#the likes and reblogs are my treats

[hannahhasafact]

Currently losing my goddamn mind regarding the new D20 season announcement

[cowardlycowboys]

🫶🫶🫶

[stardust-kitten]

wishing you the best in the worst way… using your distress as foreplay ✨

[e-likes-bones]

so a couple months ago now i think? i decided on a whim to make a puppet since i figured i had enough supplies lying around to do it, which resulted in me being struck to make arguably one of the best members* of the rock-afire explosion into a marionette: looney bird!

(excuse the goofy looking puppetry, i don’t actually have any experience w/ marionettes. whoops!)

anyhow i know a couple people that have seen puppet looney were curious how i made him, so under the cut i’ll have my rambles about that!

making looney bird was super fun! so expect this section to be long because i do wanna explain everything as much as i can. i will divid this up into sections, which shall be:

body, head, & neck

face & plant/leaves

tail & wings

legs & feet

strings & control

anyhow! let me get to explaining lol

Section 1: body, head, & neck

this is where i began! i made a base for the head & body out of crayola air dry clay so i had base shapes to put the fur on top & so the puppet would have a decent little bit of weight to it. the head was just a small ball, while the body was larger & slightly more oblong. while the base & the other sculpted parts were drying, i had to color the fur i was going to use.

i only had white faux fur (2 different kinds, a soft, sort pile, & a less soft, longer pile; what i use for most of looney is the short pile) going into this project, & since this fella was made exclusively from craft materials i had lying around, i needed to find a way to color it. I attempted dying some of the fur w/ some old t-shirt dyes i had lying around, but when that didn't work i turned to my old alcohol markers to see if they worked, & they surprisingly did! really well too! (altho there are some areas that i struggled to get ink into, but overall the color isn't too too patchy)

once i had the dry clay & fur, i got to covering the bases w/ the fur! which. i did primarily by super glueing small sections of each piece of fur down, maneuvering the fabric to lay flush w/ the base & making sure to maintain the same direction of the fur, & repeating until the fur was completely attached.

the neck was simpler, i took some more of the red colored fur, folded it over into a flat tube shape, & glued either end to the head & body (still paying attention to the fur direction!) then i took some of the remaining uncolored (white) fur & made the ring of white around the base of looney's neck!

Section 2: face & plant/leaves

imo, this was the section i had the most fun w/ lol! i actually sculpted the face after making the head & body's clay bases so that they had extra time to dry. i made the entire face as a "faceplate" for easy attachment at the size i needed, plus sculpting the face as one thing allowed me to have the 3 extra bits i needed to attach looney's face feathers the best later on in the process. the face is also made of crayola air dry clay btw.

after the face was dry it was painting time! i just used some old art kit acrylic paints for all the base colors, & the eyes were possible using a nail art dotting tool. i went over looney's cheeks w/ chalk pastel dust to get the blush effect, then sealed everything in using mod podge.

now he needed his face feathers! remember how i had 2 different faux furs? well here's where the longer pile one gets used! i cut really small sections of the longer fur & trimmed them down to be just 3 little fuzzy bits essentially, then using another alcohol marker, i colored them green & glued them to the green side sections on looney's faceplate. from here, i attached looney's face to his head, then cut & pasted the surrounding small white feather sections on either side of his face & below his beak. it was after that i made the purple feathers, as those are just colored paper clippings that i glued to the back of looney's faceplate that didn't attach to his head. (picture of what i mean below)

anyhow! onto the plant on looney's head! the stem of the plant was just a jewelry wire that i twisted to make a bit thicker, then dipped in green paint to color it & smooth the twist out, then sealed w/ mod podge, & finally glues to the top of looney's head. the leaves, much like the purple feathers, are paper, but cut into leaf shapes & colored to roughly mimic looney's leaves, then they were very carefully super glued to the stem

Section 3: tail & wings

these bits were pretty simple imo, the tail is made of embroidery floss i cut & sectioned to create looney’s tail pattern, then i tied it together to create a base i could easily attach to his body. i also tried brushing it to make the individual threads smaller since i preferred the look & thought it made it look more like feathers? but either way, from there it got glued on & i moved on to the wings.

the wings are again the short pile fur i used on the body, but they were left white when i cut them, so once i got the wing shape formed i could color the sections that needed to be red & just leave the wingtips white how i wanted. the wings were 4 panels cut into a roughly triangular shape & glued together to create 2 wings

Section 4: legs & feet

the legs & feet were also relatively simple but i have never been the best at sculpting feet so i suffered just a tad. anyhow the feet are also sculpted from crayola air dry clay like other pieces, then painted & sealed the same as the faceplate.

the legs are pony beads & more embroidery floss. i used the beads to make the legs as full & patterned as i wanted & the string to make sure the legs are loose & easy to maneuver. 2 beads were glued to looney’s body & 2 to his feet, & the string was looped thru the body beads, down through the leg beads, & tied & secured to the feet beads

Section 5: strings & controls

finally! the last section!

the string is just some clear beading string. there are 4 strings, which were tied & glued to both foot beads, the base of the tail, & the base of the plant. i eyeballed the needed length for each string to keep the puppet at an upright position when held up regularly & cut them to size.

the control is just a pair of chopsticks i cut to the rough size of the puppet & glued the ends of the strings to: the head & back end strings to either side of one stick, & both feet strings to either end of the other stick.

& that was pretty much everything i had to do to make looney!! it took like. 2 days? i was very dedicated to finishing him in just a weekend. thank you to anyone who read all my extended rambles about how i made this guy!!! i appreciate it!! also please excuse any typos, i never make typos ever idk what y’all are talking about

[necrotic-nephilim]

this is not a ship post, but something that frustrates me a lot in fanon concerning Jason Todd that attempts to soften Jason's return to Gotham for the sake of found family domesticity or easy hurt/comfort or just sliding him into the Batfam sooner, is they all seem to fundamentally misunderstand Jason.

because there seem to be a lot of fandom popular concepts of Jason coming home much sooner and just not having his whole Under The Red Hood arc. which in theory is fine and i can see the want to simplify canon to make room for your lighthearted more fluff-leaning concepts. but in everyone without fail, the way they address the clown-shaped elephant in the room is by having some throwaway line that "oh Jason quietly kills the Joker and moves on".

when the Joker being dead or alive is not the *point*. if by some chance accident, the Joker had died prior to Jason's return, whether by ridiculous freak accident, getting whacked by a fellow villain, hell even someone actually doing so to avenge Jason, it *would not* satiate Jason's anger. because Jason's end goal in UtRH is not to simply kill the Joker: it is to make *Bruce* kill the Joker. Jason's anger is directed to the idea that to Jason, if Bruce truly loved Jason, he would've killed the Joker. that is love, for Jason. compromising your personal values for love and not letting someone go unavenged. when Jason was Robin, almost every angry or misguided thing he did was born of love. he wanted to kill/hurt Two-Face because he believed Dent killed his father. he was so angry at Felipe because an innocent woman was dead due to that man's actions. he wanted to save his mother in a situation he knew he shouldn't be in because he loved her. his anger, his violence, it is driven by love and feelings of righting wrongs. that is how he thinks wrongs *should* be righted. that is how you avenge and *love* someone.

because so long as Jason's return to Gotham doesn't end in Bruce killing the Joker (which, it never will bc Bruce is Bruce), Jason will never forgive Bruce. you cannot wave away the layers of hurt and complicated trauma by killing Joker offscreen. because Jason will still be angry that Bruce didn't avenge him. in his eyes, that means Bruce did not love him enough. he was not truly loved by Bruce the way he loved Bruce. bc Bruce was Jason's whole *world*. prior to being taken in, Dick and Tim, they had support systems. they had loved ones. they knew what stability and healthy family love looked like. Jason *didn't*. and that's not to say that Catherine Todd did not love him with her whole heart and thus he loved her, but it certainly wasn't a stable and safe support system for Jason to grow up in. Bruce was Jason's first real sense of a stable, healthy life. and so of course Jason poured everything into Bruce and loved Bruce so devoutly. Bruce was his world. like he says, if it had been Bruce, Jason would've stopped at nothing.

so his betrayal is rooted in that he was not avenged, not that Joker is alive. so long as the Joker does not die by Bruce's hands, it will never be enough for Jason. (in this era, at least.) notably, this is also why i don't think it would change a thing if Jason knew the whole "oh Bruce wanted to kill the Joker but Superman stopped him" tidbit that fanon has really latched onto as a way to pacify Jason's anger toward Bruce. Jason knowing that wouldn't change a thing, in my opinion. because Jason knows Bruce. and a tenant of Bruce's character is that he grapples with murder *every day*. the whole point is how *easy* it would be for him. he is a human weapon, trained by killers, trained to be deadly. he is the greatest strategist to exist. he knows he could kill someone and get away with it. *no* trace, no proof, nothing. and he knows he *wants* to. wants to kill the Joker, Joe Chill, anyone who's hurt him that viscerally.

but he *doesn't*. that's the point. Bruce wakes up every day with that question on his mind, and every day the answer is the same. Bruce's morality is not a decision he made in an alleyway when his parents died, it's a decision he continues to make every day and he *must* continue to make in order to remain who he is. Jason is quite familiar with the fact that Bruce grapples with this daily. i do not think it surprised nor fazed Jason to know that Bruce did *consider* killing the Joker. that he wanted to. maybe even planned to. but a consideration, a want, a plan, is just a thought. it's nothing substantial, and substance is everything to Jason. at the end of the day, Bruce didn't. he was talked down by *Clark* of all people with an excuse of diplomatic immunity, as if Jason and Bruce don't both know that Bruce could've *easily* found a way to make it look like an accident or some other loophole. because he's Batman. there's always a loophole. he always finds a way when he actually intends to. but he never actually intended to kill the Joker. so he didn't. and Jason would know that there was never an intent. it's an interesting piece of fodder to add to the nuance of Jason and Bruce, but honestly, i think it'd make Jason angrier to have that excuse thrown in his face. as if Bruce hasn't beaten Clark half a dozen times by now. it's a flimsy nonsense excuse that Jason would rip to shreds.

so while yes, i understand the wish for easy lighthearted fanfic that doesn't have to deal with the nuances of canon, i think that Jason's character will always be so deeply robbed and altered if you try to fix his thirst for vengeance with an off-page killing of Joker at Jason's hands. it was never the point. the point was that -in his own eyes- he wasn't loved enough for Bruce to make an acception. he realized that not even his *death* would come before Bruce's Mission. Jason truly believed that Bruce loved him and held him as the most important thing in the world, and now he has proof that Bruce didn't. because the Mission mattered more.

i'm not saying i have a solution to this conundrum if you're attempting to solve it for fanfic/fanon, nor am i even saying it's a bad thing it exists. i just think it becoming overwhelmingly common has led to misunderstandings surrounding Jason's motivations and feelings about this arc and it's an unsatisfying solution that only seeks to pacify Jason's rage and his trauma responses for the sake of found family-ification.

[graynide]

Sneak or snack!

as a fellow captain underpants fan,

have a lil doodie of Cap twiddling the knots of his cape!! :D

[lucky-numberme]

"I see you're trapped in my gay and stupid maze again" — Flora Sutton, probably

3/20 Queer Book Draw Challenge: A Marvellous Light by @fahye

[ID: an illustration of Edwin and Robin in the hedge maze scene. They are surrounded by a holly hedge, which reaches out to them with thorny vines. Robin is in the background, pinned against a neoclassical statue. In the foreground, Edwin kneels, face racked and hair askew. The vines are wrapped around his arms, leaving cuts and scratches. All of his focus is on a palmful of dirt in his hand. Behind them, the sky has darkened to the point of storm. End ID]

[servospawn]

i've noticed a bit of discourse over the span of me being back here about peer recognition &what that does to a person's mental on socials.

idk if it's because of my inactivity or because i've just been on tumblr for 10+ years but it really puzzles me when i see someone fretting over the amount of notes and/or social engagement their posts seem to lack. of course we as humans love peer recognition &validation but i'd hate to think that's all some people care to focus on when it comes to their blogs.

i think we all should be posting whatever we want without trying to calculate how many notes we'll receive on any one single post because that's setting yourself up for disappointment. if you're a simblr.. i'd like to assume you came here because you enjoy playing your game, creating content or using it as a creative outlet to express your form of individuality.. the notes in this case should sort of act as a bonus.

people have lost their heads.. ranting in txt posts about their content "flopping" or feeling like they don't belong here.. &it's just like.. take a deep breath.. it's okay.. you'll survive. also idk what flopping is when it comes to simblr, because.. if i get anywhere between 10-100 notes from loyal followers that have engaged with me from day 1, can recognize my OCs &are genuinely paying attention to what's going on (because they care that much).. that's a hell of a lot more rewarding to me than amassing 500-1k notes because a popular simblr randomly decided to reblog me that day.

please learn to love your game, your blogs, your cc & yourself. because what's the point of notes if you're not even genuinely happy with your game in the first place? you'll continue to have unrealistic expectations &end up in that rabbithole of forcing yourself to do tzrs, spam liking &reblogging others just to get that in return &trust me it comes off super fake &people will notice that too.

[aropride]

doing my reading for my psych class for once and the book was saying most studies were reporting notably higher rates of sexual activity in men and i was trying to figure out who they were having sex with (each other in some cases obviously but that didnt account for everything) Anyway turns out the self-reported rates of sexual activity go down for men when they are/believe they are monitored by a polygraph test. chat the disparity is bc men are lyingggg 😭😭😭😭😭

[sabertoothwalrus]

idk why but the results on that "favorite finn ship" poll is making me kinda emotional 🤪

[novantinuum]

continually annoyed by how every single post i've seen supporting the notion that "the journal pages in BoB were fakes" just feels like thinly veiled anti material

[ferryfoam]

I think about The Seige of AR-558 all the time. It's probably one of my absolute favourite ds9 episodes (along with In Purgatory's Shadow and By Inferno's Light which can not be topped) that one part where Julian is treating the wounds of one of the star fleet officers who've been essentially abandoned in this war zone and the officer is clearly so deeply traumatised by his experiences there is one of the most poignant moments in the entire show to me. The dialogue is so good and it really reminds you that this is an actual war theyre having, not just some flashy space battle where the good guys win and then everything is fine- it's had lasting impacts on these people who star fleet is meant to protect but really they send out a group of officers to a planet and then leave them there for months longer than they were supposed to be and so utterly do not care about these people because they see them as disposable. Even after Sisko and the ds9 crew realised how awful the conditions were everyone was expected to stay there - a position too important to the federation for them to let these people go home but not important enough for them to send backup or replacement officers (I though Quarks presence in the episode was really good as well for providing a perspective of someone not in StarFleet and a lot of the things he said about human nature and the actions of the federation really reflected how I was feeling about it as well haha)

Also the music was really good

(Edit if you want to hear more of my take on star fleet corruption I have put it in the tags)

[hella1975]

so there's a reason my new job got back to me so quickly about my application and that's bc it's an absolute fucking shambles like actually perfect timing for me to decide to rewatch the bear bc i have never more felt like ive been thrown into a broke on-its-knees establishment trying to crawl its way up the ladder where i am somehow a godsend to them. my old job was crazy and shambolic in the sense that the industry is just Like That but this one?????? insanity. every 5 mins i am questioning what im doing with my life. ive already had a walk-in fridge moment

[smile-files]

as a jew, seeing what all of these israeli leaders have said is sickening. as a jew, anti-palestinian rhetoric is sickening. as a jew, zionism is sickening.

how dare my people -- a people who've been massacred, ethnically cleansed, dehumanized, forcibly removed, and discriminated on religious grounds for their entire existence -- do the same to another people? how dare we turn our backs on them, when they suffer like we have?

i understand that so much of us have been fed zionist propaganda our entire lives; the same happened to me. i understand the desire for a homeland where we don't have to fear antisemitism at every turn; i want that too. but it doesn't take much thought to understand that a homeland for us, which actively oppresses and kills another people, is antithetical to what we want.

if you, as a member of an oppressed group, believe that your freedom and safety can only exist when you oppress another group, you are acting no better than the people who oppressed you. such a belief is horrible, and cynical, and wrong.

as a jew, i want jewish people to be happy and safe and connected to our heritage; as a jew, i also want other peoples to be happy and safe and connected to their heritage.

don't call the palestinians "amalek". you are turning us into amalek.

doesn't the torah tell us to have empathy for those beaten down by the world? doesn't the torah tell us to make the world a better place? doesn't the torah tell us to free people of their shackles and help them escape oppression?

i have so many israeli aunts and uncles and cousins; i fear for their safety. of course, my parents do as well. i'm worried that this fear, in addition to anything they were led to believe earlier in life, is placing my parents even deeper in the zionist camp. but it doesn't have to be this way! my relatives' safety does not rely on the continued oppression of gaza!

it is easy to be uninformed, to be swayed by propaganda, to blindly hope that israel was founded in good faith -- but we can't lie to ourselves. a world steeped in senseless hatred (which we are now promoting!) could never be a home for us. none of us are free, liberated, equal, until all of us are.

as a jew, to other jews, i implore that we stand with our palestinian siblings. i want us all to be happy and safe. i want us all to live in harmony -- in the holy land and around the world. that is what we all deserve. <3

[satisaranea]

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐁𝐋𝐄𝐌 𝐖𝐈𝐓𝐇 𝐃𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐂𝐓 𝟏𝟏; 𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐂𝐓 𝐏𝐎𝐑𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐘𝐀𝐋 𝐎𝐅 𝐀 𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐓𝐘

hi! this post has been on my mind for a very long time, and with a possible hunger games resurgence underway, i want to address the not-so savoury and digestable bits about collin's writing, including her characterizations of black individuals within the trilogy.

first of all; district 11 is described as a large district, with its population mainly being black, or at least people of color. this is shown in the movie adaptations, and the several characters we meet throughout the series.

(rue, chaff and seeder's descriptions, but thresh, too.)

(depiction of district 11's population in the movie adaptation of catching fire.)

𝐬𝐨, 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦?

genuinely? the characterization of these individuals, such as chaff and thresh (both black males specifically.) the portrayal of both characters being a threat in size and combat, which is also often a microaggressive stereotype tied to black men.

(effie's reaction to the 75th's reaping & her snide comment against chaff, catching fire + thresh killing clove/sparing katniss, the hunger games.)

of course, i won't downplay thresh's kindness in his sacrifice of sparing katniss, but the display of his brutality paired with his decent & race does not look good (considering that the hunger games is written by a white woman!) and to me, will always come across as uncomfortable. even his speech makes him seem uneducated, more brawn than any brain, and that's also a heavy misconception when it comes to black men/boys/etc. i can see where suzanne tried to balance it out, but it doesn't work well in the slightest.

furthermore, we have to talk about the state of district 11 as a whole.

agriculture/farming as the role for one of the largest districts if not THE largest, seems innocent by itself. but then you have the treatment of its citizens, the way the population is worked, and the overall uneasiness of it.

(rue's experience in 11, the hunger games + katniss’ description of the district, catching fire.)

public whippings, senseless cruelty towards again, a WIDELY black populated district and their continual work on fields/in harvests all speak to remnants of slavery and pastimes taken place within the era of slavery. if suzanne collins was trying to make a point, or mock the treatment of this minority through a portrayal in her book as a white woman, she missed the mark POORLY. having the BLACK citizens, including women, children and men all working out in the fields? disgusting. beyond incomprehensible.

hoarding a minority in one district is crazy work too, because we barely hear about any other black characters minus paylor, beetee, and potentially cinna. and the fact that in katniss' eyes, 11 is treated perhaps the worst? says a lot.

𝐰𝐡𝐲 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞 𝐚 𝐩𝐨𝐬𝐭 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐢𝐭?

truthfully, i'm bringing awareness to my discomfort as a black teen/general black individual because this isn't just something you should brush past. you should see the treatment of these characters and condemn it. i see next to no posts about the blatant racism towards black people/poc in the hunger games and also within the fandom. this has been swept under the rug over and over and blatantly, I'm tired.

collins perpetuates the suffering of district 11 in historical and supposedly educational ways, but that doesn't make it okay for her to do so. as a white woman, collins abuses the usage of racial stereotypes with examples of district 11 men, the culture, their work, but also a wider environment than just 11, such as district 12 too (with the perpetuation of gale.)