#for the purpose of this post those are just simplified examples

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

the thing with the "not like one of these store-bought types" is

ok so like. have any of you ever been in a casual group conversation, like with a group of friends or classmates or something. and it's like, one guy talking with multiple girls. or one straight person talking to multiple gay people. or one cis person talking to multiple trans people. or one white person talking to multiple people of color. basically Person With X Privilege talking with a group of people who don't have that privilege.

and someone from the bigger group makes a dig at the Person With X Privilege, but like, in an accurate way? like, a woman making a joke about how the one guy in the group doesn't have to worry about walking home at night by themselves, or a gay person making a joke about how the one straight person was allowed to take their date to prom and nobody else in the group was, etc etc etc? and then the group of people laughs?

if you've ever been in that sort of situation, you know the Person With X Privilege has a choice: either laugh along with them, or get defensive. and the correct choice is to laugh along. by making the joke about X Privilege right in front of the Person With X Privilege, the group is giving the Person a chance to prove that they have a baseline level of awareness about their privilege.

not that laughing along makes Person With X Privilege like, One Of The Good Ones or anything, but it shows the group that they're self-aware enough to recognize that they have X Privilege and they're not going to try and deny it or argue about it. (and we're all familiar with those conversations, right? the "not all men" argument? like, a joke about white privilege gets countered by a white person being like "well, i'm also a woman!" or "i grew up poor!" or "my best friend is Black!" trying to distance themselves from their white privilege instead of just laughing along and agreeing with the simple fact that yes, I have white privilege, it's true)

when calico jack said "That's a real pirate! Not like one of these store-bought types," that's the social interaction he was setting up. people don't become pirates by choice, they do it because they have no other choice—everyone on stede's crew is there because they can't make a living elsewhere. stede is the only one there who was born into wealth and still has all his wealth. that's a privilege nobody else on the ship has.

and instead of laughing with them, shrugging it off, stede got defensive. only instead of arguing that he is a real pirate, he tried to argue that jack isn't. and lucius is right: it is a bitchy question! from the perspective of the crew (who weren't all around for jack and stede's first two interactions, first on the deck and then at breakfast), jack just gave stede an opportunity to laugh along with the group. and rather than be cool about it, stede got defensive and bitchy.

(not that jack was being genuine in any way. there's no way the tears are authentic. it's questionable if he's telling the truth about his crew mutinying three times in the past year. he's not actually giving stede an opportunity to laugh along with the crew, he's setting stede up to be defensive so he can make stede look bad. but that doesn't make what he said about "store-bought pirates" any less true.)

[avelera]

Ugh, sorry, one last political point because it’s the day for it and this is bugging me.

Democrats and people on the left in the US have got to knock it off with this whole, “All Trump voters are obviously stupid” thing.

I’m sure it’s satisfying to believe, but it is simply not true, and making assumptions about your opponents that aren’t true is how you lose elections.

Half of the voting population of this country is not stupid and it is ludicrous to insist on believing that. Trump voters include doctors, lawyers, business owners, people with PhDs and graduate degrees, and people who attend college courses for fun. They are, unfortunately for many of us including yours truly, our parents and relatives and I at least know for a fact in those cases that they are well educated, well traveled people.

Assuming these people are just stupid and uninformed is, in fact, stupid. It a simplistic view of the world that is going to make your platforms lose if you embrace it and refuse to look deeper.

In practice, people engage in politics because they want the greatest happiness and prosperity for the largest number of people that they care about.

Everything after that is just haggling over price.

For example, the Left/Democrats might believe that the great amount of happiness and prosperity is brought to the largest number of people they care about when an advanced degree is available to everyone without leaving them in crippling debt, when people can age with social services that allow them dignity, when billionaires and companies cannot exploit their workers, and when peace and just causes are allowed to flourish around the world, including the education and enfranchisement of women, and the long term health of our planet. I personally believe that brings long term prosperity to us all.

Left and Right wing voters right now both probably agree that everyone is happier and more prosperous if they can afford a house and have a job that covers their needs and then some. How to get to that is the sticking point that they disagree on.

Right wing voters also want prosperity for themselves and those they care for and what they disagree on with the Left is how to achieve that. I’m not going to go into their platforms here because the whole point of this post is not assuming things about your opponents.

Now in order to persuade people to hold more Left leaning views, you need to make the case for why what you care about is a thing that they should care about and, more importantly, how it enhances the happiness and prosperity of them and those they care about.

Otherwise, you are asking them to vote against their own interests, which no one engages in politics to do, at least not on purpose (even if it is the ultimate outcome in many cases).

If you don’t care about making this argument to opposite side, then fine, you’ve already lost and you deserve to keep losing elections.

You deserve to lose because you’re not making a case for why anyone should support your causes in order to gain happiness and prosperity for themselves and those they care about, including expanding the field of people they care about, and it is ludicrous to expect people to do that without being persuaded either intellectually or emotionally.

This is what finding common ground and building coalitions is about, even if you don’t agree on every point. And if you self isolate and stick to your purity, you deserve to lose because politics is about how we govern large groups of people towards a common goal that, ultimately, is best simplified as the goal of their greatest happiness and prosperity.

Good faith politics is negotiating over what that means. Because resources are finite we can’t all get everything we want all at once. And not everyone agrees on everything so you need to prioritize the best possible allotment of happiness and prosperity for the short and long term, and that’s when we get into the nitty gritty of all the horse trading that happens in politics etc etc.

And you get into things like billionaires having outsized ability to enact their own happiness and prosperity but here’s the thing, many people especially on the right go along with those views because they believe (rightfully or not) that those goals will increase their own happiness and prosperity as well and if you don’t agree you’ve got to explain to them intellectually or emotionally why that is and provide and alternate platform or path for them to gain it that is more effective by at least some measure of that value.

Anyway, at the risk of this becoming a political science thesis from someone who isn’t a political scientist, just an amateur academic, tl;dr please knock it off with assuming everyone who disagrees with you is stupid, it is a losing proposition and it doesn’t get us anywhere near the goals we want to achieve politically, ie, the greatest happiness and long term prosperity of the people we care about.

[cripplecharacters]

Hi! I was actually wondering if you all could do a really in-depth post specifically on canes versus forearm crutches. I’ve noticed a couple of the recent asks pertain to it, and I think I myself still have one in the queue related to it, but in all of the posts y’all link us too in your answers to those asks, I have found the information is still very sparse and doesn’t directly compare the two in a lot of detail. I would really really love to see a specific dedicated post that breaks down the differences Between them directly, and goes into a lot more detail about what kind of person might prefer a cane and what kind of person might prefer forearm crutches. Differences in conditions, pain levels, fatigue levels, location of issue on their body, other symptoms, examples of disabilities that might more commonly default to one over the other, all that stuff. I’ve looked through basically all your posts on the subject I can find, and still feel like it’s really only scratching the surface, so if there’s a way y’all would be willing to do one big post on this topic specifically, I know at least I would really love it and I think others would as well! Most of the existing posts are a little too broad and surface level, and while I have found them super helpful as a starting point, I would love to see one that zooms in just on these two mobility aids rather than a broad overview of all types of mobility aids being compared like most of the existing resources y’all have. Seriously love what you all do and I would be extremely grateful for this!

Hey anon, just for you:

On Writing Characters Using Canes vs Crutches

[large text: On Writing Characters Using Canes vs Crutches]

This is a writing advice post that doesn't cover every single possibility because that's too impossible to try and do. It's simplified to be coherent for writers who have little to no experience with these sorts of mobility aids, and I encourage anyone who wants to write a character using either of these to treat this post as a small part of a larger research process. This post will contain generalizations for the purpose of me wanting to actually finish it. This is writing advice, not medical information, nor something you should be applying to real life.

Please keep in mind that a lot of the disability examples will only be shown in a single category because otherwise this would be a comical block of text. So yes, I know that a ton of conditions outside the "chronic pain" category also come with chronic pain, but I want this list to be actually easy to look through.

This will compare the cane (singular stick) to crutches (two sticks). Differences between a singular crutch and two canes will be at the end.

Canes

[large text: Canes]

The most primitive mobility aid that's out there. A wrist-height stick with a handle. An incredible invention. You hold it in your hand (at a rather natural angle) and that's mostly it - it's meant to follow a standard (left leg forward, right arm forward) gait and be a support meant for generally milder mobility issues. A cane can take up to 25% of body weight, so like half of what a leg does.

As a TLDR, here's what they could be:

One leg unable to bear the entire weight (but not completely unable) - this could be a result of a problem anywhere from the bottom of the foot all the way to the hip.

Milder balance problems - largely neurological, so either a condition that affects the brain, the spinal cord, or the nerves in the leg. There are also some autoimmune, respiratory, and cardiovascular causes as well, plus a few more.

Back/trunk problems, most commonly pain.

To use a cane you need two legs, most people who use canes for leg reasons will have a “good leg” and a “bad leg”. If this is the case, you'd typically hold the cane on the good leg side, as that redistributes the weight - and pain - between the bad leg and the cane.

The good leg needs to be able to bear the whole weight comfortably, the bad leg needs to be able to bear, at the very least, half of the weight. If the disability affects legs to the point where either:

both have problems weight-bearing;

one can't bear weight at all (e.g., amputation, flaccid paralysis, pain too severe);

then two crutches (or other mobility aid, like a wheelchair) would be the move. The cane doesn't replace an entire leg and is meant to be a minor support.

Examples of what would cause someone to use a cane:

Monoplegia or hemiplegia that is spastic (rigid) in the leg. This could be a result of stroke, traumatic brain injury, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, nerve damage, Brown-Séquard syndrome, polio, encephalitis, transverse myelitis, progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, alternating hemiplegia of childhood, hemiplegic migraines, or being a hemispherectomy survivor. And many more things.

Chronic pain; arthritis, hypermobility spectrum disorders, chronic patellar instability, h-EDS, neuropathy, peripheral artery disease, past injuries (e.g., broken foot that healed incorrectly), systemic lupus erythematosus, joint replacement, chronic bursitis, and a lot more.

Relatively minor fatigue - most fatigue disorders will be on a wide spectrum, and people's symptoms often vary a lot. But a cane could help with fibromyalgia, Charcot Marie Tooth disease, POTS, scoliosis, severe kyphosis/lordosis, COPD (and other respiratory conditions), or milder forms of CFS/ME. Someone undergoing chemotherapy (or taking some other fatigue-causing medication) could also use one.

Muscle conditions, which are an even bigger spectrum. Spinal muscular atrophy type 3 and 4, early Limb-Girdle muscular dystrophy, tibial MD, Becker MD, or early myotonic dystrophy type 2 can all be reasons to use a cane. Keep in mind that these have drastically different presentations from person to person, and it's not entirely unusual for two people with the same kind of muscular dystrophy to use very different mobility aids (e.g., a tilt-in-space powerchair vs ...no aid at all). These are just the ones where I'm aware of a person who 1) has it, 2) uses a cane, even if it's not the most common aid.

Prosthetic leg on one side; usually below knee (high level amputees will more often go for crutches, even if they use a prosthetic).

The second biggest reason why people use a cane is balance. For this the cane can be held in either hand; some people have a preference, generally for the non-dominant hand for convenience - although many people with balance problems will also have a coordination disorder that might make using their non-dominant hand too difficult. Some people will switch the side they hold it on.

For a lot of people with balance problems, a cane might be the aid they use at home, and use a rollator or a wheelchair outside.

A good cane for balance purposes is a quad cane - it has four legs at the bottom and offer more stability than the single point equivalent. However, the larger base might also mean that for some people it can be easier to hit it with their foot, which ranges from annoying to dangerous.

Examples of disabilities that affect balance;

Many of the things included in the first section - primarily those that directly affect the brain or nerves.

Conditions that cause vertigo - again, many of the same things as before because a lot of them tend to originate in the brain. So other than aforementioned meningitis or stroke and the like: Ramsay Hunt syndrome, migraines, basically any sort of brain damage, POTS, Meniere's disease, labyrinthitis.

Respiratory problems, like chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, severe asthma, or lupus.

Coordination disorders - again, a lot of overlap with aforementioned disabilities, so I'll skip to things I haven't mentioned yet. Ataxia could be caused by a lot of things; some include the Chiari malformation, ataxia-telangiectasia, Friedrich's ataxia, Parkinson's, brain tumors, or Niemann-Pick disease. Dystonia is usually a primary condition rather than being caused by other things (although it can be). Dyspraxia is also a coordination disorder generally milder than ataxia, and canes can be potentially helpful for it as well.

As mentioned before, some coordination disorders will affect the upper limbs as well, and it might be too difficult to use a cane. For disabilities like Huntington’s disease, or ataxia that significantly affects the hands, rollators and wheelchairs tend to be more helpful.

Anything that causes the person to fall. Fall risk is the primary reason people use canes.

A cane can also be used for back/trunk issues. One can lift off some weight of the body from above the Problem by putting the weight on the arm instead. I have really severe kyphosis as well as (partial) trunk muscle atrophy/coordination problems and quite literally can't straighten my back for more than a few minutes at most - my cane allows me to do that more easily and without needing to think about it as much.

Examples of some conditions that cause that include;

sciatica;

degenerative disk disease;

past spine injury;

scoliosis or severe kyphosis/lordosis.

In my experience, you need fairly good arm strength to use a cane comfortably. For people with more significant weakness in upper limbs, rollators tend to work better.

Grip strength is also important; there are canes designed to mitigate this (the platform cane/crutch comes to mind) but they're not the most common because often (not always) when someone has this issue they already require a larger mobility aid.

Canes are often a "starting" mobility aid, i.e., a person starts using it at first but later transitions to using something else as their disability progresses (or they realize that it wasn't adequate in the first place, it mostly happens with slowly progressive conditions - when they decide to get a cane, it's often just too late). A cane can be useful at the very start of an onset of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, but it's basically worthless beyond that.

Similarly (kind of), a cane can be the "smaller" mobility aid for someone who uses multiple of them at the same time. Someone dealing with fatigue could use a cane at home, but need a rollator for going out, or a wheelchair for longer trips. Another person could use a cane when going out with a prosthetic leg on, but use a wheelchair or crutches at home when not wearing the prosthetic.

Crutches

[large text: Crutches]

These are more complex and provide more help. Crutches directly affect your gait depending on the exact disability, and take away both hands. They can potentially take up to 100% of body weight for parts of the walking cycle if you have good upper body strength and balance, and 50% otherwise (so, one good or two half-good legs still required).

Crutches are used for a lot of things (realistically too many to cover here) so I'll just go with the main categories that encompass most of them.

A) Both legs can't fully bear weight;

The same things as in the cane section, but present on both sides rather than one.

Hypotonia; can be caused by thousands of things. Some include Down syndrome, Tay-Sachs syndrome, achondroplasia, being born prematurely, brain damage, and congenital hypothyroidism.

Paraplegia that's low-level and/or incomplete, or quadriplegia that's incomplete. Quadriplegia is a huge spectrum as well, and it will depend on the amount of strength and flexibility that the individual person has in their arms and hands.

Bilateral amputation with prosthetics. (Someone who can bear weight no problem but has a milder balance problem could use a cane instead.)

B) One leg can't bear any or a lot of weight;

The same things as in the cane section, they're basically all on a spectrum, so some people choose a cane and others choose crutches.

Unilateral amputation, or congenital limb difference.

Limb length discrepancy where it doesn't touch the ground or barely does so.

C) Significant balance issues;

Same things as for canes, but either more severe or just someone's personal preference.

D) Back/trunk pain;

Same as C).

Additional note based on things I have seen: you can't use crutches if you have no legs and no prosthetics. You can't walk literally just on crutches. You need at least a single leg or prosthetic.

(Yeah I'm aware that there's probably a guy somewhere who does tricks where he does exactly that for a short video. That's Crutches Georg and he should not be counted because 99.9% of crutches users won't be doing that ever.)

Crutches will provide much more stability and relieve more pressure than a cane, but there is a wide range of the amount of support depending on how they are utilized.

What the disability is can actually present itself in the person's gait - there are a few main ones that are associated with crutches;

Four-point. The two legs and two crutches work as four different points of support, and three of them are in contact with the ground at any time. A lot (not all) of people who use it will use crutches full-time and/or not be able to stand without them. The most stable and the slowest out of all of these.

Three-point. Probably the one most people have in mind when thinking crutches. The crutches both move at the same time, along with the bad leg, then the good leg follows. This is the "broken leg in a cast" way of walking.

Two-point. The closest to how non-crutch users generally walk. It's like having a cane on each side; left crutch forward, right leg forward. Fairly fast.

Step-to. The crutches work as one point of contact, and the legs as the other - both of each will move forward at the same time. In the step-to, a person puts their feet at the crutches' height. Fairly fast as well.

and step-through. I'd say the most difficult, least stable, providing the least amount of support. The same as in step-to, both crutches go forward before both legs, however here the legs get swung through them while the person is only holding up on crutches. This is the fastest that it gets, and can definitely be faster than an abled person walking. You can run quickly like this.

If you have issues visualizing them, there are a lot of great demonstrations on YouTube that you can look up for clarification.

There are a lot of subtle differences in which one people end up using, but as a rule of thumb, the more balance they lack, the more points of support they need. To provide some examples;

a person with quadriplegic cerebral palsy might lack balance and coordination, so they might use a four-point gait.

A person with one-sided tarsal tunnel syndrome can walk with a three-point gait, as it can be used to mitigate weight-bearing fully or partially - if the pain gets worse, they can just not touch the ground with that leg.

A person with incomplete thoracic spinal cord injury could also work with a three point gait, though they would put both legs on the ground. If someone has good strength in the arms and trunk, they can get both crutches in the front along with one leg, then try to get the second one to go forward as well. This is how a lot of crutch users with a disability affecting two legs, but with decent balance and upper body strength, walk.

A person who had a traumatic brain injury and now experiences balance problems but not as much leg issues could opt for a two-point gait. It does help with weight redistribution, but primarily provides a lot of balance.

Both step-to and step-through are primarily used by single-leg problem havers (like unilateral amputees) in my experience, but I've seen people with diplegia or incomplete low-level spastic paraplegia use it too. You need very good balance and good upper body strength. I've seen dudes do backflips and ride skateboards on crutches like this. You can run as well and be way faster than you think.

The same as canes, crutches require arm strength. The more you're looking to take away from the legs, the more will go to the shoulders. If someone doesn't have the needed arm strength, a rollator will be more helpful. Walkers not so much as they still require some strength to turn.

More Direct Comparisons

[large text: More Direct Comparisons]

The differences between pain and fatigue levels might be somewhat evident from comparing the sections above - to generalize the subject as much as possible: the bigger the pain or the fatigue, the higher possibility of using crutches over a cane is. They provide more relief for both, as well as providing more balance.

Now, there's always exceptions. Someone might not be able to use two sticks, because of a disability affecting one of the arms - hemiplegia is a common example. In this case, the person could prefer to use a single crutch rather than two. They could opt for platform crutches, which don't require as secure of a grip. They might need a rollator instead. They might have a powerchair that they operate with their good arm.

Another thing is that some people will use crutches even if a cane would work just as well. Some people like the grip more, or find them easier to use. They could also like that crutches are seen as more medical than a cane, which could be seen as a fashion accessory. Maybe they can be faster on crutches than with a cane (e.g., if their disability is limited to a single leg, getting it out of the walk cycle might be more convenient) and that matters to them.

And to go with this, some people just don't like crutches. I personally don't like the forearm cuff because I tend to swing my wrist around with my cane rather than hold it perfectly straight, so the cuff seems annoying. For someone else that could be more than a preference, e.g. if they have a limb difference that affects the length of their forearms to be much shorter - a person like this could prefer two canes.

As to what mobility aids are better for which disabilities, it's highly individualized, but to heavily generalize again: canes tend to be more helpful for relatively milder disabilities, and crutches for relatively more significant ones based on the amount of support they provide. But that's an oversimplification so simple that it's not really useful.

Someone with neuropathy in parts of their foot might find a cane completely sufficient, but it wouldn't be as useful for someone with nerve damage that caused flaccid paralysis from the hip down; they would probably prefer crutches. But then again, someone with mild vertigo could use crutches because they prefer them (even if a cane would work just fine) while someone else might have incomplete C6 quadriplegia and use a cane with leg braces over crutches because they enjoy having a free hand.

For more similarities between the two; overuse injuries can happen to both cane and crutch users, generally in the shoulder(s). They're not very common unless you're putting more weight on them than you're supposed to. They're very annoying because it drastically tanks your mobility until they get better (unless you can walk without them just as much that is), but they're treatable with physical therapy.

Now for the two canes and a singular crutch. Let's start with the fact that the latter is infinitely more popular than the former. It's basically the same as a single cane but more supportive; it's good for people who need more balance than a cane provides but can't use both hands. Two canes is very rare and I can't tell you what the actual pattern of choosing them over other options is outside of personal preference because I have no idea.

The general conclusion of the post is that crutches and canes really aren't that different, and are more of a spectrum of usable sticks by the amount of support they provide to the user. That's why often you'll see canes and crutches listed as the same thing when it comes to "management of XYZ disability" type resources - for a lot of them they're rather similar in practice, especially when compared to rollators, walkers, scooters, or wheelchairs.

I hope this was more in depth and therefore more helpful, if this still leaves you with some unanswered question feel free to reach out again.

mod Sasza

[meraki-sunset]

so your crow strider au gave me inspiration for my own au, but i've built up the idea in my brain so much that now im scared to try to put it to paper (oops) did you ever deal with this while making crow strider? (and if you did, how you got over it would be much appreciated thanks fhdjks) also your art is cool :]

Hi, sure, i encountered a few blocks when writing CSAU and other projects. I think my method comes down to a couple rules

You need to know how the story ends from the start, so everything in the story leads to the end. Things can change about the contents of the story as you write it and you change your mind about the events that will transpire in it, but you need an end goal you can build your story towards. Most importantly, this is what allows you to add foreshadowing for said ending and structure the narrative in a clear direction. Otherwise, you might come up with a cool ending too late and regret some choices from past chapters that now don’t help this new ending you want

On that same note (and i’ll proceed to copy and paste from an old post) You need to have a Word document with a rough timeline of the events from start to finish. You need to know how it ends from the beginning and how they get there. It can be really, really vague, but it has to be there. It can go like

. They start the game, the trolls bother them.

.both games go to hell

.scratch

.trip, develop relationships

.new set of kids/teen drama

.old kids they get there

.to hell again

.John retcons everything

.new timeline

.they win

And that's homestuck simplified, Those are your Acts. With them, you will know where you're going and if you need to change something earlier. Everything will be constantly up to change of course, but you will be going from point A to point Z more easily.

From there, you go to every point in that list and create a Word document for all of them. I have them in different folders to have every act separated and in order.

A folder for each Doc for every Act, Numbered, and in each one make more lists like that one telling what happens, for example

WordDoc1 - ACT 1 "They start the game, the trolls bother them"=

.John needs to get his game

.introduce Rose

.introduce the trolls on pester chats

. John gets the game

.introduce Dave

.etc

And those are your chapters. Now you can know the extent of what you want to do and if it makes any sense.

I addition to that, every Folder can contain not only the Word document for the Act but also relevant texts and art that are connected to the Act, so evey folder is all about that specific act and any inspiration for it.

Another piece of advice I can give you is to hint at anything important. That's a rule of comedy; actually, the comedian usually closes the show with something related to the first things they said.

That works for everything, and makes people go, "Oh the thing! The meaningless thing they said earlier, it was a clue all along!"

Interconnect it like a web, and that web will stop the story from falling

Homestuck is so ridiculously interconnected that you lose track of the stuff and objects that repeat that have no way to be where they got to be, songs and people and events that are too similar to not be connected but nobody addresses, things like that make it feel like you're dealing with a universe and not just a line of events.

3. Yet another thing, it's something I'm still trying to assimilate, and is that less is more, sometimes things don't need to be said, specialy not bluntly, and an expression, a gesture, a flinch can summarize them. Backgrounds can be reduced, and ideas can be conveyed.

one example is, In homestuck, it's never said that Dave was raised with lack of food. He never sais it, but it's shown in how happy he was to find a warm bottle of juice in his closet, how there is only weapons on the kitchen and no sign of food, how he later sais he never learned what the purpose of a fridge was until he saw it on tv. If someone is lacking something, don't have them say, "i grew up without X thing" show what filled that space in the absence of X thing.

Instead of some character saying, "My dad was never there for christmas" have them say how they thrited for presents at the local goodwill, payed with their lawn mowing money and put the presents under the tree themselves for their siblings and mom.

4. Something that I always have in mind when writing the dialogs and sketching the scenes, is

"I have an idea; what's the easiest way for someone to get the idea, to get the feelings i want to transmit from the idea?" I made the art something I could handle drawing hundreds of times, simplified the coloring, the aspect symbols, the way I draw backgrounds, the way I write dialogs, etc.

That will save you time and work and could prevent you from getting stuck with a project too big to handle

5. This is the most important one: The first draft’s only purpose is to exist.

Writing is like playing darts sometimes; you only get closer to hitting the center by missing it and learning what not to do. That’s an actual rule on animation and a motto on the Disney office. “Get it wrong as quick as you can,” because when you learn what you’re doing wrong is when you start learnign what doing it right means.

If it helps, title your first draft “the dumb version,” because that’s what it is—the version to get the idea out of your head, and then you built over it.

On the same note, once you write "the dumb version" don’t correct it. Rewrite it. It’s annoying, I know, i know, but fixing and fixing a text only carries the mistakes from the first draft, and everything looks kind of disconnected, because it ends up being a Frankenstein text of all the versions of the story mixed together.

This also applies to art; that’s how I handle both writing and drawing; if it’s not working, hold onto the core idea, new page, restart.

Rewriting it puts it in perspective; it feels like a text of its own, with a clear intent in mind.

I think that’s all I have. Making a story is mostly about managing your strengths and weaknesses, organizing and not being scared of it not being perfect.

Hope this helps.

[cherryfennec]

Okay I love your most recent art work of Mario and Mr. L!!! I’m just curious how on earth did you draw their hats so well?? Especially the brim of their hats?! Hats are the one thing I struggle with when drawing them! I can’t make it look believable!

Hi! First of all thank you for the kind words, I'm glad you like the art! Now as for hats (more specifically Mario and Luigis type) there can be different ways you might go about drawing them.

(I should probably mention at the beginning that I am not an expert and sometimes struggle myself as well. Despite this I'll try my best to explain how I usually approach it.)

Let's start with brims because they seem the most problematic (as I see it.)

What I'm going to talk about might already be intuitive for a lot of people, including myself, however I thought it'd be a good idea to break down the mindset so everyone is on the same page and those who have trouble seeing it can hopefully understand stuff better.

First it's obviously the idea. No real details, just the general idea. With it we'll be able to establish the basic rules for what you're drawing, most importantly the angle and perspective.

Now this is going to be pretty self explanatory but: if I'm drawing a character looking up I know that the bottom of the brim will be visible, if the characters looking down it won't and etc. An easy way to check which parts of the brim will be visible from a specific view point is to imagine it as a slab.

Now this isn't anything mind blowing, I know, but saying this out loud can be handy and save you some overthinking.

Alright, let's talk about the hat itself now!

In most of the pictures I could find of the bros hats they're divided into two parts: the front, which is taller and slightly spiked up, and the back, which is noticeably shorter. Now this kinda goes back to the idea of simplifying shapes:

At some point it unfortunately becomes rather difficult to explain why some stuff is drawn the way it is because it's kinda justified by: "that's how the real life counterparts act". Above everything I highly recommend references, both irl and ingame ones. It's not embarrassing to use them, trust me, no one will criticise you and they'll help!

Now that we got the brim and the hat, let's put the two together!

There isn't really a strict order of how you should draw things, everyone has different preferences and processes which should be taken into consideration. For example, I personally like to draw the entire head before I touch on the cap:

(I added the hair and colours for the sole purpose of this post, this process is usually done during rough sketching.)

This way I have a point of reference where the brim ends (right before the ear for me) and where I should place the middle line on the cap (it's a bit of a stylistic choice than anything but it also lets me know where the fold will be). You can find your own way and make your own rules and with time the process will get much easier! I hope this somewhat helps.

Just practice, have patience, experiment and most importantly: have fun!

[3liza]

thank you for speaking rational thought AS AN ARTIST into the ai debate. i get so tired of people over simplifying, generalizing, and parroting how they’ve been told ai works lmao. you’re an icon

some of the worst AI art alarmists are professional artists as well but theyre in very specific fields with very specific work cultures and it would take a long and boring post to explain all the nuance there but i went to the same extremely tiny, hypefocused classic atelier school in San Francisco as Karla Ortiz and am actually acquainted with her irl so i have a different perspective on this particular issue and the people involved than the average fan artist on tumblr. the latter person is also perfectly valid and so is their work, all im saying is that we have different life experiences and my particular one has accidentally placed me in a weird and relevant position to observe what the AI art panic is actually about.

first thing i did when the pearl-clutching about AI art started is go on the Midjourney discord, which is completely public and free, and spent a few burner accounts using free credits to play with the toolset. everyone who has any kind of opinion about AI art should do the same because otherwise you just wont know what youre talking about. my BIGGEST takeaway is that it is currently and likely always will be (because of factors that are sort of hard to explain) extremely difficult to make an AI like Midjourney spit out precisely wht you want UNLESS what you want is the exact kind of hyperreal, hyperpretty Artstation Front Page 4k HDR etc etc style pictures that, coincidentally, artists like Karla Ortiz have devoted their careers to. Midjourney could not, when asked, make a decent Problem Glyph. or even anything approaching one. and probably never will, because there isn't any profit incentive for it to do so and probably not enough images to train a dataset anyway.

the labor issues with AI are real, but they are the result of the managerial class using AI's existence as an excuse to reduce compensation for labor. this happens at every single technological sea change and is unstoppable, and the technology itself is always blamed because that is beneficial to the capitalists who are actually causing the labor crisis each time. if you talk to the artists who are ACTUALLY already being affected, they will tell you what's happening is managers are telling them to insert AI into workflows in ways that make no sense, and that management have fully started an industry-wide to "pivot" to AI production in ways that aren't going to work but WILL result in mass loss of jobs and productivty and introduce a lot of problems which people will then be hired to try to fix, but at greatly-reduced salaries. every script written and every picture generated by an AI, without human intervention/editing/cleanup, is mostly unusable for anything except a few very specific use cases that are very tolerant of generality. i'm seeing it being used for shovelware banner ads, for example, as well as for game assets like "i need some spooky paintings for the wall of a house environment" or "i need some nonspecific movie posters for a character's room" that indie game devs are making really good use of, people who can neither afford to hire an artist to make those assets and cant do them themselves, and if the ai art assets weren't available then that person would just not have those assets in the game at all. i've seen AI art in that context that works great for that purpose and isn't committing any labor crimes.

it is also being used for book covers by large publishing houses already, and it looks bad and resulted directly in the loss of a human job. it is both things. you can also pay your contractor for half as many man hours because he has a nailgun instead of just hammers. you can pay a huge pile of money to someone for an oil portrait or you can take a selfie with your phone. there arent that many oil painters around anymore.

but this is being ignored by people like the guy who just replied and yelled at me for the post they imagined that i wrote defending the impending robot war, who is just feeling very hysterical about existential threat and isn't going to read any posts or actually do any research about it. which is understandable but supremely unhelpful, primarily to themselves but also to me and every other fellow artist who has to pay rent.

one aspect of this that is both unequivocally True AND very mean to point out is that the madder an artist is about AI art, the more their work will resemble the pretty, heavily commercialized stuff the AIs are focused on imitating. the aforementioned Artstation frontpage. this is self-feeding loop of popular work is replicated by human artists because it sells and gets clicks, audience is sensitized to those precise aesthetics by constant exposure and demands more, AI trains on those pictures more than any others because there are more of those pictures and more URLs pointing back to those pictures and the AI learns to expect those shapes and colors and forms more often, mathematically, in its prediction models. i feel bad for these people having their style ganked by robots and they will not be the only victims but it is also true, and has always been true, that the ONLY way to avoid increasing competition in a creative field is to make yourself so difficult to imitate that no one can actually do it. you make a deal with the devil when you focus exclusively on market pleasing skills instead of taking the massive pay cut that comes with being more of a weirdo. theres no right answer to this, nor is either kind of artist better, more ideologically pure, or more talented. my parents wanted me to make safe, marketable, hotel lobby art and never go hungry, but im an idiot. no one could have predicted that my distaste for "hyperreal 4k f cup orc warrior waifu concept art depth of field bokeh national geographic award winning hd beautiful colorful" pictures would suddenly put me in a less precarious position than people who actually work for AAA studios filling beautiful concept art books with the same. i just went to a concept art school full of those people and interned at a AAA studio and spent years in AAA game journalism and decided i would rather rip ass so hard i exploded than try to compete in such an industry.

which brings me to what art AIs are actually "doing"--i'm going to be simple in a way that makes computer experts annoyed here, but to be descriptive about it, they are not "remixing" existing art or "copying" it or carrying around databases of your work and collaging it--they are using mathematical formulae to determine what is most likely to show up in pictures described by certain prompts and then manifesting that visually, based on what they have already seen. they work with the exact same very basic actions as a human observing a bunch of drawings and then trying out their own. this is why they have so much trouble with fingers, it's for the same reason children's drawings also often have more than 5 fingers: because once you start drawing fingers its hard to stop. this is because all fingers are mathematically likely to have another finger next to them. in fact most fingers have another finger on each side. Pinkies Georg, who lives on the end of your limb and only has one neighbor, is an outlier and Midjourney thinks he should not have been counted.

in fact a lot of the current failings by AI models in both visual art and writing are comparable to the behavior of human children in ways i find amusing. human children will also make up stories when asked questions, just to please the adult who asked. a robot is not a child and it does not have actual intentions, feelings or "thoughts" and im not saying they do. its just funny that an AI will make up a story to "Get out of trouble" the same way a 4 year old tends to. its funny that their anatomical errors are the same as the ones in a kindergarten classroom gallery wall. they are not people and should not be personified or thought of as sapient or having agency or intent, they do not.

anyway. TLDR when photography was invented it became MUCH cheaper and MUCH faster to get someone to take your portrait, and this resulted in various things happening that would appear foolish to be mad about in this year of our lord 2023 AD. and yet here we are. if it were me and it was about 1830 and i had spent 30 years learning to paint, i would probably start figuring out how to make wet plate process daguerreotypes too. because i live on earth in a technological capitalist society and there's nothing i can do about it and i like eating food indoors and if i im smart enough to learn how to oil paint i can certainly point a camera at someone for 5 minutes and then bathe the resulting exposure in mercury vapor. i know how to do multiple things at once. but thats me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[rottenteeth]

It's been awhile let's talk about dissociation.

Dissociation is the act of disconnecting from ones body and or surroundings (on purpose or subconsciously). Some people are predisposed to use dissociation as a coping mechanism either due to their brain or environmental factors.

Some amount of dissociation is normal and some forms of dissociation are good to an extent.

Chronic dissociation comes into play when someone experiences an event or series of events that they do not have the ability to process. This may be due to needing to function and seem "normal", an avoidance to accepting what happened to oneself, or simply because someone does not possess other options of coping.

When a child experiences chronic dissociation ALONG with the idea that they themselves are not experiencing a trauma, their caretakers are loving most of the time, the inability to process that they are not evil, and many other forms of instability and lack of connection to trauma events they become increasingly more likely to develop dissociative identity disorder.

DID is not as complex as people make it out to be (it is complex but not incomprehensibly so). It is a way for the brain to comparmentalize many different traumas, the instability of life, and what is required of them in different situations. It is a post traumatic stress disorder with dissociation being the only coping mechanism alongside early childhood trauma.

What you as an adult/older teen consider trauma is much different than what a 5 year old considers trauma.

When your mom yells at you and says she doesn't love you sometimes and you're 5 you have no concept of what could have caused her to say that other than you are evil and horrible. As an adult maybe you see she just got a speeding ticket or her boss yelled at her or any other reason she may have lost her temper. While in no situation is this an appropriate response to stress, a child has no concept of other people's life experiences.

When you are five and you see you are not getting your needs met, you think you are evil or you are not good enough. When you are being abused it is because you think you're bad. So the brain needs to change who you are sometimes.

When moms cooking dinner don't get in her way or ask questions or she'll yell at you because you're evil = submissive depressed alter. (If you remember when mom is nice to you it might make you too comfortable so you must not remember her kindness while she's cooking)

When Mom takes you out for ice cream you need to be happy and enthusiastic or she'll yell at you = happy social alter (if you remember the trauma she gives you you can't be happy so you only have happy memories in this state)

When mom demeans your entire being you can't take that to school or your teacher will be upset you're not doing your work = school alter and a self hating alter (if you remember that you're a bad stupid child you can't function at school, those two states must be separated)

These are fairly simplified examples of why an alter may form, your memories still exist from other states. DID is NOT an encoding issue, dissociation might make it hard to encode some memories but if an alter holds memories they have been encoded and it is physically possible for every part of the brain to remember them.

Sometimes your brain doesn't want you to have access to memories that aren't important to the current situation so they must be put into a different part of the brain only to be accessed when a trigger happens.

You feel like different people because you literally do not have access to one coherent life. The memories each part holds makes up the way they act, if they mainly hold trauma they won't feel happy like an alter who holds few or no trauma memories. The world is evil to one part and loving to the next.

[supahstarrr]

rambling.

Hu's case is interesting to me because the objects associated with her (butterflies) seem to imply that her character revolves around changing & rebirth due to its symbolism, and she herself finally has the strength to speak about her secret while implying she wanted to put the secret "behind her."

This along with the chapter's themes around change/regression could hint to her "change" already happening before the killing game, similarly to Levi. Although at first I thought it would be least satisfying thing for her to be the murderer due to the symbolism and potential of her character, this "change" of hers already happening before the series taking place mean there's a more likely chance that her being the culprit can be executed in a satisfying way since the murder could act as her arc due to it being the "regression" to her "change."

This is more of an interpretation of mines, but I feel like the this regression arc of hers is more likely to happen because the series has been deconstructing that this "change" Hu implies is partially or even entirely false and struggling to occur. Her emphasis on life being fulfilling if she has a purpose (or feel useful) fuels her constant need to repress her emotions to reduce her humanity into a person who lives only to serve for others.

Thus in the process she reduces other people's humanity, speaks over them and is the negative fuel to her dynamics (Hu/Nico) & (Hu/Ace) [this example is more complex as of course Ace also the one who negativity fuels their dynamic, she surely does add to it by simplifying him as a villain than a human]. These are things that increase the unlikeness of getting outside support she needs, helping her become stuck in her chambers even more.

Her pushing aside the secret with a "putting it behind me" is although understandable due to the nature of it and her depression, the wording could be interpreted as not truly addressing her issues and the severity of her depression. I could see if she wanted to brush aside her secret if she acknowledges that it could trigger regression to recovery. Problem is that her actions so far has shown poor attempts, or hardly any attempts at all, at addressing her mental health, especially with her fixation on being useful and repressing her humanity. It doesn't seem as if she focus on recovery but more on superficial change. In a way, she constantly isolates herself from others and even herself. In way she's just developed another way to harm herself.

We genuinely cant forget that what makes her even more isolated is her preferably getting emotional connections through her idealizations of people, instead of deconstructing those standards herself. She approaches herself and others in such a shallow way. She only see people (including herself) as ideas more than genuine people, and her ideals being broken constantly isn't helping either.

There can be depth to her being the culprit other than her suicidal tendencies. She could risk being the culprit if it meant to she would go out in "glory" because she was "useful" when it came to taking Arei out. I can't pinpoint why she specifically would want to kill Arei, other than Hu desire to target her being rooted in a negative interpretation of Arei (her being the "trouble of the group"), because she wasn't there when Arei blatantly said she wanted to change.

Maybe Arei came during the wrong place wrong time, thus the murder at first was accidental before the culprit and possible accomplices decided to take the steps to make the murder seemed "planned" or "suicide." Or maybe Arei was the planned target yet the murder and planned still managed to fuck up somehow. I don't know man Okay lol. I can't explain how I feel about the murder scene, but it feels unusually sloppy yet planned at once, as if there was a sudden transition to motivates or plans or something.

The main point of this post is to see how her being a culprit could make sense for the story and her story, not really as an attempt to entirely decide that she's the culprit. I'm trying to keep my options open. Problem with deciding that she's immediately the culprit is that her words during the trial (episode 12) specifically gave an emphasis on living. Which could still mean she's involved in the murder case, but more of a planner than the one doing the killing.

Can I just go back to the symbolism for a minute. Why does she cover herself in butterflies, other than their association with femininity that she embraces in? Perhaps she admires the idea of change, but can't find the true methods to change. Maybe her covering herself in butterflies is an attempt to "force" the association with her, as a shallow attempt to say she's change without actually doing the recovery behind the change. With this "change" actually happening before the killing game, the symbolism could really be seen in a different perspective...

Semi-related but another post out there admitted that they were scared for the story, and to be honest I do too. I'm feeling too conflicted about how the story is going so far although I'm not willing to say there are writing issues yet.. im just conflicted about stuff. Okay. Okay. Okay bye im done talking.

Also, I am a little disappointed that most of the predictions of Hu being the culprit doesn't really come out of concern for her character and story, but because they don't like her. I really do feel like she's so severely misunderstood, it sucks imo.

[octosan]

Working on one of the videos for my drinking game series and I got mad and wrote a whole rant that I realized was a little too much for a drinking game post.

I just hate this script so much you guys. I hate SO MUCH how much they simplified the dialogue, the worldbuilding, the puzzle solving in this game.

I've seen a lot of complaints about fans being illiterate towards the story and to that I say of course they are! The game doesn't ask them to think! Rather than throwing up your hands saying "maybe they had a good reason to dumb down the dialogue and spoonfeed you this stuff"

consider that critical thinking is a muscle

and players do not exercise it when the game is afraid you will forget the core premises of the game, or individual missions, and so repeat them constantly.

When your companions all get along and share the same basic principles beyond bland culture differences, and their principles are all ones deemed acceptable to "modern" audiences, so you never have to think about what life experiences might have led them to feel that way.

When you have your companions constantly patting you and the other companions on the back and saying "nice job!!" in combat as if we wouldn't understand that they are friends otherwise.

When you constantly have characters make juvenile comments like "this is evil, even for the venatori!" or "they did that just for power?/greed?" or "man this makes me hate the venatori even more!" (even more?? these are fantasy nazis!!! you didn't hate them already??) and then don't give the evil factions any nuance because they're afraid you won't get that these factions are eeeeeevil. (The Venatori were never very nuanced outside Calpernia but at least there was lip service that they were a symptom of broader issues, not the convenient cause.)

When you're constantly explaining to the player how many blight pustules they still need to pop, how many crystals you have left, and oh!! the gate's open now! go through the gate! or look! there are darkspawn there where your camera is already pointed! Even late in the game they were doing this! Even at the end of Bellara's questline she was explaining that laser mechanic to me!

When they present you with lore reveals that have been highly anticipated for decades, as well as multiple memories which are meant to add to our interpretation of a core character, and they literally just tell you what to think about them and how to interpret them, at length, in that godawful regret questline. (And tbh even Solas' memories in the Crossroads did not tell me anything I did not already know)

And then Mythal saying "hey those murals are not 100% reliable memories" in a single missable dialogue option that we don't address any further, rendering even that agonizing bit of handholding pointless. Like okay what does it MATTER that they are not 100% reliable? because the redemption ending relies on your interpretations of it being 100% correct!! what purpose does that line serve except to give the writers deniability?

When you don't even bother to GIVE new worldbuilding details when they could absolutely be relevant at the time, except when it makes the writers' job easier like "turlum" or Bellara's clan's funeral practices being indistinguishable from ancient elven ones even though that's literally not what we were told about Dalish practices in the past, guess the Emerald Graves don't exist anymore-. Like just as one example that has stuck in my head, Elgy and Ghilly use terms like The Blight, Archdemons, Darkspawn, the Crossroads, etc. despite being from time periods that predate those terms and presumably having their own words for those same concepts. You can't tell me that Ghilly honestly thinks of her beloved hell children as "darkspawn", or that she would tolerate other people calling them that. You can't tell me that Elgy would agree to call his instrument of reshaping the world, which he is trying to convince people is a good thing, the Blight.

When the game actively punishes people who are familiar with the prior materials with their worldbuilding, punishes people who are reading the codex entries and looking for minor throwaway lines that acknowledge previous shit like the fact that Crows are literally tortured as part of their training and killed if they fail contracts, by having it not be remotely relevant to the story and make it much harder to have the appropriate reaction to what's happening in it (like Rook has no choice but to be happy Jacobus is taking in more orphan crows??) This is low-hanging fruit but it's so illustrative of what I mean.

What other outcome is this all going to have but players who do not look further than the surface? Who miss and ignore little details they have been trained to think do not matter and largely do not inform the broader story and characters? Players who are easily stumped on puzzles because they were not allowed to figure anything else out by themselves?

Are you going to claim that the Orzammar questline in Origins didn't teach anybody a lesson about paying close attention to the social structures and culture of a society when you pick the person who's going to rule it, as opposed to picking the guy who the narrative frames as wise and kind and the other guy framed as a power hungry third child? Are you going to claim that the Archon choice teaches anything remotely as useful?

Like!!!!

GOD

Inquisition had plenty of this stupid handholding too btw. You can argue all of the games had it by degrees. but it wasn't even remotely this bad.

[fantasy-anatomy-analyst]

Do you have any advice on how to go about designing monsters and animals and the like? I like the idea of creating those kinds of things but I always blank on how to go about it, like I know little facts like Allen's Rule but I don't know how to find out about something like that intentionally or even think of it for my thing. (me when I have no idea how to explain that I have no idea how to research smth lol)

first I've heard of Allen's Rule, so that probably says a lot about the fact that I'm mostly self taught lol.

here's the wikipedia page about it for anyone else who didn't know.

to sum up, it is a rule stating that animals in cold climates tend to have shorter/thicker appendages while animals in hot climates tend to have longer/thinner ones. Arctic hare vs desert hare, as an example.

the first thing to do when you want to design anything is to do a lot of studies. just in general. look up images of any animal or insect and draw sketches studying how they're built. do it for people too! you'll always be better at making new designs if you have a basic understanding of how real things are shaped and how they function.

study from videos by sketching fast gesture poses as you watch the creatures in motion! I have also done this while attending sports and dance performances. studying bodies in motion by watching olympic athletes or videos of people trying and failing to do a sport. just study the heck out of everything you can! it's as simple as putting down some lines and shapes to show the main body forms. heavier detail studies are also useful! tracing images in order to study the details is not wrong. I do it all the time, as you can see in a lot of the advice posts I make! I frequently provide traced images of the creature references I've found in order to show my process of breaking down the simplified body shapes.

my actual sketch process often looks like this:

(image description: multiple layers of very loose scribbly sketches in different colors. visible notes on two layers of sketches read "aerial silks dance" and "flying birds". the clearest and topmost layer of sketch is a humanoid figure with wings, performing a dance.

as you might be able to see if you can even begin to parse the mess that is all my study sketching, the final pose sketch I made here for my bird dude Morianon doing a little dance does not even match the poses I sketched from reference videos! This is because gesture sketch studies like these are more based on vibes than accuracy! They're a good way to warm up and practice making really fast gestural doodles that just show the form and motion more than anything well proportioned. It also frees you of the pressure to draw anything perfect! this is messy on purpose! you gotta be messy, it's how learning works.

and then once you're more confident with speed studies, you can get more specific with detail studies. all of this is essential if you want to be able to design creatures. it's all about artistic confidence and developing the skills to notice details. and then you get better at applying those details.

I have two posts on how to study and use references! one over here focused on humans. and another one here about non humans.

this is getting longer than I expected lol. I have other posts on my to-do list that will also be helpful to you I think, and you can explore the links on my pinned post to find more advice on a lot of topics! I might have to make a post on the more general topic of "how do I even get started on designing a creature?" because it is kind of the whole premise of this blog, huh? I have a lot of advice for people who already have a solid idea and just need some advice to overcome a few obstacles along the way, but I don't think I've made a proper advice post for what to do when you don't even have a starting idea.

the tldr version of creature creation is this:

pick a niche (mountain people, flying predator, burrowing creature)

study real life creatures in similar niches

start throwing ideas at your page until something sticks and then take the things that stick and build on them until it feels good

refine your design

[inventors-fair]

Common-Typal Commentary: Matter over Mind

What did I want with this contest, really? Flavorful purpose. Communication of niche. Some weird stuff. I don't actually know what I wanted; perhaps there's this inner frustration that came out with how Bloomburrow drafts were treating me, and I wanted to express a world where typal didn't matter as heavily, where a world could run on its own merits. As I write this, I'm just finishing a draft of Lost Caverns, where I got some awesome artifact synergies going with splashes from other archetypes in the mix. That felt good! There wasn't the typal wonders, but there were pieces in between that folks used, little bits of revelatory connections. I wish it was easier to do typal. And it's not. On a week where the prompt was "typal that didn't care about typal as a theme," it becomes... Well, let's just say that the mess was justified.

There were some messy things that I want to call attention to, though. Firstly, please read and reread the prompt, because three separate people submitted uncommons. Secondly, when you're designing for common, keep complexity and power level in mind. Thirdly... There is no third point, and maybe that itself is the third point: that sometimes, I can only say what I know, and my communication should meet you halfway. If I ain't getting there, then that ain't nobody else's fault but my own. Simplify, revise, correct, and you know what, point four: your first idea isn't gonna be your best one 99% of the time. Reiterate upon yourself and you'll be taken to the stars.

I've got a few Judge Picks I wanted to point out, as you'll see, but this week was a little light so there might only be a couple. I'll go over everything in post. Speaking of post, here's what we have for commentary, posted below:

@bergdg — Aspect of Ruthlessness

From a Tarkir-oriented perspective, I think the flavor of having snakes add to their ruthless qualities with a bit of poison is pretty reasonable. Flashing it in seems a little...off? Hear me out, because this card's totally fine, but flash-deathtouch is one of those really cool combat tricks that Green's been out of for a while (see the whole Ambush Viper debate-thing that happened some time ago, I forget where/when), and if it's not granting that, then a three-mana +1/+1 feels pretty weak even with the surveil.

Flash as a keyword provides both timing-oriented tricks for responses and proactive EOT additions for turn advantage. The advantage here feels minimal on one side and maximal on the other for snakes. And maybe that answers the prompt just fine, yeah, but I still find myself asking: if I'm not playing snakes, would I play with this card at all? Honestly, no—having some snakes would be fine and having no snakes makes this card pretty dead in the water. Looking at the Step Through example, a double-Unsummon is still decent in a pinch, and the Wizardcycling makes it better just in case. I don't see the "just in case" side of this aura right now.

~

@bowtochris — Necrosis

I think that I can see some of the BTS of this card with "creatures" instead of "creature" there in the first sentence. Regardless... In a set that has incidental Zombies, this card would be totally fine, and a lot of sets and worlds do. Honestly the amount of sets that I remember as having more Zombies than they actually do is fairly high! But you can see how popular they are and how a necromancy/grave-style play system that has incidental zombies could use this as a removal spell with upside for sure. Pretty much the only place that it wouldn't fit the contest would be Innistrad, heh.

With that said, is there anything more to this card than that? Not that it doesn't work, but I feel that the type is kinda indicative of this card's lack of polish. What world is it supposed to be from? What does this flesh-eating disease/condition have to do with the Zombies' hunger contextually? I feel that this card is unfinished in a lot of ways and it's hard to commentate fully on it when there's not much given in that regard.

~

@bread-into-toast — Gift of Wings (JUDGE PICK)

I honestly thought this was a card already and I'm kinda gobsmacked that this name hasn't been used. As far as cards in general go, yeah, we're in a good spot. I see you're still using "enters the battlefield" instead of the shorthand, and lemme tell you, I'll be doing the same thing for a while as well. But all the same, yeah, mounts with evasion add to an aggressive deck and make a target for you. I like how 99% of mounts are of a higher-ish mana value, and so this card being cheap allows for more answers to follow.

Mounts are an interesting one. How many Mounts in a set, would there be mMounts with vehicles, would Mounts be brought back as small batches...? Lots of questions being asked here. But I could tell even by the art that this would be a Theros set before double-checking your prompt, and I'm down for it. If this was before or after a more Mount-heavy set, I could see a few Mounts especially as legendary horses and/or their offspring. Pegasi, too! When they attack, they carry another creature with them. You know what, I'm not gonna lie—I almost wish this had been Horse instead of Mount, but I get why you chose to go this route. There are far more Pegasus creatures on Theros than Horses, and they already have flying. Maybe there are other possibilities, but you know what, this route works just fine. I'll hash out a more comprehensive thought process if you want later.

~

@dimestoretajic — Rockface Staff

This card falls right back into the Bloomburrow trap, I'm afraid. While Bloomburrow's color overlap was a pretty no-brainer design choice, that's really not what this contest was looking for, and as such I don't necessarily know how to judge it. Is the expectation that these creatures wouldn't be major parts in the set? I mean, I could, but what world is this on if not Bloomburrow? I don't want to make any assumptions here. I also don't think that this card was intended to be on different plane than the one where this type-batching has already been precedent.

This is the extent that I can give commentary on this card's application to the contest prompt. As an equipment in general, it's fine, and I get the hybrid cost down there is intended to be an every-color-but-best-here suggestion. But that's as far as I can go. There's just no way to interpret the typing otherwise.

~

@grornt — Smothering Spores (JUDGE PICK)

There were only about ten cards in Dominaria that cared about Saprolings, and that was quite an archetype, but my personal first introduction to them was in the Alara block, where only six cards across the whole block produced them—and looking back at DMU, there were only two. So how many Saprolings does it take to screw in a good draft common? Honestly, I'd say if there were...4-5 across a set, then this card could go from just plain decent to really funny really fast.

Saprolings are meant to be as expendable as they are delicious, and while regulating a token subtype to a cheeky one-off is a little questionable, I'm down for this being a good enough card. It's totally okay to have a derived card like this get a flavorful little twist, right? Depending on the sacrifice archetype (hint: probably B/G), you could have instances where you lean more into black, or you could have an overlap where there's enchantments on one side and Saprolings on the other, right? Maybe if there was a random rare that pumped out uncommons... But that's just extra brainstorming, because the thought of a fungal infection being made deadly via Saproling is good enough for me. Solid and thoughtful.

~

@izzet-always-r-versus-u — Lights in the Sky

I'm so sorry that I didn't get a chance to message you beforehand and remind you that this is a common contest. I'll read this card on its merits, but you're not the only one to submit an uncommon at first, so hey, that's all good.

The other thing is that I may just not be the right audience for this card as it stands. The only Aliens we've had so far are the ones from Unfinity and the Doctor Who—will there be any in the Death Race set? I forget. Anyway, there's currently no metric for what that might look like in an in-universe set, and the implications are...very sci-fi in a way that I can't critique in good faith. The card is fine, the mechanics are fine, and it could be a real painful beater in limited. You might want to put "this permanent" instead of "this enchantment," but I'm not sure. I'll be honest, comrade, I got nothin'. If MTG has a single sci-fi hater among them, it's me on top of this hill, dying from an alien death ray. We'll shoot for the stars next time.

~

@lich-of-the-golgari — A Good Boy's Rest

Let's back up for a second and talk about what this card is doing. From a purely flavorful perspective, this card makes sense. Pragmatically, it's asking for Shrines at common, perhaps additional shrines, legendary enchantments at common, and a new kind of role token, and a multicolor theme at common as well, and on an ambiguous world. Do you see where I might have some issues with this card design-wise?

Time and time again, I want to tell folks that unless we're asking for out-of-this-world weirdness, you don't have to reinvent the wheel for these contests. Most of the time, it's detrimental to good design sense. This prompt in particular is looking for starting keystones and the base beginnings for some designs that would suggest small pieces of an overarching set in a way that aren't main themes. In my opinion, this card goes against pretty much every one of those notions. Simplify, simplify, simplify. I know it's tempting to stick with an idea that resonates internally, but it's more important to learn when to go back to the drawing board.

~

@melancholia-ennui — Haunted Crypt

It's really, really hard not to see this card as a derivative of Step Through. The only question is whether or not the role it would have in the set would be that of a cycle or that of a one-off. As a one-off, it would be one of the more powerful ones, presumably, if there are any half-decent Spirits in this set at all. Never underestimate the power of landcycling. The reason that Step Through could be at common is because it's a steepish cost for a half-decent effect, and the discarding (even with no Wizard) was part of the possible pieced-together archetypes. What would the archetypes be here?

This card highly suggests something to do with discarding or BW graveyard shenanigans, but also with the typal component; a reasonable player would assume that this draft archetype would be a BW spirit typal shell. Do you see what I mean? It's hard to get away from that specifically because it's a land. Now, if there was a typal archetype, then this card would be bananas, and I think that it's certainly well-designed as it is. For this contest, it's a little too specific for what we were looking for. I'll still commend the general chops, even if, like I said, it's a bit on-the-nose given our examples.

~

@piccadilly-blue — Sonorous Hum

NB: "Deck is 22 cards, all major arcana, not magic cards (in the same way that a d20 is not a magic card), no rules text. // You choose whether or not you run a tarot deck as the game begins. If you don't, you ignore all instructions relating to the tarot deck. // If you're using a tarot deck, after all mulligans have been taken, you shuffle your tarot deck and then the top three cards are turned face-up as your spread."

When you submit a card like this, not only are you asking us to evaluate the card in its relation to the contest, but also evaluating a new mechanic with a series of highly complex rules interactions. And you're also asking us to evaluate a deck with card that each would have a series of as-of-yet unknown rules interactions that have not, to our knowledge, been designed or submitted. So with that said? I can't evaluate this card. I literally, actually cannot, because it's asking knowledge of me that doesn't exist.

I want to love it, of course, and not in the way that I want to love all submissions. I want to be able to love what you've done. I do not have the means or the tools to give you the feedback I want to give in this position, and that's because of the choices you've made by submitting this kind of card. There's nothing wrong with going off the beaten path, but in order for us to judge properly, we gotta use the tools of the collective. I don't have those tools at the moment and I don't really have the time/energy that this idea would both require and deserve. One of my partners does love him some tarot, so just imagine we're giving this a thumbs-up in an alternate universe.

~

@wildcardgamez — Tuskeran Axe (JUDGE PICK)

Berserker is a heavily underutilized creature type, in my opinion. On Kaldheim, there were all those zombie berserker thingies, IIRC, but also a few in the general BR shell. Still, what if you wanted warrior/equipment blends, or you wanted a Giant Berserker to go out there? This card, upon reflection, is a sheepish reminder for me of how I should've made this contest out to be. I'm writing this before I get to the grand reflection, but seeing this card as a unique and funky draft-archetype hybrid is certainly interesting on a design scale, but it's not exactly "weird." It's good! Don't get me wrong, it's quite good.

Was I looking for that weirdness more so than cohesion? It's possible. World flavor is a strange thing. Sometimes, everyone is a berserker. Sometimes the colorless-ness matters, especially for equipment, like that artificer example from earlier. Actually, what I like about this card is that it assumes you're playing red if you're playing berserkers, but if you manage a mono-black berserker deck or whatever, then you're just getting some cool color advantages. I dunno, this card's pushing all the right buttons for me. Am I just jaded with myself, or is this closer to the prompt than I imagined? This is good self-reflection but probably not the best critique. Well, you've already got a seal of approval, so I'll axe the rest of this before I start rambling even more.

~

@xenobladexfan — Death's Finality

When making this prompt, I feel that there was more of a typal-payoff kinda vibe than a draft-answer kinda vibe. As we have it here, Thraben Exorcism is already a card that exists, and this card more or less goes a little farther than that. I want to say that there's nothing wrong with that—and in a vacuum, there isn't. But when there's already such a specific card, and when that card itself wouldn't be what the prompt is after, it makes this kind of judgment a little more difficult than it would be otherwise.

Whether or not you saw Thraben Exorcism before this, well, I have no idea. Exiling zombies and cards from graveyards is also a little beyond the initial scope, so there's that. The similarity is just too much for me to buckle down and say that this card stands on its own merits. If nothing else, though, I hope that this is some kind of learning experience. One, it's a good idea to double-check your cards to see if some maniac at WotC has printed the effect before. Two, feel free to lean into the more proactive side of payoffs rather than answers; answers come to the board when they need to. Right now is the time for asking questions.

Tomorrow's another day. Be well! @abelzumi

[spotsupstuff]

Questions about the recent art post!

1. You said the first karma/natural urge glyph relates to the Anemons’ chitin skeletons— how so? I can see it as a pictograph of a few different things, but it’s so simplified that the connection ain’t obvious- at least to me.

3. Why were the lower caste kept intentionally stressed? That seems particularly spiteful.. though of course real life class- and casteism is just as arbitrarily cruel.

2. What role did the CitID drones play in population control? Was it primarily as a surveillance tool, and thus an implicit threat? Or were they like, literally designed to kill people

The relation is in the question of ,,Why would the very first prohibition/warning be related to violence?" and the answer of ,,Most likely because they indulged a lot in it at some point. It says not to do indulge in something, so the opposite had to be true beforehand to a meaningful degree." A religion spawns out of a prompt from physical reality, so what real events inspired pieces of their religion? It's related to my ideas about their "technological" development. Rather than evolving their abilities likes us through machines, they went through the biological aspects (getting to those purposed organisms not out of sadism, but because that is how they knew how to do elaborate complicated things). To know biology, they had to do a lot of research and, with the "respawn" mechanic real to them, they could have had the means to "ethically" brutalize each other (and animals) for the sake of researching how things work, what the limits are, how can they be used and augmented. Mentioning they are of chitin, not of bone, is a reassurance that they are not wearing the remains of their own species.

It's related to the idea of the Caste system, but also to keep them more vigilant since they are down there with all the animals (you could say the High castes can allow themselves the pleasure to be calm and slow about things) and then the fact that stress does cause physical issues and kills. This is a major wip currently that I'm trying to figure out: they could be biologically immortal, what with sea anemones sharing phylum with such things as the Hydra and the Immortal Jellyfish. They have incredible regenerative ability, one of the traits defining the Cnidaria phylum. They have the Small Cycle, which is the respawn mechanic from the game explained in-world (though might be changed around yet for better definition). But I'm a writer and I want my characters to die, have to confront it as a fate and as on-lookers (Sparrows dying is important for Caper's character, for example), I want them to have different past lives that could plague them, that they would need to reflect on. There needs to be some kind of stake in the story to make it interesting. There's also no explanation for how they don't overpopulate the planet (just Sparrows is one of 13 children from one pair of parents), from sociological outlook immortal people who remember things are also disadvantegous to manipulators with political power. So I'm trying to figure out limits for their abilities, what *could* kill them enough to result in a reincarnation we are familiar with, what they should be afraid of, give good reasons that make sense. Stressing out the Low castes to make them die and therefore have them in a sort of monstrous rotation and in somewhat controllable numbers would be beneficial for the Elites, while they get to live on for as long as they want. Nineteen Spades, Endless Reflections I imagine was over 900 when he took the Void way out. Sparrows dies in her 110s, some of her siblings in their 70s-90s. Still a wip though, needs troubleshooting and confirming it doesn't poke holes Somewhere in the logic and if things feel right.

Surveillance tool, yes. Secretly keeping track of the citizens' indulgence and location next to the public knowledge of being helpful tools for things like navigation and circumventing karma gates.

[fruityyamenrunner]

“why would i listen to someone "simply telling" me what words to use?”

….Because it's a necessary step for communication? Because in order to have language we at some point have to agree on a set of sounds to correspond to a given concept?

“in fact, i don't think I've ever seen a "definition" because every time I've seen someone telling me what words to use, it always comes with attached claims, like you easily identify with the dictionary example. if i ever happened to see a "definition" it might well be impossible for it to be wrong, but I don't expect to see one any time soon.”

You seem like someone who has probably done pure mathematics at some point in your life so I highly doubt you've never seen a definition in the purest sense.

The truth claim I identified in the dictionary example does not lie in the definition of horses, it lies in the context of placing that definition in a dictionary, which is an object with a use other than “contain any definition someone could hypothetically invent”. What truth claim do you think is made by using the combination of letters h-o-r-s-e to refer to the particular rideable animal it currently refers to as opposed to any other combination of letters? Is it wrong to also call a seahorse a seahorse because someone might think this implies a seahorse has more in common with that animal than it does?

"what's wrong about the horse definition isn't exactly "it's not the consensus". it's that i got the part of speech wrong and the description is of plasmodia. do you *really* think the most likely reason for the error is that i was trying, in some subtle, "implicit" way to assert consensus that horses are very small and cause malaria”

Yes, I can guess that you probably wouldn't actually have meant to assert that, in the same way that if you made a strange enough typo you might write a sentence I could guess you didn't mean to type. Nonetheless that is what you would be asserting by putting it in a dictionary, the same way your hypothetical typo'd sentence would still have a meaning you didn't intend. The definition is not consensus because someone could, hypothetically, have a personal vocabulary where they call horses plasmodia and plasmodia horses, and not be misled about any actual facts about the world as long as they understand that other people do it the opposite way around and remember to mentally translate every time they encounter the world - it would be an incredibly inconvenient and unusual personal idiosyncrasy but not technically wrong.

It is also ironic that you end your response by using what is clearly a completely personal and idiosyncratic definition of witchcraft and expecting others to understand you.

what irony? throughout this penny-excursion to Bedlam to see the Lunaticks (or rather, Plutoniacks) I have been consistently saying how a worldpicture and the meaning within it can be well disclosed by a purposeful, thoughtful, poetical use of terminology. That is exactly what I am doing! I am posting through a very specific persona, and this whole tumblr blog is a disclosure of a worldview.

You, on the other hand, are an anonymous grey ball. It is just as fitting that you - like the other grey balls I get from time to time who speak to me with a very familiar voice of Millennial Conscience by employing some stereotyped bit of social control (I am "not having a normal one", or am "yikes"worthy, or like your sibling in sphericity suggested of me earlier this week, that i "woke up today and decided to be...") and are appealing precisely above all to an "implicit consensus". You disclose a worldview of "reading the room". Social engineering simplified and operationalised so even shift managers can employ it... Vulgar...

Speaking of dull globes, that reminds me. Before those pictures were beamed back, this is what the best picture of Pluto was:

Do you recognise it? It's an anonymous grey sphere with black markings on it. Is it a cousin of yours? Is this why you have a fondness for the 2005 solar system picture?

[arliedraws]

Hiii I really love your art! I'm always impressed how ppl like you are able to simplify drawings like this and still get the emotion across! I'd like to ask how long you've been drawing/how long you've been drawing cartoons and how you learned designing your own characters/style and drawing all those face expressions?

🙏🏼🧡

Hi! Thank you so much!!!

Lately, I've been really frustrated with my art and style and technical abilities, so honestly, thank you for giving me a minute to reflect on where I've been! I'm annoyed at the obvious mistakes I am noticing in the things I've posted over the last few weeks but I realized during this that it's always a process and growth is forever.

This got longer than I intended, so I'll put the rest under the cut.

I've been drawing for a very long time, probably for most of my life. And for most of it, I have not been very "good" at it. I had friends who were very serious about drawing in middle school and high school, and in college, I used drawing and fandom to deal with depression and anxiety. Then I started dating late in college which took up all of my spare time for drawing, and then I had a really nasty breakup with my first (emotionally manipulative) partner. I was really depressed (not because of being single but because I didn't know who I was anymore), so I didn't draw or write for yearssssss (I did somewhat but not seriously and loathed everything I was creating).

Then Covid hit and I felt like drawing again.

This was four years ago that I made this comparison of my art. I genuinely like what I was doing in 2012 more than what I put out in 2020. So it's not a matter of how long you've been drawing but consistency and a willingness to take risks (and learn from failures).

You can see I wasn't thinking as 3-dimensionally in 2020 when I started to draw again. The character's expression is really bland and you can see I was focused more on aesthetics than character. I think I even recognized it at the time, and I was really pissed about it.

I guess it's been four years since Covid started, and four years since I really jumped back into drawing regularly. I won't pretend that I know a lot--I very much do not, but here's what has helped me in the last few years.

Think in terms of volume and shape. I always warm up with perspective exercises. I often use posemaniacs' 30 second drawing practice for about 10-15 minutes, or I draw a ton of 3D boxes and spheres and triangles. I like to draw stacked boxes at various angles just so I can get my brain to wake up and see 3-dimensionally.

Know what you want to draw and draw with intention. This sounds obvious, but sometimes, I pick up my pen and just. Draw. Like I'll draw a face or a body but it's just completely soulless and boring because I don't know what I want. Draw with emotion, and have a purpose. Otherwise, your drawing will be lifeless and boring.

Ditch "aesthetics." Seriously. Focus on character. Draw that person ugly. If it's a sexy character and you're focusing on their emotions rather than how attractive they are, it will turn out sexy regardless. For example:

This was supposed to be scary, but people got horny for it anyway.

Anyway.

Your character will determine "aesthetics." Your character wears ripped tights because THEY think it's cool (or they trip a lot and scrape their knees), not because YOU like ripped tights. This is not a hard and fast rule, it's just what works for me.

For example, I don't draw Sirius wearing band t-shirts because I don't think he'd care about Muggle bands (at least, I don't think he'd care enough to advertise that he did). Consider why YOU wear band t-shirts. My partner wears his death metal shirts because he wants to support small bands and talk to strangers who like the same, obscure music (I hate those fucking shirts but he needs to live his truth lol. Some are ok and have beautiful art, but others are gross and weird).

Point is, focus on character.

Side note: If you want to draw a hot character (or if you want to BE a sexy real person honestly lol), you need to internalize this: Sexiness is a state of mind. If you are a sexy, confident person, it doesn't really matter what you look like--people will want to be you or fuck you. This applies to characters as much as it does to real people. It's about being you, focusing on your strengths, recognizing your own worth, keeping boundaries, and giving people your full attention when they speak to you. Seriously. That's basically it. Ask me how I know.

4. Make faces while you draw. I use photo references to understand how the face works, but what helps me the most is when I physically make the same face while I'm drawing. That way, I can feel which muscles are moving in my own face. Plus, I love acting and playing pretend, so I get to "be" that character while I'm drawing. I'm a naturally expressive person and communicate with my eyebrows way too much, and I think you can see that in my drawings.

5. Study other artists. Do this all the time. I particularly love to watch process videos and observe sketches. Here are some videos, books, and artists that I regularly visit or study:

TBChoi -- this person is my favorite artist stylistically. Just search their name + expressions and study. They just understand the way muscles work in the face so well.

Aaron Blaise -- okay, full disclaimer, I've heard some weird things about this artist, so I don't purchase their materials. However, I have practiced with his videos for years and found them exceptionally helpful.

Artists on Instagram I tend to look at: sleepy_kc, krosrios, starbite, rhiwynter

And artists who have influenced me since I was a kid are Tealin, Rufftoon, Shoomlah, Makani, and so many more.

6. Oh. And also, draw things other than people. Draw animals, draw landscapes, draw that weird building. Play with shape and perspective.

And look, I'm not a professional. I am an underpaid English teacher with ADHD, an Intuos Pro, and a horniness for a particular fictional character. Take this with a grain of salt and just do what works for you.

[goodluckdetective]

This is a Tim Drake Essay, I guess

Hello and welcome back to my blog. I’ve been recently getting back into comics and as a result, I’ve been kind of chewing on why out of all the Robins, Tim is my favorite.

I think everyone can agree that the new 52 did Tim 0 favors, as it just didn’t know what to do with him. Outside of that generally shared opinion, there’s a lot of general conflict within Tim fans about how Tim should be characterized. You have “super detective” flavors of Tim where he is painted as the “smartest of the Robins” which I don’t hate, but I also think is pretty simplified (Tim is smart, but I don’t think that’s his defining factor and to label him the smartest I think is off base given intelligence is a multitude of different skills). Then you have “woobie Tim” where he’s essentially “a poor little meow meow” which I personally cannot stand for a variety of reasons (but one of the biggest is how it paints Dick and Damian as malicious actors). Now if you like the previous two, I’m not going to come and shut down your party, that isn’t really the intent of this post. My intent here is more to explain to people who don’t understand why people like Tim who are mostly familiar with the fandom depictions above, a different perspective. If my opinion doesn’t sway you, that’s cool, I just wanted to leave my two cents out here.

The character trait Tim has that I generally really enjoy in characters who occupy a “sidekick” role, is this trope of characters whose motivation to participate in heroics not because of some past trauma or destiny, but mostly because it’s the right thing to do. This isn’t to bash characters who have motivations in destiny or trauma; I also love those(and of course they also choose their lives: Dick didn’t have to be Robin either). But I have always found something really fascinating about characters who, for all intents and purposes, could easily leave the danger of the narrative but stay anyway.

I think Frodo and the Hobbits are a good example of this? Yes, Frodo is somewhat forced to set off by Gandalf but by the time he reaches the council, he is given the option to opt out. He’s in fact told multiple times that he can opt out. But he stays instead and while the ring’s grip on him has something to do with that, I think a larger part is because he knows it’s important to do. He wants to make sure the right thing is done.

Frodo isn’t specially trained to be our protagonist and neither is Sam or Pippin or Merry. They aren’t trained fighters. They commit to this dangerous quest because of loyalty to each other and the greater good (also as a WW1 metaphor I know). And I think it’s always really interesting to have characters like this in a narrative who come outside of a life of danger, a life they could still go back to, and yet choose to stay. It asks questions about what makes a hero, is being a hero something for everyone, what is the cost of heroism, and how we place heroes on a pedestal often to their detriment. They can bring the plot back into focus on the people who aren’t heroes, the reason the heroes do what they do, and the impacts on that group.

And that’s why I really like Tim. Tim doesn’t seek Bruce out to become Robin: he wants Dick to take it back. The only reason he puts on the costume in the first place is to save Bruce and Dick. After that, he could have gone home to a wealthy upbringing (with less than ideal parents but that’s a whole other story) and done anything else. But he stays. Because Batman needs a Robin and someone has to do it.

That’s an interesting character motive to dig into! Tim absolutely is a bit naive about the danger ahead but he knows what happened to Jason, and he is, for all intents and purposes, an ordinary kid. What makes him interesting is that he decides to commit to heroism, a decision that is far from ordinary (there are a lot of capes in Gotham but it’s not exactly an every teen hobby without some wild backstory). And it raises super interesting parallels with Bruce. Bruce has chosen this life trying to prevent others from experiencing his interrupted childhood; Tim interrupts his own by choice. Bruce doesn’t often see himself as capable of having an ordinary life; Tim clings to keeping his cape separate from his day to day activity. Bruce’s commitment to the mission causes him to do harm to those he loves; Tim’s commitment to try to have a normal life causes him to harm those he loves. And this dynamic continues once he outgrows Robin: when do you stop being a “normal” person? How do you define yourself when the job you dedicated years towards is filled by someone who needs it more (I love Damian, this is a pro Damian Robin blog). Do you try to go back to being normal or is it too late for that? And even if you could go back, would you even want to?

I find Tim interesting because of all of that: the commitment to help other people and to reach out to others who are hurting despite not being obligated to. Because a lot of people who aren’t obligated to help don’t, and even a lot of people who are obligated to help don’t. And that I think is interesting! Especially when packed into a teenager who slacks in school, makes terrible choices sometimes and can sometimes let his ego get ahead of him.

Anyway those are my two cents.

TLDR: Tim is interesting as a character for the fact he chooses the heroic life despite having a relatively normal upbringing.

[broomsick]

Hi! It's me again, My question today actually relates to communicating with the gods. I talk to Njord daily, and talk to Freyr and Tyr sometimes as well. But I can't tell when they are responding back to me, or even if they are at all.

I know they exist, Njord actually responded in the world around me when I prayed to him on multiple occasions.

But I see others talking about having conversations with their gods and I feel like I'm missing out.

I do have fears like spiritual psychosis, where I trick myself into hallucinating the fact they are talking to me. But I'm also afraid of things like malicious spirits pretending to be those Gods.

I know I can cleanse my area and do things to protect myself but I do not understand what ways I can establish a connection through my protections.

I've been reading books and doing my best to understand but some books can range from it just happens to literally killing animals you've hunted to protect yourself while you talk to them.

And I wanted to know if there was something I was missing, or just hear your thoughts on it.

Thanks again!

Hi there!

I’ll start by saying that if you’re interested in my personal thoughts, I’ve actually written a post on this first topic before! Feel free to read it!

As you will see, my opinion on this matter is thus: pagans on social media do sometimes mention "talking" with deities, as if having a conversation with a human being. However, this is often a way to simplify more complex means of communication. For example, having prayed to a deity and later receiving a sign which seems to come from them can be seen a sort of "conversation" with the deity. In other cases, people will receive answers from their deities using divination methods such as tarot, rune-casting, pendulums, etc... It's also possible for some to somehow hear answers from their deities through a deep state of meditation, or through powerful spiritual experiences. Long story short, these "conversations" that people post on social media are generally a way to convey the spiritual exchange which happens when you pray, or ask a question, and you receive a sign, or blessing in return, with time. Unless of course, the poster has some sort of "clairsense" which allows them to hear clear answers. If it can be of some comfort however, I myself do not possess any kind of clairsense, and I haven't met a lot of people who do. The pagan friends whom I know have a clairsense will often tell me that the answers they get isn't nearly as clear as some internet content creators make it out to be. These answers will often be short, like simple words and muffled sentences.

But believe me, I understand why you would feel like you're missing out. I had been pagan for about four to years when I first became active in pagan circles on tumblr, and it took even longer for me to truly get involved with them (posting, commenting, discussing...). When I finally did so, I thought to myself "Am I supposed to be capable of communicating so easily with my deities? How is it that everyone else seems to find such ease in receiving answers from theirs?" And with time, I came to realize that just like me, most (if not all) pagans did not hold actual, two-sided conversations with deities. The reported conversations you see being spread online are oftentimes played up for clarity purpose, and the pagan spiritual life does consist mainly of praying to yourself, and having faith that there is someone on the other end, listening. A deity's answer can take the shape of signs, unexpected blessings and the like. As a wise friend of mine once said, "The skies don't open up for me the moment I put my hands together; that doesn't happen for anyone". In any case, there are lots of ways for you to connect with your deities— ways that don't require for you to be involved in your spirituality at all times and to master deep meditations techniques! Taking in the sight of a landscape, appreciating the beauty of a rainy night and breathing in the sea wind are moments where you may feel a deity, or deities' presence. But more on that later!

Now, I’m actually not much of a believer in the whole “spirit pretending to be your deities” concept. Of course, the belief in these sorts of instances is entirely up to each one of us individually. In my case, I have had long conversations about it with pagan friends, both online and in real life, and all seemed to think this concept being spread as much as it is on social media was an exaggeration that could easily frighten new pagans. This has never happened to anyone I'm acquainted with, at least not that I know of. For this reason, perhaps I'm not the best person to give my opinion on the topic, much less on how to protect yourself from such an occurence. If you're interested in a longer, more elaborate reflection on the matter, however, one of my friends has written this amazing post concerning the discernment of trauma (or negative personal experiences/thoughts) and the idea of spirits somehow impersonating deities.

I truly hope this has cleared up a few things for you, though I'm sorry I couldn't get into as much detail for your second question as for your first. My practice looks a lot like yours, as I mostly talk to my deities and give offerings, without receiving immediate answers. The answers I do get can take many forms, and sometimes I tell myself: "Alright. I believe that this or that sign comes from this or that deity. I can't know for sure, but believing that it does is enough". And oftentimes, I will feel a deep connection with a deity simply through devotional actions, or as I am making offerings and toasting in their honor. These are unexpected times when I somehow know that the Gods are watching over me, despite them not coming down from the heavens in a halo of light to sit and talk with me like flesh and blood human beings!

I'm flattered that you came to me with these questions, and I hope I have answered them well. May you have a fulfilling and joyful spiritual journey on this path!