#basic living skills

[furiousgoldfish]

I plan to move out later this month, and have a place secured and all the rest of it. I'm just wondering what skills I need to have, in the vague sense of it, before I can really be properly independent as I've never been taught how to do that.

I really appreciate the work you do, and I hope that life treats you kindly 🌻

Having a place secured is awesome, I didn't even have that when I can escaped, I went apartment hunting the next day!

If you have an income and this income can cover your living costs (rent, bills, food) you can be 100% independent, so basically you do need either a job or a situation where you are getting consistent money that covers your living expenses. Other skills you need are just basic things like, being able to clean your place, doing your own laundry, being able to make food from ingredients so you don't have to spend a lot of money on done meals or eat low quality food, being enough responsible with finances so you don't accidentally spend money you need for rent and bills - things like that usually come natural to abused people because we're taught to be very savvy with money and usually don't get a lot of it anyway.

If you have someone who is giving you living space and food and all that, you can see what skills they're able to teach you! People who support your life without abusing you will usually want to help you be more independent so you can definitely ask them this same question and see what they think you need for independence.

Also the basic cooking, cleaning and laundry skills, you can get from a youtube video so don't despair if you don't have anyone to teach you! And even if you don't feel like watching a video, you can pick it up just by trying stuff out until you figure it out on your own, there's no shame in messing up cooking, or laundry, as long as you learn how not to do it. I believe the only way you truly learn something is when you know what would happen if you messed it up, or did it differently, that's true knowledge.

I remember thinking that just having enough money to cover rent and bills would not be enough to keep me in survival - but it was, and I picked up the rest of the skills easily. Laundry machines just have 2-3 buttons you have to push and even if you mess it up the first time, no real damage is made. If you waste some food ingredients, no harm done. If you're not sure how to maintain your living space, you just live in a bit of a messy situation and maybe get a little bug in there, or a mouse, and then you have a friend and it's all good.

Good luck in moving out, I wish you all the best!

[kittensoftpaw]

Sweet Recipe! (Part 1)

Ingredients you’ll need:

*Might also need a Knife & a Spatula

Basic Directions:

Had to split it up bc Tumblr only allows for 10 images in one post..

[hinamie]

playing around w slightly different hair renders

[3liza]

I don't know how many times we have to say this but this is because the United States of America does not have public transit in any form that a European would recognize as such outside of a few very small, highly-dense municipal locations like NYC and Chicago, and having used both those systems and the U-Bahn i can firmly assert that the U-Bahn blows American subways into smithereens. we especially do not have accessible interstate passenger train service outside of that one commuter Amtrak loop in the northeast. the country is designed to force its citizens to use cars and only cars, and the government has made it policy to incentivize car ownership since the 1940s and punish any other form of transit, including just walking around. do you understand? the vast majority of roads here do not have bike lanes. when we do have bike lanes they are not protected by a curb or divider, they are just white lines painted on the asphalt. you will regularly encounter roads and streets--inside of cities and suburbs, not just in rural areas--that do not have sidewalks

[essektheylyss]

did someone actually hate on your fave? or did they neutrally attribute a trait to them that you've unnecessarily negatively moralized and you hurt own feelings about it? or, perhaps, did you project too hard and now interpret even mild critique or simple acknowledgement of interesting character flaws as an ad hominem attack on yourself?

[gethlark]

I finished Dressrosa and am deeply unwell about the intertwined stories of Cora, Law, and Luffy in that arc.

[vaguely-concerned]

the fact that they've been blindly deceived

by those who preach, and pray and teach...

A Garashir thing I've been messing around with on and off for a while, featuring lyrics from the song 'Lion's Roar' by First Aid Kit! That song gives me such big post-war Cardassia Garashir feelings, they could trade off singing parts of it to each other and it would fit perfectly.

[spotaus]

Eyy, King Reaper and his beloved Mage Geno designs <3

[no-psi-nan]

Considering that there are actual fake fortune tellers in the series and that Aiura presumably works with a few of them for some time, it's pretty surprising that we never get Aiura's opinion on fortune fakers.

🤔 Like does she respect the hustle? Is she only okay with it if they're basically doing undercover therapy? Does she not realize the others are fakers? Does she think it's possible for other people to have milder versions of her powers? 🤔

[whirlpool-blogs]

Masters of the Air behind-the-scenes

[hadesknockedupintheunderworld]

Guys😭😭😭😭

I'm watching a playthrough of Sonic Free Riders (Don't have an xbox or a kinect) and there's an interaction early on like

Tails: Okay, but can you make sure to tune up your extreme gear next time? You always leave all the tech work to me😅

Sonic: Of course! It's cause I know you'll do better than anyone else!😊

Like guys🥲💖

[furiousgoldfish]

Survival skills: Cleaning, Laundry, Living space maintenance

(there's a separate post about cooking, here's a LINK)

So I will assume you're too tired and sick to clean, and in this case we're just trying to prevent actual incidents happening: do not leave food, especially food containing meat or animal products, laying around, because it will cause bacteria and maggots to occur, you don't want that in your home, dispose of them (you can flush bad food in the toilet to get rid, if you don't take out the trash every other day).

In the same vein, sadly dishes sometimes need to get done, if you don't want very odd smells of decomposing food in your kitchen, but it's like, do it once a week in winter, twice a week in summer, and you'll be okay. (High temperature decomposes food quicker). Dishes usually are the most time-consuming cleaning activity because it's something that needs to be done pretty often and it's annoying. You can do it with gloves if you don't like the sensory feeling of it. The absolute easiest way to get it done is to rinse everything as soon as you're done using it, before It gets gross, but do I do that? No. I would never. But it is recommended.

If cleaning is overwhelming, exhausting and just triggering for you, I encourage you to only do whatever is easiest, or even just doing one little area and having that clean and easy to use, without looking at the rest; we're just trying to survive here, not be perfect. No cleaning needs to be perfect, it just has to be done.

Okay, but if you want to have the actual knowledge of how to clean things easily, here's what I do:

Kitchen: I will go against rules and start with sweeping the floors, because I hate walking on messy floor, and having the floor clean already makes the room looks way better, so I don't mind sweeping it once again later. If I have cluttered all the surfaces (which does happen a lot), I will grab all of the things and put them in one spot, like on the table, or the floor, or anywhere just to have all surfaces clean. If there's something dried, grimy or awful happening on the surfaces, the best way to deal with it is to grab a sponge with some soapy detergent, run over the grime, and then leave that to soak 10-20 minutes. Once the dirty part is softened, you can run a wet sponge over it again and it comes out no problem, generally anything you need to clean and it's difficult, leaving it to soak will resolve your issue easily.

So once I've removed all of the things, soaked all the surfaces in soapy water, rinsed them with a sponge, I'll run a dry cloth over it to remove the last of the water, and the surfaces are super clean then. At this point I'll put a cloth on one surface, slowly pick up dish by dish and bring it to the sink and wash it. If the sink is full when I'm starting to wash, it's overwhelming. If I'm bringing in things in one by one, it feels easy, I'm just washing one thing. Once I've washed a dish, I put it on the cloth to dry. Once I'm done with all of the dishes, the pile of stuff I've compiled is usually almost empty, if there's something left like ingredients, decorations, or whatever else, I'll put it back where it belongs. I'll wash the sink and the stove top, when they're also completely free of stuff, and at the end sweep the floor again and wash it. And the kitchen is done!

Bathrooms usually need something acidic for cleaning, you either need a specific bathroom cleaner, or some vinegar (optionally with baking soda). This is because water leaves a lot of calcification on the surfaces, and acidic stuff melts calcium! It takes a while, so like before, it's best to put away all of the things that are stuck in the bathroom, use a sponge to cover everything in bathroom cleaner mixed with water, or just vinegar, leave it for 20 minutes to soak. After that, you should be able to rinse it off, or maybe scrub a little in some places where calcium is a bit heavy, and you should have a clean bathroom.

If you're cleaning a wooden floor, the best way to go about it, is to have a bucket of water, with some floor-cleaning product, few spoons of it mixed with water, and a cloth you can drop in it. Wooden floors can easily get water damage, so you do not want to have them wet for more than few minutes! You squeeze the water out of that cloth as good as you can, and then you can attach it to some squeegee or a broom or whatever you have, (if you don't have a floor cleaning tool) and slide it over the floor to clean it. It should take a few minutes to dry and then you have a clean floor!

If you have a very dirty floor, and it's not wood, but like tiles or something that doesn't get damaged with water, the easiest way to get it cleaned is to put very wet cloth over it, and to soak it a lot. I will not squeeze the water out at all if I'm deep-cleaning tiles, I'll let it all get super wet. Then, you rinse your cloth, squeeze it maximally so it's near dry, and start collecting the dirty water with it. This way, all of the dirt will get melted in water, the floor will be covered with dirty water, and you're collecting that dirty water and taking it away! It's better than just sliding, because sliding in a very dirty area will just mix the dirt, not remove it. You keep rinsing and squeezing your cloth to near-dryness, until you've collected all of the water in it, and then it should be clean or nearly-clean, you can still slide over it in a normal way with a cloth if you want perfect.

Cleaning in general, has no clear rules, you can do it your own way, however you want, with whatever you want. It's recommended to start at the top, clean top shells first and go down from there, do the floor last, but you don't have to listen, clean how it fits you. If you want more tips and really useful information on how to clean hard-to-clean surfaces, go see 'auriikatarina' on youtube, she's a professional cleaner and will make cleaning look both easy and satisfying.

Organizing: When you're organizing your stuff, the easiest way to make everything look neat is to stack things upright, and do it so everything in one category is put together (your books in one place, pencils in another, clothing is in the third spot, your sanitary products in another spot), and line it up so the tallest stuff is in the back, and shortest stuff at the front. In this way you can look at your stuff and immediately see everything, nothing is hidden from view. If you can find cool places in your home to store things from specific category, it will be the easiest to find each time. You want to be able to see everything without rummaging trough it, or attempting to remember where things are, it should be logical. If you can't categorize your stuff, or can't figure out how to organize it, think about how it would be organized in a store, and where would they put it – this helps figure out the logical category and way to store it.

Maintaining your living space

Things break sometimes, or get clogged, and if you watch out periodically for these things, you can prevent a lot of it! If you make sure never to let food get inside of your sink, and have the little plastic things in your bathtub that stops the big pieces from getting in your drain, you can prevent a lot of clogging. Kitchen and bathroom sink have a part underneath that can be dismantled (unscrewed) and you can see if there's any dirt or hair in it, and clear it out, to prevent potential clogging. If you can tell the water is draining very slowly in your sinks or your bathhub, there are drain unclogging products that you can buy, and just pour down your drain in order to clean it, before it gets actually clogged! I do this every time when I feel it's draining slow, and it prevented actual clogging for years now.

It's customary to clean all of the windows in your house, and wash the curtains in your washing machine, at least once a year, twice if you want to be super attentive to it, and this will actually improve the quality of air in your space. Yearly deep cleaning, when you move all the furniture and get to all of the dust, grime and spiderwebs stuck in there, will also improve the air quality, because all of that dust is constantly circulating in the air you breathe and it makes a noticeable difference to clean it.

Airing out the rooms should happen daily, even when it's winter it's good to air the space even for a few minutes, it will improve the amount of oxygen you have in your living space and prevent bad smells from happening. Sometimes you should take a clean broom or cloth and wipe the grime from your ceiling and walls, I rarely do this, but like if you see unattended spiderwebs in there, it will make a difference if you remove those (live spiders can stay, they take care of the flies).

Walls of your living space should be repainted, I think every 5-10 years? I think people have different preferences, I'm okay with walls getting slightly dirty. Usually the kitchen will be the worst because the walls absorb all the fumes from cooking. And, any place you have heating, radiators and such, it will darken the walls. This is normal and happens to everyone.

If you have mold anywhere, that needs to be tended to immediately, there's products for destroying the mold, you should not let that linger on the walls, and it means that either your place is not well protected from the outside wetness, or that you need better air circulation in that space. Do not just repaint it either, mold is poisonous and it grows, wetness and dampness helps it spread, dryness, fire, good dry air circulation kills it. If you have mold in your bathroom, like at the edges of your bathtub, you can destroy it by soaking patches of toilet paper with bleach, covering the mold with that toilet paper, and leaving it like that overnight. Some people say it works with vinegar too, but I haven't tried that. Don't spend time in bleach-soaked bathroom though! Get out of there, bleach fumes are not good for you. And don't mix any, ANY cleaning products together, especially not with bleach, you can create poisonous fumes, and they can gas you.

Carpets should be cleaned once a year, usually they're scrubbed with water and some carpet-cleaning product, in the old times we used just plain soap! There's now dry carpet cleaners too so you can try that as well if you don't feel like washing the entire thing by hand.

Laundry

So every washing machine works differently, but the basics are the same: you can pick a program and temperature, and click start. I have one dial with numbers of different programs, and it's like 'cotton, polyester, whites, quick wash, eco wash, colored' and I don't know what the difference is, I think whatever program you choose, the stuff will get washed, it's a washing machine, it will just take a different amount of time.

The basics of using it are: you put the clothing in, you close it. You open the little compartment by the top, which offers you a place to put detergent, and fabric softener. You can be okay without fabric softener. You figure out where to put the detergent, and put whatever amount you feel is necessary. You close that compartment. You click start. The washing machine starts working and tumbling your clothing around with water and detergent. It takes an hour, sometimes more. After it's done, you can easily open the door to your clothing. The clothing is wet and clean, you take it out, you put it up to dry.

What is important to know, is that if you put colored clothing in a high-temperature wash, it's likely to bleed color, and sometimes this color can attach to your other clothing, so if you accidentally put one red sock with your white stuff, and put it to wash oh a high temperature, you might color all your white stuff into pale red or pink. Which is fun and nothing to feel bad about, except if you really need all that stuff to stay white.

Colored stuff is usually washed on lower temperatures, it can even be washed cold, so from 0-60 is okay. It's recommended to wash winter stuff with other winter stuff, and light summer fabrics with other light fabrics, just because heavy fabrics will usually pull in more water and detergent, so your light fabrics might get neglected. There's different detergents for colored and white stuff, and I usually ignore that too because both can wash both stuff.

White stuff needs to be washed on higher temperatures sometimes, especially your undergarments because they take in a lot of sweat and stuff, and can get less white if you never put them in boiling temperatures. It's normal to put them on 90 degrees. However! Don't ever put super stretchy fabric on high temperatures, because if it has a lot of elastine in it, which is plastic, it can melt! I accidentally destroyed a white hat by putting it in with whites, it was no longer stretchy because all of the stretchy stuff got completely melted in hot water.

I don't have a dryer, so I cannot help you there, usually after the clothes is washed I'll put it on a clothing line, it dries the best in the sun, but will dry anywhere (except exposed to rain, you need to not put it in rain).

If your washing machine starts smelling odd, it's possible that some mold or bacteria is happening in there, and you can disinfect it and clean it by putting a lot of baking soda inside, and then pouring vinegar into the detergent slot. You put the washing machine to a quick wash, with hot water, and this should resolve the issue. Also if you leave wet clothing in there without taking it out and drying it, for more than 24 hours, it is going to develop mold for sure, and this can actually ruin your clothing (I had it happen to a few garments, they got black stains, it's not nice).

If you don't have a washing machine, you can still hand-wash your stuff. Putting it into a bucket with some warm water and detergent, rubbing it together, rinsing and squeezing the water out a few times, and then rinsing in clean water until only clean water is getting out of it – that can work just fine. Sometimes if you need just one garment clean and don't want to use the machine, it's best to just hand-wash it. If your clothes are basically clean but just a little sweaty, rinsing it a few times in water and detergent will make them nice again. If you have some hardcore stains that cannot be washed out even with a washing machine, there's products likes spot-cleaner, and bleach, to help you with that. However you can never use bleach on colored clothing, because it will make very ugly stains on it, bleach is only for pure whites!

Alright this is all I can immediately think of, I probably left some things out, and if anyone wants to add to this, or correct me or anything feel free! I hope this helped you feel less overwhelmed, and more informed about how to successfully live independently. Also if there's questions you want to ask go ahead! This knowledge can be hard to get by if nobody had ever taught you.

Also, this is not something you learn all at once, just from reading one post. You don't need to immediately absorb all of this knowledge, or know how to do it all at once. This is stuff that is learned over months and years or living alone and figuring it out, and none of it is difficult or impossible to do. There's no punishments for doing it wrong, maybe some annoying dealing with some stuff. Nobody should shame you if you don't know all of this, I knew none of it when I started living on my own. I learned it a bit of here and there, and I'm compiling it so it would be more accessible, but none of it needs to be followed directly or done perfectly, and you can ignore some of it completely.

[kittensoftpaw]

Super Simple Pizza!

Throw into a oven at about 300-400 f (on a cooking tray or pizza pan)

Check on it now/again (learn from mistakes)

Take it out

Cut & serve!

[yellowocaballero]

hi! i've been reading some of your older fics and was wondering if there's any merit in watching buffy for the first time in the year 2024

This may not be obvious, but this is actually an extremely complicated and highly subjective question. I'll try to go on for too long.

As background: my mother loved Buffy and its spin-off Angel growing up. It was our Bible (besides the actual Bible). Not kidding, she was on the forums and fan groups and wrote fanfiction for it and everything (These days, she's really into kdramas and Asian dramas, and calls me about how the Thai seem like big fans of gay people). So I'm quite biased.

BTVS is both a product of its times and ahead of its times. It was a show about feminism and the struggle of living in this world as a woman, when very few shows were doing that. It was the first show to have a long-lasting lesbian couple, and the first show to depict a kiss between them. For better or for worse, it was one of the codifiers of broody vampire boyfriend. It was pretty unafraid to be experimental in a lot of what it did. It had incredibly complex and nuanced character work and growth that I still aspire to. Spike's arc is still matched in quality only by Avatar's Zuko. Angel's long term arc, from Buffy to his spin-off series, still makes him one of the most complex characters on TV. It had the most complex depiction of depression on TV at the time and I still think it's one of the best. I think the show had very high highs.

It also had very low lows. Some of the feminism is problematic in retrospect. The sapphic couple has a rather famous element that was severely problematic. There are, overall, some deeply atrocious arcs that I can appreciate objectively but not in practice. Xander: a whole-ass character aged awfully. On a meta level, the workplace conditions were bad (thanks, Whedon.) There are no people of color. The spoiler's sake I won't go into detail on this, but in general the good stuff was so influential and the bad stuff was just awful.

I think these days people tend to brush off the entire thing because it's Whedon. That is more than fair. But I'd also say that Whedon & Buffy is extremely similar to Brian Michael Bendis & Ultimate Spider-Man. Bendis was fantastic at writing sassy, bouncy, permanently stressed-out teens - issue was, he wrote entirely different serious adult characters the way he wrote these sassy teens. Same with Whedon: the annoyingly constant quips are perfect for Buffy, because that's who the characters are. They're awful in Marvel, because Steve Rogers is not Xander. Kinda similarly, Buffy was genuinely feminist for 90s TV - issue is, Whedon has not grown or developed his views, and now his works feel so sexist (oh my fucking god why did you treat Natasha like that). After a certain point it's egotistical: you're writing like that because you're Joss Whedon and it's how you write, not because it's what's best for the characters and story. But it was really important to me to get the character voices right, and it's freaking difficult to endlessly write dialogue that distinct, full of voice, witty, and clever.

I think BTVS & Angel TV's greatest influence on my writing is how intensely character-driven both of those shows were, and how intricate the characters were. What every character did was something they would do, if that made sense. Even the stuff I hated to watch, that made me uncomfortable, was the culmination of so much (usually). I think I also picked up the constant wit and humor lol. On a personal level, the conversations I would have with my mother where she broke down the character motivations and composition of the story was my first exposure to looking at storytelling from an analytical perspective and a framework of critical analysis, which was an approach I carried into the rest of the media I consumed and that was the primary reason I was able to become a decent writer. Thanks, Mom. Have fun with your kdramas.

TL:DR: There is merit, especially if you care about good character work. There are things about it that may make you want to drop it, which is extremely valid. Season 1 is rough but interesting, Season 2 and 5 are the best, Season 3 is pretty good, Season 4 and 7 skippable, and Season 6 is........epic highs, epic lows......

[herrscherofmagic]

i've spent nearly 47 hours over the last ten days drawing nothing but kiana (and hov)

yeah.

anyways, since I've had about enough of drawing Kiana for the rest of my life (/hj) I'm gonna put a pause on this project; but I'll turn it from a sprint into a marathon and try and work on it occasionally instead of all at once

I want to draw other things again x-x

Close-ups of the drawings below, as well as the reference image set, and some other misc. thoughts

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Portraits drawn from imagination

Started the process by trying to draw Kiana's head from imagination; then after each drawing I'd pause, look at some references, see what mistakes I made, then put away the references and drew from imagination (and referring to previous drawings) again. I also took breaks at two points to practice drawing eyes & hair before going back to drawing Kiana

For the last 4 portraits, I'd draw a head from imagination as a warm-up to a drawing session, and then do another head much later on instead of doing it immediately. Around halfway through this "phase" I started the other phases at random points, and finished this portion of the process in the first ~10-15 hours of drawing time. The rest of the time was split across the other exercises

Also I gave her an angry expression because I felt it was the easiest for me to do from memory since I've drawn HoV more than just "Kiana" herself. I also used a boring level 3/4 view without much perspective because it forced me to really make sure I was doing everything accurately and with care.

Basically my thinking was that if I could make a boring level 3/4 portrait look good enough, then I'd have no trouble getting it to look good in other perspectives. That seemed to be true when I got to the stage where I was doing expression practice and had to deal with more head tilt and other perspectives, lol

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Studies of still images from screenshots of gameplay, character art, and stills from animated shorts

Did rough sketches first, then drew with solid color over the sketches on a separate layer. not much else to say here, lol

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Full-bodies

Started with an anatomy model loosely based on the proportions of Kiana's in-game model, and then two attempts at doing full-body drawings from imagination before realizing that it's bloody insane to try and do that much detail from imagination and I have much better things to do with my life than that x-x

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Color studies

yaaaay color! yippee!

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Action sketches/"gesture" drawings

"Gesture" is in quotes because I was way too slow with these for it to really count as proper gesture drawing, imo. But the intention was to start with gesture, and I got closer to that as I went on.

It's way too tempting to start adding detail so I had to metaphysically slap myself with a frying pan to keep myself from getting derailed by that >.>

To get references for this, I did screen recording of gameplay on the PC with OBS studios, then used DaVinci Resolve to play back the recordings.

On PC, when using the mouse controls you can hold the camera fairly still when doing an attack sequence, making it awesome for getting unique angles. For instance, when I recorded Void Drifter's attacks, I was able to get at least 4 different PoVs of her attacks: from the left, the right, behind & above, and in front & below.

Unfortunately, though, it was a bit of a hassle to get good recordings because I had to go into an actual combat stage to record it instead of being able to use an empty testing stage.

With DaVinci Resolve I could "split" clips to make cuts in the timeline that let me easily mark the spots where different attack sequences started, and I could also easily play it in .5x speed to help me figure out how the animations were going from one set of frames to another.

Plus if you close the program after saving, when you open it up again it remembers which frame you were last on and takes you straight there, making it easy to continue from one day to another.

I used White Comet, Herrscher of the Void, and Void Drifter attack animations here, but I also did recordings of Knight Moonbeam and Herrscher of Flamescion, and I might give those a try someday.

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Facial expressions practice

Started with the set of rough sketches (first image), then did some expression practice from imagination (second and third images) to try and get used to how the proportions of the face change slightly with movement of the eyebrows/eyelids/jaw, since the shape of the eyes and mouth is especially important when doing stylized faces (like the anime style that HI3rd uses)

Then this morning I started working through the original rough sketches and developing them one-by-one, getting through 8 before I decided to call it quits and wrap up the project for now

So the facial expression practice pretty much the culmination of all my practice. All the practice with proportions, the contours & forms of the hair, monochromatic shading, line quality, shape design, etc.

This was also one of the few times I've ever taken stylized references and actually adapted them to some extent instead of directly copying them!

This is especially noticeable in the hair, where I used a more standard style for the hair, in contrast with the variety of hairstyles and shapes used in the various manga references (i.e. black-and-white Escape from Nagazora Kiana's messy hair vs the neat and solid hair in the colored Gratitude Arc, AE Invasion, and Moon Shadow Kiana)

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Reference images