#moves it here so it's easier

[ganondoodle]

(new totk rewritten- PREVIEW)

since this stuff takes a long while to think out, design and write .. heres a preview of the arm abilities ( just rauru edition for now)

the shiekah one and spirit abilities im still working on though i know what each does and how it looks/works, just gotta draw and write it all

i will add a detailed description on the full post once i have everything for it regarding the abilities

[deoidesign]

Hi, how did you learn to draw Steve's physique?

Ohh what a complicated thing to answer...

When it comes to how I learned to draw anything, it's hard to say anything too specific since it's always a culmination of many years of assorted study and practice... but I can try to do my best to explain some of the biggest things that helped me learn, some tips I keep in mind, and maybe at least some places to start/delve further.

(just a little disclaimer it's not like my drawings here are going to be 100% medically accurate.. they're just to illustrate concepts!)

The main thing about learning various physiques is understanding anatomy. Which feels obvious, but I don't mean proportions; these are important, but perhaps more important is understanding the skeleton and how it moves and learning where muscles connect to bones and where fat grows on the body. When you understand how these function on a more mechanical level, depicting form and movement in a way that feels natural comes in tow.

For instance, understanding things like the pronation and supination of the radius and ulna, as well as the fact that muscles can ONLY contract or relax, will help you understand a bit better which muscles will be flexed and which will not while someone moves. It's inherent to the positioning based on the structural makeup of the body... It's not like you NEED to memorize all the muscles and bones, of course, but understanding and gaining at least a passive familiarity with the concepts really helps.

In tandem with this concept is the way parts of the body flow into eachother. Muscles ALWAYS come in groups because they can only contract. Whatever muscle is there to lift something, there is a muscle on the other side to pull that bone back down. What this results in is a series of straight edges next to curves, which gives us a lot of really lovely "s curves" and dents and folds and so on and so forth just naturally occurring.

I would suggest at least learning the "bony landmarks", which are bones (usually) visible on the surface of the body. things like the iliac crest, the great trochanter, the 7th vertabrae, the acromion process... These can be used to help you understand the parts of the body as angles and relationships, rather than trying to remember lengths and sizes, which vary immensely... (since you asked about steve, he can be our model... also study these on your own don't just take my word for it haha, these are the ones I personally keep in mind)

I've done the same thing with body hair... learning where it grows and in which directions... It helps me make up variations without needing reference, because I have a set of rules I can follow.

The biggest thing that helped me understand all this on a much deeper level was my ecorche course. I sculpted this guy. We started by sculpting the entire skeleton to understand the bones, and then we added muscles on top. Not every single muscle, of course, but the "artistic muscles" AKA the ones which directly affect the surface of the body. Doing this let us see where muscles connect, because we would make a shape, put it on the bone where it actually goes, and then you get to see how other muscles overlap that.

This helped me, perhaps, more than anything else. But I also didn't just start with this course, I had been drawing for years before I even took it. I had been in school for years before I took it. Not that I think it wouldn't be helpful to someone just starting out, but I do think that the more you know going in, the better an in-depth course like this will help you and stick with you. Classes are also expensive, though so I'm not really like... recommending you pay potentially thousands of dollars to take one... But it did help me a lot, personally.

I also, of course, have done many figure, gesture, and master studies...

These just help you quickly gain a stronger understanding of generalized anatomy, and gives you real life examples of and practice with of how people move and balance.

What all this does when combined, is gives me a very solid ability to depict movement and form in a way that feels relatively natural from my subconscious without the need for reference.

The rest of how I've learned to draw his physique is honestly mostly just stylization. I understand the body, and this is how I am depicting it for his level of musculature.

And as I move into depicting him in other ways, either moving in comics or in animation, realistically rendered, or extra stylized, these concepts inform every step of that process for me! When he keeps the same/similar relationships between parts, he gets to still look like himself.

It ALSO really helps when putting clothes on, because the way cloth falls and bunches and lifts is all directly related to the form it is on... So the more you understand that form, the more you can depict clothing and movement in a way that feels natural.

This is all, of course, true when I draw anyone, you asked about Steve so I'm trying to mostly show with him! But because I'm just drawing from raw information of general anatomy rather than trying to study one body type at a time, it allows a lot more "give," I think!

Like, here's most of the cast from TTA so far... actually, they're not as varied as I thought they were nevermind LMAO ignore this part

But, it also makes monster and alien design much easier! It's a lot easier to come up with non-human anatomy when I understand human anatomy, because I can manipulate the knowledge I have...

There is infinite more to study in the world of anatomy... The complexity of the human body goes extremely deep. For our purposes as artists, we need only depict a fraction of it, but more information rarely hurts the process.

I'm sure there's something in here that's wrong on a technical level, I'm mostly going off of memory. But that's kind of my point - I understand enough generally and conceptually that when I am missing something and need to find reference for it, I understand what I'm looking at. It's much easier than trying to learn AND draw at the same time.

I hope even one thing in here helped you! Sorry it's so long.

[amphibianaday]

Could you draw a frog or axolotl that is a vapire please?

day 1255

[arcanegifs]

"What are you doing here, Mother? You didn't sail halfway across the continent to sample the local cuisine."

[public-trans-it-deactivated20240]

i was a trans man until after a lot of build up of doubting myself, i finally realized that we are putting ourselves further into boxes by not accepting that we are the biological sex that we are and we can do WHATEVER we want at the same time.

clothes and makeup and certain interests do not equal gender.

and not liking being a woman is an unfortunately natural symptom of puberty and/or experiencing society’s deeply ingrained misogyny. and everyone deserves support for those problems.

but we can all fight together against gender social constructs in a healthy way without prescribing people hormones and invasive cosmetic surgery to make them more like the sex they “should” be according to… social constructs…. and help them be comfortable in who they are

Alright. Its been like 9 fucking months that I have been staring down this ask. What better time than to give TERFs some nuance than right in the middle of a fucking hate campaign going on where people (well... singular person probably) are calling me a TERF. This wont backfire.

This post arrived in my inbox shortly after I made another post about gender, and just how fucking weird it can be, and how I genuinely believed every single person on this planet has a fascinating relationship with gender, and so much nuance and personal identity in theirs. Even cis people. Even TERFs. In the tags, I even begrudgingly encouraged TERFs to talk about their gender on that post if they wanted. I genuinely think that TERFs do have really cool relationships with gender. As I mentioned in those tags, the quickest way to explode a group of TERFs is to get them to start talking about their own relationships with gender, and see how vastly different it is, and watching them stab each other in the back over it. So I told them to ramble away about how they view gender, as long as they stayed the fuck away from the rest of the blog WHICH THIS ANON CLEARLY FUCKING IGNORED.

But... this anon does bring up another topic I want to talk about.

Detransition.

Read More

I am a huge supporter of detransitioning. This is... surprisingly... not a very common stance in the trans community, and it breaks my fucking heart. Like, I get it. I understand why. A LOT of detransitioners, like the person in this ask, end up weaponizing their feelings of gender against other trans people.

My support of transition comes from the intersection of two very central beliefs of mine:

Everyone should explore their gender without feeling a need to commit! This is a pretty common belief in the trans community! Damn near universal in fact! We even have a fun little term we use for people who decide to play around with gender, only to end up a bit closer to where they started and being perfectly happy with that: Cis+. Someone who is cis, but at least put in the work to understand the trans experience, and actually CHOOSE to remain Cis instead of just defaulting to it with societal pressure. Many trans people are much more comfortable around 'Cis+' people, because they know these are people who have taken the time and put in the work of being an ally. Self examination isn't easy, especially not publicly, and doing so is genuinely one of the strongest ways a Cis person could ever show their support.

It is never too late to transition. This is also a pretty common belief in the trans community! It is... sadly not quite as universal though. But it is something very important that needs to be said. You could be 80 years old, sitting in a retirement home, and go "You know what? I think I'd rather wear a dress and be treated like a lady. I don't want to be buried as a man." And I think every single trans person should have that freedom!

I was discussing this with @thydungeongal the other day, far more paraphrased than this post, and she said something incredible that has been knocking around in my head ever since.

"Gender is an ongoing process"

Those five words they said to me sum up my feelings far more than this entire post could. Gender IS an ongoing process. My gender has changed SO MUCH over the past three decades. From the straightjacket of assigned gender that I was once forced into; to the very stylish and still lovable finely tailored suit of femininity that grew a little too stuffy to wear constantly, even though I do still enjoy it and try it on from time to time; to the wonderful and freeing losely fitting clothing of being aegogender, finally feeling free to be myself and just act naturally and feel natural without having to keep up an appearance!

And I think, there is no length of time you can try out being trans, and trying out new genders, before eventually coming to the realization you were cis all along. Even if you started HRT. Even if you got SRS. Heck, I don't even think you should have to call yourself trans to do either of those things in the first place, why would I be upset that someone did them and then realized they weren't trans? No single moment in your life should EVER lock your gender in place into some unchanging, set in stone thing.

So I support detransitioners completely, with my entire heart. They deserve just as much support as every other 'Cis+' person out there.

So anon, while many people may hate you and lash out at you for detransitioning, I want you to know, that I am not one of them. It sounds like your detransition might have been forced by peer pressure, which is heart breaking to hear. No one should ever force their own gender expectations on another. I hope that wasn't the case. I hope you came to the decision yourself, after realizing whats right for you. I will never give you hate for your detransition.

I WILL ABSOLUTELY GIVE YOU HATE FOR BEING A FUCKING TERF THOUGH. YOUR OWN EXPERIENCE WITH GENDER DOES NOT GIVE YOU THE RIGHT TO POLICE THE GENDER OF OTHERS, FUCK OFF. GET THE FUCK OFF MY BLOG, YOU PIECE OF SHIT!

[bookshelf-in-progress]

Honors From the King: A Short Story

The sword felt strange in Mia's hand. It fit perfectly in her grasp, but it still seemed impossible that it was hers. A few days ago it had made her into a hero, but in the confusion of the battle, she barely remembered making the lucky blow that felled the giant who had terrorized the Southern Forest for ten years.

Now she, an ordinary eleven-year-old from Iowa, was the hero of a fantastical realm, waiting to receive honors from the king himself.

Elbera bustled around Mia in the antechamber-turned-dressing room of the village hall. The elf woman—barely taller than Mia—had served almost as a mother to her since the strange wind had left her in the elfin village. "Now, my dear, as you're being honored for valor in battle, it's right for you to carry the sword, but you must never put the point toward the king. If you're nervous about it, you'd best sheathe it."

Mia sheathed the sword before Elbera finished the sentence.

Elbera continued, "Since you've slain a well-known terror, it's customary for the king to offer a boon. If he offers up to half his kingdom, don't take it—it's only a polite phrase. Best to ask for something useful—perhaps a sum of gold to rebuild the bridge outside the village."

From what Mia had heard of the king, he'd do that anyway. No, if Mia was to get a boon, she would ask for only one thing.

She wanted to go home.

For nine long months, she'd been stuck in Athelor. The cheerful, dainty elves had been kind to her—sheltering, feeding and teaching her without complaint—but they weren't her family. Her parents had to be frantic about her. And her six siblings—what had they done when that strange summer wind took her away from them? An entire school year would be gone by now. If she stayed away much longer, she'd be so far behind, and it would be harder and harder to fit back into ordinary life.

The elves had been unable to provide any suggestions about how to get back home; they only told Mia to wait for the wind. But the elves had sung praises of King Edonniel's library, spoke with awe of his scholarly works about Athelor's history. If anyone knew how to get her home, the king would.

The door to the chamber opened, and a palace guard escorted Mia into sunlit wooden expanse of the main hall.

At the room's far end, the king stood among his guard. Though over fifty, he was tall and fit, with a reddish-gold beard and a noble bearing, resplendent in royal armor. He was like the good king in every fairy tale Mia had ever read, like her father, and she forgot to be afraid of him. The king was a great man—warrior, poet, scholar, diplomat—but Mia knew in an instant that he was kind enough to help a lost girl.

The assembled crowd—all the elves and talking beasts from the village—cheered as Mia approached the king. Mia tried to ignore them, instead focusing on the king’s kind face.

The king stared at her. He stood frozen for several moments, then stepped toward her. “Mia?”

Mia stumbled to a stop. "Yes?" This seemed an informal greeting from a great king.

In a blink, Mia found herself in the king's arms, crushed in a warm embrace.

"I can't believe it." The king's deep voice sounded right next to her ear. "I thought I'd never see any of you again, not here."

Mia tried to push him away. King or not, this was too weird to put up with. "Any of who? What are you doing?"

The king pulled away and looked into her face, drinking her in. "I'm sorry. Of course you don't know me. Mia, I’m Danny. Your brother."

*

In the privacy of Elbera’s good parlor, Mia sat alone with the king. Her brother. Her ten-year-old brother. Who she never in a million years would have connected with the great scholar, warrior, and king the elves, in their musical accents, called Edonniel.

She couldn’t doubt that he was Danny. He remembered their parents, their farm, all their family, even the dinosaur village she and he had created two summers ago. With only a year and a day between their ages, they had often been mistaken for twins, but Mia had always reveled in her superior age. Until now.

Danny seemed so dignified; he made Elbera’s soft chair look like a throne. His eyes had wrinkles around them. His red-gold beard hung down to his chest. He sat so steady, so still, gazing at her like she was his long-lost child—instead of the sister whose hair he pulled when she beat him at Mario Kart.

As Mia sat across from him on Elbera's other chair, the only thing she could think to say was, “You’re older than me.”

The king guffawed. “I’m older than Dad. But you—you don’t look a day older than when I last saw you. How long have you been here?”

“Nine months.”

“It’s been forty-eight years for me.”

Mia’s head spun at the idea. “How?”

“The wind that carried us into a different world carried us into different times. I landed on the shores of the Beryl Sea forty-eight years ago. Ever since I became king, I’ve made a study of Athelorian history, trying to find the rest of us.”

“Us?” Mia had been with her siblings when the wind had taken her, but she’d assumed they were back home in Iowa. “How many of us are in Athelor?”

“All of us,” Danny said with surprise. “Didn’t you know?”

Mia shook her head. “I couldn’t see much.”

“And when you landed here alone, you had no reason to guess that we weren’t all safely at home,” he said, understanding.

“Is anyone else here?” Mia asked, half-hoping another brother or sister would pop out from behind the furniture.

“I crossed paths with Thomas not long after I arrived, but you’re the only one I’ve met in person since. Everyone else, I’ve had to track down in history and legend.”

“You met Thomas?”

“He landed among the trolls of the northern mountains,” Danny explained. “Became a master smith—the greatest in Athelorian history. He forged that sword you carry. I have no idea how it got into the elves’ hands; I’ll bet there’s a story there.”

Danny never could stick to the point of a story. “Where is he?” Mia asked in frustration.

“He was a very old man when I met him,” Danny said. “A hundred and twenty-seven, by some counts. Some say his life was extended by working with the stones from the heart of the world.”

Was? Her little brother had been only six years old when she’d last seen him. He couldn’t be—

Mia sank back into her chair, stricken.

Danny, caught up in his story, didn’t seem to notice. “Jane lived among the centaurs and elves of the Skyveil Plains seven-hundred years ago. Became a legendary warrior and explorer, defender of the weak. Beloved by all the beasts. First to step foot on the Daybreak Isles and meet the talking mice.”

Seven-hundred years?

“Now Ben,” Danny said with a laugh, “has popped up all through history. Rarely seen for more than a day or two, but he always has some dramatic effect. Some scholars speculate he’s extraordinarily long-lived, but my theory is that time is playing with him in a different way than the rest of us.”

He said it all so calmly!

“Nora?” Mia dared to ask about their oldest sister.

Danny’s gaze turned dreamy, his voice hushed and reverent. “The legendary Queen Eleanor, present at the waking of the world.”

Danny was talking about Nora—bossy Nora!—like he was in awe of her.

Her sister—all her siblings—had become legends. They weren’t waiting for her at home. They were long dead, had been dead ever since she’d arrived, which meant they were gone forever, and there was no way home—

Mia burst into tears.

Danny reacted about like how she’d have expected him to react. He sprang up from his seat and hovered awkwardly over her chair. “Mia? What’s wrong?”

Through tears, despair, and frustration, Mia blubbered something that included the words, “They’re all dead!”

“Dead?” Danny asked. “Who said they were dead?”

Mia wiped her tears on her sleeve and glared up at him. “You did! You said Thomas was ancient, and Jane lived seven-hundred years ago, and Nora’s as old as the entire world!”

“That doesn’t mean they’re dead.”

“I’m not stupid! No one can live that long, not even here!”

Danny crouched down next to her chair. He placed both hands on her shoulders and looked straight into her eyes. “Mia, look at me. I’m telling you: they’re not dead.”

Before his fatherly gaze—even with the beard, he looked a lot like Dad—Mia’s sobs became mere sniffles. “Then where are they?”

“They’re home. Safe. I promise. The same wind that brought us here brought them back home after their adventures were over.”

Just like the elves had said. But when Mia had thought she’d have to wait to go home, she’d thought it would be a few years at most, not—

“You said Thomas was more than a hundred years old.”

Danny said, “I’ve done a lot of reading about people like us. We’re not the only people who’ve come here from Earth—or gone home. The stories all say the same thing. No matter how long we spend here, the wind takes us back home to a time only minutes after we left, and we’ll be just the same age we were then. Reunited from across history, as young we ever were. A foretaste of heaven.”

His voice had gone dreamy again. The elves had said he was a poet.

Mia dried her face and sat up straight. “We’ll all be together? At our normal ages? Like we never left?”

“Exactly.”

“You and me and Thomas and Ben and Nora and—“ Mia realized something. “You never said where Claire was.”

“She’s the only one I haven’t found in history yet. That means her story’s probably still in the future. Maybe we’ll run into her someday.”

That did sound exciting, but Mia didn’t like the idea of waiting decades like Daniel had.

“How long do you think it will be? Before we go home?”

Danny stood and walked toward his chair. “I can’t say. Whenever the wind blow lately, I get the strangest feeling that I won’t be here long—maybe five years.”

Five years—half her life—not long?

“For you,” Danny continued as he sat down, “I can’t say. But I have a feeling that your adventures are just beginning.”

“I don’t want more adventures,” Mia said, as another tear dripped. “I want to go home.”

“I know,” Danny said, his voice husky with sympathy. “The first year is the hardest, and you’re so young.”

The idea of Danny—Danny!—treating her like a little kid! “I’m older than you!” Looking into his very-much-not-a-kid face, she amended, “Well, I should be.”

“You will be again, one day. But until then...“ Danny leaned forward, his hands on his knees, and suddenly sounded more like an American kid than he had all day. “This sounds so weird, but if you like, I can adopt you. You can live in the palace under my protection, and I can show you everything about Athelor. Maybe name you my heir if you like the whole royalty thing.”

He was planning a whole life for her. Plotting out a future. Here. Even without the weirdness of Danny acting like her dad, it was too much.

Danny noticed her hesitation. “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to. I know we’re all called here for different purposes, and I don’t want to keep you from your intended mission.”

“I thought the giant was my mission.” Mia had constructed such a tidy tale—and now it was unraveling. “I came here, I slayed the giant. The story should be over. I should get to go home.”

“It will always be waiting for you. Until then, you have Athelor.”

“Athelor isn’t home!”

“It can be,” Danny said. “It’s been a good home to me. It can be a better one, now that you’re here.”

Mia suddenly realized how old her little brother was. How long he’d been waiting, searching for his family through books. And now she was here, after all this time.

Maybe that was her mission. To help this great king while he was here caring for the people of Athelor.

“I guess I can try,” Mia said. Even if she had to stay a long time—well, Danny had managed to do some amazing things, and she couldn’t let her little brother outshine her. “When we do get back home, I don’t want you to have a better story than me.”

Danny grinned—and for just a second, he looked a little like the kid she remembered. “Mia,” he said, “I think you’re going to be fit for legend.”

[abirddogmoment]

We took our steadiness training out into the wild last night!

[swordheld]

i believe we all are unspectacular, though

this feeling - it's yours, through and through. your experience is yours and you have earned every emotion you hold on to. in writing this, i don't mean to try to explain away how you're feeling; i only want to attempt to show you the inverse, the hidden light that shadows beyond every darkness.

sometimes there are moments where it all becomes too much and we fall into it, that long dark, and it takes us from ourselves, from some part of us that lives close to whatever we hold to the light of things. the hard part of this was never finding that awe, that spectacular beauty, but keeping it close enough to guide us out of the dark. it slips so easy through our fingers.

when that becomes so big it swallows all else: what if you think of the softest thing? of similarity, and kindness, and how it seems to be rooted down to the marrow of us.

we have existed for so long, so little. we are like giants, on our pebble of a celestial grain of sand. our lives are short and memories far shorter. and yet look at all that we do with it: look at how far it goes - each shining piece.

how could it be just unspectacular? couldn't it always, always have the possibility for more? i implore you to read through ada limón's full piece that this is pulled from, titled dead stars:

Out here, there’s a bowing even the trees are doing.                  Winter’s icy hand at the back of all of us. Black bark, slick yellow leaves, a kind of stillness that feels so mute it’s almost in another year. I am a hearth of spiders these days: a nest of trying. We point out the stars that make Orion as we take out        the trash, the rolling containers a song of suburban         thunder. It’s almost romantic as we adjust the waxy blue        recycling bin until you say, Man, we should really learn some new constellations. And it’s true. We keep forgetting about Antlia, Centaurus,        Draco, Lacerta, Hydra, Lyra, Lynx. But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth        is full        of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising— to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward        what’s larger within us, toward how we were born. Look, we are not unspectacular things.        We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love         harder? What if we stood up with our synapses and flesh and said,         No.      No, to the rising tides. Stood for the many mute mouths of the sea, of the land? What would happen if we used our bodies to bargain for the safety of others, for earth,                  if we declared a clean night, if we stopped being         terrified, if we launched our demands into the sky, made ourselves so         big people could point to us with the arrows they make in their         minds, rolling their trash bins out, after all of this is over?

poetry is lovely for so many reasons, but a personal favourite is that it can mean different things to different readers. this one, to me, means there is more here. as in: you are not the first, you are not alone in this ache, this heavy weight of life. the ground has shook with dance since before our feet, the wind has carried stories beyond our voice. it says there has been more here.

and that, in turn, says everything without so many words, doesn't it?

we try, and try, and give everything we have. we have been doing it since before language, since before breath. it is a history that says i need you to know that i tried. that i made it out, into the light of things.

nothing lasts forever. there is no such thing as permanence. everything washes away. there is rot and things collapse, forests fall, seasons change, and time moves on. but the same time  –  there is no such thing as separation. we are not exempt. we all share this changing. 

yes, loving the world is difficult. finding pieces of living, of being alive, that make it worth living is one of the most difficult of searches, but it's one of the most rewarding, as well as the only things truly worth anything. you need to find things to keep going for. you need to recognize your own spectacular things specific to you, because who else is going to do it? 

there is something strong in teaching yourself to hone that perspective. to hold everything else in rays of scattered sunlight through canopies - momentary joys so profound: a violin melody, art that breaks you alive, poetry you want to hold behind your teeth, the smell of cinnamon bread in the oven, because at the end of it: wouldn’t you want hope? wouldn’t you choose hope?

and poems like this, they ask: if you could, even just once more, dare to dream, dream anything, dream it all, each and every piece of light that could await you - wouldn't you?

and wouldn't you? wouldn't you.

[thefandomchaos]

Everyday I’m disappointed when I remember we never got Dean carrying Sam. Either Bridal or piggy back but still- Imagine Sam being injured, unconscious or really out of it and Dean just says “fuck it” and picks Sam up and carry hims? Like I know this all comes down to if Jensen even could but I think he could have carried Jared Piggy Back Style- if this moment from VanCon2016 is anything to by…

[ultratradmalewife]

I’m taking a break from twitter again. I love this ship but bucktommy shippers when I said I fear we’ll become like bobs I didn’t mean stoop to their level. Some of y’all haven’t and that’s great, but we’re at a point where there’s more negativity than celebration of our ship, and that’s what I feared. I’ve had to unfollow two of the younger shippers, but just word of advice (you can even attack me if you don’t like it. I don’t care) you don’t have to respond to everything they say. Just let them yap their negativity.

[futuristichedge]

Thinking about which Sonic characters struggle in social situations and coming to the realization that it's the majority (if not all) of the cast.

[gotchibam]

I've made a bunch of pokemon mobile wallpapers and they're now available at my ko-fi shop! You can access them freely by joining my ko-fi membership ✨

Feel free to check them out here! :D

[thatsitso]

Just finished The Lord of the Rings (I cried)

[july-19th-club]

i love it when gay people are hicks . life mission of mine is to rep for the gay people who are not from cities and dont dress like it or talk like it and who don't plan to leave wherever small place they're from to be in a city, however easier it would be . i think even we think of our community as being city-based, and those of us out on the fringes get sort of forgotten unless we relocate, but we're out here! surrounded by corn tassels! looking for morels! a good 50% of us ecology people! dropping our consonants and wearing our barn boots and never seeing a gay bar ever come to our town but staying for the forest or the prairie or the desert anyway! yeehaw i love gay people

[lcpmon]

HOUSE. FUCKIN HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[thedreadvampy]

My housemate is moving out in January

She told us this a week or two ago, when she sat down and, after sitting with us watching TV for over an hour, said "hey so I bought a house and I'm moving out. We agreed on 2 months notice so I won't move until the end of January."

The last time she talked in the immediate terms about buying a house was in 2021, when the sale she was working on fell though and she was unemployed so it was a "when I'm back in a position to look I'll start looking again." Since then I've occasionally asked her how she's doing on the house buying front and she's been like "oh I'm getting there financially" but hasn't mentioned anything concrete.

She didn't tell us she was looking at places. She didn't tell us she had put in an offer. She told us when the offer was finalised. A week AFTER she emailed the letting agent about getting out of her part of the lease. And, it increasingly feels like, only because the letting agent's response was that we had to agree to change the lease.

The letting agent's response (which our housemate obviously didn't copy us into; we had to follow up separately and they copied us into the email chain) also includes that when we change the lease, they're empowered to change the rent, quote, "no cap". Rent was already going up in January - there's no possibility of Sam and I paying her share of the rent.

The really fucking upsetting thing is we're not strangers. This isn't a casual "housemate we found on flatshare" thing. She and Sam have lived together literally their entire adult lives. Me and her have known each other well over a decade. I lived in her and Sam's flat when I was homeless. We were the first people she came out to as trans. We're not super close but I thought we were fucking friends. And she's literally gone out of her way to not talk to us about this for what must have been months while the sale completed - which means she's lied to my face at least once cause I've asked her about her finances in that time (cause she's in a job she hates that she only took to get the house money, so it's like. when we've been commiserating about work stuff I'm often asking 'are you almost free?'). she literally went out of her way to talk to the letting agents before talking to us about putting us in a situation where we could lose our fucking home.

And she keeps. trying. to pretend nothing's happened. Every time I've seen her since then she's not mentioned anything or apologised or anything, she just keeps chatting away and offering hugs and fistbumps like nothing's happened. Like we're still fucking friends.

All it would take for us to still be friends and to be happy for her would have been one fucking sentence in the groupchat like "hey, just put an offer in on a house" or "I'm looking at properties, just so you know, that might happen in the next few months". Like nobody begrudges her for buying a house! It's very cool for her! She's 31 she's worked really hard to get the money I would love to be happy for her! Unfortunately she decided avoiding conflict is more important than giving the people she fucking LIVES WITH (who btw fronted her a month on the rent here while she was unemployed and agreed to take on a larger proportion of the move-in cost back in 2021, if we're still holding ourselves to shit we said 2.5 years ago), so no, you are not entitled to our friendship or to going back to normal.

like if she'd been honest with us it would have been something to process but we'd have had time to figure out our next steps. instead she's left us in a position where we have to find a new roommate before she gives her one month notice, which means finding someone by the end of December, which oh look that's the middle of the fucking Christmas holidays. and she didn't tell us anything until the START of December, or copy us into her conversation with the letting agent, meaning we still don't know what the rent on that space will be so we aren't yet in a position to advertise it. Has she offered to help find a roommate? Has she fuck. Has she offered to help out by moving her move-out date? Nah, she's moving as soon as she gets the keys because, quote, "that means her finances won't have to change". SOUNDS LOVELY. NOT HAVING YOUR FINANCES SUDDENLY CHANGE. I THINK THAT SOUNDS LIKE A REALLY REASONABLE FUCKING GOAL.

Thirteen fucking years she's lived with Sam. Four fucking weeks over Christmas she's left us to figure out a way to not turbofuck our living situation. And she's got the fucking nerve to try and pretend we should be interacting like nothing's changed. Jesus Christ. What a fucking unhinged way to treat...anybody, honestly. never mind the friends-your-entire-adult-life part. literally cannot imagine a scenario in which I would buy a house without telling the people I lived with.

(haha actually this is what my parents divorced over so apparently it's not unusual. although at least my dad had the decency to tell the woman he shared finances with at the point he put in an offer not the point the fucking sale went through.)

Like we'll be fine. It's a huge city centre flat with decent rent and queer housemates, hopefully even when the rent goes up it'll be an easy sell in a city with a huge housing shortage and big queer community. We've got a couple of people interested already, sight unseen - worst case scenario we have to live with someone we don't get on with. And it's given Sam and me a push to look at our own finances and as of today, we've got a mortgage decision in principle and can start looking at flats in the area - mind, we'll be transparent upfront and tell any prospective housemates that yeah, we're looking to buy and move out in the next 6-12 months, and we'll tell them if we put an offer in, because we're decent fucking people who aren't going to spring that on someone out of the blue.

But it's been I think 2 weeks and I'm so fucking angry I could spit. It's such a fucking betrayal. And frankly you know selfishly like. I just had a breakup a couple of months ago, I'm in the middle of moving jobs, both me and Sam have a history of housing instability and this has been the first decent, stable, safe, not-mouldy not-freezing home I think any of us have had, and this is so fucking triggering and upscuttling I could just start biting. like I was talking to my friend about it last week and it's just like. Can I have One Fucking Thing of the three main tentpoles of survival - home, work, relationships - that are fucking stable right now? because shit has been In Flux lately. and at least the work and relationship stuff has changed because of my decisions. going through all that work to make myself short-term unstable to gain long-term stability has been really hard and draining and then just as I was reaching the crisis point with work stuff BOOM, IT'S HOUSING INSTABILITY WITH A STEEL CHAIR. fuck. seriously fuck this and fuck her. we're going to make something good come of it but what a deeply, unbelievably shitty thing to do.