#i think i forgot to post this last year

[stephadoodles]

Happy five year anniversary to Andi Mack making Disney history

[hootyhoowoo]

A little 15 min doodle but first post of the year has to be Bingqiu!

[cosmosully]

aftermath

[sergle]

When I talk about something bad I've experienced, Baked In to my experience as A Woman, I am not "making my little cousins feel like shit for being women", because I am talking in a space with, allegedly, adults. I am not bringing my problems to children in the first place. That said, I don't HAVE to make my baby cousin feel bad, because she's already experienced sexual harassment in her life, and she's only 8, and doesn't even understand what any of it means yet. And everyone in her family can try to instill confidence in her, and never talk about our bodies in a negative way. But she can still feel like she's too chubby, because she still goes to school, and talks to other kids and their parents, and still sees ads, and still watches tv. We can be positive, but we can't fix the root of the problem. And I don't HAVE to tell trans women that "pain is a rite of passage", because that's not a Rule being enforced (by me), because I've already sat and listened to my friend complain about constantly shaving as a Baseline necessity and how it hurts her skin and she has to put makeup onto fresh cuts on her face because going out without a full face of properly feminine makeup would make her life worse, and being anything less than thin and lithe makes her "less feminine", and ALL the things that can make her "more feminine" are behind a paywall. And I can try to make her feel better, and I can hear her experiencing the tenfold version of problems I relate to, but I can't fix the root cause of her problems by just telling her not to complain. Forcing happiness as a core personality trait for women is not the Girlboss Feminist move that you think it is, and no amount of gender euphoria in the world will make you immune to systemic oppression.

[arttsuka]

I LOVE Teen Stan and Ford, it’s sad they don’t get drawn enough, so thank you so much!

Does Ford ever help Stan when he gets overstimulated? Or maybe when he has a rage response and suddenly starts crying and calls himself stupid?

Here's the other post with Ford

[theythemmer]

phinktober day 8: tatinof

wtf a whole week done already???? i haven’t drawn this consistently since i was in high school 😭

bonus bc idk when to stop

[bixels]

What did/do you like about Pharah?

Uh, gameplay-wise, I really love characters in shooters who rely on three-dimensional movement techs. Chaining together hover and jump to stay in the air for as long as possible and keep momentum is so satisfying, and picking enemies off from the sky made me feel like a bird of prey. I was a good Pharah main.

Story-wise, there unfortunately isn't much to canonically go off because Pharah is so underutilized and neglected. Her personality's pretty boilerplate "heroic hero" (she's literally inspired by Captain America).

But it's the crumbs/bits and pieces that I really latched onto. Pharah's a confirmed lesbian; her short story with Baptiste implies she harbors a crush on Mercy (fucking thank you.). She's biracial Egyptian/First Nations. She has major mommy issues, having grown up both admiring and resenting Ana. She's the bridge between Old Overwatch, inspired by the idealized heroes who surrounded her childhood, and New Overwatch. She's one of the only inter-generational characters in the cast; someone whose experiences span the gap, which is why I seriously believe Pharah would make a great main character.

There isn't much to go off of, though; she's a very uncomplicated character (she's a soldier for a private military corporation, lol.). But that just means she's a blank slate character, so I've seen fanfic writers run wild and create some really interesting takes on her. My favorite interpretation of her's a dense, herbo gym-bro type (a lot of her liens are about work outs, exercising, and playing sports) who's easily excitable under her seemingly self-serious, armored visage. We see how she tends to gloat and hype herself up when she's on a streak too, so Pharah definitely has a competitive and boastful side under her more professional and militant performance.

Now Mercy? Mercy is a real complex character.

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

2024 tuesdaypost retrospective

it's hard not to make this all about my nearly full 365 days of unemployment. i have cut a great deal from this wrapup. thank you all for your love and support (often financial!) this year :') it has never been scarier to have no familial safety net and i really, really appreciate all of you relative strangers (i have met very few of you in person!)

jobs applied to: my best estimate is 4500 given my daily target balanced with periods of more acute despair and physical illness

interviews: 2

calls to the massachusetts unemployment agency: 73

cats spayed and/or neutered: 3 (phil, orange boy, ruby)

eclipses seen: 1

hurricanes: 1

completely fallow weeks: 5

i have GOT to be more specific about writing out loud what worked and what didn't work instead of resorting to "vibes were off". i also have to remember to be better about saying where i found things and saying the premise/genre of the film. i try to draft these on sunday nights so i can kind of mull things over for a bit, but that rarely happened this year.

highlights of the year: a tomato plant in a five gallon bucket, hotvintagepoll, the eclipse, my new zebrawood desk, throwing my own birthday party (NOT passive aggressive it was very comforting to be in full control), ren faire, the modern zelda games, genshin impact, heist films, naomi novik's temeriare series, Navigational Entanglements by Aliette de Bodard, the Popping Tins newsletter about tinned fish products, new joywave and beyonce and charli xcx and kesha albums, and an actual play podcast focused on critical worldbuilding smart characterization and fun interaction between good friends.

questions? comments? concerns? something about the structure/critique of these posts or a work i talked about really click or really not work for you? i would love to know!

listening

all the tuesdaysongs are in one spotify playlist below. if i recced a whole album (only did that this year with The Offline’s La couleur de la mer and Toshiyuke Honda's SONGS OF THE MILKY WAY ) i put the song i thought most representative of the album.

special shoutouts to the Well There's Your Problem engineering disasters podcast, the Sangfielle season of Friends at the Table, The 404 Media Podcast news/tech/culture podcast, and the Whale Hunting podcast about financial crimes.

i would like to find music through other avenues than the spotify weekly recs playlists, especially since the platform has noticeably nosedived after their last round of firing people. unforch i have yet to find a music influencer/blog/tastemaker/podcast whose tastes jive with my own.

-

reading

the sort of three broad categories of stuff i talk about in the reading section are articles, comics, and actual books. fairly pleased with my RSS feed, which is filling the twitter hole and also has a separate Real US News tab i can look at in a more controlled manner. people seem to have liked the article/book combo bc reading a book a week is usually kind of a heavy lift for people who are employed. as long as i do either an article or a book i feel like this category is checked off in my brain. i would like to do both more weeks and figure out how to do more concise book reports. i am pleased that people seem to like the couple weeks of giant DNF lists where i briefly state why i did not finish a specific older scifi paperback.

shoutout to @rae-being-naughty for introducing me to one of my favorite new authors, t kingfisher! what a delectable niche. those books go down SO easy. shoutouts also to the temeraire books, Trouble And Her Friends by Melissa Scott (what if neuromancer was good?), Dark Wire by Joseph Cox (nonfiction about the encrypted phone company the FBI shadow-ran) and Witch Hat Atelier.

the OPPOSITE of a shoutout to the most frustrating books i did not finish this year, a fragile enchantment by allison saft (the very weird fantasy meghan/harry fantasy au????) and jennifer dugan's the ride of her life, a cowgirl wlw romance that had some kid pop up in the second chapter and yell about how they shipped the leads and were making a tiktok about it. hello??????? huh????? i had that book on hold for SIX MONTHS. what the fuck did people see in that book???

reading and holding and interacting with a physical hard copy book is so much better for my shattered attention span, and i have giant bookcases full of physical books i desperately want to read, but i read ebooks so much faster. a dilemma that will for sure continue into the new year.

-

watching

logged almost 169 things on letterboxd this year so far (almost nice). the giant spike is when i watched a a dozen individually loggable betty boop shorts. tasty tasty stats.

saw one entire film (howl's moving castle) in theaters and i do not think i will be doing that again bc (while fun) it was a very anxiety inducing experience.

more tv and shorts and tv comprised entirely of shorts than i expected to watch this year!

watching highlights of the year:

-

playing

the gaming rig i bought in 2020 is really staring to show its age and only very light-resource pc games are feasible rn. very many thanks to both @sybilius and @pasta-pardner who both bought me games i will one day play!

spent most of the year with big open world exploration/puzzle/action games, as is traditional. barely touched a fallout this year, which is less traditional.

by hours, the ranking is probably

genshin impact

breath of the wild

tears of the kingdom

STUFF SORT on my phone

stardew valley

powerwash simulator

what are people interested in seeing in this section?

the trouble with this section is that has been a thorn in my side basically since i started this series, but games are such a part of my life it feels weird NOT talking about them? but talking about video games is difficult bc none of them are very good. i find myself Still a little burned out on them even after almost three years on from the video games job. finding something fun and free on itch or steam is very time-consuming. every time i talk about genshin i feel like i have to caveat it with one million Don't Play Gacha Games warning stickers like the ones that come on cigarettes. and i don't feel like a screenshot of whatever achievement i hunted on genshin in a specific week is very interesting to people.

maybe the solution is to cut this section for a while and have a special bonus add on section every once in a while??? i dunno. would love to know people's thoughts here on how to make talking about/telling stories about the games i play more interesting.

-

making

the tuesdayposts as a whole have been both very good and very bad for my mental health, bc i really needed a project to work on to break up the soul crushing monotony of writing cover letters. however writing the tuesdaypost every week was often a very anxiety inducing expereince bc i felt like i didn't do much. or did stuff very unevenly. the "point" of the tuesdayposts is to remind myself every week that absorbing a lot of different things helps me stay on a more even keel. esp in times of great unrest. unfortunately, a year of unemployment.

i saw my siblings twice, managed to actually write and post christmas cards, framed a bunch of shit, discovered a new favorite soup, and did some indifferent gardening and cross stitch.

the making section this year tended to be more lifestyle blogging/what i cleaned. a lot of weeks i did not have Anything in the tank except basic vacuuming and halfhearted wiping counters down.

however??? i managed to post three fics??? two were previously written but at least they are no longer languishing on my harddrive??

this goofy little NFT genderswap blondeyes has the craziest hits to kudos ratio on anything ive ever written.

i really do intend on finishing this cait/fahrenheit 5+1. the stars have not been aligned.

this very brief crossover has gotten some of the loveliest comments!!! when i am done directing and choreographing the big prisoner/arcade argument in my brain i am excited to actually write that.

im genuinely for real afraid to ask or expect anything of 2025, but here it comes anyway!

[whenlifedaydreams]

A spy... An assassin... this is so exciting!!

[guillemelgat]

I just started a new semester, and I'm finally getting the chance to take Malayalam, which I've been trying to do since my undergrad. This is obviously a very exciting development, and it's so delightful to be in a language class again for the first time in ages, but it's also been a very unique experience as far as language classes go. First of all, for me, who is generally used to having very odd personal connections to a language and being the overachieving linguist of the class. And second of all because it's just a very different experience to be in a class largely oriented towards heritage learners and people with some cultural familiarity.

There are five people in the class. Of those five, four have Malayalee family and have had some exposure to Malayalam throughout our lives; the last person is a native speaker of another non-Dravidian South Asian language. Of the four of us who are Malayalee, I'm basically the only one who didn't have a significant amount of Malayalam at home growing up. What this means is that we've spent very little time on the phonetics of the language, because everyone roughly knows how to pronounce it - something which wouldn't be true if there were non-South Asian in the class! (It was a bit comforting to hear all the other Malayalees struggling with aspirated consonants, which have constantly been the bane of my existence, and then to hear the instructor say that few people pronounce them right in spoken Malayalam anyways.) The instructor could ask us to say things on the first day, and the more fluent speakers could say them. There is already Malayalam being mixed in with the instruction. I'm sure by the end of the semester we'll be having extended conversations - especially since the two of us who don't speak have very concrete communicative desires for our outside lives.

It's also a very scary experience for me, personally. Or maybe scary isn't quite the right word, but I've always felt out of my depth in claiming Malayalee heritage - I've always felt that there were so many things which I didn't know which any normal Malayalee would. There is no evidence that this is true, at least insofar as that my cousins with two Malayalee parents have wildly varying experiences and I'm not actually that far outside the norm. In most American spaces, I will never be clocked as white, and most people usually immediately identify me as South Asian. Nonetheless, I know that when I visited Kerala this past December, I was decidedly foreign - to the two guys speaking in rapid-fire Malayalam on the flight from Qatar, to the person at the immigration counter in Trivandrum, even to my own relatives. Part of it is a mental block on my part, of feeling myself foreign and therefore never letting myself belong. Part of it is that I am, ultimately, American. But either way, in this class, I can feel that I'm the American in the room, even when I'm not, even when my pronunciation is just as good as the other Malayalees and there's nothing that's telling me I can't belong. I keep freezing up when asked to say real things, or when people speak to me, because there's some unreachable standard in my brain of Not A Real Malayalee, and everything feels fraught and fragile. So maybe this semester will be about overcoming that.

It's still strange being in a language class where the instructor, on the first day, can look at you all and say, "You know why you're here, you want to be here, we all have a shared experience." But it's also a beautiful thing in its own way, and I'm really looking forward to taking on a language in this way. I love the structure and the logic of language, the puzzle of putting it together, the beauty of making friends in it and watching shows in it and listening to songs in it - but as I get older I find myself really reflecting on what it means to learn and to know a language. And sometimes those barriers to learning and to knowing are only in our minds, not in our worlds. Language is communication and connection, and I hope that Malayalam serves me to these two ends, even as it sometimes feels like a trial by fire at each word.

[capricores]

・┆✦ʚ♡ɞ✦ ┆・venus retrograde reflections ・┆✦ʚ♡ɞ✦ ┆・

with the amount of planets currently stationed retrograde, a lot of us may be feeling quite overwhelmed and stuck in our own heads. when a planet goes retrograde, it tends to cause us to look heavily inwards. retrogrades are about reflecting, specifically reflecting on the themes that planet is connected to. this post is focused on venus retrograde. venus connects heavily to two themes especially: relationships (romantic, platonic, familial and self) and finance.

journal prompts, or general questions to ponder during this period:

who in my life makes me feel energized, supported, seen? why?

who in my life leaves me feeling drained, upset? why?

how do i currently speak to myself? would i speak to a loved one the way i speak to myself? why or why not?

how am i taking care of myself currently and ensuring my own needs are met? am i truly showing up for myself every single day?

am i balancing a healthy amount of time between nourishing my relationship with myself, as well as my external relationships?

are my current relationships supportive/aligned with who i am becoming, and where i want to go? do i feel encouraged, or held back, by those in my life?

are there any relationships i question continuing? why or why not? what would improve by ending the relationship? what would i miss, if anything?

how can i improve the way i treat myself? how can i show myself more love and care?

am i showing up in my friendships? am i giving my friends the care and support they deserve? is there anything i should change in regards to the way i handle my friendships, and interact with my friends?

how would you define a healthy relationship? what are your major needs in a relationship (platonic and/or romantic)? are these needs being met by those in your life?

how am i currently managing my finances?

what could i do to improve my financial situation? what good financial habits could i adopt?

how does my living space make me feel? does it bring comfort? if not, what can i do within my means to make the space more for me?

what are my greatest values in life? am i living in a way that aligns with these values? am i embodying these values? are my relationships supportive of my values?

[levia-san]

I wanted to draw smth LNY related for Qijiu but ended up just drawing Bunny Mafia (roleplay) in a hurry  The wife’s the 2nd boss

man, bunny suits are great

BONUS:

what actually came around

[icewindandboringhorror]

I occasionally wish to reach out to old friends/acquaintances I haven't spoken to since high school/some other even earlier time in my life, but I have SOOO little social energy even for required tasks (like making dr phone calls or etc), I never have any leftover for extra ones, and it would be very odd to message someone I haven't spoken to in like 5 years out of the blue but then take 4 entire months to respond back lol.. My natural curiosity with nostalgia/collecting details of the past/etc. (literally if I were born a little earlier I would definitely do scrapbooking or something lol) is very strong, but, alas, not strong enough to beat out the Social Issues Demons apparently

[rachelmonart]

KISS KISS FALL IN LOVE

[murderous-coffeebean]

Touch

Some Vetvimes for y'all~

Discworld © Terry Pratchett / art © Murderous-Coffeebean (tumblr & dA)

[wundrousarts]

Mini Silverborn Countdown

If you’ve been around for a few years, you’ve seen me vaguely mention a “Silverborn Countdown Challenge” several times. It’s been delayed and changed as many times as the book itself, lol.

If anyone wants sort of a low-stakes, very chill and spaced out version of this ye olde never tackled challenge to complete in the next year before Silverborn, I propose what I’m doing:

Every 3 months leading up to the initial release, I am creating one thing based on each of the books.

January — Nevermoor

April — Wundersmith

July — Hollowpox