#i find myself projecting a lot more there

[sparkbirdmusic]

a creativity tip I will always, always give: keeping a log of the time you spend actively working on a project is one of the best ways to understand your own process better, and I think it’s a key to overcoming creative block and gaining creative momentum

my newest song “when the world resets” took 25 hours of focused work (+ who knows how much time pondering it outside of that) from Dec 28-Jan 31, with 8 days in the middle where I was visiting family and 10 where I was avoiding the song

I know from past data that on average it takes me about 2 weeks to write a song. this one felt like it took FOREVER but it actually took… about 2 weeks

but in terms of hours, 25 is higher than my average (12-16). I changed directions SO many times, and it had been so long since I finished a song that I was definitely psyching myself out. plus I was showing up inconsistently, taking lots of days off, and had the huge distraction of travel right in the middle

looking at this information helps me have more grace for myself re: how long it took to write this song. it shows me places where fear/anxiety (not a lack of ability to write the song) and circumstances interfered with the process. that makes me feel more confident going forward—it bolsters my courage to show up in spite of my fear, knowing that the more often I show up to create, the less fear I’ll feel

and the next song will give me even more data, so I’m excited to find out more about my process

I’d be interested to know if anyone else has tried this and if it works for you 💚 good luck on whatever you’re creating!!

[tekesima]

this is the 5th and unfortunately last page of this mini comic. This was intended to be a quick project but ended up stretching to almost if not a year of work due to my commitments to irl stuff. I loved working on this and I'm once again thankful to @blood-injections for letting me make these few pages based off their post here.

you can find the previous pages here: 1, 2&3, 4

more explanation and background beneath the cut

I underestimated the amount of work that would go into making these, especially with all the pages being fully rendered. Initially there were supposed to be 6 pages but I ended up having to stretch it to 7 pages. But now I've decided to end it here on the 5th page due to a number of reasons. The first being that I just unfortunately do not have the time for this kind of commitment anymore with me in college now. I also have just moved on from mcr content and have been more interested in other bands and other media. Another reason is that I do not have a lot of time in general to even do digital drawings anymore and finally I feel like my art style right now that I'm currently happy with is a departure from the style that i started this comic with, and it just doesn't fit it very well.

I felt pretty bad having to take so long on working on these pages and only coming out with one, maybe two pages after 3 months, since i've only been able to work on these during my semester breaks.

Thank you to people who've been following and reading along, and again, thank you so so much to @/blood-injections for giving me permission to make their post into this short comic, even if I never ended up finishing it.

This part will just be some final thoughts. I learned a lot while making the pages; panel shapes and placement and how to make it appealing, how to space out and arrange speech bubbles to make the dialog more digestible and easy to read, how to sort of draw out the sound effects which I'm still trying to get the hang of in terms of fonts. The hardest thing I found about making all of these is consistency, not just in terms of schedule but in terms the process of making the comic itself, particularly the designs of the characters. I hadn't created a character reference sheet at all for this since I anticipated it to be short and quick (it was not lol), and so there were quite a few times where I found myself accidentally forgetting to draw some details of the character's designs but since I had already posted them, all I could do was just add the designs I missed in the next pages. I hope that didn't bug you all too much :'3

That's pretty much all I have to say, thank you for the people that stuck around this long but I apologize for not being able to continue the comic due to personal commitments and having moved on to other interests. I hope you all have a good one :]

[toxetta]

You should yap about mcr btw :33 barely listen to their stuff but now im interested cause the fanart looks cool

ok i'm about to tism out super hard here about like the entire lore, so i'm putting a cutoff thing here cause it'll be a lot. you've been warned

first important event in the timeline: they hit the second tower. gerard way, lead singer saw it in person and forms the band as a way of getting his feelings out with his lil bro mikey(bass), as well as their friends ray(lead guitar) and frank(rhythm guitar). they went through a bunch of drummers too but nobody cares about them. also would like to mention they tongue kissed on stage a lot

so in 2002 they release album 1 "i brought you my bullets, you brought me your love". it's very cathartic, heavy, emotional with lots of themes about depression and desperation. standout track imo is:

2004, they release "three cheers for sweet revenge". it tells the story of a man who has to give the devil the souls of a thousand evil men to save his lover, but after killing 999 he finds out the final one is his. they wore a bunch of cool makeup and did amazing mvs and it's my fav album ever. it also has this song about getting sodomised in jail

in 2006 they make "the black parade" and it's the peak of their fame. gerard also cut his hair short😒 but ig we couldn't have everything. it also tells a story about a guy dying of cancer and reminiscing on his life, and it's much more glam and flashy than anything they've done before. it also contains my fav song ever, which has unironically saved the lives of many ppl including myself

asp gerard writes a comic book called "danger days: the true lives of the fabulous killjoys" and in 2010 they make an album with the same name based on it, where he gets his bandmates to dress up as his ocs for it. it's about rebelling against a megacorporation in a post-apocalypse sci-fi setting, and the music itself is very positive, upbeat and energetic, so massive tonal shift. it also contains the catchiest song ever

then frank got hunted down by the fbi, they scrapped a concept album called "conventional weapons", broke up, gerard and frank did solo projects, then they got back together again. then they did a comeback tour in 2022, wore a bunch of dresses and made monkey noises and now there's DEFINITELY gonna be a 5th album this year trust

fun trivia fact they're also responsible for the creations of twilight, the umbrella academy and peni parker from the spiderverse movies

any questions??

[betterbemeta]

because I love to cook the youtube algorithm pushes me a lot of food porn videos which I guess are adjacent. But over time, something about them feels cruel to me. The influencers are living in an alternate universe. 'Surf n' turf fried rice?' 40 lbs of it for a tailgate?

I live in the USA, and the absolute cheapest online price for snow crab legs I could find was $10 a lb and I have no idea if the product's any good quality. As of November 2024, the wholesale prices before markup were over $8 a lb. I haven't seen them in my grocery store for under $14 a lb. Online, 10 lb cases of crab like he's carrying there go for almost always over $100. Sometimes over $200. There was a 2018-2019 population collapse due to a marine heatwave that knocked out over 10 billion crabs.

The stated price of a beef tenderloin varies wildly depending on where I look. I can find a USDA report that states that the retail cost of beef tenderloin in my area in 2024 was around $8-$11 per lb but I have NEVER seen it for under $15 a lb on sale in the store, at least recently. Grass-fed beef costs a lot more. Maybe I am not looking hard enough, and there ARE definitely ways to get meat cheaper, like buying a cow share. But like... do you get what I am saying? That meat fried rice guy is holding is potentially over $100 by itself. and why the hell do you need tenderloin to make fried rice, anyway? It's one of the more expensive cow parts, it's filet mignon.

I kind of find it fun to watch videos where a butcher cuts up wagyu beef because it's a luxury that I can't justify spending on myself. But after a certain point this stuff stops feeling like fantasy, and begins feeling cruel. Maybe this guy has special connections where he can get that much crab for below wholesale prices, or has special deals with farmers to get a $60 whole tenderloin when he wants. But its more likely he's just rich, or is projecting the image of being rich using investor or sponsorship money.

The USA has leadership right now that dismantled any agency that can control bird flu and is blaming egg prices on its enemies. Normal people will be watching their grocery bills further skyrocket due to isolationist tariffs, rent, utilities, and medical prices take more out of their food budgets than ever before. And it would not surprise me if the plan to make up the difference after the feds round up low-wage immigrant workers is to send them right back to work but like, even more literally enslaved.

And youtube wants me to see the altreality where some random guy brings the economic collapse of largely indigenous alaskan fishing communities, and cubed filet mignon, to a tailgate??? what 'let them eat cake' bs is this???

[opashoo]

Do you have any advice on how not to get so overwhelmed when it comes to conlanging? I get overwhelmed way too fast with the information I read on the conlang subreddit David j Petersons book I have or YouTubers I just get burned out.

I start out on my phonological sounds and sometimes I add a new sound or get rid of a few I find unnecessary phonotactics is where I end up getting stuck/frustrated and stoping completely. I don’t know why but my brain just cannot compute when it comes to phonotactics no matter how many videos I watch of people explaining it or looking through Wikipedia just doesn’t register in my brain. I’m assuming this is happening because I’m autistic which is even more frustrating I’m so slow when it comes to learning or I end up comparing myself to others for understanding/learning things faster than me. I get motivated to make a language and then I get overwhelmed it’s just a repeat cycle to the point where I just want to give up. I’m not even sure if it’s possible for me to make a conlang at this point. And then I stumble across something I never heard before from someone else said and I stress about that too and I constantly worry I’m going to make a conlang I spent so much time on only for someone to point out that it’s a reflex and I need to scrap the whole thing and start all over :(

So I have two big pieces of advice that have helped enormously with this sort of thing and they are to work small (the big picture will come together) and to know your goals. It's gonna be a lot so I'm putting it past a readmore. I also talk a bit about my own project, but it's all the way at the bottom.

First, focus on one thing at a time and take small steps. As your familiarity with your own work grows, the bigger picture will start to come together, just focus on one thing at a time.

If there's a linguistic phenomenon or grammatical construction or concept or something that you want to explore but you don't understand it entirely, then just focus on that for a while. I like to make toy languages, really, really small and simple conlangs with extremely simply words and sounds that are meant to focus specifically on one or two concepts at a time. I don't worry about anything else but those concepts; no phonotactics, no worrying about how pretty or ugly the language sounds, I don't worry about naturalism or sound changes, I don't focus on any of these things unless those things are what I'm making the toy language to explore.

My current project, Yongasabi, has a consonantal root system inspired by Arabic, but understanding the concept in a satisfactory manner where I felt confident including it in a project that I plan on publishing took actual years. I made three separate toylangs, one of which I revised and overhauled three times before eventually using that as a basis for Yongasabi. I needed that time and work to focus on absolutely nothing but sound changes and how a system like this evolves in natural languages. While I was playing around with sound changes in one toy language, in another toy language I was also trying to figure out how a system of derivation like this could into systems of nouns, adjectives and verbs. I did not focus on anything else with those toy language but those core concepts because to do any more would be overwhelming and confusing.

It's the same when you're working on a more complete language project, you build it little by little. Focus on one aspect at a time, one concept at a time. As you become more familiar with your own work and you use and apply it, you will start to see the things that work and the things that don't, and you'll be able to make decisions accordingly. It'll happen over time, but you have to avoid stressing about the whole thing.

And if there's something causing you trouble that's stopping you from making the language, there's no one stopping you from avoiding it until you're ready. I never actually properly wrote down Yongasabi's sound inventory, assimilations, and allophones until the grammar document was at 204 pages because I hate working on that stuff. :huntershruggy: That's usually the first thing a lot of people like to work on for some reason, but I hate it and I just went by instinct for 204 pages and five months. If I let that stop me, I never would have made any progress. There were some things I had to go back and update because of it, and that took extra time, but extra work with progress is better than no work and no progress.

Second, understand your goals.

A piece of advice I got from David Peterson's videos and several other conlanging youtubers is to know why you're making your language and what your endgoal is. As long as you understand what your goal is, you can prioritize and decide what steps you need to take to get there. You need to understand what you want or else you'll never be able to work towards it, and you reduce the chances that you'll be happy with it.

For example, I've known some conlangers whose goal is to make some kind of secret, diegetically constructed language for a fictional setting, or maybe a secret language to use with their friends, but they get caught up on rules of naturalism and worry about naturalistic development. You don't need naturalism if the point of your language is that it didn't develop naturally. That's just a waste of your time.

Conversely, I've known some naturalistic conlangers who feel obligated to add every new concept they come across with the idea that "Well if it evolved in a real world language, then it must have some use to real speakers and thus belongs in this language" but they miss the point that a natural language doesn't need to contain every naturally developed phenomenon. In the end they're left with something bloated, hugely redundant, and incredibly disappointing to them.

I've also met conlangers whose goal is to make a naturalistic conlang for a fictional setting only to be hugely dissatisfied when they follow the rules of naturalistic development and it makes a language that doesn't sound the way they want, or it doesn't evoke the feeling they want, or they find that their progress is unnecessarily bogged down by learning rules they find boring, because they don't actually want a naturalistic language, they want an artlang that services their story.

In all of these cases, the authors of these conlangs didn't understand their goals. They did work they didn't like to make end products they were dissatisfied with because they failed to meet their real goals. These goals can shift over time, but in the end that's fine as long as it makes you happy. You need to be making your conlang for you and your purposes! You say that you've gotten stuck on phonotactics and that's stopped you before, but Yongasabi doesn't even have phonotactics outside of literally one single rule, and it's that there can never be more than two consonants in a cluster. I hate working with phonotactics too, so I made my language in a way that let me minimize that work. It doesn't interfere with my goal so I'm totally fine with that.

I know this is a lot but it really does boil down to those two points: work small so that you don't get overwhelmed, and know your goals so you can set your priorities. My goals with Yongasabi were:

Make a language that allows me to explore this fictional culture I made for the slugcats of Rain World

Derive sounds from Mongolian, Korean and Filipino (And a little bit of Vietnamese)

Explore grammatical concepts that I find cool from these languages and others (My main focus was converbs and agglutination in tandem with a consonantal root system, but in general there's a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in the grammar)

Make sure I like the sound of the language

My main guiding forces were:

Have a rough basis in naturalistic sound changes, but if it leads to sounds or situations I don't like, change it; the readers won't notice because they don't see the development process

If something starts to feel weird or stops fitting in with the rest of the language, don't be afraid to change it or get rid of it entirely because that in a way reflects organic change in the language (and extra work for progress is better than no work for no progress)

If there's an opportunity for the culture to express itself in the language, take it

If you want to judge how well I've realized those goals, you can check it out here (I'm making this post free to reblog unlike the last one because the link is hidden under all this text and 1st edition release is super close anyway I am so excited).

Anyway, good luck! I hope my advice helps!

[manofthepipis]

I heavily headcanon that spamton has adhd (although tbh I am heavily projecting).

Just his erraticness and emotional instability gives off huge adhd vibes, along with no volume control (my voice too does whatever the fuck it wants and I won't notice until someone points it out lmao)

Also since I subscribe to oldest of the group hc, it likely put him behind his peers.

(Just watching everyone do what they're meant to do and just not being able to measure up because even your best effort isn't enough and you don't know why you're like this why you can't be as good as the rest of them is just...oof. it be like that sometimes)

And also he's impulsive as fuck (I choose to see the constantly changing prices on his wares as a joke on unstable e-currency and a testament to how he can't stick to some decisions worth a damn)

TLDR: comfort bastard character my beloved (that your fics actually introduced me to, so thank you very much for the brainrot <3)

honestly anon i'm w u (fellow adhd individual here) and though i desperately try not to project in my writing, trying to keep the character as in-character as possible with some leeway, some projection is inevitable lmao

i rlly think his character, while charming and fun, is also immensely relatable. For reasons you've pointed out, like relating to the other addisons and feeling like he's 'behind' them, to where he compensates this with his delusions of grandeur and a strongly-unhealthy god complex. Oof. this guy. He hasn't had the best support system or the healthiest of habits, and unfortunately was put into a very dark place during a very dark time.

but i can definitely see the build behind this headcanon. His character does give off some of those vibes. I try not to diagnose spamton, chalking his habits up to his spammy email antics and existence as email, but regardless its nice to have some personal traits resonate in a character and it can be comforting.

(he's my comfort character as well i wrap him in a blanket but also will dunk him headfirst into a pool <3)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Another year has passed, and with it the opportunity to reflect back on all that has happened. While my growth was not as dramatic as last year, I can still see lots of positive change.

I'll never have enough ways to say thank you for all the love and support you have given me this year. On to 2025!

(2023 summary here!)

[couchcouchcouchcouch]

HEART. LUNGS. LIVER. NERVES. HEART. LUNGS. LIVER. NERVES. HEART. LUNGS. LIVER. NERVES. HEART. LUNGS. LIVER. NERVES.

[bixels]

While I do think anon was rude, I do think it's pretty shitty to set up all this stuff you were going to add the au and then just drop it. It's disappointing. Definitely unfollowing.

Bye.

[elyachkins]

spontaneously watched marahuyo project in one sitting and cried my eyes out, it's just that good i appreciate so many themes and topics it's managed to raise, but the difficulty of being queer in a small town, being queer in a place that was and still is scarred by imperialism/colonialism is something that resonated with me the most. this show felt so comforting and filled me with so much hope

[batsplat]

oxley bom pod was talking about the friendly atmosphere in the paddock today and they brought up vale as someone who would make himself hate his opponents in order to beat them. they mentioned biaggi before saying vale didn’t need to make up a reason there lol, and the gibernau, stoner, lorenzo, marquez. thought it was interesting to hear them say that especially since oxley specifically had a particularly close working relationship with vale!

got around to listening to the podcast rather belatedly + had a chat about this general topic that helped me organise my thoughts on this a bit. I transcribed the most relevant comments - probably some small errors because of cross-talk and like... I'm a fast transcriptionist but can't be bothered to properly do it, here:

O: One is because racing is so fucking complicated now. [...] They've got so much to do, so much pressure - to have the negative energy of anger and hatred is actually - B: It's a waste. O: It's a bad thing, you're just wasting your energy. I mean it depends on the character, okay - B: So maybe Vale was the last who really needed to hate somebody to give him - and now even Vale invites Casey to his ranch to ride with him. But he really needed to - It was not difficult for him to hate, but he - Some riders he really looked for a reason to hate them even more, because then he could dig deeper in himself - because he was just a happy chap - in order to beat them. O: Max Biaggi. B: But it was easy to hate Max! That was not very difficult. Sete Gibernau, basically he needed to try - O: Casey Stoner. Sete Gibernau. Marc Marquez. B: He hated Vale probably before Vale hated Casey! But that's another podcast. O: Yeah, I think so. No, definitely, definitely, definitely. [...] Some people - they get fired up by hating other people, and that's fair enough.

so yeah. I mean, qualified agreement, I guess? they're definitely right about casey hating valentino before valentino hated casey lol. if valentino ever really hated casey at all. which is not necessarily a mainstream take, so it's nice to hear it!

I also agree with this general take about... y'know, the creeping professionalisation of the sport and how that affects how likely you're going to get fun drama. goes beyond just hours spent looking at data and also about... having a bit of a life, having time to actually form a personality. and as I've said before, it's the fans! clickbait news + social media featuring partisan fans, who aren't just going to read every statement but also react to every statement like it's life or death shit. pecco and jorge have gotten push back for some incredibly, deeply, ridiculously mild comments these last couple years. they HAVE to phrase everything they say as inoffensively as possible while still getting their points across, and even then they'll generally be jumped. like, forget valentino, how do you think casey would have fared in this current media environment? up against a fanbase as partisan as valentino's - or marc's nowadays? not well is the answer! I think to some extent you can get away with this stuff more depending on people's perceptions of you, so marc and increasingly pedro will generally be fine... but on the flip side, the pecco's, the casey's, the jorge x2's of this world... everything they say gets read in the worst possible light, but now everyone's just so much louder about it

but this ask was more about valentino than the current landscape, so I'll get back to him. I do think it is a bit of an issue if you frame it as a completely either-or issue - at the end of the day, most competitors will probably motivate themselves through their enemies at least a little. pecco definitely uses negative emotions to fire him up, people criticising him and the like. casey absolutely used them, often directed at valentino. all the comments from the haters to fire them up right, to show everyone how wrong they are. on a psychological level, there is not something *fundamentally* different between using your rivals or the fans or the press to motivate yourself - it's still the same underlying motivational process (and indeed the podcast references lawson's distaste for the press). casey signs off his first every grand prix win by saying how nice it was to beat a spanish rider sponsored by the circuit, like are we calling that pure love for the game? he and mostly martin and to a somewhat lesser degree pecco do share a tendency to... believe the world is out to get them, and use that to fire themselves up. idk if casey strictly needed to do that or if it was just ingrained at a young age and became a stable self-perpetuating way in which he viewed the world but also, it doesn't really matter, right. maybe in both valentino and casey there is a pure unpolluted soul who could have enjoyed winning just for the sake of winning, but in practise it's clearly more complicated than that. as has been recently discussed in quite some depth in this parish, late 2007!casey was getting sympathetic interview write-ups that described his mentality as informed by 'bitterness and rejection'. including bitterness at valentino, who at that point in time was not meaningfully reciprocating any of that stuff!

so I do have a bit of a bone to pick with this idea of 'the last guy'. valentino didn't 100% motivate himself by hating his enemies, the blokes after him didn't do so 0%. I think of the aliens casey is probably the most similar to him by this metric... some are definitely less inclined to do so. lorenzo's a bit of an odd case where at times it felt like he was better at making other guys hate him than necessarily hating them himself... complicated guy but I think he actually really did want to mostly fuel himself in a positive manner, except then for various reasons both external and internal he needed to also draw a bit more from. the darkness. marc is more likely than either valentino or casey to just fight to win for the sake of winning... then again you do have cute little incidents like misano 2019 where marc - off the back of two back-to-back last lap defeats - miraculously happened to find an extra bit of motivation through a spat in qualifying after duly harrying the yamaha's all weekend. again, it's a question of degree, right. marc is just inherently less restless than valentino and less inclined to think the world is out to get him than casey, which are all contributing factors

with valentino, I think I disagree a teensy bit in terms of framing more than I do in substance. first off, not to be a broken record on this, but obviously all of these feuds were very different, involving very different emotional landscapes. I don't think it's correct to say valentino needed an enemy to fire himself up, but he did always need something. some mission to dig his teeth into, some way of making the whole thing exciting. of making it fun! I'm not all that convinced of this happy-go-lucky characterisation of valentino - a lot of the time he had to go to an awful lot of effort to keep himself entertained, and when that didn't work he could get pretty miserable. he needed to keep himself stimulated, he needed to stop himself from feeling lonely, he needed to give himself a purpose to work towards. hatred did help him in a motivational sense, and he's talked in his autobiography about how anger has made him ride faster. it's useful... up to a point. it's just not a uniform thing across rivalries

my sense is that it comes down to two things. 1) he needs something to motivate himself and get excited, be it a rival or whatever. and 2) he needs some distance from his rivals. motivating yourself through a rival is not quite the same thing as motivating yourself through an enemy. for instance!! casey was only really his enemy once they were no longer on-track rivals - it was unrelated to actual competitive calculus, and was in some ways more about casey than it was about valentino. when valentino did that shit to casey at laguna 2008, he's not like... mad at casey. he doesn't hate him. he's gleeful at least in part because of how obviously pissed casey is, but he doesn't hate him. because he doesn't need to hate casey to want to beat him! casey is already so considerable a challenge that beating him is reward enough in itself - he's this super tricky puzzle for valentino to work away at... and when he comes up with the answer at laguna 2008, he's delighted. he doesn't really hate jorge in 2009 either - dislike, yes, hate, no. he's already plenty stimulated by the challenge of beating his feisty young teammate... he doesn't need anything else. he gets through 95% of the 2015 season with barely any animosity with his title rival - there, he would have seen it as distracting from his primary mission of winning his tenth in a way that was entirely disconnected from any particular rival. he also runs into the problem that it feels like any psychological warfare feels like it's getting aimed more at marc than jorge - but that's entirely accidental, he isn't TRYING to fuck with marc in the middle of the season. why would he!! and jorge refuses to be fucked with on the track because he's just never in the same postcode as valentino, and valentino isn't attempting to fuck with him off the track. he's barely even doing like,, mild mind games, like they're quite actively friendly the entire year

(I do sometimes think you can do a bit of displacement here where you don't necessarily need to hate the person you're actively fighting to get the job done - cf marc at misano 2019, also... tbh casey 2011-12 kinda had that vibe where he was getting all that energy out of his system in valentino's direction and could then keep things civil with his actual title rival. there's a LITTLE bit of that 2015 even pre phillip island but mostly valentino does have a more early 2008 'we move in silence' vibe or whatever that pecco tweet read. this is the restlessness thing, right - he kinda needs to fill his brain with SOMETHING)

which brings us to the second element: needing some distance. zero problem with biaggi, which is kinda the training wheels feud in that it takes a bit of a life of its own before valentino REALLY was intending it to. he's a kid (literal eighteen year old) who's kinda snarky about biaggi in the press and biaggi takes it EXTREMELY poorly and confronts him about it and it kind of spirals from there. with casey + jorge, valentino ensures that they never GET too close. I do think there is an element of... y'know, not wanting to be close friends with the guys who are your title rivals, because it's harder to beat people you care about and deprive them of the thing they want most in the world. which I actually think is pretty normal!! valentino's problem is that on a few occasions he has ended up in rivalries with blokes he was at some stage close in - and either he preemptively withdraws as with marc and... ? probably...? melandri...? - or the relationship deteriorates and then blows up as with sete and also marc. the 'preemptive withdrawing' bit does suggest a degree of self-awareness with regards to his own competitive process - and as has been previously argued in this parish, valentino's relationship with marc developing as it did was in large part due to his competitive situation 2010-14. the two of them falling out was probably always going to happen if they were competing, the two of them falling out that badly required valentino's stint in the competitive wilderness to let him lower his guard to such an extent

so that's the argument in broad strokes. yes, valentino can use enemies to motivate himself - he certainly enjoys having rivals, he enjoys fucking with them, he enjoys figuring them out and measuring himself against them and also a little bit of competitive edge. that doesn't mean he needs enemies per se, or certainly he wouldn't have seen some of his rivals in quite such extreme terms (casey in particular of course felt differently). he did need SOMETHING to motivate him... rivals, definitely - enemies, perhaps. and he also needed a bit of distance from those he was competing against. which post-sete he tended to preemptively enforce, except that one time when he didn't, and when it wasn't preemptively enforced it did have a tendency to blow up rather spectacularly. so in essence, you still end up at the same conclusion, right - valentino did get a lot out of having enemies, did motivate himself with them, did need to beat someone. but the working process is a bit different as I see it. sometimes making enemies is about emotional regulation, y'know. feuding as a healthy outlet for competitive tension. as it should be

[hotsugarbyglassanimals]

it's probably the sunnier weather that's doing stuff to my brain to make me more optimistic but it's so interesting having a brain that craves a lot of self-fulfillment to the point where I can move past some hang-ups around perfection by going "oh I really wanna do that though" and then I do it well because researching how to do it right is also a rewarding part of the process

[hahniana]

ren and stimpy adult party cartoon ranked from worst to least worst imo

6. naked beach frenzy - already not very fond of the contents of the episode but knowing anything about john brings it all down for me

5. ren seeks help - mostly extremely boring to me but it did have that nice walking segment and that one frame i took a screenshot of

4. fire dogs 2 - just didnt care for it. laughed

3. onward and upward - a little gross at times but generally left a positive impression on me. laughed

2. stimpy's pregnant - would be my favorite if it werent for the poop twist tbh. i dont know what else to say about it

1. altruists - would be significantly improved if it was shaved down 10-15 minutes but like other than that it was just fine for me. actually I don't remember if I laughed watching this one.

[vampiremourning]

need at least 1 person to be mentally ill with in the dms about my own writing perhaps then ill be able to publish something

[fluffs-n-stuffs]

"Do you not realize it? Do you... truly not see what this means?"

The next Destiny Bond update is in progress! ❄️✨ –> Check out the latest part here 🔷 –> New to the series? Follow from the start! 💜

[somethingwittyandweird]

LOVE your swords 💖

do you do other pixel art outside of swordtember?

Thank you so very much! You're wonderfully encouraging (and a big reason why I realized I should be posting them more frequently here).

Aside from Swordtember, I don't usually do much in the way of art. I definitely do make little things here and there, but my creative inspirations generally tend to be pretty far between. I'm not someone with ten thousand ideas constantly clamoring to be realized- just the occasional inspiration now and then. As my header says, I spend most of my time enjoying the content of others, while more infrequently making my own. Swordtember just happens to fall into a particular niche (cool weapon design) that has always made my creative wheels spin, so it's a prompt that I really enjoy doing year after year.

But, as thanks for asking, here's a little tome animation I whipped up a while back!