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The Top 3 NFT Trading Strategies for Gaining an Advantage

Learn about the strategies which Hardcore #NFTflippers use when seek ing out the most promising and #hyped-up #nftprojects everyone else is likely to invest in.

The Quick Flippers and Momentum Traders: Hardcore NFT flippers seek out the most promising and hyped-up projects everyone else is likely to invest in. They also make extensive use of Twitter and Discord to follow industry influencers and identify new and promising projects before they launch. Many influencers use a common strategy in their trading alerts: mint or buy an NFT on a secondary market…

[thankskenpenders]

The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings review

The day has finally come. Many, understandably, thought we'd never get here. Maybe we shouldn't have gotten here. We've been through so much. Lawsuits, reboots, redesigns, unreleased NFTs, empty legal threats over the fact that movie Knuckles has a dad, an attempt to license out Scourge the Hedgehog to fans that immediately got canceled (in both meanings of the term), and many, MANY idiotic Twitter controversies. But now, here we are.

Thirteen years after first announcing it in the middle of his legal battles with Archie and Sega that changed the American Sonic comics forever, former writer Ken Penders has released the first part of his new series: The Lara-Su Chronicles.

Yes. I had to buy the book. I had to take one for the team. Look at the fucking URL of this blog, a blog I've been using to talk about the American Sonic comics for nearly a decade while the specter of this book loomed in the distance. The one time I've actually been paid to write an article about anything in any professional capacity, it was an article about the Penders lawsuits. I'm cited on his Wikipedia page. There was no way I was going to skip reviewing this, and there was no guarantee that scans would ever turn up online given the incredibly small audience for this trash. (Only 166 people preordered this, and even that number feels way higher than it should be.) No, I had to preorder it to ensure I could get a copy and cover it for the blog... even if that meant my name would be forever immortalized in the list of "supporters" in the back of the book. These are the sacrifices I must make as a woman who stumbled ass backwards into being an amateur Archie Sonic historian.

So, what exactly is in this book? How much of it is new? How bad is it? How did we even get here in the first place? How can this exist without Sega pursuing legal action? What happens next? And, most importantly... why are there multiple depictions of an Archie Sonic character breastfeeding in this book?

I'm here to answer those questions as best I can, and in agonizing detail.

First, for those just tuning in to this decades-long saga or those who maybe don't know the full story, here's a refresher on the background info.

"What the hell is this?"

The Lara-Su Chronicles is Ken Penders' long-dreaded long-awaited continuation of his 1994-2006 run on Archie Sonic, ignoring everything written after he left by other writers like Ian Flynn. In particular, it picks up from the cliffhanger ending of the 2003-2004 arc "Mobius: 25 Years Later," which was set in what Ken considers the definitive canonical future of the series. It stars Knuckles' daughter from that future era, Lara-Su, among other new and returning characters. The project was first announced near the start of Ken's legal battle with Archie in 2011, and he's been posting WIP previews online for about a decade. Now, after all this time, a Lara-Su Chronicles book finally exists.

We'll get to the actual contents of that book in a bit.

"He can do that without getting in trouble with Sega?"

Believe it or not, yes, he can.

Thanks to the outcome of Archie Comics' woefully mismanaged lawsuits against Ken (yes, they sued him after he started filing for copyrights, not the other way around), he now has full legal ownership of every story he wrote for Archie Sonic and every character he created for the series. This was explicitly granted to him in the terms of the settlement between him and Archie (acting on behalf of Sega). He can even reprint his old Sonic material as-is to his heart's content. The main catch is just that he can't write new stories featuring Sega characters or trademarks, and his new stories also have to be distinct from Sonic at a glance to avoid confusing readers. As such, reprints can't use Sonic iconography on the cover, a few Sega characters (mainly Knuckles) have been renamed and slightly redesigned in the new stories, and the art style has been changed to less closely resemble Sonic. But otherwise, he can do whatever he wants with his own characters.

All of this is because Archie lost the original copy of Ken's work-for-hire contract that signed over the rights to his work. Without that (or any alternative that was considered permissible in court), his comics and characters are the property of their creator by default. Yes, those old comics are full of Sega stuff, but Sega doesn't automatically own the copyright for every drawing of Sonic in existence. And Sega put their stamp of approval all over those comics and let them get sold at retail for decades, even though (in the eyes of the court) there was no legal paperwork granting them ownership of any of it. It's almost like they were unwittingly distributing a fan comic for years and declaring it a fair use of their property, and now there's no takesies backsies. It's a strange and unique copyright situation. Again, they worked all this out in the settlement. And, yes, fans have long speculated that Ken stole and destroyed his own contract to regain the rights to his work, but frankly Archie was so incompetent throughout the lawsuit (it went so bad that they had to fire and replace their lawyers midway through) that I completely buy the idea of them just losing important legal documents.

Also, in case it needs to be spelled out: while Ken's a weirdo, it's ultimately a good thing for creatives everywhere that Archie lost their lawsuit against Ken. We do not want to live in a world where corporations can claim ownership of peoples' work without the contracts to back it up. That would be an incredibly dangerous legal precedent to set. And more comic creators, and artists in general, should own their own work! Corporations are not your friend! They'll delete your work for a tax write-off in a heartbeat! It's just bewildering that this guy, of all people, was the creator who ended up successfully getting his shit back, and that this is what he's doing with it.

"What about his old collaborators? Are they involved? Is he paying them?"

Ken is mostly doing The Lara-Su Chronicles solo, though he has, in fact, talked about compensating the artists involved in any material he's reprinting. The ones who give enough of a shit to get paid for a small scale reprint of something they did 20 years ago, anyway.

On the subject of his collaborators, it's also worth pointing out that Ken's wasn't the only contract that was lost. Most of the early Archie Sonic writers from before Ian Flynn's time seem to be in the same boat as Ken, with the ownership of their stories and characters defaulting back to them. Again, Archie fucked up big time. But like I said, most of them don't really seem to give a shit. For most of them, Sonic was just a random temporary gig they took to pay the bills while Marvel was busy going bankrupt in the '90s, not the thing that defined their entire careers.

The only other Archie Sonic contributor who's tried to do anything on the level of what Ken is doing was writer and editor Scott Fulop. In 2016 he attempted to sue Archie for the unauthorized use of what are now retroactively considered his copyrighted characters and stories, and he even announced a standalone comic about his most famous Sonic character, the recurring villain Mammoth Mogul (sort of a pastiche of DC's Vandal Savage and Marvel's Kingpin, with wizard powers added for spice). However, Fulop lost his lawsuit because he didn't put together a particularly compelling case. Since then he seems to have wiped all traces of his ill-advised Mammoth Mogul comic and his company, Narrative Ark Entertainment, from the internet. For now, this leaves The Lara-Su Chronicles the only project of its kind.

"What about those other Archie Sonic reprints he just announced?"

At the time of writing, Ken is once again claiming that he's trying to get the band back together to reprint all of Archie Sonic, now under the bad new banner "Floating Island Productions: MOBIAN LINE" that I can't imagine he consulted literally anyone else on.

So, like, look. As we've established, Ken can reprint his own stories. And if he can work something out with the other contributors whose contracts were lost, he can print their work, too. But there is no fucking way he's getting his hands on Ian Flynn's run, which Sega undoubtedly holds the copyright for. Even if they don't, Ian needs to maintain a good working relationship with both Sega and IDW if he's to keep his job, so he'd never go for this. Not to mention that Ian and Ken just... don't get along! Ken's whole plan here seems to be predicated on IDW going out of business (a thing he REALLY wants to happen) and freeing up the Sonic comic license, after which he knocks on Sega's door and goes "hey I've still got dirt on you guys," blackmailing them into giving him the Sonic license back so that he can reprint the later comics. Every step of this plan is ludicrous. It's never gonna happen.

He's been saying he wants to reprint the whole series for a few years now, though. This isn't really anything new. And despite his lofty plans that set Sonic Twitter ablaze, he quickly backpedaled. The only specific things in the works right now are a "two-volume omnibus" of all of his Knuckles stories and a collection of artist Scott Shaw's work on the very early Archie Sonic issues, since they're on good terms with each other. I have no idea how Ken plans on packaging these when he can't put any Sega characters or the Freedom Fighters on the covers, but these projects are small enough in scale that there's a decent chance they'll see the light of day. Scott Shaw only did like five issues. But anything beyond that? I'll believe it when I see it.

Or, y'know, this could've all just been a publicity stunt for his new book. I wouldn't put it past him. Let's just focus on the book that actually exists.

"So he finally did it? He made a whole Lara-Su book? It's out? He finished it??"

Yes and no.

The book that's out now is The Lara-Su Chronicles: Beginnings, a prologue for the series of seven graphic novels Ken somehow plans on making, even though it's taken him 13 years to put out literally anything new. I don't know whether or not this counts as book one of seven, because it only features 30 pages of new comics. 30.5 if I'm being generous.

Most of the book is actually just a reprint of his infamous Archie Sonic storyline "Mobius: 25 Years Later", which ran from issue #131 to #144 in 2003-2004. (Again, yes, he can reprint this, he just can't put Sonic on the cover.) Why's it infamous? Well, Ken had been building anticipation for this future era of the series for basically his entire run. We kept seeing King Sonic and Queen Sally from the future. Knuckles' entire backstory hinges on his dad having a vision of this future. Several years before Silver the Hedgehog was created, it was Lara-Su who was Sonic's equivalent to Future Trunks, the cool-looking child of one of the main characters who traveled back in time to try and prevent a dark future. Believe it or not, yes, there was hype for Lara-Su. And then we finally got M25YL, and none of that cool stuff happened. Instead it really ended up being about how unbearably boring the middle aged Sonic, Knuckles, Sally, and co. are in this peaceful future where Robotnik is dead and they're all married with kids, forced into traditional nuclear family gender roles. Lara-Su is present, but she mostly just does generic teen girl stuff and complains about how Knuckles won't let her do anything even though she REALLY wants to be the new Guardian of Angel Island, like, super bad! Come on, dad!!!

In its original printing, this meandering arc ended on an abrupt time travel cliffhanger that Ken was never able to follow up on before he left Archie in 2006. This new printing slightly changes that ending, using the unresolved timey-wimey shenanigans as a convenient excuse to alter the entire timeline. This creates the slightly different world of The Lara-Su Chronicles, where the few relevant Sega-owned characters have been replaced and everyone is ten times uglier.

After this, we finally get two short new stories picking up where M25YL left off: "The Storm," starring Acorn Kingdom super-spy and known creep Geoffrey St. John, and an early release of the first chapter of The Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows, the first full TLSC graphic novel.

And now that we're all on the same page about what we're looking at, let's actually talk about the book!

The cover

Let's start by beating a dead horse. The cover art: it's still bad! But why is it bad?

The cover is, of course, based on Patrick Spaziante's cover from Archie Sonic #131, the start of the "Mobius: 25 Years Later" arc. (Ken did the layout for that cover, though, so in the eyes of the law he's the original creator who owns that cover.) That cover was, itself, a tribute to the iconic cover of Giant-Size X-Men #1 by Gil Kane and Dave Cockrum, the issue that introduced the version of the team with Wolverine, Storm, Nightcrawler, etc.

Ken seems to have forgotten that the point of both these covers was to hype up the arrival of a new cast of characters. The new guys are supposed to make a dramatic entrance front and center. That's the focal point. Meanwhile, the cover for Beginnings has the old timeline versions of the cast from Archie Sonic dramatically bursting out of a shattered crystal ball, while their new counterparts look on in mild bemusement - if they're even bothering to look at all, since most of the characters here are just copied and pasted from their profile pages. That's just not how you do this particular homage! The point is supposed to be "out with the old, in with the new." And why are they using a crystal ball to view the past? Hell, why are they even using a crystal ball at all? The original arc was presented as a magical vision of the future courtesy of Tails' uncle Merlin (don't ask), but the new story leans all the way into being futuristic sci-fi.

Of course, there is no real artistic intent at play here. The old versions of the characters are placed front and center in the crystal ball simply because Ken traced over Spaziante's original art of Lara-Su and Julie-Su (the only two characters on the Sonic cover he owns) and threw out the rest, ruining the composition in the process. Look at the awkward empty space where Sonic, Sally, and Rotor once were, and the new drawing of The Character Formerly Known As Knuckles who's no longer properly centered between his wife and daughter. Even if Ken can claim ownership of the cover because he did the original layout, this all just feels scummy and lame.

And, yeah, if it needs to be said, the new characters and Ken's new rendering style look like absolute fucking dogshit. Putting new Lara-Su directly next to old Lara-Su does her no favors. The shattered glass effect looks absolutely atrocious. I could go on, but we'll have plenty of time to talk about the art style when we see how bad the stories inside look.

Changes to "Mobius: 25 Years Later"

Overall, 99% of M25YL is presented identically to its original printing. Sonic, Sally, Knuckles, et al. are still present with no changes to their names and no tweaks to the art. Even the original cover for issue #131 is included only a few pages into this book with its Archie, Sonic, and Sega logos still intact and everything. Again, because of the weird copyright situation described above, these preexisting comics can be released without any changes.

There is exactly one bizarre change to the art, though, where a hand drawn shot of Angel Island is replaced with an unfitting photo background and the ugly Floating Island photobash that Ken has been using as his personal logo for decades. I think he only did this as part of a test for his motion comic app that nobody asked for. I don't know why this had to make it into the print version. It's like the book is firing a warning shot for what's to come if you keep reading.

The new content begins on the final page of M25YL. In the original wet fart of a cliffhanger ending, Sonic and co. accidentally alter the timeline with an old time machine of Robotnik's and Lara-Su begins to fade away. Then, after everything goes white, we just cut to the present day heroes going "gee, you ever think about the future?" In this new printing, that last bit has been cut, and the rest of the page has been awkwardly shrunk down so that Ken can fit in a new panel. We now see the hands of an off-screen villain, seemingly named "Override," proclaiming that "the Praetorian" (Knuckles) has messed up the timeline again and that they'll finally get their revenge.

Who is this Override? I have no fucking clue. The new stories in this book make no mention of them. You have to buy the next book to find out.

My confusion over the identity of this villain overlaps with another big problem: name changes. So many names and nouns have been arbitrarily changed in The Lara-Su Chronicles, even ones Ken didn't have to change for copyright reasons, and I only know what half of them are replacing because Ken's been tweeting about this shit for years.

The echidnas are now a totally original alien race called "the Echyd'nya." Even in flashbacks to events from M25YL attempting to mimic the old art style, if it's on a new comic page, they're gonna call themselves "Echyd'nya." Evil echidna faction the Dark Legion is now the "Cyberdark Dominion," hailing from the "Cyberdark Colony." The Brotherhood of Guardians is still the Brotherhood of Guardians, but now the main guardian is called "The Praetorian." Angel Island is still called "The Floating Island," like it was in the older Archie comics, but it's ALSO sometimes called "Avion"? When I read this I wasn't sure if he had randomly renamed Albion, the other echidna city from the Archie comics. But no. Now we have an Albion AND an Avion. Sally is mentioned simply as "Princess Acorn," while Sonic is referenced once as an unnamed "blue-spined Erinaceinae," using the scientific name for hedgehog to make it sound more sci-fi. In an incredibly ballsy move, Ken even mentions Robotnik as "the Insurrectionist Kintobor," retaining his original surname from the Archie comics that's just "Robotnik" backwards. Guess Sega never trademarked that one.

Aside from every name change being a downgrade, this leads to confusion when you're not sure if something is supposed to be new, or if it's just an Archie thing you're supposed to recognize despite having a new name and design. Is "Override" someone I'm supposed to know already? Am I just supposed to have read a fucking tweet from Ken where he said he changed the name of some existing villain to "Override"? The answer is no, but I had to term search his Twitter just to verify this.

Moving on!

New story #1: "The Storm"

If you've been following the WIPs, this is that story about Geoffrey St. John that Ken's been posting previews of for almost a decade. The title page copyright dates it to 2015, and that absurdly long gestation is probably why the art is so inconsistent here. Even the style of speech bubbles and the font change between pages two and three.

This is a problem when there's supposed to be a deliberate and noticeable change in art style here signaling the moment where the time travel stuff alters the timeline, replacing the Archie Sonic world with the Lara-Su Chronicles world. If you don't already know that's what's going on, the idea isn't conveyed clearly at all. It just goes from one hideous art style to a slightly different one with no explanation.

The main problem here is that Ken has hitched his wagon to a franchise about anthropomorphic animals when he can't draw furries to save his life. (Though a bit later in the book we'll also begin to wonder if he can even still draw humans.) He's shifted away from the cartooniness of the original designs and given them more human proportions and facial features, but this just ends up making them look incredibly uncanny and lumpy and gross. With some designs he's trying to lean into more of a Star Trek alien vibe, but then he still insists upon retaining the giant Sonic eyes on most characters even though he has no idea how to make them emote.

The rendering of these godawful designs doesn't do them any favors, either. Ken's going for more of a painterly look now, but it almost seems as though he's shading everything with Photoshop's burn and dodge tools that are designed to darken and lighten select areas of a photo. The result is a muddy, smudgy look that makes it feel like the color layer has been smeared in vaseline. And it only looks worse after coming off of 14 chapters of M25YL that have way more palatable art.

The backgrounds, too, are a complete mess, a jumble of low res jpeg photo elements (sometimes with extremely noticeable pixelation), stock textures, and smooth digital gradients. There's no real sense of place here, and it gives everything a surreal, dreamlike quality when you can't really tell where anything is supposed to take place. This first story is seemingly set in a high-tech stronghold below Castle Acorn called "the Bunker," but it could just as easily be confused for the bridge of a spaceship. This whole story features characters speaking to each other over floating video displays and hologram projectors from three different locations, but without a hologram effect and without a clear sense of where the characters are it often feels like they're just in the same room as each other. Characters will be in one location on one photo background, and then the camera angle changes and they're in a completely different place, because Ken just uses mismatched photos off of the internet. It's been like 25 years since he first tried using photo backgrounds in the Archie comics and he hasn't gotten any better at it.

When I had my boyfriend read the book to see if it made literally any sense to him (it didn't), Anthony said this: "This is the kind of shit I'd see linked on a Second Life world that hasn't been touched since 2004." I think he really hit the nail on the head. Now, there's actually a contrarian part of me that thinks that might theoretically almost be kind of cool, in sort of a messy counterculture way. I love weird indie shit. I was a Homestuck reader! But this isn't a scrappy mixed media zine, or experimental outsider art from someone just messing around with Photoshop, or a loving throwback to weird old internet art, or even something intentionally bizarre and offputting like Xavier: Renegade Angel or a PilotRedSun video or whatever where the fact that it's weird and ugly is part of the humor. This is supposed to be a sincere sci-fi epic drawing on Star Trek and Jack Kirby comics, made by a guy who's been drawing comics professionally since the '80s. This is supposed to look good. This is supposed to compete with mainstream comics that are on sale right now. He thinks any day now IDW's gonna go out of business and Sega will come crawling back to him so that he can stamp the Sonic logo on shit like this. It just doesn't work.

But, okay. It's ugly. We knew it would be ugly. But that ugliness would be much easier to accept if it was in service of an otherwise genuinely good story. So what about the writing? After all this time, how does Ken choose to kick off this new saga? Well, credit where credit's due. "The Storm" feels like a proper continuation of Ken's writing style from M25YL.

Because it's eleven pages of characters standing around and talking while nothing fucking happens.

Here's the synopsis: A dog woman named Brownie, an ensign in the Royal Secret Service fresh out of training and the only character who's almost cute, walks up to Geoffrey to deliver a report. He's immediately suspicious of her, asking who let her in and if she's a spy for Elias (Sally's brother, if you're new here) or Alicia (Sally's mom). The art style suddenly shifts when the timeline is altered, but the scene continues uninterrupted. Geoffrey points a gun at Brownie when she won't say whose spy she is. Geoffrey is distracted by a call and proceeds to have a conversation via a mix of holograms and video screens with Remington (head of Echidnaopolis security), Spectre (Knuckles' great great great great great grandpa, the one with the helmet who always looks evil), and a new scientist character named Dr. Zephyr/Zephur. (The spelling of this character's name changes multiple times throughout the 11-page story, because I guess nine years wasn't enough time to spellcheck this shit.) They say a bunch of made up technobabble nonsense about how it looks like the timeline was just altered and Knuckles and co. seem to be involved. It's complete drivel that I'm not even going to try to make sense of. Everyone decides to investigate further, and the conversation ends. Brownie tells Geoffrey she's his spy, then walks out and implies she's actually Alicia's spy in her inner monologue.

To be continued!!!

Yes, that's it. It's really just a bunch of technobabble where some characters talk about how it seems like the timeline has been fucked with. That's it. The whole time Geoffrey doesn't even get up out of his damn chair, which he's of course sitting in backwards to show how cool he is. It's just 11 pages of Geoffrey sitting in a chair and talking to people and looking uglier than he's ever looked. Nothing happens. Nine years for this.

I'm also struck by how meaningless all of this is to anyone who hasn't read Archie Sonic. The added context from M25YL may help a little, but "The Storm" focuses on characters who weren't in that arc, and the story does very little to introduce who any of them are. Brownie could've been super useful as an inexperienced point of view character who's only meeting the others for the first time here, but instead she's really just a passive observer who's here as part of some kind of 4D chess game between Geoffrey and Alicia, an off-screen character whose motivations in this era of the story are completely unknown to even returning readers. Who are the good guys and bad guys here? What are the conflicts and the stakes of the story moving forward? What do these characters want? Basic questions like this aren't really answered. I can't imagine a new reader being able to make heads or tails of this. Hell, I can't really imagine a returning reader who hasn't been following the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets about this story making heads or tails of it, either.

...Maybe more will happen in the next story?

New story #2: Shattered Tomorrows preview chapter

After another message from Ken, the story of The Lara-Su Chronicles proper begins with the redesigned Lara-Su walking along a jpeg photograph beach at sunset and crying while thinking about how Knuckles - sorry, his name is K'Nox now - is dead.

Yep! Straight into the dad stuff!

Look, I'm the last person to complain about writers getting super personal and drawing from their own baggage in their writing, but Ken's just no fucking good at it. There's no nuance, nothing interesting to say. He just keeps writing mediocre-to-horrible dads whose misdeeds are always justified by their "good intentions," and then sometimes they die and their kids are like "we may have fought but actually you were the bestest dad ever and I'll miss you forever, I'll never be able to fill your shoes!"

This is the only part of the new material here that feels like it has any heart behind it, because I know how much his complex relationship with his late deadbeat father means to Ken (there's an author's note in this outright saying as much). But the guy died 42 years ago, and it doesn't feel like Ken has had any new thoughts about this part of his life in those four decades. He's just not an introspective or self-aware enough artist to actually mine his personal baggage for anything beyond "father knows best."

Anyway, so then it jumps forward in time(?) and now we're following this human guy who looks like this.

Previously, Ken got a lot of shit for literally just using the likeness of Anthony Mackie for this guy, based on his IMDB profile photo. Ken has thus redesigned the character... and by that I mean I think he looks more like Ernie Hudson now? Ken's clearly just working off of photo references (if not straight up tracing), given his face is the most detailed and realistic-looking thing on any page where he's present.

But you may be wondering: who is this, and why is he here? Well, for one, he's here to run around in front of some low res space photos while making trite references to things like Planet of the Apes and Star Trek. Haha, he makes a joke about red shirts! Original!! But beyond that, Commander Mykhal Taelor (yes, that's really how he chose to spell it) is a human... from Earth! Archie Sonic readers are probably confused, because in those comics Mobius is Earth in the distant post-apocalyptic future. Well, despite being a Planet of the Apes fan, Ken always hated that particular worldbuilding decision from Karl Bollers, always preferring to think of Mobius as a separate alien planet. And now he gets to make that canon in his own stories and throw out Karl's ideas. So Mobius is basically just, like, a Star Trek planet now, with its own alien creatures that sometimes just so happen to look like anthropomorphic Earth animals.

Also, at one point Taelor wonders if the inhabitants of the dead Mobius might have been human, and the alien ally he's talking to over the radio says it's unlikely. "I don't understand why your kind has a problem understanding you're a minority within a minority." Perhaps poor wording for a line said to the only Black character in the story.

Anyway, Commander Taelor here seems to have discovered the uninhabited husk of Mobius after the vague time-space cataclysm everyone was worried about in M25YL has come to pass, and he finds an audio log from Lara-Su that I presume will explain what happened. I guess those are the titular Lara-Su Chronicles. In theory this flash forward establishes some sense of pressing danger, but when the threat to the planet is so unclear and technobabble-y it just kind of lands with a thud.

It doesn't take long before we get back to Lara-Su being sad about her dad. A good little chunk of the chapter is spent with this new timeline's Lara-Su recalling moments in her life, including echoes of the original Lara-Su's memories from M25YL, which feels redundant coming hot off the heels of a straight reprint of that entire arc. And boy, for anyone who read the later Archie Sonic comics, the protagonist having vague memories of the old version of the series from before a lawsuit-related timeline reboot sure does sound familiar, huh?

The art inconsistency somehow becomes even worse in this story, with Ken flip-flopping on whether or not he wants to use outlines, with the no-outline art managing to look even worse by relying entirely on Ken's awful rendering. By this point in the book, readers are also likely to start noticing how often Ken reuses art from previous panels. This is a shortcut that tons of comic artists use, of course. Invincible famously did a joke about this. It's often understandable. But, again... it sure does stand out in a book that took 13 years to make with only 30 pages of new art. Amusingly, Ken even manages to combine his inconsistency and recycling problems by reusing the same art with and without outlines. And, of course, any time Ken tries to draw the Archie era designs it's just... the worst.

And, yes, it's in this dreamlike montage sequence of Lara-Su's life that we get...

The uncomfortable family nudity scene, followed by the dual timeline Julie-Su breastfeeding scene.

Yeah, you might have heard about this one already. If this incredibly eerie presentation of Lara-Su's hazy memories of the two different timelines make it hard to tell what's going on, don't worry. There's another, clearer version later in the book as part of Julie-Su's character profile, because I guess Ken was just so proud of it.

(I censored these myself because I'm not playing Russian roulette with Tumblr's inconsistent nudity rules and risking getting banned lmao)

Like, okay. Is a mother breastfeeding her child really that shocking of a thing to see in a story? No, not at all. But, like... when it's two characters who you previously created for an officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comic for 7-year-olds... and some of those officially licensed Sonic the Hedgehog comics for 7-year-olds are reprinted in the same book... and when it's drawn like this... yeah, it's kind of a shocker.

It just looks so unnatural. Julie-Su is posed very deliberately so that you'll see both of her breasts, and in the new timeline version she's barely even holding Lara-Su so you can really get a good look at her supermodel body, showing zero physical signs that she just gave birth. Most people will immediately jump to this being Ken putting his fetishes in his work (a type of criticism that I'm incredibly tired of - it's 2024, all the cool artists are blatantly putting their fetishes in their work now). And my immediate response is that, no, this is probably just Ken trying to come off as really mature on a surface level, a thing he's been obsessed with since the Archie days. Free from the shackles of writing a licensed children's comic, of course he's going to jump immediately into depicting some nonsexual, artistic nudity to try and prove he's A Real Mature Artist For Grown-Ups who just thinks the human body is beautiful and breastfeeding shouldn't be a taboo etc. etc.

But then, like. You look at some of the other character designs. Like Espio's daughter Salma, who's now this horrifying alien lizard person who's always nude, and her scale pattern puts scales exactly where her nipples should be. Or you look at his comments about the Echyd'nya age of consent. Or you look at how he keeps drawing Lara-Su in this. Like, does the shuttle really need this, like... reverse chaise lounge thing in the cockpit? So that we can keep getting these shots of the 16-year-old Lara-Su lying on her stomach and posing with one of her legs kicked up, her naked ass in plain view?

The vibe isn't great, is what I'm saying!

I'm not going to try to ascribe authorial intent here. I don't know. I'm not a psychic. Given his very blatant reliance on photo references elsewhere in the book, it's entirely possible he just referenced some figure drawing photos that were maybe just a little too sexy. And also, he's an American comic book artist, and a boomer one at that. Those guys tend to draw women a certain way, even when it's not supposed to be sexual. I don't fucking know. It just sucks. I'm not gonna make some hyperbolic statement about how this makes him a literal pedophile who should be in jail, but it is deeply offputting and objectifying.

But if you already knew about the nursing scenes and were hoping there was some other really shocking stuff in there for me to talk about in this review, sorry to disappoint, but nope. That's the only shockingly weird new thing in here. Once again, not a lot happens in this story, and what does happen is pretty boring.

Once we get past the recap stuff and the human guy, the plot developments boil down to this: The timeline was altered at the end of M25YL... but not as much as you might think. In the new timeline, Knuckles ("K'Nox"), Cobar (now looking significantly younger), and Rotor (now a rhino just called "The Emissary") still traveled via shuttle to go find a time machine in the Badlands and fix the time-space continuum, like in the climax of the original arc. This time, though, Sonic wasn't there, and Lara-Su came along without having to stow away. Lara-Su watches the ship while the grown ups go deal with the time machine, and then after a couple panels Not Rotor comes back with Cobar and is like "Hey, Cobar got hurt, we gotta leave. Dunno what happened to your dad." And then they just, like. Presume that Knuckles must have died. Even though we have no idea what happened to him. And then they just fly away. And then Lara-Su is sad that her dad died.

And that's pretty much it!

This is supposed to be a really emotional sequence - it's literally the scene where Lara-Su learns that Knuckles is dead - but instead it comes off as unintentionally funny because of how poorly it's portrayed. Not showing Knuckles' actual disappearance is a huge misstep, for one, making his uncertain fate more confusing and anticlimactic than dramatic. But also, Ken keeps just using the same two drawings of Rotor for two pages, so he doesn't really seem to be emoting at all, and he's in this spacey hazmat suit that honestly just makes him look like fucking Moltar from Space Ghost. So the whole time I'm just reading his dialogue in Moltar's deadpan voice as he's like "I dunno. We did what we could. Anyway, let's leave."

After this, we get a two-page spread previewing the rest of the story from Shattered Tomorrows. It's basically like a trailer in comic form. It has one of the most mystifying layouts I've ever seen in a comic book. I have no idea what order I'm supposed to read this in.

Yeah, I kinda have a feeling this is the full extent of what Ken has drawn for the rest of that book. I'd love to be wrong, but I fear that I'm right.

Bonus material: Data files

These are mostly very dull, recapping a lot of events shared between Ken's Archie run and the new Lara-Su Chronicles timeline. It seems like almost his entire run is still considered canon to the backstory of the new timeline, just with some names changed, and things only really diverge at the climax of M25YL. But I'll share the interesting stuff here.

Lara-Su

The main thing you'll notice in Lara-Su's profile is the massive, unreadable wall of text where Ken felt the need to list the entire Knuckles family tree, split across both pages.

This is literally so long that Lara-Su's personal history has to awkwardly cut off mid-sentence and be continued on the final page of the book, after the rest of the data files.

Also, please note that this list gives Julie-Su's mom's full name as Mari-Su of the House of Atrades. Incredible on all levels.

There's also a reference to the dark timeline Lara-Su was originally supposed to come from. You know, the one where Julie-Su is the leader of a rebel movement fighting against a Knuckles who had gone mad with power? The timeline that would have been way more interesting than the one in M25YL? Here it seems to have been written off as the result of another "timeline disruption." Lara-Su allegedly has vague memories of this timeline, in the same way that she has vague memories of the M25YL timeline.

Geoffrey

Geoffrey's bio mostly recaps events from the Archie comics, which means the Sonic/Sally/Geoffrey love triangle has to be alluded to. His rivalry with Sonic is described like this:

"He would later resurface when Kintobor was transporting his latest hi-tech weapon, the Dynamac-3000. It was during that mission he discovered a rival for the Princess' affections. Whereas the Princess would be one of a line of conquests where St. John was concerned, the blue-spined Erinaceinae who protested doth a bit too much regarding his affections for the Princess for St. John's taste would prove to be a source of great sport and amusement."

Yes. It's gross. Saying that Geoffrey saw Sally as "one of a line of conquests" is gross. Ken writing this and then still treating Geoffrey as the coolest badass ever is gross. The "Princess Acorn" is also first on the list of Geoffrey's "female relationships" elsewhere in his bio, though I suppose how much of a "relationship" they had is left vague. Honestly, at this point the fact that Ken didn't explicitly confirm that Geoffrey took the underage Sally's virginity in the book comes off as a display of restraint. The bar couldn't be any lower, I know.

Remington

His bio is, frankly, shockingly long for such a minor character, though I guess he does get a large portion of the word salad dialogue in "The Storm." There's a lot of stuff here about how the identities of his biological parents are shrouded in mystery, a plot point that fans have long speculated Ken just straight up forgot about in his time at Archie. (Ian confirmed that Kragok from the Dark Legion was Remington's dad, though, so this isn't really much of a mystery.)

Lien-Da

She gets a bio even though she's not present in the two new stories, just so we get to look at her awful new design and compare it to how Steven Butler drew her earlier in the book:

Commander Taelor

We get to see two drawings of him with the same exact Ernie Hudson face side by side! That's fun.

Julie-Su

She gets a list of "known friends," but the only character listed is Knuckles' mom. Poor Julie-Su.

Also, Ken feels the need to reiterate that Knuckles and Julie-Su are still distant cousins. He made a whole new timeline where he can change whatever details he wants, but THAT had to remain canon. Thanks, Ken.

And then after the data files we get the special thanks page, listing everyone who preordered the book and/or bought TLSC merch from Ken.

With my name on the list. Because I had to buy a copy to cover it for the blog.

My name is on the very next page right after the breastfeeding panel in Julie-Su's data file.

Yep. He got me.

Is it at least a well put together book? Like, in terms of manufacturing quality?

Its physical quality is... fine. It's a nice, sturdy hardcover. The print quality seems fine, though mine does have a bit of smudging from some sort of printing error on one page. The pages don't seem like they'll fall out on me. The image quality is crisp. The colors are vibrant. This is a low bar, but this is one of the few places where I'm able to give this book anything resembling praise.

The formatting and graphic design work, on the other hand...

(I didn't crumple those page corners, it came like that.)

For one, the placement and sizes of the M25YL pages is inconsistent, largely due to the fact that the book doesn't actually match the proportions of a comic. A lot of pages aren't properly centered vertically. Some pages go all the way up to the top edge of the paper, while others leave a visible gap of about half a centimeter. Every page has a 1cm gap to its left and right, which is sometimes filled in with a solid color or gradient that doesn't quite match the page it's surrounding. I have to assume Ken didn't have any sort of source files or original artwork to work off of, as those ideally would've had more generous bleed to account for slight shifts in printing. It kind of seems like he just got the highest resolution versions he could find of the digital releases online and printed those. The colors are a dead ringer for the digital versions, which have always looked slightly more saturated and pastel than they did in print.

I can't say this bodes well for his further plans for Archie Sonic reprints - sorry, Mobian Line reprints. If they ever come out, please, for the love of god, do not buy those. I don't care how much you love Archie Sonic, they aren't going to be good reprints. For comparison, IDW's similarly priced hardcover Sonic collections have none of these formatting problems, because they're made by people who know what they're doing with access to the actual source files.

The book also has its fair share of text-focused pages, split between the data files and messages directly from Ken about the history of his career and this project, and these are formatted in the most amateurish way possible. Just massive walls of Arial text over either plain white backgrounds, simple gradients, or faded photos. I've seen school yearbooks with better graphic design. Even ignoring my subjective feelings about the art and stories within, this book does not feel like it's worth $36 USD.

It's frankly shocking how shabby he let this thing look considering it's supposed to be his baby. And doesn't that really sum it all up?

Closing thoughts

Obviously, I did not expect this to be any good. But I'm still left kind of dumbfounded by it.

I think what really strikes me about it is that Ken had a blank check to do whatever he wanted here. He got an opportunity many writers would kill for when he gained complete ownership of his most famous work. He's free from the limitations of a monthly licensed comic book for children, free to make whatever creative decisions he wants without editors or other writers or Sega to worry about, free to completely reinvent the series to his heart's content and finally tell the story of his dreams. And with that opportunity and 13 years of his time, he made... this. A direct continuation of "Mobius: 25 Years Later" that barely changes anything about the characters or world beyond their awful new designs, even though much of the word count is spent rambling about how the timeline has changed. A story that makes zero concessions for new readers, or even returning readers who don't already have the last decade's worth of Ken's tweets explaining his creative decisions burned into their memory. 30 pages where nothing really happens and the story barely moves forward an inch despite the decades-long wait - but maybe something will happen if you buy the next book!

Who is this for? Maybe this really is a project for no one but Ken. Maybe he just really, really wants to finish the story he started, a story that's personal to him due to the family history it evokes, and the number of people who enjoy it or buy it beyond that is irrelevant. I think that many of the best artists are incredibly self-indulgent ones working with that exact mindset, artists whose enthusiasm for their own work jumps off the page or screen. So, if that's the case, then why the fuck isn't he telling the damn story? What's stopping him? Why is he still spinning his wheels? Where is that passion for his own work? Because it sure as hell isn't there on the page. There's a huge part of me that really wishes I could say "Man, what a weirdo, but you do you, Ken. You tell your weird little story." But there's barely any story here. It's like he loves styling himself as a storyteller, but he's terrified of finally having to actually tell a story after all this time. He's still stuck in the exact same mode of writing he was in almost 30 years ago when he was doing 6-page backup stories about Knuckles, just killing time and stringing readers along until he's eventually able to truly realize his vision. If not now, then when, Ken?

Even the back cover blurb is mostly just a dry recap of the history of this thing. It was a Sonic comic, the original arc was published in these issues, it went unfinished, Ken left Archie, the lawsuits happened, now he's continuing the story. There's nothing about why anyone should give a shit about this as its own story, even though Ken has spent years trying in vain to convince people TLSC is its own beast that shouldn't be judged as a Sonic story. I think deep down he knows that there's no pitch for this beyond the novelty of it originating from Sonic. And that's why, despite declaring that he'd leave the site, he's still on Twitter riling up Sonic fans. It's the only attention he gets at this point.

Maybe this is too harsh when those 30 pages of new comics are just intended as a preview for the "real" book. But the elephant in the room is that we have no idea if that "real" book will ever actually come out, let alone the entire series of seven graphic novels that will supposedly complete this saga.

Ken is undeniably a complete jackass and all around unpleasant, vindictive person who's rightly become an industry pariah. He's a self-proclaimed paragon of progressive values who'll send Comicsgaters after his successors for the crime of not worshiping the ground he walks on, and then turn around and announce he's going to reprint their work without even consulting them. He's a sore winner who already won his copyright battle on a level most comic writers would never dare to dream of, and yet still won't truly be satisfied until he sees an entire major comic publisher go out of business, putting god knows how many people out of work, because he thinks this would get him back the license to a video game franchise he doesn't even like.

But I still have to pity him.

As an artist, the trajectory of his life is my nightmare. I think all of us fear dying before we can tell all the stories we want to tell. There's simply never enough time to do everything. And here's Ken in his 60s, talking about how he's still planning on making his magnum opus all by himself out of stubbornness and pride, despite demonstrably proving he can't handle the workload, and also talking about how if he dies before the project can be finished he'll have to pass the torch on to his kids and get them to finish it for him. It's so grim. Even just typing that sends a shiver down my spine. It took nine years of his limited time on Earth to finish and release an 11-page comic about Geoffrey St. John sitting backwards in a chair.

This is a purgatory of his own creation. And yet... I'm not sure he's ever been prouder. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

I guess if I want people to take anything away from this review, it's this:

Lesson one: If you're an artist or writer of some kind, or an aspiring creator, don't wait around. No one else is going to tell your story for you. Start writing that novel. Start drawing that webcomic. Start making that game. If Penders can put out this damn book that no one asked for after 13 years of work, then proudly proclaim that he's still going to make six or seven more books and also reprint hundreds of comics he doesn't have all of the rights to, then show up to cons with that foul Lara-Su Chronicles: Shattered Tomorrows banner and sit in front of it beaming with pride, fully aware of his critics but saying "fuck 'em, I know I'm hot shit," then you can do fucking anything. Tell the weird, sincere, cringe story of your dreams. If Ken Penders doesn't have imposter syndrome, then nobody should.

And lesson two: Don't buy Ken's books.

[davidboles]

Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 13 (2022) is RIGHT NOW Available to Buy!

Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 13 (2022) is RIGHT NOW Available to Buy!

It’s that time of the year again — yes, time for us to ask for the pleasure of your continued, kind, support for this blog by joyously buying our eBook — Best of David Boles, Blogs: Vol. 13 (2022) — to show your support so we may continue to publish this blog without advertising while still being able to cover our yearly, ongoing, online publication costs that include server space, hosting fees,…

[missis-maple394]

We didn't saw that coming... (hollow knight doodle)

DO NOT REPOST / EDIT / TRACE / MONETIZE MY ART FROM OTHER SITES.

Author’s comment:

"I miss Maple, I wonder where she went on her indefinite hiatus?" -my friends

Well... about that. I played Hollow Knight again after 6 years of hiatus (while waiting for silksong, lol.lmao.). Today's quick doodle on slightly burned out life & creatives, the Knight itself from Hollow Knight! Why do they have that on their head stuck in the buzzsaw? Well... for a quick recap:

- I completed the 4 Pantheons and its seal of bindings, I'm saving the last pantheon later after I took an actual break.

- Pure completion on 112% using Sealed Siblings ending for this steam's achievement.

- All Attuned/Ascended/Radiant clear, two bosses remain empty, as I assumed it's from last pantheon's exclusives.

- Completed Path of Pain under 6 hours before my dinner's ready. 

Was it worth? Oh hell, you had no idea how I'm so happy to complete it! However; it's okay that your experienced with this game were good enough. I can't blame you for struggling one of the hardest, optional post-game content they provided, and it's all FREE in base price. By the way, did I mentioned that game is in sale? Go get it, don't feel guilty for small price to play this game. Play blind and don't look up, explore and enjoy the combat!

Hakita, the ULTRAKILL dev, said his tweet saying "If you pirate a game, then enjoy it, spread word about it and get someone else to buy it, that's at worst an equal trade, at best an additional sale that wouldn't have happened if you hadn't pirated it." (source: PCGAMER Article - Ultrakill dev says it's fine to pirate his game if you don't have money to spare). So what he meant that, don't feel guilty and get it full game for pirating/sale for this.

Now if you excuse me, I'll be working on slowly with art again after I had vacation on flight since weeks back. It was so cozy but cold!

Author’s note:

DO NOT start a roleplay using direct messages/comments & replies with my artworks.

DO NOT add your playful or direct rudeness to my posts such as replies, comments, hidden tags and private messages.

DO NOT tag and marked as a kin/me/morally questionable content etc. Aesthetic or Inspiration tag is good enough.

DO NOT claim my artworks belong to you, and removing / cropping my watermarks away.

DO NOT sell my art for monetary profit.

DO NOT SUBMIT ANY CRYPTOCURRENCY/NFT ART AND A.I. IMAGE GENERATOR WITH MY COMMISSIONED / PERSONAL ARTWORK.

DO NOT dub my artwork / comics, especially A.I. voicework.

Please DM me for inquiries such as commissioned work or reporting my artwork has been reposted or edited.

[songmingisthighs]

Oddeleny

introduction pt. i | pt. ii | pt. iii

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ch. xx - plan z

ghost!yeosang × reader

wc: 1.4 k

genre : ghost!au

rating, warning : mature; crude jokes and filthy language, mentions of attempted murder, depiction of trauma (described) fear, hitting

buy me coffee ?

a connection once had, broken with the expectation that the ending is final. but life has an odd proclivity of making attachments from detachments. in the end, we don't know what we lost until we look at what we have

You could hear your heart pounding in your ears and the vibration was so prominent that you were sure that it was beating right against your skin.

You were never a fan of hospitals what with the two most traumatic experiences of your life happened at the hospital. The first one was when your grandfather was officially pronounced dead and your parents blamed you for your 'negligence'. You were a child, you thought your grandpa was napping, it was just a freak situation that had your parents been there too, they wouldn't have been able to foresee or avoid. The second one was when your parents dragged you by the collar of your uniform (literally) to apologize to Yeosang for almost killing him and seeing Yeosang avoiding your gaze, not even acknowledging you nor the fact that your father had you bowing to the floor so harshly that there was a bruise on your forehead. Not even your sobs and your apology which ultimately became the ammo they wield in their weapon to get you thrown out of school because it was a "confession". Coercion was never questioned and the fact that no one was backing you up because you were an outcast didn't help.

So now, back in the hospital with an unconscious Yeosang in front of you started stirring some anxiety back. You hesitated to make a move because Yeosang's unchanging look made you think that something bad was going to happen. As ridiculous as it was, you did think that your parents would suddenly barge in and throw you to the floor and force you to beg for forgiveness again.

"What are you doing?"

The voice from your phone almost gave you a heart attack but thankfully you recovered immediately. "What the hell is wrong with you?" you hissed as you brought your phone to your face and glared at Yeosang who was on the screen, "What did I tell you about suddenly showing your face like this? I almost shat myself you asshole." Yeosang cringed and shook his head, "Yeah, that's not something I need to know. Why are you just standing there?" you look between your screen and the body lying on the bed a couple of times before answering, "This is a lot freaky for me, okay? To be honest, until 2 minutes ago, I still believed that you were not in a coma and were just pranking me to extort something out of me." Thankfully, Yeosang was understanding to your predicament, only nodding and letting you take steps forward at your own pace until you stood next to his physical body.

"Okay, so how are we doing this?" you asked, "Do I just... Plug you in?" you looked around to see if there was any way you could... Transfer? Him? "Do you think this is like a data transfer?" he asked, unsure as well. "I don't know what this is like, it's not like your soul came with an instruction," you deadpanned and he rolled his eyes, "I'm equally stumped so let's not be snarky," you couldn't help but mock him because while he had a point, it was annoying.

Without thinking, you tried a bunch of stuff from putting the phone in his hand to pressing the phone on his forehead, both the front and back. This made Yeosang sigh loudly, "Do you think I'm Bluetooth transferable or NFT readable or something?" he sounded exasperated you couldn't blame him because his body was just there and he was so close to returning but you were trying your best. "Hey, at least I'm trying here. I'm risking A LOT to be here and it's not like you're giving out ideas on what to do!" you exclaimed angrily. Yeosang opened his mouth to answer but you held a hand up, "No, you listen to me first. I'm doing this out of the kindness of my own heart and you're just pressuring me to try and try and try and I am trying and I'm so pissed at you for only bitching and not doing anything to help either of us in this situation!" "I would help if I could but my movements and reach are VERY restricted! I'm scared, okay? I can see the way I'm just right there and it looks like I'm just sleeping but I'm not! My soul is stuck in a tin can like sardines!" he fought back.

Although you wanted to respond, something he said struck you and an idea popped up.

You slapped Yeosang's physical body and the Yeosang that was in your monitor reeled from the impact.

"Hey!" he exclaimed and he was about to angrily tell you off when he realized that he felt something. "Oh my God, what did you do?" he asked, now amazed. So you tried again, this time slapping him from the other side and he responded accordingly, reeling to the other side.

"Can you feel that?" you asked, amazed at the reaction. When Yeosang nodded, you hit him again and this time his physical body stirred at the same time your screen started glitching. "Yes!" you exclaimed loudly.

Your phone became even more glitchy despite you not hitting Yeosang's physical body but for a moment, you truly believed that he was about to wake up. "One more! (y/n), one more!" Yeosang's voice boomed from your phone and despite the cracking and delay, you could hear what he said.

So you did as told.

Hoping that this was it, you slapped Yeosang's physical body again and this time, you saw his eyes fluttered open slowly.

For the first time in almost one and a half decades, you were looking into the eyes of someone who you used to care for a lot. You had once thought that seeing Yeosang again would be painful, that you would hate it and that you would probably want to run away from it. But no, all you felt was glad and you couldn't help but crack a smile the same time Yeosang almost too.

But, your feeling was right.

All of a sudden, the door barged open and you were suddenly yanked back while someone, in a flash, headed over to Yeosang's side to reach over to the buttons above his head and pressed something that made an alarm ring. You looked up to see a face that cursed you at your last meeting and in fear, you turned to look at Yeosang. Your heart sank when you saw that his eyes were back to being closed as if he hadn't just opened his eyes merely seconds ago.

The chaos that erupted caused your ears to ring because all you could think about was how you came so close to getting Yeosang back only for it to fail so miserably.

You didn't even know what happened until you were grabbed by the shoulders and shook violently.

"Was the first attempt not enough for you?"

It was confusing. It took a moment for you to focus but when you did you were met with the face of the other person who cursed you at your last meeting.

Yeosang's mom was hitting you as his dad handed you over to a nurse who immediately escorted you out.

"I- I was-" you tried defending yourself but his mom kept following and hitting you, "I saw you! I saw you hit him! You wanted to kill him because you failed last time, you wretched girl! How can you live with yourself? How can you do this to someone innocent?"She cried, screamed, really which then became an announcement to the whole VIP coma ward, allowing people who were in the hallway to stare and whisper while the people in the other rooms who got curious stepped out to see the commotion.

Noises mingling together between Yeosang's mom's screams of hurtful accusation at you, his dad who was trying to get her to go see if their son was okay, Yunho and Jongho who did their to shield you from the impact while telling Yeosang's mom to back off, and Hongjoong who clawed the nurse off of you so he could cover you instead.

Your head was buzzing and there were pins and needles prickling your fingertips. So you closed your eyes and let your friends take you away, you let them lead you to wherever you needed to go because, at that moment, you were not the you that had grown. At that moment, you were the 12-year-old middle school student who got accused of attempted murder.

And it was terrifying.

network :

@cultofdionysusnet @sandsofire @kflixnet @pirateeznet

taglist :

@luvt0kki @aestheticsluut @stayatinykatsy @miaatiny @yukichan67 @maidens-world @wlv-asteria @bee-the-loser @junstulip @keinskpopcorner @donghyuckanti27 @axo-l0tl @aurora-tiny @cyber-innie @oddracha @dinossaurz @vcutparis @redzie02 @blackb3ll @mizumigi @jan-l @zoro-nanami-wifey @charreddonuts @angelicyeo @green-agent @teenyfinds @gxlden-bxbyy @that-irrelevant-ricecakeaddict @tinyelfperson @jenowithjaem @mayonnaisehoeshit @allisonleannn @raspberrysannie @surveilenceysystem @borahae-reads @watanabehan @boo-ven9eance @cosmolight

@starjoongie1117 @rheriver

[hikari-hellspawn]

ART COMMISSIONS OPEN! FINANCIAL HELP DESPERATELY NEEDED!

The title is what it says on the tin; I'm opening up art commissions, because after my next paycheck I don't know how much I'll be getting after that, or how much, and I'm desperate for work and some kind off income because I am literally in danger of losing a place to live. I need need NEED income if I want to continue to, well, live.

My Ko-Fi

My deviantART

NOTICE: I RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REJECT ANY COMMISSIONS THAT I DEEM INAPPROPRIATE. THIS INCLUDES ART CONTAINING HATE SPEECH/HOMOPHOBIA/TRANSPHOBIA/APHOBIA/RACISM/BIGOTRY/ANTISEMITISM/ETC.

How do I pay you? I take payments via my Ko-fi or PayPal (h.m.reed@mail.com), half before I start the sketch and the other half on delivery. That is set in stone; I will not accept any kind of cryptocurrency or things like Amazon or Walmart gift cards as payment. None of those can be used to pay rent, and paying rent is exactly what I need.

Do you do NSFW? Not at present; I'm not comfortable drawing NSFW content, though doing shirtless and swimsuits are fine. However I won't draw sex, and I won't draw straight-up full-frontal nudity.

Do you do furries/anthros? I'm not gonna lie, I don't have much experience drawing anthros--THAT BEING SAID, if you want to commission me to draw an anthro character or your fursona, it's definitely on the table and I'll do my danged best--even if it takes a bit longer than non-furry/anthro characters.

Do you draw mecha? I...have zero experience drawing mecha. Do I like mecha anime? Yes (Evangelion my beloved). So this is a soft no on my part, purely because of my own lack of skill with the subject matter.

Do you draw horror and/or gore? Hard no. Not simply because I can't draw said gore (which I can't, same reasons as the mecha explanation above), but because it's another one of those things that I'm not 100% comfortable drawing at the moment.

^HOWEVER, this question comes with a caveat: I will draw eldritch horror. Y'know, eyes where they don't belong, tentacles, pulsating masses, bodies that're just...weird? Those are fun. So, negotiable, but keep in mind that if you want slasher-type stuff that ain't my jam.

Will you send me progress pics? YES. At every stage of the process, I'll both scan the image and take photos to make sure that what I'm working on is the direction you want to go.

What about reference images? If you have references you want to provide, whether they're drawn by you, someone else, google image search, etc, then I'd appreciate it so I have an idea of what your character looks like. Written descriptions are also fine if you don't have any visuals--basically, if you know what your character looks like and you have some way to communicate that to me in a way that puts us both on the same page, we're good.

Can I use your art as an NFT? NO. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES WILL I ACCEPT A COMMISSION TO CREATE NFTS, IF THAT IS THE REASON YOU WANT TO COMMISSION ME THEN GO FIND SOMEONE ELSE.

Can I use your art to train an AI algorithm? NO. AI art is the reason why artists like myself are being pushed out of work; if you're only commissioning me to get hold of some works so that you can train an algorithm to make more based on my style, then you don't actually want to buy art; you're just looking for some excuse to screw yet another artist over.

If I don't have the money right now, can I just pay you the full amount later? While I understand the desire to buy art but not having the funds, the whole reason I'm opening commissions is because I don't have enough money to survive. Paying me half now and half upon completion is non-negotiable, because I can assure you my need to be able to make rent and feed the Fuzzballs (aka the cats, please ask me about them I will go total Maes Hughes on them because they are PERFECT) is as strong as yours to make sure your expenses are covered as well.

Are the prices negotiable? To an extent, though the prices you see in the image above are the minimum; I won't go lower than these.

I want something that isn't listed on here/I have an unusual request, can you do it? That is something we'd have to negotiate, but it's not off the table. I do some weirdo drawings for myself in my free time (I've graced several servers I'm in on discord with the little wonders known as Eyeshrooms, no I will not elaborate here), so I can do other weird stuff too (as long as it's SFW).

Do you have more art examples I can look at? Yes! I have a deviantART page, though due to the company's own exploitative and artist-harming features they've rolled out, I've been working on glazing everything in my gallery there (if you haven't heard of Glaze and Nightshade, they're both really cool and you ought to check them out, seriously I really really really want to start using them both on my art SO BAD but I CAN'T) and migrating to Inkblot and Cara.app. Once I have links to both of those, I'll add them to the post!

You said traditional art...can you do digital? No, unfortunately; I don't have a device powerful enough to run a good art program (not for a lack of trying; attempts at experimenting with Krita have only resulted in it crashing the laptop I've been using, which is bad because it isn't even mine), nor do I have the funds to be able to get one--and I don't know when, or if, that'll happen. This circles back to the initial problem; I don't have the funds to pay for what I need to survive, which means I literally cannot afford to save for a new, more powerful laptop for myself. As it is, I've been borrowing my roommate's laptop for everything I need to do that requires the use of a computer, as mine died back in 2020 and I haven't been able to scrape together enough to even get a bare-bones basic one myself.

If there are any other questions you need me to answer, then please please PLEASE send them to me in a DM here and I'll do my best to answer them! And please, I'm begging you, I'm begging you so much, even if you don't buy something please spread this around I need the income desperately. I'm not lying when I say that my ability to continue living is in danger, I literally do not know if I'll even be able to pay my rent next month. I need every penny I can get, just to be able to have a chance of surviving, and what determines if I can keep a roof over mine and the cats' heads and if we're out on the street with nowhere to go is very much determined by if I can get commission work. So even if you can't buy anything, or only get a headshot or two, please spread the word. Reblog this. Share it in tweets. Post the link to this post on Facebook, link it on Discord, if you have friends who are looking to commission art tell them because I'm desperate and terrified that I might not have a place to live come October. I'm begging, please, I need the help. I need the help more than I can put into words. I don't want to die.

(Also big shoutout to @nomnomroko for putting together the commission sheet, thank you so much!)

[invidiaesc]

🇧🇷 LET US SAVE RIO GRANDE DO SUL - BRASIL 🇧🇷

EVERY SINGLE DRAWING YOU BUY THE MONEY WILL GO 100% TO HELP RIO GRANDE DO SUL. GO GET YOUR DRAWING! Any character,OC,person, anything, bust up face FOR $5 SUCH BIG SALE. BEST DEAL! ⚠️

Paypal: gabi.estrazulas@yahoo.com.br

The Goal? At least 1k to send to my two friends who are in need. It will be used to buy medicine for pets and food for them. The drawing is made by A HUMAN ARTIST (me)

PLEASE HELP ME HELP MY FRIENDS AND MY LAND. 1 Dolar is 5,08 Reais. You're helping A LOT donating.

Who am I? I'm Invidia, I was born in Rio Grande do Sul, I only changed my home state (but I'm still living close there) because my father and grandparents died, they are still buried there. Two of my friends, my dear coralis who I know personally, are suffering due this tragedy.

Coralis is helping as a voluntary to the pets who were hurt due the dirty water or abandoned (or even lost by the owners, who are missing or dead). She needs help with money for pet food and medicine.

Tabata is a victim who lost everything, her entire house is destroyed due the water and she doesn't have anything than being with her family in another place, who are in a risk area of flood too. She is needing money to help with food and with the expenses.

An example of how much Tabata lost is that she lost all her computer, television, freezer and her home, everything is underwater now.

I got some help from an american friend and send entirely the money to Tabata, who is using to buy food. They accepted me to share the transaction (ofc I'm censoring our personal data for safety measure).

Tabata: https://instagram.com/lunari_alune/

Coralis: https://twitter.com/unfragility

What is happening with Brazil? Rio Grande do Sul currently has 497 municipalities, with 345 of these municipalities being affected by the recent rains and floods that are happening in the state.

More than 850,422 people were harmed, 83 dead, 111 missing, 276 injured, 121,957 displaced and 19,368 people in shelters. Today, at 9:15 am, the measurement of Lake Guaíba was 5.27M, with the warning level for flooding being 2.5M and the flood level being 3M

Currently the home state is on alert due to the possible collapse of dikes and walls that prevent all the water from rivers and lakes from going to the city, but during the week the population has been witnessing historic moments.

More information from:

I'll be sharing the screens of the transactions to them with the amount of money I get from it on my twitter:

I will be sharing everything!

If you read everything, THANK YOU!

Please share with everyone, you're literally saving lives.

I'm sorry any english mistake.

[shinsart]

Talksprite Commissions | Gacha Adopt Commissions | Open Adopts | Kofi Shop

Experimental Pixel Adopts

I've been really enjoying Pixel Art recently and thought, sure, why not? I could do some tiny sillies. My finances aren't the best right now so a little bit of extra cash would be helpful. I priced them very cheaply so I hope you guys enjoy them!

Pixel Teal - 15$ - Kofi Link

Pixel Indigo - 10$ - Kofi Link

Pixel Red - 15$ - Kofi Link

You can buy the designs directly from my Kofi Shop! No more waiting for replies and file transfers!

Please note that I changed my rules recently! I opened up things that were previously not allowed, so please have a fresh read trough! Thanks!

Rules/Info under the cut

GENERAL ADOPT RULES:

I can make a ToyHouse transfer, if you want it

Don’t use it for hateful content, NFTs or feed it into AI software

Don’t claim the design as your own, please make sure you credit me appropriately (aka, first posting the art and crediting on their profile)

You are allowed to gift or trade the design

You are only allowed to resell at a lower price than the original!

If you have added additional art to this design, you may raise the resell price above the original.

Gender is free for you to choose and you may edit the design as well, as long as the it remains recognizable

This includes changing the species

If the design is POC you're not allowed to change those design elements

Adopts are not to be used for Commercial Use! If you want to use the Design commercially, you can ask for and buy a commercial use license

Thank you in advance!

[idkaguyorsomething]

favourite doctor who episode? (idk why I'm asking, still. have fun ranting about your favourite episode if you want to)

what an ask, there are so many incredibly episodes across all the eras that are outstanding in all these different ways, with so many characters i adore who all manage to stand out despite the lengthy history of this show. but when you asked, there was one standalone episode that came to mind immediately. so sorry to all those other ones, but for today we're going to discuss one episode (it's gonna be a long one):

dalek. nostalgia definitely plays a strong part in my choice here, especially since i saw it for the first time at a pretty impressionable point in my life. but hey, it wasn't always even my favorite episode with the a dalek in it (shout-out to asylum of the daleks), it all kinda shifted for my on my rewatch of the revival last year.

starting with my most obvious bias, NINE EPISODE <3 !!! i think a lot of us can agree that this episode has got a standout performance from christopher eccleston, one which undeniably carries so much of the episode as he channels his rage and pain into the character of the doctor. being pretty fresh off the time war, this is just about the first time where we get to see exactly how hurt the whole experience left the doctor, and it gives us just a hint of how utterly terrifying he was during a period where he lost everything. it's not just an episode where we get to see an iconic classic villain, it's one that's essential to fleshing out the doctor's character for newcomers and his development for classic fans.

speaking of iconic villains, oh my gosh the dalek itself in this episode is fucking terrifying. nostalgia is definitely playing a factor here again, but this is honestly one of the first times i remember being legitimately terrified by a tv show. we have exactly one alien to face off against here, and it's gunning down people left and right. this story does such a good job of establishing the menace of the daleks (among other things, we'll get to that later) and basically obliterating any of the jokes you could've come up with about how goofy it looks or other tone killers, it's a perfect reintroduction to the daleks. even when they reappear in larger numbers and act less effectively than in this episode, i can't help but think back to all the damage that a single dalek was able to do in this episode and think "ah fuck". if you don't know what a dalek is going into the episode, you're going to shit your pants by the end, and if you do know, then the buildup before the reveal and first confrontation is going to have you on the edge of your seat before it pays off spectacularly. top-tier tension.

the bunker is a pretty brilliant choice of a setting as well, since having it be on earth instead of a spaceship helps reinforce the feeling that the doctor and the dalek are very much alone in the universe. there's other places out there that we've visited, sure, but now they're both trapped underground in this dingy backwater planet, cut off from their respective cultures that don't even exist anymore and the wide open world.

it's a smaller thing, but i also love to hate on the villain of van statten here. he's such a puffed-up wannabe who thinks that his money can get him anything or out of any situation, and in an age of dunking on all these techbro ceos who make increasingly dumbass choices that screw over tons of people, his character has aged surprisingly well. fuck this idiot, i bet he'd have been one of the first to buy in on nfts or kiss elon musk's ass if he'd still had his fortune by the end of the episode. (also adam is here but i don't think we're actually meant to dislike him in this episode, so let's just pretend that he doesn't exist)

okay but this episode really gives us a lot of interesting stuff about rose as well. personally i think the world war three/boom town episodes do this the best, but this might just be season 1 rose at her most unhinged. she touches a spooky sad trash can alien, it starts killing everything, then at the end she discourages the doctor from destroying it despite the fact that it's clearly suicidal. we get to see the extent that her compassion for all things reaches, and how it can be a flaw as much as a virtue for her. i'm not saying she or the doctor were entirely right while the other was entirely wrong, but their opposite stances on what to do with the dalek at the end is the lynchpin of the climax, and the way she snaps him into revealing his trauma is a perfect demonstration of why he keeps around companions. (though bringing adam on board the tardis was 100% a stupid decision, okay that's the last time i'll mention him)

but then we have the dalek itself. and i think the most impressive thing about this entire episode is how it legitimately manages to instill a sense of tragedy in the dalek's existence even though it is demonstrably a complete monster. it's another really fascinating parallel to the doctor that the titular dalek becomes infected by humanity as a means of coping post-time war, and this completely emotionally annihilates it. unlike the doctor, who committed some... morally dubious actions but was still relatively fresh off the boat when humans started rubbing off on him, this dalek has committed atrocity after atrocity after atrocity, the only thing that a dalek can know how to do. so those human emotions rubbing off on it and shifting its nature so that it becomes aware that there are other things to do, and what it has done is indisputably wrong is kinda perfect karma. and from its perspective, the dalek is experiencing the most horrifying fate that a dalek could experience. the implications of what it's going through, of having the very foundations of its self shifted in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with what it has known all its life, to the point where clinging on to its old hatred and self destructing before this change can progress any further, has just stuck with me for ages. when you read into how it's a foil to the doctor, and remember that the doctor has changed so much over the ages, especially during the time war, it gives you insight into both characters. it's tragic and fascinating and there are so many ways that you can read into it.

(here's a picture of iris wildthyme just to break up all the text)

anyways, dalek is a really well-written, incredibly tense, magnificently acted self-contained episode that still manages to tie into an be essential to the overarching narrative. i thought about it so much that i started writing a fanfic what-if about it. if you made it to the end of this post have a cookie.

[biocrafthero]

Reminder that I take commissions!!

I currently do not have a job due to several factors, so this is the best I can do right now. Anything is appreciated!

Terms such as usage and such can be discussed. I do not accept commissions for NFTs, AI, etc. I only take upfront payments. I can turn down offers at my own discretion.

Prices* + examples:

*Does not include add-ons like charges for complex backgrounds or extra characters.

[mk-writes-stuff]

Personality Through Quotes Game

Rules: write a quote for your OCs based on the prompt, then give a new prompt for the next people

Thanks @elsie-writes for the tag! My prompt is “a quote about their thoughts on cryptocurrency or NFTs” which is very specific but I’ll do my best :)

Belladonna: “Wasn’t that a calculation challenge on the Old World? I think we have bigger priorities for our computing power right now.”

Cassie: “You mean some people were so obsessed with pictures of fucking cartoon apes they went blind? HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

Nellie: “That sounds very confusing. Why would you own something but not own it?”

Narcissus: “I should make NFTs of my face. They’d be the best ones and they’d sell for millions.”

Ricinus: “That’s a waste of computing resources. Don’t even think about it.”

Goldenrod: “Darling, why would I want those images? They’re much too expensive for how they look.”

Cassiopeia: “If they were still popular today, I’d get into the NFT business, if only to scam idiots out of their money.”

Stellaris: “Oh, yeah, that was a big Old World fad for several years! The technology behind it is a bit confusing, I’m not the most tech-savvy, but the way new computing techniques affected the culture of the time was really fascinating!”

Rhys: “Um, why would I buy an image and not own it? If I was allowed to have money, I feel like I’d rather spend it on other things.”

Sel: “Um… what do you think about them?” (Has never heard of them)

I think I did okay for this one! @televisionjester @vyuntspakhkite-l-darling @illarian-rambling if you’d like to play, your prompt is, “A quote about their thoughts on the other classes/castes of their society”

[queen-mihai]

I wanna talk about the concept of "the next big thing"

Because I keep getting frustrated that banks and businesses and smooth brain CEOs keep jumping on stupid trends without knowing what they're getting into. And then think they can just sell us on it being "the next big thing"

That's not how it works, idiots. WE decide what's the next big thing. Not you. You have no control here. You're a passenger on this ride. Forever. That's how it is, and that's how it's always gonna be.

So allow me, a consumer, to tell every business on the planet what to look for instead of buying into friggin TurboSlugs or something and making another trillion dollars worth of OUR effort vanish into thin air

Whenever your little money obsessed brain starts to notice a lot of rich people buying something, I want you to ask yourself a single question:

Would this help a 7 year old have a relationship with her grandma?

A 7 year old is hardly able to navigate the internet. She can't drive. She doesn't know how the world works and doesn't know enough yet to be able to make all her own decisions

Her grandma is maybe still in the workforce, or may be retired. Might be sitting at home or might be flying off all over the world. Could be more internet savvy than me, or could not even barely know how to get a search result on Google.

It doesn't matter. You need to put them together or help them be happy together. You need to do that better and easier than everything else that exists on the market.

THAT'S what will be the next big thing.

Skype was huge because a parent could sit their daughter in front of a screen for basically the first time ever and she could talk to her grandma on the other side of the planet face to face.

Cars were chosen over horses because you could get your daughter to your mother faster than with a horse; and didn't have to clean up after it.

The internet is huge because your daughter and your mother can follow each other's life stories and make each other laugh with memes. Your daughter can make grandma proud with what she has been learning and grandma can invest in your company's stock to be able to help pay for a family vacation.

Even something like Tumblr helps because it lets your daughter, as she gets older, have a wonderful place to explore being weird without freaking your mother out. And vice versa.

A stupid nft doesn't help daughter see grandma. It doesn't make their lives better when they're together. It's too hard for daughter to learn and grandma thinks it sounds like a scam.

Ai doesn't help them either. It takes attention away from daughter seeing grandma or makes grandma's search results come back wrong.

You want the next big thing? You're looking in the wrong places. And by the way, if you get the idea to gather a bunch of 7 year olds and grandmas in a room and interrogate them, trying to pick their brains for some damn idea? I am going to beg the universe to send a gorilla to drop from your ceiling and rip your arms off.

You just have to wait

You can't force it to happen. You can't know where or when or how it will be invented. Focus on making whatever product or service you make right now as best as you can. And when you see something that looks like it's going to make the relationship between daughter and grandma better? That's when you invest.

By the way, I know no one has told you this before. So when I inevitably hear you talking about "seeing your grandma" in some commercial or news spot or being parroted by some politician you have in your pocket? I'll know you've been listening to The Queen.

[doctorofmagic]

Strange #8 Review

Super late to the party, as usual. Sorry about that...

I already posted the preview with Stephen reuniting with Bats, Wong and even Pandora, but I don’t care, I’ll post it again because it’s very wholesome.

I do understand Clea’s frustration, though. They've been separated for so long, both physically and emotionally. And now that they confessed they still love each other, they can’t even touch. Still, I’m not that worried because yes, DS v6 has been confirmed and they’ll be together once more!

To be honest, I wasn’t too hooked on the flashback, although I did love Stephen’s smugness (I missed that a lot). And I mean, it’s quite obvious that he isn’t into crypto (he barely understands basic technology, for starters), but I loved this all the same, just in case some tiktok weirdos come up with bad headcanons like “Strange is a crypto dude and buys NFTs”. I don’t doubt these people’s lack of sense, they made a trend on pronouns once and said Stephen wouldn’t care about them. Much to their despair, Stephen respects pronouns so having canon material to shut them up is always a good thing. Ah, but I digress.

It was revealed them that Director None was the head of W.A.N.D.’s task group Bravo Charlie, also known as the Blasphemy Cartel. So this is where they come from. Why they’re summoning the revenants? We don’t know yet, but I do have a feeling that we’ll learn it pretty soon, if not next week, then in the final issue.

I was just so scared that Wong’s memories would be a result of Stephen’s doing because writers of the past used to do that (as in, Illuminati era). But I’m really grateful that Jed simply loves Stephen and portrays him in a way that matches his smugness, kindness, sassiness and altruism. I also forgive Pandora for lying to Wong. she had no choice since she was their main target. She’s cool and I loved their banter!

My only complaint here is the fact that it sounds super fishy that an intel task force, a branch from the best spy agency in the world, wasn’t aware of what Clea was capable of. Sure, she was often sided in many stories and was weaker on Earth’s dimension (because Vishanti forbid women be stronger than their male partners), but still???? First, she was a Defender. Not just once but twice in the (ew) Fearless Defenders era. It’s not like she was hiding her power. And again, it’s a spy agency!! You can’t tell me they had contingency plans for Wong and not Clea, especially knowing that Wong hardly fought outside the Sanctum (maybe once in Damnation? And that’s it). Point is, they’re dumb for not considering her. (Also, between you and me, they could have countermeasures for Victor all they wanted, they’d never stop him, especially if he were the Sorcerer Supreme lol)

Aaaaand here’s my favorite panel after the hugs! Smug powerful couple ready to end Director None’s whole career. I can’t wait!

[undrgrnd-nft]

UNDRGRND: IN THE BEGINNING

by NFTjoe

ORIGINALLY POSTED ON UNDRGRND.IO: NOVEMBER 12TH, 2021

Every day someone tweets that they quit their job to focus on NFTs full time. Someone within our social circle makes a previously inconceivable amount of money and can now turn their hobby into a career. While the rest of us sit back, watch and wait our turn.

The messages we receive from Twitter make it feel like it will never happen to us:

If you’re reading this tweet you’re early to NFTs. _

Perseverance is all it takes to succeed in this space. _

GM, NFT World! Let’s see those unsold NFTs and find you a collector!

I’ve got (insert amount of crypto) to spend! Show me your dope art! I’ll buy something.

This last one in particular frustrates me the most. Artists flock to these tweets with hopes that this thread will be the break they need.

Rarely does this method work.

The Problem

The NFT market can crush an artist’s spirit. The expectations of becoming an instant success do not match the work required. The emotionally draining act of constantly selling yourself along with the energy needed to create can lead to depletion and exhaustion; it’s why we also see so many tweets about mental health in the NFT space.

With so much effort and resilience required to survive in this space the easy thing to do is hop on a Twitter thread. This typically leads to some followers but no sales. So what is the next step for an artist?

Some artists are accepted to gated platforms (SuperRare, Makersplace, Nifty Gateway) giving them an advantage. There the artist must display the talent that the platform deems worthy of their brand or standard. But what about the ones that don’t meet an arbitrary requirement or style? And what about the artists that are never considered due to the sheer volume of applicants?

OpenSea has become a perfect metaphor for the experience of the NFT artist: an ocean filled with NFTs for anyone to purchase, if only you can find it and can discern between value and speculation. At least on SuperRare or other curated sites, a collector can trust that the gatekeepers have put in the time to discern whether this artist is “worthy” of being collected.

The popularity of Hic Et Nunc (HEN) helped bridge the gap between value and speculation by allowing a lower entry point for amateur collectors to simply buy what they love. While HEN has provided a cleaner NFT alternative to ETH marketplaces and created a launch pad for unknown artists - with no curation, artists still go undiscovered by collectors who may love their work.

This is why many of us in this space turn to Twitter to discover new artists.

This is why influencers have taken to profiting off of their following to help artists gain exposure.

This is why shill threads have become a daily practice on Twitter.

On the surface, these threads appear innocent and supportive. Perhaps many of them are sincere, but this is an inefficient way to connect artists with collectors and an even worse way to highlight talent that may go unrecognized.

The Solution

“In 4 months, you’re going to look around and wonder how you got here.”

That was my boss back in February. It took a little longer than that, but he was right.

How did I end up here?

How did I become one of those people tweeting about how NFTs changed my life?

Nine months ago I answered a random post on Reddit:

“Looking for NFT content creators to join our community-driven NFT publication.”

Thus, I met my boss, Sean, the co-founder of Cryptowriter, and began talking about NFTs and the insanity that was beginning to take hold of people and push NFTs into the mainstream.

Since then, we’ve talked every day: late at night spitballing crackpot ideas to each other; tinkering and rewriting articles; arguing (Sean calls them “discussions”) about the best path forward.

Every crazy idea I have, he encourages me to go further, explore it and make it a reality.

I began gaining his trust and vicariously gaining the acceptance of the other founder, Kenny, as well. Freelance writing turned into recruiting artists for interviews. That led to me hosting the podcast, Behind the Pixel, with an open-ended conversation revealing the artist’s inner thoughts, ideas and influences surrounding their art.

Behind the Pixel was also created as an airdrop feature for our Cryptowriter Membership cardholders. Partnering with artists, we feature them on our website, host them on the podcast and then drop a piece of their artwork to our members.

We quickly connected the dots realizing all these pieces worked together and were part of something bigger.

UNDRGRND was born from those “discussions”. UNDRGRND would become an art platform, dedicated to newly discovered artists, elevating their exposure through articles, podcasts and airdrops to our community.

No longer would artists rely solely on the Twitter algorithms and shill threads. We would partner with artists, collectors and curators to filter through the noise and discover talented artists that deserve recognition for their work.

Our Passion

In the early 2000s, there were underground hip-hop, garage-rock and pop-punk bands floating around on the internet in blogs to gain exposure. Those unknown bands eventually became music video stars and grammy award nominees. But it all started on a website just like UNDRGRND.

There was competition and pride among people who knew musicians before they were mainstream. The band, Bon Iver, won a Grammy for Best New Artist in 2012, despite their first album being released in 2008. Bands like Saves the Day, Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional were indie label monsters before radio stations began playing their singles. Before Mos Def and Talib Kweli were superstar rap lyricists they were heading the underground hip-hop movement. And before Arcade Fire was on the cover of Rolling Stone, they were receiving accolades on the blog Pitchfork. This was my foundation and a formative experience for who I am today.

Sean started telling stories about his blog, TheFreshBeat, that highlighted underground and unknown electronic music artists. It gained enough of a following that clubs in the Miami area began looking to TheFreshBeat for new undiscovered electronic music.

We talked about how great it was discovering music that no one else knew. We enjoyed sifting through everything to find the gems; it was work but it was fun.

Now, we bring that same energy and mentality to UNDRGRND.

Our Mission

Like Indie music to mainstream pop music, UNDRGRND will focus on unfamiliar names before they become famous.

As a member of our community we hope to fuel your excitement of discovering something new.

We will think in terms of years and not hours. You will not find hype on UNDRGRND. You will not find a quick flip on UNDRGRND. You will find the genuine-honest substance of style and creativity.

We will provide you with diverse viewpoints, our knowledge, and our passion. We will write thought-provoking pieces and explore deeper discussions about art. We will share the wisdom of experienced collectors and curators to help guide and teach a new generation of investors, art enthusiasts and hopefully future millionaires (but remember us when you’re rich and famous, ok?).

There are cliches in the art and writing industries:

Buy what you love.

Write what you know.

The writers at UNDRGRND were recruited to write about the art they bought because they loved it. They are individuals with experience and opinions, who have helped shape my own taste in art. Before I became the Managing Editor of UNDRGRND they took the time to educate me. And now, I’ve recruited them to teach everyone else.

We will purchase art we love and we will write about it.

Through this, we hope to elevate some of the best unknown artists through our writing, podcast episodes and share some of those artists through weekly airdrops to our UNDRGRND Membership Cardholders.

The artists we share will become the storytellers and cultural influencers of the future.

If we elevate everyone together, we all succeed.

My personal goal is to give back to the community that has given me a chance to fulfill my dream. To all the underground artists, writers and collectors that haven’t yet reached their full potential, I will help you reach it. I will help you reach the goal of changing NFTs and art from a passion to a career.

UNDRGRND is more than just an art platform, it is a philosophy; a philosophy shaped by the community; a community we build together.

Curators. Collectors. Artists. Writers. Enthusiasts. Colleagues. Friends.

UNDRGRND.

[gildead]

@thetravelershub asked:

“ssso not all bananananas are CURSED.” Pap’s got it, now. Pap fully understands. Yes. “rrrrRRRIBB-BUT. Papeeno heard WIZARDS can talk 2 animals. and. other such things. and papeeno was won-der-ing…” Pap plunged a hand into its doughy torso, and withdrew 1 (one) bunch of oddly realistic bananas.

…where did Pap get those, and where is Pap going with this? “Can BANANA WIZARD GOLD. talk 2 NOT cursed Fruits At Best.” … well, Gold? Can you understand what the banana bunch is saying? Humor the frog, Pap looks really excited about this.

Gold's not entirely sure, as a matter of fact. The Dancing Banana was arguably not cursed, but he's not really a normal banana, either. The less said about Banana Proton, the better. Still, he doesn't bat an eye as Papeeno reaches into himself and pulls out a bundle of bananas from within. Instead, he leans close and-

"Hey, you!" The ripest banana of the bunch wiggles as its high-pitched voice screeches at Gold. "I'm talking to you, ugly! Ever heard of personal space before?"

"Aww, Nanners, that's no way to talk to a kid." The banana next to 'Nanners' wiggles. "Don't mind her, she's always been the crankiest out of all of us."

Nanners scoffed. "You'd be cranky too if you were stuck in that doughy blob's gut all day!"

"So dark..." The greenest banana mutters to itself, rolling back and forth. "So dank... I will never forget that awful Mozzarella smell. I thought I'd never see the light of day again."

Then the red banana started talking. "Hey kid, it's me. Banban, from the hit indie mascot horror series Garten of Banban, featuring Choo-Choo Charles from the hit indie horror game Choo-Choo Charles. You know, you look like a kid who's excited for Garten of Banban 5 & Knuckles: Neon Genesis Banbangelion. While you're waiting for your Steam pre-order to come in, why don't you consider buying one of our plushies or delicious, potassium-filled NFTs-- AUGH WHAT ARE YOU DOING-?!"

Sorry, Papeeno. Gold's just gonna. Gently shove the bananas back into your torso from whence they came with a single sleeve. His eyesockets widen at the horrors he's heard from them.

"Y. You don't wanna know what they have to say."