#I don't think I'm reinventing the wheel here I'm sure a lot of these things have been said before

[pluckyredhead]

i’m not sure if you vibe with omegaverse, but if u do, how abt 5 things in a Roy/Jason a/b/o au?

I'm sort of lukewarm on omegaverse! And I don't have super strong feelings about what designations they'd have, but for the hell of it:

Jason is an omega because I know what the people want lol.

So let's let Roy be an alpha. Ollie is also an alpha. The Arrowfam is...let's say alpha-heavy.

Ollie was in fact a particularly obnoxious alpha until he lost all his money and got woke and now is extremely vocal about omega rights and gender equality and a lot of that trickled down to Roy and oops I turned this into a gen Arrowfamily fic, didn't I?

Anyway I know this isn't reinventing the wheel here but Jason is of course on the strongest suppressants known to man because he does not have TIME for a heat, he has WORK to do (the work is murder).

I do like courting as a trope so I'm going to say that Roy is vibrating with the need to give Jason courting gifts but he won't let himself because that's Sexist and Jason longs to be courted but won't let himself admit it and so they're just loudly Refusing To Date at each other and everyone around them thinks they're idiots.

[inkovert]

Not sure why I chose to answer this since I also suck at brainstorming and coming up with ideas, so here is some advice from someone who relates to your plight that may or may not be helpful!

Start with what you know

I think this is probably the advice I'd most recommend. Draw inspiration from what you see around you, either real-life scenarios or in media/entertainment. The amount of times I have been watching a TV show or a movie and am like "oh my god this is such a good idea but they executed it so terribly" could fuel like 1000+ WIP ideas. But this actually became the inspiration of one of my side-WIPs that I work on occasionally for fun. I was so frustrated with a specific concept/genre of books that I felt was consistently executed terribly and so I picked up a pen and paper (metaphorically speaking) and started writing out of spite bc I was like this can't be that hard.

One tool that helps to do this in a more structured way can be found on the google doc for "week 1" of Nano Prep 101 . It has you write a few sentences summarizing some of your favorite books/stories - and then change various elements until it sounds like a totally cool new story. I tried it out once just to prove to myself that I could generate new ideas and it was a fun exercise!

2. Mind mapping

This is more for fleshing out an idea once you have it. But I recently hit a wall with Act 2 of one my WIPs and I didn't know where to go next. And I just kept thinking that I wished I just had a large whiteboard that I could use to draw a web of ideas and see a broad overview of my story and how everything connects together. So I found an online whiteboard through canva and did just that. It was actually pretty useful in helping me find a way forward in my story. But I think it could also help if you just have a central concept you want to write about but are struggling to come up with the plot - you'd be surprised the things your mind generates if you just put a single word or phrase at the center of the board and stare at it for several minutes.

3. Random plot generator!

But actually. For that side-wip I was talking about earlier, I wanted to add a twist on the central concept to make it more interesting, but I couldn't think of anything. So I found a plot generator and kept clicking the refresh button until it gave me something I was interested enough to use. This is the one I used but I'm sure you could find others through a quick google search. Again sometimes your brain just needs a word or sentence to jog ideas and I think even if you don't end up using anything the generator spits out it still helps get the juices flowing.

I hope anything I just wrote was marginally helpful. Just know I understand your pain. Coming up with ideas is hard! And I think we especially shoot down very viable ideas because "it's already been done before". But, as I mentioned in my first point, just because it's been done before doesn't mean it's always been done well, and there's always a unique spin that only you can bring to an idea. Just don't force it or get down on yourself, sometimes the best idea just come to you when you least expect it and if that happens only 3 times a year - that's okay!

Does anyone have any advice on how to brainstorm? Or just.. how to come up with ideas in general? It seems that every time I try to actively think about ideas, my brain just goes blank. So right now I'm at the mercy of whenever my brain decides to feed me ideas, which is like, 3 times a year. And that's very much not ideal or productive.

[starfleetshrimps]

i love star trek bc it's actually a high school theater production most of the time. We focus a lot on the over-acting, theatricality of the actors and the directors, and that's all well and amazing, but /I/ want to focus on the /TECH/ bc ASHAijnjsdnbhgaARREghghhuuagjkshdmhbAHJBSSHJHIEJBnkjsdjhbsdhjBmahbsjshsbHkjnswkjshsn yea.

FIRST THE SETS?!? they're so silly and stupid? i know they get a lot of shit but the amount of work (not to mention styrofoam) that went into building individual sets for each planet they went to? like sure about 50% of the away missions take place in the california desert (the arena, *cough cough*, etc) but the rest of them have individually made sets that look PRETTY GOOD MAN. they get the point across, they're FUN, and innovative, and they really don't reuse planet sets all that often as well.

PLUS they used traditionally /theatrical/ cycloramas with painted backgrounds and classical cyc lighting (reminiscent of mariano fortuny's domed cyc! i WILL talk more about lighting) which look really cool and once again get shit for being unrealistic.

it's not supposed to look realistic it's supposed to look cool as shit. and it does. shut up. <3

if you view the sets as being modern TV sets then yeah, they're weird, and they look sorta bad, but THEYRE NOT modern TV sets: they're THEATRICAL SETS FROM THE 60-70S. AND I LOVE THEM.

SECONDLY, THE

lighting

while it's true that some shows in the 60s were developing new lighting styles specifically for TV, remember that in the year 1950 less that 10 percent of US homes had a television. this shit was new. COLOR tv was ESPECIALLY new. nobody knew how to light these things! and actually why would you need a new lighting style, we already KNEW how to light dramatic productions, why would we ever need to reinvent the wheel Stanley Mccandles, Mariano Fortuny, and Gene Rosenthall already invented says Gene Roddenberry and Jerry Finnerman (the head lighting designer). and oh my god i am so ridiculously glad. because the lighting. is so good.

i HAVE seen others talking about how good it is in the super early episodes (Charlie X and the conscious of the King, etc.) and i do agree! but i disagree that the quality goes down. i think it just got a tad bit more subtle as the show went on and it gets less in your face, harder to notice. but i noticed. because I'M the WORST (and also a lighting tech)

the impossibility of listing every example of amazing theater lighting choice they made is absolutely horrific and nasty so i'll just lost some my my favorites:

the cyc! i mentioned before but the cyc they used on away missions was only painted when they needed a specific scene in the background, otherwise? that bitch was LIT. and i LOVE IT.

any of the scenes where they light spock's face have green and half pink? or even just washing the walls behind him? i eat that shit UP. the METAPHOR. the CONFLICT. i will acquiesce that green and pink are (and were) pretty goddamn industry standard gels (color-films) to add to lights, for subtle contrast, but this is not subtle. it is LOUD. was it purposefully done from a storytelling perspective? no idea. is it cool as shit and interpret-able as hell? absolutely. also sometimes they do it with just green when they want to emphasize his vulcan-ness and other him a bit. like they do it a lot when he's in his room in amok time. anyway.

whenever they shutter a light so they can emphasize a character's (kirk, we're talking abt kirk here. and *sometimes* spock, and also Charlie in Charlie X but yeah mostly kirk) eyes when they say something #Deep, or just pre-commercial break closure worthy line. it's so SHJSDJBFEJNKN. to add onto this, they'll do a striking half-wash over half of their face sometimes in conjunction and it looks So Good

The GOBOS. sometimes, they'll just throw light through a gobo, or wall screen, or something, for /visual interest/ and it looks so silly i love it sm. does it make sense from a realism pov? nO. but star trek is a theater production actually and they lit everything using mainly naturalistic techniques! amazing!

honorable mentions: the glowing time donut, and the entirely random colors in the hallway.

there are so many other examples but this post is long enough lmao. notice the lights next time you watch tos!!,! please!!! <3

[mdhwrites]

Going back through TOH's episodes, it strikes me how boring they are. Part of the problem seems to be how criminally unfunny the show is, generally speaking. I can count how many times I've laughed on one hand. In fact I can list them:

There was the "It's been my dream since I was a boy" guy pushing kids off cliffs (Moving Hassle), Luz's "He'll be fine" after throwing Hunter overboard - and then his subsequent re-entry (Hunting Palismen) - and lastly Luz tumbling offscreen in front of Amity after a spider crawls on her face (Grom). That's 3 scenes, 4 jokes if we're being charitable. And sure, maybe my sense of humour is just incompatible with TOH's and I'm being harsh.

But I can't deny that I just feel like there's no rewatch value in TOH? Like it's just... the jokes are so bad to the point it's not fun, it's not entertaining, it's a slog, I see no value in retreading the same ground. And I am a SERIAL rewatcher! This is coming from someone who spends maybe 85% of their time experiencing the same stories! I love seeing well-done media all over again, because even if I know what's going to happen or what they will say, a well-structured joke or a skillfully delivered line is still gonna engage me.

I can't even recommend the show to anyone because I HAVE in the past... and what ends up happening is they watch the first couple episodes, get bored, go "I recognize that you like this, but it's not my thing" and drop it. And I CAN'T BLAME THAT! Because that's how I reacted too when I got into the show! I only stuck with it because it seemed like it was going really interesting places. And it tried to, I think, and failed.

I'm also a very fandom-heavy person so TOH's boring episodes have made it increasingly harder for me to stay within it. Because I'm not rewatching anything, I can see myself in real time as I forget more and more of the plotlines, and even a lot of the characters. It's just... kind of disappointing. It's like I just had a gradual fizzling out of interest. I don't even hate the show, which might be better in some ways - instead I just can't muster enough shits to feel any type of way towards it.

I rambled a bit but I guess my ultimate ask here was: what are your thoughts on whether or not TOH manages to entertain new/old viewers?

So I like S1. I think the characters are what carry it and that they are at their most interesting, EASILY, in S1.

The vast majority of S1, in terms of concepts and executions for plots, is OKAY AT BEST.

This actually just comes down to a simple tonal decision of TOH and also just the fact that a boring world with boring magic creates little to do with bog standard plots and TOH actually has a LOT of bog standard plotting. It is a pretty classic story structurally and takes genuinely very few risks in the structure... Which is okay in theory.

There is nothing wrong with not reinventing the wheel and TOH talks a big game about subverting tropes but no. As a fantasy fan, I can tell you this is EXCEPTIONALLY normal. Like... Insultingly from how much it talks a big game. Especially because if you're going to do classic, you have three options: Shoot the moon, lean into the unique elements of your concept or do it VERY. VERY. WELL.

And remember: They did a body swap episode and it is one of the most hated episodes of the entire show. That's not a good sign.

But this touches on the second problem I brought up: This is a boring world with boring magic. Because TOH's fantasy world is so basic, has little magic and little flair with its magic, it inherently limits what it can do. Now, it doesn't have to be this way but the show made it this way with how little we see of it, how limited it is (like how plant magic is 99% vines), and how often it just blatantly makes one to one comparisons between it and our world with effectively NOTHING altered like how the covens are just jobs, right down to them being introduced through a job fair and a boring one at that.

So when we look at a classic episode concept like the body swap episode, the three plots are... Easily replicated elsewhere. One person gets in trouble in the swap's job because they don't know what they're doing (with the most unique twist of this actually landing them in prison), a classic animal plot where they're taken in by a place that seems cozy and then isn't with literally no changes, and finally... Teenager pisses off bullies and agrees to jump DEAD MAN'S GORGE! But instead of skateboards and people really building it up, its rat beasts.

None of these plots are actually bad, they're go tos for a reason, but... No one is bringing anything special to this. Luz is entirely ignored so her character may as well not matter, Eda is doing NOTHING to add to her plot and King... King is fun for about two minutes leading the bullies and otherwise is just any other character in this situation. It's not bad, I personally enjoy parts of the episode... But it's nothing special. From the second the thing that X character is going to do is revealed, you can guess every step of the plot and they don't even really throw in good jokes in the process. A couple jokes but nothing memorable because everything is weirdly subdued compared to how other shows would be, even in an episode that is definitely trying to be more over the top.

And this runs into the inherent tonal issue of TOH: It doesn't want to be an adventure comedy. Those are genres that are commonly really over the top. They hear jump the shark and go "How about a shark jumping ten other sharks in order to finish making a can of tuna for their fire giant overlord?" And the face of this fact, in that the genres it pitches itself as for the first two episodes!

TOH flatly refuses to be silly and over the top. It's characters are very... 'realistic'. I don't mean real, just that they're meant to feel more mature by being more in control. They don't let them interrupt each other for a joke, they don't let a character be potentially OOC for a one off gag like Hop Pop screaming "EAT THE RICH!" or Sprig asking "Have you ever killed a a man, Hop Pop," and I can only think of one time Luz got mad for the sake of a joke and honestly, yelling about the Rusty Smidge barely comes across as a joke because of how genuine the anger feels after a point. Otherwise, stuff that would normally get exaggerated frustration or the like to at least let you laugh at the reaction just... doesn't get one, like how Luz yells about Luzura being killed off but then... Just walks off and is passive aggressive mostly instead of even exasperated. For a drama or romance, this is not a bad approach but for even just an adventure kid's show... It's not great to put it mildly because people meet odd situations with weird levels of nonchalance. Not quite irony poisoned levels but getting there.

It's why TOH is mostly remembered for the romance and drama episodes. Not only do they allow some of the romance scenes to actually include melodrama, they also just fit how the characters act better. It's why Amity has some of the biggest emotions of the series and why Lumity have such great lines between each other because they're actually willing to lean into the sort of genre fiction that they're doing. This is also why S2 works better than S1 because a lot of the pretense of being a comedy adventure gets dropped but like... There's still plenty of boring in S2 with stuff like how Elsewhere Elsewhen takes time travel and includes a couple jokes at the beginning and then is just... horribly bland and barely qualifies as an adventure.

This lack of allowing people to be emotional and jokey also leads to the reliance on comic relief characters. People like Gus, King or Hooty, or S2 Lilith, who the characters can mock in someway, including the writers. Characters who can be the punchline even if it means a lot of people come off a lot meaner than they should, i.e. Luz absolutely rejecting Hooty for the vast majority of the series despite supposedly liking the weird and rejected. That also means that most of the time they're not on screen, either the scene starts getting pretty dry or you have a character suddenly warp to be comic relief, like how Eda gets in some S2 episodes like Elsewhere Elsewhen or Eclipse Lake where suddenly she's MUCH more of a joke than she normally is and also REALLY bad at it too and seeming potentially brain dead for it. Thanks to Them even does this to Amity even though she is probably the last person in the cast to make sense as a sudden clutz.

All of this stuff makes it so that if you go in wanting a kid's show, a fantasy show, ANYTHING that is pitched in the first episode... S1 is going to be just okay to you. I enjoyed it... But I also fell off when I first watched it. I thought the characters were good but none of it stuck with me as actually memorable and I watched until I think Adventure in the Elements. I never was never compelled to come back until Lumity animations (literally THE Little Miss Perfect animatic that is nowadays probably hard to find actually) made me go "I remember this show being neat." And Lumity was what kept me, not because I was generally laughing or calling these episodes something special. In fact, that sense of unsatisfaction is probably why I watched through it faster than Amphibia. No one episode of TOH is really great to watch on its own because... It's just kind of boring, or like half of it is boring because the B plots across the board are SO BLAND. S1 or 2 for that matter since Lumity starts getting boring B plots like with the archives or finding out the author of Azura. Both concepts btw that could have been really interesting setups and instead... If you're not into blushing Amity, get FUUUUUCKED.

That's without getting into REPETITION. Repetition kills comedy so King having one joke for S1 and also taking up like half of the B plots for the first ten episodes means you are going to be in agony eventually anytime someone talks to him because you know where it's going and you have DEFINITELY heard this joke before. And you know, he also gets three repetitive B plots which just hurts the joke even more, even as they try to make twists on it, and hurts the feeling that the show is doing... Anything..

It's just not good. Which is probably why once the characters and the 'subversive/unique' elements of the show both weakened, more and more people left because... Why would you keep watching this then? Those elements are what made up for boring plots with boring execution in a world that didn't allow for more interesting storytelling because it had few ideas and expanded on NONE OF THEM. So of course people pitch it using the elements that say "this isn't like other kids shows/fantasy shows" because if you pitch it to people who like those... They'll just be disappointed eventually and bored quickly. Like i think a lot of people did to be quite honest.

And a lack of creativity, and a lack of genre understanding, isn't something time could have ever fixed.

======+++++======

The short version of proving this point btw is going "Compare Bumi's introductory episode, which is a character giving three trials to prove another's worth, versus when the Bat Queen challenges Luz. One is exceptionally funny, interesting and has genuinely interesting twists while the other is... There. So very there. Painfully just... there. Not even bad, just... There.

Also, yes, comedy is extremely subjective which is why I tried to talk more about how a lot of these premises are boring because that can be a bit more objective.

I have a public Discord for any and all who want to join!

I also have an Amazon page for all of my original works in various forms of character focused romances from cute, teenage romance to erotica series of my past.

I have an Ao3 for my fanfiction projects as well if that catches your fancy instead.

If you want to hang out with me, I stream from time to time and love to chat with chat.

A Twitter you can follow too

And a Kofi if you like what I do and want to help out with the fact that disability doesn’t pay much.

[keirametzbrassknuckles]

I have to ask…. how do you feel about the blood and gore King Charles portrait

I mean it certainly is A Portrait (tm)

I'll be honest, ignoring the subject and talking just about the painting, I actually think it's like fine lmao. It's boring to the point of being a snoozefest but the artist is technically skilled and besides the color choice the piece itself is so blandly inoffensive its almost insulting.

(Art ramble under the cut)

Contemporary portraiture isn't really My Thing and Jonathan Yeo (the artist) isn't exactly reinventing the portraiture wheel here but there's a lot of stuff I find interesting in the composition.

The artist has a whole faux-deep, stupid philosophy about focusing on the "presence" of his sitters, hence why everything but the face is out of focus and he seems to be resolving out of that meat void that everyone is so concerned about. I like the gesture in the abstract setting,there's some variance of texture with different brushes and some splatter technique mixed in and he clearly paid attention to the layering of pigment and optical blending. The focus on his face of the sitter to the exclusion of the uniform/trappings of office places it in contrast with both historical portraiture of monarchs where the focus is on their symbolic trappings and the contemporary focus/outrage on the royal family's ostentatious displays of wealth in a time of a national cost of living crisis. As a piece of humanizing propaganda I think it would've functioned quite well based off of that alone and I can see where he was going with it (he's just an old man! Just like your grandpa! Don't you just love him?)

I would have to get up close to see the way he did the uniform but I'm 99% sure it's all done in monochrome red. Suggesting light and shadow and folds and different materials of different colors and textures all out of shades of a single color while, again, not particularly novel does take a particular amount of skill to pull off to that level of realism.

That being said, the FUCKING BUTTERFLY is gag-inducingly kitschy and faux-sincerely twee and I'm surprised more people haven't mentioned it. It makes my fucking blood boil. Fuck that butterfly and fuck Jonathan Yeo for trying to give king whatshisface a cutsey magical girl persona and fuck that singular, out of place, ham-fisted attempt at symbolism and the horse it rode in on.

Anyway...

Official portraiture is hard because you're still beholden to both figurative accuracy and certain visual codes of stuffy, stately gravitas but there are ways to play with it. I think the Kehinde Wiley Obama portrait is a decent example of official, figuratively exacting portrayal and the artist's own visual language (of note is that Obama is also emerging out of a sort of void in that portrait too. There may be an allergy to context among portraitists?).

TLDR: I think it's an extremely boring if technically competent portrait and the color choice is unfortunate but really just not that deep.

(Totally irrelevant but I went to undergrad with the son of the owner of the gallery where it's currently being shown. The whole family is Obnoxious.)

[jinxxsims]

Hi, Jinxy! Thank you so much for your wonderful conversions! Please, can you tell, which tutorials you've used to learn? I would love to make conversions too, but some parts of creating process are quite confusing (like getting GUIDs for example). Any advices would be much appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Hello, anon! I'm happy to offer up the tutorials I used to figure out (as much as I have, anyway...) this whole conversion and object creation thing.

@keoni-chan has a really well written tutorial on converting objects (with pictures!) available on her Livejournal here. For the most part, her instructions are what I do, we just have a few differences in settings. For instance, in blender, you don't need to check "Write Normals" and "Write Materials," because they just create unnecessary files for you to delete and if you're new to things, the fewer files you have floating around to confuse you, the better.

The other main difference would be that there is no longer a database for GUIDs in Sims 2 (as so many tutorials point you to). To create a unique GUID for an object, in SimPe, go to Tools > Object Creation > Hash Generator and make sure the little dot beneath the "string" box is on CRC 24. At the bottom of the box is a field marked "Hash Value." So long as you've given your object a thoroughly unique name, it will create a random GUID derived from that name that you can use. It's super easy to do. The picture below shows each of the necessary elements.

If the object you're creating requires multiple GUIDs (like a dining table or bed or the hutch I'm converting right now, for instance), I just use what would be immediately around the GUID SimPE generated for me. For example, if the GUID the program generated is 0x0075768B, I'd make the additional GUIDs 0x0075768A, 0x0075768C, and 0x0075768D. Or 0x00757680, 0x00757681, 0x00757682, etc. Just change that last letter or number, and you're good to go.

The only tutorial I regularly reference is by @hugelunatic and that's her repository technique tutorial. I can never remember all the steps on my own, so I check back on it every time I'm doing something I want slaved.

My biggest piece of advice would be to work smarter, not harder. Think about what you're creating, and clone something that makes creating your job easiest, at least until you really get the hang of SimPE and all the different parts of it. For instance, if you're making something decorative with glass, clone the football helmet in a case because it has a glass subset and you won't have to change a bunch of things in the TXMT because of it. If you want to make an end table with a lot of slots, clone an end table with a lot of slots already. There's no need to reinvent the wheel. Learning to do this can be time consuming and frustrating, but so much of it is trial and error and just getting used to the SimPE program. Any way you can make things easier on yourself... do.

Other tips based on my own errors... if at first your object doesn't succeed, go to Tools > Object Tools > Fix Integrity. More than once that's righted a frustrating problem I spent way too long trying to puzzle through. If you find your recolors aren't showing up, it's because you forgot to click the checkbox next to update all MMATs and update (see: Keoni's step 16 for reference). Go and check it, update it, and then redo your recolors with the corrected MMAT. For glass subsets, make sure the "stdMatAlphaBlendMode" in the TXMT has a "Value" of blend. If you have things like leaves or filigree or something that has a white outline that should not have a white outline, go to the TXMT and find the field that says "stdMatAlphaTestEnabled." Change the "Value" from 0 to 1 and the white boxes will be gone.

I hope this was clear enough to be at least a little helpful. I'm still learning myself, so I know just how overwhelming it can be. If I get a little extra time, I'll try to put together a step-by-step tutorial myself with all the little tips and tricks I've picked up through trial and error.

It can be really intimidating at first, but once you start spending time in the program, the pieces of it kind of fall into place. I know that may sound like a cop out, but it's really not. I'm nowhere near an expert, but I'm much more confident with it now than I was just a few months ago.

Be patient with yourself! If an object is causing tons of problems, sometimes it's best to start over from scratch, or at the very least, walk away for a while and come back to it. Making mistakes is part of the learning process. Good luck!

[demonslayedher]

Why do you like Demon Slayer so much?

I---I don't know, Anon, w-why do you like breathing so much?

...because BREATH TECHNIQUE LOOKS WICKED AWESOME AMIRITE!??!!?

UFOTABLE MADE SUCH A FREAKING COOL LOOKING ANIME that both looks and sounds amazing with all that care put into it HOW COULD I NOT LOVE IT!? Such good source material too, ALL HAIL WANI-SENSEI!!!!

Or rather, to more eloquently express myself, I'll answer this in two parts: the "why" and "so much."

Why do I like it?

- Simplicity

It's a classic Good .vs. Evil story, a triumph of working hard and working together. It's Coming of Age and Hero's Journey, all themes that never get old because they're really good themes. KnY isn't even that fresh of a take if you boil it down to this, but it didn't need to reinvent the wheel, it just needed to be a good wheel to keep the story going.

I was grateful it ended when it did, it had a goal to accomplish and everything in the story worked toward that goal. I've fallen away from adventure shounen because I can never stay interested in super long series that get mercilessly extended past their natural life as cash cows. Not to sound like a Swamp Demon here, but this manga got to end while it was still young and beautiful.

The fighting mechanisms are complex enough to be fun to explore, but it's not as complicated as other shounen series, making the barrier to entry lower for first-time anime viewers. That's part of why I think it's been so successful. Plus, even though we get things like Red Blades and Marks later, their existence as ultimate techniques was in place from the start, so they felt believably set up and paid off. They made sense within the world building, even if they had to be dropped on the readers later so as to weekly serialization interesting.

It tackles deep themes, but doesn't overcomplicate them. Muzan being a simple villain and Tanjiro simply being good-hearted created interesting tension just fine, the motivations throughout the cast keep the story nicely driven.

- Depth

Although the story, world, and characters are simple enough for people of all ages and familiarity with anime to enjoy, if you want to scratch deeper than the surface level, the hundreds of thousands of words of meta and cultural background throughout my blog go to show that it's very, very easy to bury yourself deeper in it. In my case I already have years of obsession with Japanese culture to build on, so KnY fit very nicely into my niche. I already love samurai and oni and swords and such so that was already playing to my knowledge, but as a passionate nerd, it's also given me lots and lots of exciting new material to learn more about. But more about that later, suffice to say here that Gotouge is a very, very knowledgeable gator.

- Characters

THEY ARE JUST GOOD AND FUN AND UNIQUE DESIGNS IN THE FIRST PLACE, but also, I don’t feel like I already know these characters from other anime. Many of them defy being typecast, and even the ones that do feel like like other characters in a plethora of anime have such a unique spin to make them stand out in my heart. I'm sure I could be a nerd for plenty of other series, but it takes the right characters to make a fangirl.

Also, my emotions got manipulated excellently; I like Tanjiro and immediately wanted to root for him, but I ha-a-a-ated most of the rest of the cast until I got to spend a teeny-tiny bit more time with them, and then I liked them hopelessly. I got totally strung along and I love it when I can get strung along like this.

Why do I like it so much?

A lot of that comes down to my personal recipe of brain soup and the situation I already felt stuck in by the time I got into KnY, a few months prior to the pandemic. Watching the anime and feeling really into it came as a comfort while I was finding myself in what felt more like a situation than a good career move and feeling frustrated with the second draft of a novel which wasn't working. Then just as I had hoped there might be some improvements to my situation which I was holding out for, the pandemic changed everyone's plans.

Simply put, the isolation and stress in those early stages of the pandemic both gave me lots of time to explore and write fanfic and made me rely a lot on the joy I got out of KnY, and then I got so practiced at making KnY fanwork that this blog became like my bonsai I could cultivate in peace while most other things in life have continued to feel out of control. And dang it, I'm good at cultivating this bonsai of a blog! It's gratifying to feel good at something when real life is making you feel otherwise!

Hopefully the upcoming new start in a new city and in a new job that'll hopefully make me feel good at things again and provide some smidge more control over my life will make me less reliant on KnY for such a big share of my happy hormones, but...

THE HYPE IS PART OF WHAT I LOVE

IT IS

SO MUCH FUN BEING OBSESSED WITH A MAINSTREAM PHENOMENON

THERE ARE THINGS THAT MAKE ME HAPPY EVERYWHERE

I SAY THESE CHARACTER NAMES AND EVERYONE KNOWS WHO I'M TALKING ABOUT AND THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED TO ME

IT STAYS ON MY BRAIN BECAUSE IT IS EVERYWHERE

AND THIS IS SO COOL

[mermaidsirennikita]

ARC REVIEW: Damned If I Duke by Anna Bradley

3.75/5. Releases 3/26/2024.

Heat Index: 5.5/10.

Vibes: ballroom historical, snarky sniping, SCANDALOUS EARRINGS, and head over heels heroes who don't want to admit it

Prudence Thorne isn't happy with the rakish Duke of Montford, Jasper Vincent. Not because he's done her wrong personally--but because he won a sum from her father at cards, so massive that Prue is now forced to look for a husband to save them from ruin. A boring, staid husband. In an attempt to avoid her fate, she tries blackmailing Jasper--but when it backfires, there's the added complication of his grandfather deciding that she's EXACTLY the woman the duke needs. And pushing them inexorably towards a marriage they say they don't want.

Anna Bradley is good at writing chemistry, and you definitely feel the spark between Prue and Jasper from the start. They can't help getting their little digs in, even as their attraction to each other is very apparent. She doesn't reinvent the wheel here; it's kind of a classic ballroom historical, all about the snarking and the virgin-heroine-ing and the marriage-of-convenience-ing. However, the humor (I found several elements of this one QUITE funny) and Jasper falling pathetically in love made it entertaining, even if it didn't quite blow me away. It's definitely one for the traditional historical romance girlies.

Quick Takes:

--As I said above, a high point for me was the humor in this one. Jasper happens to have a pair of earrings he just secured from his former mistress (and I did like that he was an actual rake who'd kept actual mistresses, even if I wasn't in love with how this particular mistress was presented) which is what Prue gets a hold of for her blackmail scheme. And those earrings. Are not... normal earrings. They are earrings which teach Prue a thing or two, unintentionally. Visually.

Which leads to one of my favorite moments in this book, which is "Prue learns about things further while talking to her friend, the heroine of the previous book, who Is A Woman Now". I really wish that we had more historicals in which heroines learn about ~the marriage bed~ from previous heroines. It reminds you that, oh yeah, that last romance happened, and everyone is still AT IT. Plus, it's just a nice, authentic friendship beat for the girls.

--The physical comedy in general is really good here. Prue shoots Jasper by accident (and like, the location she shoots him in is probably one of the better locations to be shot in from a health perspective, but THE SHAME!!!). In general, you get the sense that Jasper is kind of a disaster, and he's just sort of fumbling his way through love while growing both increasingly besotted and increasingly infuriated with with her.

--I'm actually surprisingly fond of an "older person meddles in the love lives of the younger people" thing in certain historicals, and I don't think I realized this until I read this book...? Jasper's grandfather is right, and he knows he's right, and though I honestly wasn't 100% sure about how he had the clout to force Jasper to marry Prue, it worked. It's fine.

--That does lead to my critique of this one, though. The fluff and the chemistry and the romance is all good, but the plot kind of lacks? There isn't a lot of one, and that's FINE, but when you do have elements like the grandfather forcing the marriage, or Prue getting confused about her wedding night in a way that has actual ramifications... I just kind of feel like they weren't solidly tracked? Like, it sort of seemed thrown together, which is not how I felt about the previous book in the series.

However, I still had fun and I still very much want to read the next installment. So it doesn't derail the read, but it does keep it from being as strong as it could have been. I kind of felt like Prue and Jasper just sort of stumbled into love, versus falling in a way that I as the reader could track.

The Sex:

There are 2-3 sex scenes in this book, depending on how you define them (for me, it was three). I could have used one more, or more DETAIL in general. The first one in particular felt weirdly bare, as we get this pretty delightful lead up to the wedding night from Jasper's perspective. And he actually has a lot of anxiety about it, and it's charming, and I just wanted more follow-through after that.

This is a sweet romcom, which I do think could've hit harder, but was nevertheless pleasing. I think it will work very well for the Bridgerton crowd.

Thanks to Netgalley and Zebra for providing me with a copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

[carsonian]

*mcconaughey voice* alrightalright... Grievances Ask Game #s 3, 16, 25?

3. What's your biggest tumblr pet peeve(s)?

When folks posit as SteveTony fans and GUSH over x but y is just. There. Barely, even. Not my thing, honestly. When it comes to the fandom stuff I reblog, I'm here to see SteveTony content sure but also to get to know PEOPLE so I LOVE seeing behind the curtain into their lives, interests and headcanons. But when it's just a hyperfixation on one character over the other, I'm like Cool, good for you! But I'm not going to follow you. Just not what I'm here for. TBH: I don't use Tumblr religiously enough to have a pet peeve so maybe that's not the right answer....less of a pet peeve and more just a what-I'm-gonna-click-very-quickly-out-of.

16. Name a canonical aspect of SteveTony’s relationship that you think is problematic/not mentioned enough

Uh. MCU has the predictable hang-ups about Ultron and Civil War with Tony and Steve getting their respective character beatings. I feel like the comics have a lot more content to mine as far as problematic behaviour to explore. Maybe--as far as not mentioned enough--just HOW much of a fumble the team was. Tony leaving at the end of A:AOU, Bruce/Hulk fucking off, Nat kissing Bruce and manipulating him, Thor and Steve both being too aggro--all of this shit is so Bad when you think about it. Maybe one day I'll write a fic where they're all Like This and SteveTony are also fucking but uh. What the fuck was going on there, eh? Uhh I guess an extension of that would be Steve being written in fic as someone who pulls his punches but being the total opposite in the films up until IW. The man doesn't account for the serum much? And maybe we should explore that, even though I'll admit that I prefer writing the alternative. & I wish, on Tony's end, that his "mastermind" tendencies/pulling strings BTS were explored without flinching from his control tendencies. We could probably get some very good stories out of Hyper-Aggro!Steve x Control-Issues!Tony. We probably already have, TBF. Drop 'em in the notes, folks!

25. Share an unpopular opinion you have RE: fanfiction (writing, culture, etiquette, etc.)

Being insistent on updates is never cute! Honestly. There is the occasional "oh that's sweet that they really like the fic" but a lot of the times when I see comments--mostly on other fics, I'm not talking about mine here--that boil down to "update plz", even if it's worded kinder, I'm just like.... Shut the Fuck Up. After writing a truly horrendous amount of fic last year, I've gone full circle with the process and realised that the attention you get from readers is never going to be more fulfilling than the actual writing, so if you're constantly pushing to get stuff out to appeal to/satisfy readers, you're going to get very quickly uncharmed with the whole fic writing gig. True enjoyment is what makes it sustainable, and a huge part of that is writing on your own terms and by your own timeframe. I'm less bugged about it when I see it in my comments because I'm not out here reinventing the wheel but some very, very good writers in the fandom get a lot of that shit and every time I see it, I will indulge in an emphatic, "ah fuck you, hoss". Is that an unpopular opinion?

Ask game here.

[lunarsilkscreen]

Jesus and the Law

At some point, I'm going to turn into a hippie youth pastor if I keep talking about Jesus, and I should probably stop but here we go.

Evangelicals turn away, this is gonna be an alternate interpretation you're not ready to hear. I'm not quite ready to say either. But no doubt, will regret saying anyway.

Jesus noted something important in his days. He was one who spoke of the invisible guiding hand, the machine that controls humanity, the system of which to rage against.

He was a child of God. And God was not the law.

A child born against the law, however you wish to interpret that. Rape, incest, premarital. The Bible never quite explains, but if we're thinking realistically, he calls God "The god of those Alive, not the god of the dead" the living word, the living God. And he stands law and God side-by-side.

He says that God doesn't care about the laws of man and will do as he pleases. And if not for that creation, Jesus would neither have lived nor died.

If humans were lawful, Jesus wouldn't have existed. And if they listened, Jesus wouldn't have been crucified.

He routinely talks about the things that humans were doing to each other, that society had agreed were shitty things to do, but did them anyway. Broke commandments and laws, and nobody bats an eye.

But you call people out on their transgressions, and everybody loses their mind.

The gist is this: when you give people no choice but to break the law in order to survive. Even if you offer them a livelihood through a system that makes them burnout, or a lack of freedom of thought and desire, or a lack of being able to pursue their dreams.

Then they'll pursue that which gives them that hit of dopamine their body should be giving them for free.

Think about it, you get dopamine from eating, creative thought, sex, solving problems, and exercise in moderation.

What happens when you restrict freedom? Give people too much stress? They resort to other methods in order to get the dopamine they need to get through the stress.

I can't get through the morning without coffee.

So if you take away freedom of expression, of thought, of sex, force them into hard not-moderate exercise, restrict their food intake to protein powder and water.

How do you think they're gonna get that dopamine?

It's not by wanting to keep working that's for sure.

"man cannot live on bread alone."

What kind of people resort to hard drugs? Depressed people, who don't want or can't afford children, who eat a diet of whatever is cheap and sodapop when they're feeling like splurging, who couldn't break free from the grind to do something that was actually meaningful, and was told they'd have to jump from one shitty know nothing boss to another ad-infinium until death.

Sisyphus pushing that rock up the Hill. A perpetual motion machine for others to profit from.

It's right there documented in our historical texts, that which still happens. And people at the highest level of powers have decided "you know who had It right? The ancient Egyptians, whose workers were so tired of their shit, THAT THEY DECIDED to go on strike in the middle of the desert FOR FORTY YEARS."

They went on strike for so long, their descendents still carry the stigma of being lazy to this very day, by people that keep trying to reinvent the slaver wheel.

That cycle repeats, even by people thumping Bibles, that definitely should know better had they thought to open the book.

Jesus was a lazy hippie, leader of the feral hippies, and probably hosted the first burning man festival before it was called burning man. Literally fed a bunch of unemployed lazy good for nothing's when he did that one sermon on a mount.

Jesus proved it was possible to feed a lot of people at once, that it was possible to have wine aplenty after it had all been drank, and was a carpenter, all the way up until he wasn't allowed to be anymore.

[thebiballerina]

Community-Building (and a warning about choosing Discord for online communities)

Here are some notes I have on community-building. I am coming at this from the perspective of someone who has started online communities, moderated additional communities, and lead both new and established in-person community organizations. I hope someone finds this helpful!

This post has also been cross-posted to Dreamwidth.

Clarifying The Term "Community"

When I refer to "a community" in this sense, I am referring to a specific space that attracts people around a common interest. The interest doesn't have to be what we may traditionally think of as an interest. For example, "living in the same neighborhood and wanting it not to be terrible," can be an interest. I'll probably lean slightly more towards talking about online communities here, because that is where we are currently talking, but most of this applies or can be altered to fit offline community dynamics.

Don't "Reinvent the Wheel"

One thing I think is really important in community-building is to not put too much effort into figuring out things which other communities have most certainly figured out before you. I think that is a huge mistake many new community leaders make. Use your resources!

For example, if your community is a Discord server, Discord itself has an entire section of their website devoted to helping you learn how to moderate better, and that's outside of their resources on the technical aspects. If your community is an activist community, check your local library resources, talk to people at research institutions who study these types of movements, and talk to activists in related areas on how they maintain their organizations. If you are starting or taking over leadership of a school extracurricular club, your school may have resources on how to make it better. My university has an entire department that will help with that, including with specific scenarios such as leadership transfers, declining membership, etc.

If you plan to start a local organization, look into whether you may be better served starting a branch of a regional, national, or international organization. Or perhaps you could work with a coalition of similar organizations. If that possibility exists, you already have framework and resources to start the organization, and there are likely people whose job role specifically includes helping people like you succeed.

The point is: Whatever you want to do, people have done this before. People naturally assemble in communities; they have done it for thousands of years, and for at least the past few centuries, they have often kept records while they have done so. Take advantage of that!

Also, don't just stick to frameworks and tools you know. Look into your options. For example, I see a lot of Discord servers that pop up these days for communities that I'm not sure are best served by Discord servers. I will elaborate on these cases under the cut.

Potential Problems with Discord for Online Communities

Note that I do not mean this as a criticism of any communities, creators, moderators, or users. I mean this as an observation and warning regarding potential community dynamics, and nothing more.

To be clear, I love using Discord, and I love that it is becoming more popular. I moderate multiple Discord servers, so I am not saying this because I have something against Discord. But I have seen a few Discord servers, especially very large ones, that I think would have been better off as forums, Dreamwidth communities, subreddits, or using some other service/site. Or, perhaps, they would have been better off using Discord for only some community functions, and also having other "homes" online. Allow me to elaborate, in general terms, on why many large or fast-growing communities are not best served by Discord, at least not in their entirety.

Why communities, especially large ones, may encounter issues as Discord servers:

It is really difficult to moderate a server with many people, especially one that grows quickly and requires many channels to stay organized. If the creator has a predetermined moderator team on hand, this can lead to a moderator team without diverse perspectives and opinions, as well as troubling dynamics when the original mod team is a group of friends or a segment of a different community. If the creator does not have a predetermined moderator team on hand, it takes time for community members to become involved and trusted enough to be responsibly chosen as moderators, and it takes time for responsible community members to develop enough trust and attachment in the community that they want to moderate in the first place. Therefore, a server which grows extremely quickly will have trouble finding a sufficient number of moderators in a timely manner.

While a synchronous conversation style (i.e. channels with one long continuous chain of messages) can work well for smaller communities, it's not great for many larger communities which often segment into sub-communities. Some of this is mitigated by Discord's newer features, which include replies, threads, and the forum feature (which is only available in community servers at the moment). But it is still Discord's main method of communication, as opposed to other services which may operate on a more asynchronous style of communication.

If the community is big, it is often based on a somewhat well-known topic (I use "well-known" in a relative sense), and invite links may be posted publicly. The server might also be listed on Discord's community pages if it wishes to make use of the functions of community servers (which include the forum feature at this point in time). Therefore, this creates a community which essentially anyone can join (at least for some period of time), but the conversations themselves are not public. This leads to valuable information and discussions on a popular topic being kept in a closed space, when they could be helpful if they were publicly posted. Also, this means new members may have difficulty understanding what they are getting into when they join. Finally, this contributes to issues regarding accountability and safety.

The Accountability and Safety Issue

A large Discord community might:

be too large and too busy to moderate properly,

be still growing, faster than they could possibly responsibly onboard moderators,

contain many sub-interests, so people may frequently take conversations to direct messages or their own servers, then moving the conversations out of the original moderators' purview entirely,

not be viewable to the outside world,

not have a built in method to keep users updated on the results of harassment and abuse decisions,

not have a built-in record-keeping system for messages deleted/edited by original senders or deleted by moderators, and many third-party bots which perform these functions only do so for moderators, not users who submit harassment reports.

Well, you may start to see how that is dangerous, and vulnerable to abuse. So, keep these issues in mind when you consider what service will be the best home for a community you wish to start or grow.

I hope you found this information interesting or helpful! If there is interest, I can work on assembling a list of resources for community-building. Let me know in the comments!

[nirikeehan]

Hello hello! 🤯, 🌞 and 💋 for the fic writer asks, pretty please?

Hi!! thanks for the ask!! Full question list is here.

🤯 What's a genre you struggle with as a writer (ex. romance, action, etc.)?

I don't know if this counts as a genre, exactly, but it's so ubiquitous to fanfic it may as well be one: fluff. I was taught in writing school that you shouldn't be writing anything if there isn't a conflict, and the stakes should be appropriately high or else the reader will get bored. (And one piece of advice I got was that the stakes aren't high enough if the outcome of the conflict doesn't fundamentally change a character's life in some way!) So the very concept of fluff makes me sort of nervous. 😅 Like, things can just be okay? And the characters can be like, happy? What is that about??!

I am trying to get better at writing it, and fanfic is a different beast than original fiction – I get the appeal of just seeing your faves going to get coffee or something. But it is still very difficult for me to actually write and not feel like I should be putting someone's life in peril to spice things up. (I'm kidding here, but only half. I think some valuable writing advice I wish someone had given me when I was a beginning writer is that you don't have to make stakes life or death in order for them to matter a lot to your characters. That's something I had to come around to on my own, after a lot of trial and error.)

🌞 Do you have a preferred time of day to write?

Lately it's either been late morning/early afternoon if my schedule allows, or evening hours before bed, if my energy level allows.

💋 First kiss fics. Love em or hate em?

I don't have very strong feelings on them either way, honestly, lol! I guess I'm more interested in them if the characters don't kiss in canon – I don't see the need to reinvent the wheel. I don't think I'd write one with Thalia/Blackwall or Thalia/Cullen, for instance, since she had an onscreen kiss with both of them in Inquisition. However, in Through a Glass, Darkly, I had no problem having Samson creep on kiss Thalia because that option sure doesn't exist in the game, haha. (Not that that fic can be considered a "first kiss fic" by any means LMFAO, but hopefully you know what I mean.)

[mystybelle]

Hey hey! This is technical game design chatter, it's okay if you don't get it, it's only important if you're trying to make a game or something. 🖤

Thinking about partial success as a mechanic in tabletop RPGs..

Idk if they make a whole lotta sense? Or at least, it seems like a design decision that requires a lot of distance from crunchy conflict solutions in a system.

- Like, when somebody designs a game mechanic, they hafta abstract and either exaggerate or simplify something in the real world, same as when you're drawing or writing a song. Even new things are a riff off our understanding of something else.

Like, In a fight, your "win condition" is to incapacitate your opponent in some way.

Exhausting, maiming, killing, or binding, etc

Each action you take in that altercation brings you closer to that goal, each with varying degrees of effectiveness.

In a game with crunchier combat than literal rock paper scissors, that's represented through abstractions of an Entity's well being or status. HP, special status conditions to indicate situational advantages or benefits in the midst of a fight. So by extension the only full success you can really have in combat is defeating/sufficiently incapacitating an enemy, and every action taken by an entity in that combat is then only a partial success or failure leading up to that.

I haven't played a system besides what I'm working on myself that gamefies social interactions very well yet, but treating a given social situation like a game, allows for the same sort of dynamics.

Your win condition becomes whatever your goal for the conversation was, let's say getting free tacos from the street vendor. Every action a character takes on the way to that goal, is then also a partial success or failure leading up to that. Sweet talking the vendor to make them more receptive to a request, or an attempt to reduce their self esteem so they're more receptive to a demand or a command, etc.

Here a partial success/failure is possible though, because the win condition is more abstract than, "hit a target." Or rather, the hypothetical system or structure in place here is a lot less crunchy than something like combat might have to be. There's room for more vagueness and ambiguity here.

You can maybe haggle the poor vendor down to half or thirty percent off, maybe get 1 taco free but not the whole party's, etc.

That's not to say only social situations can be gamefied meaningfully to have partial successes. This is literally where the idea of Save DCs in dungeon crawler ttRPGS, sweet and sour hit boxes all manner of fighting games, and critical strike/success chance as a concept across all sorts of games where you can do exceptionally well or bad at something.

Hm... I think I might've gotten a little lost sight of my point a little bit. I guess the gist of it is just, make sure you're not trying to reinvent the wheel when you're building things, y'know?

[makel-grax]

I SPENT AN HOUR ANSWERING THIS AND TUMBLR CRASHED AND I LOST IT ALL BECAUSE I DIDN'T KNOW THE SITE COULD CRASH. I AM EXTREMELY MAD NOW!!!

Anyways, I'll try to recreate the hour and half of extremely-in-the-zone thought I put into it, but fucking hell I finally understand why this site is called a Hellsite.

Third person breaking in to try and answer the questions because I want to be a part of something and this is a public site woohoo!!!

Depends on the loosely defined definition of "Karen". If I only count the ones who are desirively annoying people they consider to be "of lower social status", and only from the US, because I'm not sure how "Karens" manifest on other places, then about 30% of white women living in suburbian hellscapes, and 12.5% of white women living in cities.

I agree with smile-2-be-happy here, how many people must follow a label depends on how explicitly defined that label is, how broad (or narrow) the demography mentioned, and the historical context associated with everything. Something I can think of the top of my head is that if more specific a label description is, then less people should need to fit it... No, actually that makes no sense because saying that a group is X because one person is U, V, W, X, Y, Z, requires further context, like with Nazis.

Huh, this one was weird, I don't quite remember much, but I did write a lot before it got deleted; turns out trying to answer with either a yes or a no is really hard, but I also know that for my case, it doesn't depend, it has to be one of the two. The nutshell answer is that I put labels on everything I'm not thinking about, then quickly attempt to strip them out the instant I realize they exist, but that takes a while and most often than not isn't worth the effort.

The main benefit is to avoid reinventing the wheel whenever there's a discussion concerning a group of people; using an agreed-upon description that suits them for most cases can genuinely speed up a lot of talks. The main drawback is that people change a lot, and a group of people that is truly homogeneous just doesn't exist, and the lines for everything regarding social definitions are always blurry.

Yes, they didn't. Yes. Yes.

Not American → Next question doesn't apply.

All I can think of saying is "Oof, what an interesting tough life that must be/have been". Other than that, I am not sure what the question is asking, what about them... What?

TLRD: No, I don't interpret those two statements as equal. I know from logic class that those statements don't make sense, as you are doing something akin to: "If (If A then B) is true then (If B then A) is true", which isn't a tautology, so it is a logical fallacy. HOWEVER! Trying to write something like that in English is really hard, because I end up saying stuff which is grammatically incorrect, like "Most mornings are good, therefore most good are mornings." Which is very weird and hard to properly say, but in other words the second part says "of all good (things) (that exist), more than half are mornings." Which is technically not a logically flawed hypothesis, but technically probable with empirical evidence that (a) there's an ennumerable quantity of "good (things)", and (b) more than half are mornings. Oh, and also it is very different than saying "of all mornings, more than half are good"... This is hard to explain without getting into set theory so I'm just not gonna.

This isn't marked as a different point to 8, but it is a different, albeit related, question. Sentences 2 and 4 are true, Sentence 3 is true as long as "Most" is mutually exclusive with "All", and the first sentence is false because for such a sentence to be true, you need to have at least half of the counters in barrel B to be red, but what we know is that there's between 3 (considering equal distribution, it can't be 2 because all barrels would have the same amount of red counters, without any having the most) and 9 (Most ≠ All), both numbers being below 500, which is the threshold to cross to be considered "most counters in a barrel" means that the first sentence has no case in which it is true. Also, there are only 10 red counters and 10 < 500.

I have no patience for negativity toward "boomers" anymore.

Almost everybody doing the work to restore ecosystems, grow native plants, and preserve rare species is 50 or older

The people I work with IRL have told me that my presence is encouraging because it means "the younger generation is getting involved with this stuff too." There's really not very many people my age

Who do you think was fighting this fight in the 1970's

[airiat]

Hello! I am an aspiring graduate student, possibly going into a post doc. I love writing fanfic, yet I feel like I must focus on academic writing.

How do you reconcile both styles?

i'm interpreting this question in two different ways. let me speak to both of them. but also know that i am extremely biased--academic writing torments me. i have nothing positive to say about it. this is long, so here's a cut.

one: there is no need to reconcile both styles. you can keep the creativity out of academic writing, and, in many cases, it's necessary to do so. do not think of your academic writings as works of art. think of them as a means to an end. you just need to fulfill a set of requirements. you just need to get a grade. you just need to make a point. they can be soulless. it's alright if they are.

however. you can be creative if it's appropriate, if it makes you feel better to do so. here's the introduction to a paper i wrote last term. you'll see what i mean:

To be human is to tell stories. For as long as we have had minds to think and mouths to speak with, we have been weaving tales about ourselves, our ancestors, about how to explain the way the world works around us. People have been using art, for perhaps almost just as long, to grapple with the pain that comes as a part of living. From J. R. R. Tolkien conjuring a literary marvel out of the horrors he endured in WWI to a teenage girl scribbling angry poetry in detention, creative writing has become a way for us to cope and overcome. It is only natural that it could also be used as a therapeutic tool to process trauma.

this is not my best work. frankly, i don't care that it isn't. it just made me feel a little bit better to write this way. it gave me the relief of that little creative spark while i wrote something that i have to turn my brain off in order to cope. sometimes that's all it has to be. but my professors probably liked it. i got 100% on this paper.

you can grow as a writer through academic writing. it will teach you how to organize your thoughts and present ideas clearly. it will teach you how to convince and how to be concise. but, again, i say: your writing does not have to be a masterpiece. do not hold it to the same standard as the work that you are passionate about. but if you are, perhaps, passionate about academic writing, go ahead and give it that treatment. i'm not, so i won't. i'll cry about an assignment and grit my teeth through the whole thing. that's okay, too. it gets it done.

lastly, my first draft is my final. i run it through grammarly and then hit that submit button. if you have been writing, in any capacity, for a long time, you can probably do this, too. you'll have the foundational skills down, and you can be adequate, or even above adequate, in anything you write with little effort. you can also use your creative process in academic writing. if you outline, you can outline. if you pants, go ahead and do it here, too. use your editing practices. don't reinvent the wheel.

all in all, your professors are not expecting beauty. they just want you to follow their rubric. toss your work into the ether, get the grade, and then forget about it.

two: i'm not sure that this is what you were asking, but i thought i'd talk about it, too, briefly. how can you continue to pursue your creative endeavors while also in school?

believe it or not, you can. it just takes a lot of sacrifice. i'm in school, i work a highly, highly stressful job, and yet, just about every night i sit down and write. but i also have no social life. absolutely none. that's my sacrifice. but it does not feel much like a sacrifice because i need to write. i cannot live without it. it's the only thing i do that makes me feel like i can actually get through my days.

if there's a will, there's also a way. if writing is important enough to you, you will find a way to do it at any cost.

but even if you love writing with the whole of your heart, do not feel badly if you just can't swing it while you're in school, or when you're enduring another stressful time of life. it's okay. it'll be there for you again when you're ready. you're always a writer, even when you're not writing.

hopefully this helped in any small way. but i'm not really in the best place right now, being bitter and resentful toward academia. take it all with a grain of salt.

[domirine]

You probably do a lot of life drawing seeing as how perfectly fluid your art always is so this ask might be redundant lol but,, i was wondering what kind of references you usually use? Do you just google similar poses, does it come from your mind, or do you have a go-to app to look through like pinterest?👉👈 i ask bc I struggle a lot with poses and usually when i look them up i end up drawing nothing bc its not. Ever good enough for me/what im looking for lol😔 still not sure how to even draw characters smoochin, rip

thank you, nonny!! i do a lil bit of life drawing, but man i really do feel the same way you do. while i'm happy to show some art when i get it done, the process can be a real struggle.

sorry this is gonna be long and all over the place lol hope it helps tho:

life drawing good: i recommend ditching the idea of finding the 100% Perfect Ref right off the bat. studying anatomy and life drawing (this site has a range of body types and fun poses) somewhat regularly, therefore growing my mental library so that i can try and make whatever pose is in my head happen later, has been more viable to me than spending hours looking for the Perfect Ref.

drawing a bunch of generic people skating without pressure of creating proper character art is good practice, and it primes me to then come up with a skating pose of my own.

ref hunting: i save pictures i might use as refs regularly in a browser folder - good refs, bad refs, boring refs - losing a ref standard can be helpful because at the end of the day it’s what you make with it, so it doesn’t have to be particularly mind-blowing to begin with. you don’t wanna reinvent the wheel or create the most never-been-done-before pose, you just wanna get a thing right.

pinterest is very good for poses, yes, though you have to know how to look for them - i.e. i found that typing out "dynamic pose" will not yield organic results, as opposed to looking up people in motion like athletes, boxers, skaters and such. for fighting, i recommend using photos or clips from (ideally staged lol) fights, as opposed to stock images where the models are standing for a while posing - the former preserves a lot of the movement. i also recommend looking up group photos from events or shows for interesting natural poses and people interacting.

best hot tip of all tho: what helped me most is to not treat references very religiously. don't be tied down by what's in your ref, or not finding the perfect one, because then you're focusing on accuracy and not necessarily on what you wanna communicate with your drawing. if you can't find what you're looking for in full, just use a part that you find interesting, and then bullshit the rest and revise accordingly.

idea-generating can be very hard but you can practice it like any other skill, because having a decent idea of what you wanna draw is helpful - you don't have to have the whole pose visualised 100%. it's the mood, body language and expressions, that i think are more important. looking at refs can help reveal your ideas and intentions, but i will not create them for you i’m afraid.

for example, speaking on characters smooching, i've drawn these using refs in   pretty uptight way with no ideas beforehand - and i find them painfully boring because they're not rly communicating anything aside from a anatomical accuracy (more or less);

i was being too intent on staying faithful to the reference, and they're looking kinda stale to me. the only one that was done without any ref, was the bottom left - which i like! bc it's got spice and it’s portraying some emotion.

but i wouldn't have drawn it if i hadn't already started on the others, so maybe another good tip is to trust the process and not give up mid-work!! drawing stuff you’re not proud of is still drawing stuff, and not everything you create is gonna be satisfying. things are gonna click here and there, but you never know when, so don’t give up on your ugly artsy ducklings!!