#hey thanks for asking!

[hrngraystrs]

How is ragpicker king so far? No details ofc but just wondering if you’re liking it!

I'll confess I'm only 100 pages into the Ragpicker arc right now. I have been super busy and haven't had a lot of "physical book reading time". It's Cassandra Clare so the book is a chunky one, of course.

It's great so far. Does a very good job of reminding you what happened towards the end of Sword Catcher but I'd suggest doing a world building refresh anyways. That's about as much as I can share.

When you agree to read an arc you also agree to not share TOO much about it. It is not like I signed a contract, of course, but its definitely unsaid that I can't share too much about it so I don't wanna say TOOOOOOO MUCH. you know?

[stealingpotatoes]

Hi, just wanted to say I really like your work! The Last Four Jedi + all the non evil Anakin aus are my life juice. I was wondering, is Ezra still Kaleb's Padawan in the fix-it au, or something else?

aw thank you! and well, yes, but… there's some complications

(commission info // tip jar!)

[squidwujun]

"Hey how is it going?"

[whump-in-the-closet]

weak in the knees for situations where a stoic whumpee allows someone to help them. they don't say a word of acceptance but they don't protest either. Too injured to say no and too tired to deny they need it. Just grudgingly letting a gentle hand guide them to a bed or to wrap a wound. Then a quiet, "thank you." in between sharp breathing as they try not to break down in front of someone else. Love love love shielded vulnerability

[noodles-and-tea]

Your Mario Kart World fanart with Peach and Mario made me feel something I’ve never felt before. I am aroace. However. My gut reaction upon seeing your Mario in that outfit was “whoagh…” and I had to take a second to wonder what the hell was going on GFGJDJSJNS

All this to say your art is wonderful and keep up the good work, always love seeing your stuff :)

That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever read I’m so sorry

[inkskinned]

so while i was writing the book, i became violently suicidal.

this was mostly due to the fact that i had a very bad reaction to some meds and my brain stopped producing any serotonin. also i was in the last semester of grad school where it's actually illegal to feel anything but dread. so it wasn't going well.

somewhere in the fog of it i became aware i needed help. nobody was taking clients or my insurance. i didn't want to do inpatient care - it wasn't right for my needs. there's not really an "in between" stage between "inpatient" and "no care," but i was trying to do the right thing. i was trying to activate the chain of command that was my emergency plan. i knew i needed help now.

i used betterhelp.

i know, i know. i'm a straight-A student and so smart and so clever, how could i ever use something so blatantly bad. to be honest with you, i didn't feel particularly keen on it from the getgo - things that seem too good to be true usually are. also, if something online is free, the price is usually your privacy.

the thing is that there was kind of a global pandemic happening at the time and i worked 5 jobs alongside of being a fulltime student and also like writing a book on the side. it is a miracle that i even thought about getting help. i would love to tell you i had the mental wherewithal to like, process whether this was the right choice for me. mostly i was desperate. i was so suicidal that i was trying to find a reason to stay inside of fortune cookies. i was the kind of suicidal that looks like splatterpaint. i hadn't been that bad in an entire decade.

they took my data. i gave them it freely. somewhere out there, they have a dossier on me. on everything i survived. my story in little datapoints, scattergraphed beautifully.

the first woman told me that really i should be grateful, because (and this is a direct quote): "at least you're not anne frank." i said that i felt that statement was antisemitic, as anne frank's life and experience shouldn't be compared to like, a nonbinary lesbian in western massachusetts. the therapist said that i should try to use lucid dreaming to try to picture myself in an actually scary situation, like running from nazis.

i applied for another therapist. i was willing to accept the possibility that there was a bad apple in the bunch. the next therapist and i even laughed about how inappropriate that statement was. and then, in our next session: the new therapist said if i was struggling with body image issues, i should just work harder on my appearance. she spent 3 sessions in a row talking about how she was grieving, and made me memorize facts about her grandmother so "she can live on through my clients."

i am a three's-a-charm kind of person. okay, so what if the last person made me uncomfortable. i figured it was just a misunderstanding of priorities - she had felt she was sharing with me, i had felt like i had to take care of her. i applied for another therapist.

the last woman asked me to help her pray. she bowed her head. i stared at her, frozen, while she said: lord, i beg you: cure her. take the pain of being gay away from her.

i spent somewhere between 2.5 and 3 months on betterhelp. in that whole time, i was not getting the professional help i so desperately needed, even though i was fucking trying.

in the end, i survived this because i finally could get off the meds that were literally killing me. a request for a real therapist finally went through. i survived because my friends saved my life. because nick let me sob myself dry in his arms. because maddie took the razors out of my room when i asked them to. because grace slept over in my bed for like 3 weeks in a row since nobody trusted me not to hurt myself when i was alone. i survived because i got fucking lucky. because even when i was desperately suicidal, i was too old and too self-aware to take "you need to be prettier" as good advice.

the thing is that there's a 19 year old me who isn't like that. who would have heard "just think about how grateful you should be" and said - oh, i see. i would have assumed that is what it means to be in therapy: the same thing my abusers used to tell me. that i am just pretending and lazy. that i am ugly and unworthy.

betterhelp positioned itself to take advantage of an incredibly vulnerable community. it preys on desperation. it knows it is serving people who are not doing well mentally. it saw that there is a huge need for real, immediate, compassionate mental health care: and then it fucking takes your money and privacy.

i still get their ads on instagram. last night i watched as a woman in a pool pretends to talk to a different woman. they discuss her anxiety.

there's a 19 year old version of me, and she didn't survive this. she was too tired, and drowning. i almost fucking died. this thing almost fucking killed me.

in the ad, the woman playing the therapist takes a note on a clipboard and then nods once, sagely.

i have to admit it's a pretty scene. the steam and light coming off the pool water lands on the actresses. like this, it almost looks baptismal, holy.

[peace-hunter]

For the haunted au I had an devilish little thought. Has Optimus ever had a really bad time and when the primes try to give him advice he just shouts "you guy's FAILED!" Like for all their wisdom they couldn't beat the quintisons or see Sentinels betrayal coming?

He feels bad but in his spark he wishes HE didn't have to do what THEY couldn't.

absolutely evil thought that was inflicted upon me months ago and that i finally get to inflict upon the rest of y'all OTL

i can see it happening with the caveat that he immediately regrets saying it. but it's too late. it's the kind of thing you say in the heat of the moment and then feel the ground drop under your feet because you never meant to say it out loud. but now it's out there and you can never unsay it.

it's just. a bad situation all around :(

haunted au

[figloom]

…….We are so back🗣️‼️

Twisted from the Mouse himself. By all means an art prodigy, Lille longs for the creatively pure years of his childhood. He’s been burned by corporate interest too many times rendering him distrustful and tired. Perhaps he might reignite his passion in NRC…

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 126

You know what would be hilarious? 

Constantine comes into one of those meetings as he sometimes does every blue moon. Though the proper word would be storms into a meeting and practically slams a whole stack of papers down. “Can someone bloody explain to me why the American-fucking-government is trying to go to war with the fucking Infinite Realms?!” 

The Justice League is of course alarmed and confused- and also John weren’t you in Hell?! Yeah, he was, where the fuck do you think he found out about this? 

Now if you’ll excuse him he’s going back to the House of Mysteries with his now haunted trench coat. John, John Constantine what the fuck do you mean by that? No don’t just leave, don’t leave this mess just for them- JOHN! 

[ooliecat]

can you draw Frazie 🥺🥺🥺 (PS: your art is so freaking rad I always get a stupid smile when I see it on my dash)

i quite like her

[froggitonamelon]

So what would be the fallow up to your souless clover AU who do they live with, how life now their husk, do they get their soul back after True pacifist

[stealingpotatoes]

Ummmm if I give you 6116 potatoes can you make a fanart of kix my boy 🥺🥺🥺

kix always deserves more fanart so i'll ignore my usual aversion to requests and i shall take your 6116 potatoes <3

(commission info // tip jar!)

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

Hi, new to the WOT fandom here! What are the production issues from season 1 that you keep referring to? Thanks!

I'm so glad you're wotching!!!!!!

So when amazon commissioned the show, they originally slated the first season to be 10 episodes. After the team had written the entire season's scripts, Amazon pushed them to do rewrites on certain things and shortened the episode count to 8.

The first episode was supposed to be two episodes, probably ending episode 1 with the start of the trolloc attack and then episode 2 would be them choosing to leave the two rivers and emond's field (their hometown), and they had to shorten that to 1 episode, so the pacing in the first episode ends up really wacky and fast. I'm pretty sad about this because part of what makes the first book effective is the contrast between the sleepy pleasant small town life in emond's field and how that peace is destroyed when the plot intrudes. And I think the change made it harder for new fans to attach themselves to the main gang properly.

They also, after amazon's rewrite requests, changed Perrin's early plot significantly. Originally he was going to accidentally kill his blacksmith master, Master Luhan, and after the rewrites he was given a wife who isn't in the books who gets fridged immediately. I guess amazon thought people would only understand the emotional significance of killing a lover and not a mentor. I really didn't like that choice when I first watched it, but I do think now they're going to do something interesting with the aftermath of the dead wife stuff in Perrin's s3 arc.

The shortened episode count also impacts the pacing of the end of the first season, which also got crunched together a bit. The end of the season also had further problems because covid happened, and the last two episodes were interrupted and had to be filmed after a hiatus and with new covid protocols in place, so the characters can't touch during some key scenes at the end. They had to rewrite the scene where Nynaeve and Egwene almost burn out during the battle of Tarwin's Gap on the day of shooting, and I think the scene is less effective as a result.

Also, one of the main actors was unable to return after lockdowns for possibly covid related health reasons, Barney who played Mat, so that's why it was changed and edited so that he doesn't come into the Ways with them in episode 6, and they also had to rewrite the last two episodes to accomodate his absence and then recast Mat for s2.

As a result of all this, episode 1, 7, and 8 in season one are all a little rough around the edges and a lot of book fans, including me, didn't really like the first season when it was airing. I like it more now upon rewatch now that I can see all the stuff they did manage to set up really well for the long haul of the story, but the first season had a difficult reception when it aired, and I think a lot of people let that less than stellar first impression color their opinion of the show as a whole. Which is unfortunate, because almost all* television shows improve as seasons go on and the team behind the show gets into the groove with it, and this one definitely improves each season.

Season 2 was written with the knowledge that it would only be 8 episodes, and they didn't have any interruptions during filming, so it's significantly better in its pacing.

[heybiji]

magic man

[laser-tripwires]

At what point do you think Eliot fully trusted each member of the team? Do you think Sophie was the last, given what happened at the end of season 1?

i think people get the meaning of that line wrong, where eliot implies he doesn't trust sophie. to quote john rogers on the matter:

and yeah, exactly. i think the same basic principle applies to the rest of the team. eliot is never going to trust any of them fully - that's not his job. his job is to backup, is being a failsafe, and that means having some working knowlege of where everyone is likely to slip up.

heck, look at the R2 finale. that plays out how it did precisely because eliot didn't trust sophie, eliot knew she was at risk of cutting arthur way too much slack. it's not a personal slight on sophie; he just knows her. he knows all of them. knows their strengths, knows their weaknesses, knows who he can lean on for what. sometimes they surprise him - but you have to remember that on the whole, eliot is an extremely emotionally intelligent character. he's pissed at sophie at the end of season one, and to be honest it's justified - but what it does is inform the limits of what trust he does have in sophie, and that's important. prior to it, it's not that he did implicitly trust her in those areas - just that that was yet to be decided. part of getting to know people is filling out those blindspots.

that said, i think there is definitely a period of time wherein eliot's still growing into working with a team. but by the time events hit the point in the show where things truly are down to the wire, he's got the beats of everything down. look at how neat and tidy his plan is in the zanzibar marketplace job - look at what he offers to do in maltese falcon - look at just the WHOLE of gone fishing, and the fact that he doesn't cut and run as other events in season three progress.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

In Regards To Your 2024 Summary:

Holy shit it’s been another year????? The hell?????

Also! Your art style is gorgeous and that being found in 2023 and then refined throughout late 2023 and the entirety of 2024 really shows, as does your growth in panel layouts, perspective, and — as you said — experimentation. If you ever post your animation or video game art I’m looking forward to it.

As cheesy as it sounds, being able to laugh at funny comics and look at all the details of your art really made my 2024 brighter, even when things were hard. Including looking at your older art— it doesn’t need to be new to be enjoyable! I’m glad your art is well loved and it’s a privilege to have been here since the (near) beginning. I hope you take care of yourself in 2025 and beyond!

You and your art bring a lot of people a lot of joy never forget that <3

Thank you so much for keeping up with my art journey throughout these last two years! Two years!!! I am baffled at how that feels both too long and too short!

Admittedly, my art summary didn't manage to capture the fact that I did a lot of comic layouts that I'm really proud of. I also drew more backgrounds and made some very detailed works (*Dungeon Meshi spoilers for these examples*).

The growth is lot more evident when comparing my 'best' comics of 2023 to 2024:

Sometimes the growth is vertical, sometimes it is horizontal - and damn, sometimes it goes out of sight into the Z-plane. But it is always happening!