#big cats procession

[peppermint-moss]

OH NO RAIN'S EYES ARE GREEN???? FUCKKKKK

[alitteraladhdmess]

The white boards back baby!!

Nothing too big just some doodles

HELP WHAT DID I JUST DRAW

WHY DOES SNUF LOOK LIKE THAT😭

One of these days I’ll make Whiteboard Art part 2 with Moomin Valley:)))

[trashlie]

ILY FP 258

I can't believe we're actually passed episode 250 lmao I Love Yoo is truly the never ending story (affectionate). I appreciate how much of the story we really get to dig into at this pace and while I know a lot of people have long-since dropped it, I imagine the rest of us (those reading this post because why else are you here?) also appreciate it. And that's what is even more refreshing about this episode - if refreshing is even a word we can use to describe it. Getting the extra scenes from other characters, a look at their lives and from these glimpses, what we can glean in the unsaid between the lines.

Can you believe I used to prey on Kousuke's downfall? There's so many posts of me talking about him from a different view, believing that the only way he could grow and develop and make the changes necessary to make him a better person was for him to crash and burn, to fail so significantly that he would be forced to pen his eyes to reality. But here we are, me, fervently swaddling him up like a baby and shoving him into my pocket because GOD he needs to be protected.

I don't even remember when it was, that my view on him began to shift, when I went from "he's interesting but awful" to "GOD THIS IS MY SON AND I WILL FIGHT EVERYONE YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH ME" but.... lol there's no going back!

That's enough rambling, let's jump in.

There is something so painfully devastating about every time ILY confirms to us something we have long-since known or suspected through nuance, foreshadowing, reading between the lines, etc: That Kousuke isn't Rand's biological son, that Shinae was at the formal for Gun Kim, that Kousuke has been manipulated his whole life. Nothing in this episode regarding Kousuke is actually new to us. We have known, and talked about, for months and months long before the confirmation reveal that Yui drugs Kousuke - that he has been manipulated by her his entire life, that she orchestrated his life to manipulate him into situations she could take advantage of. It's the way she spoke about Rand's affair around Kousuke, the way she commodified Rand's love so Kousuke became convinced he'd never earned his father's love, the way she spoke of their family vs others and convinced him from such a young age that everyone was out to get them, to destroy them, and that he couldn't let them get close, couldn't let them near - and how Nol was very much a target planted in his mind.

But it's the fact that he is speaking of this and acknowledging it! Until now, Kousuke has heavily lived in denial. Again, we know this. We talk a lot about the chasm between reality and the reality he believes in. We talk a lot about how Kousuke couldn't face reality, even though on some level he knew everything he believed and was told was not quite true not quite real, but that he was so afraid of the truth, he couldn't do it. Kousuke admitting that he's been driven by fear and envy explains everything about him, and why he could not accept the only unwavering unconditional love he was offered.

A few weeks ago I saw a video on instagram of this father talking about a conversation he had with his daughter, who was feeling a little uncomfortable with her friend group. A new girl started to play with her and her best friend and she said she wasn't exactly jealous, but that maybe it was that she was afraid that there wasn't enough love to go around. Her dad had to explain to her that love is not like a pizza - it's not finite, a limited amount that could be taken and hogged by someone else. But Kousuke never learned this. His father's love was commodified and he was made to fear this other kid who he mistakenly believed knew a version of his father he'd never been privy to. He never learned that love is finite, that Rand could have enough love for the both of them, and feared that Nol would hog it all - that he WAS hogging it all because whether or not it was good or bad, Nol received more attention that Kousuke did. And that speaks VOLUMES about how Kousuke sees Rand, what he thinks of their relationship. In his mind, he is still unworthy, that he's not noteworthy enough.

This part gets to me so badly. We, as omniscient readers, know that Rand has tried his best, but that Yui runs a spectacular interference with which he can't compete, largely because of the roles their family have placed them in - Rand the busy businessman, Yui the mommy homemaker. But no matter how hard he tries, it isn't good enough. Rand tries to reach Kousuke, but the manipulation and paranoia are so far gone that the times Rand does have the chance to convey his feelings, Kousuke can't even believe it, because he thinks he's not good enough to deserve that love, that he hasn't fully qualified for it yet. And despite that, Nol, who Kousuke feels hasn't done half of what he has to deserve Rand's love, gets the attention. It doesn't matter that it's negative attention, that Rand barks at Nol, that Nol feels Rand hates and regrets him, because ultimately, it's still more than Kousuke receives. And worse, to him, every time Rand is busy reprimanding Nol, he turns away from Kousuke to do it.

I want to make it clear that this is a deep trauma point of Kousuke's. He's never learned healthy love and the only person who gave him healthy love was someone he was set to fear and fight. Something I think about a lot is the flashback to Kousuke, in the bushes, watching Nessa and Nol's display of warm affection, before Yui appears literally looming before him. In that moment, he witnesses something he's been deprived of. "We're not like other families"'. He's told from a young age he shouldn't compare himself to those healthy families, to warm and affectionate relationships that he will not cultivate in this household. From such a young age it is normalized, that they aren't like others, that they are cold and distant. From a young age, he's made to stuff down his feelings, his tender wants and desires, in order to earn them. To be a good little boy who makes his parents proud. To make his father look his way.

There's also something about the way he says "I've been a good boy" that echoes Shinae learning she's been manipulated by Yui, devastated and angry and yelling about how she's been a good girl so why do these things keep happening to her, all she wanted to do was help her dad. Two people who, from a young age, felt they had to be so obedient, so good, to not be a burden, and despite following the rules, despite doing as they were told, despite trying to be whatever version of "good" they believed in, the world still beat them up and mistreated them. The world still punished them.

As Rin in our discord server pointed out, though, to some degree, Kousuke is very much a person who can - and does - act out, when he's emotionally high-strung. He's a volatile man, and it's largely to do with the fact that he's been drugged to placate him for so long. He never learned emotional regulation, he never learned how to deal with high-stress situations or to face conflict or to own up to things. This is something that some readers who hate Kousuke and expect him to act a certain way because of his age are missing. You don't just learn these things with age. You learn them with experience and Kousuke was deprived of the opportunity TO have those experiences. He never had to learn these behaviors, and now as an adult he cannot function when overwhelmed.

Idk this whole episode is just heartbreaking. It's devastating. I remember when I was someone praying on Kousuke's downfall and now I want to take it all back ;___; I always believed he had to crash and burn to be able to see the world for what it really was and to face his fears, but this is somehow so much worse.

And even though he's drunk, I don't think he's going to forget all of this in the morning. Rather, I think what he's voicing are things that have been plaguing him since waking up in the hospital. From that moment, we saw him wary and distrustful of his mother, we saw his concern for Nol rising above everything else, but grappling with the understanding that he doesn't deserve to stand in front of Nol anymore. These aren't epiphanies coming to him just because he's drunk; it's more like he's only voicing them because he's drunk. But even when he sobers up, he will probably still be haunted by these fears, these agonies, these truths, this understanding.

How does he face his mother after this? How does he face anyone? He may not even feel like he can trust Jayce - who while very kind to him, is still employed by his family. He may not even feel like he can trust Hansuke (though I really hope that's not the case).

He's so miserable and it genuinely hurts to have him lay it all out for us - everything we've known and suspected, like how it was so painfully clear he WANTED Nol's friendship, their brotherhood, but feared it, didn't believe that there was enough love to go around, that there could only be one of them and that even if it was for good or bad reasons, Nol cast him in the shadow. And all these years, watching as Nol, as Yeonggi, grew into this person who sounded so very much like this unknown version of their father, someone funny who makes others laugh, someone goofy, someone so boyish in the ways Kousuke was never allowed to be. Watching as he gathers friends, while Kousuke, so unlikeable, is wanted only for his money, for his status, for the clout.

He doesn't even know WHO HE IS! Questioning his own traits he's believed of himself, wondering if this is even him, if these parts of him are real or does he just act it, say it, pretend it, while trying to fulfill a role he was shoved into. That makes me feel SO deeply sad, because it's something I've been anticipating for so long: Kousuke wondering WHO he really is, how much of him is real and how much of it is the result of manipulation.

And that moment that he catches himself and says no no that's offensive and rude you can't be like that. ;AAA;

For him to admit how much he envies others, how much he craves the kind of connection others have, the kind of family others have, to feel that love and warmth that he's been deprived of, forced to endure this solitude because, as he believes, he didn't get the good parts of Rand. And what will happen when he learns that Rand isn't his father? That he never stood a chance to inherit any of those traits. Kousuke has operated on this belief that, if he tries hard enough, he can earn the things he craves, but I fear learning about his parenthood will make him think that no matter how hard he tried, he would never earn that, because none of it was ever him, could have gone to him.

I think this is where Shinae, in the future, will come in. I feel so very strongly that she will be someone who helps Kousuke to see that this isn't true, that these kinds of personality traits aren't something inherited, but rather something learned. For him to one day realize it's the paralyzing fear that holds him back, not his genetics. Of course, I acknowledge this will still take a lot of therapy but...

Something else very remarkable to me is the way Kousuke recognizes Shinae in Shinhye, because their eyes "feel the same" and he opens up to her - on some level, whether or not he is consciously aware of it, Kousuke knows, or maybe just wants to, that he can trust Shinae. That she is someone who is safe. He even knows how she feels about his mother. I don't think we'll see a lot of Kousuke and Shinae's friendship until we're passed our timeskips, but it makes me feel a little hopeful about it, that she'll be able to reach him, because she feels like someone who is safe. It's the way he sees Nol in her and wants to try to have that do over, a relationship with someone who  has unconditional love for him. It's the way he knows he mistreated Nol, that it was wrong, that he took it all out on this kid he was so afraid of because he had no other outlet, and he wants to do better but knows that there's nothing to salvage anymore.

But also, it just makes me hope more and more that in the future we WILL see a reconciliation between the brothers. As I say every time, it doesn't mean they have to become brothers or friends, but I just want them to see each other fully. Kousuke knows what he did to Nol. He doesn't deny it, even if he might not say it out loud unless he's drunk. But Nol is still so in the dark. Yujing is trying to tip him off and make him aware of it, but I hope one day when Nol realizes it, when he finds out that Kousuke, too, was Yui's victim, that he wasn't the only one, that Kousuke was made to fear Nol's love, he might.... understand. I'm saying understand here loosely because I don't want people to get the idea that I mean Nol will forgive him and Kousuke will be justified, but rather that Nol would be able to understand why Kousuke felt that way, and move on. But I can't help but hope that it will lead to an understanding, a reconciliation, where maybe they can try to be in each other's lives.

I think it's also interesting that Shinhye was somewhat honest, even if she wasn't very forthcoming, with Kousuke about her own family. It sounds like her mother has been gone for a long time, that she's been on her own the whole while, and I think it reinforces the idea that she believes both that Simhan is her father and that he rejected her, that he didn't want anything to do with her. It lines up, too, with how she feels that he wouldn't react well if he saw her (although I think she credited that to looking like their mother). In the same way that Shinae has felt abandoned and cast aside by their mother, Shinhye probably thinks their father never tried reach out, to find them, to maintain a relationship with her. Or perhaps it's that her mother fed her lies about him, made her believe him a different type of man, made her believe there would never be anything of their relationship to salvage. And given that she's the one who Kousuke opened to, it makes me think that there must be some kind of parallel there; the way she mentioned her own mother feels like maybe her mother, too, was a manipulative - or at the very least, dishonest - person.

I don't speculate a lot on Shinhye because frankly I don't think I know enough about her to really try to talk about her, but I do think that it's very likely there's some kind of connection between Shinhye and the Hirahras or Gun. To be clear, I don't believe she's working with Yui at all. I think it's more like... Alyssa isn't the only girl who has been trafficked by Gun. What's the likelihood that Shinae and Shinhye's mother was? Given her history, the gambling addiction that was so egregious her reputation haunted Shinae and chased her to a new neighborhood and school, was she seeking money somewhere else, somewhere more dangerous? Is that part of why they had to change their name? There's so many questions left about them, and I look forward to learning more about her, but, much like with Alyssa, I think it will take time and be dropped in little tidbits like this - things to read into and try to glean something from.

And maybe we'll see more of this duo in the future? It would feel a little weird to give them this one single run in, but I'm not entirely sure. Quimchee likes to keep us on our toes. After all, Minhyuk and Shinhye have also had only the one run in. Still, I think it would be interesting to watch, if Shinhye ever felt.... I want to say maybe compelled? to dig in more to Kousuke, ever feel a kind of kinship. I don't think she'll open up to him at all, but rather, maybe she'd keep going back because a. he's wealthy and there's more she can nick from him (assuming he doesn't realize she stole anything while in his apartment, if he even remembers any of this) and b. wanting to gather more intel.

Like I said though, she's hard to read so I don't want to cling too hard to any ideas and, instead, sit back and enjoy the show.

[fisheito]

snakes have something called a jacobson's organ that allows them to smell. they stick out their tongue, and then when it enters their mouth again, the jacobson's organ processes what they just smelled with their tongue. i say this to propose that, after yakumo licks eiden's dick for a good 10 minutes, he closes his mouth and processes it all like O_____O

when i TELL YOU that this message left me bracing the wall like

(overwhelmed with positive affect)

[juiceycube]

leaves this here

[kasper-tag]

Your opinion wasn't in the recipe 🙄

Hey y'all!

Here's a photo edit I did for my latest fic, To Warm the Home, to Warm the Heart! I haven't really done a lot of photo editing before, especially to this extent, so this was quite an adventure lmao

I wanted to warp the text to make it look wrinkled, but I couldn't figure out how to do that with multiple layers at the same time. Eh, it's good enough 🤣

You can find the fic this piece is featured in here:

[ganymedesclock]

So that #Syrin the Dread Blade tag, thats a new one. Seems like a interesting character, a sentient sword, how did Tyler happen upon them? What does the sword look like, and does it have any special magical abilities? How do they like the other members of the party? Do they actually speak or do they have a telepathic voice?

Technically it's just a tagging misconception; I haven't tagged Syrin reliably before because his nature as a sword does mean he's kind of attached to Taylor. But he is his own dude!

A short primer: magic items in this setting tend towards a level of awareness. Magic is essentially what souls are made of, ergo, if you stuff enough magic in anything, it starts to have a soul, and behaves accordingly. Entities as fully developed and chatty as Syrin are rare; far more common is that magic items tend to feel just a little bit haunted, inclined towards some things and away from others. It's a bit creepy if you're not used to it; enchantments are commonplace and widely accessible, so that 'not being used to it' is more a statement on if the individual is used to handling a particular thing.

Syrin himself is the ostensible opus of the previous Lord of Darkness, a Dark Sword that was meant to contest and cancel out the legendary sword of light wielded by the hero. Ostensibly, because for unknown reasons Syrin was left in storage the eve of the fateful battle. Being groomed exclusively for this purpose by someone he regarded as a father and then abandoned for ten years definitely wasn't traumatic or terrifying for someone with the cognitive level of a child, we promise. Especially since Syrin needs to eat.

Syrin's construction, and what leads Taylor to point out he's a bit like a 'needle', is a crystal-bladed thrusting sword with a hollow core. Despite its delicate looks, the blade is actually both quite sharp and highly durable; the thin tube at the center being essentially his mouth, by which he is supposed to drink blood. His victims', if he can get it, or, failing that, magically drawn from his host. As a result his blade itself ranges from grayish translucence to dark red if he's gorged to fullness.

From there, he has the power to generate and shape a kind of magical flesh, allowing him to weave more elaborate forms around his core body, the sword.

As you can guess, this gives Syrin a somewhat unpleasant and brutish first impression on people, as he has no verbal filters, was raised by a would-be conqueror of the world, and is dependent on blood and thus interested in more fights than not. I've described him before as like a preteen on xbox live who talks up a nasty game mostly out of loneliness and a need to be liked, where you can tell the kid themselves is not as bad as the people who taught them all those words and that they were "funny".

Deep down (and not all that deep, like I said, no filters), Syrin is a vulnerable child who was groomed to do violence and got no experience with it until strangers came to loot the dangerous ruins he was held in, at which point he did what you'd expect a strong but sheltered child to do faced with a home intruder, and killed/devoured that individual in a panic. His first kill being no glorious conflict or victory approved by his father, but essentially a desperate scramble in the dark with himself on the edge of fatal starvation messed him up even more than ten years of silence.

Enter Taylor and party, who happen to pass through those same environments. Syrin makes an attempt to body-snatch Taylor that fails due to the latter's particular properties, and Taylor, being both a good-hearted person and a stubborn busybody, feels obligated to bring this chatterbox with them and attempt to bully him into developing some sense of tact while Syrin attempts to Corrupt His New Wielder To Violence.

This doesn't work because Syrin has no real ideas how to go about corrupting someone besides loudly telling them to stab things more, while Taylor is an apprentice surgeon and mortician who is a lot more desensitized to bodies and their workings such that if they have a weapon, they'll at least consider it as a solution to most problems. So the punchline is that Syrin is more often thrown/flabbergasted by Taylor than vice versa, while the latter just sees him as a sort of annoying kid who's easily talked into almost anything as long as you compliment him first.

[neongulls]

Some Frontiers themed drawings!! ✨

[ittybittyblondie]

Here, Beneath My Lungs

Fandom: 9-1-1 (TV)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)

Summary:

“Okay, okay, come on, let’s do this,” Buck says, in a trying-to-be-serious tone that just sets Eddie off again. “Come on, we’re gonna do this right. You need the full Buckley Experience.”

“Someone’s confident,” Eddie manages.

“I know what I’m good at,” Buck says, and something about the way he says it—grinning and smug with laughter still leaking out of the edges of his smile—makes Eddie go still.

Podfic of Here, Beneath My Lungs by @glorious-spoon. Thank you for having blanket permission to podfic!

[arteliisa]

The Ivy Snowleopard 🌨️🗻 [Inktober Day 16]

[bigsnorp]

imo the recent wave of "ai art is valid actually" discourse often misses the point of the reaction against ai art. And I think the reaction is often reacting against the wrong thing too.

The end product is not the problem. Like it or not, AI generated art is now a valid subset of art. It makes something that wasn't there before, usually has some purpose or intent in the process, and it makes people feel something. Hating it is still something.

El problema, como siempre, es el capitalismo. Just like that old man said.

Creating an AI model always involves training it on a dataset. The bigger the better, every single time. How do you do that? You write a program to scrape everything from whatever you point it at, and run it through various levels of processing until your AI reliably spits out something you want to see.

This is hard to do, so there is a lot of monetary value in creating one, hosting it, and offering it to others. At no point do you have to create anything of value, you just have to take what other people made and extract surplus value from it. And you do this while interacting as little as possible with the art you've used for this massive dataset, or god forbid with the artists that made it.

In return these artists get nothing, usually. Not so much as a note of acknowledgement in the readme.

Human artists can and do steal from, plagiarise, and piss off other artists all the time. But they cannot do it at the scale of AI art, nor can they completely divorce the original art from its context. Even when this is done for financial gain, it's on an entirely different level, with entirely different stakes. I'm not talking about copyright law or intellectual property, I'm talking about large scale labour devaluation and deskilling for the sake of corporate capitalism which is an inherent part of most of the AI generative art tools that are used by people today.

There's a lot of cool possibilities and interesting thought-provoking questions that have become immediately obvious with AI art and it's not in any rush to go away. I think spending hours debating the artistic merit of the end product of AI generated art is the wrong thing to focus on right now. Humans also make art that is uninspired or derivative or mass-produced and it can still be artistically valuable. Look at Duchamp's fountain, literally mass produced and likely plagiarised from another artist, and one of the most valuable pieces of modern art history we have.

It's about the scale. The decontextualisation. The capital gain for a generally uninterested company seeking to extract surplus value from the unconsenting labour. The picture that gets generated at the end is kind of the least interesting part of the discussion.

[iorekbyrinson]

thoughts on bcs characters and their pullman-universe daemons

James McGill - Weasel or stoat family. The long sleek shape of the mustelid can squirm through any hole after its quarry, taking down prey several times its size. Folklore associations with being untrustworthy, unscrupulous, despite its diminutive size. Also known as the family from which Pantalaimon, daemon of Lyra Silvertongue, heralds from - associations of the protagonist.

Kim Wexler - Jackal. A desert animal with associations of the howling prairies, independence, a looming threat in a familiar canid form. However, jackals have a little known quality of centring the majority of their social behaviour around a monogamous relationship; marking out territory together, forsaking packs mostly for the pair bond. Cunning, determined, opportunistic.

Chuck McGill - Porcupine. Like all Rodentia, porcupines are intelligent and frugal, not carnivorous by nature but certainly with enough natural advantages. Unusual tree-dwellers that live far above the rest of the creatures on the forest floor, the porcupine's most notorious trait are its barbs, shaped so that they stick in the skin and cannot be pulled out.

Howard Hamlin - Golden retriever. Exactly what it appears to be to a fault, the ubiquitously loved animal has a few significant traits; it is above all a retriever, an animal that works in tandem with a master to seek out prey and skilfully return the prize, and any attempts to isolate this intensely social breed go awry - the animal withers away.

Nacho Varga - Rusty-spotted cat. The smallest wildcat in the world, to mistake this feline for its domesticated counterpart is a mistake; it is a predator of its lands, feeding on rodents and any creature beneath it, and has the hallmark of being one of the most successful predators relative to its size in the world. However, this elusive, nocturnal little wildcat has its weaknesses as a daemon; it will not stop until it is at the top of its food chain, even if it exists in an ecosystem where it will be swallowed alive. It has the typical feline traits of aloofness, independence, and particularly beautiful eyes.

Lalo Salamanca - Vampire bat. Largely associated with the handsome, deadly supernatural creatures of mythology, vampire bats do, in truth, hold blood as the superior tonic above all, and are also vastly social creatures; grooming, feeding, and raising families within a group that has strong ties to family members, but also makes room for non-relatives too. They hunt entirely in the dark. Like most of the bat family, their need to communicate means their high pitched chirps are constant when flying through the night sky. An unusual daemon for an unusual man; be watchful of his reflection in mirrors. It may not always be there.

Gus Fring - Coati. A daemon can sometimes settle in the appearance of an animal of meaning to an individual; and the mercurial and mysterious Gustavo Fring has inferred the coati's importance as much in his fateful recollection. However, the coati is also no insignificant animal; it is preyed upon by nearly every major predator in the Americas, but the coati has a tough hide attached to its underlying muscles, making it extremely difficult for teeth to get a hold. It is a contained and somewhat elegant looking small mammal with a handsome pair of spectacles around its dark, round eyes, and a reputation for intelligence rivalling that of its opportunistic cousin, the raccoon.

Mike Ehrmantraut - Badger. Whether of the European badger flavour; forest-bears of quiet and solitary pursuits, devoted to the burrows of their families, or of the American type, the fearsome ratel or honey badgers that face down mountain lions without a second look, badger daemons carry the traits of strength, perseverance, and an undeniable aggression that make them the animal that never backs down. Badgers construct setts that go deep below the earth, a vast underground system of resources that belies the staid, unemotional appearance of these creatures. Man + mountain indeed.

[claypigeonpottery]

this damn piece has a pretty severe crack - you can see it in the last ten seconds of the video when I spin the piece around. I'm praying it survives the bisque kiln but ... I'm not really expecting it to.

[silentkimiya]

I rarely show you my own works. 95% of my publications are commissioned sculptures. The fact is that in the process of work I usually give priority to orders (since I feel responsible to customers), so my projects very often lie for a long time waiting in the wings. For example, this photo was taken last summer… and seven sculptures from this box are still in the same unfinished condition.

But five of them are already painted! I will show them to you over the next two weeks. They will also be available for adoption! ^^

[glttrvlntn]

love the way u draw red guy :0]] is there any chance u could draw him in a sweater vest or with lil hairclips in or anything cute like that?

He’s such a pretty gal <3

[fishyartist]