#Still so frustrated

[wolfgirl-valentine]

Watercolors, watercolors pencils and ink pen.

My entry for Dreamling Nation's House of horrors, I wasn't going to publish it(and I'm still anxious about it) but my friends at the "Dreaming con ñ" server were very supportive about it, so I decided since I spend so much time in it I might as well publish it. I wanted to make a drabble companion for it to give it more context, but I didn't have the time, so I'll write down the general idea...

This was inspired by the Ballroom prompts(all of them)

An AU where things ended differently in 1889, they actually talked, Dream accepted Hob friendship and after a couple years they realized it was more than that. They got together, and loved wach other in a very obsessive and deranged way. So when Burgess captured Dream, it only took a couple months for Jessamy to get Hob to rescue him. Hob arrived in the middle of one of the first parties throw by Burgess, Jessamy wanted to wait for the next night and do it discretely, but Hob wasn't going to make Dream wait even a minute more. Hob promised Jessamy to don't take unnecessary risks, but seeing Dream Ruby hanging from Burgess neck makes him see red. He ends killing everyone in the place, except Burgess, he left him to Dream.

Hob takes Dream out of the sphere, and he finds charming the violence Hob is willing to inflict in his name. Dream gets his things back, punishes Burgess, and shares another tender moment with Hob in the middle of the Ballroom, the gramophone still playing, they end dancing a waltz, the end.

Everything was supposed to be narrated from Alex perspective.

Anyways, close up of the faces before the colors under the cut

[aropride]

it's so fucking frustrating to be in college and know everyone uses chatgpt and to be tempted by it constantly while also knowing intellectually that it doesn't work and it's a bad idea. like, i hang out in the library a lot, and i see people using chatgpt on assignments almost every day. and i know it isn't a good way to learn, because it's not really "artificial intelligence" so much as it is an auto text generator. and it gives you wrong information or badly worded sentences all the time. but every week i stare down assignments i don't want to do and i think man. if only i could type this prompt into a text generator and have it done in 10 minutes flat. and i know it wouldn't work. it wouldn't synthesize information from the text the way professors want, it wouldn't know how to answer questions, it just spits out vaguely related words for a couple paragraphs. but knowing my classmates get their work done in 10 minutes flat with it while i fight every ounce of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in my body is infuriating.

[letmetellyouaboutmyfeels]

I am incredibly serious right now when I beg you all, please, and if you have Twitter or Tiktok or whatever to please spread the word: click on an author's profile on Ao3.

You want to know if an author has written more? Want to know if they're still writing? Want to see more from them? Want to know if they've written a trope or kink or sex scenario you enjoy?

Click on their name. And look at their profile.

I cannot tell you how many times in the last six months someone has read a new or newer fic of mine and said they (a new reader who has read nothing else I've done) "can't wait to see what you do next!" I've written 50+ fics and over a million words already.

"I don't know if you're still writing..." click on my profile. I am. I literally wrote a 128k+ fic for that ship last month.

"Would you ever do X?" "Please do Y!" I already did. Click on my name and look at my works.

Archive of our Own is a library. It's an archive. Not social media. It is your responsibility to fight back against the laziness that corporate algorithms have trained into you.

Click my author name. Just click it. Just click it.

Before you demand more, or ask if a writer will do XYZ, or wonder if the author still writing, or anything - click on their profile. Click on the author's profile.

I'm not trying to be mean or condescending or anything like that. I'm just exhausted. It's disheartening and frustrating to repeat myself ad nauseam, because someone couldn't take thirty seconds to do the tiniest bit of work to see if I've written lately, if I've written more for their ship, or scan my works to see if I've written what they're asking for. Please. Please. I'm begging.

Click the author's name, and explore before you ask.

[bizarrelittlemew]

i can't wait to be 30+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 40+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 50+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 60+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 70+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 80+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 90+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to look back on my life and know that i loved things deeply and passionately and was inspired to create and was part of communities with incredible people from all over the world brought together by the stories that touched us

[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.

[hinamie]

picked up an old pen

[cuntylouis]

I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It's simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw or a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn't necessarily mean that the character is 'wrong', it definitely doesn't mean that they're wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don't even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently

[all-my-ocs-are-evil]

Jason's been pestering Danny about why he looks like a borderline walking corpse for ages and Danny has decided to put his lying skills to the test. (he has none)

rambling below cut

I've been playing w the idea that the more Danny transforms, the more his ghost form gets "lively" while his human form gets weaker and more sickly. He knows that if he keeps transforming like this then, one day, he's not going to have a livable body to go back to, but he really doesn't want to think about all that. He's more interested in the weird "totally dead but not dead" Wayne son who may or may not have a thing for his sister.

everytime i do one these im like "this time I'll keep it simple so I don't have to suffer through colouring bc I have zero foresight—it'll be greyscale at most" and then all of the sudden its 4am and i'm trying to finish a stupid comic but i decided to add "some" colour to spice it up and hide my shitty ink job and then SOME COLOUR ALWAYS BECOMES FULL COLOUR WHY CAN I NOT ESCAPE THIS STUPID CYCLE!!

(did this all stem from me not being able to decide between a super pale character design and one w a vibrant tan bc I love white hair + tan but I also love extremely pale albino so I forced myself to find a way to make both work? never! that's absurd!)

[merlatealeaf72]

[gotchibam]

Shiny Masquerain & Shiny Aggron ko-fi doodle for cyrus!

[xiaoks]

trying out heavypaint to get back into drawing again

[spending-life-pretending]

conservatives really wanna act like the “woke left” is winning the culture war or whatever when people are out here making basil and dorian brothers and casting white men to play heathcliff in 2024

[squuote]

this was meant for an ask my friend sent about what if stanley wasn't actually stanley's name but tumblr DELETED IT and now i am pissed take this comic from my hands NEOW

[lucabyte]

So does anybody else ever think about how Loop felt the need to demonstrate that the party's deaths wouldn't have any effect on the loops. I know I do but that's besides the point. Anyway I don't think Loop actually needs to bathe, they just like to feel included.

[snow-body]

grimm: no homo

[spidehpig]

can’t stop thinking about soap being the kind of boyfriend that takes you on arcade or carnival dates. he definitely takes all of the games WAY too seriously. absolutely smokes everyone at skeeball. probably does those stupid punching bag/hammer strength tests just to show off in front of you. he doesn’t even let you win he’s that competitive. but it’s kinda funny and endearing. he wins a TON of tickets and then gets you the biggest fucking stuffed animal they have even as you protest and tell him that you have no place to put it.

his little mohawk popping around the head of the giant puppy stuffed animal he won you boyish smile plastered on his face while he ignores your protests. you’re stuck with the thing forever now.