#things I'm trying to work on

[bemorch]

Unfinished Lae'zel and her (youngling?) red dragon

[bixels]

in case you wanna know how bad things are on twitter rn.

[blackkatdraws2]

[Toon x Mobster] drawn for fun, he doesn't know how to hold that thing wwwwww

[sunderwight]

Scum Villain AU where Shen Yuan and Shen Jiu transmigrate by swapping lives (i.e. Shen Yuan wakes up in Shen Qingqiu's body on Qing Jing Peak, post-fever, while Shen Jiu wakes up in Shen Yuan's body in a hospital in modern China) but it doesn't quite work right.

The system glitches or something and they end up having to jointly time share their lives. Every time a certain moon phase or something (cyclical) comes around they abruptly switch back.

So they spend the entire time trying to undo everything the other one has been up to while everyone around them is just desperately attempting to figure out wtf is going on. Shen Yuan does the skinner quest and stops Luo Binghe's abuse, and Shen Jiu gets a job with a rival company and starts showing up Shen Yuan's brothers. Then they switch back and Shen Jiu is like "it's woodshed o'clock for the beast" and Shen Yuan resigns. Then they switch back again and Shen Yuan saves Liu Qingge's life and gets poisoned defending Luo Binghe, and Shen Jiu creates his own start-up and blackmails his eldest brother about the mistress he's just uncovered. Then they switch back and Shen Yuan gets his brother and his sister-in-law into couples counseling and Shen Jiu embarks on a quest to either cure himself without Liu Qingge's help or die trying.

Eventually they just start leaving bitchy messages for one another to find and doing things that won't cause lasting damage but are incredibly petty. Shen Yuan keeps trying to tell Shen Jiu to read PIDW but Shen Jiu takes one look at his merch-filled bachelor pad and immediately decides that his opinions aren't worth anything, so it takes him a while to actually do it (he is really mad about this when he finally opens the novel and it turns out to be extremely relevant information).

[lucabyte]

even dogs pass the mirror test

[chipthekeeper]

"I'm so grateful to be part of the [Star Wars] family. And I'll miss it, and I'll miss the people. It's the people that I'll miss very, very much." - Faye Marsay, Andor Declassified: Farewell

[fonulyn]

since I've seen it talked about in several places recently:

if you are going to do a whump- or kink- or ANY-tober or other similar challenges please please please don't post them as one fic with 31 chapters unless it actually is one coherent fic. if they're 31 completely separate fics or ficlets then please just make a collection for them or just post them as separate fics. it doesn't matter if they're only 100 words or if you think they're too small or insignificant to post alone, they're not.

and why this?

because if you post all 31 of them in one fic the tagging is absolutely useless. if I look for things to read on ao3 I'm gonna look at the tags, and if the tags include something that's a dealbreaker for me, i won't even click on the fic. I might not even SEE the fic because I've filtered out the nope-tag! so I'm gonna lose out on reading 30 perfectly nice fics because of one fic that my nope-tag applied to.

ao3 is about archiving. it's about clear tagging and being informative. there is nothing informative about it if the tags in the fic apply to random chapters while others have nothing to do with it. it makes so much more sense to have each work as an individual fic with its own individual tags and warnings, so readers can make informed choices.

of course, you do you. I can't police what other people decide to do. but personally, I find it incredibly frustrating to weed through 31 chapters to find the ones I actually want to read. so I don't. I automatically scroll past all works posted like that. and I know some others do, too.

there is absolutely no shame in posting short things on ao3. there is no minimum word count. no one is going to look at you funny if you post a small ficlet on its own, I promise. it's just going to make some readers very happy when they can actually find the things they want to read.

so, please. at least consider the upsides of posting each work as their own fic.

signed, one very frustrated fandom grandma.

[journey-to-the-attic]

"karasu search how 2 cheer human up"

"karasu search difference between sad human and zoning out human"

"karasu search how long is it safe for humans to zone out for?"

(+ a longer look at each scene:)

[monstermonger]

I recently bought an art book on Caspar David Friedrich, whose emotional work stuck with me since I first saw it in a museum years ago. Over the course of a few weeks, I read about his life and at the same time did studies/interpretations of many pieces. It was a really enjoyable and fulfilling project; here's a good lot of them together :)

I was happy to see many people enjoyed Friedrich's work+my interpretations while posting them individually. It took way too long, but I FINALLY set up a print shop for some of these + some other pieces for those who expressed interest. Thank you so much!

[lurking-loaf]

It's essential to teach them color theory when they're young so they understand how to mix colors. How else will you get art that's good enough for the fridge?

Day 6 of DCA Promptober - hues plus bonus animation of Sun imitating the Mac's wait cursor aka the Spinning Beach Ball of Doom

[screambirdscreaming]

Something that peeves me whenever I see another post going around with some variation on "autistic people take things literally which means we are the only people who communicate Clearly and Directly" is that - for any given statement, there is not one singular, agreed on, universal Literal Interpretation. If there was, none of this would be a problem!

The nature of language is that there's always some degree of interpretability. Words have several different meanings, often overlapping, and there's nuance of context, cultural references, and so on.

Faced with a statement, most people will quickly come up with an interpretation that to them makes the most sense. But if you asked a roomful of people to explain in detail their interpretations, everyone's would probably be a little different, even for a pretty simple statement. Regardless of whether those people are autistic! Everyone conceptualizes the world a little differently, and everyone has a unique personal history of all the language they've encountered, and these things effect our interpretations.

In order for communication to be workable, given this slosh in interpretability, there's another couple of processes that go on. As conversation goes on, people reassess if their initial interpretation matches up with additional context. If it doesn't, they revise it, or ask clarifying questions. And on the flipside of this process, the other person in conversation is tracking if your reactions make sense with *their* understanding of what they're trying to convey to you, and offering context or rephrasing things if it seems you're out of alignment.

These processes are social skillsets that are, like most social skillsets, not ever directly articulated or explained. Many people are bad at one or both. Sometimes you encounter someone who is really, notably good at it - the vaunted "good listener", who puts in the effort to really understand what you're trying to say, or that really excellent teacher who engages with you back and forth until you really get it. But a lot of the time, it's a sort of passive social friction - people just not getting each other.

Sometimes, you encounter someone whose brain works so much like yours that talking to them feels almost effortless - you just get each other. But that's a pretty rare occurrence for anyone. More often, as you get to know someone, you start to understand the shape of the way they interpret things and learn to account for it, so over time it's easier to make sense to each other.

It's honestly not uncommon in society for people to aggregate in groups of people who interpret things similarly, and who are thus easier to talk to, rather than actually building the skills of communicating across interpretation gaps. Particularly egregious are those groups of men who talk about Women as an incomprehensible monolith, but it turns up to a greater or lesser degree on a lot of levels.

I suspect this is the root of a lot of parenting problems - people who have never built this communication skillset, and relied on choosing friends who make sense to them without a lot of effort, and who are then totally unprepared to interact with a child who interprets things in ways they don't expect.

Obviously I can't speak to The Universal Typical Experience, not least because it doesn't exist. But in general I would posit that:

Most people, give or take a few assholes, are not trying to say things that are confusing. Most people think they are communicating clearly, because the first interpretation *they* would come up with on hearing one of their own sentences is the correct interpretation.

Many people are not very good at accounting for different ways people could interpret things they're saying. However, it is normal and polite social behavior to be somewhat flexible about this and forgiving of misunderstandings. If people are being shitty to you about not understanding them, they are assholes. And I wouldn't assume that the rest of the communication they have with everyone else they know goes totally smoothly for them.

I suspect there is a bit of an unfortunate feedback loop, where people have bad experiences when someone gets mad at them for not getting something, and learn to hide when they're confused. Which then leads to larger, more complicated misunderstandings, which other different people get upset at them about, because those people think they should have asked for clarification in the first place.

Truly you can't win with everyone. No one can win with everyone. There is no monolith of "neurotypical communication" which resolves all these contradictions - all those people you're lumping in together under "neurotypical" have just as much trouble with each other.

[merrigel]

Sometimes your buddy tells you to do smth with your OCs and things spiral out of control?? (song is Lost Library by Louie Zong!)

[duracel-battery]

crowley is so funny bc he's down bad for dean but unlike cas he's able to multitask and NOT make it his whole personality.

like yeah he wants him smth bad but he's also got a job so

[silvermoon424]

[hellacioushag]

this mentality is SO WEIRD some of you clearly were not around for superwholock and it shows.

this obsession with needing to only ship something canon or to prove your ship is better because you think it will be canon... SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP! it shouldn't matter if people are shipping something that is or is not canon. let us play in our respective spaces and enjoy the content we want. it hurts literally nobody if fanart or fics are made for a couple that isn't canon. if it's upsetting to see then blacklist the tag and grow up.

[a-compass-without-a-needle]

This is what happened after 3.1 isn't it?