#salem talks

[autisticarachnid]

yes, sometimes it sucks to be a kind person and to feel so deeply in a world that seems so cruel. in a world filled with cruelty and hatred and negativity. but do not let anyone fool you into thinking being kind and feeling deeply is a curse- it’s not. because yes, it means i feel sadness deeper, but i also love more profoundly.

i hold so much love and happiness and joy and optimism in my heart that it feels as though i’ll explode. and while the world may be cruel, i promise you, there are good people. there are average people, there are people who are completely different from you but share your interest(s). there are people who will open doors without a word, or offer you a sandwich and a bag of clothes when you’re down on your luck, or will see your semicolon tattoo and say “i’m glad you’re still here”.

there is kindness in this world. there are good people in this world. you just have to look. find local community markets, go to any conventions you can find (not just cosplay cons!!! i love repticon myself!), and talk to people. seek out videos of humans being human. i promise you- kind people exist and are out there. do not let the negativity and cruelty of the internet poison you into thinking everyone in the world is cruel, or that you have no one, that no one is like you. the world is filled with kind, helpful, good people.

“if you look for the light you can often find it; but if you look for the dark, that is all you will ever see.” - uncle iroh, atla

[allabouttaleblr]

creating a crackship rare pair with your friends is great because then you already have a little club for your ship to brainrot over it and make content

[sweetpumpkinmouse]

Man, the Ortensia erasure in fanworks is sometimes baffling to me. She’s either dead, non-existent, or barely present in the story.

But I can kind of see why.

She’s not really fleshed out in cannon, so people won’t really implement her in stories that much because…well, how are they suppose to write her?

And I think we can all agree that it’s Disney’s fault for why that is.

I feel like if we got an Epic Mickey 3 or if the Oswald show wasn’t cancelled (or Disney actually USING THE CHARACTERS) then I genuinely do believe she would’ve been more fleshed out and even gotten some character development.

And it sucks to say it because I do love Ortensia and I do believe, despite very little we have of her, she does have a lot to offer as a character.

[crwndsprkzy]

lmao tumblr dot com i ran away from home today (im fored to go back in a few days)

family am i right?

[salembookworm]

I'm still debating, but I think Emily fell first, but Sue fell harder. I mean just look at the way Sue LOOKS at Emily. Girly, please!

[salem-starlight]

Tw vent below

Dada's angry again and yelling an I don't like it...

It makes me so upset an anxious an he's been like dis for the last week. An I was jus trying to talk to him about phones an he started yelling and arguing...

Is been a bad day.

[salemsimss]

Random tag game!!!!!!

1. Take this quiz

2. Do this picrew

Thank you for the tag! @hazelsnakes

I tag: @diactrl @red-simulation @helltrait @rebelangelsims @raiiny-bay @koibish @mangosimoothie and YOU

[cloneloverrrrr]

I just wanna visit here so bad!😭

[spoopy-kayla]

The Ropes Mansion (Allison’s House) - Built from 1727–1729. Y’all the stories this house holds 😳 It gave me the creeps. Salem is truly one of my favorite cities because you can deeply feel the history but goodness this place was something else.

[pkmn-salem]

Living in a tropical country w a lot of tropius is nice and all but the fruit they shed everywhere stinks after awhile :')

ALSO A SKARMORY SAT ON MY CAR WHEN I GOT DOWN FOR A HAIR CUT. DO YOU KNOW HOT THESE FUCKERS GET. HOT METAL IN 38 DEGREE HEAT

[salemoleander]

Creator Commentary / Explaining Elements

I don't normally do this, but there's SO MUCH going on in this one that I actually wanted to do a commentary on it and why I picked what I did! I put a LOT of thought into elements and how they contribute to the overall effect of a piece, so I thought it might be fun to lay some of that out.

That all got (predictably) incredibly long, so it is under its own cut! I've labeled each bullet by what I intuitively called that element, rather than the actual title/author/etc, to make it easier to follow which bit I'm talking about. (For example, rather than "Président de la nuit", I've labeled it "Chair painting".)

Also, you seem unstable… speech bubble

Chosen because it evokes superhero comics (which is the AU we’re in) and gives a humorous/light-ish start to the piece.

Could genuinely be said from either of them.

Overlaid on the wound-tending image to form a kind of tableau

Bandaging hand art

The hands being Grian/Scar’s isn’t sensical per the fic (they only had the 2 hands during the backstory) but the theme of helping/dependence due to injury really benefits from it.

This art also works bc it ties in the seafoam green & skin tone/reddish hues that appear in the chair & other hands. (The right side of the piece is blue/black, bc it’s about Scar’s “betrayal” of evicting Grian from his body)

in his eyelids poem excerpt

Contains the idea of existing inside another person, as well as the fear - one last nakedness, one last level of being exposed to the possible judgment or harm from someone else. 

The words ‘sleep until dawn’ create an image of soft/warm affection, and the mention of nakedness also leads well into the nude man with blank eyes below it, what happens when Grian is kicked out of that body.

Broken glass

Needed a low-contrast bg image that would blend well into the art below, and to enhance the idea of superheros/danger/risk/fighting without just chucking another wounded hand into the mix. 

When you/ bend and kiss the rotting wings poem excerpt

The rest of the poem is much longer, and even this stanza is longer, but it had several bits I found either redundant or less-applicable for this use. 

The final line in full is “Even now I still need something better to say/ than this hush love creates between two people” but ending it at “better to say” hits harder. The hush love creates is being created by the other pieces & its placement over a cozy house scene, no need to belabor the point.

He tugs gently on my towel… poem excerpt

I HAVE BEEN TRYING TO USE THIS FOR FOREVER Fjords is a phenomenal collection but the poems create such a specific feeling that they’re very hard to use well. 

The full poem POV is referred to with she/her, which isn’t a dealbreaker but I found I could cut around those lines & still get the core image I wanted to steal for this.

Again emphasizing this gentle/warm/caring nature that still results in unclothing (a last nakedness!) the POV character, in reminding them they are not human, and an assumption that that is a flaw.

Blood decanter

This was one of the last additions - I like to break up horizontal/vertical edges when I can, and that middle edge was VERY unbroken. 

There are a bunch of other vein-style carafes by the artist, but this one had an alien/baby-animal-taking-its-first-steps spindliness that I liked.

The recurrent blood motif is partly my own personal bias towards it but also bc it turns out it is VERY HARD to visually convey ‘guy who is living inside another guy’, especially if you, the artist, have a phobia of parasites. So, blood/veins/connections through tendrils it is. Vaguely mold-like but not bc I am a big baby.

Red wings

Again, wanted to break up that vertical line, and also this Grian does have wings, and also also I figured I could maybe do a sort of tableau thing w/ the guy sitting. Not trying to do true collage there, but the implication of his having wings is good enough for me!

Would you murder me texts

Needed something small/with simple or no text to go over the cozy chair. At one point Grian mentions basically ghosting Scar for almost a year?? And it seemed like an appropriately funny-but-not-really thing to include.

Chair painting

I needed the coziest, most Scar-tastic living room (with a balcony/night view bc superhero au obvs) and Ms. Carole Rabe fucking delivered. All of her paintings are so richly done!! Go look at them!

Scar colors, and also blends between the seafoam/pale green & orange -> sunset tones that play so well with the red and dark blue.

Also. There’s only one chair, and it’s empty. 

Give until I’m… poll

I originally used all 4 of the results from this, bc imo they fit REALLY well to Scar Grian Xisuma and then one aimed at recovery. In the fic it’s clear they’re all kind of.. different flavors of too-altruistic, different flavors of lighting themselves on fire to keep someone else warm.

However that ended up dominating the feeling of it/ adding too much gray, so I dialed it back to ones that convey the fears/themes of the work. 

Scar refuses to become hollow, refuses to be a home for someone else; Grian trusts and trusts and that breaks him, gives up his own body until it is a shell for Scar to carry out; Xisuma has seen everyone he loves die and keeps going, doggedly continuing a heroic fight that nearly ended with him dead on a warehouse floor.

Sitting on floor guy painting

GO LOOK AT DENIS SARAZHIN’S ART. NOW.

Okay - the blue with touches of red at the toes was the right color for what I needed. He’s in the dark, almost veiled by the quotes around him.

Mostly I picked this for his expression. Go look at a full-res version of this - his eyes are intelligent but veiled, mouth slightly hardened and fist clenched. 

I also think the title has some very good synergy with the themes.

love me enough to drown me out

I don’t do easter eggs, but this is about as subtle as I’ll let things get. Depending on screen brightness a lot of people won’t even see this element to the right of the sitting man, which is intentional.

With this I was both thinking of Grian’s need for Scar (love me enough to ignore your misgivings, to let me be part of you, to escape the pain of being alone in my own head, drown me out) and Scar’s implied request in return (love me enough to drown out the distrust, to let me see you, to eclipse your fear of not being enough).

It’s hard to see bc this is the point in the story where they are the least communicative - Grian made into an insensate thing, Scar never even telling him what he was planning. 

Think of visible red/blood in this collage as representing ‘wear your heart on your sleeve’; the text is obliterated because the idea it contains is obscured.

I return to the site of injury

Trying to let some pieces be more/less easily legible, letting smaller/more private thoughts exist with less contrast.

They are each others’ sites of injury; Scar literally could not have lived without him, and Grian cannot forgive the wound of separation.

to have & to hold

This might as well be the thesis statement. To have - to possess, to contain, to consume, to be - is incompatible with to hold - to comfort, to exist beside. Wanting doesn’t make them synonyms.

happiness is…

Gonna be real, I just saw that title on an old blood donation ad and was like ‘LOL yeah that works’.

Like yeah happiness is helping other people despite the risk to yourself, reaching out will always be nobler than stagnation, etc etc.

Birds and smoke

I love the bright red of the birds against the smoke, and the sky/smoke mimics the blue of the top right side excellently.

Needed something to subtly set the scene (there’s a fire in the warehouse, it’s nighttime, etc) without being too muddy bc there’s so much stuff in the foreground.

Veins and Bones Arm Embroidery

MAYBE MY FAVORITE ELEMENT

The artist (if I’m understanding correctly): Photographed her own arm. Printed it on fabric. Drew on her bones. And then embroidered her veins!!! Sick as hell!!

I wanted something that used veins, that showed the entry/takeover of Grian into X’s body while also avoiding gore. I had a cool old blood-drawing illustration that I decided to abstain from bc I thought it might be a bit much (and also it wasn’t colorful and I didn’t wanna have to do Yet Another Filter)

The tracing of bone underneath - the implication of something permanent and solid that veins are woven around/ latticed on - felt like a good choice to convey what Grian does in the fic.

with all the holes in you already…

Abjection, baby!

No seriously, go read some Kristeva and then come back. 

Jenny Holzer the text artist of all time tbh. 

Needed something to convey injury/damage/mutualistic parasitism/’you’re afraid but you don’t have to be’ and unfortunately just pasting in a scene from the Xenogenesis trilogy would take too much room.

Also the pale mirrored silver/red fit great with the arm embroidery and bloody hands.

Car headlights

Wanted to convey city/bright/hard to see, and the moment they stepped out the door with Grian piloting X, the need to stand up to news & paparazzi, just a bunch of things related to ‘bright light in my eyes ouch’

I did not hunt down the moment

I am SO SAD scatterghosts deactivated. Wonderful TMG edits.

So this already had the perfect colors and was itself a city scene, it felt very logical to overlay it on the car headlights.

I was mostly thinking about how after a year of avoiding him, this reunion comes upon Grian without warning. 

Also thinking about dreams/waking, potentially suppressing X’s consciousness, and a blurry-eyed attempt to determine What Is Happening.

Bloody hands

\o/ HANDS WITH BLOOD (Do you have any idea how hard it is to get good art with blood/gore that isn’t 1. Guro (very.) 2. Irl photos of dubious provenance 3. Medical photos again of dubious provenance??)

There’s a whole set of hands with blood in that series, actually! I chose these bc I wanted 2 hands (Grian and X), and I wanted X’s to be lax, with Grian’s active.

I thought the way the thumb is digging into the lower arm seemed evocative of the connection/penetration of letting your cells start to breathe for somebody else.

The blood is blood but the way it coats one hand while marring the other also brings up contamination/spreading, like we can see Grian’s cells flowing down?

Do you have a question…? poem excerpt

Again, slightly harder to read than I might normally do!

A question that can’t be answered is about keeping secrets, as well as Grian’s refusal to ask Scar why, to confront him, to have that conversation.

Mercy being difficult to understand is the other side of that coin - if Scar wasn’t being cruel, why did becoming hurt? Why is he willing to risk his life for X, despite knowing the incredible danger? He wants to be a pigeon again.

A piece of burned meat poem excerpt

This is Xisuma’s POV to me, post-fic. Not much of it, but I wanted to explore both the idea of ‘my body is HURT and I am not in control’ and also ‘I am so tired. I have been so tired. At least this isn’t up to me anymore.’

catching signals that sound in the dark webweave

Created as a gift for @droidofmay for her incredible fic!

// Sources under readmore //

What is a webweave? Previous art: Third Life | Void Falling | Attempt 33 | Limited Life | Nightingale | solving counting sheep | Hunger au

Also, you seem unstable… speech bubble / via imperiuswrecked ◆ Naka-Choko [the inherent homoeroticism of wound tending] / @dontbelasagnax ◆ Excerpts from Your Lover (The Galloping Hour: French Poems) / Alejandra Pizarnik via @feral-ballad ◆ Constellation No. 26 / Zhao Zhao via @psikonauti ◆ Excerpt from Hush / C. Dale Young via @grocerystoredean ◆ Excerpt from Refrigerator General (Fjords I) / Zachary Schomburg ◆ Carafe Nº6 / Etienne Meneau ◆ Red wings / Natalia Karna ◆ Would you murder me… texts / sparklebussy (deactivated) ◆ Président de la nuit / Carole Rabe via @huariqueje ◆ Give until I’m… poll / @orewing ◆ Out of touch / Denis Sarazhin ◆ fill me up, fill me full up / @taohun ◆ Excerpt from Heed the Hollow / Malcolm Tariq via @geryone ◆ Excerpt from No I Don’t Want to Connect with You on LinkedIn / Emily Skaja via @serratedpens ◆ Happiness is- / National Institutes of Health ◆ Fire reflected on birds in smoke / Coen Robben via @theanimalblog ◆ Constructual 5 / Juana Gomez ◆ With all the holes… (Survival series) / Jenny Holzer via @valtsv ◆ New York Winter 2014 2015 / Lina Scheynius ◆ I did not hunt down the moment edit [[Need More Bandages / TMG | Night Lights, Berlin / Lesser Ury]] / a-doctor-not-a-fangirl (deactivated) ◆ Lie (Peripety series) / Jen Mazza ◆ Excerpts from From The Book of Time (Devotions) / Mary Oliver via @liriostigre ◆ Excerpts from Having It Out with Melancholy / Jane Kenyon via @cithaerons

[autisticarachnid]

also i wanna give a HUGE shoutout to every single person who helped me get to 400 followers!! (though i’m a bit late to announcing it skfhdkf)

in celebration, imma actually hold a little raffle! whoever wins will get a fully rendered drawing of an oc of their choice! the raffle will be open until the 31st :))

to enter:

⭐️ you must be following me

⭐️ each like & reblog counts as an entry

⭐️ you may submit multiple entries by: 1, reblogging it multiple times (not back to back) or 2, sending in asks about my hphm mcs

the winner will get either a headshot, waist up or knee up drawing of an oc of their choosing, fully rendered! for personal reasons, i won’t be doing full body pieces 😅 thank you all so so so much for 400 followers <3333

[allabouttaleblr]

I kinda announced this on my other blog, but I’m probably gonna be taking a brief step back from the fandom for a little while. In all honesty, the recent drama stressed me out to the point that it sent me spiraling into a really bad depressive episode, so I’m gonna take a step back to try and focus on other things for now. My mental health has been declining for weeks, and I also just lost my beloved oldest pet snake, so I’m going to take a while to try and prioritize getting better. I highly appreciate all the support on my content and the friends I’ve made here ❤️❤️

(And I will be back. My posting will just likely be very sporadic and sparse for a few weeks or so)

[sweetpumpkinmouse]

Cringe culture was just an excuse to bully neurodivergent kids. Think about it.

If you saw ANY cringe compilation at that time, you noticed a pattern. The original creators of the “cringe content” are young, “obsesses” over a fandom or character, and/or has trouble with certain social cues or standards.

Granted, did they do things that they weren’t supposed to do (nsfw, death threats, etc.)? YES! Most certainly. But why did people think it was a good idea to BULLY the person rather than explain to them why what they did or are doing was wrong?

I’m not saying to parent the person, just help push them in the right direction. And if they ended up ignoring you? Well…move on with your life. Block and report, if you wish, but there’s not much you can do.

Cringe culture was ESPECIALLY hard on older artists who didn’t fit their standard of “adult” or “professional artist” (even though people do it for FUN). Like, the ageism, man!

When I was younger, I would watch these cringe comps, treating it as what not to be as an artist. So, I would OBSESSIVELY try and perfect EVERYTHING. I would ridicule everything that wasn’t “perfect”. I was ashamed of my interests in fear of being bullied on the internet because it was my only escape from bullying in real life. Doing art and animations wasn’t fun anymore because I never allowed myself to improve or make a mistake.

Now that I’m an adult, I still have this compulsive need to perfect EVERYTHING. The moment I notice a mistake, it feels like the end of my “credibility” as an artist. I still scrutinize every little thing I do in fear of being made fun of. Even when I now know that my need for perfection is unhealthy.

Cringe culture RUINED any chance I had for improvement and creating because I was so scared of ending up in a fucking Youtube video spitting out slurs and unhelpful advice.

Whenever I think of cringe culture, I think of the ever present ableism of the internet. I think of this idea that kids have to act like adults the moment they leave the womb. That artists have to be perfect in their craft the moment they grab a pencil.

Cringe culture stunts a person’s ability to grow and improve due to the ever-present scrutiny of what their creations presents; whether they are affected or not. Even if you didn’t end up in those cringe comps, you still have that fear of ridicule.

Cringe culture has and will always DESTROY creativity and time for improvement. NOTHING will ever change my mind about that.

Cringe culture is DEAD, and should STAY DEAD!

[crwndsprkzy]

Your family is going to catch these hands. We gonna fight

But yeah I am supporting yo ass from. Far away. Unfortunately.

On better news, the crows be OUT today. CROW TIME

crow time WOOOOOOOOO -ry

i mean far away isnt too far considering we share internet /lhj

luckily i think ive solved part of the financial stuff (one part was the bodys mum wouldnt pay for our data)by having her card details saved to the app

yipep

[salembookworm]

*takes notes* If I wanna be gay, I need a white dress shirt and gold rings. Got it.