#All of these tricks work

[maydays-medbay]

All of these are fantastic tools! I use them when I'm in a writing rut lol. Because I am who I am I figured I'll throw in some of my own tips as well because writer's block can suck and this is what helps me get through it - Something that helps me is to seriously remind myself that if I don't like where my writing is going, or if I get a better idea part of the way through what I've got down, that it's okay to restart or put that idea on the backburner. It's okay to write for an idea, even if you're unsure of whether or not you'll like it. I'm the kind of person who gets overwhelmed by ideas and what-ifs when looking at a blank page, all the prose and possibilities and directions I could take an idea of mine hitting me like a towering brick wall, and it really helps me to realize that I can just take one of those ideas and try to write something for it, ignoring the other ideas and whether or not it's the "perfect" one. (I'm going to use an analogy here so forgive me if it's hard to understand) With the brick that we take from that wall (the initial idea), we can try building a new one with that brick as the base. If the brick fits and creates a stable wall that we're happy with, the original wall won't be an obstacle anymore as we build up a new one with the brick that we picked from it. If we aren't happy with the brick we chose, if it's misshapen or plain just not fitting right, we can try a few things. We can reorder the bricks, see if there's somewhere where the idea does fit, or we can take a different brick from the initial (or current) wall and try to create a new wall from that brick. We can keep doing this until we find something that works because the old wall is always there for us to take a brick from. If you run out of bricks, that's okay! Just pick up any you find and save them! You never know which one will be the one you're able to successfully build something off of! TLDR: Take an idea, run with it, and if it doesn't stick you can always try a new one or rework it to fit your vision better as the writer. You won't know if you really like an idea more than another if you don't write it down first and try it out. And, if you run out of ideas, just allow yourself time to think of some new ones (or try to bounce ideas off of someone else) and write them down so you'll have them for later.

unprompted advice segment over, I am sorry, my brain wouldn't shut up this morning lol

Anybody else got that Evergiven sized writers block

[elodieunderglass]

Having dug out the Unfinished Tales to reference a conversation Tolkien wrote between Gandalf and Pippin (but didn’t publish) I thought I’d share it. Gandalf is talking to Pippin about the history of Thorin’s company, hobbits and why he chose Bilbo.

This is evidence for the grand statement I just made about how Bilbo was intended to be a catalyst that changed his society, and that hobbit society was indeed significantly different after his journey, with large social changes occurring between The Hobbit and Fellowship. But it’s also a very funny passage to me so here it is:

‘And then there was the Shire-folk. I began to have a warm place in my heart for them in the Long Winter, which none of you can remember.

They were very hard put to it then: one of the worst pinches they have been in, dying of cold, and starving in the dreadful dearth that followed. But that was the time to see their courage, and their pity one for another. It was by their pity as much as by their tough uncomplaining courage that they survived. I wanted them still to survive.

(😭😭😭😭. Also the theme of having pity for each other is what redeems both Bilbo and Frodo re: Gollum.)

But I saw that the Westlands were in for another very bad time again, sooner or later, though of quite a different sort: pitiless war.

(This is possibly one reason why this passage didn’t make it to publication - Gandalf shouldn’t have had this much foreknowledge of the upcoming war of the ring.)

To come through that I thought they would need something more than they now had. It is not easy to say what. Well, they would want to know a bit more, understand a bit clearer what it was all about, and where they stood.

(It’s also explaining that Bilbo’s role in Thorin’s company was predetermined both by a more omnipotent Gandalf and by Fate; that Gandalf selected Bilbo to be a social catalyst, to return and provoke hobbit society into a more adaptable, resilient state; therefore increasing their chances of surviving.)

They had begun to forget: forget their own beginnings and legends, forget what little they had known about the greatness of the world. It was not yet gone, but it was getting buried: the memory of the high and the perilous. But you cannot teach that sort of thing to a whole people quickly. There was not time.

(Thus Bilbo was supposed to be changed, and return changed by his journey, to teach his people.)

And anyway you must begin at some point, with some one person. I dare say he was “chosen” and I was only chosen to choose him; but I picked out Bilbo.’

‘Now that is just what I want to know,’ said Peregrin. ‘Why did you do that?’

‘How would you select any one Hobbit for such a purpose?’ said Gandalf. ‘I had not time to sort them all out;

(He is SO funny)

but I knew the Shire very well by that time, although when I met Thorin I had been away for more than twenty years on less pleasant business. So naturally thinking over the Hobbits that I knew, I said to myself: “I want a dash of the Took” (but not too much, Master Peregrin)

(This is brilliant we are always BODYING pippin constantly. NOT TOO MUCH TOOK 👀. We were ROBBED not having this in canon )

“and I want a good foundation of the stolider sort, a Baggins perhaps.” That pointed at once to Bilbo.

(Eugenics! Observing them like laboratory mouse lines! Call him a Charles River BILB/o the way you’re genotyping these poor little bastards for your purposes)

And I had known him once very well, almost up to his coming of age, better than he knew me.

(??? Hiding in the bushes spying or…?)

I liked him then. And now I found that he was “unattached” – to jump on again, for of course I did not know all this until I went back to the Shire. I learned that he had never married. I thought that odd, though I guessed why it was; and the reason that I guessed was not the one that most of the Hobbits gave me: that he had early been left very well off and his own master.

(Was it cos he’s gay as fuck, Gandalf)

No, I guessed that he wanted to remain “unattached” for some reason deep down which he did not understand himself – or would not acknowledge, for it alarmed him.

(I 100% now and for always love a narrator in a constant state of Just Fucking Lies To Everyone All The Time, Giving Us Nothing, Acknowledging Nothing Including Himself. NOPE NOT PROCESSING ANYTHING TODAY THANKS. WE’RE CLOSED. COME BACK TOMORROW. just A Massive Liar about everything and for what!!! Bilbo Baggins my beloved you were born wrong.)

He wanted, all the same, to be free to go when the chance came, or he had made up his courage. I remembered how he used to pester me with questions when he was a youngster about the Hobbits that had occasionally “gone off ”, as they said in the Shire. There were at least two of his uncles on the Took side that had done so.’

You can see why I love this! And I can see why Tolkien didn’t include it, too. Still very fun passage and near enough to canon to be used if you ever want to.

[xxplastic-cubexx]

[right to left]

finally finished This Wip from Ever ago and so now i ask you ever look into another dudes eyes and suddenly want to do whatever he wants

[romanceddawn]

Puzzleshipping: "You gave me your heart, you know..." [Insp.]

❕ Please do not repost to any other sites ❕

[artgletic]

case study of the self-identified god

[turtleblogatlast]

I think a lot about Leo’s tendency to push his way into the spotlight despite clearly being a natural in the shadows. Hell, you could argue that his worst moments are when he’s forcing himself onstage, and his best are when he does things no one notices until it’s already been done.

[copia]

endless ghifs 11/? ⛧ source — "I don't wanna end like this—"

[achromaticabberation]

if i was making the "disco elysium but its a young witch in the alps" game i'd have like only two endings where you actually find the cat and bring it back. ending one is you lean fully in to "dont question things, dont step outside of your comfort zone, dont ask why the village has no black people or jewish people or nobody darker than lightly tanned, just focus on the cute cottagecore vibes" where you trap the cat in a cage and bring it back to the neighbor and the neighbor goes "thank you! she gets out ALL the time, it's such a pain to bring her back!" and cat portrait is sad. the other ending is where you actually fully interrogate the setting and why the village is so isolated and white and why everyone is just accepting of this. in this ending the cat trots up to you while youre talking to the neighbor and willingly goes back inside. and the cat portrait is happy.

[ballad-of-the-lamb]

Hi!

trick...? rabbit.

[ianthedebonair]

thank you for your service, themmy 🫡

[datcravat]

Ghost Trick Enamel Pins back in stock, they will be limited this time too! They are made with lots of love to feed the hungry ghost trick fans. I hope you like them!!

[styllwaters]

I suppose tumblr can see the cringefail star wars oc who has been occupying my brain for the past few weeks

General Kord has a roguish charm that has not depleted with age (her words). Not a big fan of responsibility and kind of lazy. Jedi master of doing the bare minimum and somehow getting by. A total menace who makes her own fun tripping anyone unlucky enough to pass her in the temple

[ckret2]

Loved the comic above the chapter. It was glorious and this is now my headcanon XD. The art is great too! What's the new programs you got? Had to ask before I dive into this chapter!

-🥸

new program is Affinity Designer, for vector art. My hands are shaky as hell (it's amazing how many weird-ass symptoms ADHD has that you don't hear about until you dig deep) and that makes it a pain in the ass to get my lineart looking as smooth as it does—i'm hoping using vector art for lining will speed up my workflow.

Right now while I'm still getting the hang of it I think it's slowing me down lmao. Got to learn how to deal with entirely new problems from the ones I used to have, like, "why does this damn program keep randomly switching between clicking on the layer I want and clicking on some totally different object group, when i choose a layer in procreate it stays on that damn layer until I tell it otherwise" and "why does drawing a new line sometimes apply the line style I wanted and sometimes apply a line style I used like twenty layers ago for no reason"

But once I've worked out the bugs I'm hopeful it'll speed things up.

Like, this! Look at this. I made a Bill and saved it as an asset. Have a generic Bill.

And now I never need to draw Bill again in my life.* (*this is hyperbole.) I can just slap that asset down, bend some things, rotate some things, and turn it into...

... whatever pose I want.

His body and hat are always the right shape and it's easy to deform them however I want and then instantly un-deform them with one button; his bricks & tie & eye are already applied; his limbs are always the exact same thickness, his feet are always the same shape, it takes one click to put his joints into perfectly smooth swoopy curves at the joints, and even the glow effect is always already applied

and man, I know stuff like an automatic glow is no big deal to people with fancy-pants high-end art software like Adobe Whatever, but I don't have Adobe Whatever, I have Procreate and you have to manually make your glow layers and if you redraw the image you've gotta redo the glow from scratch. Never again!!

You wanna know what I had to actually hand-draw to change the first image into the second image?

That's it.

My two issues are—one—because I'm so new at this, it takes a lot of time twitching around individual nodes and figuring out clever little ways to layer objects to get the right effect that a pro wouldn't have to spend on it, and—two—because vector art is SO precise and smooth, it tends to drain some of the personality and "character" out of the art. Like,

the angry Scalene on the left "looks better" just in terms of having clean consistent lines and pixel-perfect gradients and no sketchy corners—but the one on the right has a better angry face, it's more visually appealing and more intense. There's a lot more rage in those scrawly uneven fists than there is in the smooth flawless fist. I spent a lot of time fussing over her expression on the left and still couldn't get it to look as good as the one I did months earlier with Procreate, because in procreate you can just draw the lines but with vector art you manipulate the curves in strange and esoteric ways.

So I've gotta work to bridge that gap.

and then by god I'll be unstoppable.

[sergle]

would you consider golden retrievers a beginner dog? i've been thinking of getting a dog for years now but only just started to do the research but the cuteness of the big goldies is hard to ignore. i guess what im asking is are they very hard to train!

I would say that goldens are THE beginner dog, lmao, if it's going to be your first time training a dog then it might as well be a golden! Hugo wasn't hard to train! training a dog isn't "easy" per se, but it's very doable, you teach them little things day-by-day and it builds into the behaviors you want! but goldens are really very receptive to training!! they aim to please, they love treats, they respond strongly to praise. so it's really rewarding for everybody involved. Hugo was the first dog I ever trained! my fam had Great Danes before, but I was a kid back then, and didn't have any hand in raising them, so I was starting fresh this time.

[rhythmmortis]

[turtleblogatlast]

“Haven’t You Noticed (I’m a Star)” from Steven Universe works so ridiculously well for Leo