hungry for prosperity and success. Let's get this bread, king.

Not to do gender here, but compared to the rest of the house, this is a "my wife got her way" room if there ever was one.

Fixer Upper was basically 9/11 for "architectural foam trappings" and "color." Look what they took from you...

Honestly, what a great juxtaposition. This is what that book The Machine in the Garden was all about. (No it's not.)

Half of this post tbh:

Well, that's it for this extremely upbeat and positive McMansion Hell post in this extremely positive and upbeat time we are living in. Join us soon for the concluding part 2 of the Neuschwanstein Castle series, especially if you like beautiful, psychosexually crippled swan boys (real and fictional) and kitsch theory.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don't worry! This doesn't adjust for inflation! Now's the perfect time to join!)

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! McMansion Hell stocks, much like mortgage-backed securities only ever go up!!

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sound on

my mans running animation only got two frames

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🛸 .。.:*°　🌙　•　　.°•　　🚀 ✯　.°• ★　*　　　°　　 .。.:*・°.　.°• 🛰 　°· 🪐.　 •　° 　 •  ☄ .。.:* ・°☆. •　.°•💫 .。.:*・°☆.。.:*・°

mutuals look we are in the planetarium together

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Yep oh boy

see the THING IS I don't feel like I ever worked hard enough to have "earned" the burnout, which is. probably how we got here.

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Use a day planner, digital or otherwise.

Using a method of recording and planning desired actions that separates effect from cause for purposes of self-programming optimization allows for a high-fidelity analysis of behavioral patterns by externalizing memory and tracking iterative optimizations.

By structuring cause (actions, decisions, energy allocation) and effect (outcomes, momentum, recovery quality) as distinct variables, this system enables:

Reduced Cognitive Load – No need to rely on in-the-moment recall; instead, decisions and their effects are logged, reviewed, and refined over time.

Pattern Recognition Over Time – Trends emerge that may be imperceptible in daily subjective experience.

Separation of Perception from Reality – How an activity felt versus its measurable impact can be assessed objectively.

Granular Optimization – Small, precise adjustments can be tested without disrupting the core structure of a day.

Feedback Loops for Adaptability – The system itself evolves based on performance and reflection, leading to continuous refinement rather than stagnation.

This approach effectively externalizes executive function - which is a fickle bitch that cannot in itself be fully trusted to always be there for you - thus transforming subjective experience into iterable, experimental design. It aligns closely with automated self-regulation, where feedback mechanisms guide increasingly optimized actions.

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you talk a lot about characters that cannot be redeemed, usually because they've become some sort of trauma katamari through which no good decisions could emerge. does this extend to your view of humans irl? always been fascinated with the concept of the unsavable, but people always strike me as tensed up knots, highly resistant to being unmade, but still perfectly good rope if you know where to pull. how do you conceive of the gordian soul?

Well, the idea of redemption is a fictional one, really, and doesn't have a lot of place outside of stories and away from characters. I'm not entirely sure how a real person goes about being redeemed. That might be a religious concept that's never compelled me.

In my experience, awful people tend to remain awful. I have known a wide variety of them in my time: rapists, child abusers, spousal abusers, thieves, arsonists, narcissists. Some of them have gone to prison and never come out again; others were never caught, lived to be rich and happy old men slipping into idiot senescence without ever uttering one word of apology - and probably never feeling one moment of remorse.

Now, could someone have made a project of these people and tried to reform them? I don't know, maybe. What would their reformation look like, though? More importantly to me, what would it accomplish?

Because I've not only known a wide variety of awful people, but I've watched a lot of them die, too. They often leave the world better when they're gone. I'm just not sure they were still perfectly good rope, like you suggest; more like just enough rope to tie a lot of unfortunate people to them. A lot of crap gets stuck in those knots.

Now I'm largely a misanthropist, but that's tempered by also believing we're all products of our environment and upbringing. I'm at an age now where I've watched quite a few people grow from babies to adults, and it's been a little dismal to see how little say anyone has in who they become - and we know we have no say at all in who raises us. It's really hard to get worked up over even the worst people when one takes a wider view and recognises how small they are - socially, historically, conceptually. Instead I guess I'm more interested in systems. People live, people die, but it's the systems they're born into that form them and outlast them. We'll always have terrible people, but it's the systems that give them any meaningful power or influence.

Can we redeem systems? I think that question and that pursuit make more sense than redeeming individuals. Biology will always take care of the "unsaveable"; but better systems ensure fewer bastards rise up to replace them.