#one of those things I guess

[miscreantahead]

really only here because i've finally come to terms with the drop but no one talks about the irrational pain of fandom hopping that causes you to go from this

to this

...like i said im posting this bc im good now but this was actually a rough transition even though I know, logically, it's just how it is. Not only is this a much smaller fandom but I also have a much newer/less solid grasp on these characters and what I'm doing with them than I did before. My confidence in what I'm doing with them and my grasp on who they are is significantly lower than it was for the characters in the top fic. I just feel like we're constantly trying to go bigger, do better than before, no matter how much you get you'll always want more. But now I've reached a point where there's something nice about actually getting excited about getting a single kudos. I spent a long time thinking 'i need to get out of here and get a bigger fandom so i can stop with these tiny numbers that make me irrationally upset' but now I'm content with the way things are now and just wanna write what I feel the urge to write. As much as I do push myself through writing by saying it's just for me the response have a strong impact and I wish they didn't (insert something something about stop tying your self-worth to social media) but I'm enjoying the change of pace at this point.

[inbetweencreature]

can’t believe I’ve been in love with you for going on 4 years now. I can’t believe the past four years how tumultuous it’s been. I remember before I met you I once said I was perpetually heartbroken. honestly, it still rings true.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I hope you take this as the compliment it is intended to be, but you strike the same chord of irreverence-as-love, jokes-to-showcase-sencerity that I get from Chuck Tingle, and I adore both of you.

You have bestowed the greatest honour upon me.

[egophiliac]

like mother, like son, but less wholesome this time?

(I couldn't decide whether or not to put them together, so have them in all the different ways!)

[meamiiikiii]

silly comic based on a time i struggled to read live on stream :thumbsup:

context clip compilation below ASDASDFASA

(cw for brief mention of hospitals/strokes)

[jonnywaistcoat]

When writing, did you ever suffer from a fear or underdelivering or misrepresenting a topic? If you did, how did you overcome it? I enjoy writing but rarely bring it to the public out of fear that I am either not doing good enough or badly portraying the themes or aspects of what I write.

Absolutely, and on the one hand it's a very healthy fear - it prompts you to do your research and be thoughtful in how you write. On the other hand you've just got to accept that occasionally it will happen. Inculturation is a hell of a thing, and leaves us all with a thousand kneejerk preconceptions and perceptions of the world, some benign and some downright awful. And sometimes they crop up no matter how thoughtful you try to be. And you gotta understand that when it happens and people call you on it, you just have to take your lumps and learn what you can from it.

It doesn't help, of course, that the words you write are only ever half of what your audience reads: five people reading the same book are reading five different books, each filtering the text through a lifetime of psychology and experience. And they will find themes and problems in there you never even considered, and they will also find resonances and beauty in your work that you could never have foreseen.

At the end of the day, writing stuff thats meaningful to you (hell, writing anything at all) is a messy, bruising business, and anybody who tells you there are simple solutions or clear rules to follow is either lying to you or to themselves.

But you can't let it paralyse you. Its like if you're playing football and you're worried about falling over. It's a reasonable fear and you should do your best to avoid it, but occasionally it's gonna happen, and unless you want to spend the whole game just standing still in a field, you've kinda just got to get on with it. Just try not to be one of those writers who's always taking dives and... screaming for the ref to get a free kick? Hm. That analogy may have gotten away from me. I don't actually know much about football.

Point is, I'm aware that this isn't the most reassuring writing advice I've ever given, but yeah, its a messy, scary business. Just do your best. Be thoughtful. Be kind. And always do your research.

[katabay]

WOW this has been ROUGH in the Life Events category of things, but. slowly crawling out of that. hopefully

this was the opening scene for a something I started writing after watching the Manben inverview with Nishi Keiko and thinking back to all the classic shoujo manga I stayed up reading back in the day, like damn that's so true Urasawa Naoki

it's partially a love letter to all the greats of the genre that I read, and also to the late night teleseryses that captivated me over the years lmao. it'd be nice to find the time to tackle it properly as a comic, but I'm having fun working on it recreationally :)

✨but since it's recreational, some character info✨

the first character seen is lawrence 'law' valenciano (late 30s), the one with the glasses is cris volante (mid-later 20s). law works at a karinderya, cris is an extremely broke university student.

⭐ places I’m at! bsky / pixiv / pillowfort /cohost / cara.app / insta / tip jar!

[saragrosie]

As promised, incredibly stupid s4-5 drawings

[greenfiend]

All I ever wanted, all I ever needed… is here in my arms.

[aroaceleovaldez]

I was reading a post about CoTG and I realized: Rick has seemingly started to write every character pairing with the exact same dynamic, and he's not good at writing that dynamic and it doesn't make sense for 90% of the characters he writes it for.

It's that very specific dynamic of one half of the pair who is almost aggressive to the other party - "teasing" them constantly/insulting them, affectionately punching/judo flipping/maiming/etc, seemingly almost always exasperated with the other - and said other party usually just accepts this treatment or blanketly views it fondly, and may generally be framed as more incompetent than their partner and a little bit of a doormat (particularly relating to being insulted/teased/etc by their partner).

We start seeing this dynamic in HoO with Percy and Annabeth, as a sort of semi-inconsistent twist on their rivals-to-friends-to-lovers dynamic from the first series. Then the dynamic pattern develops further with Leo and Calypso. Then Magnus and Alex. Then Nico and Will, particularly in TSATS. And now in CoTG, it's Percy and Annabeth again but even more in this direction.

I know people have talked about Nico and Will's relationship over the series rapidly being shoehorned into Percabeth Two™, and it's extremely apparent in TSATS that Rick's doing it on purpose (including directly quoting Percabeth scenes but minorly tweaking them to be Solangelo). But recognizing it as an overarching trend in Rick's later books honestly reminds me a lot of how Rick started trying to apply the "Percy Formula" so-to-speak to nearly every protagonist in HoO (and then try to replicate similar character archetypes with Magnus and Apollo's narrations - moreso Magnus in being jaded and sarcastic, very much trying to be first series Percy. He only sounds unique because Rick failed at making him Percy 2. Apollo is more akin to later-series Percy characterization of being goofy and incompetent. Apollo [and Zeus] even got retconned to give Apollo a more similar backstory to Percy's). Rick seems to have decided that he thinks the audience wants this specific dynamic but 10 times over, except he's not good at writing it the first time because it's a bastardization of the time he did a different thing okay.

And Rick also seems aware of that too! Because he retconned Calypso and Leo at the end of TOA, probably because he realized how absolutely awful it was reading when they were written with that dynamic of Calypso just functionally hating Leo and constantly being aggressive towards him! The only time Rick's actually made the dynamic even semi-successful was with Magnus and Alex, because it actually fits within their characters, their dynamics with each other, and their environment. Alex beheading Magnus on the regular works out fine because there are no repercussions to that in Valhalla, Magnus will be fine, so it does genuinely come off as humorous. And Alex has been effectively established to be abrasive at times but have her genuine feelings shine through regularly, and that meshes well with Magnus' jaded-and-aloof-but-quietly-very-empathetic character. And Magnus has been established to, yes, not be great at combat, particularly compared to Alex. They are the only time that flavor of dynamic in that form was effective and cohesive.

Percabeth is no longer rivals-to-friends-to-lovers badasses on equal levels with shaky pasts who finally found some form of permanence with one another. Now it's super smart doting and affectionately aggressive girlfriend and her silly goofy 50%-of-the-time incompetent boyfriend who she judo flips/pushes off cliffs/etc - but affectionately~! Solangelo is trying to riff off of the early series "Poseidon & Athena are enemies" dynamic that Percabeth had but with Apollo & Hades being "opposites" but learning to accept each other, except it ends up with Will just coming off as a huge asshole and Nico being retconned to a complete doormat about it - when prior to that those characterizations would be completely contrary to their established characters (even just from TOA!). Calypso in HoO gets retconned from her PJO characterization to being snooty and aggressive, and Leo's false persona gets merged into his just normal personality except he just also becomes a doormat but more goofy than Nico with occasional haha-dark/depression-humor! Which Nico also got. Which was also a bastardized Percy trait that got redistributed.

It's exhausting. Rick write more than one relationship dynamic you can do it I promise

[thresholdbb]

what's the threshold theory

There was a post about how Tom is the only crew member who isn't really affected by the Borg, and there's a theory that he has so much luck because he saw the past and the future when he crossed the transwarp threshold. He saw the past and the future, all of time and space. There's some subconscious part of him that remembers that experience. In fact, Tom refused to play a part in Chakotay indulging Annorax's temporal incursions, probably because a part of him knew nothing good could come of it.

If we extend that same theory to Janeway, some of her wild luck with time travel and other crack plans starts to make sense. She doesn't verbally hate time travel until after the events of Threshold, since it happens in Time and Again without complaint. Janeway has an uncanny knack for time travel, as evidenced every time she deals with it. She hates time travel, but it might be because part of her knows exactly how to manipulate the timeline. She manages to avoid the "inevitable" temporal explosion in Future's End, saving both Voyager and Braxton. She resets the entire timeline in Year of Hell, and no one else followed her reasoning. She pulled it off flawlessly. In Relativity, she senses the incidents are all related, despite it being just one reading that connects them. By the time she's involved, she has a temporal incursion factor of .0036 and a time travel protocol named after her, even if that may just be Braxton's personal grudge. Then there's Endgame, where she intentionally changes the timeline. Up until this point, she has been dragged into time travel, but for the first time, she jumps in on purpose. How does Admiral Janeway know how to get them home sooner in a way that completely avoids the Temporal Integrity Commission? It's because she has seen all of time, and part of her knows exactly what needs to happen so she can get Voyager home and do it in a way that becomes baked into the prime timeline. Maybe she doesn't consciously remember what happened during her transformation, but the experience lives in her mind somewhere, guiding her decisions.

[feather-bone]

This is the devil’s hole pupfish! A tiny species that lives only in One water-filled limestone cavern in Nevada. It was one of the first animals on the endangered species list. At the last count in 2022 there were 263 pupfish observed - the most in 19 years! They’re tracked pretty carefully, as their 215 square foot habitat (the smallest of any know vertebrate) is fragile and has been disturbed in the past by groundwater extraction and other human interference.

[ID: an illustration of a shiny metallic blue fish, the male devil’s hole pupfish, facing to the right. It is on a lighter blue background with a ripple pattern. End.] l

[radioroxx]

more stupid little pixel doodles from last night. most of which fall under the “i wanted to draw loop small and fucked up” category. enjoy if you dare

[theabigailthorn]

spent ages preparing to audition for a role I really really wanted and it's looking like (still unconfirmed) they might not even be holding auditions at all but have just given it to someone directly

which, meh, that sucks but that's the industry!

I'm just like now what? I spent a lot of my free time the last few months prepping and I genuinely don't know what to do with myself now!

[egophiliac]

Serious question.

Do you think we’ll see the parents/family of each of the guys???

Like, We’ve been TEASED with Ace’s brother, that I’m starting to think it’s just a reference to that Alice in Wonderland park character in Japan and nothing else….

Jack’s family, Ruggie’s grandma, Falena, Maleficia, Ms.Rosehearts, Just now Vil’s dad is in the picture which I am really happy but now I’m wondering about his mom, and so Deuce’s mom.

I mean, some HAVE a silhouette!! It could mean they do have a design in the making/ready to show. They could’ve shown us Falena in the Tamashina (hope I said that correctly) event, but didn’t (prolly to make Leona not so σ(▼□▼メ) and it’s understandable)

Anyhow, any idea/headcannon about this? Who do you want to see first?

I'm wondering if everyone might eventually get a travel event? like they've now introduced with Vil's that it doesn't have to be specifically hometowns, so that opens things up a lot! (especially if they have to figure out how to do three separate Coral Sea visits) (how would that even work otherwise)

but yeah, I hope everyone gets a chance! there's a lot of backstory characters I would LOVE to meet. :D :D :D though I do think some of them don't really suit the more light-hearted tone of the events (pretty sure you're right about that being why Falena wasn't in Tamashina-Mina, that would've just been. too much for Leona.) so like...we're probably not ever going to meet the Rosehearts. or Maleficia (although I maintain that this would be THE funniest possible way to introduce her outside of the main story, and actually I would love this a lot, can we please Twst) (I need to see her to put Malleus in a froofy little outfit and tell him what a handsome boy he is). but they've sprung surprises like Kifaji on us, and honestly anyone who shows up and tells embarrassing stories about characters' childhoods is good in my book!

characters off the top of my head who I most want to meet: literally any of the Zigvolts, Azul's mom, Ace's brother, Che'nya's grandfather (<- I think he would be a good one for Riddle) (please just any non-terrible adult in his life), any member of Rook's family because I need to see how they managed to produce him, and...really just whoever they can come up with for Silver.

[acekindaneat]

I don't want this to end.

A cute little date scene that I really liked from the fic The Big Woo by @tinkertoysdamn !!!!!