#that's probably a good thing

[inkskinned]

probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.

we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."

at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.

the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.

the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.

what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.

here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.

[chloesimaginationthings]

The Mikes and Vanessas celebrate 10 years of FNAF!

[hinamie]

yuuji smiling and sukuna making a face like That did u really think i wouldn't do a panel redraw

[glacier-shrimp]

Some flowers for you ❤️

[thebaldursmouthgazette]

I’m sure Dumat being defeated the same year andraste was born means nothing

I’m sure this has nothing to do with the fact that andrastes mother was part of a tribe who helped the grey wardens fight and defeat dumat the same year she was born, meaning that she could have been a fetus affected by the taint in the proximity of a dying arch demon

And the fact that nobody knows which grey warden killed dumat, as seven wardens died from injuries from his death throes, and therefore we cannot actually identify a warden who absorbed his soul, means nothing

And I’m sure it is a complete coincidence that andraste had dreams and visions of the being later referred to as the maker her whole life, and behaved strangely, talking about hearing lost voices and seeing strange auras. That absolutely doesn’t sound like anyone else we know

[danganronpa-despairverse]

So I was looking at the art folder for Chapter 1, and I found an old CG meant for Chapter 1 Deadly Life that never made it in

[ruushes]

my hof was born to be a griffon rider, if they could've given him a griffon at the start of dao the blight would've been over in a week

[bophamet]

actually i think sony should take their sweet fucking time with beyond the spiderverse cuz even with the time they took with atsv it wasn't enough for the animators to have proper working conditions. like take ten years i don't fucking care, people can bitch and moan but i would rather know the employees aren't working 8hours a day plus overtime for 7 days a fucking week to get a movie about spiderman done cuz "waah waaaah i wanna see it" people won't shut up and sony demands their film be made for the profit of it all

[carlyraejepsans]

sans undertale would not make i fucked your wife jokes. people want to make jokes about sans fucking asgore's wife but sans the character would NOT do that r you kidding me. you can cut the secondhand embarrassment with a knife every time they're in the same room together, sans likes the guy, i bet he feels genuinely kinda bad for asgore. he'd be like sorry about the dating your ex wife thing. to be fair she's a really cool ex wife. and asgore would be like (rescue shelter dog sigh) She is.

[inkskinned]

at some point it's just like. do they even fucking like the thing they're asking AI to make? "oh we'll just use AI for all the scripts" "we'll just use AI for art" "no worries AI can write this book" "oh, AI could easily design this"

like... it's so clear they've never stood in the middle of an art museum and felt like crying, looking at a piece that somehow cuts into your marrow even though the artist and you are separated by space and time. they've never looked at a poem - once, twice, three times - just because the words feel like a fired gun, something too-close, clanging behind your eyes. they've never gotten to the end of the movie and had to arrive, blinking, back into their body, laughing a little because they were holding their breath without realizing.

"oh AI can mimic style" "AI can mimic emotion" "AI can mimic you and your job is almost gone, kid."

... how do i explain to you - you can make AI that does a perfect job of imitating me. you could disseminate it through the entire world and make so much money, using my works and my ideas and my everything.

and i'd still keep writing.

i don't know there's a word for it. in high school, we become aware that the way we feel about our artform is a cliche - it's like breathing. over and over, artists all feel the same thing. "i write because i need to" and "my music is how i speak" and "i make art because it's either that or i stop existing." it is such a common experience, the violence and immediacy we mean behind it is like breathing to me - comes out like a useless understatement. it's a cliche because we all feel it, not because the experience isn't actually persistent. so many of us have this ... fluttering urgency behind our ribs.

i'm not doing it for the money. for a star on the ground in some city i've never visited. i am doing it because when i was seven i started taking notebooks with me on walks. i am doing it because in second grade i wrote a poem and stood up in front of my whole class to read it out while i shook with nerves. i am doing it because i spent high school scribbling all my feelings down. i am doing it for the 16 year old me and the 18 year old me and the today-me, how we can never put the pen down. you can take me down to a subatomic layer, eviscerate me - and never find the source of it; it is of me. when i was 19 i named this blog inkskinned because i was dramatic and lonely and it felt like the only thing that was actually permanently-true about me was that this is what is inside of me, that the words come up over everything, coat everything, bloom their little twilight arias into every nook and corner and alley

"we're gonna replace you". that is okay. you think that i am writing to fill a space. that someone said JOB OPENING: Writer Needed, and i wrote to answer. you think one raindrop replaces another, and i think they're both just falling. you think art has a place, that is simply arrives on walls when it is needed, that is only ever on demand, perfect, easily requested. you see "audience spending" and "marketability" and "multi-line merch opportunity"

and i see a kid drowning. i am writing to make her a boat. i am writing because what used to be a river raft has long become a fully-rigged ship. i am writing because you can fucking rip this out of my cold dead clammy hands and i will still come back as a ghost and i will still be penning poems about it.

it isn't even love. the word we use the most i think is "passion". devotion, obsession, necessity. my favorite little fact about the magic of artists - "abracadabra" means i create as i speak. we make because it sluices out of us. because we look down and our hands are somehow already busy. because it was the first thing we knew and it is our backbone and heartbreak and everything. because we have given up well-paying jobs and a "real life" and the approval of our parents. we create because - the cliche again. it's like breathing. we create because we must.

you create because you're greedy.

[the-uncanny-dag]

Related to my previous post: it's amazing how the setting of Muir's novels contrasts with the depth of character writing focused on queer WOC. Bc it doesn't matter how woke and diverse John Gaius' Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Catholicism is from the audience's first glance at the dramatis personæ, the Nine Houses are still a fascist theocracy cracking liveable planets like walnuts & making sure not a single denizen of the colonies has a moment of peace, and it was built by a man who grew up in the 21st century and whose female (citation needed) partner he killed, ate & put in the fridge. Women are still assigned value by their physical appearance (like the twins), their treatment still hinges on their gender expression (compare treatments of Gideon's body vs Harrow's), they still aren't taken seriously at work (like Mercy), interclass marriage (necrocav couple Abigail & Magnus) is scorned, reproductive rights and healthcare in general are abysmal (Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, Ninth for different reasons). "Does the narrative respect women" and "Do the characters in the story respect women" are two completely different questions with sometimes completely different answers

[egophiliac]

ENG PLAYERS I BESEECH YOU

I have been informed that you guys are getting part 4 of episode 7 tomorrow, which means we are FINALLY going to get the official romanization of Revaan's name, somebody please tell me because I need to know what it is.

like, yes, it's probably just Revan/Levan, but look, I'm sitting here with my finger over the button of all these Laverne and Shirley jokes and just waiting for the opportunity to deploy them --

[yourcousinvinnie]

y’know, there are times were I see a post on tumblr and i realize that i am absolutely not a part of the majority of tumblrites.

[hinamie]

sidelong

[lonesome-dreamsss]

his handprint may be burned into your skin but it's still the gentlest touch you've ever received.

[keferon]

…..SO. AHAHAHAHAH. I finished reading Mistakes on mistakes until (technically I finished chapter 68 which is the last one currently~)

What a ride OH MY fuckINg god