#or adjacent

[spockandawe]

Lord of the rings! Again! I'm fond enough of this story, but what this project definitely taught me in contrast to things like svsss is that I have I have basically no patience for repeating myself unless the thing I'm repeating was a passion project from the start, haha. But after I finished my first take last year as a gift for my cousin's wedding, like a fool, I told my brother he could pick what handmade gift he wanted for his wedding and he said... lord of the rings.

I wasn't going to give my brother a less extravagant version than I gave my cousin, so I went all in! And I really think i nailed it with the edge art. Watercolors are classic, but I was the type of sketchbook kid who stuck to pencils and pens. It was originally going to have watercolors also, until the lines turned out this detailed and I started worrying about making things muddy. And honestly, doing lines like this where you don't miss the watercolors worked out REALLY well, and I'm going to keep that strategy in mind going forward. I want to get good at watercolors, but I also know it's valuable to play to your own strengths!

I'm really pleased with how the elements of this came together! The last book was black and blue, so flipping the palette to reds was a lot of fun, and I really enjoy these endpapers. Leather endbands against a leather spine remain one of my fave effects. And as painstaking as drawing the siege of gondor was, and as hard as it was to scrape together references for a spread that 1) showed the cool stuff and 2) had the aspect ratio to cover an 18"x4" surface area, it was really rewarding to see it all come together. I'm really delighted with how this turned out! Two last indulgent pictures to show off the art without those covers getting in the way:

[lesbianraskolnikov]

I sincerely can't tell if the house md ds game is genuine or a scrimmy bingus situation

[danceydancejk]

[krawdad]

Protip: learn how to remove spirit gum before gluing something to yourself or someone.

[tenderwatches]

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

[shadesofmauve]

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

[astriiformes]

One hill I will die on is that it's always infinitely funnier for mad scientist characters to have an actual area of expertise, and the narrower it is, the funnier it gets. Like, they're mad scientists. They can branch out from it. But it's a very special thing to be able to point to the person who built a death ray/engineered life in their basement/etc and be able to confidently state what they got their PhD in.

"Doc Brown is a mad scientist" Well yeah, obviously.

"Doc Brown is a mad physicist" Now we're getting somewhere!

"Doc Brown is a mad nuclear physicist" Specifically conjures up images of a guy who spent his PhD doing a million repetitive cyclotron tests and eventually said fuck this, I'm building a time machine instead. Comedy gold.

[bettalbimarginata]

Shouldn’t go walking around on stony creekbeds, either, as a general rule. Walking on regular ground is fine- that’s usually way less delicate, since it’s not made entirely of nooks and crannies and moveable objects. Plus, feet walking around on the ground is a normal thing that the ecosystem is adapted for. Rocks being picked up and entirely removed from the water to make pretty stacks is not.

I’ve seen a few ~aesthetic~ photos of rock stacks in rivers recently and this is just a reminder that you are destroying habitat when you move rocks around in rivers and streams.

In addition to dragonfly nymphs, rocky river beds are home to lots of other larval invertebrates like damselflies, mayflies, water beetles, caddisflies, stoneflies, and a bunch of dipterans. Not to mention lots of fish and amphibians!

Plus large scale rock stacking can change the flow of a stream and lead to increased erosion.

Anyway dragonfly for admiration:

Calico pennant by nbdragonflyguy

[wickedsmille]

Jason: You've heard of elf on a shelf, now I give you-

Jason with a dramatic arm flourish to Tim in the batchair: Tim Drake still awake!

[hinamie]

oversaturate

[savaralyn2]

[kelpeigh]

Something Doctor Who misses out on is how none of the companions are extremely interested with any one thing. All the companions are all “idk, I have a few ideas of stuff that’d be cool to see, but I’m up for whatever! All of space and time, woohoo! :)”

And that’s great for them and I know it makes for a better show overall but I think it would be more realistic for someone to say “I want to see every historically significant moment for my special interest, and then I want to double back for mundane bits too.”

I, for example, would be an insufferable companion.

I’d be like, “okay now take me to the place and time where they first used stirrups for the whole ride instead of just using them as a foothold to mount the horse. Then I want to watch Ray Hunt put a first ride on a colt. After that we’ll take a nap, and then let’s sneak onto set of the Return of the King to be extras in the Ride of the Rohirrim”

The Doctor would be all “please. This is the twentieth horse-centric stop in a row. We have all of space available to us. Can we leave Earth this time I’m begging you”

And my annoying ass would go “not unless there’s horses in space” roll credits

[undead-in-space]

Starting to think some of y'all don't even want to go on a doomed polar expedition with me

[bacchuschucklefuck]

no more fan-ta-sizing about it! everything's already changed~

[quacaserous]

an old doodle of the lady herself... morena dekarios the woman that you are