#hobby meta

[poupeesdecirque]

Posting by Queue, or: why I need some distance from my crafts

It has been some time since my last hobby meta blog entry, it had different reasons and one is that I need distance. Like, yes I of course enjoy crafting and sometimes I am like a little child that runs everywhere to show off things.

But it got ... less intense. And I learned I do better when I keep projects or at least details to myself to sit on them for longer. That the first euphoria is purely mine and not to be shared.

Like for my photos I have a buffer of several weeks now. Yes, I know past-me would have kind of hated that. But I learned I do better when I have a time buffer. I do take photos weekly but sometimes they don't feel special enough to get the weekly photo feature?

Friday & yesterday I went out for photos and while I like the ones from yesterday way more than the ones from friday I am not sure if the set from yesterday will get the feature or not as it's only a hand full of photos giving me that certain spark.

Other than that I am a very emotional artist, I sometimes really fuck up my art and hate it at the moment I worked on it, but then, sometimes, after a few days or weeks I can look at it and just wonder about what was my problem the day I made it.

Another thing is that I, myself, enjoy my art. The process of it. And I like to see my blog updating, sometimes I forget what post will go online and then I check the blog and think "ah yes, this was that thing!", and it reminds me why I made the blog overall, to show myself I had progress and that every tiny step counts.

Which leads to another reason why I hold back in regards of posting. Yes, I do share some snippets in my stories over on insta but not always and not all. I sit on over 300 drawings from the last two years alone nobody ever will see, I enjoyed drawing but it's nothing for the public eye. I will maybe go back and redraw some and share the redraws then, who knows?

But wait, there is actually more reasons.

The biggest or main reason is ... i sometimes go really wild on projects. In January I finished so many dolls it was insane, I worked on Cosplays and other crafts in an incredible speed, I have literally no idea where I found the time but I somehow did and doll parts arriving every week did the rest.

I keep the blog running with partially 2 month old stuff but .... to be honest I don't have doll stuff aside photos to do anymore. All I can do is wait for bodies to be shipped (or dolls even) and arrive. There has been no movement since January. Aside Iza getting the shipping notice for our Split, might take a while until its at her place and I can't really start on the Akuma until I got the body (which I at least have finally ordered this month) as colors need to be matched and mods to be made.

I am truly itchy to do something else than sewing all the time, I do enjoy cosplay but you know how much I like sewing (hint: not at all). So to remind myself of the fun I had in the past weeks I have mixed my blog to bless me with some progress I had which was maybe not sewing all the time. And well, the Cosplays have deadlines and I do get some ideas aside purely sewing while doing them, so that keeps me going for now.

Yes, I could start redoing dolls like Alastor or Erwin. But you know what? IT'S ALMOST ALL SEWING. Urgh.

Aside that real life is pretty good at eating me up and I just want to enjoy crafting. Right now drawing feels like stress relief but I hate the results and just scan the pieces and put them away to never look at them again, I have a bunch of posts queued up without any captions, a wip entry of a current project only has two photos but I lack the spoons to actually get them done. But since those posts are so far back it's fine (yes I know drafts are a thing).

In general I enjoy having my art to myself to get used to it before I put it out into the wild as I just recently got reminded I do bad with direct comparisons still and it hits some triggerpoints from the past and makes everything harder, I don't need that.

I literally have no idea if this blog makes sense even, lol. I just am tired of sewing and stopped working on my current project around lunch time and have drawn so much today and I walked way too much the whole week my friends urged me to stay the ef home and at least try to relax. But I'm restless as my body is too stressed (I know it all I'm a certified relaxation trainer so eh), so, have an over the place blog entry.

[dirtd0g]

I need everyone to be aware that Rei took these photos SPECIFICALLY that beach candid

[littlebigmouse]

No you don't understand. Reigen does not commit tax fraud or insurance fraud. He doesn't actually have psychic powers, not even a little, or empath powers or what you have it. His family are regular ass people with regular ass jobs and frankly, so is Arataka, a young, self-employed guy living pay-check to pay-check because that's what most people starting out self-employed do. He spends most of the day at work and then gets take-out not because he's bringing college-student energy to the table, but because that's what the average single and fresh member of the japanese work force does. Because holding on to friends at that age is hard enough without existential-crisis-induced self-loathing.

It is so, so important to me that Reigen is the most statistically average twenty something japanese man there is. He's literally just a guy. A perfectly average middle schooler who liked to slack off and forgot his lunch that one time and wanted to be someone one day, when he was filled with youthful optimism, before life got complicated, before he realized he was just another fish in a really, really big ocean with a LOT of other fishes. One perfectly average fish among thousands of other, average fishes that become perfectly average members of society.

[sad-endings-suck]

so bf of taigen to recover from life threatening wounds, just so he can hike all the way to kohama village from master eiji’s forge, buy the best food you can possibly find there, hike all the way back, and then proceed to promptly plop said food right in front of mizu and watch her eat all of it. dosen’t even blink. those dumplings are a childhood nostalgia food for him and he did not eat a single one. literally recovered from his injuries just enough to leave on his own, solely so he could go get food for mizu, and only for mizu. he didn’t get dumplings for anyone else, not even himself. he hates kohama, but he’ll go walk straight into the village centre that smells like the fish on his dad’s fists, just to purchase the only good thing from his childhood in that place, proceed to enjoy none of it, and offer it all to mizu with absolutely no expectations.

[transmalewife]

this is little more than a personal headcanon but i just find it so annoying when people equate anakins experience with language to that of a modern third culture kid. framing huttese as his native tongue, a part of his culture and personhood, with basic as an addition, something foreign that he had to learn to assimilate into the order/function in the galaxy, when really its the other way round! huttese is the language of his enslavers. basic is his mother-tongue, literally, its the language he uses with shmi. she has an accent so it might not have been her first language but afaik the story is she was kidnapped by pirates as a kid so even then her native language sure wasn’t huttese.

i think trying to map the experiences of someone from an ethnic or national minority moving into a more powerful nation as a kid in our world onto anakin is just bound to fail because the culture he’s being taken away from was not his in the first place. it’s a culture from which he was explicitly excluded, a place and system and language that denied his personhood.

it’s not the tragedy of someone struggling to hold onto their roots while a stronger culture threatens to sweep them away, it’s being denied any culture of his own. it’s the tragedy of a mother speaking to her son in the lingua franca of the universe because she knows her own tongue will not be useful to him in the life they live. if she even remembers it, if the memories of her free childhood aren’t too distant and too painful.

it’s someone who’s first language is the second language of the whole galaxy. whose second language is that of his enslavers. who then joins an organization that unifies its members as its own culture, but unlike other jedi, he wasn’t raised in that culture either. we see jedi like ahsoka or luminara maintain connections to their cultures of origin despite leaving them as babies, but what exactly does anakin have to anchor him? the culture of the place that subjugated him and killed his mother? or the culture of the jedi from which he will always be a little excluded because he doesn’t have the same experiences as those who grew up in the order

[tavina-writes]

I started writing an essay in the tags of a post that was not strictly related to this topic but started getting me thinking and realized I should just. Make my own post about this because I have kind of been sitting on this frustration for a while? And mmmm idk how to feel about this.

(For the record, the post that inspired this is this one.)

I want to make it clear UPFRONT that I am not knocking on ANYONE's interpretations of NHS or about having gender headcanons about a character in general. I think people can headcanon NHS as whichever gender they like because those interpretations are fun and exciting and I like to read about those too.

What I have been getting progressively iffy on, and am not entirely clear on how to express until I came across the above post is the idea that 'NHS is femme-coded because he has femme-coded hobbies' or 'NHS is very gender/gender nonconforming because he likes to paint and doesn't like exercise/practice his saber' or 'NHS is not very masc in comparison to his brother and people in his society put him down/are irritated with him/react to him differently because his gender presentation is more femme.'

And I think what's always kind of boggled me about interpretations like these that I've mentioned above is because...

Hobbies like keeping birds* and painting and calligraphy and poetry** and being well dressed and fashionable*** were strongly masculine coded scholar gentry hobbies for bored rich men**** in historical China. People react to NHS they way they do in text (at least from what I can understand of the social norms of the MDZS jianghu) because NHS is determined to be a particularly foppish dandy and also yknow, actively wailing about his many problems.

So, I think the tldr of this is that: NHS can be interpreted as whatever gender people would like! But his society and his peers and the other characters are not reacting to him in a certain way because he's femme-coded, they're reacting to him that way because he's an irritating asshole and kind of foppish (affectionate)

*keeping birds (as pets and not like, just raptors for hunting) was a rich man's hobby in Ancient China from at least the Zhou dynasty, though which birds were popular as pets (everything from parrots to orioles) differed depending on the dynasty, but the Ming and Qing dynasties were extremely big on pet birds in rich people's houses in particular.

**it is unclear if NHS is particularly good at say, painting or calligraphy OR poetry but the point is that he appears to like these things

***men's fashion has been a wild beast throughout the ages both in the east and the west, and men have done things for fashion like wearing gaudy archer's rings to show off archery skills they didn't have, high heels, Song dynasty men wore flowers in their hair, and my own personal unfavorite: the Qing Dynasty queue.

****the four gentlemanly arts were for example: qin qi shu hua -- playing the qin (music), weiqi (Go if you want to use the Japanese name for the game), shu (calligraphy), and hua (painting). See brief wikipedia summary about the four arts here. There were different things also included in the education of an aristocratic gentleman in pre-imperial China but we have no time to delve into that in this post. HMU for more info if you want it because I love to talk about historical things.

[pagannatural]

2.16 Roadkill

- this episode starts off from the victim character’s perspective, Molly, so we see the brothers through her eyes much of the episode. She notices the brothers communicating with their eyes a lot, the camera focuses on their shared looks and reactions to her. It shows how well they know each other to communicate nonverbally like that.

- Molly says she and her husband “only ever really argued when we were stuck in the car” and Sam can relate because he and his husband also get on each others’ nerves being stuck in the car together.

Dean glares at him because he doesn’t like his personal life being shared with strangers or ghosts.

- Sam and Dean are aggressively giving married vibes. When Sam introduces himself, he doesn’t say “and this is my brother Dean” like he normally would. I’m pretty sure that throughout the episode Sam and Dean’s relationship is never clarified to Molly and they are heavily couple-coded:

Sam is the softer one, reassuring Molly it’ll be okay, Dean is more frank and takes charge. They speak using the royal we, work together as a team, and have little moments of influencing each other’s behavior the way couples do. For example, Dean telling her they’re hunting ghosts and Sam exasperatedly saying “don’t sugarcoat it for her.” She’s incredulous about ghosts and Dean says “crazier things have happened, huh?” hitting Sam’s arm and smirking playfully. It comes across as a warm, intimate little interaction, not like siblings bickering. Later, Sam insists on burying the bones they find because it’s important to him. Dean doesn’t want to at first, but of course he can’t say no to his wife. Sam is the one with the emotional influence who seems to have the last say, even though he appears to be gentler, filling the archetypal role of the feminine in the relationship. I would be surprised if she thought they were anything other than a couple.

- Sam is the one who looks after Molly and shows her more kindness. He has so much empathy for this ghost who can’t move on from her lost love, her husband. Sam is also the one who feels so uncomfortable with keeping from her that she can’t be with her husband.

It seems to really get to him, this woman pining for her impossible love. Like he knows what that’s like, pining for someone he can’t have. There is no romantic relationship this could really be for Sam, which makes me think it’s Dean. In reality, Molly’s husband moved on from her with a new family just like Sam thinks Dean should and will move on from him. He knows at this point that’s the truth of her story.

Sam can also relate to the fact that many ghosts “weren’t evil people. A lot of them were good, just something happened to them” as he grapples with his own fate. I wonder if on some level he sees Dean as what happened to him to make him feel like a monster.

- Molly says “she didn’t want to live without him” (her love) when they find a skeleton and Dean glances at her like this hits him.

He has proven and expressed that he does not want to live without Sam. He can relate to her too, he just tries to act tough.

- Sam tells Dean about an old country custom of planting a tree to mark a grave and Dean tells him “you’re like a walking encyclopedia of weirdness” and Sam says “yeah, I know,” like he’s genuinely hurt. Dean seems aware of Sam’s feelings for him, which adds another layer to this kind of interaction between them.

- episode theme is about blindness to the truth and inability to accept reality. Sam and Dean continue to struggle with accepting their reality too in terms of Sam’s future, but the other (stronger) parallel is the brothers’ relationship in comparison to Molly and her husband’s. She can’t accept a devastating truth about herself and the man that she loves, and throughout the episode Sam and Dean act just like a married couple. Their relationship is steeped in angst and tension because of their love for each other, because Dean won’t kill Sam no matter what he becomes. There are truths about themselves and their relationship that are too painful to accept.

[kismetconstellations]

Because I'm still bitter... The first time I consciously verbalized that "I hate this show", came when, as I predicted, there was absolutely no acknowledgement of Shiro having no living family on Earth, come the Atlas's "launch date" at the start of Season Eight.

We get shots of each of the Paladins interacting with their families, including Allura as a part of Lance's family, which is a sweet touch.

Then, there's a passing shot of Shiro standing alone and isolated on the Atlas's bridge that he isn't even the focus of.

I had a feeling this would be the case when, ahead of the finale of the second season, the Paladins are cheerfully reflecting on their growth and the challenges that they've overcome preceding what they believe will be their final fight with Zarkon.

Shiro, however, is dead silent, back turned to the others, and, when we do see his expression, he's stone-faced and seemingly deep in contemplation. Something that no one acknowledges, or seems to be in any way concerned about, even with Shiro's history of thoughts that he loses himself in being distinctly unpleasant ones.

When he does speak, it's to somberly offer the definitive statement, "You realize, once we defeat Zarkon, the universe won't need Voltron, anymore." The kids naturally express wanting to see their families, again, once the burden of defending the universe has been lifted from their shoulders, even if it means, for Pidge and Keith, going out and finding them.

Shiro, though, voices no such desires. He dons the Fearless Leader/Black Paladin mask and encourages his underlings that they can't fail, and that's that. Cue them looking dramatically out over the horizon before the credits roll.

One could hem and haw and offer any number of supposed explanations for the unsettling absence of any lifegoals for Shiro outside of "defeat the bad guy and defend the universe", especially viewing this scene in hindsight.

"Shiro and his long-term partner split up before the Kerberos mission. Maybe it would be awkward for Shiro to see him, again, and Shiro doesn't want to discuss that with a group of teenagers, especially as their commanding officer."

"Maybe they intended for Shiro's family to show up later and simply didn't have the time to include them, or he has a strained and/or estranged relationship with his family and wasn't too concerned with going back to them."

"He's been declared legally dead, and the cartoon made to sell toys to kids didn't want to bog their child audience's brains down with the confangled nuisances of bureaucracy."

"Maybe Shiro had no personal desire to return to Earth, and would have assisted Pidge in looking for Matt and Sam had he lived."

And, any of these would be more interesting than what we were actually given, which is nothing, because the showrunners didn't know how to and weren't equipped to handle the sheer level of complex and compounded trauma they had afflicted Shiro with. It was easier to brush it all aside, as that shot of an out of focus Shiro so deftly displays. Especially once Shiro had been killed and effectively permanently replaced as the Black Paladin, then brought back to life and retired to "boring adult" status. They killed his partner off-screen, following the dissolution of the relationship, and briefly showed Shiro mourning the loss,

and I guess that was their "emotional pathos for Shiro" quota met for the rest of the show.

After that, he was gifted his own ship and the position of Captain/Admiral aboard it to sequester him off with Sam, Iverson, Veronica, Slav, a similarly unceremoniously demoted Coran, and the rest of the side characters, under the guise of him being promoted to a position of actual significance. And, as much as I love Shiro having his own ship, and the figure he cuts in that stylish and immensely flattering Admiral coat, it shouldn't have to be said that this is both a massive insult to his character after he had the most narrative significance and pathos of anyone during the first two seasons, and a cheap, cowardly tactic employed to avoid the reality that the writers have alluded to Shiro seeing himself as having no purpose if he isn't performing a heroic duty to others, and being passively suicidal when no such duty exists.

"Don't look too closely, everyone! Let's not linger too long on this!" Otherwise, you'll realize that Shiro, in fact, has no one to support him outside of people who already have families of their own. And, "The universe won't need Voltron, anymore", was really Shiro saying, "The universe won't need me, anymore."

And, damned if the brain trusts behind this show didn't try to prove how little they needed Shiro, only for their story to fall apart at the seams after killing him, and the quality to, fittingly, take a nosedive straight into the abyss once they committed to nerfing and sidelining him while having other characters pitifully attempt to retrace steps that he had already taken, stumbling over his distinct and unforgettable bootprints.

[19burstraat]

I love that kaz's revenge kind of... fails. I really love that he doesn't quite get a satisfying revenge on rollins, and I've always thought that was... well, the point. I said more about the specific scene with pekka here but like. it IS a turning point for kaz, it's just not the one he wanted. kaz gets about three narrative warnings/pieces of foreshadowing that it's not going to go how he wants it to go, but he really doesn't heed them until it's too late.

the first is the broken leg from the heist on the bank that helped pekka scam them; while its main narrative purpose is that it's the source of kaz's disability ofc (which feeds into his personal arc and his dynamic with wylan), and it exists outside of the pekka stuff, it arguably has a secondary purpose as the first in a series of 'don't pursue this, it's going to hurt' warnings, which he ignores.

the second warning comes when kaz lets pekka out at hellgate for personal score settling reasons, wastes time and fucks up the plan, and then starts a big domino effect where rollins turns the dregs on him, teams up with van eck, and hires dunyasha to attack inej.

(there are lots of other mini-nods to kaz absolutely refusing to let go of what happened and it informing everything he does; making nina give muzzen fake firepox, the fake pandemic, his interest in fifth harbour being implied to be because that's where he crawled out of the harbour, his dynamics with jesper and wylan, the body boats taking everyone out of the city, etc, but these are the big slip-ups)

the third strike feeds from that; the sweet reef sugar silo job is an almost perfect copy of the second stage of rollins' scam on jordie and kaz; sugar stock prices being driven up due to scarcity. it going so horribly wrong (because pekka anticipated it, of course he did, he made it up) and almost getting inej killed by dunyasha is a final warning to kaz to, effectively, let go or be dragged. if he carries on living in the past like this, he's going to lose his new family, not just his old one.

I think pekka's inability to remember jordie's name was more crushing than kaz admitted to himself, at least on the page; "it was a start" feels almost defeated after all that, and it lacks closure. kaz only gets one more point of view chapter (iirc?) one which feels quite reticent (it's the council of tides one and it's quite short) and he's quite quiet for the rest of the book, at least until the last inej chapter. he gets probably the cruellest wake-up call he could have been given. he doesn't get what he wants, and he'll never get it, because rollins still can't remember jordie's name by the end of the novel. it's time to move on. to his credit, he does it; he does what he always does, which is rise to a challenge. half of kaz's appeal lies in his ability to do that, no matter how hard the task, but it's a hard bandage to rip off.

unfortunately he does not really let go until he's being dragged, when his idea of what his confrontation with pekka should be like, crumbles in the face of pekka just not being able to remember jordie's name, no matter what kaz does. kaz is dragged to the precipice and told, look– here's inej, here's rollins. choose. and that's when he finally has to let go and start doing things for the future and inej, not the past and rollins and jordie. (remember that bit when he's drowning in SOC and he tries to think of revenge, and he can only think of inej instead? he always knew what he was going to pick, really).

he gets rollins out of ketterdam, but it's definitely hollow, in my estimation; the one thing kaz wanted him to remember, and he couldn't, because it wasn't important to him like it was to kaz. there's one final nod to kaz making everything about what happened to him and jordie (sneaking the grisha, colm, and matthias' body out of the city via the bodyboats and 'the bodymen don't bother to rearrange them') but I think inej saying "he doesn't say goodbye. he just lets go" comes at the perfect point; up until then it wasn't true, but now, kaz has finally been forced to (somewhat) let go, having never ever done that before.

but kaz buying inej her ship and a berth at fifth harbour (where he crawled out of the harbour and vowed to start the entire revenge plot) is a nice indication that he is trying to close that part off and move forwards with her, rather than staying in the past. and I really like that it's inej who actually makes the threat against pekka's life, to make sure he stays out of ketterdam; it's hard to know if kaz told her anything that prompted that visit (if he did, I doubt it was much, and I actually suspect he didn't know she'd gone there at all) but no matter what the circumstances, it indicates that he doesn't have to go on alone anymore, and he can finally turn away from that obsession. shared burdens n that. it's not a sad ending, it's honestly a good one for both of them, but it was a pretty rough journey to get there, and he had to fail first.

[nutcasewithaknife]

There's something about how Di Feisheng survives, spends a decade with the knowledge of Li Xiangyi's death, struggles to see the shape of a future without him, while Li Xiangyi does exactly the same for Shan Gudao. How Di Feisheng without Li Xiangyi would most likely have gone back to a joyless life of relentlessly pursuing power to survive, and how Li Xiangyi without Shan Gudao builds himself a new, peaceful existence that nevertheless leaves him as alone as before, that has only death after the relentless pursuit of correcting his incorrigible wrongs as best as he can. How Di Feisheng finds Li Xiangyi, alive but intent on dying, barely recognisable. How Li Xiangyi finds Shan Gudao alive, twisted beyond recognition, and is forced to face that he never really knew the man. How Di Feisheng slowly and surely comes to care for Li Lianhua, Li Xiangyi, whoever he is, while Li Xiangyi can only allow himself to feel grief and rage at Shan Gudao. In the end, Li Xiangyi must kill the one whose death he has spent a decade mourning, and Di Feisheng is left waiting for a match that will never come. When you build a life around one person, what else is left once they are gone? Do you leave the rest behind, or do you keep looking?

[veinsfullofstars]

"Now can we please get on with the meeting already? The monarchy isn't gonna overthrow itself, y'know."

(ID: Kirby series fanart comic of Dark Meta Knight stuck in a mission debriefing, clearly bored and letting his thoughts wander towards a certain rat thief, much to the frustration of his old friend/begrudging henchperson, Mirror Sailor Dee. Transcript below the cut. END ID.)

Me: wants rarepair shenanigans. Also me: wants compelling plotlines. Also me: compromises by making an absurd amount of notes for yet another highly-detailed and overcomplicated AU. Also me: tired of my nonsense.

Started 03/09/24, finished 03/10/24, updated for color correction 11/02/24. | Kintsugi AU Masterpost

---

Transcript:

Panel 1

*A dimly-lit, nondescript room, the plain walls tacked with papers and sticky notes depicting scribbled writing and various images, such as the Dimension Mirror, Dark Matter, the sword Master, a crossed-out headshot of Shadow Dedede, and the symbol for anarchy. DMK sits at a simple table looking off to our left with lidded eyes, leaning his head on one hand, the other tapping idly against the tabletop (SFX: tmp tmp). Three thought bubbles float over his head, each showing a different physical feature of Daroach - his sharp-toothed smile, his long claws, and his big ears respectively. A faint blush can be seen just behind the knight's mask.*

Panel 2

M!Sailor: (from off-screen, depicted as a simplified Waddle Dee head with two slash scars on their right cheek, wearing a white sailor cap with a blue-and-periwinkle ribbon, a blue bill, and two fishing hooks embedded in the top, yelling with their eyes squeezed shut) Hey, scarface! Quit daydreaming about your boyfriend for five seconds and pay attention!

*DMK startles, eyes shrunk to little gold lines, the arm holding up his head slipping out from under him, nearly bumping his chin on the table.*

Panel 3

*DMK turns sharply to our right to point and glare at M!Sailor off-screen, slamming his fist down on the table (SFX: THUD!).*

DMK: (angrily) Hey, shut up, he's not my-

Panel 4

*DMK pauses, his eyes once more shrunk to points, his pointing hand dropping a bit as he realizes what he just said (shown by an ellipses over his head). A tiny bit of blush can be seen through the mask.*

Panel 5

DMK: (glaring and pointing once more, the blush in his face more noticeable, visibly sweating) I mean, I am paying attention!

M!Sailor: (from off-screen, looking unimpressed with half-lidded eyes) Nice cover, Boss. Very convincing.

[poupeesdecirque]

Photo Challenges - Why I do them & why I do them alone

Time for a new blog, my topic this time: Photo Challenges!

With the new year a lot of people attempt to do the "A Doll A Week" a weekly photo challenge, some are even that ambitious to do the 365-Challenge, a photo for each day.

Back in 2014 I started my very first attempt to do a photo challenge, I got a DSLR as gift 1 1/2 years in before and kinda wanted to do more with it than just taking photos here and there. The weekly challenge of the ADAW seemed fun. On the top of this entry you can see my very first entrance for it. As you can see it started with a quite random photo.

I can tell I didn't make the full 2014 according to the ADAW but as I checked my files I noticed I indeed took photos each week?! Therefore I failed but .. also did not. It was somehow weirdly motivating for me to see that I can do it.

2015 was the first true attempt for me to finish the ADAW, this time with more effort. Because just taking photos is boring right? Aside taking more photos I wanted to feature each doll I had, around that time that was still very much possible with 52 photos for the 52 weeks of the year.

I was prepared, this was the first pic of 2015 .. well.. no. It wasn't I took it in advance and this is one of the points I later on disliked how I approached the whole thing. I was in a flickr group for some time and the same theme was going against my own liking, that people just took 20 photos at a time, posted them (all looking alike) and were finished with the whole challenge within half of the time.

I asked myself if this was what I wanted? The whole thing started to frustrate me, as I tried to come up with cool ideas and I saw other people half-assed their entries. Of course each to their own but no passion for the project, 'cheating' with multiple photos from one photoshoot just to make it "full" that seemed wrong for me.

But I managed to finish 2015! My first year with 52 weekly photos taken. The next year started with a photoshoot as well but I didn't use it for the ADAW.

Instead I took a break to regain and started with another idea:

Names! Like this one was named "ADAW 01 - Frost Pattern" I made it into an own challenge to add creative titles to go with the photos, also I added more and more photos, not just one but multiple. This was to challenge myself more and more. Still I tried to be motivated by others and motivate them but somehow... it still was turning me off that people approached the whole thing less .. uhm.. strict? I can't really put it into words, I just can tell as I later on within the years tried to build up a guide how to do the ADAW I got so demotivated seeing others doing it that I had to put the thread in the forum on full ignore and do my own instead? It's super weird.

What really got me going though was that I started to print my photos. 2 Photobooks for one year, having my photos printed made them more precious to me. I still make photobooks and last year I reached the maximum page count for the books and uhm.. might need to do three a year if that continues.

I can tell I got hooked by photos. Sometimes it felt hard to start over though, to start with "nothing" all over again, as I tend to null & void my own progress in my mind and well.. "new year, nothing done" got me hard sometimes, that's why the first days of the new years were hard for me to find ideas.

Also the fact that I still tried not to feature a doll twice got harder and harder even given I had more than enough dolls. But you know how it is, right? When you restrict yourself you want to do exactly that what is restricted.

Did I feel drained in the process of taking photos weekly? Oh yes, I did. Especially because I decided I have to take WHOLE PHOTOSHOOTS and sometimes even posts with outtakes to share fact about the characters. Some weeks I was so demotivated.

But a thing that helped me going was ... routine. And the photobooks. I picked a day during the week I was taking photos, which for me is Saturday, and it's still mainly Saturday to be honest.

It was 2019 already and you can see I returned to taking new year's photos, 2020 was similar. But I got tired of the ADAW thing, because it was kind of still setting to close borders for me. Taking photos weekly was becoming easy for me because I did it for so long. I still kinda tried to keep up with other hobbyists but in 2020 with the pandemic I cut ties with my local community and decided that 2021 would be the first year of me not doing a 'A Doll A Week'

Wait? What? Yes, you read that correctly.

Welcome to my own challenge the ... Weekly Photo!

This might seem not much of a difference but allows me to take photos, not just of dolls but of landscapes, people, animals and that was important to me. I still mainly use it for dolls but I wanted to do an own challenge, without any link back to the 'rules' of the ADAW and without the mental connection to the community I had left behind.

With the Weekly Photo I started to thrive. No more (own set) boundaries, every doll could be featured, even 20 times in a row, no rules, no titles, no themes, just me and my camera. For the sake of being creative.

And that's what I can tell you about my challenges... do it for the creativity, do it to challenge yourself. Don't be that dumb like I was and think you have to stick to what everyone else does or that you have to do it a certain way.

Now taking photos became so easy for me I see it as challenge to use the seasons as canvas to come up with something, to learn what light/time is the best.

I can tell my photography has envolved because I dared and tried, I challenged myself, revisted ideas but didn't try to set boundaries to my own creativity.

To be honest I now see photo ideas everywhere and almost have to stop myself from taking TOO MANY PHOTOS because .. I still need to sort them out :')

Oh a little thing that still is a rule for me ... I didn't bury them all: the first photo has to be taken in the actual year. Yes, I stayed up super late to take Tamani's photos as the first set of 2024 just to be sure I have that done.

I'm not sure if this entry is helpful for someone, for me looking up the old photos (I put in one for each year of a challenge) was super interesting and with a super busy week and weekend behind me I wanted to do a lighter topic for once.

I can tell writing down really helps me to reflect the hobby and to think through some decisions.

[vladdyissues]

So

Jack does cross stitch

Vlad knits (pictured: his bookshelf)

And Maddie's into bushcraft

I just think that's neat

[metamatronic]

i’ve been trying to learn japanese recently and i would love to know how god-awful my handwriting is lolllll.

[nym-wibbly]

Which one of TFW got the best line in Spn?

Huh. If it has to be one of Team Free Will then you've got me. They all had so many great lines. Crowley, Bobby, and Lucifer all got some stonkers, too.

The line that really seared itself into my brain from all of Supernatural was guest-character Hester's:

It really shook me! I mean, in and of itself it's a great line. But there's so much worldbuilding packed into the combination of the line with Emily Holmes's delivery. This idea that Castiel fetching Dean out of hell was the first domino tipped over, not only in Cas's personal fall ("You have fallen in every way imaginable,") but in the subsequent chaos and destruction in Heaven. And she's not wrong to single that event out as the turning point, but she turns the blame on Dean, who hardly got any choice in the matter:

"Why should we give you anything after everything you have taken from us? The very touch of you corrupts. When Castiel first laid a hand on you in Hell, he was lost! For that you're going to pay." Supernatural 7x21 - Reading is Fundamental

She says these lines to Dean, and it starts as the whole aloof, disdainful shtick we've seen from other angels speaking about and to humanity. But Hester reaches max gross load right there and then, so it finishes raw. She breaks down, shouts, loses all self-restraint and just hurls her grief, rage and pain at Dean. Moves to punish him. When Cas deflects Hester from physically attacking Dean - no small intervention, given his fragile state of mind - she whales on the helpless Cas instead, trying to claw back some control of her life by attacking what she sees as the source of her problems.

Hester's completely adrift in this new world of free will and personal responsibility that Team Free Will have dropped on her, and on all the other, surviving angels who didn't get a starring role in the Apocalypse or the war in Heaven. Hester's fallen too, they all have, and she only knows it when Inias begs her not to kill Castiel. Then she snaps completely, and Meg kills her before she can kill Cas.

That's some corking dialogue right there, and in some ways it's more of a reveal about the state of things in Heaven, post-non-Apocalypse, than all Castiel's season 6/7 power-grab arc with its exposition about what's going on up there. Hester's public breakdown is one of the few hints we ever get of exactly what Cas is so regretful and self-hating about in later seasons. Every time his storyline trips him over another failure or mistake, it adds to this guilt until he ends up just desperate to do something right. So desperate that it blinds him to the nuances of an evolving situation, sometimes.

I don't think Cas understands until almost the very end of the story, after becoming Jack's father and reaching rock-bottom in his relationship with Dean, that the one thing he always thought he got right in the first place - pulling Dean Winchester out of Hell, saving him, taking his side against an absent and uncaring God - was always victory enough.

[sleepynegress]

On Greta Danesti...

I'm just taking this time to correct a certain anti-Black, (and anti-Romani) sadly typical fandom troll's misogynoir fuckery in the tag and establishing who Greta Danesti is in canon Castlevania animation lore. This is Greta Danesti's official character sheet:

She's the village headwoman of Danesti a few miles away from Alucard's castle. This is what her voice actress, Marsha Thompson looks like:

It's pretty obvious her character design took cues from the actress, who is Afro-British. In show canon, however, her family escaped from the Roman city of Carthage, which today, is located in the African country Tunisia. Alucard correctly speculated where her people are from while conversing with her, here (s4 e5):

Greta then confirms that her people did escape the Romans, but she now fully embraces her "family" in her village who are "from all over" and the responsibility of taking care of them.

This same troll used the g-slur to insist that she is Romani.

She is not. This troll used an early character design here, to make her case.:

And though it does have similarities to Romani clothing... It also looks like it takes cues from Tunisian clothing and likely local and non-local European clothing of the era with "fantasy" elements sprinkled in, as well, which would match the fact of her village's people coming from all over:

There definitely should be more Romani rep in media as it is so often whitewashed, but Greta is not Romani.

FYI, these women actors actually *are* of Romani descent: Fairuza Balk of The Craft, Oona Chaplin who played Robb Stark's wife in GOT (she's also Charlie Chaplin's granddaughter[!]), and Noomi Rapace from the Swedish movie, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo says her father may have been of Romani descent, as well.

And because I can predict it, as people like to find ways of discounting blackness in every way...

Yes, there are plenty of non-Black indigenous POC in North Africa, including within Tunisia. Another fun fact... Africa has more indigenous human genetic variation among its peoples than every other people on the planet has with everyone else on the planet[!]. All this to say non-white POC AND Black people are indigenous to Tunisia.

I feel I have to say that because there is a lot of anti-Black anthropological fetishization of North Africa. Egypt is a major example of that (see: Rami Malek, an indigenous Coptic Egyptian who self-identifies as African man of color and has likely had to clarify that *often* because people keep wanting to mislabel him as an Arab, but I digress...) And sadly, there is a decidedly anti-black movement to totally disconnect certain North African countries' identities from a continental African one, and to largely see it as mainly a part of the MENA world (it is both kiddies, BOTH). Here is an informative article (linked in the image) about that struggle:

So, this got heavy...but between the post insisting that Greta is NOT Black and the one saying she's not bisexual because that same troll is purposefully and maliciously being obtuse about how words go together... I figured clearing some things up and educating folks might be helpful. BTW, the fact of those issues in the article makes her blackness all the more resonant as rep in pop culture. And hey, poly folks have disagreements, just like the het folks do... -Still bi. I'm gonna end here with two images from the linked article of anti-racist Tunisian protesters (MENA and Black):

P.S. I also side-eye those keen to make her muscular... I mean yeah she wields a big-ass hammer and shortsword/dagger, but the tendency to masculinize black woman characters deserves a hardy eye-squint. Especially, given that the show has *no problem* making muscular women look like that and they DIDN'T for Miss Greta.

See: Zamfir and the Berserk-style sword-carrying Vampire warrior, Striga. Both of whom had that flex going on.