#sorry I'm just rambling

[softcryz]

Soft warmup where I tried to draw it's old design but got sidetracked drawing the much more fun incomprehensible true design things. I don't know. One day I'll be able to give it the justice it deserves

[okaioh]

ough it's the way that phil told chayanne "being a leader is hard Chayanne, I know" (I'm paraphrasing what he said exactly but yk)

Hasn't he been the one people go to in the past - in which people would say "Phil what do you think we should do?" "I think we should listen to him-" "what would you do Phil?"

then in purgatory he went through all this stress of having everyone depend on him and be their hope in guiding them during the darkest time of their lives, he was the one they all looked up to

and he sees himself in chayanne, who's just a kid :(( - he's been put into the leader role because of being the oldest and hes just trying his best :(( he's just trying to comfort his kid whos doing his damn hardest oughhhhfh,,

[bidonica]

Some artists are taking their art off twitter in protest because of Musk's latest AI scraping announcement, and many are pointing out if your art (and text) is public on the internet it definitely has already been scraped quietly before, while Elno is probably just pushing his own proprietary AI, which... I guess is a silver lining on a cloud of shit.

But it got me thinking of the old adage "when they give you something for free, it means the product is you", and how up until not long ago that meant socmedia platforms would host your content in exchange for information on what you liked, how old you were, your political leanings, your physical and psychological ailments, and so on and so forth, into increasingly murky ethical territory. We've seen what the algorithm has done to push entire demographics of voters towards reactionary politics. BUT, as tenuous as it was, this exchange between the content host and its users still left the latter with agency. You can be influenced, but ultimately you can choose not to buy, you can choose not to click on the ragebait article.

In the system that's shaping up you don't get to have that. Right now it feels like: oh you want to put up a little exhibition in a corner of the town's square? The licence fee is that your paintings are also ours now, and we can cut them up and turn them into a brand new collage. You want to step on a shoebox and give a little speech to whoever wants to listen? We have the right to record you and sample your voice so we can make a new tape where you say things you never really said, but it sounds like you.

I honestly don't know where we go from here; the only solution I can think of is legislation catching up with the technology and putting a cap on it, and/or the rise of a new platform whose selling point is that it's unscrapable (though it would probably amount to it being a gated community).

It's sad though, I started using the internet regularly between the late 90s and the 00s and there was such a sense of it being an infinite sandbox where anyone could build whatever they wanted from scratch, while now we're funneled towards predetermined spaces where whatever form of self expression is going to be monetized by your virtual landlords and worse, regurgitated as something different you have no control over.

[seariii]

Seeing a few people hating on Kotoko, and seeing their reasonings makes me think...

How some take others actions without much care about what is behind it, or even when they see what is behind the action, it's just on a superficial level...

I guess it really translates to what my friend said about "to everyone else it's OBVIOUS that your action makes you an asshole, but you yourself don't see it, and no one cares to explain it to you"... I'm not justifying her words or actions in any way, it's just...

In real life we act a certain way, and we see mean people who we dislike for a reason or another... 2 years ago, I had to work with someone who was a total asshole. Everyone hated him, except his girlfriend, who was my friend. She went on and on about how he was a sweetheart and so nice to her... He ended up cheating on her and hurting her deeply, she ended up hating him just like everyone else, despite everyone's warnings...

There are people who by my standards I'd consider "bad" which is a subjective term... I still don't believe Kotoko is a bad person, but I believe she has done terrible things... Encouraging Haruka like that, is almost like Muu not doing anything to stop him... I don't think he has "a higher chance of doing it" because of her words, I believe he had already decided and the moment he talked to her about it it was just to further set it in stone

She believes Haruka is a sinner so punishment shall be brought

Just like Amane did to her mother

Just like Fuuta did to that highschooler

Just like Kotoko herself did to that serial killer

... and just like Kotoko did to the guilty prisoners

She is cleaning the world in her own eyes... After tsumi pointed out to me how radicalization mirrors (or is basically a variant of) cult indoctrination, I can't stop thinking about even more parallels about Amane and Kotoko....

someone said how Kotoko is basically a window of the future of Amane if she isn't helped, and I can see it even more clearly now...

I don't know, I wish there was something that could be done - she says, as if these were real people and not fictional characters on a story

[pessimisticgh0st]

You know that feeling when you're so far away from everything? And everything is going so fast so you just feel like another small thing caught up in the fake background blur? And life keeps happening outside of your imaginary bubble, you're always surrounded by it actually - people truly and properly living and enjoying life - but that's just it, isn't it? It's just happening infront of you, you aren't doing anything. And you can't, because you're now part of the blur that provides the stage for those who actually want to perform the routines of life. But it's comfortable. So comfortable and familiar so you stay in that feeling for a long, long time until you forget that you were supposed to live properly too, right? And then you look back on everything and realise how much of your life you left to be unlived after all.

[roamwithahungryheart]

One of the strangest things about watching your family & friends going through tough times is that their pain becomes your pain. But to acknowledge that pain feels somehow selfish. Because it's not about you. But you want so badly to fix it all, even though you can't. That's where the deep ache in your soul originates. The knowledge that it's all beyond your control. You're just a bystander who can only offer a kind word and a hug. It doesn't feel like enough, even though to them, it is. And when you're struggling with your own pain, you feel doubly selfish. It's not about me. It shouldn't be about me. So you internalize everything. You internalize your pain and their pain and you sit with it until your soul is so heavy with grief that all you can do is mourn for all the moments you can't pause. Mourn the life that goes on day after day, sadness after sadness. Mourn for the part of yourself you've lost to this constant darkness and hope to God there will be light.

[thyandrawrites]

I was test swatching a beautiful multicolor yarn I got a couple of months ago and

Sigh

I knew it could look weird depending on the width of the project, but this is so underwelming. Kinda just looks patchy. Tho it makes me wonder if I could make a calico cat amigurumi with this type of yarn and achieve little multicolor spots that way 🤔 but it might still just look like abrupt lines

Idk, that's a thought to return to at a later date

Then I remembered a yt video explaining that using doubled yarn and pairing a multicolor skein with a solid color one could help mute the color variation, so I tried that next

For reference, here I used a teal color similar to the other skein for the first three rows, then switched out to white

The color transitions are definitely more muted in the bottom half, tho the teal kinda drowns out the colorway imho 🤔 but if you have a bright ass multicolor skein that doesn't go well with other colors, I'm seconding this advice. Doubling it with a similar color mutes it pretty well

I think my favourite is the bit where I doubled it with white tho. It makes the colorway pop without that messy striped effect of the first swatch

But I guess my brain is still stuck on that "calico cat amigurumi" thought.

Solid white + brown/black multicolor yarn... Or maybe switching between doubling with white and then with another solid color... Damn now I want to try this

[lastoneout]

I was going to go to college back in 2020 but ofc that got put on hold, and I think I've kinda been operating under the assumption that like, eventually things would calm down and I could go, but it's been three years and due to my adhd I cannot do remote learning so I've just had to accept that if I want to do the things I want to do with my life I'm just gonna have to go and wear a mask the entire time and like...idk I don't mind wearing a mask I know I need to and I want to, but like coming to terms with the fact that this is just How The World Is Now is hard.

I mean it's probably just a side effect of the privilege that comes from living in a "developed" country but I was born the year the chicken pox vaccine got approved and I was fully vaccinated as a kid so for most of my life I've lived without the looming fear of a dangerous disease swooping down out of nowhere and killing me and/or my community, and tbh it's weird being part of a generation that now has to re-learn how to live in that sort of environment?

Like for most of human history people just kinda dealt with the fact that plagues and outbreaks happen and there's not much to be done but pray and hope you're spared, and like, you just had to accept that and live your life, you know? And now I'm looking back at history and wondering HOW people did that. How did they just accept that a disease could hit at any time? How did they spend time with people and go outside and have children and go to school and all that? How did they live??

Idk I guess it's just weird to have been the first generation that didn't have to worry about that sort of thing, not really, and now have to let it go and learn to live differently. And like...there's also this sense of grief? We were getting there, we really were, kids in my generation didn't have to worry about polio or measles or small pox or TB, medicine actually progressed to a point where some humans no longer had to live in fear of diseases like that...and now we do. I just wonder what all of the scientists throughout history who worked so hard to build a world safe from plagues and pandemics would think if they saw how easily we gave it up. And maybe I shouldn't complain bcs I know not everyone got to live in that world free of disease, I just got born in the right place at the right time, but like...the feelings are all still there and I don't really know what to do with them anymore.

And I really wish I could figure out how to live with covid. But I don't know if that's ever going to be possible. Not for me, at least.

[manobjectifyer]

i always fine it pretty funny when i post a giopalis fic on twitter, people unfollow. i don't care if they unfollow, because y'know, curate your feed to how you like it. but i, quite literally, have the ship name in my bio and have for quite a while. i feel like that's a basic thing to search up when you're about to follow someone? or it's on my ao3 too. it's not hidden information fjsnfns

[sxcret-garden-archive]

,

[gingermintpepper]

I think, perhaps one of the funniest things to come from EPIC popularising the Odyssey is that now a ton of people think Poseidon wanted to kill Odysseus.

In the Odyssey, Poseidon has no intention of killing Odysseus. In fact, part of the whole reason Zeus lets Poseidon do whatever he wants even though he thinks Odysseus is rad and should get to kiss his wife is explicitly because Poseidon had no intentions of killing Odysseus. Poseidon wanted to pay back the suffering/inconvenience blinding Polyphemus would have caused. It's a really abstract thing tbh. How do you pay back someone permanently disabling your son? Poseidon's solution was just to amputate Odysseus from his other half; i.e. Penelope. The end game was never murder, it was always an endurance race.

(Od. Book 1: Zeus reassuring Athena that he is not, in fact, a part of Odysseus Hater-Nation. Trans. Robert Fagles)

Also, for those wondering if there's any sort of in text reason for why Poseidon wasn't around in God Games - at the time in the Odyssey when Athena petitions Zeus to let Odysseus leave Calypso's island, Poseidon was -checks notes- on vacation in Ethiopia. Yep. He left to Ethiopia for a festival and thusly was very much absent for Athena's whole "please let Ody go? Please? 🥺" request.

(Od. Book 1: While Odysseus was suffering, Poseidon went to party in the east)

I am begging y'all to read the Odyssey. It's a comedy for everyone except Odysseus and Penelope who are, in fact, suffering 24/7 365.

[seariii]

The whole concept of the red thread of faith/destiny is so pretty... To think that you will always be connected to someone in some way, and that no matter what that bond will never break is a really pretty concept...

I guess it can be a little sad or scary too, if you think about it "what if I don't find them" sounds scary... Or what if you find them at the wrong time... Yeah.... It can be a little scary

I know the concept is related to romantic love, but it's also cute to think about it as platonic soulmates... Or to think that maybe that red thread actually connects some to more than one person...

Destiny and fate are a little annoying to some, and if you think about it, it can be a little boring to think that everything is already set a certain way, but I see it more as in... No matter in what universe, in what timeline, you were destined to meet with this person... Maybe as lovers, maybe as friends, maybe as some sort of found family. That's what I think it's pretty, the infinite possibilities and yet finding each other in every one... How cute....

[pessimisticgh0st]

I don't think I actually feel anything anymore

[half-man-half-lime]

Okay, let's talk Netflix One Piece, spoilers below the cut.

Hard to sum up my thoughts, I guess... better than I expected before the second trailer came out, worse than after I got my hopes up? There were a lot of great moments, and a lot of very confusing choices.

Like, casting-wise Iñaki Godoy is great for the role, he really embodied Luffy very well. Same for Emily Rudd as Nami, that felt very natural.

The rest.... Eeehhhhh? Mixed feelings. They were mostly good, although Mackenyu felt like maybe 70% like Zoro? Jacob Gibson as Usopp was okay, but Usopp needs to feel more childish, at least IMO.

Sanji was fine. Less of a disgusting creep, which was nice. (On a similar note, points for not doing tons of fatphobic jokes about Alvida! She actually seemed like a cool villain!)

Funny that they kept Usopp's one-on-one fight with Chew but Hatchan vs. Zoro didn't make the cut, honestly I wish they sold Usopp's internal conflict in that fight better, that was one of the big scenes that originally sold me on his character in the manga. I also missed the Usopp Pirates as part of his characterization, I wouldn't have cut them.

Same with Rika bringing the rice-balls to Zoro in the bar instead of sneaking into the prison yard, that kinda reduced his character in those moments to "being nice to kids" instead of "respecting and reciprocating the effort and sacrifice of a major act of kindness".

The Baratie stuff was... Look, I understand the budget and time constraints that made them cut the Don Krieg fight, he's honestly not the most memorable villain, but those episodes got kinda boring? You could tell when they were padding because it was either "Zoro falls down a well" time or "Zoro is in a coma" time, and those moments fell pretty flat.

Actually speaking of, were there budgetary reasons why there was so little blood when Zoro got injured? Shouldn't be a big deal except they kept remarking on how much blood he was losing, made it more jarring when the script and the visuals didn't match up.

And little changes around the Arlong plot didn't work so well for me. Nami keeping her plan a secret from her sister and the village felt like a pretty good character decision tbh, she sold that self-blaming motive enough that it seemed right. The walk to Arlong Park happening before Nami failed to stop the villagers from doing an uprising was worse, that should have been her breaking point, when she couldn't stop her loved ones from sacrificing themselves. Not a big thing, but yeah. And Arlong hunting Luffy down and fighting him once before also detracted from that final conflict, because Luffy and the Straw-Hats can't really come off as punk-ass kid underdogs when everyone's already taking them seriously, Luffy kicking the door down doesn't mean as much when he's already being scrutinized.

Mostly the aesthetics were a decent blend of silly and gritty, although I would have leaned wackier in a lot of smaller parts. Like I said in another post, it takes serious skill to make characters yelling out their attack names come off as cool in live action, and they threaded that needle even when Buggy threw his crotch at people.

There were some fun choices too! Buggy stole the show, and I never found him all that interesting most of the time. Then again my One Piece OC is from a circus so maybe I'm biased towards certain aesthetics. I dunno, he was over the top in all the right ways. Somehow he came off as entertaining despite dressing like a Mad Max character trying to be the Joker.

Arlong was a good villain too actually! Different kind of hammy villain, but it was fun to watch him be a tough-guy shithead with those ridiculous prosthetics, felt like exactly the right amount of weird and silly.

I liked the more in-depth use of Kaya's mansion as a setting too, it was way more distinctive than just fighting some pirates on an island, and the dark of night made it very atmospheric- some great shots of Kuro's silhouette.

Tonally, it was mostly good! It was fun and silly in a lot of the right places, and the parts that fell the most flat were the ones that didn't have much levity or weirdness to them.

Speaking of... What the fuck did they do to my dude Garp! Look, I tried to go into that subplot with an open mind, but it felt kinda pointless at the end. First off, why is he so severe! Garp is a goofy meathead like Luffy! Why can't they let him be dumb and funny! It was so jarring to see him talking about strategy over a dramatic game of Go, same guy who falls asleep mid-fight and makes his men fix the wall he just busted through for dramatic effect. And it's because... He wants to stop Luffy from being a pirate and/or test him? Honestly who cares! I have no idea why that was what they chose to insert from out of canon instead of... I dunno, anything more relevant or interesting? Bringing in Smoker early as an actual nemesis? Buggy's quest for revenge with Alvida? Some bigger Baroque Works foreshadowing?

But overall, it did catch my emotions in a lot of great moments. Fun, heart-wrenching, exciting, dramatic, all the good stuff.

[aingeal98]

Ultimately the resolution of Jason and Cass fights comes down to the fact that while he has his own ideals that don't mesh with the bats, Jason can be flexible. DC skipped the whole reconciliation with the family but while he's willing to kill it's generally a means to an end to him, not the whole entire point unless you're talking about Joker. Meanwhile for Cass the question of killing vs not killing is dead serious to her which means any time they're working together and things start going off track it's like:

Jason: Look if we kill this guy we send a message to his boss which makes it easier for us to negotiate with him from a position of power and I just think that-

Cass, snatching one of his guns and pointing it at her own head: Go on, pull the trigger. Kill him. Kill me. Go tell Batman that you let his daughter die to make a negotiation easier. He already let you die so no problem right? You think we should die? You think our life only worthwhile as part of a plan, just because we're killers? Are we doomed? Are we rotten to the core with no hope of redemption? Go on then, kill us and kill part of your soul alongside it. You clearly don't care for it so why are you even trying? Kill yourself along with us, come on Jason let's all just die right?

Jason, slowly backing away: I think you may be projecting a tiny bit so just. Calm down before I call the suicide hotline please.

Cass, slowly lowering the gun and knocking the random henchman unconscious: Yeah that's what I thought, fucking pussy.

Jason: Mm yeah you know what I hate you actually. Fuck this mission I'll just shoot you right now if you're going to be this annoying about it.

Jason, explaining things later to Dick: So I just kept shooting at her until I ran out of bullets and we both calmed down enough to call a truce. We tracked the guy down and didn't kill anyone but I did blow up the batplane just as a last minute screw you. Is she always this uh... intense?

Dick: Yeah, one time I broke up with Barbara and she threw me out a window. She's just like that.

[technically-human]

Can you draw something with Doom Patrol!Edwin and Netflix!Edwin?

Maybe something about Dp!Edwin talking about his feelings for Charles with N!Edwin?

It's just something I've been thinking of, make it a little angsty?<3

Glad you asked

ko-fi