#was 100% the correct option

[docholligay]

What's the three best and three worst places you've been?

I assume this is like, cities, and not, you know, prison.

Cities to which I very likely can and will return someday I enjoyed them so much:

London, UK

Boston, USA

Minneapolis, USA

Glasgow, UK (I know this is four I know I know shut up)

Cities where I am unlikely ever to darken their door except by absolute necessity:

St. Louis, USA

Cambridge, UK

Atlanta, USA

I enjoy so many more places than I do not enjoy, and this was shockingly hard for me in the positive to narrow it down to three. I have friends outside of London and Boston, and so I had to think carefully on whether or not that affected my answer. I enjoy seeing them, and so that's always a positive.

So, what cities would I return to outside of getting to see a single person I know? The other problem with this is I'll go almost fucking anywhere, I am a very adaptable person and find many ways to have a good time. Even NYC, which was very very hard for me the first time I went, I think I've figured out how to have a great time there. So even my bottom of the barrel, given a cheap and easy chance, I'd probably give another shot, just with knowing what I know now and trying to massage the things I didn't like.

London: Samuel Johnson said that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life, and that's remained true for me. Not only is there a lot to do--this is true of many big cities--but the vibe of the city is much more low to the ground is the only way I can think of to say it, compared to NYC and LA, both of which genuinely have a lot offer but feel extremely frenetic to me in a way London does not. Narrowly beat out Paris simply because the subway is better than Paris'. Also it is I think more chill than Paris, but I sort of like the ways Paris is out of its mind.

Boston: This is another one I would call "Low to the ground" in a way that I think makes no sense to anyone but me. It feels like people live in Boston. Also I eat my weight in oysters at least once a trip. Great food scene on both expensive and cheap ends.

Minneapolis: The whole world is sleeping on Minneapolis. They have a rapidly growing food scene, great craft beer scene, the sculpture park is immense amounts of fun even in winter (a/n: I am cold-hardy), and minnesota nice is a REAL thing. We walked into a brewery and were standing at the counter, I said something offhandedly to Jetty about how it was real wet and cold out that day, and the guy at the counter was like, "Oh you don't have to buy a beer just to get out of the cold! Go ahead." I wanted the beer, mind, but I thought the attitude was great. We went to a piano bar that made its own mini pop tarts that were shockingly great, also go to Black Sheep Coal Fired for pizza.

Glasgow: I will spend the rest of my natural life trying to talk people into going to Glasgow, and probably fail because everyone wants to go fucking Edinburgh because it's instagrammable and ~'arry Potter~ and whatever. Anyhow, I did not hate Edinburgh at all despite that bitter little screed, but much like Minneapolis, people are sleeping on Glasgow. Great boutique hotels at extremely fair prices, amazing Indian food (Dishoom did beat Mother India out, but damn is it close as fuck, and Ashoka won for me for casual Indian), and again, like Minneapolis: The people. Are so. Nice. Legit if I had left my passport on a bus in any other city I feel I would have been fucked, but on a weekend, the bus system and the extremely nice people at the coffee shop were all working to try and get it back to me (and we did!) And the gal at our little hotel took time to chat with us every evening (full disclosure: She was Irish, and when she found out we were from a rural part of America, she spent so so much time trying to talk us into rural Ireland for our next trip, because we'd love the vibe of it. Someday), and I had the ABSOLUTE WORST old fashioned of my life made by the most amazingly kind woman in history, and I drank the whole thing and thanked her profusely. The pub near our hotel was incredible and homey (little boutique hotels are in neighborhoods there. Fantastic.) Glaswegians GET THEIR PARTY ON EARLY, mind.

[ddarker-dreams]

there needs to be a name for the emotion you experience when you can tell a guy's about to turn a normal convo into something real awkward

[angelic-waffles]

Ima be so fr the way I see people living in The Slendermansion is like

So obviously his proxies are there right? But then everyone else(the supernatural things and killers and shit) kind of just… showed up.

I like to think Slenderman like demanded they leave and they just kinda… didn’t. And now he essentially runs a group home crime organization he didn’t even want because why even fight it anymore?

[makshu]

"What's your biggest regret?" - GM

"Not having died before" - Joui Jouki

-

"If you could change everything, rewrite everything. What would you change?" - GM as the energy entity

"To have gotten out of this right at the beginning" - Rubens Naluti

[nerdie-faerie]

So I'm supposed to be in London tomorrow for a 9am meeting. Just went to check my ticket which I specified I wanted to arrive at 8am for..... and it departs at 11:35pm and gets me there....... the day after my appointment 🤦‍♀️

[zeawesomebirdie]

Genuinely i am so irrationally excited to get a cute pretty notebook to take notes on my cooking and baking adventures with, like. The whimsy!! The glamour!!! The !!!!

[nesurii]

PYRUS; a default + non default skinblend

default replacement skin + non default faceoverlay

for infants to elders, unisex

eye preset + weight friendly

uses my anatomically correct body

default skin in 2 options: V1 with defined nose and V2 with softer nose

faceoverlay in the options above + one extra, all 3 in 100% and 65% opacity options

credits: @sims3melancholic, @obscurus-sims

download folder: SFS | patreon extra previews under the read more >

faceoverlay comparison |

( pyrus skinoverlay > v1 > v2 )

( ea > pyrus skinoverlay at 65% opacity > also 65% )

female body preview* |

*the male, child, toddler & infant body is more or less the same as EAs, they have the same belly button and collar bones as pictured above, the rest isn’t edited much.

@mmfinds

[gibbearish]

does anyone know of a yknow. chill youtuber who's looking for a captioner

[deathxproof-archive]

doing a tensimm rp in which they effectively got themselves exiled from the TARDIS and kicked out onto Earth for doing Too Much Fuckshit (long story) and it has occurred to me that in these circumstances I could give simm!master a little job. and there are many good options that I’m considering, but my boyfriend literally always manages to kill me with their suggestions: gucci sales attendant

[alfheimr]

My Favorite Cheap Art Trick: Gradient Maps and Blending Modes

i get questions on occasion regarding my coloring process, so i thought i would do a bit of a write up on my "secret technique." i don't think it really is that much of a secret, but i hope it can be helpful to someone. to that end:

this is one of my favorite tags ive ever gotten on my art. i think of it often. the pieces in question are all monochrome - sort of.

the left version is the final version, the right version is technically the original. in the final version, to me, the blues are pretty stark, while the greens and magentas are less so. there is some color theory thing going on here that i dont have a good cerebral understanding of and i wont pretend otherwise. i think i watched a youtube video on it once but it went in one ear and out the other. i just pick whatever colors look nicest based on whatever vibe im going for.

this one is more subtle, i think. can you tell the difference? there's nothing wrong with 100% greyscale art, but i like the depth that adding just a hint of color can bring.

i'll note that the examples i'll be using in this post all began as purely greyscale, but this is a process i use for just about every piece of art i make, including the full color ones. i'll use the recent mithrun art i made to demonstrate. additionally, i use clip studio paint, but the general concept should be transferable to other art programs.

for fun let's just start with Making The Picture. i've been thinking of making this writeup for a while and had it in mind while drawing this piece. beyond that, i didn't really have much of a plan for this outside of "mithrun looks down and hair goes woosh." i also really like all of the vertical lines in the canary uniform so i wanted to include those too but like. gone a little hog wild. that is the extent of my "concept." i do not remember why i had the thought of integrating a shattered mirror type of theme. i think i wanted to distract a bit from the awkward pose and cover it up some LOL but anyway. this lack of planning or thought will come into play later.

note 1: the textured marker brush i specifically use is the "bordered light marker" from daub. it is one of my favorite brushes in the history of forever and the daub mega brush pack is one of the best purchases ive ever made. highly recommend!!!

note 2: "what do you mean by exclusion and difference?" they are layer blending modes and not important to the overall lesson of this post but for transparency i wanted to say how i got these "effects." anyway!

with the background figured out, this is the point at which i generally merge all of my layers, duplicate said merged layer, and Then i begin experimenting with gradient maps. what are gradient maps?

the basic gist is that gradient maps replace the colors of an image based on their value.

so, with this particular gradient map, black will be replaced with that orangey red tone, white will be replaced with the seafoamy green tone, etc. this particular gradient map i'm using as an example is very bright and saturated, but the colors can be literally anything.

these two sets are the ones i use most. they can be downloaded for free here and here if you have csp. there are many gradient map sets out there. and you can make your own!

you can apply a gradient map directly onto a specific layer in csp by going to edit>tonal correction>gradient map. to apply one indirectly, you can use a correction layer through layer>new correction layer>gradient map. honestly, correction layers are probably the better way to go, because you can adjust your gradient map whenever you want after creating the layer, whereas if you directly apply a gradient map to a layer thats like. it. it's done. if you want to make changes to the applied gradient map, you have to undo it and then reapply it. i don't use correction layers because i am old and stuck in my ways, but it's good to know what your options are.

this is what a correction layer looks like. it sits on top and applies the gradient map to the layers underneath it, so you can also change the layers beneath however and whenever you want. you can adjust the gradient map by double clicking the layer. there are also correction layers for tone curves, brightness/contrast, etc. many such useful things in this program.

let's see how mithrun looks when we apply that first gradient map we looked at.

gadzooks. apologies for eyestrain. we have turned mithrun into a neon hellscape, which might work for some pieces, but not this one. we can fix that by changing the layer blending mode, aka this laundry list of words:

some of them are self explanatory, like darken and lighten, while some of them i genuinely don't understand how they are meant to work and couldn't explain them to you, even if i do use them. i'm sure someone out there has written out an explanation for each and every one of them, but i've learned primarily by clicking on them to see what they do.

for the topic of this post, the blending mode of interest is soft light. so let's take hotline miamithrun and change the layer blending mode to soft light.

here it is at 100% opacity. this is the point at which i'd like to explain why i like using textured brushes so much - it makes it very easy to get subtle color variation when i use this Secret Technique. look at the striation in the upper right background! so tasty. however, to me, these colors are still a bit "much." so let's lower the opacity.

i think thats a lot nicer to look at, personally, but i dont really like these colors together. how about we try some other ones?

i like both of these a lot more. the palettes give the piece different vibes, at which point i have to ask myself: What Are The Vibes, Actually? well, to be honest i didn't really have a great answer because again, i didn't plan this out very much at all. however. i knew in my heart that there was too much color contrast going on and it was detracting from the two other contrasts in here: the light and dark values and the sharp and soft shapes. i wanted mithrun's head to be the main focal point. for a different illustration, colors like this might work great, but this is not that hypothetical illustration, so let's bring the opacity down again.

yippee!! that's getting closer to what my heart wants. for fun, let's see what this looks like if we change the blending mode to color.

i do like how these look but in the end they do not align with my heart. oh well. fun to experiment with though! good to keep in mind for a different piece, maybe! i often change blending modes just to see what happens, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. i very much cannot stress enough that much of my artistic process is clicking buttons i only sort of understand. for fun.

i ended up choosing the gradient map on the right because i liked that it was close to the actual canary uniform colors (sorta). it's at an even lower opacity though because there was Still too much color for my dear heart.

the actual process for this looks like me setting my merged layer to soft light at around 20% opacity and then clicking every single gradient map in my collection and seeing which one Works. sometimes i will do this multiple times and have multiple soft light and/or color layers combined.

typically at this point i merge everything again and do minor contrast adjustments using tone curves, which is another tool i find very fun to play around with. then for this piece in particular i did some finishing touches and decided that the white border was distracting so i cropped it. and then it's done!!! yay!!!!!

this process is a very simple and "fast" way to add more depth and visual interest to a piece without being overbearing. well, it's fast if you aren't indecisive like me, or if you are better at planning.

let's do another comparison. personally i feel that the hint of color on the left version makes mithrun look just a bit more unwell (this is a positive thing) and it makes the contrast on his arm a lot more pleasing to look at. someone who understands color theory better than i do might have more to say on the specifics, but that's honestly all i got.

just dont look at my layers too hard. ok?

[cheswirls]

i took 2 quizzes that assign you a mbti type to match your quiz type (one of them was that candy/relationship one that's actually SO cute) and both of them were so close yet so wrong

[pluto-sims]

Groovy - A Wallpaper

breaking news! eli uploads more wallpaper! ground-breaking! unprecedented! listen sometimes you just get an urge to make some mid mod wallpaper, blink, and suddenly have 32 swatches. what can i say! It's simple, but I had a lot of fun doing all the colour variations, and hopefully some of you will like 'em too!

@maxismatchccworld @emilyccfinds @mmfinds @mmoutfitters

details and download under the cut >:)

Details

BGC Wallpaper

All three wall heights

16 different colour variations, each with white and brown panelling options for a total of 32 swatches

Custom thumbnail, correct colour tags

aaaaaaaaand thats it lmao. i KNOW its super basic but honestly i really enjoyed it ashgfds, i always forget how much i like making wallpapers until i do it again and am like, oh shit this slaps. so i might do some more 60s-ish patterned wallpapers in these colour palettes :O

And ofc thank you to all the creators of the cc items used in the preview pics! If anyone has any wcif pls don't be afraid to ask!

anyway, as always, please let me know if there's any issues at all, and if not, i hope you enjoy!

Download: curseforge / patreon (both 100% free to everyone, always.)

[touyahoedoroki]

I literally can’t stand hox copium

[cacowhistle]

was just talking to my mom about what just happened and yk what fuck it ill say it here too:

stop focusing on making sure you're NOT doing the WRONG thing.

focus on doing the right thing

not every choice you make can be 100% morally correct. thats just a part of the world we live in. if youre an american citizen and youre able to vote, you need to vote blue. biden sucks. hes a terrible person. but the other option, the only other one with the potential to win? he will make everything so much worse.

take inspiration from france and the uk. make the rough choice so you can fight for a better tomorrow. because if you dont, we wont even be able to fight anymore.

[cyphyree]

FREE RICE - Official UN World Food Program free nonprofit game that Feeds those in Need!! https://freerice.com/

What does it do?

You play simple trivia games in-browser, and for every correct answer you will help raise "rice" (meaning money to go into emergency relief such as rice and other foods) to help feed those most in need.

Freerice officially works with the United Nations World Food Program (see: https://unric.org/en/freerice/ ), which serves, as of writing:

State of Palestine

Afghanistan

Ethiopia

Ukraine

Sudan

Yemen

See more listed here: https://www.wfp.org/emergencies, as linked from Freerice

How does it work?

Private sponsors now match the rice grains earned in the game. Every question you answer correctly earns 10 grains of rice, triggering a financial payment to WFP. The donations generated through Freerice help support WFP's work in emergencies around the world. (source: https://freerice.com/frequently-asked-questions )

100% of all funds generated via Freerice go to the World Food Programme. Freerice does not earn or keep any money it raises.(source: https://freerice.com/about-us)

Important Notes!

If nothing shows up when you hit "PLAY GAME," try enabling cookies to reveal the site shown above

Making an account is OPTIONAL, not having one does not lessen your impact

Can be used towards virtual community service (download a certificate to fill out yourself)

Freerice has no time limit and perfect for using in conjunction with arab.org, a single click website for various good causes