#do u guys like my inconsistent light source bc i do

[vaguely-lavender-er]

what’s that post that’s like “girl that’s not bisexual lighting those are police sirens”

[lividian]

Wat up, I'm here to bitch about stuff.

A good 90% of my life is straight pain and struggle right now. I spend every day trying to distract myself from how I'm feeling, whether that's through sitting on facebook watching slime videos for hours, doing schoolwork for even more hours, or doing regular things and pretending everything is fine. I try to make myself believe that I'm ok. Not say I'm never going to be ok, but I'm having a hard time dealing with all the shit life is throwing at me; has been throwing at me, for years.

I took off that mask yesterday, and I feel like I've been emotionally flayed. I'm raw and feeling all those little fragments of emotion I was protecting myself from, all at once. I've been in bed for the past 3 hours or so, thinkin about life and what mine is trying to teach me. Writing helps and I'm really open abt my mental health struggles, so I figured I'd pour it all out on here so maybe it could help someone or something.

A lot of my stressors include other people, so for their privacy, I'm going to use aliases.

Have you ever done something completely against your values/beliefs and wondered what underlying causes made you (re)act that way? I try to think about that often bc it tends to give new perspective and shed light on information necessary for changing those behaviors.

I had a tough childhood and now that I'm older, I can see the impact it's had on me for so long. Even things I can barely remember are reflected in my emotional responses and conscious decisions if I pay enough attention. Bc of the trauma and inconsistent relationship I had with my parents, I have varying degrees of trust issues, problems with relationships (platonic, familial, and romantic), and mental illnesses. I've struggled with behavioral problems for a long, long time. At one point, it was thought I had ODD because of the severity of some of my outbreaks.

Fortunately, some of my more unusual symptoms started showing up as early as 7. I had been placed in the custody of close family a couple years before that, who sought professional help when my depression and visual hallucinations first appeared. I was in counseling from that point on and began seeing psychiatrists at the age of 13, all of that lasted until I turned 19 and lost my medicaid.

Shortly after I started experiencing various mental health problems, I went into sort of a "dark age" and I don't remember much, like there's a big blind spot in my memories. There are some memories that survived and I've clung to, because I don't have much left from that time period. It lasted until about when I started taking psychiatric medications. And about that time, I started to experience extreme mood swings which resulted in damn near anything, from self harm and suicide attempts to violent outbursts and severe paranoia and delusions. These only increased in intensity until I was kicked out at the age of 17.

*I was hurt by that for a long time which fueled poor decision after poor decision, but I have forgiven both myself and my family bc all that anger and pain and guilt was doing was holding me back. I appreciate everything my family has done for me and I hold them very dear to my heart, especially in times of hardship.*

That's some back story for ya. A lot has happened since then, and maybe I'll talk about it some other time, but I'd really like to focus on the present.

My biggest source of pain currently is the fact that my daughter, Acacia, is in one state and I'm in another. I miss her terribly and every day I sit and think about how I've failed her. I want to be a source of joy for her, but right now she's hurting because her mother is gone and she doesn't understand why. We facetime, but she tells me that she doesn't like me and she's sad. It breaks my heart that she's dealing with such big emotions and I can't even be there to comfort her. But I'm also very grateful she's surrounded by people who love her and we can talk every day. It's really hard, and I'm usually in a lot of pain after we hang up, but I will always be there for her. I have to be the mother she needs me to be so I'm going to have to make some tough decisions. I'm not going to talk abt this anymore bc it's too much for me right now.

I'm in another state living with my husband, Onyx, and I feel utterly and completely alone. We left bc we were evicted back home and the only place we could go was his parents'. He shut me out a long time ago, but the homesickness is amplifying my feelings of isolation. Due to some of the toxicity in our relationship, I burned many bridges with friends and family, and aside from my 2 best friends (who I rarely talk to anymore) I have no one. Many days I beg Onyx for affection or communication or some semblance that he still loves me, but my efforts are futile. Weve been having the same fight for nearly half a year. I bring up something that's bothering me, and he becomes angry and says "it's always something", in some form or another I try to remind him that we have to work on the issues in our relationship at some point if we want things to get better, this is where he usually gets defensive and says something something along the lines of "I always need 'more or too much'". From that point, I've learned to just be quiet bc our problems are suddenly my fault and he will do everything in his power to deflect and shame if I try to get him to own up to his negative behaviors that hurt me almost every second.

I saw the red flags a long time ago, but I had hope. Hope that has now completely withered away bc I know he won't change, at least not anytime soon. I can see it in his face when I try to have any form of an adult conversation with him. The way he just barely squints his eyes while I'm talking, the smirk that I try to convince myself isn't real bc it's so slight, the overall look of complete apathy.

I've tried leaving before, several times and one period of 5 months, but I wanted to make things work bc we got married this year. He told me it would make me more consistent and I wouldn't feel like leaving all the time, but let me tell you, I feel like leaving all the time. I've told him about my plans to go back home, without him. I've told him I would stay if he would be a part of this relationship too bc I can't be with someone who is the source of so much of my pain. You know that saying, "you can't make someone love you if they don't want to"? It's true, fucking painfully true. I've found myself holding on to tiny shreds of hope here and there, making myself believe that he'll try in small gestures like a kiss or laying his head on me. But I've been doing that for too long. I have made sacrifices for him over and over to the point where I don't recognize myself anymore. I've stopped talking to wonderful ppl bc it made him uncomfortable. I'll admit it, I kissed a guy back the night after we decided to be mutually exclusive. I talked to an ex love interest for a period of time abt how I was struggling in my relationship w Onyx. But I apologized, owned up to those behaviors, and made changes. I don't deserve for those things to be held over my head and brought up in almost every fight bc yes, I fucked up, but I did what I had to do to fix things. At a certain point, you have to be accountable for how you let your hurt and anger manifest.

So now I'm leaving bc I have to get back to my daughter and get in a better environment, but I don't know how or when. Like I said earlier, I ruined a lot of relationships try to preserve the one that was ruining me. But I'm really stuck out here, I've never been able to hold a job in my working career, and even if I could, I'm also taking several online college classes (that's been a bitch too) so I can't work more than part time and even that would jeopardize my mental health. I'm really stuck and so frustrated and I'm sorry that this has been a super long post. Like I said, I'm just bitching about life. I know the most sucky situations bring about the most growth.

For those of you who are curious, my diagnoses are PTSD, atypical OCD, and persistent depression w mood incongruent psychotic features.

Also: Besides being a good talker, I'm also a great listener. If you're struggling right now, I'm here for u.

[clearvenus]

(bad) editing tutorial

hellooooo so this editing tutorial was requested by the lovely @phoenixresurgent. this is for basic story scenes, so nothing too fancy. I do the same with edits but just with a lot more carefully and with a lot more thought put into it. disclaimer, im not the best at editing or using photoshop, and even worse at explaing what im doing. im fairly inconsistent in how i edit. my editing is basically a mashup of editing tutorials of a few blogs i follow on here, so you guys will probably recognize some of the thing im doing.

keep in mind have a reshade preset which does a lot of the work for me :3c

OK so first i start off with a fresh screen shot from my game, and duplicate the background/layer 0. that wayi have the original in case i mess up, but also to keep track of the progress im making as i edit. 

then i go in with topaz clean:

in case you can’t see, the only things ive messed around with is edges, and i have accent set to 3, radius to 1.50, and sharpness to 1.00.

then i go into filter > camera raw filter, and set the exposure from anywhere to +0.10-+0.50, depending on how bright the picture is. most of the time i set it to +0.40 but its fairly bright in the scene so i only set it to +0.25. 

then i always set contrast and clarity +7. 

ill then go in and use some actions. first i’ll use warm n’ colorful, delete the curves layer, sometimes the level’s layer if i find the image to still be too bright after using the action. i merge all the layers except the original layer. and then i go in with melanchole, but ive modified this action to not have the first or the last layer. and then i merge the layers again, excluding the original layer. 

then i go for the lighting effects:

since this takes place in the late afternoon, i set the color to a nice warm yellow. its usually on the whiter side, because the tint from the effect is very strong. i then position the effect to where the original light source is (the sun in this case but if its in a room i set it to where the lamps or ceiling lights are) . and then i mess around with the ambiance and intensity, which i dont have a set number for because it usually varies from picture to picture.

extra but sometimes i do lighting effects twice to make the photo more intense, or if theres another light sources behind a sim or object. when i do this i duplicate the layer that already has the lighting effects on it, then add the second one, use a layer mask, invert the layer mask (ctrl+1 i think), and go over the parts of the screen shot i want the light to be visible (around the sim or object). 

then i dodge and burn (shading and highlighting), but im not good at explaining that but i learned by following this tutorial. i know a lot of other simmers do this differently but this is just how i learned how to do it, and it works well.  

then if theres any other extra things i want to add, dust or scratch overlays, noise, smoke, breath, hair, change their expression using liquefy, ill do that on a new layer (for the liquify part tho i just duplicate the previous layer then go in with the liquefy tool and start adjusting stuff).

in this case since theyre outside on a cold winter day, i added breath by making a new layer, using my breath brushes (u can find some on deviantart by googling breath brushes or something like that), setting the opacity to 10%~20%, and start adding that, adjusting the brush size as i go. 

then i add my subs and thats pretty much it! sorry if this is hard to understand, im shit at explaining stuff, or if there were any typos bc i did NOT proof read this at all asoidsdnhaisod. 

heres a before and after 

(the difference isnt really apparent here but i promise its more noticeable in other photos ;_;)