#that you like this stuff my mind produced

[sleepymccoy]

Okay so something happened in the trekdom (is that a term anyone has ever used)

I think spirk got canonised?? Or something?? And I assume that as my certified Trekkie Mutual you feel some kinda way about this. you’re a Spones shipper but still how we doing?

I'm sure someone's used trekdom! It makes sense as a word regardless

I appreciate the Trekkie certification lol

Yeah dude, look. Most of the fandom is big into spirk so like people enjoying that romance is par for the course! I got nothing against spirk, it's just a bit of a boring dynamic so I don't really spend time on it. Too healthy for my tastes. Spones is way more juicy, it's got the tension and the sort of different world views that you see in good omens, so it's fun!

To be clear tho, spirk is as canon as it's ever been. Strong subtext, but in the way that a homophobe could watch it and say well they're just good friends. Nothing has changed in that sense, it's just another bit of footage doing more of the same. It's less gay than a lot of the original series, but it's new and shiny so on a surface level i get the excitement

Shatner, who plays Kirk, has done this as a non canon short film. It's apparently considered as canon as the novels? Which is like, not much. Most people don't engage. I haven't really looked into that, im not gonna watch it cos it kind of pisses me off

The thing that really fucks my goat about it is that the guy who plays Spock died a while ago, and didn't get along with the guy who plays Kirk. But the guy who plays Kirk has funded and produced and managed this whole thing to be about his character and his importance, regardless of the wishes of the original Spock actor. Including literally doing someone up in prosthetics to look more like Nimoy. Not just Spock generally, but specifically Nimoy's Spock. Nimoy was involved in star trek films in his late life, and he didn't choose to do this when he was alive. Only after his death has Shatner forced this to happen

That's what's leaving a really bad taste in my mouth. And I feel like people are either not accepting Nimoy's death and are happy to see him puppeted by someone he disliked, which makes me pity them. I work in aged care so I know I'm more comfortable with death than the average, but like. This is a bit fucking dark, no? It's maudlin, let him rest in peace for fucks sake.

That, or they don't mind the manipulation of his image if it tickles their ship, which makes me dislike them. And I don't think I'll really get over that any time soon, it's so disrespectful. And those are both negative feelings, so I'm kind of generally not pleased about my dash rn

I'm trying to take an angle of being about McCoy cos he doesn't feature in the short and that feels wrong. Spock-centric stuff is feeling a little tainted right now, but I'm sure that'll pass. Fanart is different to this kind of image stealing, but it's still weird for me rn. And as much as I love Kirk, I can't remove him from Shatner and his megalomania right now. I hope that'll pass, but I don't think Shatner's gonna stop here so. Hm.

Besides I like McCoy and he's not complicated by all this so I'm just continuing to play in my little sandbox

It's a weird time for trekdom. There's a bit of a rift, and not down shipping lines. I'm seeing a lot of posts working through their complicated feeling around the disrespect inherent in stealing Nimoy's face for Shatner. And I'm seeing other people celebrate the disrespect cos their ship held hands and that makes it worth it.

I'm hoping people overwhelmingly calm down a bit in a week, get a bit embarassed about how pleased they were over something so gross, and it just sort of goes away. Then we can all go back to having a go at Shatner for his constant sexism and homophobia

At least it's not fucking AI tho!

[bluecapsicum]

hi Blue! I am absolutely IN LOVE with the "Reports From Unknown Places" series. If you don't mind me asking, how did you learn to draw the clouds and the sky so well? I've always found the prospect very daunting, but you draw them in a way that simply amazing! Do you have any tips for brushes/practice?

Hello!

Thank you so much for the message, and your kind words! I'm so glad you enjoy Reports.

I completely understand how one might find drawing the sky daunting. I still regularly give myself headaches when working on reports. Everyone has their own issues when it comes to drawing, though.

For instance, this might sound a bit absurd, but one of my main issues as an illustrator is that I don't think well in 3D, and I ended up realising that I was unconsciously thinking about the sky as a flat image. When I started drawing clouds as objects moving in space, everything became a little easier.

(This is the kind of epiphany that I had. Truly a revolution in my mind. Now I can totally rotate clouds in my brain.)

This all came about as I kept on drawing more and more, sure, but the most important part really was watching clouds for myself, as much as possible, and to try and notice things every time. It's mostly silly stuff, especially at first, like oh yeah, I guess clouds produce shadows on other clouds too. Wow! Or, huh, this cloud doesn't have the same density throughout, so the light scatters differently inside of it.

Because it's all fundamentally physics, it ended up sounding incredibly simple once I had noticed it. Of course! It's all logical! I had just never connected the dots before I saw it in person.

So I also bought some books, and watched videos (all those airplane videos are fantastic), read websites, looked at pictures. Everything was helpful in one way or another. Listen, I knew about cirrus and cumulonimbus and that was pretty much it, at first. So looking at diagrams about how high cirrus are in comparison to stratocumulus, for instance, was a revelation. Looking at the life cycle of cumulonimbus explained so much for me.

These are studies I did on the side of Reports, in November 2020, then April 2021, and the third one in September 2023:

I think I'm able to look at these and tell that I got progressively more confident because I understood what I was drawing a lot better.

If I had to say, a few concrete things I learned that work for me is being bold, not to be afraid of contrast and sharp edges, and to treat light as an actor of its own. I can't find it right now, but I once read a quote by (I think!) Cezanne that went something like "I'm not painting the mountain, I'm painting the air between me and the mountain". I think it's the most helpful thing I've ever heard for painting and drawing. It's obviously especially relevant here. The air changes everything.

Anyway, I could go for ages more, I'm totally rambling, so I'll just leave a few references I find helpful:

The International Cloud Atlas

The Cloud Appreciation Society

What's This Cloud

In the end it's just fun, and good for the soul, to spend quality time with clouds, so nothing is ever lost!

[tekatonic]

guys you're actually so insane for this

this isn't shit that happens

like, what, i'm legit stunned !

[miodiodavinci]

i saw that you used to hint at oc stuff on twitter (don't ask me why im digging im looking for zola stuff lmao) why don't you post more about them?

i am simply terrified that if i post oc things online someone will steal the concept and run with it faster and better than i ever could have and then i will be devastated forever and ever

more seriously i have very little to show for any of my oc things (adhd brain making life difficult as per usual awawawawawa) and every time i've shared oc things in the past i've ended up never following up on it and it makes me feel bad and guilty so i've just convinced myself i will Never talk about my ocs until i have something substantial i can put out there

[kitty-fighter]

Here is some small bits of Lore for My MCYT AU.

There's small things that aren't fully explained here. But I plan on adding them in the future stories. {If I ever get Motivation to write them-}

[ubersaur]

one weird part of my job is sometimes I get little old ladies with sweet hearts poking through the compost box on the bottom of my cart that tell me I shouldn't be throwing away what I am throwing away. Like yeah, I get it. Food waste sucks! I hate throwing anything away. But everything down there is rotting or bruised or withered or just ugly enough that I know it will sit on the shelf until it is rotting, bruised, and withered. I cannot mark it down, and you will not buy it at full price. "But poor people---!" Poor people deserve food that isn't moldy or bruised or withered or ugly! And afaik our company already donates actually edible food to pantries!

[just-spacetrash]

😦

[tenrose]

I'm only realising now that the way RTD talks about Doctor Who is the way the Doctor talks. As fast as humanly possible and excitedly and you feel like he's about to jump or start running away at literally any moment lmao

[spaghettithighs]

More fallout from the James Somerton debacle; local person reluctant to respond to a post about the racism of disco revival because most of their argument revolves around anecdotal or observational evidence and they're too eepy to collect citable sources

[sodrippy]

damn really cannot take one (1) day off from being so strict w myself about everything or else my whole life unravels

[luxraydyne]

pop quiz what breed of childhood trauma borne neuroticism is it called when being condescended to on just the most neutral, limpid, nothing thoughts you express like you’re a little silly child, or “out of your depth”, or woefully misinformed, or just speaking on something you shouldn’t cause fuckin hell you’re doing it *wrong*, and with the most plainly obvious remark too, makes you want to chew on your own arm until you reach bone marrow

[sanderscat]

idk what it is but i find character ai extremely off-putting, i just can't put my finger on why

[suprsingr]

I have never in all my life had so many emotions about a tumblr poll but oh my GOD I'm so happy Garak won, lmao. That was so tense.

[blackvahana]

reminder to self to eventually write on the coning of the term heaven (counrable noun) as distinct from realm, specifically an astral realm built to house gods. The way he described it was effectively like a software that runs well, but the hardware also supports someone walking physically through it as it's a miniature city in and of itself, with all the subsystems of sewerage and electric and so on. The way it exists is particularly intense but the mental image is of one of those rope things in a jungle gym where you can fall down it and at all layers it's supported by matrices of rope

The main thing is that a heaven is created from and supported by these ropes of big, heavy archetypal forces - it is to environments like a gods body is to a non-gods body. ANVD is going down the road of being a heaven in that it's supposed to be a house for gods, and specifically that conversation came about with the planets getting involved, those are.... heavy expressions of me and those I'm an incarnation with as well as being old and heavy divine forces - they are divine in that they blur the lines between personhood, externality, Consciousness, matter, and so on like aspects of gods do

Whether I succeed in making ANVD like this is besides the point, it's just an example: a heaven is a place that, again, is to an environment what a god is to a nongod, specifically it's lucid in many layers and has the underlying infrastructure to support god manifestation in its flesh. It's not that it just has backrooms that God's can spill into, or at least that's not what ANVD is drifting towards, it's that its flesh itself is capable of holding the consciousness.

It's ultimately a little bit more complicated than "it can withstand a god"? It's ultimately more so about the fact that gods are more present in underlying parts of reality that don't often get built up by those making realms, the behind the scenes type existence of gods fries the system. That's probably Lev's computer metaphor - a nongod can exist in a simulated mmo on a pc but will glitch the game out and fry the pc itself if present. Likewise, realms as opposed to heaven (realms, realms is still an umbrella term I'm just using it like this for now) can support those who don't exist with claws dug into the coding and logic of the realm itself as well as all the elemental things involved in it from fate to time to Mind to whatever else

It's not that heavens are just better realms either in case that seems like the implication, it's not that normal realms lack functions of heavens and that's the only difference. But now I'm sort of like... Oh right. I was trying to remember without realising I was trying to remember what exactly the afterlife and big realms were doing...

Reminder is still a thing because I'm sure I could describe this way better in the future when it's not 1am and I'm not half here

[medicinemane]

I still argue that bleeping someone like Gorden Ramsey is bullshit so that people who love and find swearing fun can pretend that they didn't just hear him call someone a fucking donkey, because there was a bleep... like they don't know the exact word he used, like they didn't think it, and like they didn't have fun with it

Cause I bet you... any amount of money you want honestly, that if you asked Gorden Ramsey not to swear he just wouldn't... I don't think they ever bleep anything in shows where he's helping kids cook

No, people find swearing fun, it's entertaining... they just don't want to admit they like it because it's naughty

And to be clear I'm directly pointing to this and pointing to 'unalive' and drawing a line between them for how we got here

[gonzodangerfeels]

No, I am a little mystified you were doing romance predictions for a 3 year old with surprising accuracy in your special retard way.