#I've been wanting to say it for a while

[hime-bee]

Small yandere rant below

Everyone has their own idea of what they think a yandere should and shouldn't be. I think everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Because no matter how egregious it is, there's always gonna be at least one other person who agrees with you. If you don't like the way someone writes a yandere in a fanfic or a game, you can distance yourself from it. You don't even have to let it be known.

Personally, I really do enjoy the yandere trope, it's one of my favorites. But the way I see it is admittedly different than others who follow me might. For example, the current yandere OC's I have (Leumin, Vivian, Mikka), are all at varying levels of yandere. Some people may think Leu is too extreme, or not extreme enough. If I had to say, without spoiling the sequel, Leu is very much a "I can fix him or make him worse" kind of yandere. His disposition depends solely on MC.

While I am still working on the sequel to Inclement Idée Fixe, I've been more focused on other side projects and learning new game development software instead. I won't lie, the yandere community here (and on Itch.io) just rubs me the wrong way a lot of the time, specifically the way someone of y'all treat creators. Most of my interactions have been positive, for the most part, but I've also seen more discourse here than I have in most other fandoms. It's concerning ngl, and it makes me want to distance myself even further from it. I want to keep making things I, and others, can enjoy, but if that comes at the cost of my mental health then it's really not worth it. So whether or not I actually finish the sequel is highly dependent on whether or not I'm still willing to interact with the yandere community

I really think it just comes down to being a decent person, really. No one is forcing you to consume yandere/dark content. You're responsible for your own internet safety at the end of the day, as an adult. So please don't blame others who make the content you don't like when you're actively engaging with it.

[goodluckclove]

clove my kind comrade. i have a very emotional writing advice question for you. this turned kinda long, i apologize

i've been working on college applications these last few months, with the majority of that time taking the form of essay writing. and in these months it has been discovered that, at least to my dad's standards, my normal nonfiction prose writing skills are absolutely abysmal. i would write a draft, think i had everything pretty much shiny and complete, only to have everything i had worked so hard to finish absolutely picked to shreds by my dad and told i needed to start over. and there's nuance to this; i do quite literally forget a lot of writing tips and processes that worked for me, and it took last week's adhd diagnosis 17 years too late for me to stop hating myself for not being able to write a 300 word essay in a week. but this has left deep scars on my psyche and sent me for the most intense mental heath loop ive had in years.

that all contributed to a very intense anxiety ive developed about writing. i'll open a wip (or hell start writing an ask) and i will feel such a sense of dread. it's like i'm reaching into an oven that i know i've burned myself on so many times before. i can barely write a sentence before i start overthinking things too much and give up. this is specifically talking about my own personal writing. five minutes ago i opened my most self-indulgent wip that only four people on earth would ever be allowed to see and felt such an overwhelming fear of "what if it's bad". "what if it doesn't read this way to people". i've never had that before. i write what i write, and it's generally pretty damn good. but the anxiety i have about these stupid college essays has bled into MY work, MY own fun projects.

essentially, what i'm asking you is if you can offer any advice of how to conquer this anxiety. i know that an essay and a gay little fanfiction are fundamentally different things that cannot be equated with each other, and i know that other people's opinion on what is ultimately a self indulgent project can be easily and happily disregarded. but i can't have a self indulgent project if i can't even bring myself to physically write it.

this turned into a vent lmao. i hope you and Wife and the cats are doing splendidly.

Hi Bas! This ask made me deeply angry when I read it last night! Shame from artists, especially young artists just starting out in life and in their craft, apparently provokes a pretty deep rage in my soul.

I'm fine now. I'm at a coffee shop. Thank you for a pretty vulnerable and heartfelt insight into your brain-space, and I'm going to give it a pretty long and ramble-y response because that's what it deserves - and honestly, you've known me for long enough that I'm sure you kind of assume this is what's coming. Before that, though, I get the sense you're pretty anxious and drained. In the name of meeting your sincerity I would like to offer a look at the drawing my surrogate child demanded I draw for them after they saw the terrible Sonic the Hedgehog I drew from memory last night. Their prompt was "T4T Sonic/Shadow"

What do you think? I gave Shadow a wallet chain. I've never drawn fan art before but I do think going forward I'm going to give most, if not every famous IP I draw a wallet chain. This made me grin a lot because it's so fucking weird. Also it's not canon. Canonically Shadow would not smoke a blunt. Canonically Shadow the Hedgehog vapes.

Okay I made myself properly silly time for business. Come follow me into a hypothetical situation so I can talk to you (and anyone in your position - which is a lot of people your age) more intimately.

Okay, so I'm at a new coffee shop. It's open concept, fairly minimal an industrial in decor. I'm in this seated nook in the back at a bench by a large round table. The lighting is soft. There's a lot of plants and the baristas are like kind of anti-social which usually means the coffee is going to be great or pretty bad. Luckily it's the former - I got this iced maple cardamom latte. They have other drinks too. Tea. Your usual coffee varieties. They have a rosemary syrup you can put in lattes that I might try if I feel like I want another coffee later. Take my card and order something. I'll wait here.

You're back? What'd you get?

Mm. Fuck. I should've gotten that too. Nevermind, it's fine. I'll probably come back here again.

Okay, so college essays. I'm going to go ahead and just open by saying that college essays are absolutely not the same as nonfiction prose. Flat out, end of sentence. They're aren't apples and oranges - it's like comparing an apple and a used 2007 Honda Accord.

Good nonfiction means different things to different people. I personally enjoy a bit of humor and love for a subject, even if it's mundane to most of society. My wife prefers a Wikipedia-level of dry Academia. Different strokes.

College admission essays, however, are not good. They're really not. From a vague amount of research it seems this has been an issue for decades now.

You can still write like a bad college essay, don't get me wrong. Something riddled with typos or dribbled out by a generative AI. But if you look a little bit at what the people who actually check applications are, it seems the spectrum isn't "bad to great" as much as it is "bad to fine". My own college essay was some bullshit about how I learned about myself and the world around me by going to the grocery store before school and buying a baguette to have for lunch. It was stupendously mediocre. I got into college.

There's a lot of reasons for this. It could be because the average 17-18 year old isn't given the tools or opportunity to write really solid nonfiction - probably because the society we live in doesn't expect them to have anything to contribute in that way, but that's beside the point. You're taught essays. Ways to format papers that, from what I gather, only really apply in academic settings. When I was in high school the average essay had pretty stark parameters students were expected to follow, and from what I've heard those parameters have only gotten more specific.

With all that in mind, I understand why you're freaked out. If you look up tips on solid college essays the advice is like just comically vague. Be authentic! Focus on deeper themes! Pose a philosophical question! That last one actually made me laugh out loud when I read it, because it's so insanely discordant compared to how I've seen people you're age be treated. To go straight from people assuming you need your hand held on nearly anything to having a person say "Hey solve nihilism in 450 words " is baffling.

There's real advice in this odd, clickbait-y quips. You shouldn't feel like you have to play a character or pretend to be something you don't want to do, because that comes across in the text pretty easily. You should consider exploring a topic, because it reveals more about you as a person and that's valuable to the application as a whole. You - I'm going to go out and say you don't need to pose any sort of philosophical quandary at all, actually. That's a pretty wild thing to ask a huge portion of New Adults to be able to do.

So this isn't nonfiction. This isn't a think piece or a memoir, even though people might compare it to both. This is closer to a cover letter. You should still try, but do so knowing this is separate from your skills as a writer. Once you do that, you'll hopefully be able to relax enough to actually let your character slip into the work. What you mainly want to do is express a sense of your voice and sort of imply an idea of the type of presence you would be as a student at your school of choice. That's the point of the application as a whole. It's not going to win a Pulitzer. It would be truly, very weird if an admissions essay won a Pulitzer.

The other thing that I think might be making you and people in your shoes feel crazy is that you're in the period of your life when a lot of adults around you are going to say just the wackest nonsense. Oh this application determines the rest of your life! The stakes have never been higher! This is your future! You're setting the entire course of the rest of your life right now, somehow!

That obviously is also not true. Next year will be a decade since I graduate high school, and I still actually have no idea why some people had that level of intensity. It strikes me as incredibly counter-productive. I explained this to my kid, and they were shocked when I told them how many paths there are to get a higher education. You can get your first few years at a community college and then go to a university. You can go to a polytech school (They make them for the arts too! my brother went to Cogswell and it was such a cool campus) and get straight into industry experience. You might get into a university and transfer to a different one because it has a better program or opportunity.

All of these are cool. Not going to college is also cool, although it comes with other pitfalls. You can also go to college later on down the line. If you haven't figured it out yet, existing in the world is actually really flexible and open in terms of life choices. A college application, essay included, is not likely to play a huge part in the grand scheme of your life. The results of this will give you a sort of better understanding of your options for a plan for the next - like - year, maybe? It won't even determine it. It's more of a cool, maybe or a cool, I guess not right now situation.

It's also way harder for most people to work with a smaller word count. Less words mean less margin for error. That's stressful. You aren't a failure for struggling to write 300 words in a week when you can't choose the parameters of the writing, can't change the deadline, and probably have a bunch of people saying how crazy important all this is. Those are batshit work conditions for someone who doesn't have ADHD.

For someone who does, I can see how easily this would warp the perspective you have on everything else you do. Being picked apart by someone who hasn't been where you are in like 20+ years but still expects you to take their words as gospel? Confusing! Maybe feeling the inexplicable need to compare yourself to any published nonfiction you've read and loved, even though this isn't even nonfiction - and if it was, those writers have definitely been working in the genre longer than just goddamned now.

I think I've told a few people your age that this is the point where you kind of have to pick and choose how often you listen to the adults in your life. That feels irresponsible for me to say, but I do stand by it. When it comes to the transition between high school and college, most established adults are just crazy biased. Maybe because they raised you. Maybe because they're blinded by nostalgia and think that high school was the best part of their lives. Maybe they aren't familiar with the work you want to go into and what's needed to get a start in it. Or they could just straight up not understand how the college system works now.

It is such bullshit that you eventually have to craft a sense of internal intuition out of essentially nothing but it is a thing. It takes time, though. I won't pretend like you can make it happen immediately right now.

What matters is that you're okay. I promise you that - you're okay. Looking you straight in the eye, Bas, you're a good writer. Not "good for your age", I have read enough of your actual writing to know that you're pretty solid already. I've also read enough of your posts and had conversations with you to know for certain that if you wanted to pursue nonfiction you'd be pretty good at it right off the bat. This would be under the usual standards of a nonfiction writer, of course - meaning you get to pick the length, subject, and when you finish it.

You are in the unfortunate period of going through multiple transitions at once. It's hard enough to navigate the way relationships change when people decide (or struggle to process) how you're an "adult" now (also not really true in a lot of ways, but that's another ramble). But going so long under the assumption of having a Default Brain Experience and then realizing that all of the struggles you assumed were normal are actually an imbalance of chemicals is jarring.

It's treatable, yes. Once you get on a medication that helps with the dopamine everything is immeasurably easier, holy shit. But even then it's still painful at times because the difference is so palpable you sometimes stop and think why did it take so long for me to be able to have this? Why did no one see I was struggling? That was my experience, at least.

This is a crucial point in life where you have to be extra kind to yourself however you can. Once you get on stimulants, if you go that way, drink a lot of water and remember to eat (Some of them can make appetite wonky and I think they all dehydrate you). Be careful with caffeine because they do make you more sensitive to that. Maybe like just stop thinking about whether or not your writing is bad or doesn't work in certain ways because I am a Professional Writer and those kinds of thoughts have literally never been helpful to me. When they pop up in my brain I literally say "no" and force myself to think about something else.

Whether your writing is "good" is not an actual question. Is it coherent and does it contain a noticeable and unique voice? Yes. Is it what you want? I can't answer that, but if you say no the way to fix that is usually read more/write more/think more/share with other more.

Also does it read the way it should to other people? Stop it. Don't worry about that yet. You have to finish the damn thing or else it won't read any way to anyone. So much of writing is Second Draft You's problem.

Anyways that's all I have to say. My heart goes out to you for being pulled in so many directions. From my own experience it gets slightly easier once you submit the apps, but people do continue saying dumb nonsense until like midway into your first year in college. And if you end up leaving college for some reason or another people will keep occasionally saying dumb nonsense. But usually by then you're more equipped to ignore them.

You're going to be okay. You are an intelligent, insightful, artistically capable and deeply kind individual. Whether you share your thoughts and make your stories, true or not, through text or art or a mix of both, you have so much to offer. Just remember that.

Also I'm hungry. I've been writing this for a while and I didn't get any work done on the painting for my wife, but it's almost noon and I didn't have breakfast. There's an American Chinese place near here and they have pretty cheap lunch specials. Come on, get your stuff and let's take a break.

Mongolian beef yum yum.

[beansprout-draws]

When you and your husband successfully convict someone of murder.

No text version + reference image:

[benevolenterrancy]

~ Extremely Unwilling Magical Protagonists Attempt To Outrun The Plot And Not Fucking Die ~

(@takofukkatsumi this tag is from a while ago but it hasn't left my brain -- L-Space got very weird all of a sudden)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Thank you all for an incredible 500 days of love and support. I offer you: answers to questions that no one has asked.

(As always, more can be found in the tags <3)

[creeping-sense-of-oh-fuck]

Here's the thing though. The people who say they saw Jon watching them in their dreams didn't say anything about a monster version of him with glowing eyes or many eyes or floating or whatever.

I love a good monster Jon design but just think THINK about how scary it is that he isn't. You met a fairly normal guy once and you told him the worst thing that ever happened to you. Now that man is there staring blankly while you suffer, over and over. You don't understand why it's happening. There's nothing you can do. The man is still out there, somewhere.

[frostfires-blog]

Me rn:

The thoughts:

[bizarrelittlemew]

calling it right now that season 3 starts like this

[backpackingspace]

Okay so with the line "the olive tree where we first met" we have two equal hilarious options.

When penelope was sassily like oh I'll marry you if you make a living bed out of this tree right here! Cue penelope stumbling over odysseus very very carefully digging up the tree "because how else is he going to get it to itacha we can't have a wedding bed out in the open in sparta duh"

Or

2. Penelope, knowing that Helen's suitors would soon be arriving to take over her home for a while. Snuck out and went on her own wacky shenanigan filled journey where she scoped out all the major players. Odysseus caught her spying in an olive tree. And when she got back she told Helen she had dibs on the cutie from itacha.

[separatedleoau]

*waddles into your inbox and pulls on your sleeve*

Is Oneion ok? 👉🏼🥺👈🏼

After the whole battle with Toast, I’ve been worried about him.

Baby boy just really looked like he needed a hug.

Is he up for hugs or is he isolating right now?

he's fiiiiine, he's just being very emo about it, ignoring texts and calls from Sprout and coming up with stupid "too busy" excuses not to hang out

he'll put on his big boy pants at some point and go deal with the whole situation

he knows he can't keep coming with excuses forever, also he doesn't want to do that, he wants to be with them, he just can't trust himself with that for now

[brainrotcharacters]

deadclaws being so attuned to each other that they have a conversation with facial expressions

[secriden]

I woke up this morning still thinking about Fadel waking up in Style's bed.

I wonder what was running through Fadel's head as he turned to look at Style, eyes still squinting against the too-bright morning light, the unfamiliar comfort of the shape of Style's name on his lips for the very first time. I wonder if he was too sleepy to process how strange it was that he didn't really mind being pinned down by the weight of Style's thigh thrown over his hips; that the sensation was grounding and reassuring rather than being confining or suffocating. I wonder if the thought crossed his mind that he wouldn't mind waking up like this again, wouldn't mind letting someone into his space, wouldn't mind giving someone the bared vulnerability of lying naked and unprotected with all the implications of unwavering trust that has -- not if it was with him.

I wonder if Fadel registered the way his heartbeat is steady and calm despite the strange surroundings and unfamiliar bed, because something in him has already labelled the person lying next to him as safe.

I wonder if Fadel even understood that this, right here, in all its quiet and unacknowledged stillness, was the moment he fell in love?

[lacecap]

song about something you'll never be forgiven for. beepbox link here, and a singalong under the read more :''-)

starting point "…so don't look back" i took your hand and led you astray into the light i fear i might have made a fatal mistake walk in a straight line walk in a straight line i couldn't ask i only hope that sinners are saved but in all honesty, my honor keeps me somewhat afraid walk in a straight line don't dare look behind ♫♫♫ i had a dream we tried to reach the finishing line but in the silence still the time we killed had come back to life walk in a straight line walk in a straight line the signs had merged into a single "end of the world" where every undead thing was damned to sing "esrever ni gnos a" walk in a straight line …tell me that you're fine ♫♫♫ walk in a straight line (walk in a straight line) don't dare look behind (don't dare look behind) tell me that you're fine (something that had died) you're still breathing right? (are you satisfied?) walk between the lines (how to save a life) don't dare look behind (change the ending line) reach the end this time (tell a little lie) bring me back to life… ♫♫♫ if i'd look back and held the hands that led me astray into the light i'd proudly cry "this is my final mistake" walk with me this time walk with me this time i should have asked i know the answer's somewhat cliché but was it worth the price and worth the pain? you're fading away— walk with me this time bring me back to life… if i'd look back… if i'd look back… if i'd look back… if i'd look back… if i'd look back… if you'd look--

[nattravn-art]

Some Bloodborne runes (Beast, Hunter and Corruption) as a pixel art practice! I'm still pretty new at this, but what do you think?

[Transparent versions masterpost]

Which runes (or items?) should I draw next? Feel free to leave suggestions (Soulsborne Ring preferred)! :D

[licorishh]

so uhhh happy valentine's day i suppose !!

shoves this in your face and runs away

so. uh. yyyyyeah. when i said i liked all interpretations of their dynamic equally i uh. i lied. and to be totally and completely and 100% honest with you it speaks volumes to the state of the internet that i have been legitimately afraid to say that like i've genuinely been debating and turning it over in my head and arguing with myself about it for days because i don't want people frickin' YELLING at me and telling me to off myself because i like a dadgum fictional ship but it's valentine's and my friend has been hyping up the crap outta me so i'm past the point of having a reasonable excuse to chicken out (and i know myself and if i don't do it today then i likely won't do it at all)

anyway words actually cannot express how obsessed i am with post-o66 aus in which they stay together (largely because i so completely refuse to believe they'd be willing to split up after THAT, ESPECIALLY that soon) so yeah shoutout to the softest fluffiest gut-punch-iest pair in the galaxy to whom everything bad has happened but who stay silly despite the horrors

[vocaangel]

oh and i drew this yesterday, it's not my full effort but school has been wearing me down. ame as darling dance! was gonna put this on my artblog but a fandom mutual followed it and i got a bunch of followers yesterday so i'm kinda paranoid right now.