#but it is what it is! i do have a post queued up actually i think but i doubt it'll be popular

[cent-scratchnsniff]

doodles and stuff. struggled with painting until i gave up

[every-sanji]

[akkivee]

i am still shocked at how deep jyushi’s voice is here lmao

[specialgradefckr]

i dunno man. i'm writing this stuff and i look at it and go "i feel like i'm repeating sentiments here. like all these sentences shouldn't be the same place. i'm packing too much detail or action between dialogue and it just shouldn't be like this."

but then i ask my brain, what's the alternative? what other way can this work look like? and it just doesn't turn out anything better. i don't like taking things out.

i do think i can get better at like. not breaking up dialogue with tags CONSTANTLY and not putting actions between dialogue. god i wish i could write dialogue that flowed more.

but maybe sometimes i have to admit. i'm not that good a writer. or, i dunno, maybe that's just not my style. but like idk sometimes i feel like i just don't have a style at all. like i have plots, i have ideas, i have the same five words i re-use over and over sfjlhdgffg but style, who knows

anyways i'm just rambling now when really i should be writing. i've had this gripe with my own writing for a long time now but i still enjoy it so don't feel too bad for me jksdghdfg every writer has one

[sydney-carton-of-sour-milk]

The Many Illustrators of A Tale of Two Cities 15: Charles Keeping

Keeping This One Brief

Our second in the spooky subseries is a set by Charles Keeping, a famed English illustrator, children's book author, and lithographer who, among his many other accomplishments, illustrated the entirety of Dickens's work for the Folio Society.

This set is unique among all those we've seen so far, both for its recentness (call its publication date a Bowling for Soup song the way it's "1985"🤪) and for its source:

Rather than being from a large public resource like the Internet Archive or from my own personal scans, these are all coming from the personal blog of Derrick J. Knight, a fellow netizen who just so happens to have scanned the illustrations of the book he was reading and uploaded them to the Internet for all to see.

Out of gratitude and respect for giving these precious rarities of illustrations to the public, I'm going to keep this post simple and straightforward, with no post-notes.

Here they are (fair warning, a couple of these are pretty gory):

That's it! Thank you, Charles Keeping and Derrick J. Knight!

& the standard endnote for all posts in this series:

This post is intended to act as the start of a forum on the given illustrator, so if anyone has anything to add - requests to see certain drawings in higher definition (since Tumblr compresses images), corrections to factual errors, sources for better-quality versions of the illustrations, further reading, fun facts, any questions, or just general commentary - simply do so on this post, be it in a comment/tags or the replies!💫

[sanchoyoscribbles]

black friday sale- 30% OFF your VERY OWN AquaBot Kitty Edition! ™️

Only this weekend! Hurry and grab yours TODAY!

>https://tokyomiracle.net/<

(this is a silly craft I did back in october! I thought posting her for a fake black friday ad would be funny :3 she's about 6 inches tall! I have the full process of making her posted on kofi for members, if you'd like to see, the link to my kofi is in my pinned post ^_^)

[victorluvsalice]

Hi everyone -- if you're a Sims 4 player, you may have seen that, back at the beginning of April, EA did a surprise SDX drop with various Pride-rated Build/Buy objects and CAS assets! I'm not sure why they did this in April, but I'm not going to say no to more fun Pride stuff in the game. :) Anyway, I hit my current building save a couple of weeks ago to check out the new stuff, which resulted in some updates to the Polyheart OT3 House and a mini-dress-up session with one of the Valicer trios living in my Library. And I figured it was about time I got around to sharing the results of that playsession with all of you! :) Let's start with the house and the new Build/Buy stuff I added all around the shop --

Bedroom – Checking out the new “Burst of Pride” beds (single and double versions) out on the front lawn by the pool (oh yes, the house now has a pool! A heart-shaped one no less) led me to realize that I’d never actually checked out any of the non-base-game loft bed options for the trio’s bed set up! (As a reminder, this is a double bed tucked under a loft bed (inspired by this "third wheel" bed), with the idea that the lower bed is for everybody, but the upper bed is for Alice should she want to sleep alone but not alone alone.) So, in the hopes of finding something better than the sad little metal-framed base-game loft bed I was using, I took a look through my options from Horse Ranch, Werewolves, and Growing Together. There were definitely some fun patterns and colors in there (lots of great stuff for a kid’s bedroom in particular), but in the end I ended up going with the “Cormac Pine Bunk” bed from Horse Ranch that had a nice red-and-black swatch that I thought went pretty well with the red-and-black theme of Alice’s personal room. I mean, it’s supposed to be HER bed in particular, so, yeah. I then swapped out the High Schools Years double bed I was using as a base for the “Burst of Pride” double bed in the pansexual swatch – it was bright and colorful, AND that particular swatch was the closest match for having all the trio’s colors (yeah, it’s yellow, blue, and PINK, but I’ve used pink for Alice elsewhere in the build, so…). So now the trio has some new beds! That’s nice! :)

As for the rest of the room, while I didn’t change the position of the rugs or the furniture or anything, I did rearrange the wall decorations a bit – after trying and failing to put the “Colorfully Eclectic Wall Gallery” somewhere in there (it was just a TINY bit too big for the space they had available), I ended up putting the calendar and wall clock in slightly different places above the dresser (the calendar closer to the door, the wall clock closer to the side wall), and swapping the positions of one of the poster collections and the painted-records-and-CDs collection – now the former is on the wall next to the bed, beside the other big poster collection, and the latter is on the wall beside the bathroom door, behind the hamper and the big corner plant. Just thought it looked a bit better, and the plant doesn’t cover up the painted CDs and records like it did the poster collection, so extra bonus there! :)

Left-Hand Hallway – Just added the new “Knitted Pride Flag” wall hanging to the wall here, beside the big picture of the lady with the wacky hair and across from the door to the trio’s bedroom – went with the most inclusive version of the flag, of course, with the rainbow stripes, Black pride and trans triangles, and intersex symbol. *nods* Nice. :D

Living Room – I ended up putting the “Colorfully Eclectic Wall Gallery” art in here instead, on the wall beside the game table (it contains a clock among all the various bits of art, so I figured it would be handy there). The trio of bird pictures that was in that spot previously ended up going on the wall behind the TV, as that seemed like the best spot for them – meaning the big bright fancy mural I had there had to go somewhere else because now it was a little too covered up for my liking. I ended up sizing it back up one and putting it on the outside wall by the pool, because I thought it looked good there and was a bit of fun. I REALLY wanted to put it on the wall next to the outdoor dining table, near the grilling area (which also now exists), but the game wouldn’t let me because that’s where the straight wall transitions to the curved one, and apparently it wasn’t fully supported by the wall there. (I have since "bb.moveobjects on"-ed it to the spot by the table where I originally wanted to place it -- you'll see it there when I do a proper update on what I've been doing to the yard around the build! For now, enjoy the sneak peek at the heart-shaped pool. :D <3 )

Front Foyer – Another simple one – I replaced the base game wall-mounted coat rack I had in there above the shoe rack with the “Out & About Wall Shelf,” since that has a coat, bag, and lanyard dangling from it, meaning it looked like it belonged perfectly in that space. :D And yes, I went with the “pansexual” swatch again, because it reamined the best match for the trio’s colors. *nods approvingly* (And also, I mean, Smiler IS pansexual as well -- I just lean into the nonbinary stuff for them because that's the flag that matches the coaster's colors.)

Smiler’s Room – Speaking of which – as my last action, I replaced the regular nonbinary flag they had up on their wall with the new “Pride Rocks! Collage” in the nonbinary swatch (because that sort of photo collage with a flag signed by their friends is EXACTLY the sort of thing they’d have on their wall)! Though, uh, after fiddling with their wall decorations for a bit to see where it looked best, I ended up REDOING THE PATTERN OF YELLOW-AND-BLACK-STRIPES ON THEIR WALLS just so I could get the darker-themed side of the collage on a yellow stripe and the lighter-themed side on a black stripe by their computer, because that’s where and how it looked best. *shakehead* Not like it was the hugest deal to swap the stripes, but seriously, Vic. You couldn’t just live with it the other way? (Survey says: “no, I like it much better like this.”)

*nods* Nice stuff, right? I really like these new objects and decorations -- they're very fun, and they suit this particular house to a tee. And I'm definitely using that "Pride Rocks! Collage" deco in any place my Smiler lives going forward. :) But how did the CAS items rank in my estimation? You'll find out in the next post!

[broke-on-books]

AND WE ARE BACK BABY 🥳🎊🎉🥂🎆🎊🎆🥳🎉🎊🎆🥳🎊🎊🎆🎆🎊🎉🥳🎆🥳🥳🥳🎉🎉🥂🥂🎊🥳🎉🪅🪅🪅🪅🪅🪅🪅🪅🪅🪅

If anyone asks me if I regret my decision (being unable to post for 22 hours bc I went ham on a sideblog and hit post limit at 2am yesterday) I'd like to give a resounding HELL NO by the way. It was a terrible experience bc unfortunately I'm horribly addicted to this webbed site HOWEVER. I'd do it again. It's what they [noncanon hetbait comic book couple] deserve. Anyways it is SUCH a relief to be able to post again. I am now so aware of how much I use this site though rip

[solrin]

Really wish America was less of a morally bankrupt place and that I could directly confront streamers about politics and their decision to not be involved, or involve themselves with something like a military sponsorship during a literal genocide. I'm sure the military's decision to use a lot of streamers interested in fitness on the 11th wasn't a coincidence either.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[akkivee]

choose your fighter: ichikuu lyrics edition

[sysig]

Your Weekly TV Guide

On Monday you can expect:

2:30 PM: Hermitcraft - Rescuing Rusty

And Tuesday:

2:30 PM: Adventure Time

Wednesday:

2:30 PM: AT

Thursday:

2:30 PM: AT

Friday:

2:30 PM: AT - Petrigrof

Saturday:

2:30 PM: Just Desserts - Pets

Sunday:

2:30 PM: Sona daily goings-on

Thanks for tuning in! (Patreon)

[winter-spark]

Reposting a Reblog as a separate post!

[I'm too lazy to update the text I legit just copy and pasted the post, I'll strike through dated text if I notice that it's dated, not including what's in these brackets, I just like crossing out words lol. Here's the link to the og post it was a reblog from, I mean this whole sentence. You can click it but there's nothing of real value or note in the og post tbh. lol it'd be funny if you click the link and I haven't deleted the old reblogs yet lol]

{Part 2: The Outfit Moodboards}

Alright I caved.(It wasn't in as short of a time span as it seems I drafted the og post like a day or two ago, then posted it because I was starting to really really want to draw them lol)

Here's the first rough sketches.

This is as hard as I expected <3 But also it is a bit fun so I guess I'm not too upset. I only want to cry a little lol. I think having headcanons is helping a bit so that's cool, I'm using this guide Lavendertowne shared on designing ocs in the video linked in this sentence.(I put it at about the beginning of the section.) It was still a little bit of a struggle to fill out probably because they aren't ocs but also because I'm indecisive so yea.

For clothes, I'm looking at various Zafran outfits that have appeared in game but I'm not at all confident about what can and can't be worn by the royal family and what can be mixed and matched so it's a bit loosey-goosey right now but I can figure that out later.

If anyone sees this, please, tell me what you think so far?

[unladielike]

    Vivian nods away in agreement for to her, having a considerable amount of burgers without any soda didn't seem like something that's really heard of... and yeah, perhaps there were way better palate cleansers to be had than carbonated drinks, but as this was a food truck and not a restaurant, the selection of beverages they could realistically order would understandably be a bit limited.

    "Welp, I wouldn't go as far as to say I necessarily understand 'everything', per say, but yeah, once you manage to live through twenty one years on this planet, you start discovering some pretty basic stuff... like, for instance, how the human body gets thirsty if you consume salty snacks yet do not occasionally bring yourself to drink water throughout regular intervals," Vivian states. Granted, most would consider that to be 'common sense', but as per usual, she frames it more like an academic study than redundant knowledge nobody would truly bother disputing.

    Either way, it doesn't take long for her bespectacled gaze to soon settle on the drinks menu, which was situated to the right side corner of the food truck... and to her delight, Coke was listed as one of the drinks that were available to order, causing her to clasp both hands together.

    "Ooh, what do you know?! They do indeed have Coke! No Fanta to be seen, though... then again, at least we aren't forced to choose Pepsi, which is the mid alternative to Coke," Vivian pipes up. Of course, after the final customer leaves, she'll then finally pull out her wallet before turning to Mizumachi. "Alright, so to summarize super quickly... we want ten teriyaki cheese burgers with two cokes?" Vivian repeats in order to ensure they were on the same page.

[水]

“Bia is so smart! I love it!”

Who knew there was such a place so close by? He hadn’t found the place yet, and who knew how long it would’ve taken before he found it. The food truck  now had a new fan who was bound to visit pretty often any time homesickness struck him- which was surprisingly often if he was left alone with his thoughts.

The jock laughs at the comment that the food truck wasn’t going anywhere. It wouldn’t sprout legs and run away—but it had wheels, didn’t it? Couldn’t it drive off?

“Yeah! A Teriyaki cheese burger sounds great!”

Sometimes, he’d go into restaurants and find that the food was very different compared to his expectations, but if going by the smell alone, he was sure that he was going to like the burgers here. He normally wasn’t that picky when it came to food anyways, but still! It was a kind of betrayal for someone who craved familiar tastes to walk into a restaurant and walk out of it confused over what he’d actually eaten. He learned the hard way that many ‘fusion’ places weren’t… the best. Guess not every fusion was stellar and epic. Sorry Goku and Vegeta.

“You really understand everything, huh? You’re right! If you’re going to be eating a lot of burgers anyways, ya gotta drink something that pairs well with it. Coke is the best! Fanta is also good, though.”

If you were going to be eating your fill of burgers, was there really any real difference if you chose to drink soda over water? The difference was minor at that point, so there was no point in picking straws. Water was his preferred drink for regular hours, but if he was doing rigorous exercise, then he would reach for sports drinks to replenish his electrolytes. Soda was for whenever he was treating himself to some junk food. Might as well go big or go home (and eat healthier).

[victorluvsalice]

Happy Birthday Newt!

@dont-offend-the-bees A combination of you telling me that anything cute and Valicey would do as a birthday fic and me knowing that you are still into Saw as a fandom led to this -- Victor and Alice reacting to the first Saw movie, inspired by a couple of posts I saw on your blog before you moved all the Sawposting to The Secret Saw Sideblog! Though the fic is technically Valicer out of necessity, because the only way I could think of to get the pair to watch it was to have it be a Halloween Movie Nights pick by Smiler's friend Thirteen, as per this headcanon post...

--

“That is unfair!”

“What’s unfair?��� Thirteen asked, looking over at Alice.

“The ending!” Alice said, waving at the slowly-rolling credits on the screen before them. “All Jigsaw said to Adam was that he had to survive until six o’clock, correct? Nothing else? No other secret catches?”

“Don’t ask me,” Victor muttered, hands over his face. “I am actively trying to erase this movie from my mind.”

“There there,” Smiler said, rubbing his back comfortingly. “You’ll be fine – and yeah, ‘survive until six’ was the gist of it,” they added to Alice.

“Well, six o’clock rolled around, and Adam was still alive!” Alice pointed out, stabbing another finger at the TV. “He was wounded, sure, but he was still very much fucking alive! Which means he succeeded! Lawrence was the one who failed in his goal! And yet Lawrence’s the one who gets to crawl off and seek help while Adam gets electrocuted and sentenced to – I guess starving to death in that horrible bathroom? All because he, unsurprisingly, didn’t notice a damn key in his bathtub when he first woke up?”

“You are assuming a lot in thinking Lawrence survived after–” Victor swallowed and shuddered. “After c-cutting off his own f-f-foot.”

“Actually, uh, it’s canon Lawrence survives,” Oblivion put in, sporting a slightly sheepish grin. “He shows up again in Saw 3D.”

“Oh great – when do we watch that one?”

“Don’t worry, we don’t have time for tonight,” Thirteen informed him with a cheeky smirk.

“What, because it’s long?”

“No, because it’s film number seven.”

That finally got Victor to look up. “It’s – wait, what?”

“Yeah, for some reason they decided to name it after the 3D gimmick instead of following the numbering system,” Rita explained, leaning around her girlfriend. “And then films eight and nine are Jigsaw and Spiral respectively, though Spiral’s actually more like a spin-off of the main series–”

“Can I please fully express my annoyance over the fact that Jigsaw killed Adam despite him winning his ‘game’ before we start talking about how this series screwed up its numbering system over halfway through?” Alice cut in, folding her arms and scowling.

“Well, the thing you have to understand about Jigsaw is – he’s a total asshole,” Thirteen reminded her. “He says that his games are to help ‘rehabilitate’ people and make them appreciate life and all that bullshit, sure, but honestly, I believe the dude just wants to torture as many people as he can, both before and after he bites it.”

“I can believe that,” Victor muttered, shivering. Smiler put a comforting arm around him. “And this is probably the least bloody of all the movies, isn’t it?”

“I haven’t seen them all, but I’m pretty sure it is, yes,” Galactica confirmed, giving him a sympathetic look from the other side of Oblivion. “You know, you could have left if you weren’t enjoying it – we wouldn’t have thought any less of you for it.”

“Yeah, I’m shocked you actually sat through the whole thing,” Smiler admitted, giving him a little squeeze.

“I am too, honestly,” Alice said, wrapping her arm around him to do the same. “I’m used to horrors like these – hell, the bathroom looked kind of like one I saw in Rutledge – but I know it’s not your cup of tea.”

“I thought it would be too rude to just get up and leave,” Victor groaned, putting his face in his hands again. “And I kept telling myself, ‘it’s the very first one, it can’t be that bad...’”

“We won’t make you watch any of the others,” Thirteen promised, patting his knee. “I mean, I appreciate you making the effort, but despite appearances, I don’t want you to have nightmares.”

“Thanks.” Victor shook his head. “I know you love that sort of thing, but – it’s just not for me.”

“Me either – especially if John Kramer can’t practice what he preaches,” Alice agreed, glaring at the screen as the DVD menu came up again.

“It’s actually not my favorite series either, if I’m honest,” Thirteen confessed. “I just like this one because of all the hot gay tension between Lawrence and Adam.”

“...there was a surprising amount of that,” Victor allowed.

“Mmm – though given Lawrence is married, he’d better start talking to his wife about either opening the relationship or getting a divorce before he hobbles his way back to that bathroom,” Alice declared.

“You know, I bet there’s a fic like that somewhere on AO3,” Smiler said, pulling out their phone. “Who wants to find a nice domestic AU to help us all decompress?”

[wip]

A very very minor thing I have been curious about for a while, and I'm finally asking: why do you calculate queue posting times the way you do? For example, if I set my queue to post 3x a day, naively I would expect it to post every 8 hours. But in reality it posts every 6 hours with a 12 hour gap between days. Why complicate the math like that?

Answer: Hello @circumference-pie!

Buckle up y’all, it’s story time again!

First: nobody who works at Tumblr right now was a part of the work of planning the default queue implementation, which was more than ten years ago. So the full story behind “Why does it work that way?” has unfortunately been lost to the sands of time. All we can do is tell you how it works today and surmise some reasons why. The queue is actually a very clever system and part of how it works explains some of why it works the way it does. Also, there have been attempts to do what you ask—we still have “Queue 2.0” available in your Tumblr Labs settings, which tries to get closer to how you expect things to work.

Anyway! How the queue works today is not actually a queue in the traditional sense. There is no single list of posts that are in “your queue”. Instead, when you “Add to queue” after creating a post, we’re actually scheduling it to post at a future time, as if you had used the “Schedule post” option instead. We’re just calculating that time on your behalf when you use “Add to queue”, based on your settings, and how many other scheduled posts you have already. We use a secondary “index” model, called “ScheduledPost”, to keep track of posts you have scheduled on your blog. We do mark the ones that are a part of “your queue”, but the data model doesn’t keep one list of your “queue” per se.

You can see this in action on your blog, hiding in plain sight. If you add a bunch of posts to your queue, and then schedule a post for a specific future date, you’ll see both in your blog’s “queue” list, side by side. Because technically to us, they’re the same thing: queued posts are really just another kind of scheduled post, relying on the same always-running service to publish scheduled posts across all of Tumblr. Here’s a fun fact: we typically have about ~14.5 million future posts to publish from this list at any given time and are publishing hundreds of these scheduled posts every second.

So when you’re adding a new post to your queue, what we’re doing behind the scenes is starting at the beginning of your “day”, and creating time slots based on your queue settings. If a time slot is already filled, we move on to the next one. That’s why the default queue scheduler works how you describe—we’re trying to fill those “slots” based on the start of the day, rather than trying to divide the calendar day evenly. This just makes it much simpler for us to understand, scale, and predict when our “peaks” will be. At peak times, the publish-scheduled-posts service is publishing tens of thousands of posts in a manner of seconds. We did rewrite that post-publishing part of this architecture a few years ago to improve its efficiency and solve a lot of “lost post” bugs, but we didn’t change how “Add to queue” works.

However, the Queue 2.0 project available in Labs was an attempt to change the queue system to work as you expect—instead of starting at [beginning of day] and creating enough slots to fit [number of slots] every [number of hours], it tries to divide the calendar day into [number of slots] and fit the result back to the original algorithm’s mapping of the day. We never productionized this alternative approach, because it has a few bugs that some blogs hit in extreme cases, and we’ve never had time to fully fix them. It also can cause a bit of weirdness when time zones diverge, like with daylight savings time. Also, a lot of people prefer the default algorithm, and we haven’t thought of a nice way to transition everyone from one to the other. So for now, both options exist, and you can choose which algorithm for queue-slot-generating you want to use. We hope that makes sense! 

While complicated, it is a great example of a system built by engineers to make sense and be scalable and predictable. But sometimes these kinds of systems, while clever, aren’t very intuitive to understand without digging into how they work.

Thanks for your question, and keep ’em coming.