#yes I use my own art as reference

[soulful-soda]

How he looks at me when I lay him on the grill

[littlebit-of-art]

haven’t seen one of these for chunky people, despite how perfect our cheeks are for this

[cubedmango]

analog love 🩷

[liauditore]

Equally Invalid

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[greenbottle-kisser]

Paintmy needs to be stupider. He needs to be more Spencer-coded

[monstersinthecosmos]

gotta stop checking tumblr before I have caffeine because all my principles fly out the window and i feel like i'm gonna start being an obnoxious asshole when i see people citing events in their book posts that literally did not happen :SOB:

[antidotefortheawkward-art]

Sun Wukong's assorted lingpai (mandate tokens)

[ID: 1) An illustration of the two sides of a mostly rectangular lingpai made of wood. One side reads "令" and the other reads "弼马温", both written in seal script. The bottom of the lingpai is adorned by horses facing outwards, clouds by their feet.

2) An illustration of the two sides of a stone lingpai shaped mostly like a rectangle, but flared at the top and bottom. One side reads "令" and the other reads "美猴王", both written in seal script. The top of the lingpai is adorned with a dragon-pearl surrounded by flames and clouds. The bottom is adorned with mountains, the sea, and coral. The borders of both the top and bottom are decorated with clouds and flowers. The top is swirled in a way that resembles a lingzhi or a ruyi.

3) An illustration of the two sides of a red jade lingpai, shaped mostly like a rectangle but with a curved top. One side reads "令" and the other reads "齐天大圣", both written in seal script. The top of the lingpai is adorned by a ruyi with a flower and mountain at its center. Below the ruyi is a lotus flower, which sits on top of the forehead of a Yazi carving. Clouds extend out from either side of Yazi and below him are flowers. The two sides of the lingpai have the carvings of cloud pillars wrapped in a stylized waterfall. At the bottom are clouds which could also be the foam from the waterfall. Lotuses float atop this foam/these clouds. At the center of the bottom is a mountain with a ruyi at its foot. This ruyi also has a flower within it.

4) The lineart for the three lingpai, with accompanying commentary. The one labeled "BiMaWen" reads "carved and burned wood," "simple, only horses and clouds," and "ornamental, basically no power." The one labeled "Beautiful Monkey King" reads "carved from a chunk of Sun Wukong's stone egg," "customized from Ao family royal lingpai template," and "mostly sea, cloud, and dragon pearl imagery." The one labeled "Great Sage Equaling Heaven" reads "carved from red jade," "fully custom, in style of an emperor's lingpai but HuaGuo," and "flowers, waterfalls, mountains, ruyi, Yazi, and clouds imagery." At the side are simple doodles of the three lingpai. The first is light brown with a yellow cord, captioned "simple cord, no tassel." The second is grey with a red cord and tassel, captioned "silk cord and tassel." The third is red with a red cord and tassel, captioned "braided cord," "jade and gold accented." End ID]

[docdufresne]

Her ass is not drawing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[ziftclaw]

Haha! AUTISM.

Block Tales grabbed me y'all I'm so screwe--

1st drawing is my third drawing in this program I'm going to be using from here on out. Second is one I was just messing around with. Not going to using that one unfortunately.

[m1kas0ra]

Girl this is my first time rendering, don’t look too close then it looks fine 🥲

[call-me-cosmic]

“Now Malva, let’s not be rash—”

“That’s right, dafty! Get tae an’ don’t come back!”

I used a reference from @mellon_soup to help with the pose! 🫶

[waywardsalt]

mmmmmm two sketchbook linebecks im pretty happy with

[godofthestupid]

another art collab piece by @dragonscereals and me!

this time with Radiant Ruze(cereals') and Obsidian Ruze(mine)

and here the portraits by themselves:

and this was from where we got the base:

[v0idwraith]

why is it almost fucking impossible to get good quality photos of a pair of eyes. no google i do not want a single eye i just want a simple photo that has references for a pair of eyes that hasn’t been edited to hell and back to look more artistic is that too much to ask

[isaspsp]

Practicing drawing varied faces