#advice !

[reasonsforhope]

Btw you do NOT need to read the news to help people

You can do all of these things without reading the news:

Go to protests

Volunteer

Join a mutual aid network

Write to your representatives

Donate

Clean up trash and pollution

Curate and provide resources for your community

Citizen science/citizen history projects to help the environment/etc.

Much, much more

Reading the news is not a moral obligation. Following people whose posts make you spiral is not a moral obligation.

I am more able to help people when I don't regularly read the news. I volunteer more. I go out early to go weed invasive species at a nature reserve. I have more capacity to support my friends and the people I care about.

I have more energy to work on this blog, for that matter. (Obviously I regularly read a lot of good news. Which I recommend. The rest of this post is about normal news, which highly rewards negative content.)

You cannot pour from an empty vessel.

What matters is doing something to help.

[thatsbelievable]

[brick3621]

[reasonsforhope]

There's a saying my dad taught me, that I've found is very true in life:

The antidote to anxiety is action.

If you're like me, you're probably anxious right now. And scared. And quite probably angry. About climate change, about the Palestinian genocide, about Donald fucking Trump.

That only makes sense. It hurts to find out that people aren't as good as you thought, or hoped. It hurts to know how much better we could be doing, and then see all the ways in which we aren't doing that. It hurts to know that people are going to die.

This is something I've been grappling with myself since the US election. I had hopes that were higher than this, and I had reasons for those hopes, but in several spheres, those hopes have been disappointed.

That's not a reason to give up, though. It's not a reason to give up on the world, on yourself, on your life, or on hope.

The antidote to anxiety is action.

(Nobody is allowed to interpret this statement as being about/against psych meds btw. Meds are great and help a lot of people. But this isn't about them.)

Fear and anxiety exist for a reason: to warn us when there is a threat. And to motivate us to do something about that threat.

That's why, the more you push anxiety down down down, the worse it tends to get.

Your brain - your self - is telling you that something is wrong, and that you need to do something about it.

So listen. And find something you can do to help. Anything.

It will make you feel better, I promise. Maybe not right away, but it will.

And the more you do to help, the more you'll see the difference it can make. The more you're surrounded by people who are also helping, who also care. The more you'll see more and more ways to help.

Look up organizations near you - especially organizations that help protect the groups that are most vulnerable right now: undocumented people, immigrants, trans people, BIPOC, queer people, Muslims, Jewish people, disabled people, unhoused people.

Find someone who is helping, and find a way to help them.

The more we do to help each other, the more we organize, the more we resist fascism and work to beat climate change and make those fuckers pay for every. last. fucking. inch...

The more we will change. The more people we will protect and save.

We're stronger together. So find something you can do. And do it.

[thatsbelievable]

[thefemigirl]

✤ What To Add To Your Vision Board

Visualize what you want these 6 areas of your life to look like in the near future.

( 1 ) FINANCIAL a. What is your ideal annual income? b. Describe your ideal home situation to look like and its location.

( 2 ) CAREER a. What kind of organization or role do you envision yourself in? b. What type of projects or tasks are you passionate about doing?

( 3 ) RECREATION a. How do you prefer to spend your leisure time? b. Which hobbies or interests are you actively pursuing?

( 4 ) WELLNESS a. In what ways do you care for your mental, physical, and spiritual health? b. What kind of diet do you follow to stay healthy? c. What activities help you maintain your fitness?

( 5 ) RELATIONSHIPS a. How would you describe the quality of your relationships? b. How often do you connect with friends and loved ones?

( 6 ) PERSONAL LIFE a. What personal goals are you striving to achieve? b. What habits, values, and boundaries guide your daily life?

Remember: you can build your vision boards any time of the year.

[angstandhappiness]

True

tbh when i hear some people talk about 'breaking cycles of abuse', it becomes clear pretty quickly who has come to understand that phrase to mean 'since i was a victim of abuse/neglect by my parents/caretaker/s i will do everything to be nothing like them' and that is all. its not a completely flawed way of thinking either - something that hurt you would very likely hurt someone else; through empathy we learn to understand not to hurt others the way we were hurt too.

but what 'breaking cycles' looks like is more complicated than just not being your parents/caretakers - it's about recognizing how the things that happened to you changed you and how you can heal so you don't hurt someone else in turn. the survival skills you learned in an unhealthy enviroment often translate to poor if not unhealthy interpersonal skills in an enviroment where things ARE safe.

its a difficult pill to swallow for a lot of survivors of abuse (trust me, i know) because we have a tendency to simply want our pain to be recognized. by painting yourself as "absolutely nothing like my abuser" you can abstain from recognizing your own harmful tendencies and live comfortably in the role of victim hood for the rest of your life. it can be tempting to do this especially when so many people will do their best to deny what you experienced - almost like leaning into a stuck door that just won't budge.

the problem with this is if you never recognize that being mistreated made it so you LACK a lot of what other people learned from a loving enviroment, you can hurt people pretty badly even when doing your best just not to replicate what your parents/caretakers got wrong.

this also hurts for victims because, when it comes down to it - it's not FAIR. you were hurt for no reason, and most of us will never hear an apology or even admittance from the person who did it - so why do YOU have to change? why do YOU, the person hurt unjustly, have to put in the work?

and i mean. that's what breaking a cycle is. it means pushing against what's fair and comfortable deliberately so that you can stop something that's been repeating. it's work. its not just recognition of pain, it's the purposeful healing and treatment of it. but thats scary, and it's not fun, so a lot of people fall right back into it. its a lot easier said than done.

[sonandheirofnothinginparticular]

[teresablogs]

You are capable of achieving the dream that’s been planted in you.

[thepersonalquotes]

I dont celebrate any friendship that was build on hate, because we share the common enemy.

De philosopher DJ Kyos

[zeekszooks]

.... Good advice. Yoink.

I was asked by a friend yesterday if I could offer basic tips about comic paneling. As it turns out, I have a lot to say on the matter! I tried breaking down the art of paneling using the principles of art and design, and I hope it helps you out!

EDIT: uh uh there are a lot of people reblogging this, so i figure i may as well append this now while i can lol

This whole thing was very much cranked out in a few hours so I had a visual to talk about with a friend! If this gives you a base understanding of paneling, that's awesome! Continue to pull in studies from the comics you see and what other artists do well and don't do well! You can tell paneling is doing well when the action is flowing around in its intended reading format.

Here's the link to the globalcomix article from which I pulled the images about panel staggering! Someone sent in a reblog that it wasn't totally clear that the 7th slide mostly covers what NOT to do in regards to staggering, and that is my mistake!

I saw in a tag that someone was surprised I used MamaYuyu too, and I don't blame them lol. If I had given myself more than a couple hours maybe I would have added something else on, I just really admire MamaYuyu's paneling personally.

uh uh, final append: I am by no means a renowned master of paneling, so if you find anything off base here, by all means, counter it with your own knowledge and ways you can build upon from here! Art is always a sum knowledge of everything we find. 💪

[meanbossart]

Hellow

I was catching up with the latest chapters of ANE before reading The Spice™️ and I was reminded of how well you build and describe the environment surrounding your characters. Which prompts me to ask:

1 Do you have any drawings/sketches of landscapes and places from ANE that you can/would like to share?

2 Any advice for someone (me) that isn’t really good at putting their characters in places? I always end up with either a ‘too crowded’ or a ‘too barren’ of a setting.

Thank you for reading and hopefully answering my questions byee:3

Hello!!

Thank you! I have no idea what I'm doing so I'm glad I'm able to paint a good enough picture 😅

I do have two VERY simple sketches of the house of blood/the compound that I made to compare against my boyfriend's mental picture of it, basically to see how well I had been able to describe it since it's by far the most challenging area to put down into text.

(everything is very boxy and not exactly the ideal proportion, but again, this was a very simple sketch I made to "aid" the descriptions rather than for it to stand on its own at all) Here you see the "apple core" of the hive with the drow settlement and all the precarious platforms that interconnect and spring out of it. The cabins you see are sometimes two stories high so the area us actually quite big! Which is how Do'zynge is able to walk across the support-beams on the underside of said platforms even though he's rather large for a drider. The catwalk pictured can be moved up and down to connect people to different floors a little faster.

Here's a similar sketch based off of an specific scene, this one focuses more on the walkways built into the walls. I'm not sure why I huddled the doors together so much, they should definitely be more spaced out.

Also, while I used the same shorthand for everything, the spawn living spaces are all wood and stone - from the doors to the floor and railings. While the drow settlement (where Dalyria is too) is mostly metal and well structured tents.

For your second question, that's rough because I am also never quite satisfied with my descriptions 😂but I think that's a part of it; you need to make peace with the fact that you will NOT be able to paint a perfect picture, and think of the whole process as less of a job that you must do alone, but rather a collaboration between you and the reader's own creativity! You have to be willing to put some of the onus on them to imagine what it is you're trying to transcribe, instead feeling under the obligation of giving them exact descriptions for every little thing.

I try to use words that evoke a specific style and mood - say that the room is ornamental, warm, say that it's all golden and red and six sentences from now mention that the couch your character sat in is velvety. Reveal things as they come into relevance instead of interrupting the pace for two entire paragraphs to describe the room your characters just walked into - when appropriate, consider what they would even pay attention to at all and maybe limit yourself to it. Set a rough base for your environment at the start of a scene and then sprinkle descriptors in throughout the prose, and always consider if you truly NEED to get into the specifics of something or if the reader can be left to their own imaginative devices.

Also, unless necessary or some sort of plot device, I find that trying to establish where things are in a room (doors, furniture, stairs) in a map-like manner is a waste of time. Just say "behind him", "to her left", "right ahead", I don't think being overly specific benefits anybody - your reader picturing this set of stairs facing the west rather than the east is unlikely to be consequential to your narrative.

That being said, don't shy away from pointing "unnecessary" things out when they help set a mood, or help in characterization. Way early in ANE there's a scene where DU drow walks into the room where him, Astarion, and Shadowheart have been staying and are now about to leave, he takes note of the fact that one of them made the bed - he doesn't say who, besides that it wasn't himself, but I put that there to hopefully establish from early on that one character's priorities had started to change. In the compound, Dalyria is described as collecting useless things she found in the underground and displaying them around the office - this, on top of her new look, outfit, and company should paint a picture. Irennor's living situation should say all there is to know about him, and the way DU drow dismantles his belongings after only what is immediately valuable instead of considering the historical significance of anything says something about him, too. That's my favorite way of setting scenes, by finding out how to say something about the people in it.

[thewhimsicalarchives]

~ one of my favorite movie quotes. everyone has their own set of goals and aspirations, and whether or not they align with your visions- never dissuade or discourage someone from achieving what they dream of.

[earthkittytarot]

PAC READING - (PICK A CAT READING!!!) 🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛🐈‍⬛

By EarthKittyTarot.

What does spirit want you to release in 2025?

Using your intuition, pick a cat you feel the most drawn to. If anything calls out to you, that is your cat/message from spirit!

Left cat ☺️ : 1

Right cat 😎 : 2

Pile 1:

Spirit wants you to release old ways of coping this year.

The wheel of fortune signifies fortunate events, therefore spirit is asking you to embrace new ways of feeling. Release emotional burdens you’ve carried along. Spirit is saying to release the emotional baggage from the past and look forward to positive changes and clarity. Despite loss, sadness or grief you should allow yourself to to embrace what’s to come. Spirit is also reminding you that all is not lost, which you will soon start to see! (Two upright cups in the 5 of cups). You don’t have to stick or stay tied to the past, you can embrace change. Clearing out the the past so you can embrace changes will be important. Freshness is to come. Spirit is saying “it’s okay to move on”. Don’t block yourself from fortunate events and experiences due to emotional loss! Embrace your destiny and do not shy away from new offers of love due to past experiences. Surrender to fate and don’t hold any expectations from anyone. Gain a higher perspective on an experience you had to endure.

Something that came up while I was revising was making necklaces with stones/“philosopher’s stone”. You can be reborn emotionally. Don’t doubt your ability, shift your focus on the good life has to offer.

Awakened dreamer oracle message for cat #1 :

Pile 2:

Spirit wants you to release insecurity, doubt and poverty consciousness.

Spirit wants you to tend to your mind so that you may find stability in all areas of life. Taurus, Virgo, Capricorn energy. Release thoughts of insecurity as what you have to offer can benefit those around you. Spirit is saying to fully embrace your purpose. Create relationships and connect with those from your past (could even be past lives) who can offer you support and wisdom. Let go of being idealistic all the time. Being pragmatic and grounded will help you this year to realize your goals! Don’t be afraid of planting new seeds and fully engage with your work/passions. What you create now will bring emotional harmony. (You could have also started this during Capricorn season as that’s the last earth season we just had). Through diligent work spirit is saying you can reach your dreams. Ground your ideas as they can bring needed structure and emotional bliss. Put effort into your goals or ideas. You can create peace, stability and a sense of belonging. Release the idea that you can’t achieve a goal or personal desire. Through dedication, what you desire can be yours.

Something that came up when I was revising was that people from your past may be of service to you, bringing stability, advice or an offer (they may be a Taurus, Capricorn or Virgo) You may also be focused on building a connection with someone from your past.

Awakened dreamer oracle message for cat #2 :

More PAC readings will be posted in the near future! Stay tuned ! 🔮

Feel free to let me know what topics or questions you have for future PAC readings!

[thenaiads]

👆👆👆

now that trump has tiktok, twitter, facebook and insta in his pocket, get ready for a massive wave of internet censorship. one of trump's greatest weapons has always been misinformation; it's going to become harder and harder to spread facts and criticism going forward. posts that aren't made invisible will be magically ignored by the algorithm. dissidents will have their accounts deleted and voices erased.

this is a suppression tactic. this is another stage of fascism.