#I should not be up this late

[neiksduckyducklab]

currently thinking about duck comics but also mickey and friends comics as a whole. and like, thinking about how donald and mickey's worlds are so different because of their statuses as disney characters.

mickey was born first. he wasn't destined to fame, his fate was extremely uncertain, and yet he rose to the top and became disney's number one, nobody could predict it and yet he did it. and nobody can ever reach that status, not a single other character. donald can only dream of ever reaching such a status

but if mickey is so much more famous than donald, how come the latter's stories have a deeper layer of depth? because donald's stories have always made me feel more invested, more satisfied than mickey's.

i always found this case interesting... how because of his fame, mickey had to give up, or rather, his writers had to give up on giving him an actual, full rounded personality. donald not only received a personality, he received his very own universe in a way.

not only was donald given a personality, he was given a whole city for him and his family to live in. he was given *family*! family that we know about, who eventually even became detached from him and went on to have their own little stories.

his uncle is the richest duck in the world, an extremely old yet never tired adventurer who got a series of TWELVE comic book stories about him, an animated show and a REBOOT of said animate show; he has three mischievous yet loving nephews, who sometimes are respectful and the voice of reason and sometimes their uncle's antagonists. he has many cousins: one of them is lucky and always trying to steal his girlfriend, another one is a misunderstood goofball who tries to do a lot of things but ends up causing messes. another cousin of his lives on a farm with his grandma, which in some versions he grew up with. he has a twin sister who is the mother of his nephews but who is never acknowledged for many reasons that are not even about the stories themselves.

he has friends! and enemies! he's friends with the inventor of the town, who works for his rich uncle who never pays him and who helps him by making him gadgets for his secret superhero part time job- he has a secret superhero part time job!! he is even a spy!!!

and what i mentioned is only the tip of the iceberg... we did so much with donald duck as a character, it's always a nice thought for me. this duck was not given main mascot status, but that's okay because it helped him develop. it helped him become a fully fleshed out character in a world that was made for him. he is not first in line but he is free and that freedom is full of love.

[finchesslingshott]

it's 2:30 in the morning, and i'm sobbing tears of joy over this song. happy birthday to me i guess :D

[asecondglassofcinnamonwine]

ty for one last chuckle Hobb

[stellawolfearts]

Looks around supsiciously

[thelostmoongazer]

more figuring out how i wanna draw the Lamb :3

[magentasnail]

long distance

[stil-lindigo]

an ex-zionist jewish man recently went a bit viral on tiktok for sharing exactly how he sees zionism tie israel to the jewish identity and his personal experience with breaking away from it - I think it’s a really great watch.

He also made a follow up talking specifically about how he learned to humanise Palestinians, and a really integral part of it was his school, which would often bring in Palestinian speakers who’d share their perspective (here’s a link to it).

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[vally-vall-vall]

There were always signs

[berenshand]

one of my favourite little things about the murderbot diaries is how present all secunit's friends are even if they're not actually physically present. it doesn't do the annoying thing where it jumps through hoops to bring back characters that aren't really relevant to the narrative but it also doesn't do the other annoying thing where it pretends they never existed either. like secunit talks about art and mensah all the time even when art or mensah aren't in the book. it's clear how bharadwaj has impacted its personal growth even when she's literally on another planet. it complains about gurathin and pin-lee when they're not there. it's still sad about miki and don abene and it mentions tapan and maro and rami even though it only knew them for a few days (because when you're new at being a person every interaction with other people is important even if it's short). iris reminds it of mensah. iris also reminds it of ratthi. its hair is fluffy bc it let amena play hairdresser off-screen and it messages her so she knows it's okay. it doesn't have to worry about protecting volescu anymore because volescu retired thank goodness. it's still using thiago's language module. etc etc etc

it's such good writing because it's such a little thing that gives the characterization and relationships greater depth and also reinforces the running theme of friendship in the series and then also subtly gives this sense of 'the people you love are a part of you/your story' and also reinforces secunit's role as a storyteller because it's constantly telling little stories about all its friends.

[asterwild]

seal block prints (shop)

[hinamie]

congrats on your recovery n all yuuji but unfortunately for you I thought the scars were cool >:/

[multiversal-pudding]

A fun Danny Phantom idea:

One of those “mediums tormented by the fact they can’t turn Off the ability to see ghosts” types moves to Amity, and for the most part, it’s great! Like yeah maybe there’s still ghosts everywhere, but now they can react normally, because finally for once in their life everyone else sees the ghosts too. Granted, judging from what everyone else says it sounds like they’re seeing significantly tamer humanoid proper-manifestations than the near-incomprehensible masses of emotion, spectral energy, and whatever that particular spirit’s associated with they’re used to seeing, but eh- between how jaded they are to seeing stuff like that after all these years and the fact that in practice the response of “GTFO” tends to be applicable regardless of whether you’re dealing with a poltergheist in overalls who likes hucking boxes at people, a giant robot guy who’s yelling about world domination, or reality breaking fever dream vomit, it’s not too big a deal

…There’s just ooooone little problem

Which is that when people look at the Fenton’s youngest kid and when people see local town hero/cryptid The Phantom, clearly everyone ELSE is seeing two different people/entities, but in their case, all they see is the same wild plasma-lightning living tear in reality either way, and they’re afraid if they mix the two “identities” up they’re either A) gonna fuck up some poor kid’s life/put him and those around him in danger, B) piss off a very powerful spirit whose repeatedly proven why that’s a very bad idea, or C) both-

(Bonus points if it’s some completely mundane guy like Ted the Bus Driver/ the county deputy in training/ some poor janitor who’d be reasonably expected to come in contact with either one fairly frequently-)

[kazz-brekker]

tolkien's tendency to leave women off of family trees is annoying to me not just because it's an overall trend in fantasy novels that i wish wasn't a thing (to quote arya stark, the woman is important too!) but also because i desperately need to know who celebrimbor's mom was and which elf lady made the bold yet fantastically bad decision to marry into the house of feanor.

[blujayonthewing]

awright here we go

[why-the-heck-not]

me, a responsible being, working on the coding project as I should vs. me, a dysfunctional shithead, getting distracted by reading about brains (once aGAIN damnit (it's my favorite "I need to study my field but bc I should do that it's an impossible unthinkable feat now, so I'm reading about something else to fool my brain I'm still being productive"-topic))