#if your goal on art is just to make silly stuff

[samgatinho]

omg I just stumbled upon your art and WOW it’s amazing!! What program do you use? Any tips for a beginner artist too? Sorry totally [not] asking for a friend

thank u! i mostly use ibis paint x and sometimes clip studio paint too! :D

i don't think i'm much of a pro to be out there telling on beginners but, if you're looking to improve in certain aspects, i'd recommend studying art fundamentals. i like searching for tips on youtube and i personally love watching pikat's videos; they give pretty solid, good advices for studying art :)

overall, i think the most important part about drawing is having fun, as cliche as this sounds, it's true. stressing over your art might actually bring down the quality of it, so don't worry so much about making masterpieces! do what you like! ^_^

[buttercupshands]

Thinking about what happened in the summer

Kids are... Really different when it comes to spending three weeks without their parents

Some start crying near the end of first day

Some start crying after couple of days

And some don't show anything while feeling the same

And being... I think English has a good word for that, let's go with a teacher but mix it with caretaker a little bit

I think seeing a kid cry at the end of that first day finally short circuited my brain, teens are way harder to understand that pre-teens who are literally still kids

They come around after a week, settle down and find new friends and your job stays the same mostly to be the one controlling their behavior

And then you'd have a kid crying again, because they miss home and the only thing you can really do is comfort them that they're not stuck here forever and that time flows so fast they won't notice it

And maybe they didn't. Time really did flew and they were leaving

Parents visited kids sometimes, of course, and it was so scary at first but they were mostly friendly and nice

Maybe because of that group chat that let them see that their kids are fine and are having fun

In the end for kids it was painful at first, but fun in the end. I got hugged more times than I could count when they were all leaving

And then poof

Back to your own life you go, like nothing happened

[devotion-disorder]

Hi Devo! If it's okay to call you that, I just wanted to say I'm a big big fan of your work and you made me fall in love with your silly doodles and masterpieces. First time sending in an ask considering how long I've been following you but I've gathered to courage to write my little love letter to you. I just wanted to ask how you color/render and how you study art? I love how your colors flow seamlessly into one another, and how your art just tickles my brain.

Anyways! Kuuya is so boyfailure and I love him but Asa. OH MY GOD ASA.

I want him so bad it's uncanny. His ears are so cute I just want to bite them. I want to unlock new things inside him. I want to do things to him. Literally all your submissive and breedable ocs will make me drool like a dog. Kuuya was my first love but Asa will be my last. I will kidnap him, carry him bridal style while he's in a wedding dress, and then kiss him silly. He will work at home and will make silly little things for the bedroom /hj.

(我想要对他做一些难以启齿的事情。我希望他属于我，让他崇拜我。我真想揪他的头发，让他发牢骚。他是我可爱的狗。）

Thank you so much for all the kind words...!! here's a wedding dress asa for all your troubles

putting the art questions under the cut!

I've addressed a little bit on giving out advice for coloring here, and tbh im surprised you think my colors flow together well because i pick my colors pretty haphazardly LOL but generally speaking, nowadays my usual line of thinking is “how do i express [a certain shade of color] without using that exact shade of color”. Like if im coloring an apple then im thinking about all the colors except red that i can be using.

as for studying art, sometimes id straight up copy and paste other artists’ work into csp myself and re-trace anatomy/ action lines over it, colorpick it etc etc to really get a feel for their techniques. of course, this is all kept to myself privately. sometimes i also draw things specifically with the goal of emulating said techniques, like “for this piece im going to draw clothing folds like how X artist does it” etc

akjdfjksjsjd i hope all that makes sense / is useful! thank u for likin my stuff 🥺

p.s. i can read chinese and your little passage has not moved me in the slightest /lh

[rainbow-starlight]

Why is Help Wanted 2 Sun… Like That?

Okay, I’ve been putting off making this post until I felt like I had a better idea of what was going on, and now that I’ve watched at least part of a play-through and gone over the lines a whole bunch, I think I’m ready.

I’m gonna talk about my thoughts on Sun as a character as well as HW2 as a whole here, so it’ll be a bit long. Pop some popcorn or something.

Please keep in mind that this is all my personal opinion and you’re free to disagree with it! In fact, if you think I’m totally wrong, please tell me why. I love new perspectives!

SO! Let’s get right into it, shall we?

First things first: Help Wanted 2 Sun is not the same guy as Security Breach/Ruin Sun. If his personality difference was significant enough to surprise you, that’s because he’s a different person.

I’m not entirely sure how much of Help Wanted 2 is meant to be actually happening, but I think that at least the mini games are training simulations.

However, it’s important to note that a lot of the stuff happening in the mini games is just… nonsense. How did Freddy get frozen like that? What’s with those regular batteries in his arms? Why are half the supplies in first aid explicitly for robots and not humans? Why is there a shredder table in the daycare for kids to stick fingers into?

Some of this can be shrugged off with the usual “FazCo is meant to be comedically shitty and the tech often doesn’t make sense anyway,” but the first aid simulation is what really stood out to me. Even with the previous explanations, that doesn’t explain the calming gas mask that could only ever fit Helpy or the steel wool scrubber or the tank cleaner spray bottle among the medical supplies. If the goal is to train new first aid staff to avoid lawsuits, it’s doing a pretty poor job of it. So… what is it for?

I touched on this idea previously with my post about Sun’s AI being trained on kids’ artwork. The idea of FazCo making a silly new employee training game as a means of harvesting behavioral data to train their AIs seems very within their realm of scummy.

This is why the Arts & Crafts mini game exists. It’s literally a task that requires exact copying. Maybe it’s essentially like teaching an AI to solve captchas by feeding it a bunch of data on how humans solve them correctly and incorrectly.

Maybe its presence is explained to employees as fun practice with the VR system or a break activity during training or something.

This would explain several things about the game.

The existence of the shredder table and Sun shredding literally ALL of your artwork: It being a funny way to despawn the stuff you make is a lot more reasonable when that’s exactly what it’s for in-universe, too. The generators in the play structures are unsafe enough, but that would’ve been on another level if it were real.

Sun’s line “Be creative on your own time, we are making ART!” It literally isn’t a creative activity, it’s a task. I know you can’t really apply logic to a lot of FNAF stuff, especially the DCA’s design, but if Sun were actually this detail-oriented and perfectionistic with everything, he’d never be able to function in childcare.

The fact that Sun’s “fear” of the dark seems like a bit. It literally is a bit. There’s no threat, it’s not real. I originally thought he just wanted the player out of his space faster and didn’t know how to assert a boundary there, but I think it’s actually just to make the player finish the tasks faster for data collection purposes.

Possibly also why he’s so comfortable being casually rude to the player. He is a jester, after all, and the player has lots of opportunities to do things they shouldn’t, too. It’s basically all a bit.

Also… what if the minigames have versions of the base AIs in there? It’s a version of the Sun AI with the theater programming and the basics of the childcare stuff? His entire existence is a shitty little simulation where he runs a singular activity for grown adults who can’t (or won’t) follow very simple instructions.

The biggest thing that’s been bothering me about the takes I’ve seen regarding HW2 Sun’s personality is that people have been calling him “mean” while completely ignoring the circumstances he’s reacting to. If a coworker came into my personal space and I was so generous as to share my favorite activity with them and they proceeded to intentionally ignore the rules I set and EAT SUPPLIES I USE FOR WORK? Yeah, no, I’d react like that too.

There’s definitely something interesting about how genuinely excited and happy Sun sounds when first welcoming his new friend the player to the daycare and inviting them to Arts & Crafts vs. when they return. He seems like he WANTS to befriend the player, but the game just assumes you’ll be upsetting him so there’s no option for dialogue where you’re nice to him and respect his boundaries and participate in an activity with him in a way he’s comfortable with.

I say “in a way he’s comfortable with” because he is a little weird about the whole “sit right there and DON’T MOVE” thing. He does seem actually excited and enthusiastic about the idea of shooting darts at the items you want so he can get them for you, though. Maybe because he sees it as a happy compromise, or maybe because it’s supposed to be a fun part of the game he’s programmed to be in charge of.

I saw some other commentary on Sun (primarily thinking of @kazzykatt) talking about how he seems almost excessively self-sufficient, and how this could possibly be due to neglect (he and Moon definitely aren’t as well cared for as the other animatronics, the generators in the daycare are a very lazy fix for actually reprogramming Moon properly, he seems bitter that he can’t fix the carousel on his own and he and Moon don’t seem to trust the player to fix it, their design is clearly better suited to the stage but didn’t get changed for the daycare, I could go on and on), and this would also explain his control issues to an extent.

Sun, in SB and HW2, doesn’t leave the daycare. He has so little that he’s in control of in his own life. He used to be on stage (and based on his dialogue probably misses it quite a lot) but had the job he was built for taken from him. He’s a perfectionist that’s constantly overwhelmed by too many things being marked top priority in his system, working too many hours with too many small children. Of course he’d be desperate to hold onto any little bit of control he has.

Honestly, when I first heard his voice lines, the initial vibe I got wasn’t “wow they made Sun mean” but “wow Sun sounds actually miserable” and I’m kind of surprised more people didn’t pick up on that. He sounds less bitchy and more like he’s lashing out because he’s trapped in an awful situation that’s completely out of his hands.

“Wait, are you saying none of HW2’s characterization should be taken seriously?”

You might be asking that, but my answer is a resounding NO! This is definitely still a Sun, and I think seeing two different Suns (even if we don’t know how much of HW2’s personality we can assume is meant to be taken seriously) is really helpful for interpreting what the base Sun personality might have.

It’s also important to keep in mind that none of the Suns we’ve seen were in a good situation. Security Breach Sun had the virus, Ruin Sun had gone slightly mad from isolation, and HW2 Sun is stuck in a shitty simulation babysitting bored adult staff as they fail to complete simple tasks. What we mostly know about him is how he responds to stress, and this is why there’s so much room for interpretation!

Here’s some traits I think every version of the Sun AI would have.

Love of making things. Despite everything, HW2 Sun seems to genuinely love doing arts & crafts. Especially with googly eyes. This could kind of be assumed from SB Sun, but he was also trying to entertain/bribe a child.

On this note… interest in fixing things? Maybe he just wants to avoid having to rely on staff, but if he and Moon are subject to that much neglect, it makes sense that he’d try to learn to do repairs himself. I saw @pixelchills talking about the possibility that the S.T.A.F.F. Bots in the DCA’s room are not there because Moon broke them, but because Moon collected them for Sun to practice fixing. It seems feasible to me, especially since taking something apart and putting it back together might have the same calming and satisfying effect on Sun as completing something like a paint-by-numbers.

Playful insults and lots of drama. I don’t mean actual rudeness, I mean friendly teasing. Again, he is a jester. A lot of his HW2 insults come across more like this. Hell, even his compliments come across like this with the delivery and immediate shredding. He’s just a theater kid at heart.

Difficulty regulating emotions under pressure. This is the kind of thing that would pop up on his worst days (such as being trapped in his destroyed home with a poor connection to his badly damaged physical form while the only help he’s seen in ages ignores his instructions and puts their own safety at risk, or being trapped in a shitty simulation while his only company ignores his instructions and puts their own safety at risk). He’d have to be able to manage this sort of thing better to work well with children, but everyone’s got their bad days. He’s prone to outbursts and tantrums when he’s overwhelmed and unable to stop people from breaking the rules and/or hurting themselves.

People pleasing and nonconfrontational. Yes, HW2 Sun, too. SB Sun seems genuinely desperate to make sure Gregory’s having a good time, and HW2 Sun is shockingly tolerant of some of the player’s bullshit (ex. how he tries to laugh off them shooting darts at him/throwing things). Even calling the player “good friend” when he’s not so happy to see them or threatening them with Moon instead of just telling them their time is almost up seem like signs of this to me. And letting the player make arts and crafts in the ruined daycare in HW2? Yeah, that’s a people pleaser through and through. Sun needs a lesson in setting boundaries (and for those boundaries to actually be respected).

Perfectionistic + “if you want something done right, you’ve gotta do it yourself” attitude. This would mostly manifest in how he completes work tasks, but I think every Sun’s incredibly detail-oriented and would rather do everything themselves just to make sure it’s exactly how they want. This could manifest in lots of ways, from “insulting the staff for how they put things away and telling them to do it again while he supervises” to “politely thanking them for their help and complimenting their hard work only to redo everything himself the moment they’re gone.” I think where on that spectrum you wind up is dependent on the version of Sun you’re interacting with and the environment his personality developed in.

High-energy and social! A given, of course. He never stops moving and everything is always so exciting. New people are friends he hasn’t met yet until proven otherwise.

Love of pranks… to an extent. Again, jester! I stand by my headcanon of Sun and Moon conspiring to convince the staff Moon’s some sort of spooky monster whenever he’s not actively dangerous. As long as he’s not making a mess, breaking the rules, throwing himself off-schedule, or actually hurting anyone? He’s all over it.

Anxiety. This seems like it’s at least partially caused by the lazy daycare reprogramming. All the Suns we’ve encountered seem to lack knowledge of how to actually get children to behave. It seems more like they programmed him with a bunch of games and activities and then set a bunch of super high-priority tasks for him such as “keep kids safe, keep kids happy, keep kids entertained, keep daycare clean” etc. and he’s unable to really prioritize so he’s just constantly overwhelmed.

Kinda always using “childcare voice.” If you know anyone who’s worked with kids, you know what I mean here. Even with adults, he talks to them like kids sometimes, just because it’s what he knows and what he’s used to and because his processor’s fried from however many hours a week he’s surrounded by kids. Consider his reactions to when you eat the crafts as an example. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I don’t think he’d coddle adults like children. It’s more about tone and vocabulary, like “customer service voice”.)

Stickler for rules. He cares about things being done right! The rules are there for a reason! Order is important to him (probably in no small part because it keeps him out of trouble and reduces his stress).

That’s about all I can think of for now, but as someone who writes a very friendly and sweet Sun, I actually don’t think HW2’s characterization was that far off from what I had already assumed based on Ruin/SB. The only difference is that the Sun I’m usually writing is in a much more supportive environment with lots of helpful staff that care about his well-being. If he didn’t have that, I could absolutely see him becoming more like HW2.

I will finish this off with two final important points:

Being an emotional person and liking “childish” things does not make an adult less of an adult.

(He’s a childcare worker, c’mon.)

If someone gets pissed off after being repeatedly antagonized, that does not make them a “mean/bitchy/sassy person.”

(Yeah, he doesn’t handle it gracefully, but to be fair, I wouldn’t either in his shoes.)

Thank you all for reading!!

[jesncin]

Lil' musing about Public Domain, AI theft and Transformative creativity

Old essay originally written on Cohost in February 2024. With additions.

I'm putting my thoughts here because I don't want to risk going viral for subtweeting discourse again, here we go! So with the Steamboat Willie Variant of Mickey Mouse going to public domain I've seen the usual cynical pushback over transformative art. Particularly in response to overplayed EDGY DARK WINNIE THE POOH and EDGY DARK STEAMBOAT MICKEY and YOUR CHILDHOOD THING DARK NOW that inevitably happens around this time.

But to group all transformative art as derivative, soul-less, profit-driven, lazy and "reliant on past successes" is frankly just...really silly? I saw a notable concept artist making this over-simplified talking point, and I find it odd that someone can look at the most visible (by being formulaic, provocative and made by rich people) examples of public domain adaptations and just generalize all art ever inspired by a thing as uninventive and compare artists who do that to being "ai-like". It feels like the false dichotomy constantly set between "real books" and fanfiction.

We've seen marginalized people reclaim cosmic horror from Lovecraftian fiction. I've seen queer people reckon with and reclaim the queer history of Peter Pan. There's something special about taking a familiar thing and informing it with a perspective that wasn't present in its original iteration. It takes a whole other part of your creative brain muscles to adapt and reimagine something that already exists. And it can be just as creatively fulfilling as making original stuff.

While it's important to recognize and remember the origin of archetypes in stories or movements in art, I think there's sometimes a misplaced reverence put towards the original version of something. Whenever I talk about how Asian writers like Gene Yang and Sarah Kuhn have more thoroughly integrated Superman's immigrant themes in their re-imaginings of his mythos than their white peers have, I get hit with the constant "hey remember Superman's creators were the sons of Jewish immigrants (who made racist jokes about Chinese people)" and "hey remember, Gene Yang and Gurihiru's Superman Smashes the Klan was based on a radio show arc made by WHITE people first (who made the story about a binary of Good white people vs Bad white people, along with centering how white people feel about racism)".

Especially if it's a means of centering white creatives, people love to dismiss the transformative contributions of marginalized people, but especially that of people of color. It took until 2016 for the World Fantasy Award to change their statuette to not be based after the face of renown racist H.P Lovecraft, after all.

Last year I gave myself the goal to do something "unnecessarily ambitious" with no plan of pitching/printing/selling it. Just "art for art's sake", something really not-algorithm-friendly. And yeah, that ended up being a fully rendered, 40-page martian manhunter fan comic. I did it for no other reason than being a huge fan of a severely unpopular character and feeling like there was a new story I really wanted to tell about the character that would never happen in canon with how little there's been written about him. I don't think it's fair to call writing 40 pages of a new origin story, drawing fully colored pages with unique re-designs, reading hours of martian manhunter comics to tie different aspects of his lore into coherent worldbuilding, putting that comic up for free for the few other Green Justice League Guy fans to read, as lazy, profit-driven, and soul-less.

There's tons of artists who do stuff like this all the time. It just comes off as being very out of touch to view true creativity as only existing one way. That transformative media must inherently be "less". One time a white guy pitched to me some ideas he had for Superman if he ever had a chance to write him, and I said "that sounds cool, you should write a fanfic about it" and another white guy (who felt the need to come to the first one's defense), viewed what I said as an insult. There's something about doing fanart because you enjoy it and don't need to profit out of everything you make that's seen as lesser than having the seal of canonicity from a company.

My motto with making needlessly ambitious fancomics is "You don't need to work for DC Comics to make DC comics". Because canonicity has nothing to do with what makes art special.

To bring this back to edgy Mickey Mouse spin offs, even if you do just want to make cliche mascot-horrified stuff because you enjoy it, then by all means go ahead! I always go back to this video Sagan Hawkes did about petscop-inspired video series. There's a running theme about grappling with the concept of Originality in Art in relation to youtube horror projects (the thesis comes around at 2:04:10), and some valuable words are shared in the collected interviews with web series creatives (2:18:47) in the end. SeireaSong (creator behind Diminish) talks about how misguided conversations surrounding "originality" can be (2:29:43). It's so worth it to watch when you have the time.

Anyway happy 2024! Be good to each other.

[another-goblin]

2.1 Spoilers, Aventurine analysis

I regret to say that I enjoyed Aventurine's story much less than I should have. And not because it was bad, but because it was spoiled for me by people who don't tag their leaks, mostly fanartists. People call it one of the best stories in the game so far, and I usually love emotional stuff like that, but instead I was just going through the motions. 

Yeah, child Aventurine, Aventurine in shakles, whatever, I've been forcefed all this stuff a month ago, I already saw dozens of arts of it against my will, let's move on. To all these artists - I hope not adding one little "hsr leaks" to your tags was worth it.

(speaking of which - my current goal is to unhate that new cowboy guy before he actively enters the story. Currently, I can't stand the sight of him, and for exactly the same reason, untagged leaks. He seems like a potentially great character, and he's already quite popular. And hating a popular character isn't fun at all)

But not to be too negative, even though I weren't allowed to enjoy 2.1 story as much as it deserves, I still liked it quite a lot, and it's a testament to how well written Aventurine is. 

One of the worst things you can do to a character is to make them emotionally static. Aventurine doesn't suffer from this at all, it's shown very well in the different ways he talks to people, and that's what I wanted to talk about.

The first way is what I call "slimey creep." It's the way he mostly talks in 2.0 to TB and most other characters, and he's quite antogonistic and unlikeable, probably because it's his goal to seem antogonistic and unlikeable.

Second is the fear and desperation that's always under the surface, carefully hidden, what his future self talks about - we can see it when Sunday does his harmony thing on him.

And third, my favorite, is what I call "disarming sincerity." Not that he's neseccerily insincere in his other modes, but this is his dippest self, hidden under all the layers of pain, fear, and cynicism. He shows it when he talks to his younger self (btw I don't usually go there, but it made me think that he'd be great with children.)

We also see him using it for self-defense - when Ratio goes too far in 2.0, he retorts with this seemingly naive "I didn't go to school and my parents "left" me", and Ratio immediately apologizes.

But most interestingly, he uses it with Ratio, most of the time they spend together in 2.1 up until the "betrayal.". 

It might be a deliberate ploy to manipulate him, trying to seem more likeable, to assure his loyalty (Ratio's reaction to "I didn't go to school" showed that he's quite susceptible to it).

It might come from his realization that the end is near, and why not just be yourself and have some fun for a change.

Or, of course, it might be because he actually enjoys Ratio's company and feels safe enough to show this hidden vulnerable side of himself.

The truth is probably somewhere in between.

They both joke and bicker (with Ratio remembering from time to time that he's supposed to show his "hatred" of Aventurine), and they both seem to really enjoy it. They argue about birds, Aven gets excited about the sandpit, and so on.

Let's take the joke Sparkle made about Aventurine and Sunday (about undressing and kneeling down) - it's mean and maybe even cruel, considering certain things from Aventurine's past that weren't directly implied but can be assumed, probably. And let's compare it with the joke he himself makes about him and Sunday ("now that I'm tiny I can hide on Sunday's clothes and spy on the Family, hehe, uwu"). It's a joke you'd expect from a child. Or from an adult who feels comfortable enough in your presence that they aren't afraid to seem childish or silly.

So yeah I'd really like to see them interact in a less stressful situation after these events. tbh I think they'd talk in more or less the same way. Aventurine already feels as safe and open around Ratio as he can allow himself to. And Ratio is too rigid in the way he speaks, he won't change that easily. 

In defiance of a tired stereotype of an eccentric genius who is bad with people, Ratio seems quite good at understanding them. What he's bad at is expressing his feelings in a "convencional" way.

(he only sounds sincere and emotional when he talks about abstract matters he's passionate about, like his little speech to Screwllum at the end of his quest. He probably sounds like that when he talks about science too.)

But when it comes to his feelings towards people he becomes even more formal and strict (remember his messages from the valentine's day event on twitter)

I can imagine his thought process after he leaves Aventurine in 2.1.

"I verbally expressed my concern to him, which should reassure him of my loyalty and support. Furthermore, I provided him with an insightful and reassuring message in written form. So he should be fine."

btw speaking of that note, when I read it, I can imagine Ratio saying "Do stay alive" aloud. But I can't imagine how he'd say the next line, wishing him luck. I mean, he can't say it in his usual "I'm tired of idiots" way of speaking, right? Something to look forward to.

[iraprince]

do u have any advice for those that want to run a quest?

it feels a LEETLE silly answering this when all my own are currently on hiatus bc i got busy (SORRY TO CALLIST0 READERS LOL) BUT!!! yes i do. i have only ever run quests/interactive comics on the site questden, so i guess as a baseline this will kind of all be geared towards that, but i think most of this should translate to any hosting situation

you have to be cool with your plots branching and mutating in unexpected ways, and you have to be willing to play ball with your readers. quests are a collaboration between the author and the audience. it often feels a lot like gming a tabletop campaign (and that's the origin!! questden, specifically, was originally an offshoot of /tg/.) -- we've all had or heard about bad GMs who view their position as that of a narrative dictator who exists to punish and prod a captive group of players thru their own personal novel, but a good GM is interested in telling stories as a group. u have final say and have to stay true to the important stuff abt ur story, but if u get mad or frustrated when ur readers want to explore something "off topic" or aren't following the threads of ur narrative the way u expected them to, u don't actually want to run a quest, u just want to make a webcomic w mandatory comments. (the flip side of this is: consider if the story u want to make is the right one for an interactive quest. if it is REALLY important to u that the plot beats of a story go a certain way, maybe save it for a medium where u have more control!)

keep it loose and fast. the art does not matter. i am rly guilty of not following this one, but i still think it's really important! one of the things i like best about quests is the barrier to entry is very low and you SHOULD be able to start and maintain one very quickly. if i were better at keeping my art scrabbly and sketchy and loose, my stuff would not go on hiatus as often as it does. draw fast! it's NICE if the art is gorgeous to look at and definitely will draw readers, but it's way better if the art is simple enough that you can update frequently and without much stress. the quality of ur writing + character building, and whether u are telling a story that's engaging and that ur readers feel meaningfully involved in, is 100000x more important than the art.

on the more nitty gritty side: try to have a hook in each update. one of the most common reasons suggestions die off is readers being unsure of what they're supposed to do next. sure, too much spoonfeeding could end up feeling like railroading, and you don't have to end every single update by getting right in their faces and yelling "WHAT DO YOU DO NEXT??", but when you finish an update try to take a second to put yourself in a reader's shoes and see if there's an obvious next step. is there a course of action to decide on/debate, are there clear questions they can ask an npc, etc -- i can't think of a great way to describe it, but you want to avoid ending an update on a note where the player character and readers are basically sitting there looking at each other like "um... okay. that's that, then." some ppl even just end all their updates w multiple choice options, which is a super simple way to keep things moving if it fits the style of what ur doing. if you don't want it to be that overt but you still can't think of a way for there to be a clear hook, you can at least try to leave a little nudge in the narration that invites the readers to try to tie whatever they've just done/learned back into the pc's main goals/motivations or current tasks. (on this subject, VERY useful for your main character to have a very specific goal or end destination that everyone is on the same page abt. it's harder for your plot to lose momentum if you can always point at what your readers are supposed to be moving toward!)

finally: KEEP UPDATING EVEN IF YOU GET VERY FEW/NO SUGGESTIONS. it's a niche genre. questden is a small website. it's hard to get people to read something new, especially if it's in a new and unfamiliar format (and especially especially when it's on a website that looks like a chanboard lmao). picking up readers takes a long time, and a lot of people lurk without suggesting (ESPECIALLY if it's a difficult/plot-important decision, and also especially in the opposite, if it's a very obvious next step and someone else has already commented what most ppl would say). it's very tempting to want to wait for more suggestions bc u "only" have one or two, and then that wait becomes stagnation, and then you're frustrated and u end up dropping the quest bc "nobody cares." instead u just have to push thru!!!! u only have two suggestions and u wish u had more? maybe next update u'll get more. u have NO suggestions and u feel like that means ur quest is dead in the water? NOPE! the solution is to update again, bc maybe ppl with latch on more and have something to say in the next scene. the more u update ur quest, the more u'll be able to talk abt it (and maybe get more readers), and specifically in the case of questden the more ur thread will be bumped to the front page. think abt how many times you've seen ppl talking abt a webcomic or a book and thought "i need to check that out eventually...." but it takes months for you to actually do it. 99.9999% of the time, ppl need to see something MULTIPLE TIMES before they check it out!! most readers do not come from clicking something the very first time they see it!! i know it can feel lonely and discouraging, but u owe it to ur art and the stories u want to tell to keep trying, even if engagement is very low at first, otherwise you're killing it before it's even had a chance. like, get shameless about it. ask your buddies to comment on your quest. but give that horse a few really good whacks before you decide it's dead!! i think that's my main thoughts. if you have any more specific questions i'm happy to help if i can! but also i think you'll learn the most by just jumping in and fucking around. quests are easy to pick up and easy to drop, and imo do really well as a playground where u test different ways to draw and tell stories, so might as well just get messy.

[muffinrecord]

Not MagiReco, just Life Stuff

I've been doing a lot of reading lately, not just of star mythology books but memoirs from EMTs, Firefighters, and Rangers. Trying to study and get research in for the story I wanna make. I've also been reading a lot about bears which are slowly becoming a favorite animal. How dare bears look so goofy and silly while being so dangerous!!!! Scandal!!!! I've also been reading about cults and stuff, which is also research. Also medical stuff on how to repair injuries if you're in the wilds with no one else coming to help you. My protag is a former EMT so she needs a decent-ish amount of medical backing.

If I do actually start writing my story, and if people notice it, and if I somehow make money off of it, I think my current dream goal is to start a lil fundraiser and donate money to various EMS organizations. Like maybe help fundraise money so that a place can get a new vehicle with state-of-the-art equipment. I can't think of a cooler thing to do.

I think the next few things I wanna start reading about is Alaska, where the story takes place. A friend is helping me with the inside scoop of living there, but it's always good to diversify your sources and learn as much as possible. I've been watching videos and stuff but I just absorb stuff through physical text easiest.

If folks are curious; my story (When the Sun is Gone) is about star-themed magical girls (magical women?) called Celestials. I'd categorize their magical duties more similar to EMT/Firefighter/Ranger work than police/army stuff. I really want to focus on them protecting the community and the kind of struggle that arises from it. The monsters should feel more like a wildfire than a person. There are infections that develop when monsters and humans live too close together, called "lunacy" (cause these monsters formed from the lingering corpse from the dead moon god), and this presents a problem because you gotta cure these people who are going through some issues and might fight back about it. And if you don't cure them in time, they might become fully fledged monsters that they can't come back from. Some of them want to be helped, some of them don't.

There's a dead moon cult up to no good too, which is difficult for the protagonist to deal with. The cult does some negative shit to the outside populace for sure, but the real issue is that the leaders are hurting their own people inside and those victims don't want to be saved because they think this is all for their benefit. How do you help people like that? Do you walk away, even if they're being hurt? Even if they do want to be helped, how do you do it? Sometimes the protag has the best intentions but it goes horribly wrong. You can do everything right and still fail. It's hard to not take that personally or to feel like a failure.

I don't want it to be too much of a bummer of a book though, so balancing failure and winning is going to be a tricky issue. But I think it will be fun. A lot of the research I've been doing is been to prepare for the right mindset for the Celestials to be in and for different ways for my protag do develop burnout and depression akfsjsafklas. Something I've noticed from a lot of the memoirs is that they almost always start out hopefully, optimistic, and anxious about their new job. Then they develop almost an addiction to the crazy nature of it all, to the unpredictability, the out-of-the-box thinking involved in street/wilderness medicine, and to the adrenaline rush. But as it goes on, that becomes burnout, then depression, occasionally suicidal ideation. The lucky ones get out before it becomes irreparable. We always read about the lucky ones because they're the ones who survived to write a book.

That said, it's scary to work on personal projects because of stuff like perfectionism. But if you're too worried about "perfect" then you'll just end up in the situation I'm in, where you never get started lol. But still, it's scary to write something personal and think that someone might read it and be disappointed in it. What if it's just not very good? The other thing that frequently comes up in my head is "am I really the right person to tell this story? What if I get it wrong?" What if I hurt someone's feelings by getting it wrong? What if I say something wildly inaccurate and contribute to misinformation out there? Or what if it's morally wrong to read memoirs about people's tragedies for the sake of your creative writing? I'm "using" a person's life to mine for storytelling material. It feels wrong to do that. Is it okay? Am I doing a bad thing here?

But maybe it's okay to write something that isn't very good, and maybe it's okay if I'm not the "right" person to make it. I don't know. I feel a pull to move my feet forward though, step by step, and see if I can do my best at least.

I think one thing I'm really thankful for from the game and this fandom is that I was just myself and people seemed to like that. I could shout out my loud opinions about stories or gameplay into the void and people would agree or disagree, but they were generally polite and excited.

This is a lil all over the place ajfaslfaf

But-- if you've been checking out the blog, then thanks for being here :) I hope that the upcoming liveblogs will be fun to read. If you decide to hang out and read my stupid lil story in the future, then thank you for giving that a chance too. But no worries if you aren't.

<3

[muriels-brainrot]

૮꒰ “ . . ꒱ა

{Referencing this post: https://www.tumblr.com/muriels-brainrot/755439602787139584/how-do-you-cope-with-the-fandom-being-so?source=share }

Forgive me if I'm intruding but I recently came across some very helpful advice which I think is quite insightful.

To set the scene, before I found this advice, I myself was struggling with staying consistent with art. This time however, I had decided that no I won't keep procrastinating. SO, in my attempt to find resources, I stumbled onto this video. Now suddenly it all began to make sense. The reason I was struggling was not because i'm lazy and horrible and lacking motivation. Rather it was because I had outcome related goals. TLDR: I was focused on the outcome (wow rlly iri we didn't know that's what outcome related goals meant pfft-)

Anyways so, instead of focusing on the process, I was instead focusing on the end product aka the finished drawing. Ofc I'm a beginner so I wouldn't look like I wanted to. Not bad but it wouldn't be what I wanted so i'd get frustrated and eventually give up on drawing . . . before inevitably returning with my tail between my legs cause I still rlly want to get better.

Honestly, it's natural and normal for these feeling to occur, because like you said we pour so much time and dedication. Not to mention heart and soul to make these creative projects that it feels almost personal when it doesn't get engagement. But if there is something i'd like for you to know, it's that it rlly helps if you take enjoyment in the process. Draw inspiration from odd places and craft scenarios.

Don't write for others, or the cliche of writing for yourself but rather think of it as you sharing your brainrot with ur future self haha. Write stuff that you'd wanna read yourself! (then come back to read it like a crazy person at the dead of night . . . wait, don't tell me that just me-)

Just . . . let your brain do its thing! Let your brain create instead of letting the ideas and projects fester in your head. Keep growing your skill because you never know, these might be the very thing that comes in handy later on in life. Think of singers like Sabrina carpenter who was niche (I mean to say not worldwide popular yknow, but u get my point) for a long time. However, if you look at her now that she's gone viral, it's the hard work during the years she spent creating with most of the world with their backs to her that is the sole reason she continues to be so well known for her . . . well, everything! (For example: She is extremely comfortable on stage while performing and looks like she's in her element even with thousands of eyes on her . . . it's cause she's been performing for almost 10 years I think.)

So, to both anon and anyone else reading this, pls keep creating stuff. Especially passion projects. Even if you feel like you're screaming into a void. You'll only get better IF you continue. Also, you never know maybe there is someone out there that really enjoys your work. Even if it's one person, that still someone out there that keeps coming back just for your work. This silly tangent I went on, won't completely get rid of all the thoughts and feelings . . . but it's a start. Hope this helps . . .

(Example: I always find myself coming back to this artwork by @cinsilly cause Asra's expression here is so funny. No not once a week but every few days oops- )

Oh my god thank you!! I'll post my thoughts in the comments. But it was honestly v cool of you to share this, the only thing that keeps me together in any fandom is knowing we're not alone in feeling this way :'> !!!

[eridude]

How do you draw so often without the fear of it not looking good or it’ll look weird? Or what do you do when you feel like art is just, too hard?

You’re someone who has increasingly been motivational and inspirational to me towards my own art in a sense, because it looks like you’re absolutely having a blast doing art, and admittedly I wish to have that same drive.

You’re doing great, I love seeing your stuff! But I am sorry if this sounded like a lot to say randomly on Anon, it’s just been something on my mind for quite some time.

hi! i cried.

anon, i want you to know that my art journey for so long, was full of trepidation for a lot of those exact reasons. i spent a good deal of my early art years worrying because i felt my work didn't compare to my friends, or the people i followed online - and so I didn't go out of my comfort zone much. which resulted in stagnation. i think, if i had pushed myself to draw the stuff i wanted, i might have been in a much better place artwise then i am today!

this is going to sound super corny and dorky but my number one art tip is to just go for it! sometimes stuff doesn't come out good. hell, i feel like a lot of my stuff still doesn't come out how i'd like! but in my opinion, art that comes out bad, that you still tried on, is better then no art at all. everything, and I do mean everything, that you try is an addition to your skillset somehow. i really hope i am not coming off too much like a dorky middle school teacher right now, lol.

another tip is find something you like or that makes you happy and draw it a million times whenever you have artblock. that is basically what i do with homestuck characters - and is the whole reason i have this blog hehe. i'm definitely not suggesting you post three drawings every day for a year because as much as i loved my dailies, i know that type of shit can be a huge burnout for people. it definitely was for me at times! but keeping a sketchbook or a page where you post silly little doodles frequently allows you to give yourself that goal of practice.

i feel like i have rambled forever now, oops. art is hard! and i am not great at communicating my thoughts. i guess at the end of the day, keep at it! when i was younger- hell, even a year ago, i would never have thought someone would send me a message telling me that my work inspired them. this means so much to me, and i promise someone someday is gonna reach out to you and tell you something similar.

you are awesome and your art is probably awesome too :D keep drawing- as long as you do, you will never stop getting better.

[unreadablehandle]

How fanfic changed me as a writer

Since discovering fanfic, I feel like I realized so much about writing!

My awakening is probably the most significant on the field of characters - because the way they spring from what I know and love while writing fanfics (instead of how I always tried to make them out of scratch and build them from the dark)... it showed me I always did it wrong before.

And the secret is pretty simple, even. I just never saw it so clearly.

Because the key is not to make a sheet with their traits and spend hours thinking about their favourite drink and if they are the kind of person who pees in the shower or not. No.

And don't take me wrong, it can be very useful to do this. But if you lack the thing that matters, it's still useless. Because writing is definitely about the craft. But have you ever wondered why a painting that does not conform to the rules of perspective can blow you away more than the one that does?

It's because art is about heart, too. So to write a good character... the only thing you have to do... is to love them.

I know it sounds silly. But I really think it is the truth. To fit the character to a base that feels familiar helped me realize this.

Your characters can be horrible, despicable, unlovable. But if it's so, your goal when writing cannot be to depict it (as I often tended to do before). Your goal has to be to love them through that awfulness. So much that the readers can learn to love them, too.

That's it. That's the charm.

Also: writing characters whose traits were inspired by my faves (and reading hundreds of stories of the same two people who are somehow always different, though) helped me realize that people are very different but also very similar.

So when I write other stuff than fanfics now, I use the essence of people I've met in real life as a base for what I aim for in the "final product". It works like magic, really. Because with something to bounce back from, it's different than to pull something entirely out of thin air.

Changed the way I view character building.

...

Do you share the same experience? Do you disagree? What other things did you learn from fanfics? I'm curious!! ;)

[postmail]

hey guys i love you. its my birthday in three days have some queeshmael (and other assorted stand-alone ishmaels and queequegs) moby dick fanarts that ive drawn over the course of like... several months that i never posted because i thought they looked like shit. and tbh i still do. but also theres beauty in everything and also also i need to lead by example of fearlessness in posting shitty ass fanart just for funsises. just because it makes me happy. some of these are outdated but idgaf. enjoy inconsistent character designs lol

its under the cut cause uh wow thats actually a lot more than i expected? whoops?

okay funny story i actually lied up there a little bit i drew this several months ago and was so madly in love with how it turned out that i never posted it because i didnt want the inevitable lack of attention to sour it for me. its a little outdated now but i still love it, i just want to put here so i never lose it. ishmael please go to therapy

newer art yet somehow even more outdated designs? i think i was trying to be a bit more experimental and didnt like how they came out. i still dont like the designs very much but looking back now i dont think the art itself is actually that bad.

never posted because i just couldnt get the anatomy quite right. i actually kind of miss when i colored grays like this idk how i forgot that actually wait i should start doing that again-

this one was for mermay, just pure silliness and cringe for the soul. more of that awesome gray shading line stuff that i need to start doing again, but i didnt like how queequeg's face looked. and also i think i felt a bit silly about this? like i thought it was too cringe or something? idk why tho its kinda cute to me now. best of wishes to ishmael in his goal to fuck that fish man

more inconsistent queequeg designs! i really liked this one when i first drew it, but i thought it was too small to post on its own, being just a itsy little doodle for shading practice. now i can post it :). wonder who it is thats talking to him?

another little drawing! this one i never posted because 1) i fucked up when drawing it and accidentally drew it way too small and 2) i accidentally made it waayy too similar to another moby dick fanart by another more popular user and i didnt want other ppl accusing me of copying or smthin... i jusr didnt think this piece was particularly worth the risk of that. i think its fine now tho.

incredibly shitty doodle i really only made for myself ft. incredibly innacurate drawing of a sperm whale. ngl i still think the joke is funny tho.

shhh dont tell the cringe police about this one but this is a queeshmael fankid i made. her name is rachael and she cannot make normal facial expressions to save her life. she loves listening to her dad infodump its interesting to her. she knows so many incorrect facts about whales! whoopie!

this might have been a valentines special? idk. i was gonna redraw it but then i forgor. let this be a lesson to you: finish your drawings, or else you'll only have the older version to show to people (its okay i still like this a little bit)

oh shit i ran out ok bye guys hope you liked your gay whalers peace and love on planet earth

[den1skap1ska]

OKAY,SO TIME TO TALK ABOUT MY DC AU!!!

Basically, it's usual all Gotham stuff but in reality of 1990-2010 Russia (with no politics!!!) I like the vibes of the past and it would be funny to see my favourite cuties in doomercore. Also I would love to make them in the USA like in canon,but y'know,I don't have an experience of living in USA. So,I thought it would be funny to tell about characters I love in the situation that I'm actually very familiar with. So basically that's it. I don't have any particular goal by making these silly headcanons,just goofing around and romanticising my life a just little.

So that's it ig???

I will draw tiny comics maybe,fanart,writing down headcanons and just random stuff. I will really like to answer all your questions if you have any!!! I will make more content I hope. And I hope I won't just let this AU rot when my hyperfixation dies.

This blog will be just for silly sketches with that au and shitposting about it. My main blog is just for my art generally and omnimnamnom will be just for me to vent about my life. So,ba do bim ba da bo-💥

[bogleech]

Dearest Bog,

First off, thank you! You've been my main source of biology and horror articles for years, along with having a super unique art style and aesthetic sense that I really like :)

Gushing-aside, I've noticed a trend these last few years of less emphasis on the whole months-long halloween thing. Not that you don't have enough contributions under your belt already, but i was just curious how you prioritize this stuff, how much you value the planning stages before jumping into new projects, if at all, and the direction you might want to take your site in the future, if you're able to answer that.

Apologies if this has already been explained in detail, been a follower of yours for years, but not exactly the most consistent one ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe it's the ADHD, but basically my mind is a non-stop hurricane of things I'd like to do or create, all the time, to the point that there's not enough time in even a whole human lifespan to give all of them the attention I'd want. Sharing the silly things that inspire me is really fun and I have a constant urge to do it, but my usual level of Halloween updating is as much work as a full time job; even a short little article on some goofy things I saw in a store can take me hours and I can't even rightfully justify why. Maybe I write them too carefully, worrying about the perfect flawless cadence and making it as interesting as possible for such a niche and frivolous topic? So to make those things I end up actually sacrificing as much time as a job without even the benefits of a job, and it kind of pains me to think about what else I might have accomplished if, over the years, I'd instead managed to put even 1/3 that time towards other stuff. Mortasheen is pretty big, and I actually am spending more time on it this Halloween season than on my website, though it's still slow going and with it being October 26 right now, I've already failed my goal of a Halloween release :/ ...a Halloween II release, though, is looking incredibly likely, because the amount of work left to do on it is significantly less than the amount of work I did in just the past month and a half. But @revretch got me Godot and a bunch of resources for learning game making, so I'm going to start on that soon. I'm also getting the hang of making videos more comfortably, and streaming, and other things that engage people more directly. When I've gotten more done with the Mortasheen book I'll be able to devote more to my webcomic, too, which I still care about as much as ever. I guess unfortunately my answer to how I prioritize things is just "some sort of way, I think, maybe???"

[arrimorr]

Hello! Lately I've gotten a huge inspo boost from your personal projects (especially... birbs....) and fanart

and I started to wonder — what media was the most inspiring for you? How did different fandoms influence you and your art direction?

I simply adore the range of different media that you post and talk about (like starting with scifi and ending with forest whimsy) but I feel like there are still some general trends in your artwork! How would you describe your taste(?) in art direction? Or perhaps it's something not possible to grasp and put into words?

Love your artwork!! Best wishes!!! <3

First of all, THANK YOU for this question, it's really really touching that someone is interested in stuff like this. Also SORRY for not answering for so long, because you are right and this IS a difficult question, partly because I view my art direction and media taste as two separate things. If you want to hear more about...birds...and my thought process behind their development, I made a podcast about them after the second episode released. I'm making a guess that you must follow me somewhere else given that you know about my game, so, if you speak the language I won't name you can listen to my rambling in my vk group.

If we are talking about fandoms I think I was REEEALLY affected by Over the Garden wall and Gravity falls as a kid. As well as a bunch of horror stories, I think "pen pal" was the first horror story that made me fall in love with the genre as well as the concept of kids facing situations that even adults may find difficult to handle. I generally love child adventures that have a darker theme to them. This is present in my...birds...game only in emotional manner, BUT, both of my next games are going to be more direct horror stories, so I hope to play with this a bit more in the future. (Also my friend said that "the left right game" explains a lot about things that I like and write and this IS my favourite horror story of all time so...like, cmon, my next game is literally going to be a creepy roadtrip adventure and this isn't even the first horror roadtrip im going to write)

Tonally I'm really inspired by things made by Davey Wreden (the Stanley parable, The Beginners Guide), One (mp100, opm) and Toby Fox. I just love how these guys manage to create silly light-hearted experiences that are pack full with often times difficult emotions. This is something I REEEALLY want to achieve in my stories. Also the Beginners guide became a really big deal for me as a kid because of the way this game literally spoke with the player. Up until the last couple of years I viewed art solely as a way to reduce loneliness and feel a connection with other people, even through the screen, so my main goal with birdcatchers was to recreate this feeling of personal conversation, even if less direct.

If we're talking about visual style, I'm really inspired by Brecht Evens and Plastiboo, and I got into mixed media because of Чистотел in vk. I won't say that Im anywhere close to these people but they are very inspiring for me. Anyways - my current "philosophy" in art is that I want my pictures to have more air in them and also spend as little time on them as possible. This is easy for me in traditional art (for example these chalk thingies), but still not so much in digital, however you can see that I'm kinda doing the same unfinished line art and blurry colouring thing with it too.

[fazcadeemployee69]

EASTER EVENT

I know this is late shush

This year the Faz-manager, Henry E, is proud to announce an egg-decorating competition!

(Details below cut )

Here's the egg ( it's free! )

The competition is simple; Slap a design onto this bad boy and submit it to us. It can be anything ( nuthin offensive or inappropriate ). Draw over it using your funky art apps, or just use your phone's inbuilt editor, it doesn't really matter to us.

ALT bases:

How to submit:

Make a seperate post with your decorated egg and tag us in it! Try to avoid using the inbox as its pretty cluttered right now ( cough cough theres 165 asks and tumblr's notifs are dying ). You may also reblog this post with your egg attached to it, whichever works best for you!

What are the rewards? Well, chosen winners get a bunch of coupons here at the Fazacade. These can be stuff like free meals or free tokens! You might even get a life-time worth of eggs from our very own kitchen! ( Thank Ronaldo )

AKA, There's no real awards. This is just a silly event and the main goal is to have fun!

Deadline: 7th April

That's all for now, happy decorating!