#even got the rainbow gradient

[soutakuphi]

Line art for Another Duel Disk model in the world of Yugioh Stars, donned by the villain faction Nexus Tech and their villain organization (name pending)

Unlike the normal Academy Disk, this one is just full on Arc-V disk with the Hard Light playing field.

Also here is the flat coloring for both current models. Colors change depending on user. Perhaps there's other users out there with variants of this model as well...

[tgcg]

ms paint. you know her. u used her age 8 to make loads of rainbow ovals all over the canvas and then scramble it with selection tool. now u will know her true powers with my handyrandy tips under the readmore. some will be pretty basic and others are very special.

this post has 8 cool trix to learn for you. enjoy and i may do another in the future if i remember/learn more stuff

some of it might be common knowledge. but its got some deep cuts. all tips have gifs to show process easily.

🙂 enjoy and i hope this encourages you to fuck around in mspaint more

soundtrack for this post (loop it while you learn for advanced learning experience)

TIP 1) the right click trick

left and right mouse click correspond to col1 and col2 respectively, which u can see in the top bar. this applies to all brushes and the fill tool like above. when using shapes col2 will be the fill colour (if you have solid fill selected). right clicking with shape maker will reverse the colours use on the shape.

TIP 2) right click eraser

this one is extremely helpful for lineart or add shading. the eraser always uses col2. so your eraser can technically be any colour. but here's where you get powers: right clicking with eraser will only erase onto col1, with col2.

TIP 3) transparent selection change a guy destination

the beloved transparent selection tool works based on what is selected as col2. so long as you have the correct colour as col2 you can make any image transparent and put it on top of anything else. and yes this works with photo bg as you can see.

TIP 4) the gradience

this one is a little more complex. you want to start off with any canvas size, and make as many diagonal coloured bands as you want. (protip: holding down shift makes a perfectly diagonal line with line tool)

then you need to resize the canvas to a width of 1px (make sure you resize by pixels, and do not maintain aspect ratio). then resize again back to its original width (or a different width i cant stop you). you will have your lovely gradience.

TIP 5) superimposter

so. you got a cool gradient and wanna put a guy on it. heres what i do:

i open a 2nd mspaint with same canvas size and draw whatever i want on there. i then pick a completely unrelated colour to my entire piece, and set that as the bg. you could use white, pink, geen, whatever you want as long as it doesnt appear somewhere else in ur drawing. copy the guy.

go back to your gradient tab. ensure that col2 is set as that bg colour you picked (lilac for me). have "transparent selection" enabled. paste your guy in. cue fanfare

TIP 6) advanced superimposter

the great thing about this method is u can put multiple gradients in multiple areas of the image. this is where it gets all japanese printmaking type of shit. ukiyo-esque

all you need to do is make another canvas with a new gradient, ensure col2 is set as the colour you want to replace, then paste your original piece onto the new gradient. now my guy has a soft fade. you can do this as much as you want. (you could even make a canvas with a texture or photo and paste your drawing onto there)

TIP 7) "sketch layer"

so as you now know, col2 is what is removed when you click "transparent selection". which means you can also remove any instance of a colour from ur drawing. which means you can have a unique colour for sketch layer and remove it from the drawing later. i admittedly dont do this but it is a great trick to have.

now combine this with lowering your dpi for smoother lines. may seem obvious but it helps. its like a free stabiliser whenever u want.

TIP 8) rainbow art

now this is where you can get dizzee rascal "bonkers". check out my small and shitty rainbow trick. you can select anything and hold down shift, then drag with left mouse, to turn that selection into its own brush. i even did it with a guy. and you can of course do this with a photo as well.

🙂well that it for now. hope you liked it thanks for reading now back to your regularly scheduled tgcg programming

[egberts]

we are finally home after a busy day. if you don't know already, callie passed away this morning. she fought so hard for the last month and held on for long enough that everyone who knows her and loves her got to see her and say goodbye while she was still in good spirits. unfortunately in the days leading up to this morning she suddenly rapidly declined again and we knew it was time. i won't go into the sad details but despite her condition she continued to love and be loved. she fell asleep in my arms leading up to her final moments, and we got to give her so many hugs and kisses. it didn't take long for the medicine to take her when it was finally time, she was already so weak. her personality has always been so quirky, it was hard to see her decline but she was still so full of love to the very end.

immediately after she passed alana and i went to a boardwalk nature trail and just walked for a while before going for ice cream (the cashier was incredibly nice to us, we must have seemed in need of cheering up because this was a theme of the day)

after ice cream we came home and cleaned up callie's things. vacuumed up some of the cat hair and packed away her furniture and the things we wanted to keep, we set aside some things for her memorial space, and we took everything else to the animal shelter.

just packing up her things was already somewhat cathartic but while at the shelter we decided to visit with the kitties and this was actually a very good idea. it was so bizarrely comforting, seeing and holding the small lovable kittens and realizing in a way that one day we will be able to get a cat as loving as callie was and it will be easy to fall in love with it too.

after the animal shelter, we had to swing by our house again to get the bulk pack of wet food that was delivered, very cruel irony there. it was a $50 box so i reached out for a refund and was given one pretty much immediately and told not to return the food, which gives us a reason to go back to the shelter on monday and donate this food too. (and visit more kitties of course)

we were probably keeping ourselves busy subconsciously, but it was good for us i think, because next we went to a state park and just enjoyed some time by the ocean. we saw so many crabs and even a heron came right up to us!

and you'd think that's the end of the day's adventure but no, after that we went to get pizza for dinner (because cooking is just not an option right now iykyk) and we saw a deer!! a freaking random deer after already seeing a random heron, it was just amazing.

finally we went to target to grab some necessary groceries as some kind of weird semblance that even though callie is gone life has to go on.

i am not kidding when i say every single other human we had to interact with today was nothing but kind to us. all friendly smiles. we didn't tell any of them what happened and yet every single one of them from the ice cream shop girl to the lady at the state park and even the target self checkout person. it was genuinely a beautiful day despite everything. it almost feels like callie's loving energy was just with us throughout the day.

i'm going to miss her so much, and knowing she's gone forever is very hard but i don't think i could've asked for a better experience with it. now it's time to finish up the last bit of cleaning and take a much needed shower.

after her urn and ashes arrive i'll post one final callie update, but as of now this is it. she is gone, resting in peace on the other side of the rainbow bridge. our sweet angel baby 💗

the cutest gradient trio ever btw

[staridust]

Sunny Day Jack ★ Stari’s Versions

—

★ DO NOT USE/REPOST WITHOUT MY PERMISSION. NO MINORS.

—

Apologies for the tumblr inactivity, space crew! I’m much more active over on Twitter!

Here’s a simple lineup of Jack designs that I’ll be personally using for myself! I love when artists take a character and add their own personal twists on them, so I’ve done the same to my favorite technicolor clown.

I’ve also seen a few people be interested in two other designs that I’ve done, so I’ve added them to the lineup as well for others to use or to see their full outfits!

—

Here’s a explanation of each design element if you all are interested in that:

Sunnyverse Jack(Left):

Sunnyverse!Jack is my personal interpretation, artistic recolor, and story with him. He is basically a spin-off of the Sunny Time Town AU by JambeeBot.

I wanted his jacket to reflect looking up at a vibrant summer sky, with clouds, rainbow pockets, swirls, and stickers to add to the childlike wonder. His different color suspenders replaces the stripes on his shirt, which is now a sun on the collar!

I’ve personally always liked the idea of Jack’s hair cascading into purple tips, it’s been referenced in many other drawings of mine. Considering Papa Rise also has purple-ish hair, I think it fits!

This design went through a couple sketch phases and some reworks with the most recent showcase being the birthday drawing of Artemis, where this design can be seen in now outdated-concept!

Alternate Outfit (Middle):

Over a year ago, I made a drawing about Jack and bowties, spreading my bowtie propaganda…. And I still am HAHA. Listen, Jack with a bowtie is so cute, So I’m bringing that design back as well as a full ref!

I’d like to say that this is his work or side outfit, but this is not the teacher AU. I did not create that AU, so don’t refer to this design as the teacher AU!

Even though I don’t consider Jack as a rodeo clown, I gave him clown cowboy boots to reference [Redacted] and his southern residence somewhere.

Rainbow Factory Jack(Right):

RainbowFactory!Jack or RF!Jack is an AU I made last year as well, and finally got around to giving you all a full standing ref for him!

He got more attention than I thought, I know a couple of you like delusional men. I get it.

For his hair, aside from the primary highlights, I also changed the coloring to be a bit more muddled and darker on the teal spectrum, as I like to do that when I draw Jack in a not so-friendly manner. His hair is also more spiked, compared to the others who have more of a fluffy round curl.

His coat is very simple, red and yellow stripes down to a cloud border, and the inside of the coat shows a giant sun on the underside. He also has different color rainbow splotches in different places on him!

His eyes can vary in size or be consistent, and the colors of them can change or spiral too! Usually though, the right eye is lighter than the other. His colors are more saturated and darker than the other designs.

Cotton Candy Cupid Jack:

Finally, the last design I have in the lineup is Cupid!Jack!

This is the first custom design I’ve made of Jack. Shared in this post, this was meant to be the Valentine’s Day design I had for him! Though this drawings is extremely old and outdated now for both my MC and art, I decided to carry it on to a proper Cupid AU design for everyone!

He was originally labeled as Cotton Candy Jack in a wip post that keeps getting shared around from time to time, but I’m unsure if I should keep that name for this lover boy now! There was a community cotton candy Jack trend a month or two ago, so maybe I should change the name? What do you all think?

Design wise he parallels the classic Incubus Jack, which I believe was originally a Halloween costume. His design shares similarities on purpose, being the extended body paint gradient and the sheer fabric overlay on the pants.

Almost like an angel/devil duo, Cupid Jack is more pastel, softer/brighter primary hues, has fluffy wings! My goal was to have them be similar enough side by side, but also different enough to tell that they are different themes/holidays.

He has a motif of hearts, ribbons, and sun swirls. His hair gradient is also the most vibrant one, going from cyan to a vibrant pink at the tips.

He has sandals because I thought it fit the whole Cupid vibe, but drawing his dogs out every-time might actually be the end of me.

—

While I will use these personal redesigns, I want to make it clearly stated and obvious that Jack is not my original character, nor are these redesigns an attempt to change his character or completely detach him from his media. There are simply my fun artistic portrayals of him, as I admire his original design, media, and game as well.

The Rainbow Factory and Cupid AUs are technically my AUs. Ship art, written stories, headcanons, etc. of RF or Cupid Jack are completely okay to create! I just ask that you tag me so that I can see what you all do with him!

However, I ask that if Sunnyverse Jack is used, please ask for permission before using his custom design, as it is my own design of him that I use personally.

…and also, I wanna see more MV Jacks! Artists! Show me how you would draw him in your trademark! I love creative expression!

[dnpanimationstudioclone]

Niffty Redesign🐛

Made my own take on Niffty for Fun!!!!!!!!💖 I def thought a lot on what to try with her!!!!

Pushed for a more 50’s Housewife aesthetic/hotel maid vibe. She’s wearing a pinafore apron which was very popular during that era and I took the poodle skirt idea and reworked it into the apron, but rather than a poodle it’s a bug 🐛. Also brought back warmer colors like the pilot look had. Pastel yellow was def a pop color!

Also added a name tag as to show she works for the hotel 🏨

Added more splotches and made them bigger on her apron. Polkadots were popular in that time and I think are cute(lot of her concepts had polka dots on her) plus I can see her wanting people to assume she’s a ladybug or Asian Lady Beetle 🐞 (@peeperscreeperz made a take of Niffty being that which is AMAZING and I considered making her that too but I ended up going a different route). I can see her also wanting them to give off flowers…only for most people to see them as blood stains.🌸🩸

Also gave her those iconic cleaning gloves 🧤. Shes the Hotels maid AND cook afterall 🧽 👩‍🍳

Gave her a bandana bow for the housewife and maid look and because I think it’s cute and lowkey gives off antennae. I LOVE the idea of her being a bug demon so I went with that. I was going for a subtle ambiguity of what she’s suppose to be(she’s hiding what she is).

Gave her warmer eye color back! Also made the pupil more leaf shaped 🍃.

Added gradient for her limbs.

Added extra limbs. Great for extra cleaning 🧹 🧼

Her hairs actually antennae…and extra legs 🦵

Gave her three fingers.

Made her eye bigger(bugs often got big eyes! Or for her case eye 👁️)

Added a lil bug instead of a poodle for her apron!🪳

For her color motif, went back to warmer colors and because for mine I’m going with a rainbow motif she’s Yellow💛🌈 the color known for its positives such as joy and friendship…but can also mean negative things such as Deceit, illness and often used as a warning color⚠️ it was also a popular color for Sci-Fi posters(she was based on B-Alien Movies)

Made her skin a kinda warm pastel orange🧡 I missed her having a warm palette but I also get why they changed it due to her roots 🇯🇵. So I went with orange!!!! Her hairs also a more brownish red-orange.

For her bug theme,

I went with something that I figure would connect her both to her ability to take down pests so well and Japanese origins. The Japanese Centipede! Centipedes are great for pest control but apparently to Japan they’re considered symbols of evil and rottenness, plus with how they look they often scare people even those they don’t pose serious threats to humans, which I think fits Niffty’s whole desire to be loved only to accidentally scare people away…shunned & unloved by a world she can’t seem to fit in💔

HUGE Spoiler alert!!!! Hazbin Hotel

With the reveal of Husk being once an Overlord I like to believe the same with Niffty but rather than souls(talked about this with @a-sterling-rose, she was an immensely powerful sinner like Alastor, but alas her form was far too big and scary for people to want to get close to and she was alone…until Alastor offered her a deal he’d provide a more approachable form in return for her eternal service)

A lot of her looks meant to be hiding what she is. Disguising her extra limbs as hair, her body’s color scheme based on a centipedes, poofy dress that could cover extra, even the bug design could be Interpreted as a long centipede. I was also going for a subtle sharp, mini legs for her apron ruffles, giving off her trying to look sweet and soft but could also be interpreted in another way…

I read and learned from a @lovesart23 redesign vid for her that, she was meant to be based on B-Alien Movies. LOVE that and I tried it myself(hardest part was figuring out what bug to make her and what themes to go with) but I ended up going for another Sci-Fi route. Kaiju/Giant Bug monsters. Creatures like Godzilla or those giant bugs creatures like “the Tingler” 1959(which was a centipede monster I read). I figure it’d connect well to both her struggles of fitting in but also her Japanese Roots.

Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy. They are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy. They do not attack people because they want to, but because of their size and strength, mankind has no other choice but to defend himself. After several stories such as this, people end up having a kind of affection for the monsters. They end up caring about them."

— Ishir⁠ō Honda The Director of Godzilla

Plus some certain Kaijus could qualify as Aliens!.

There’s even a Yokai/demon based on the centipede know as the Ōkumade!

CW freaky Pictures of centipedes and Mice

What do u think? I’d love to know💖

I’ve also done Charlie, Vaggie and Angel🍎🦋🕷️

[ipso-faculty]

Five new autistic flags! And a nautilus as a symbol of the spectrum 💛

My current autistic hyperfixation has been the question of the autistic flag. By this I mean a flag for autism specifically rather than a broader neurodiversity flag.

Between autistic flag designs that look too similar to the Métis flag to a new flag design that looks annoyingly similar to intersex flag designs, none of the designs I've found for an autism-specific flag I've found have felt right.

So, I've made a whole bunch of alternative flags, varying from tweaks to existing flags to ground-up redesigns. Here's my current shortlist. Feel free to use any or all of them, or remix as desired! <3

I'll start with describing the flags that are tweaks of existing designs, and work my way to the nautilus, which I'm introducing as an alternative symbol for the autistic spectrum.

Flag Idea 1: golden infinity symbol on white background Most neurodivergent flags I've seen is a rainbow infinity (usually an infinity loop) on a white background; this is the oldest kind of design, from 2005. Many people are already using a gold infinity symbol (ideally an infinity loop) as a symbol for autism, because Au = gold.

I took the gold infinity symbol used to represent autism in the 2023 Autistic Progress Pride Flag, and stuck it on a white background, in the style of neurodiversity flags. I tweaked the infinity loop a little bit to further visually distinguish it from the Métis flag.

Flag Idea 2: fixing the red-yellow-green autistic flag This one takes the 2021 red-yellow-green autistic flag and replaces the problematic white lemniscate infinity symbol (which has been used to represent the Métis since 1815) with a dark red infinity loop. Red is another popular colour in autistic designs as a fuck you to Autism Speaks (fuck Autism Speaks).

Flag Idea 3: recolouring the Disability Pride flag (AuTiSTiC) There are two ideas in this flag. The first is to take the Magill disability pride flag and recolour the diagonal stripes to represent autism.

Since gold is used in autistic designs because Au->Autistic? Let's go all in. This flag has the colours of: Au: gold Ti: titanium (light grey) S: sulphur (light yellow) Ti: titanium (light grey again) C: carbon (off-black)

This is unashamedly dorky and I feel like if any minority group gets to have a dorky flag it should be us autistics.

Flag Idea 4: golden infinity + disability pride flag These flags represent the accumulation of the ideas thus far. Gold infinity symbol plus disability pride flag. I tried putting the infinity directly on the diagonal stripes and it was too busy, so I've moved them to the corners.

On the left is a version with the disability pride flag colours. On the right is a version using a yellow-white-yellow stripe design from the 2021 neurodiversity flag that's based on the disability pride flag.

Flag Idea 5: the rainbow nautilus for the spectrum After showing earlier drafts of all of these flags to a bunch of my autistic friends, a consistent feedback was that none of us were actually that keen on the infinity symbol as a symbol of autism (even without the Métis issue).

I think flags are an opportunity to tell outsiders about what we’re about. One thing I want to convey about being autistic is that the autistic spectrum does NOT mean a gradient from autistic to non-autistic. Here’s a visualization I like:

So I got to thinking about how to visualize that polar graph. I realized a nautilus shell works on a number of levels:

To convey the polar graphs in a stylized way

A fractal shape keeps with the theme of infinity

We autistic folks tend to live in our metaphorical shells =)

Best as I can tell from google text & image searches, the nautilus is not used by any minority groups or geographic regions for flags. A handful of businesses and software projects have nautilus logos, so I iterated design to be nice and distinct.

Here's another version with the gold-and-white neurodiversity stripes:

I also wanna note that as somebody who has ADHD and autism that I am 100% fine with anybody who wants to use the nautilus for AuDHD - the very idea of the autism spectrum was to unite highly intertwined diagnosis categories and personally I think it's reasonable to include ADHD in the autism spectrum.

If you would like alternative versions / tweaks to these flags, let me know in the comments. I also want to be explicit that I release all of these designs in the public domain, so you are free to reuse and remix as desired! 💛

I've tried to provide a nice range of options from remixing existing designs to new ideas, and I hope everybody can find at least one autistic flag they like that is also distinct from other minority groups (e.g. Métis, intersex). I've also posted a detailed overview on infinity symbol design for anybody designing new flags! 💛

If you have any favourites or ideas for flags let me know! I'm curious which ones people will like most. edit: uploaded the SVGs to Wikimedia commons for anybody who wants to play with them.

[aliendragondreaming]

look at my g5 redesigns boy

.

incoherent ramblings under the cut

tbh i really hated the fact that g5 got away from the dumbass names they'd give to the ponies and i wanted to try to bring that back but still have g4's flare to it

i made hitch green cause god damn it we need more green horses in this world, and the fact that he and sunny look too alike like you could mistake them for being siblings (plus changing him to be loosely cactus theme ties him back into his sheriff stick in my opinion) (also i kinda hate how his cutiemark turned out, oh well)

every day i grieve the hippie izzy we could've had, i would've LOVED a hippie main character. Also i made her reflect her moon name better cause it really bugged me that she had moon and they did nothing with it, moonshine is a sleep therapist that does art on the side in this. I gave her dreadlocks to help differentiate her from misty but still keep the natural hair (also haha alcohol name)

I also grieve mechanic sunny, it wouldve been so fun having her invent shit on the fly, not to mention it would actually give her a hobby cause all she does is roller skate and sell smoothies when she isn't yapping. And now that i think about it if she was a mechanic it would make even more sense on how they managed to make that flying van thing they use.

Zipp and Pipp have always annoyed me in a design sense I hated how they didn't look related and i hated zipp's hair style toothpaste looking ass. I wish they would commit and give her a mow hawk but alas we live in a cruel world. My designs for them don't really help them look that much more related but I did give them the same markings so you can't say i didnt try. Another thing I changed zipp's special talent from daredevil or whatever to making storms because A i think it wouldve been interesting to see a character who needed magic to gain their cutiemark and B it helps differentiate her more from rainbow dash.

Misty I have the least amount of issues of her in canon cause I think her design is actually really stinkin cute! I mostly just made her look shyer and got rid of the weird pink gradients on her cause they didn't really look that good. (plus her orange mane she gets later I don't like as much)

[adobe-outdesign]

Review Kyrri? My first neopet.

Kyrii are vaguely weasel-like, but that's probably not what you remember them for. If you're like me, you remember them for A) having extremely luxurious manes, and B) being smug and vaguely conniving. The design itself is fine albeit somewhat plain, but it's those additional traits that help them stand out a bit. (They're also allergic to apples—not the only species with an allergy to a certain food, but I feel like they get it played up the most.)

Visually, Kyrii have a standard bipedal pose with a complimentary lighter tint of the main color used for the underbelly, including the jaw, and the inside of their ears, which have a nice teardrop shape to them. The mane, arguably the driving concept behind the species, is also very pretty, having lots of curves and swishes to it that really give it that full, rich look. I also like how the tail and the mane are one unit, so the tail looks like the hair and vice versa.

In terms of customization, Kyrii got the short of the stick. They're not the worst by a long shot, but the big problem here is the face. It's too short, too wide, a little too round, and it doesn't taper the way it should. Technically speaking it's a subtle difference, but it really does majorly change the way the species looks, and not in a good way. They also lost that vaguely smug look, possibly due to having the head turned upwards more.

On top of the face, the body also got a bit screwed up, as both the stomach and forearms became too bulky, whereas originally the Kyrii was a pretty lanky species. Other odd decisions including running the underbelly up onto the jaw, which kind of affects the way the mouth reads even if it has a nice shape to it, and reducing the amount of shine in the mane. On the plus side, the mane itself at least looks better—it's much fuller than it was originally and the really janky shape of the fur on top of the head has been majorly improved.

Favorite Colours:

Royal: Royal Kyrii are a good example of how badly customization messed up the species, as they went from being quite beautiful to incredibly awkward, in part due to their faces being too wide and round and in part due to some weird decisions on the clothing (such as the Royal Boy loosing his cape and large sleeves and the Royal Girl loosing the entire back of her dress in addition to her hair braids no longer wrapping around the back of her head).

However, the original designs are fantastic! Both versions are good and have their own unique flavor (something royal pets sometimes struggle with). The Royal Girl has a lovely elegant look with a long muzzle, pretty dress, and a very nice turquoise and white color palette. The Royal Boy has a primarily maroon palette with an extra over-the-top mane and a vaguely swordsman-like outfit.

The poses are also full of personality, especially with the long-defunct battledome art bring us these gems:

10/10 no notes.

Pastel: Pastel pets are usually just taking a pet and applying pastel colors to the design as-is, so the pastel Kyrii really stands out by having the addition of stripes added to its mane. This gives it a very distinct look and adds a fun rainbow aspect to the design. The palette itself is also nice, juggling five colors at once without it feeling overwhelming or too busy. Just really nice!

Water: Water is a very hit-or-miss colour and it depends entirely on how good the art is, but thankfully they really nailed it with the water Kyrii. The white-foam mane draws attention to the most important part of the design and has a good amount of depth, especially int he darker areas at the base, while the body has a nice subtle gradient, highlights, bubbles, and ripples to give it that water-y feeling.

[splatsvilles-fashionista]

Investing in T-shirts! The biggest beneficiaries of Gear Adjustments!

For fashion aficionados like myself, Gear Adjustment is the most exciting part of the upcoming Season. Being able to make small changes to the way your gear is worn is something that opens up a ton of customization while requiring less new stuff (though I'm sure it required a lot of work to add). With that said, for the moment, it is looking like they are limiting the feature to caps and t-shirts. I don't personally think caps are changed very much by the ability to flip them, they're all pretty good as they are, after all. But for t-shirts, being able to oversize them is actually really big. Pun unintended.

T-shirts have the tendency to be modeled in a way that makes them cling really tightly to your character's body, and it is has never looked right to me. Looking at the clothing choices I see in my multiplayer games, I get the impression that is the general sentiment, as well. Oversizing shirts solves their central problem, loosening them up and giving you a less constrained silhouette. In this post, I wanna highlight what I think are the biggest winners of this change are. Shirts I think you should pay attention to once the patch hits.

That said, I should highlight that since we don't have the patch yet I am only assuming these will be Adjustable. We cannot know for sure until the we get the update.

I've picked out ten T-shirts I think are the standouts, split into a couple of different categories, starting with the ones I think you all expected to see here:

Annaki Accessories!

I have to imagine that the Annaki Bracelet Tee and Annaki Choker Tee were some of the first shirts that came to mind when you think of noteworthy T-shirts in this game. They've got nice, dusty colors, the big Annaki A in slick silver, and of course their signature accessories. Oversizing these I think will amplify their punk aesthetic even more, because there's nothing punk about tight-fitting clothing.

Unless it's leather.

And leather these are not.

High-fives for Tie-Dyes!

Tie-Dyes are really fun with their bright, trippy patterns, so it's no surprise that the Takoroka Rainbow Tie Dye and the Takoroka Galactic Tie Dye are some of the better T-shirts in the game. We did see the Rainbow Tie Dye get Adjusted in the reveal trailer, and is it just me or does that just seem right for these kinds of shirts? Something about them screams "wear me at one size larger."

Ride the Wave!

Next up, we've got the Firewave Tee, Icewave Tee, and the Vaporwave Tee. There is also a Duskwave Tee, but I am personally not a big fan of the shade of orange they use for the bottom half of that shirt. That said, I think the gradient on these shirts them really make them stand out from the rest, and their color palettes are just very nice and evocative.

Assorted Graphic Tees!

These three don't have a common throughline aside from all being graphic tees, but I think they all have something to recommend them by. The Eelzebub Tee has a really gnarly, radiation-green design that is just really cool, giving an outfit something really eye-catching while still staying nice and simple.

The Green Tee is interesting because its big bold graphic lettering actually extend across the side and even a bit onto the back of your character, which gives it a really unique look I don't think any other clothes can replicate.

Finally, I just think the Mint Tee looks nice. Its color is pretty unique amongst shirts, and the white print design is decorative without being overbearing.

And these were my picks for the T-shirts to keep in mind come Drizzle Season 2023. Were there any others you feel I missed? If so, please tell me in the notes!

[sabertoothwalrus]

Your zoo sketchbook pages were amazing!! You got so many drawings done as well, what’s your progress when doing art at a zoo? Or do you have any tips for those who want to do the same? :0

Thank you!!

When doing gesture drawings, you have to go FAST, especially with wiggly animals. All my drawings tend to be around 1-2 minutes or less (average 30-45 seconds? I’ve never really timed myself). With that, here’s what I try to keep in mind:

Part of it is choosing your subject. I like ungulates because hoofed animals are REALLY FUCKING WEIRD and have so many shapes in them. They tend to stay still long enough to get good poses too.

So take this Okapi.

The things I try to focus on are capturing the overall silhouette, while also maintaining clarity. You can do this by not only paying close attention to the outer contours, but also the negative spaces in between. Getting the contours right will help you maintain the likeness of the animal, and checking the negative spaces will help to keep everything in proportion.

on top of that, mentally break apart your subject into layers and focus on planes. Pay attention to overlapping shapes (a very subtle but important thing for making your drawings look three dimensional rather than flat)

I like to draw with pen, but there’s really no rule. Sometimes I use a rainbow pencil. If you have multiple shades, use a lighter value (or even just use some open hatching) if you want to indicate and cool markings the animal has. For example:

In this sleepy tapir drawing, I used hatching to show the subtle gradient of the dark part of its nose. I like to keep my lines directional to help indicate the volume of the form, too!

And really, these are all techniques I do with all kinds of life drawing! Drawing at the zoo is one of my favorite things ever because of the challenge of going fast & the huge variety of things to draw!!

[bomberqueen17]

hood wrap

OK so when I bought my boring silver car i was like "i'm gonna find some art and put it on a hood wrap and then my car won't be so boring" and then of course i did not do that.

but this past... whenver that was, my mom came to visit and on THREE SEPARATE OCCASIONS with several people in tow I tried to get into the WRONG SILVER CAR. Once it was a Crosstrek, understandable mistake. Once it was a fucking, Honda something. Like not even close! Ugh. And everyone's standing there and I'm clicking my clicker and all three times I look in and i"m like "that's not my stuff in the center console" and then I turn my head and there's my car, two spaces down, blinking forlornly at me. WHOOPS.

So I've got to get off my ass and actually do it, get some art and get this fucking hood wrap put on, because my car is Too Anonymous.

So the first step is, I'm gonna commission Sass to draw me something amazing. I already figure, two figures at least, some kind of action pose. A dragon and a unicorn maybe. IDK. No background, just some kind of gradient. A rainbow color scheme. This is all fine.

But i need some inspiration for what to request, so I'm just putting it out here. My original inspiration was "sick wizard van" but i don't want a wizard because people are going to keep trying to assign that to a specific fandom and i don't want a Fan Van, I just don't want to be tied down like that. i want something Generic Fantasy.

So anyway if you've seen any art like that or are stricken with any inspiration, please send me inspiration pictures or breathless descriptions of your awesome idea, so I can get this commission together. (I meanwhile have to research what kind of resolution and dimensions a hood wrap needs to be printed to, so.)

I need it to be kinda SFW and not anything that's going to inspire cops to persecute me or offend family members and all; i know i'd said "titty wizard" but honestly i should probably not put titties on my car just because we live in a society and i don't want to be tired about it all the time. Hence probably sticking with non-anthropormorphic figures.

though, i *could* have a smaller-scale titty wizard riding the unicorn into battle or something, if it wasn't the main focus of the composition. That of course makes this three figures rather than two but I can afford that, LOL, if I'm doing this at all. which i AM. so.

(gandalf big naturals in the background in morvran's baltimore robe)

[cjgladback]

[ID: Three photos of a purple to pink to orange gradient yarn sitting on weathered wood planks in direct sunlight. In the first, the yarn is a single, unplied twist wrapped into a ball around a disc shaped core (the cardboard of an empty masking tape roll).

In the second, it is a loosely tied hank of three-ply yarn; it has been chain-plied, so neighboring segments of yarn are wrapped together, preserving the color change with minimal variegation.

The third photo features the hank laid with the opposite side up next to a shallow dark-orange mug with a spindle resting in it at a 40 degree angle. The spindle was 3D printed horizontally with a rainbow colored filament, from a spot of orange on one side through red, purple, blue, and to green on the other side. It is about nine and a half inches or twenty-four and a half centimeters long. The spindle is a supported Russian style, its base an inverted teardrop shape before a waist and the shaft of the spindle that's widest just above the waist and tapers down to as thin a spike at the top as possible. End ID]

I spun yarn! And plied it! This spindle and spinnable fluff were an incredibly generous gift from @dangerphd amid excess from 3D printing experiments! I'd previously spun one skein on a drop spindle in high school -- and I loved it for the process and made a chunky shawl of the Stephen West Spectra scarf design with it, but boy was it an uncontrolled thick and thin mess. Whether due to actually carrying over that learning more than a decade later, or the lighter (supported) spindle, or marginally more patience with age, this went way better!

I was definitely struggling with repeated breaks at the start and compromised my intention to go as thin as possible, but by the end I felt like I got decent control and consistency in my single's weight. And seeing how much less fragile those once-broken sock-weight singles are once plied should help me keep up the confidence with future fiber to really push for the thinner threads that I want to use. I had just learned about chain plying and wanted to try it when Danger sent the gradient fluff, so it wasn't a problem when there were several spots that I was sure would need plying for strength--and overall it's still less chunky than the thicker parts of the single I had made before! And much more even than I expected.

I haven't been brave and tried fulling it yet, just barely dampened and hung with a minor weight (a thick flannel shirt on its hanger) while drying. (It smells like wool once wet, though less strongly than some and I don't actually know its fiber contents.) But it's already pretty well behaved. It's a bit less than 20 feet of yarn, and I have to get into and through a different project right now, but I'll find something that lets me use it soon enough.

[beeeinyourbonnet]

Covetous | Chapter 20

Pairing: Nostelle 

Summary: Father Joseph MacAvoy wakes up in a library across town with no idea of how he got there. When the kind librarian doesn’t kick him out immediately, he considers that maybe there’s more to life than alcohol.

[chapter 1] [chapter 2] [chapter 3] [chapter 4] [chapter 5] [chapter 6] [chapter 7] [chapter 8] [chapter 9] [chapter 10] [chapter 11] [chapter 12] [chapter 13] [chapter 14] [chapter 15] [chapter 16] [chapter 17] [chapter 18] [chapter 19]

[read on ao3]

-------------------------------

Belle couldn’t explain the nerves she’d woken up with at the thought of meeting with Kathryn again that afternoon. If anything, she should be less nervous for this second meeting instead of more, but maybe it was because a second meeting meant they were closer to the trial, even though there’d been no date set for that yet.

The sooner the trial, the sooner Nosty might end up in prison, and she didn’t know if he’d survive there. Of course she’d visit him, and of course she wouldn’t hold a prison sentence against him, but he valued his freedom above all. He’d been incarcerated before, but never for a felony sentence like this would be. A sentence like that might break him.

At least she didn’t feel the need to impress Kathryn this time, so she didn’t spend longer than usual on her outfit—a belted herringbone dress and yellow cardigan—and arrived at work in a good, if slightly manic, mood.

She shelved her books, gave Kaz more construction paper for the paper chain—almost long enough to drape around the reading room it was for by now—and read more books than usual for story time. 

Ashley was coming to relieve her when she left to meet Nosty at Kathryn’s, but since she couldn’t ask her to work just two hours, she came in at lunch. 

“What’s all this?” Ashley asked when she spotted the paper chain. Kaz blinked at her.

“It’s decoration,” Belle said. “Can you reshelve that cart?”

While Ashley worked, Belle sat at the circulation desk and browsed new titles she could start ordering next month. 

Her phone buzzed around one, but it was just Nosty confirming Kathryn’s address. She sent him a thumbs up and then, on a whim, a heart, and then blushed for no reason. Sending a heart with an address confirmation? His art purchase had turned her even sillier than she’d been.

Kaz appeared in front of her, and she jumped.

“Sorry.” Kaz grinned, not sorry at all, and Belle smiled in response. 

“I wasn’t paying attention. What can I do for you?”

“It’s getting a little out of hand.”

She was not wrong. When Belle took one end of the paper chain and Kaz took the other, it spanned almost the whole main area of the library.

“It looks like it’s time to hang it,” Belle said. The two of them trooped into the reading room with a stepladder, tape, and arms full of paper chain, and Belle stood on the ladder while Kaz held the bundle of paper and handed Belle tape.

“What else is going in here?” Kaz asked, watching Belle like she might tumble to her doom at any second. 

“I haven’t decided yet,” Belle said. “What do you—oh, hang on.” 

She pulled her buzzing phone out of her dress pocket, but when it was only Joseph, ignored it. She could call him back later.

“Anyway, what do you think?”

Kaz shrugged. “What’s the theme?”

Belle chewed her lip, surveying the colors in the chain. Either Kaz had taken care to make sure there was never a double of any color, or she’d gotten lucky, but it was a lovely rainbow gradient.

“Maybe something with clouds? Like a beautiful day after a rain?”

She didn’t blame Kaz for her baffled look, but without any further ideas, she climbed back down the ladder to scoot it a meter over and climb back up.

With one hand on the paper and the other holding tape, her phone buzzed again. Belle sighed and stuck the tape to her palm, fishing her phone out again. 

“Joseph? Everything okay? I’m in kind of a precarious ladder situation.”

Holding the phone between her ear and shoulder, she tried to position the paper where she wanted it again. 

“A precarious ladder situation?” Joseph asked. “Is everything okay with you?”

“Yes, just hanging some decor.” 

“Sorry, I’ll leave you to it, then,” he said, and then hung up.

Too precariously on her ladder, she did not have the energy to parse what had just happened, so she just slipped her phone back into her pocket and taped up her paper.

It took them another fifteen minutes to get the chain fully hung, and in the end, they had to remove about ten links from it.

“It’s perfect,” Belle said. “Maybe I’ll get different shades of construction paper and just hang loads of chains.”

“Do I have to make them all?” Kaz asked, wrinkling her nose.

Belle snorted. “You don’t have to do anything. You are a volunteer, not an employee. Are you hungry?” 

Kaz nodded, so they headed out to the snack cart and Belle poured herself a cup of coffee. A quick glance at the wall clock told her she only had about ten minutes left to drink it before she wanted to leave for Kathryn’s office. 

“I’ll be leaving early in a little bit, just so you know,” Belle told her as they headed for a table. Ashley had taken over the circulation desk, and there was no point in Belle disturbing her now.

“What for?” Kaz asked. 

“I have to meet with my solicitor,” she said. There was no reason for Kaz to assume the solicitor had anything to do with Nosty, so that was safe.

“Solicitor? What for?”

Belle really should have prepared for that question. “Just routine,” she said, hoping that Kaz was young enough to believe that routine visits with solicitors were normal.

“Can I stay a bit longer?”

“Sure.” Belle shrugged. “You’re welcome any time.”

They drank together in companionable silence until Belle had to retreat to her office to pack up and go, and it was just as she was hoisting her purse over her shoulder that Joseph burst in, collarino falling off and hair sticking up every which way. 

“Joseph!” She was too shocked to moderate her tone. “What’s wrong?” 

Joseph licked his lips. “Belle, I’m so sorry.”

It was like he’d dumped ice on her. There was only one reason he’d be sorry enough to rush here—something was wrong with Nosty.

“What happened?” she asked. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe someone had stolen her car or something. Maybe he’d relapsed.

“Can we talk outside?” he asked. 

“Okay.” She locked her office with numb fingers, barely remembering to wave to Ashley and Kaz as she followed Joseph to the parking lot.

Nosty wasn’t there, though she hadn’t expected him to be.

“What is it?” she asked, sounding like a stranger to her own ears.

One of Joseph’s hands reached inside his jacket, but returned empty. “Belle, you know I’d never do anything to hurt you, right?”

“Of course,” she said, too busy imagining Nosty lying dead in a ditch or dead in a pew or dead impaled on kitchen knife to question this direction in the conversation. 

“Nosty left.”

The images froze. She hadn’t heard him right. Nosty hadn’t left. Sure, yesterday therapy had left him raw, and even though he didn’t tell her what they’d talked about, she knew it had been harrowing for him. But she’d spent hours on the phone just being with him, cheering him up, she’d thought. He wouldn’t have left. Not again, not like this.

“What?” she said. She couldn’t see anything other than the blue roof of her car right in front of her.

“He left.”

She clutched her keys hard enough to hurt and squeezed her eyes shut.

“Belle?”

“No.” She shook her head, opening her eyes. Nosty had no reason to leave. But then, Joseph had no reason to come all the way down here just to lie. “He wouldn’t.”

“Yes, he would,” Joseph said, and before Belle could even begin to scream, he raised his hands in surrender. “And I know he would, because—because it’s my fault.”

Belle frowned. “What do you mean?”

Joseph looked as though he’d prefer to be anywhere but there. “I said some—well, some awful things. And he stormed off and said he was leaving.”

“What did you say?” It didn’t make sense. Had Joseph tried to defend her honor or something? Had he told Nosty they’d kissed?

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Just—it was bad.”

“It does matter.” It mattered because what if it was nothing? What if Joseph had quoted the bible and Nosty had run off citing freedom of religion? Or what if he’d mentioned the kiss and Nosty had left in a jealous rage?

“Please, Belle, I don’t—” He wrung his hands, then touched one to her wrist. She laid a hand over it in reflex. “I’m so ashamed.”

“What could you possibly have said that was that bad?” 

Joseph closed his eyes, and she thought he was going to continue not answering, but then he threw his hands up.

“I said he had shelter and food at my mercy, and—” He pinched his bottom lip. “Well, I guess the implications were that I could take it away for any reason.”

It took Belle what felt like hours to process these two sentences. She kept trying to rearrange them into something that made sense, but they kept being awful. After an eternity of Joseph watching her like it was only a matter of time before she tore his throat out, she closed her eyes. Nosty was gone again.

“How could you do this to him?” she whispered and then, louder, “How dare you do this to him. You’re the one who offered him a place to stay!”

“Belle, please, I’m so sorry.” He touched her elbow and she tore it away, unlocking her car with two angry punches to the fob. 

“Don’t touch me,” she said, and he raised his hands again. She yanked her door open and threw herself in, needing to get as far away from Joseph as possible so she could cry.

“What are you doing? Where are you going?”

She glared up at him, into his helpless face. She wanted to slam her car door into it. “I’m going to find him, and if I can’t find him, I’m going to go tell his solicitor exactly what happened and try to keep him out of prison.”

“Let me help you. Please, Belle.” He grabbed the top edge of the door. “It’s the least I can do.”

“You’ve done enough.” She tugged the door out of his grasp and shut it, unable to look at his wounded, desolate expression because it just reminded her of Joseph another lifetime ago, a Joseph who’d held her and called every hospital in town.

Did that Joseph even believe in her either?

She started the car, and when she put it in reverse, Joseph backed away. He was calling her name, so she turned the radio on, and then all she could see as she backed out was him clasping his hands in a plea and mouthing Belle, wait! to the too-happy song playing through the speakers.

****

MacAvoy stared at the empty space where Belle had been until well after she’d gone. What had he expected to happen? He’d gone and fucked it all up again, just like he’d always known he would. 

For this, he deserved a drink.

****

Belle cried the whole drive to Kathryn’s, a fresh wave of tears coming every time she phoned Nosty and he didn’t pick up. She wanted to have faith in him, and maybe if she had longer than twenty minutes to process, she would, but now it felt like Joseph had picked the scab off an old wound and driven a knife into it, and all she had to stop the bleeding was her fingers.

She parked a block away and dug some napkins out of her glove compartment to fix herself, though there was nothing she could actually do about her makeup except wipe the tracks of mascara off her cheeks. At this rate, she’d be late meeting Kathryn, but she was sure the solicitor would understand.

As put together as she could be under the circumstances, Belle got out of the car and forced her legs to carry her to the office building.

Then, when she turned the corner, there was Nosty, smoking a cigarette at the picnic table and reading. She blinked and shook her head a few times to be sure she wasn’t hallucinating, then sprinted to him, heels and all.

He closed his book and stood, opening his arms to receive her with an oof as she barreled into him.

“Oh my god, you’re here.” She squeezed him so tightly, she could feel his ribs.

“Said I would be, didn’t I?” He rested his lips atop her head, and she could have cried again. “I guess you talked to the Father.”

“I thought you were gone forever. Why didn’t you answer your phone?” 

He shrugged. “Didn’t want to let him off the hook if he was with you.” 

“Nosty, I am so, so sorry.” She turned her head so she could breathe, loosened her grip just a hair, and rested her cheek on his chest.

“Don’t apologize.” One of his hands came to rest on the back of her head while the other stayed curled protectively about her waist. 

“What happened?” she asked. She had been too frantic to ask Joseph any followup questions, and she considered now that, maybe in her panic, she’d overreacted. Safe in Nosty’s arms, the rage that had filled her seemed so far away. 

“He’s fucking mental, that’s what happened.” 

She wanted to look up at him but couldn’t bring herself to lift any part of her from any part of him, so she just slipped her hands under his jacket to clutch at the back of his t-shirt. 

“He told me what he said,” she said. “But he didn’t tell me why.”

Nosty didn’t speak, so with a tiny sigh, she leaned back to look at him. If she didn’t know better, she’d say that the pink tinge on his cheeks and the way he wouldn’t meet her eyes meant he was embarrassed. Embarrassed of what, though?

“Nosty?” 

“You might be mad,” he said.

Of course. Of course she might be mad. She didn’t know what to think anymore. Joseph had come to her to self-flagellate, but he didn’t want to tell her what Nosty said because he didn’t want to incriminate him. She would have to apologize to him later, but she would be the judge of what did and didn’t make her mad.

“Lay it on me,” Belle said.

He tapped her left arm. “Need to get in me pocket.” 

She moved out of his way and he came out with a folded piece of paper that looked like it had gone through a washing machine and handed it to her

Accepting that she would have to let go of him eventually, she unfolded it and scanned quickly. As she read, her cheeks warmed with heat she could not acknowledge standing on a public lawn. This was Nosty’s clean bill of sexual health, just like the one she’d received over the phone yesterday. 

“I don’t understand,” she said. “Why would I be mad?” 

Nosty shrugged, his feigned nonchalance as familiar to her now as his jacket. “Joseph seemed to think it was presumptuous to go without you.”

She had never felt so stupid in her life as she did trying to process each tiny piece of information about this conflict. It seemed so easy to understand, and yet every time one of the men said something, she had to pause and deconstruct every single word over and over before she got the picture.

The picture, as she best understood it, was that Joseph had somehow found out that Nosty had gotten tested and then lost his mind. 

“How did he even know?” she asked. 

“Belle, come on, you don’t want to hear anymore.”

Belle frowned, folding the letter back up and handing it to him. She was opening her mouth to say something but was saved the trouble by Kathryn calling their names. Nosty turned, and they both waved as Kathryn made her way to the picnic table with her legal pad, a cup of tea, and Joanna in tow with two more. 

“I figured you’d want to meet down here again,” Kathryn said, taking her seat. Joanna set the cups down and then fled back inside.

“Thanks,” Nosty said before Belle could, and she could have fainted with shock. 

They joined her at the table, and Belle forced herself to focus on the matter at hand instead of trying to figure out what had happened today. 

Kathryn had gotten Nosty a court date for three months from then, and Nosty grimaced. Belle wanted to grimace as well—as long as he was out on bail, they were free—but she just took his hand under the table and squeezed. 

“I think we should talk about the actual trial,” Kathryn said. “We want to make Nosty look as sympathetic as possible. I know his story is sympathetic, but you know how juries are.”

Nosty snorted. “Aye.”

Belle didn’t know how juries were specifically, but she knew how people were. She knew what people saw when they saw Nosty. 

“So, first thing’s first, I don’t think you should go by ‘Nosty’ in court.”

Belle bit her lip to keep from saying anything, especially when Nosty yanked his hand away to fold his arms. This was his call.

“Why not?” he asked. “Never been a problem before.”

Kathryn raised an eyebrow. “Were you found innocent before?”

Nosty’s glare held no fire, and Belle almost laughed. “No.”

“Okay, so what is your real name?”

Belle watched Nosty and Kathryn watch each other like it was riveting cinema. Nosty had the full force of his glare turned on the solicitor, and Kathryn just smiled blandly in return, not moving an inch. Finally, Nosty huffed.

“What if my real name is worse?”

“I’ll be the judge of that,” Kathryn said. 

Nosty glanced at Belle, and she only shrugged. “You’ve never told me your real name, so I can’t help you.”

He groaned, fingers tapping against the bench like they weren’t attached to him.

“Look, you don’t have to tell me,” Kathryn said. “It’s all your choice. But if we put you on the stand and say, ‘This is Nosty, he assaulted a cop,’ they’re all going to say, ‘of course he did.’”

“Fine.” He snatched Belle’s hand up again, and she squeezed his fingers. “It’s Fraser.”

“That’s not bad at all,” Kathryn said, jotting it down. “Last name?”

Nosty mumbled something. Belle and Kathryn both leaned closer.

“Didn’t catch that,” Kathryn said.

“I said, that is me last name, and it’s dead to me.”

“After this, you never have to acknowledge it again,” Belle said. “Though it probably wouldn’t hurt to get some ID.”

“I guess Nosty Fraser isn’t so bad if you really don’t want to give a first name,” Kathryn said. “It doesn’t really roll off the tongue though, does it?”

Nosty glanced down at Belle. What did he think was going to happen? She’d hear whatever his name was and immediately turn against him? 

“Nosty, we’ll still call you whatever you want,” Belle said. “This is just for the court.”

He groaned again, then slapped his other hand on the table. “Fine, it’s John. Happy? I’m just a sad, boring fuck named John, just like every other bloke in the fucking UK.”

It took a herculean effort for Belle not to laugh, but she forced down her amusement as Kathryn made a long note on her pad, much longer than just the word “John.” 

“Oh, Nosty,” she said, and when he glared at her, she couldn’t stop her eyes crinkling. “Just because your name is common, it doesn’t mean you are.”

“It’s perfect is what it is,” Kathryn said. “John Fraser? Who’s afraid of that guy?” 

This statement did not help soothe Nosty in any way, but Belle’s snickering seemed to take the wind out of his sails, and he loosened his grip on her hand.

“Fine, but if I hear it outside of the courtroom, I’m knocking both your heads together.”

It was such an empty threat, even Kathryn smiled. 

“Duly noted. Now, your look.”

Nosty spluttered. “What d’you mean? This is how I fucking look.”

Kathryn shook her head. “Not in court, it isn’t. Do you have a suit?”

“Do I have—”

“We’ll get one,” Belle said, patting Nosty on the hand. “What else?” 

“Keep it mute, sedate. If it looks like church clothes, it’s perfect.” Kathryn took a sip of her tea, giving Nosty a chance to settle, and then said. “You’ll want to be clean shaven as well, and I think you should shave off the locks.”

“No.” Nosty shook his head. “Absolutely not. D’you know what I’ll look like with a shaved head? A fucking skinhead, that’s what. No.”

Belle studied him, and he probably wasn’t wrong. As skinny and gaunt as he was, he would certainly look threatening in a new way if he was bald as well.

“If you shaved it off now, it would have plenty of time to grow back,” Kathryn said. “Just think about it, okay? If you show up looking like a clean-cut former altar boy, it’ll make a huge difference, especially with Belle there.”

Nosty cast her a helpless look, so Belle squeezed his hand again. 

“We’ll think about it,” Belle said. “We’ll definitely think about it.”

“Good.” Kathryn smiled, making a few more notes. “Now, let’s talk a bit more about our defense.”

****

Nosty was quiet as they walked back to the car, hand resting loosely in Belle’s. She thought the meeting had gone well, but then, she wasn’t the one Kathryn had lain bare. 

“You don’t have to do any of it if you don’t want to,” Belle said. “I mean, I think you should wear a suit, but you don’t even have to do that.”

Nosty grunted, so she said no more, content to swing their hands between them. Once in the car, Nosty dug through her purse for the snack she always brought him, and a swell of affection ballooned in her chest.

She drove off, though she wasn’t exactly sure where she was going. Obviously, she wasn’t taking him back to the church right now, but would he go back later? She still didn’t exactly know what happened.

For now, she’d drive to her flat, and then they could walk somewhere to get dinner. Maybe once Nosty calmed, they could talk more about the hair.

He polished off the bag of crisps she’d brought, then rolled the window down to stick his head out. Even the thought of what happened with Joseph couldn’t quash Belle’s happiness right then. Nosty had pulled his disappearing act, but he hadn’t disappeared on her. This was what she’d wanted, wasn’t it? For him to prove that he was in it for good?

“Belle?” Nosty rolled up the window.

“Mm?”

“You’ll still look at me if I look like a skinhead for a few weeks until me hair grows, yeah?”

She glanced at him, then grinned. “Of course. Besides, I think if we go to a professional instead of me shaving it in a bathroom, they might be able to salvage some.” 

“You think?” He pulled the mirror down and bunched up his locks, tugging them back and studying his face. He wrinkled his nose and shut the mirror. 

“You really don’t have to cut it, Nosty.” She squeezed his knee, but couldn’t keep her hand there since she needed it to drive.

“It’s fine. I don’t need it anymore.”

She frowned, almost hitting the car in front of her when she glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

“Eh, it’s like—” Nosty moved his hands like he might find the words in the air. “It’s like armor, right? That’s what the shrink says, I have all this armor, like me kilt.” He plucked at the kilt. “But I don’t need all of it anymore.”

She smiled at the road. “You don’t?” 

“Nah, I’m not going it alone anymore. I’ve got you now.”

Belle was on the verge of responding when what he’d said hit her, and the words disappeared. I’ve got you now. 

It was the sign she’d been waiting for, and if she did not kiss him immediately, she would disintegrate. She turned onto the next street, pulling into the first open space she saw while Nosty watched her with a furrowed brow.

“Belle, what are you doing?”

She put the car in park, unbuckled her seatbelt, then grabbed his face and planted her lips on his. 

“Got it,” he said, and then his hands were in her hair, and he was biting her lower lip, and she was pressing herself as close to him as she could with the console in the way. 

“Nosty,” she sighed into his mouth.

He bit her lip again and then dragged his mouth off hers to kiss down her jaw, holding her head still. 

“Yes, love?” he growled.

“I couldn’t go another second without kissing you,” she said. “I forgive you.”

He groaned, surging toward her and then stopping to glare at the cupholders. She laughed, but she felt the same.

“We should probably get going,” she said, though she tilted her head back as he kissed down her neck.

“Are you kidding? Get in the back seat. My cock is clean as fuck, let’s go.”

She felt his smile against her neck when she snorted, but he did bring up a good point about all the things they could now do. “Come on, let’s go on a date or something.”

“What’s with you and dates?” He pulled himself off her neck, and she took the opportunity to kiss him once more before turning to the wheel. She didn’t want to be in this car anymore.

“I like you,” she said. “I want to date you.”

“There are too many other people,” he said. “I want to just be with you.”

“Maybe another night, then?” She wasn’t giving up on being able to do things with another person. 

Nosty’s hand slid across the console to rest on her thigh, and she could have melted. “If it makes you happy, love.” 

“You make me happy.”

He grinned, and she could not get them home fast enough.

****

MacAvoy didn’t know how he made it, but he’d walked all the way home from the library. It took hours, and it was only the pain in his feet and legs and stomach that reminded him he hadn’t died.

He wished he’d died, but if the look on Belle’s face as she drove away from him hadn’t killed him, nothing would.

He knew he shouldn’t have bought a bottle of whiskey on his way home, but what the fuck did it matter now? At least it was cheap so he wouldn’t feel guilty about wasting money as he poured it straight down his gullet.

Nosty’s presence had never been a comfort until now, when his absence loomed over MacAvoy like the grim reaper. He dragged himself through the barren church, up the stairs to the kitchen. 

There was still plenty of food, but he didn’t want to eat. He didn’t want to think. He just wanted oblivion, the void.

After grabbing a mug from the dish rack—Nosty’s from that morning—he sat down and plopped it onto the table with an angry thunk. 

With weak, trembling hands, he unscrewed the cap off his whiskey and sloshed some into his mug. Sweet relief would be his soon, but when he brought the mug to his nose and inhaled deeply, he coughed. The smell made his eyes water. 

No matter. He tipped the mug back, ready for the joy of alcohol, and when it touched his lips, he gagged, the smell so horrendous, his stomach lurched.

“Fuck.” He stood, glowering at the bottle, and then he hurled his mug, followed by the bottle, against the door, relishing the shatter of glass and ceramic much more than he’d relished the drink.

[clara-maybe-ontheroad]

Growing up I was not good at anything manual. I was clumsy and messy (two left hands and ten thumbs as we would say), with poor hand eye coordination, was generally a bit brusque and impatient (got called an elephant in a porcelain shop pretty often), and because of that I was never good at drawing or painting. So I didn't like it, because I felt like I was so much worse at it than other kids.

I was good at drawing rainbows though, or to be more exact I liked it because it meant I would spend most of my time aligning the pencils or markers I had so they would form the perfect gradient of colour I wanted. I could only get started if I was sure I had the perfect colour plan ready.

Needless to say, I didn't do any painting or drawing once I became a teenager. And as I grew up and developed so much love for art, it became just another thing I could admire but knew I couldn't do myself. And let's be honest, I was a bit jealous of people who could.

When I met my girlfriend, I fell in love with how creative she is. First her music, then her writing, and then how all encompassing her creativity is. And I was inspired by her endeavours, while also still being a bit envious.

The most important thing she helped me realise though, is that I wasn't even trying. Any time I mentioned being inspired by something she was doing and wanting to do it myself, she would just reply that I could. Even as a perfectionist herself, she was encouraging me to just let go, say fuck it and try. And I admire that about her.

So recently, I impulsively suggested we do a paint date. And I had to go out and buy stuff to paint, but as I was setting out I already knew I wanted to try watercolour. It just felt right, like it was what I wanted to do, play with colours again, because that was always what I liked most.

And tonight I tried it, and guess what ? It was just fun. It was play. It was discovering how colours change when you mix them. It was looking at water move and gather on the paper, it was figuring out the power of the brush in my hand. It was very simple and unpretentious, with no expectation of results, and that was just fun !!

This post isn't to tell an incredible story of discovering my true passion or becoming a great artist. It's just about listening to yourself when you want to play, and giving yourself the space to just try things, even the ones you've thought you're bad at for your whole life.

Because who knows ? Maybe you're good, maybe you're bad, but if you do it because it's fun, who the fuck cares. It's worth it.

Anyway I know what I'm going to do when I'm bored in the train now ! YouTube tutorials here I come haha

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Episode 83: How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘How kids learn Q’anjob’al and other Mayan languages - Interview with Pedro Mateo Pedro’. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch. I’m here with Dr. Pedro Mateo Pedro who’s an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, a native speaker of Q’anjob’al, and a learner of Kaqchikel. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about kids acquiring Indigenous languages.

But first, some announcements. We love looking up whether two words that look kind of similar are actually historically related, but the history of a word doesn’t have to define how it’s used today. To celebrate how we can grow up to be more than we ever expected, we have new merch that says, “Etymology isn’t Destiny.” Our artist, Lucy Maddox, has made “Etymology isn’t Destiny” into a swoopy, cursive design with a fun little destiny star on the dot of the eye, available in black, white, and my personal favourite, rainbow gradient. This design is available on lots of different colours and styles of shirts. We’ve got hoodies, tank tops, t-shirts in classic fit, relaxed fit, curved fit – plus mugs, notebooks, stickers, water bottles, zipper pouches. You know, if it’s on Redbubble, we might’ve put “Etymology isn’t Destiny” on it.

We also have tons of other lingthusiastic merch available in our merch store at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I have to say, it makes a great gift to give to a linguistics enthusiast in your life or to request as a gift if you are that linguistics enthusiast.

We also wanna give a special shoutout to our aesthetic redesign of the International Phonetic Alphabet. Last year, we reorganised the classic IPA chart to have colours and have little cute circles and not just be boring grey lines of boxes and to even more elegantly represent the principle that the location of the symbols and rows and columns represents the place and degree of constriction in the mouth. I think it looks really cool. It’s also a fun little puzzle to sit there and figure out which of the specific circles around different things stands for what. We’ve now made this aesthetic IPA chart redesign available on lots more merch options, including several different sizes of posters from small ones you can put on a corkboard to large ones you can put up in your hallway. They look really, really good, especially if you have some sort of office-y space that needs to be decorated. Plus, it’s on tote bags and notebooks and t-shirts. If you want everyone you meet to know that you’re a giant linguistics nerd, you can take them to conferences and use them to start nerdy conversations with people.

If you like the idea of linguistics merch but none of ours so far is quite hitting your aesthetic, or if there’s an item that Redbubble sells that you think one of our existing designs would look good on, we’ve added quite a few merch items in response to people’s requests over the years, so we’d love to know where the gaps still are and keep an eye on lingthusiasm.com/merch.

Our most recent bonus episode was a behind-the-scenes interview with Sarah Dopierala, who you may recognise as a name from the end credits, about what it’s like doing transcripts from a linguistics perspective and her life generally as a linguistics grad student. You can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to get access to all of the many bonus episodes and to help Lingthusiasm keep running.

[Music]

Gretchen: Hello, Pedro, welcome to the show!

Pedro: Hello. Thank you so much for this invitation. I really appreciate it.

Gretchen: We’re really excited to have you. Let’s start with the question that we ask all of our guests, “How did you get interested in linguistics?”

Pedro: That’s an interesting question. I think there’re two main things. One is that I had the opportunity to attend a boarding school where there were many Mayan languages and, in addition to that, there was a class on grammar of Mayan languages, and I think that’s one of the things that motivated me to be curious about that language. Then after becoming an elementary school teacher, I was also interested about knowing more about how these languages work. For example, how language works in this case – well, in the case of Guatemala, for example, people think – I am assuming that that was in the past, but there’s, I think, some people who still think that Indigenous languages don’t have a grammar from there as well. Is it true that, in fact, there’s no grammar of this language? That’s kind of how I started –

Gretchen: There’s no language with no grammar.

Pedro: That’s true. I like when people say that everybody has a mental grammar. I like that. Which is true for every language as well. It’s how I would say I got interested in linguistics.

Gretchen: And you’re already a speaker of Q’anjob’al, and so going to this boarding school and being exposed to other people speaking other languages.

Pedro: Also, I acquired Q’anjob’al when I was a kid. And then I went to this boarding school. But unfortunately, I didn’t know any of those languages until later when I started living with my wife who is a native speaker of Kaqchikel, and from there I started to learn, but it has been a long process for me.

Gretchen: To learn different ones. So, you were at boarding school, and you’re encountering, “Okay, Mayan languages have grammar – great!” What happened after that?

Pedro: When I graduated from this boarding school, I became an elementary school teacher. I taught, I think, a couple of years. But one thing that I noticed is that there was that need to understand a bit more of the language. I thought, well, this is something that one of my best friends, who is Eladio Mateo Toledo, he said, “Well, let’s find someplace to go.” We went to school in Guatemala City to study sociolinguistics at that time. I’m talking about years ago. But it was a way to find opportunities to learn a little bit more about the languages.

Gretchen: So, you studied sociolinguistics in Guatemala City and thought, “Oh, this is cool. I wanna do more of it”?

Pedro: I finished sociolinguistics, and then I received a fellowship or a scholarship in a different university. It’s Universidad Rafael Landívar. There was this project called “EDUMAYA” where there were scholarships to Mayan speakers or Indigenous speakers in Guatemala. This was an opportunity for me to get an undergrad in linguistics. After that, I think I took two or one year off, but while I missed those years from school, I was working at OKMA – Oxlajuuj Keej Mayab’ Ajtz’iib’ – under the direction of Nora England.

Gretchen: What is this organisation?

Pedro: This organisation works on Mayan languages. It’s a group of Mayan speakers who studied their own language.

Gretchen: That sounds great.

Pedro: It was really great. In that case, I was an elementary school teacher, and then I started to work very hard at OKMA. It was a huge difference teaching kids and then doing analysis on a language. For me it was a big transition, but it was amazing because I had the opportunity to learn many things about how Mayan language work. It was unique.

Gretchen: And the kids that you were teaching when you were teaching in school were Mayan kids as well?

Pedro: Yeah, most of them were Mayan kids, so they spoke Q’anjob’al. Even though there is this idea about bilingual education in these Indigenous communities, I had this opportunity to teach these children in Q’anjob’al. One of the norms of education is you teach these kids, and they have to learn Spanish and something like that. So, what I did is, okay, let’s take as the base the knowledge that they bring from home. They speak the language, they understand the language, so we need to teach them how to write and read. That’s what I did. I was in trouble because the parents didn’t like the idea of teaching the children in Q’anjob’al.

Gretchen: They wanted them to learn Spanish.

Pedro: Exactly. They said, “Why do we need Q’anjob’al? Why do we need to write when we speak the language?” One of the arguments I made is, okay, yeah, but we need something already that will help us to learn to write and read. It took me a while. One way to convince the parents to change their mind was that, in the first meeting when they came in to get their children’s grade, I started the meeting in Spanish. I messaged them in Spanish. It didn’t last for a minute, and they stopped me. They started to complain and say, “Why would you talk to us in Spanish when, in fact, you know that we speak Q’anjob’al?” Different people, they were angry or uncomfortable because of that. After that, I asked them this question, “Have you thought about your children who spend about five or six hours every day here at school?”

Gretchen: “And if I speak to them in Spanish, they’re not gonna understand me either.”

Pedro: Exactly. That was my point. And this “Oh, yeah, yeah.” “Have you thought about that? Do they complain?” “No.” “Okay, because they are kids.”

Gretchen: They don’t know any better, yeah.

Pedro: For me, it’s important for these children to understand what’s going on in school. One way to do this – using the language that they know. I was able, in this case, to talk with the parents, “Okay, we understand what you are after.” I had the opportunity then to teach the children, at least, I mean, at that time – so divide a year in two parts. In the first part, I would teach the kids in writing and reading Q’anjob’al. And then in the next part of the year, we switched to Spanish. But at least that was an opportunity to –

Gretchen: They have sort of a balance of the two and accommodation of the two, and they’re not coming in and suddenly someone’s talking at them in a language they don’t understand at all – “Okay, what’s going on?” Yeah.

Pedro: Those were the things that I really liked when I go back to that experience that I had as an elementary school teacher.

Gretchen: Then you started doing language work with other linguists and speakers.

Pedro: Yeah. Again, when I came to OKMA, I started working with a group of Q’anjob’al speakers on the dialectal variation of Q’anjob’al. I was there, I think, less than three years. Then I left Guatemala because my wife had a scholarship, and we went to the US. That’s how I started learning English, and then started the MA and PhD programme at the University of Kansas.

Gretchen: In linguistics as well?

Pedro: In linguistics, yeah. Then I started to work on how children acquire Mayan languages – of course, not all Mayan languages, but I started to work on Q’anjob’al to document how these children acquire Q’anjob’al.

Gretchen: Sort of informed by this experience as a schoolteacher saying, “Okay, these kids are coming in already speaking this language. What’s going on?”

Pedro: I think the question is, “What do they know?” That’s how I got interested in this. Plus, at that time I had my first son who was, I think, one-year-and-a-half or something. It was like, okay, this is an opportunity for me to learn how to document child language acquisition. So, then I started to work on Q’anjob’al.

Gretchen: I think there are a lot of linguists who get interested in child language acquisition because you have a child, you’re spending all this time taking care of your child, “What are they doing?”

Pedro: For me, it was really interesting because, again, going back to when we moved from Guatemala to the US, the first time I took care of my son, so I made basically a diary of what he was saying almost every day. I have my notes – I dunno – somewhere.

Gretchen: Then you started looking at other children as well.

Pedro: Yeah. For my MA, for example, I looked at, I think, eight or ten children. It was a cross-sectional study. As for my PhD, I worked on a longitudinal study. My main focus at that time was on how these children acquire the verb morphology in the language, in this case, the word that indicates action, for example, what happens, and then the different parts that are necessary in that verb, for example. We talk about when the action happened, and who is participating in the action. Those are the kinds of things that I tried to evaluate in my study. That’s something that, also, I have been working on these days.

Gretchen: I mean, this is the kind of thing that it’s not like, oh, you study it for one degree, and now you know everything. This is the kind of thing that people could study for a whole career.

Pedro: Exactly. That’s an interesting point because what I have learned is that, okay, I’m going to – so my advisor said, “Well, you can start with this.” And I said, “Well, okay.” I started studying acquisition of the verb morphology, I think, more than 10 years ago. And I thought, “Well, I am done.” It’s not true! Because every time I look at the data, and I find other things, and I start asking other questions. There is no end of that – which is a nice thing that you start with something small –

Gretchen: You’re not gonna be out of a job.

Pedro: It’s nice. I think one thing that I really appreciate is the opportunity that I have also in documenting acquisition for Mayan languages. For example, I have documented the acquisition of Chuj, another written Mayan language to Q’anjob’al, for example. By looking into a known language, it helps me to understand what must be going on in Q’anjob’al. And I said, “Wow! I wish I had access to this language before so I could have a better idea of how to explain what was going on.”

Gretchen: You can find some things that are similar between Chuj and Q’anjob’al, and some things that are different, because the languages are grammatically, you know, related. They’re similar.

Pedro: That really helped in terms of analysis, in terms of understanding what’s going on, in terms of explaining a specific phenomenon, for example. It really helps to have that kind of mirror, for example, to see what’s going on.

Gretchen: One thing that I know about when kids are acquiring English is they often make mistakes. They’ll say things like “runned” instead of “ran” or something like that. This tells you “Oh, they’re generalising something about a rule.” Are there some things that come up with mistakes kids make or interesting things that kids do when they’re acquiring –

Pedro: That’s an interesting question. That’s something I was looking at, for example, for Chuj and for Q’anjob’al is that, so in Mayan languages, for example, there is this suffix that is known as the “status suffix” that appears after a verb. The idea of this status of something, like, it’s indicating what information is provided by the verb.

Gretchen: “Style” suffix?

Pedro: “Status.” “Status suffix.” It indicates whether the verb is a transitive verb or an intransitive verb. In this case, when we talk about intransitive verbs, it’s one participant of the verb. Transitive verb – two participants.

Gretchen: So, if you have something like “walk,” it’s gonna be intransitive, and it’s gonna have one status suffix. If you have something like, well, the classic example is “hit,” but I always find that very violent – you know, “hug” or something – that’s gonna be transitive. And it’s gonna have a different suffix.

Pedro: A different – yeah. In English, for example, that’s just one form of the verb. But in Mayan languages, or someplace, you have a specific morphology on the verb to indicate that, well, you are talking about an intransitive verb or a transitive verb.

Gretchen: So, if it’s just “I eat,” it’s gonna have one status suffix. If it’s “I eat an apple,” it’s gonna have a different status suffix to indicate that that’s there. Okay.

Pedro: I think, trying to answer your question, that all of this – I mean, there are all things that happen with this status suffix, but I haven’t seen children, for example, producing errors with these status suffixes. One thing that we have seen as maybe “errors” or children overgeneralising is the production of the status suffixes in a specific position. One thing that we know about status suffixes is that sometimes they appear at the end of a verb, and other times, they don’t. But in other times, they do. Then the question is, “What happened?”

Gretchen: And adults know this?

Pedro: An adult knows. But for a child, there are different variations on these status suffixes that a child has to find as a challenge. One thing that we notice is that these children, for example, produce these suffixes in non-final position – something that is not seen –

Gretchen: The adults only produce it at the end of the verb, at the end of the sentence?

Pedro: Yes and no. If they have what we call a “root verb” – consonant-vowel-consonant is the idea.

Gretchen: Consonant-vowel-consonant is a “root verb,” okay.

Pedro: When you have that verb with that “shape,” let’s say, that suffix doesn’t appear in the non-final position. But if you have something that is, let’s say, derived, then that suffix has to be there.

Gretchen: Okay. If you make the verb into something else by changing the tense or something –

Pedro: By changing the status of that word. You have the word “song,” for example, and then you make the verb “to sing,” then you add a morpheme to it so that this noun “song” becomes an intransitive. Because of that, then it’s a derived intransitive verb.

Gretchen: It’s a derived intransitive, and you need to have the suffix. Do the kids do this?

Pedro: They produce that. One thing that we noticed is that they make that difference between derived and non-derived intransitive verbs. Again, it’s like they are acquiring that, but that’s what we see as something problematic for them in acquiring those status suffixes.

Gretchen: They have some difficulties still.

Pedro: That’s, I would say, where we see them making those mistakes or having trouble with acquiring the suffixes.

Gretchen: Is there something that you’ve noticed that’s interesting about how kids are acquiring the languages you’ve worked on?

Pedro: In addition to looking at the verb morphology, I also studied how children acquire the nominal classifier – numeral classifier – in Q’anjob’al. In this case, some Mayan languages have a nominal classifier or a numeral classifier. In this language, for example, everything has to be classified. If you refer to a woman, for example, you’re going to use the classifier “ix,” and then “naq,” for example, for men. Then if you have other things like –

Gretchen: You know, a hat or something.

Pedro: Then it would be “chʼen,” for example.

Gretchen: That’s for objects in general, or are there several different kinds of objects?

Pedro: Well, for animals, for people, for objects, and things like that.

Gretchen: So, if you have a dog or something?

Pedro: That’s going to be different. That’s going to be “no’.” I was interacting with this child. He was a boy. Well, first, he was interacting with his grandmother. These classifiers were there. He was like “ix” or “naq” or “chem” or “ch’en” or “no’” – everything that was –

Gretchen: Everything that you would expect for all the different kinds of things that you can refer to.

Pedro: And then someone came to visit grandma. So, grandma left the conversation, so that left just the boy and myself. This is what happened. All of those classifiers were gone. There’s just one that stayed, which is “ix.”

Gretchen: So, he’s using “ix” for everything.

Pedro: “Ix” for everything. But this is not something that he’s just making up. It’s something that we can see in the other grammar.

Gretchen: Okay. Do other children do this as well?

Pedro: Other children do, but mainly boys – not girls.

Gretchen: Interesting.

Pedro: The thing is that this “ix” that replaces all nominal classifiers occurs mainly among men. People have argued that it’s mostly in informal contexts.

Gretchen: Right. So, because his grandma is gone, and you two are men together – well, he’s like, 3 years old.

Pedro: Exactly. It’s kind of like, “Okay, yeah, let’s use the ‘ix,’” replacing the others.

Gretchen: He’s sensitive to the sociolinguistic context of “Oh, women aren’t here anymore, so I’m gonna do this thing” –

Pedro: “With this guy.”

Gretchen: “With this guy.” Even at this young age.

Pedro: Exactly. He was about 2-and-a-half or 3 years old. This boy is able to distinguish both contexts. His grandma has come back in the conversation, and then those classifiers came back.

Gretchen: Wow. He’s really paying attention to this dynamic situation of whether his grandma is here or not changing how he talks.

Pedro: When to use all the classifiers and when to use just one classifier. For me, again, that’s a way to illustrate that these children, they’re exposed to the language, and they are exposed to this system of the nominal classifier, but in addition to that information, the social aspect of that nominal –

Gretchen: And the cultural context where if you just had kids who are trying to learn language in a classroom while maybe the teacher is a woman, and you don’t have all the different types of social situations.

Pedro: One of the things that’s important to emphasise, then, when we do language documentation is making sure that that interaction with that child doesn’t happen only with grandma, for example, but happens with the different gender – I mean, in this case, female/male, and also –

Gretchen: Ages.

Pedro: And there’s ages and the kids themselves.

Gretchen: Because maybe the kids are talking differently with each other than they’re talking with their grandparents or their aunts and uncles or the older generation. The researcher doesn’t necessarily know in advance which things the kids are gonna be paying attention to because maybe the kids don’t learn how to talk like the men until they’re older. You don’t know what age they learn that until you’re studying it.

Pedro: Exactly. I would say the take home message in this part of the conversation is documenting everything, basically, because you never know, I mean, what you will learn. I mean, you never know what will come with this child’s interaction.

Gretchen: I think sometimes when we’re analysing how kids talk, at least a lot of the studies that I see on big languages like English, they bring the kid and maybe one parent, the mom or something, into a lab and they have them talk in this controlled but also very artificial environment. You don’t have the environments of, “Well, somebody comes to the door, so grandma has to go answer the door” that lets you have this situation where you can illuminate this effect. Sometimes, if you do too much control, you don’t actually see the natural things that happen.

Pedro: That’s the difference that we see, I mean, in this case between doing an experimental study and a naturalistic setting, for example. I think when you do certain things in that natural setting, then you have the opportunity to see the language being used in different contexts, for example. In this case that we are discussing for the “ix,” I think it’s a unique illustration of the importance of documenting the language as a whole.

Gretchen: In the whole community, cultural context. I mean, of course, then you also have the thing of like, “Oh, if there’s some birds in the background or something.”

Pedro: Again, that’s the advantage and disadvantage of doing this kind of work. I think it’s good to do both, especially when we talk about Indigenous languages. You mentioned something important, “Okay, what do we know, for example, about language acquisition?” I think most of that information comes from the well-known languages. What happens to these less studied languages or languages that haven’t been studied at all, for example – how to bring those languages into discussing what we learn about language acquisition?

Gretchen: And there’s two reasons why that’s really important. One is because, for speakers of those languages, if they want to try to support using them in schools or using them in daily life or trying to revitalise a language that’s become less common in daily life, having the knowledge of “How do kids talk in this language? What are their first words like? How do adults normally talk to children in a bit of a different style?”

Pedro: I think we can say that it’s not just about the grammatical aspect of the language that these kids are acquiring, but at the same time, how they are acquiring that language, for example. I think one thing that it would be good to connect with language revitalisation is, like, let’s learn the language thinking like we are kids. Because a kid, for example, wouldn’t think about “Oh, is this the way to say it?” “Should I put this here?”

Gretchen: “Should I put this suffix on this verb?”

Pedro: Exactly.

Gretchen: Kids don’t know what a suffix is.

Pedro: And it takes time for them to get to the production of the adult level. For instance, also the sound system that these children produce. Q’anjob’al, for example, has retroflex sounds like /ʈʂʰ/ or /ʈʂʼ/, for example, /ʂ/. And these kids do not produce them like –

Gretchen: They can’t produce them immediately.

Pedro: No, no, no. It takes time for them. I will say three-years-and-a-half or four. It takes that time to produce this retroflex. I think when we are in the context of revitalisation, those learners of a language will go through similar patterns of acquisition.

Gretchen: If you’re trying to re-learn Q’anjob’al as an adult and being stressed that you can’t produce the retroflex and say, “Look, it takes the kids four years. If it takes you four years, that’s really normal. You can keep practicing this and get better at it. If you can’t do it on the first day, then you still have hope.”

Pedro: That’s the importance of doing this kind of project and documenting how children acquire this kind of language. Then this information can be useful for other purposes.

Gretchen: Q’anjob’al also has the ejectives, which I’m not doing a very good job of pronouncing, but you’ve been saying it in the name of the language itself that “Q’anjob’al.”

Pedro: /qʼanxobʼal/, yes.

Gretchen: Do kids learn those really early, or are they a bit harder?

Pedro: It takes time for them as well. That’s another interesting question because what we have noticed is that these children, when they try to produce these ejectives, they would follow two strategies. One – either they produce the plain consonant.

Gretchen: So /kanxobal/ instead of /qʼanxobal/?

Pedro: Exactly. Or they would just produce the glottal stop.

Gretchen: Oh, okay, so /ʔnxobal/?

Pedro: Or something like /ʔanxobal/, but I’m just making this up. It will be something like this – either they use a plain or this glottal stop. It’s a process.

Gretchen: Extracting the two possible features that you would need to put together eventually.

Pedro: This has been reported for the acquisition of sounds in K’iche’ and Chuj, and I also see it in Q’anjob’al.

Gretchen: These are all Mayan languages that have –

Pedro: Mayan languages that have ejectives as well. Maybe someone will say, “This is our dialectal variation,” or “It’s just the kids,” I mean, because of individual differences, but no, it’s across –

Gretchen: It’s across a bunch of them. That gets us to the other reason why it’s really important to document kids acquiring lots of different languages – Indigenous languages – is that, when we’re trying to think, “What do we think about how kids learn language in general?” if we base those theories entirely on a few big languages that have other relatively similar typological features in some cases – English and Spanish are typologically related, and so if you’re coming up with a theory just based on English and Spanish, well, you know, that’s not very generalisable.

Pedro: That’s true. I think that’s one of the other things that we wanted to mention here, like how to include other languages to understand human language and also how these children acquire languages – human languages in the world, you mentioned, that sometimes haven’t been explored at all. It would be good to document those languages and have a better idea of what these kids do. But the other thing that I’m going to add here is that, yeah, we want to have a better idea of how these children acquire language, but at the same time, how this information can be used, again, for language revitalisation or for language maintenance or things that the community’s interested in. One thing that I noticed, for example, about this in Q’anjob’al is that these children, their first words have a basic shape which is consonant-vowel-consonant. This is really common in the whole Mayan languages, but these are the specific things that these children produce. If that’s the case, then is this information possible to use when we consider creating teaching materials for these children? It would be a good thing to have this because it’s going to be much easier if these children can read these words with this shape, for example.

Gretchen: Right. If you know what words they’re acquiring early, then you can say, “Oh, well, we’ll put those words in maybe the first books that we’re trying to have them learn because you don’t wanna try to have them read a book with words that they don’t understand, they’re not using already. You can use this small shape – because Mayan languages have, you know, quite a bit of prefixes and suffixes and things on the words but, of course, you have to start somewhere, and that’s just with – the roots are generally consonant-vowel-consonant, so they just produce the root first, and then they start adding things onto it.

Pedro: Exactly. They are good at identifying those roots in the input or in the adult grammar in this case, yeah. Also, I had the opportunity to collaborate with other people about trying to understand how these pieces are put in the verb. What we have noticed is that there’s the root, and then children are good at producing suffixes.

Gretchen: Ah. But not prefixes?

Pedro: Not prefixes, but for a reason.

Gretchen: What’s that?

Pedro: Stress.

Gretchen: Oh.

Pedro: Stress is also with these suffixes. You have the root and then the suffix.

Gretchen: And that’s the part they do first, and then they do the prefixes much later.

Pedro: Yeah, later.

Gretchen: Interesting.

Pedro: That’s the other thing that we have.

Gretchen: So, you work at the University of Toronto now.

Pedro: Yes.

Gretchen: What sorts of projects are you working on there?

Pedro: Well, my position is about language documentation and language revitalisation. One of the projects that I am currently working on is about the revitalisation of Itza’, another Mayan language spoken in Guatemala, in the northern part of Guatemala, in Petén. It’s a language that has been considered an endangered language because it has less than 40 speakers.

Gretchen: Wow. Less than 40.

Pedro: And most of them are elders. I think this week I was asked about how old is the youngest, and I said, “Well, 70-something.” Children are not acquiring that language anymore. But the goal in this project is how to teach the language and how to bring the language back. That’s one of the projects that I am doing – how to do that. One thing that we are doing with the community is two main things, 1.) is developing a workshop on teaching them how to teach the language.

Gretchen: Right. Because just because you can speak a language doesn’t mean you know how to teach it.

Pedro: That’s one of the things that we did. What would be the best method? We’re using a method that has been used in other contexts, so let’s try to use this for the revitalisation of Itza’, in this case, not for all Mayan languages, but for Itza’ because of the condition of it.

Gretchen: Because Q’anjob’al still has lots of speakers.

Pedro: Lots of speakers, yeah, so it’s different from Itza’. So, that’s one thing. The other thing we are doing – and for me this is really important because we are developing pedagogical material that we are using for the same purpose, but the unique thing for this grammar is that we have students at the University of Toronto who are involved in creating information about the grammar. In this case, these students are doing research about the subject of Itza’, but because they are preparing this material for non-linguists, for example, it’s an opportunity for them, okay, they have to understand the structure of the language but then how to share that information with people who are not linguists.

Gretchen: Who wanna become speakers and don’t have background in grammar or any of these theoretical concepts, but they just need to know how to talk to people.

Pedro: For me, these students have this opportunity to learn to speak the language and then also the opportunity how to share that information with these people, but in addition to that, having the opportunity to work with Indigenous communities and also doing language revitalisation.

Gretchen: And trying to accomplish the community’s goals rather than, okay, I have this research agenda, I’m just gonna show up, extract some information, and then go off and get a degree and have a career without benefitting the community.

Pedro: I think that’s something that I tried to tell the students. Okay, it’s good that you are learning this. You’re doing your research. But at the same time, this is the impact that you are making with your work. Maybe you cannot see it now, but later, you will realise, “Oh, this is what” – it takes time to understand what you are doing. Again, I consider this as an opportunity for the students to be involved in this situation. The other part is, in addition to the workshop on teaching methods, we are also working with community members about the different lessons that we are putting into this grammar. How can we do this? Or how do we do this? Or how do we say this? Basic expressions.

Gretchen: So, if you wanna have a lesson about foods, you wanna make sure you’re using the foods that are in the local area that they wanna be able to talk about not some sort of food that nobody’s actually eating in this place.

Pedro: Exactly. But again, just by doing that, it’s a long process. It has been a long process. We have been working on this grammar, I think, more than a year, and we are not even done. But still, that is helping us to understand how to work with the community, but at the same time, how to work with the elders who have the knowledge of the language, for example. I was telling some of the colleagues a while ago saying that, okay, I was asked whether this pedagogical grammar will be going on under review. I said, “Well, it’s going under review at the moment with the elders.”

Gretchen: Right. It’s not necessarily going under peer review by academics, you’re having the true experts, which is the elders, look at it and say, “What do we think? Do we think this is a reasonable reflection of our language?” How is it like for you as a speaker of a different Mayan language to go into a different community? Do you think this makes it complicated for you or interesting?

Pedro: It’s really interesting for me because I always consider this as an opportunity to work with another group of Mayan speakers but also an opportunity to help them because, I mean, as Mayan speakers or as Indigenous speakers, for example, we go through the same situation. For me, it’s really important to consider that. But I also feel like I have built this good relationship with them and to work in this project. But one thing that I would like to mention is that even though I am a Mayan speaker, even though I am from Guatemala, one thing that I have tried to emphasise is like, showing respect for them. Again, they are different cultures. I mean, we’re Mayan, but our way of living is not the same. I think I try to respect that, like, yes, I am from there, but that doesn’t mean I have impulse things.

Gretchen: It doesn’t mean you know everything already.

Pedro: No, no, no, no. I always say this – I am also learning with them. I am helping. We are developing this project. But we are learning together. That’s the approach I take when working on these kinds of projects.

Gretchen: And you’re also coming in with the backing of a big Canadian research institution and this sort of stuff which puts you in a different situation.

Pedro: I think it’s a lot of responsibility. I think one thing that I am learning is that, yes, we have to do language revitalisation, but I think there’s another component that we have to consider that’s about the research aspect of that. One thing that I noticed about what I am doing is working in the infrastructure of the project, building that relationship, working with elders, working with the different activists in the language, for example. I think that’s the first step. Now, we are doing this, but as for research, you asked me, I don’t have much to say, but again, I think building that infrastructure, it takes time. But if I try to think a little bit more, I would say, well, we have some results of this project. I could mention two. One of them is that we have trained some speakers of the language about the teaching method. They are using this method to teach the language. We are about to finish up this pedagogical grammar for the language. I think those can be considered as “results.”

Gretchen: That’s balancing the way that you have to talk to funding agencies and universities and these bodies that care about results that you can report in a list somewhere while also saying, “Okay, but we actually care about the results that the community members care about, which is having more people able to speak the language,” which is not actually what the research institutions are trying to fund. So, there’s lots of different people who have different priorities that you’re trying to balance between.

Pedro: But for me, that’s an opportunity of how to communicate those ideas and how to make that balance. Sure, research will come. Research will grow.

Gretchen: But the relationship –

Pedro: But the question, “Is it easy to start?” It will take a little bit of time. I think one of the things I would like to mention here, a “keyword,” I would say, is to be patient. Sometimes, we want to see really fast.

Gretchen: Results really fast, yeah.

Pedro: It takes time, yeah. That’s one thing that I see. I also see that this project will grow, and I think there will be more students who will be more interested in working in the project. That’s my hope.

Gretchen: I hope so, too. If people wanna know more information about Q’anjob’al or Chuj or any of the other research that’s being done on Mayan languages, is there somewhere where they should start for more information?

Pedro: I think if you are interested to know more about, in this case, the work that I do, I would recommend exploring my personal website. You can go to linguistics, the University of Toronto, and then you will find my personal website.

Gretchen: We’ll link to that from the description as well so people can follow that for more information.

Pedro: Thank you.

Gretchen: If you could leave people knowing one thing about linguistics, what would that be?

Pedro: That’s a good question. I would like to say the following – when you do linguistics, it’s good to start with something small. It’s good that you start with that something small and then start asking questions that maybe you don’t have answer to that question, but you will find answers to that question. I hope I can connect that or relate that to what I mentioned in the discussion that we had today. Remember, I said that I started studying the verb in Q’anjob’al – and I am not done exploring that. Start with something small. But the other thing is that, yes, as a linguist, for example, or as a researcher, you have your own agenda, but try to reflect a little bit about, also, the community’s agenda and the community’s needs. I think that’s important to have that in mind and also important for you to build a relationship with that community that you are working with.

[Music]

Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get redesigned IPA posters, “Not Judging Your Grammar, Just Analysing It” stickers, t-shirts that say, “Etymology isn’t Destiny,” and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and my book about internet language is called Because Internet. Lauren tweets and blogs as Superlinguo. Our guest, Pedro Mateo Pedro, can be found at pedromateopedro.ca. Lingthusiasm is able to keep existing thanks to the support of our patrons. If you wanna get an extra Lingthusiasm episode to listen to every month, our entire archive of bonus episodes to listen to right now, or if you just wanna help keep the show running ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include an interview about what it's like to transcribe all of the Lingthusiasm episodes as a linguist, using linguistics in the workplace beyond academia, and a very special Lingthusiasmr bonus episode where we read The Harvard Sentences to you [ASMR voice] in a calm, soothing voice. [Normal voice] Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s curious about language. Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Pedro: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[dnpanimationstudioclone]

Meet Baxter🐟🧪

Meet my take on Baxter, an old Vivziepop character shown in the past, at the moment a background character in the show, many believe he could join due to concept art and suppose scrapped episode concepts online. In my take, I’m making him part of the group! Ngl his designs been one of my favs because of the fish motif and color scheme.

Here’s a link for his Wiki page Info. Baxter

Character:

I can see my Baxter act as the Hotel’s medical expert. Perhaps the closest so far they have to a medical professional. He dabbles a lot in Biomedical/Chemsitry science in contrast to Pentious who’s more of an inventor. Fun fact, Baxter also died in the 1900’s and his names of English origins so he and Pen could’ve known eachother! Supposedly Bax died via boating incident, drowning.

I can imagine Charlie got him to join, speaking to his scientific interests, making him invested in the hotel as one of his newest and greatest experiments yet. Can a Sinner be redeemed and go to Heaven?

I def want him and Sir P to become science buddies and do all kinds of crazy experiments. I can see him be a mix of Kreiger from Archer , Abed from Community along with some bits of what he’s supposedly like from the wiki. I can see him have a voice like Richard Steven Horvitz(Invader Zim, also does Moxxie in Helluva Boss), Paul Rugg(Freakazoid) or perhaps David Tennants Voice(Dr. Who!) “ Baxter's personality is considered still in development, but Vivziepop likens him to the character Myron Reducto from the show Harvey Birdman in his mannerisms. He is a screechy, neurotic, fidgety, anti-social "gremlin" and an all-round mess. He is introverted and wants nothing to do with anyone, preferring to do science alone in peace”.

Abed clips.

Design:

His design has always been one of my favourites, especially because of the color scheme, the fish theme and blues are amazing!

Made his eyes dark for a flowy effect and to make them more fish like.

Removed the red ❤️

Added wet marks on his coat aswell as some tatter.

Added webbing for her gloves and feet protection.

Made his hat more like a bowler/derby hat. Was popular 1900’s style.

Added more bioluminescence. Added a gradient affect with the fins.

For my Gang I’m going for a rainbow motif, he represents Blue as he’s a sea creature and the color blue can often symbolize intelligence but also things such as stubbornness and timidity.💙🌈

Gave him more an underbite. I can imagine in his full demon form it becomes bigger with more teeth sticking out and more eery glow!

Added lil nostrils.

Made his hair more fin like!!!!

Fun fact, Only female Anglerfish have the lights. TRANS BAXTER 🏳️‍⚧️ ⚧️ . I can also see him be Intersex and mainly goes by He/him pronouns. here’s Baxter concept art. He’s the guy in blue.

I’ve also done some of the rest of the gang such as Alastor(links for the others in his page) and even other characters such as Mimzy who was also once suppose to be a main character.

What do u think? Do u think he’d be a great part of the cast? I’d love to know💖