#it's a lot of fun i swear

[zunaki]

Repainted an old Byler illustration 💖

[glassesanddisasters]

Thought it would be rude not to show you all this Ianthe sketch.

[spacebubblehomebase]

FINALS ARE FINISHED and finally finished- haha -with this monster of a dedication art that includes 30 Radioapple Fanchildren designed by 24 different artists I got direct permission from!!! Think of it as a super early Christmas gift in a way and a sign of more art to come!🤞🤞✨ Don't forget to click picture for better quality and happy holidays! ^v^ 💕

(I mostly interacted with these artists on Twitter, so I'm sorry I couldn't tag everyone here. TvT It's quite a lot to find and confirm. My hope is this gets boosted enough to find y'all. Thanks again for letting me draw them!) BONUS: Art process GIF! =D

-Bubbly💙

[joyfuladorable]

Baby Junior's First Steps (based on a scene from Bluey)

Prompt from my buddy @vadfannypack! Everyone thank them Right NoW!!

[chalkrub]

so i remembered daily comic day this year and i am paying for it

[wolfsbanesparks]

Okay so I've gotten a few questions and I'll do my best to answer them with a brief walkthrough of how this exchange works.

All this information (and more details) can be found here if you still have questions! (The link is to the Yuletide 2023 profile page)

Full walkthrough under the cut.

Eligibility

This exchange is for small fandoms only! Your fandom is eligible if it has <1000 completed fics on AO3. Fics are counted towards that total only if they are in English, complete, and at least 1000 words long. So if your fandom has more than 1000 works but only half of them meet the criteria it may still be eligible!

There are a few exceptions and if your fandom is borderline you can provide evidence for why it should be included (Check out this post for more info on that)

Since a lot of my followers are comics fans: a fandom can be a single title or run of a comic if it's distinct enough. For example I nominated the We Are Robin comic run. Even though characters (like Duke Thomas) are in multiple comics and exist in larger fandoms, this run is distinct and self contained enough to be it's own fandom.

Nominations (Open now until Thursday Sept 28)

Nominations are optional, so you can still sign up even if you don't do a nomination. Just be aware that if your favorite small fandom isn't nominated it won't be included as an option for this exchange.

If you follow the link at the top of this reblog it will bring you to the top of the Yuletide Exchange profile page on AO3.

Once there click the "Yuletide 2023 Tagset" link.

Once you click the link it should take you to a new page. Click on the "Nominations" button to be taken to the nomination form.

The Nomination form looks like this:

Just fill it out with the fandom(s) you'd like to nominate and the characters from those fandoms you'd like to see.

You can nominate up to 4 fandoms with up to 4 characters for each fandom. Use the canonical tags for the fandom/characters. If there is no canonical tags just enter it as you would expect to see its canonical tag. For example I nominated the "Monkey Prince" fandom even though it does not have a recognized fandom tag.

Under Characters you can also add "worldbuilding (fandom)" for fics that expand on the world/lore/etc. without focusing on characters themselves.

Once you hit submit the mods will review the submission to double check that your fandoms are eligible and if they are they will be added to the list of fandoms for the exchange.

Sign Ups (Friday Oct 13-Saturday Oct 21)

To sign up all you need is to be 18 years old and have an AO3 account!

I'll add photos once Sign ups are open in October but I'll give you the rundown of how it works here. (And here's the AO3 tutorial on signing up for events like this with visuals)

On Oct 13, a sign up link will appear on the Yuletide 2023 profile page (linked above). It will also be linked on the Dreamwidth page. I will also try to link in this post.

The link will take you to the form where you can fill out your Requests (what you would like your gifted fic to be) and Offers (what you are willing to write)

Requests: Select 3-6 fandoms that you would like a fic of. For each fandom select from the nominated characters (up to 4). If you don't specify characters then your writer can choose any of them.

There will also be a space for "Optional details" where you can specify what you want to see in a fic and what you DON'T want to see. This is where you can put ships, genre preferences, triggers, squicks, prompts etc. Including Do Not Wants (DNW) like triggers and squicks will make sure that there is nothing in your gift fic that will upset you.

Offers: Select 4-10 fandoms that you are willing to write for. For each fandom select 2-20 nominated characters that you would be willing to write (Or you can chose "Any" if you are comfortable writing all nominated characters).

Bucket Offers can be made if there are many fandoms where you are comfortable writing Any characters. You can offer 9 fandoms plus one Bucket Offer of additional fandoms. (I wouldn't recommend doing this for your first exchange but it is an option)

Once you submit your sign up form it will appear on your AO3 profile.

You can click on this button and edit your sign up form at any point before the sign ups close.

Assignments (Sent out by Monday Oct 23)

Once sign ups close you will be matched up with another person based on your Requests and Offers. Matching is done by fandom and by character to find the best match.

When Assignments go out you will get an email with the details of your assignment. This will essentially be the Request portion of your match's sign up form. If you don't get an email or if it gets deleted/eaten by the Spam filter, the Assignment (and all the details) will appear on your AO3 profile.

The person you are writing a fic for will most likely NOT be the person writing a fic for you. It's like a Secret Santa/White Elephant gift exchange--It's supposed to be a secret!

Posting (deadline is Monday Dec 18)

When you finish your story you can click on your Assignment tab. Beside the assignment will be 2 buttons: "Fulfill" and "Default".

Default is for if you can't complete the fic in time (Pinch Hitters will then take over to ensure the person you were matched with still gets a gift). The Default deadline is Dec 11.

If you click the "Fulfill" button you will be taken to the posting form. Just add in your story and metadata as you usually would when uploading a new story, but just double check that it is included in the Yuletide 2023 collection and that your recipient's name is correct (both should be autofilled if you do it this way).

You may also click "Post a New Work" on your main profile page and add in the story that way. Just make sure that it is included in the Yuletide 2023 collection and that your recipient's name is correct.

When you hit "Post", the work will go up but it will be an unrevealed Mystery Work. Others will not be able to see it on your Works page but you will. You can still go in and edit it anytime before the deadline, but no one will be able to read it until the collection is revealed on Dec 25.

Reveals (Story reveal on Dec 25 and Author reveal on Jan 1)

On Christmas morning all the stories will be revealed, though the author will remain a mystery. Recipients will get a notification that they have a gift and they will be able to read it as a special gift to them. It will be available for anyone in the fandom to read and comment on at that time.

On New Year's day, the authors will be revealed. This is when you can finally chat about your story, crosspost it, and show your enthusiasm for what you've written!

And that's everything! This got super long but I hope it helps demystify the process for anyone new to the exchange! Good Luck and I hope you enjoy Yuletide!

@cerealboxlore and @zorilleerrant I know you both mentioned maybe being interested so this one's for you!

Yuletide 2023

Hey y'all!

So I have (perhaps foolishly) been thinking about doing the Yuletide fic exchange again this year and thought that I should share it with all of you!

What is it?

Yuletide is a multi-fandom fic exchange that takes place every year around the holidays. It's for small fandoms with less than 1000 completed fics on AO3. (Find out if your favorite fandom is eligible here!)

When is it?

Nominations are open now! If you are a part of an eligible fandom you have until Thursday September 28 to nominate them. It's very simple, just list the fandom's name and up to four characters from that fandom you would like to see in a fic. You can nominate up to four fandoms if you have multiple that fit the criteria!

Sign-ups to participate happen October 13-21, where you can list which of the eligible fandoms you would like to write for (and which ones you would like your own gift to be from!) Once you're matched up you will have until December 18 to finish your fic!

If you want to know more about Yuletide and how it works go here!

I had a lot of fun doing this exchange last year and would love to have more people join us this year!

EDIT: Here's the link to the rules on AO3 for anyone who isn't sure how to navigate Dreamwidth.

[beargregor]

wait i'm curious, what makes you say that gregor doesn't like everyone else (if i read that post right)? just curious since i've never seen anyone else say that

i don't necessarily think gregor dislikes everyone else at lcb but i do think that gregor is an incredibly petty person that isn't nearly as close to the rest of the sinners and even outright dislikes some of them cough cough rodya cough cough which a lot of people just Refuse to see because he's as much of a doormat as he is. there's several examples i could get into to try and prove my point however i'll just focus on what i personally think to be the biggest ones.

additionally, this is going to be kind of long, so i'm adding a read more. read more! read it. sorry for being so wordy. i have several diseases.

Pt1. gregor is the type to try and get along at least decently with everyone, especially if he gets a good first impression from them.

this is less a point in favor of gregor's distance w/ the rest of the sinners and more just a contributing factor to it. once again there's several examples i could point to here but i think the most in your face one happened in canto I with yuri, as several people have pointed out. even before gregor comes clean about growing attached to her as quickly as he did because she reminds him of his sister, we get this interaction.

i'll go ahead and make the disclaimer now that i don't necessarily think gregor is the most reliable of narrators, especially when it comes to his feelings and interactions with most people, but from the way he acts when the topic of yuri comes up (and the way we still see him act even all the way up to c7, nearly a whole year after yuri's death) i don't see reason to question his sentiment here. gregor immediately got that aya and yuri were close, potentially even taking note of their traded belts, and went out of his way to get something nice for yuri despite hardly knowing her.

i feel like a lot of people have forgotten as much, especially since it's been so long since c1, but gregor actually spent a good bit of season 1 doing the exact same thing with the other sinners! gregor reads a connection between him and ishmael pretty quickly despite getting off to a rocky start

mostly because gregor can tell that ishmael is pretty sardonic in a very similar way to him. there's been multiple instances where ishmael and gregor have essentially expressed the same sentiment at different moments, most notably gregor's little argument after ishmael got shot with a decay ampule in c4

and ishmael's response to pilot talking about self-sacrifice in c5

i could go ahead and pull up more examples, but in general pm has gone out of their way to show us that gregor and ishmael are pretty similar, so it makes sense for gregor to assume that they're friends, right?

this will be pushpin 1. keep note of this for Later.

ishmael's only the first sinner we see gregor trying to do this with in s1, we also see him try it out with heathcliff, sinclair, and ryoushuu

he's tried to get along with charon, being one of very few sinners that we've seen actually try to establish a connection with her at all

even rodya, despite my insistence that gregor doesn't like her nearly as much as the fandom thinks he does

all of these seem pretty fine and dandy, right? sure it frequently leans towards self-degradation, micromanaging, and commiseration, but gregor can at least be pretty chummy with most of the sinners, can't he?

Pt2. hell's chicken was more than just comic relief guys please

i'm fully aware that this is quite the hot take, but i think hell's chicken deserves a lot more credit for character writing than the fandom gives it. hell's chicken gave us foreshadowing for several events, such as the donqui bloodfiend reveal

heathcliff's distortion in c6 (as well as hong lu's highly speculated distortion at some point in the future)

and ryoushuu and sinclair's continued connection by making him the odd one out on her team

which, hey! that implies something about gregor's odd one out, don quixote, too, doesn't it? yes. yes it does. that's pushpin 2. keep note of that for later.

speaking of pushpins, hey! that's pushpin 1!

splitting into teams is one of the major events in hell's chicken, and most of the sinner's choices are either motivated by very little, backhanded, or motivated primarily by not wanting to be on the opposite leader's side. i didn't include all of the picks, just because i feel like including most of them already gets this across, but i think gregor took one major thing from this: most of the sinners, when push comes to shove, will only side with gregor when they refuse to or can't take his opponent's side.

now, don't get me wrong, i'm fully aware that this is primarily intended to be comedic relief, but when gregor is being described as having his trust broken by ishmael or nearly crying because no one on his team properly sided with him for him, i feel like it's pretty fair to read into this.

something that i think is pretty important to remember in conjunction with this is that we know that gregor is the type to hold a grudge, both from his general attitude towards the G corp soldiers in c1 as well as his continued distaste for vergilius

even beyond the splitting into teams of hell's chicken, the sinners have given gregor plenty of reasons to feel bitter. i feel like this is something people have noticed but haven't really put a finger on, but it's kind of wild just how often the rest of the sinners make gregor the butt of the joke

and sure, we could argue that a fair few of these aren't really made with any ill intent. quite a bit of it could have been meant as harmless teasing, but with gregor being more sensitive than most, it coming from nearly all sides, and as often as it does? yeah, i think he's prone to taking it a bit personally.

Pt3. yes i do still think gregor was the third most important character in canto VII you guys gotta hear me out okay

of course, all of this leads up to the bit of the story i highlighted, doesn't it? c7? i totally get why people haven't really picked up on all the gregor things i did in it, seeing as they were mostly not *directly* said about him or by him.

personally, i think that gregor's distaste for talking about himself on any serious level and thus leading to him getting sort of "sidelined" narratively (which i take issue with that claim, but still. it's effective for getting what i mean across atm) is supposed to lead players to take a deeper look at the times gregor gets held up to other characters and compare and contrast what's being said about them by the matchup. as i showed earlier with his immediate latching onto ishmael, i think this is something gregor himself is at least partially aware of too.

so, that begs the question, who was gregor compared to in canto VII that makes me think it's one of the most critical pieces in understanding his character?

really, i'd like to avoid getting too lost in the analysis of this canto specifically, since i'd like to do a proper post about this later, but i figure i can bury the lede a little before doing it properly.

c7 features several characters being made to perform in sansón's play, acting out the relevant backstory for this segment of the plot. a lot of these characters have rather direct, degrading reasons for playing the roles they do.

outis, a character with an inflated ego who wants her journey to have a purpose, is made to play an aimlessly wandering villager with a single line.

hong lu and ryoushuu, two characters for whom families and the expectations placed upon them are likely going to play a major role, are made to play bloodfiends.

rodya, a character who resents her lot in life and is constantly shown to be eager to leave her destitution behind her and become someone special, is made to play a helpless villager that's too poor to even offer any money to the hero that saves her.

heathcliff, a character that has spent most of his life getting dehumanized by comparing him to beastly animals, is made to play a literal bear whose sole purpose in the plot is to get beat up and then quickly left by the wayside.

sinclair, a character that has two opposed parties essentially treating him as a macguffin to procure for their side, is made to play the character who was arguably the catalyst for this entire canto, not to mention playing a decently major role in ruina.

our star don quixote is made to play her father, the first kindred, but there's someone by their side the entire time, isn't there? don quixote's dear, steadfastly loyal companion. a character which don quixote has tasked themself with getting to come out of their shell?

hello again, pushpin 2.

gregor has been made to play our unreachable star, sancho. someone had to, of course. you can't really tell a story without it's main character, now can you?

now, i should once again give a disclaimer. i am not trying to say that i think adapting what happens to donqui/sancho in c7 to gregor is the road pm is going to take here, not only would that toe a bit past the line of foreshadowing, but it'd also just amount to rehashing that plotline again, which i don't think would make for a particularly exciting story.

what i DO think is that we can take a lot of the things that are said to either directly be the case for sancho and use them to inform how we see gregor.

and god, does playing sancho have some fucking implications for our favorite ossan archetype.

starting off, the earliest moment we get to see of sancho is quite literally her just waiting for death to take her in a pile of ashes.

which, i should remind everyone, is actually pretty damn close to what happens to gregor's literary counterpart at the end of the metamorphosis. gregor samsa experiences one final breaking point that pushes him over the edge and makes him decide to just wait for starvation to take him.

gregor and sancho both consider themselves to no longer be human, something which sancho goes out of her way to highlight repeatedly throughout the canto and gregor is quick to get defensive on her behalf for when outis starts really tearing into her

sancho spends quite a lot of this story denying herself the joys of community and friendship, despite knowing that, even with the rest of the sinners frequently making jokes at her expense and outright insulting her, they were things that she desperately craved.

and, while this is getting into my "outis is a red herring meant to distract us from gregor's eventual betrayal" theorizing, i also think it's worth noting for this discussion that sancho's fellow kindreds, her family, all seem to be under the impression that she dislikes them and ultimately her departure was an act of betrayal

and that, despite gregor being one of LCB's resident mood makers and attempted conflict de-escalators, one of the sinners that's most prone to making appeals to the bonds they've all forged together, only him and faust remained silent during everyone's speech

so yeah, i think there's quite a lot of little details and hints building up to the reveal that gregor's not quite as fond of everyone as he presents himself to be. i do think a lot of this ultimately comes down to gregor getting in the way of his own happiness, similarly to donqui, particularly because he's been frequently portrayed as something of a self fulfilling prophecy, especially by giving him as many christ allegories as they have by way of priest and garden of thorns. gregor is convinced that the rest of the sinners don't like him because he's not convinced anyone could like him, so he convinces himself that he hates them because why should he care if someone that he hates hates him too?

a lot of this ultimately ties back to my personal interpretation of what happens in the metamorphosis as well as my own theories regarding all the times gregor has made weird callbacks and references to lobcorp and ruina, but yeah. i think about this guy and his deeper characterization a fairly normal amount, i think.

to end this off i'll highlight one of my favorite little "gregor is fucking seething and trying so hard to keep it cool" moments, in the credits CG for c7 we see rodya teasing him by drawing a little horse on his window and actively pointing and laughing at it, which gregor really doesn't seem all too pleased about.

i personally think this ties into the other cruel part of sansón forcing gregor to play rocinante, which is the more literal "he's actually just straight up playing rocinante" side of things. gregor was quite literally made to play something less than human, less than even animal really, as he was reduced to nothing more than the shoes don quixote wore as she got to play the leading role. sansón directly makes jokes about gregor being nothing more than shoes in the play twice, which adds to this reading, i think.

this, imo, really plays into the adaptation of the metamorphosis! i've seen a lot of readings for the book that posit that, despite being the protagonist, gregor samsa can't really be considered the main character due to nearly everything he experiences in it being used to further his family's character development at his expense, which i think fits nicely with limbus gregor seemingly having the most said about him through indirect means by holding him up to other characters. also it's rodya carelessly making fun of His Big Major Insecurities™ again like she did in c1 which i always find fun. rodya i love you but god you're the worst.

[exercise-of-trust]

oh hey one more really stupid sock construction before i go: tablet woven heel band! this pair is a christmas gift for a good friend so i'm not modeling them myself, but the water bottle works ok. (i am not immune to a non-knitter who appreciates and actually wears hand-knit items, and my friend, god love him, lacks the good sense to tell me to quit giving him weird stuff, so here we are.)

i can't find the post now, but i remember seeing someone on here tablet-weave a color transition for... a sweater? a shawl? i don't even remember anymore. anyway, the idea was still knocking around in my head when i found the squircle sock pattern, which starts with a cuff in the round, adds a very long and narrow heel flap (only 6 stitches wide!), and picks up stitches on either side of it to work in the round again. this monstrosity replaces the original garter stitch heel flap with a short tablet-woven band grafted onto the back of the cuff. to "pick up stitches" along the side, i wove each section with some slack in the weft, using a couple dpns to keep things even (looking back, i don't think i actually used the weft loops themselves as the "slipped stitches," because you can already see the warp twists kind of coming undone along the sides of the dpn-less section in the bottom photo? i think i ran another bit of scrap thread through those loops, tightened the slack out of the weft, used the scrap thread as the slipped stitches, and then tightened those loops out too once i'd gotten a couple rounds into the rest of the sock to get the knitted stitches flush with edges of the woven band.)

things i would do differently if i made these again: tablet weaving is a twined weaving style, so it's a bit thick, and it gets even thicker when you have to weave in the ends. this pattern uses 18 tablets with 4 threads each, for a total of 18 x 4 x 2 x 2 = 288 total ends that need weaving in, which as you can imagine is Deeply And Profoundly Unfun. i might do a missing-hole tablet woven pattern (which the "dublin dragons" motif is supposed to be anyway, but i wanted three colors to match the flag stripes), or i might do a baltic pickup band instead, which should reduce the bulk a bit.

[vaguely-concerned]

obsessed with the fact that if you choose the last purple option in lucanis' romance chat before going off to tearstone island ("they MOVED the MOON!!!" still in the running for the best delivery in the whole game btw it's so ineffably hilarious to me), it's rook who flinches away just a little bit (if still warmly <3) and tries to change the topic and lucanis who's steady even though he's clearly still so afraid. 'don't tempt fate'/'*the softest fucking voice you've ever heard in your entire life* I don't intend to'. pain and suffering

lucanis looking at rook and helplessly, with a wonder that verges on despair, saying 'what would I do without you?' is soooo. especially at that point in the relationship and with what's about to happen. and for whatever reason rook can't quite stay with the fact that they do mean that much to someone, that they are so reverently and so groundingly 'I want to know what your favourite food is so I can make it for you any time you want it' everyday loved, it's too much and they have to deflect from it or the fear of losing it. can say some very interesting things about them, too.

(there is also a Pattern in that in my estimation lucanis frequently responds better to inviting humour than to earnest shows of concern -- it seems to help him be more engaged/online to be offered that more neutral space to meet you in and uh 'build' the conversation around something funny together than to be confronted with compassion head-on because that clearly mostly deer-in-the-headlights him, as we also see with some of the early flirt options haha. contrast this especially with bellara, who repeatedly gets genuinely upset if you try to make light of some pressing and painful situation she's dealing with (girl I'm so sorry I'm so jestercore and I canot change this but I'll try :'( for you). I think the times lucanis reacts negatively to the purple options are much more about you siding with other (frequently more charismatic lol) people against him or throwing him under the bus interpersonally -- like seeming to go along with illario's charm offensives, or telling teia lucanis didn't want to come help out with caterina's funeral and he'd just sit alone and brood about it if you didn't force him (???!!! hello??? unprovoked and deeply unkind out of left field???? this option is so fucking MEAN and for what fhdaskjfa you're telling me there's no way for rook to be a bit of a dick in this game?)

when it's one on one conversation he consistently seems to find it quite comforting, though... which makes a lot of sense because in many ways it's how he interacts with illario, just shorn of the resentments and hidden daggers and things they Do Not Talk About but really should beneath the levity that makes it sharp. it's gone ugly between them, but I think the affectionate instinct beneath is real and goes back a long way before all of that festered -- it's a form of play he does with people he loves. and uh. not really caterina huh. notably.)

[ricky-mortis]

So, I heard it was Holloweane Week?

It’s a bit late in the week but I wanted to draw something for it, and I liked this prompt.

The way I see it- their roles may have been swapped, but their dynamic? Exactly the same.

[beeduoo]

exile

[okartichoke]

at a concerrttt yyessss yessss

klapollo >:3

design notes

link to masterpost || some quick justifcations/explanations below cut!!:

Birds of paradise <333 Them being of the same bird family is important to me... (honorary mention to the snowy owl for Kristoph) (also honorable mention to the paradise crow) (but i like them having matching ribbons (and the two birds i went with are more closely related))

I originally tried giving Klav the whole fluffy back of yellow/white feathers, but (a) he looked SO over complicated (especially compared to everyone else) and (b) I realized that no other character has back feathers, anyways. so it would make sense he does not either.

The ribbon-tails are similar to Apollo and Trucy's hearts: they both inherit this feature from one of their parents. (One parent is a stephanie's astrapia, one is a lesser bird-of-paradise). (Also of note: the lesser bird-of-paradise also has two long wire plumes, if you look closely)

Tails: (Klav's is basically a ribbon-tailed astrapia's tail btw.) Because the tail is such a notable feature of these species, I'm including it, though they also come from the base of the wing (though I'll probably just draw them as essentially tails in the future), and are much shorter than they would be, were they proportional.

i got very lazy on the individual introduction sheets they're so bad 😭😭 specifically klavier pls just imagine he and his wings look better there 🙏🙏🙏 LOL i hope the other drawings make up for it !! >:3

FINALLY MY CAT!!!! it’s been a while,,, this is him everyday after taking his pills cuz he knows it’s milk time now (image from my dad) (also flat colors and zoom bc me likey this image)

[recalled11]

Lost Pt. 3

Pt.1/Pt.2/Pt.3/ Next >>

[sysig]

The familiarity is not very comforting (Patreon)

[transitcowboy]

I kinda miss making YT thumbnails.

[chalkrub]

been doodling some bri'ish wildlife - love seeing these guys. because they are the classics aren't they?