#5am here

[mmiillk]

Ilby

[piowasthere]

the file is literally titled 'that one au where Sun kills his Moon' i think that's a good enough caption for this

i would've post this a few days ago but we're currently moving so don't have that much time

there i go with being on time with these for the eps sob

[EP: Moon’s NIGHTMARE Encounter While Hunting Dark Sun (SAMS)]

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji Goes To Lotus Pier AU: Part 4: Deranged Bedfellows

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.5)

[whatifitwasgttho]

Soft, Flirty & Fluff

Giant/Tiny Prompts

“There you are..” Whispers that still rumble your core as your trembling form is picked up by gentle, steady fingers— curling around you. Theres nothing but affection in the giants voice.

Giants with elegant, sleek hands and subtle clawed nails carefully plucking up a human between two fingers on their back and their thumb to their torso.

“Awh.. don’t tell me you’re afraid~? I’d never hurt someone as cute as you.”

A giants eyes clouded with affection, a distinctive blush on their features. Their eyes are half-open; focused solely on the tiny.

Giants being teasing when sleepy, gently cooing things like “Waking up a monster like me at this hour~? How brave.” or “Aww.. what will I ever do with you?” Their voice is more velvety, the gentle, sleepy rumble thats followed by soft giggles or a yawn. (even better if the giant has fangs)

Gentle giants that ask before kissing their tiny. Even if the tiny knows if they really wanted, anything the tiny said wouldn’t matter. The mutual respect and love.. throwing away the obvious power imbalances.. i love..

“Whats that look for? Sweetheart, im not going to eat you~! how could i ever do such a thing..”

Loving giants that pepper their tiny love in kisses— lips enveloping their torso and whatever else. The slight squirming of the tiny trying to get comfortable while so obviously giddy, and the giant pulling away as their love is either awe struck or sleepy now. (for girls, the tiny having maybe an accidental lipstick mark or two)

Looming over a tiny with a flirty smile, fawning over how cute they are— curling your hands around them or leaning in to scan their features.

Holding a tiny carefully— getting lost in the moment and beginning to massage their back, shoulders and arms with a thumb, patting their hair until they eventually have fallen asleep.

“You’re safe.” While holding a tiny so close, either comforting them from a memory or nightmare.

Giants kissing tinies on their tummy, its a vulnerable place that protects vital organs— so an abundance of trust would be needed. But goodness, would the gentle contact melt them..

Giants waking a tiny up, not bothering to fish them out of their comfort— instead picking them up, comforters, pillows and all.

Giants that purr

[hocooart]

Quick colored sketch~

[starkspi]

"why, I had no part in that. you've always been this way!"

just a little something from @morningstarwrites fanfiction "of saints and sinners" which i'm obsessed with

[journey-to-the-attic]

happy fnaf movie (uk) release day!

[nordidia]

having a very rough night so raph doodles needed to be made

when in need, mash two interests together

[aimseytv]

people who are weird about artists sharing their own OCs make no sense to me. if you support an artist and you don’t bother getting into their own original art with their own world building and characters you’re missing out! it’s so fun to see artists i follow going down paths with their own OCs and creating a world with their own lore, side OCs and everything i find it fascinating

[lycandrophile]

Songs sung in T voices? You mean just regular male voices because trans men are men

imagine being so miserable that you see a post about trans joy and pride in transmasculinity and the first thing you think is “i’m going to find a way to see this as transphobia instead”.

i have a t voice. my voice is distinctly different from most cis men’s voices in a way that a lot of other trans people’s voices are distinctly different after being on t. a lot of us have voices with a unique quality to them. the claim that me, a trans man with a t voice, talking about voices like mine somehow implies that my own gender isn’t real…is just fucking wild, honestly.

i think t voices are BEAUTIFUL. i love them so much, having my own voice sound like that was genuinely one of the things i was the most excited about when i started t because to me, that voice is the kind i heard when i watched videos made by other trans guys that taught me about what was possible for me and met other trans guys irl for the first time and got advice on transitioning or just life from them. it’s such a comforting sound and so important to me.

nothing about recognizing that distinctive quality implies that trans men aren’t real men. i have a t voice just like i have a deep voice, a quiet voice, a tonally expressive voice — it’s just a descriptor for one of many things that can make a voice unique. my voice is a “male voice” and it’s also a t voice because i’m a man whose voice has been affected by going on t in a distinctive way. the two aren’t in any way at odds with each other.

if i described my chest as a post-op chest, would you come into my inbox saying “you mean just a regular male chest?” i have a feeling you probably wouldn’t because on some level, even you get that talking about unique parts of living in a trans body doesn’t invalidate who we are. it’s fine if you personally wouldn’t want to describe your voice that way because it makes you dysphoric or isn’t applicable to your voice or isn’t as meaningful to you, but that doesn’t mean it’s morally incorrect for me to do so.

trans bodies are wonderful. visible (or in this case, audible) transness is wonderful. it’s not a bad thing to have features that are distinctively trans, and having those features doesn’t make you less of a man. we don’t have to reject our transness or be exactly like cis men to be real men because cis manhood isn’t the gold standard, it’s just one of many ways to be a man.

(also, not everyone who goes on t is a trans man, so not every t voice is a male voice. it’s funny how the people who get mad at me for being proud of my t voice are always the same ones who have really gender essentialist and binaristic views on transitioning.)

so no, i don’t mean “regular male voices”, i mean fucking t voices because that was a post about unashamed in-your-face proud transmasculinity, not transmasculinity that tries to make itself indistinguishable from cis manhood. please keep your assimilationist bullshit away from my trans joy, thank you very much.

[moodlemcdoodle]

After a year of doing art in secret (and forgetting to post anything… I’m sorry I will have my backlog queued up soon!) I have finally accumulated enough power… to revive my ancient human superhero Sonic AU and make it actually good! Here’s a bunch of my sketches, mainly of Sonic and Tails but also of a bit of lore… More to come later!

[ukulelekatie]

[xx-j4nu5-c4t5-xx]

"An ideal Sims game would have Sims 2's gameplay mechanics, Sims 3's open world, and Sims 4's graphics!"

I absolutely despise this take, and I want to explain why. This is a very long rant and it is full of piss and vinegar directed at everything in the Sims 4. I'm gonna try to keep everything kinda professional as much as I can but I can't guarantee an unbiased opinion.

If you'll let me talk your ears off for a moment, I'd like to explain, from my own experience as an artist and a casual player, my issues with the art style and direction of The Sims 4 compared to The Sims 2. (I'm not really going to comment on 3 because I've never played it.)

I want to start off by explaining the difference between better graphics and higher resolution. The Sims 4 absolutely blows Sims 2 out of the water when it comes to textures and polygon counts on sims, no contest. But I'd argue that the graphics themselves... aren't better. They're worse, even, so much fucking worse. The biggest problems come from the stylization and the animations, in my opinion, so I'll explain what I mean.

Have you ever felt like the Sims in 4 just look... weird? Not quirky, not kinda strange, but off. Distressing. Uncanny. Whatever the fuck the kids call it nowadays. When you strip away the packs and the CC and the shaders, the sims in the base game look bad. They're very close to being human; they walk like us, talk like us, have families like us, but they don't look like us, not exactly. There's always something off about them, no matter how close you try to get. Proportions will be a bit off, or your eyelashes will be like three polygons for some fucking reason, and the jig is up. The illusion is gone.

This is one of the instances where a higher resolution and more detailed models and meshes work against you. You aren't making believe. You are beyond the point of pretending that the pixelated shapes are real clothes and bodies and faces, because at this point, they're close enough that you don't need to. There's no gap to bridge. But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're lifelike, at least, not enough to be completely human. In some ways, they're still tethered to being cartoony and plasticky and fake. Just enough to frighten you. Enough to put you off. They're not using it to their advantage anymore, and instead, it's holding them back.

When the Sims 2 came out in 2004, the developers knew that they weren't going to make a perfectly accurate life simulator. They physically couldn't render every wrinkle in the face or fold in the clothing. In some animations, things clip strangely or the facial expressions are sort of janky or there's just some form of roughness around the edges. But that's okay; your brain doesn't need a perfectly accurate representation this time. That's not what you're here for, anyway.

The Sims 4 is basically Icarus-ing itself into disaster. The entire game sacrifices style for complete realism, a goal that was unachievable ten years ago, and is unachievable now.

The Sims 2 never thought of itself as a completely realistic life sim, though. It has cartoony, low poly meshes and exaggerated proportions and wild, raunchy storylines that would never occur in real life. BECAUSE IT ISN'T REAL LIFE. And it isn't like real life, not because it's failing to be, but because it doesn't want to be!

The Sims 4 is not ever going to completely replicate human looks or interactions or dynamics. And if it's trying to, it's doing a shit job of it. That shouldn't be the goal in the first place. If I wanted to watch a lonely college student talk to himself in the mirror to try and get better at interacting with people, I'd close the computer and go look at myself. It somehow highlights the most mundane parts of life without any of the whimsy and goofiness that the earlier installments had. It takes itself too fucking seriously for its own good, and it's killing both the gameplay and the art style.

The other point I'd like to bring up is the animation. The Sims 4 allows for much more customization of both sim and environments, but at the cost of dynamic animations. How many times is that grab animation reused? How many times is the same set of animations used for sims with wildly different personalities? Your sims barely feel alive with how little they express themselves.

Now, look, I'm a digital artist. I've dabbled in animation, but only briefly, and only in 2D. I've got no clue how 3D animation works, much less how it worked 20 years ago, but I can see the passion in every single animation in the Sims 2. The more niche interactions allowed for more expressive animations than in 4. They could afford to have a distinct animation for mean sims throwing the football extra hard to be assholes, rather than every sim using the same generic football-throwing animation to save time and money. I get where they're coming from. I get the idea. But in one move, you've both made the art style stiffer and less expressive, and you've made the personalities of the sims seem meaningless. Everyone acts the same, regardless of what their moodlets or their traits say. It's hollow. It's stifled. It's a waste of potential.

But for what Sims 2 lacks in polygons, it makes up for in smaller animated details. Quality over quantity. The sims have hair physics, they open the door before they get in the car, they take utensils out of the counters when they cook, they jump on the couch and the cushions smush under their weight. When they dance, the weight is realistic, and when they smile, it tugs at every one of the few dozen shapes that make up their faces. The sims are lively. They dance and sing and love and hate just like humans, and rather than being some strange attempt at mimicry, it's almost a tribute. They were made with love. You can tell that they were drawn up and rigged and animated by a bunch of people working together, studying each other and making faces in the mirror for reference and watching their kids and neighbors and dogs and hands for reference. The sims are not human, and not trying to be, but they're taking the most human parts of us and making them their own.

You could never have a game with the Sims 4's graphics and the Sims 2's gameplay. The gameplay and graphics are inexorably connected, and the Sims 2 just has so much glorious detail baked into it, that you could never really make it work underneath the limitations of the later games. The developers of 2 knew what their limits were, and they worked tirelessly to make the game as full and complex as they could within those limits. The developers for the Sims 4 just did not have those guidelines, and thus, the drive to bend the rules was no longer there. They didn't go wild in rebellion because they were never told they couldn't in the first place. They spent the entire time chasing a goal they couldn't meet, and lost sight of what made the series fun to begin with.

It wasn't the realism you came for; you had realism already surrounding you. It was the caricature of it that made it interesting.

[butchdiaz]

to open up my arms and give it all to you

2.5k ; buck comes out to chris, chris diagnoses him with bisexuality, and the buckley-diaz family is the most family-shaped family ever.

It should be weird, is the thing – Tommy dropping him off at the Diaz house for dinner. But he didn't even bat an eye when Buck said he couldn't do Saturday night because Eddie was attempting to cook a new recipe and Buck had promised to be there to try it. He had just nodded thoughtfully, like prioritizing dinner with a friend over a date wasn’t weird and said, "I’ll just take you out in the afternoon instead." And that was that. Buck has never had a partner like this, someone makes him feel equally valued in both their own life and Eddie and Christopher’s. It's kind of dizzying. They had a flying lesson today – though the word "lesson" quickly became irrelevant when Buck got too distracted by the views of the city and Tommy’s competence to do anything but hold his hand about it over the gearshift. Tommy mentioned something about yoga, which got Buck started on a rant about one of the PTA moms at Chris's school, and how she always wears head to toe lululemon and constantly hits on Eddie despite Eddie very clearly shutting her down every time. And her cupcakes are definitely store bought, which is totally fine, but she acts like she made them from scratch. And she never has gluten free options. It's about five minutes of this before Buck realizes how long his mouth has been moving and he snaps it shut, suddenly self-conscious about how much he just rambled on about going to school bake sales with Chris and Eddie, and thinking that Tommy will probably find that very weird. But then he looks over, and Tommy’s smiling – the smile that causes his whole face to crinkle up in a way that makes Buck’s heart do backflips in his chest. He places a warm, solid hand on Buck's thigh and asks, "Does she at least bring peanut-free options?" And Buck says, "No!" and they both laugh and the sun shines through the glass onto Tommy’s face as his nose scrunches up and Buck's stomach swoops, only partially due to the fact that they are thousands of feet in the air.

read more on ao3!

tags <3 @goldenbcnes @chronicowboy @buckstommy @shitouttabuck @evankinard @ilostyou @911onabc @anirudhpisharody @try-set-me-on-fire @goforkinard @youreonyourownkid @buckttommy @leothil @canonbibuck @bucktommys @bvckandeddie @exhuastedpigeon @wearherlikeanecklace @diazly @eddiebabygirldiaz @hunybody @chaoticeddie @loserlesbianbf @sibylsleaves

[impaladin]

getting around to pearl’s double life pov. she is making me cry chat (i’m only 2 episodes in)

i’ll do an actual design eventually. this is mostly emotion + not wanting to think. hence eye

[acaesic]

happy birthday dallon!