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Gloam eyed queen

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i feel like a victorian man seeing ankles whenever i see a shirtless man. lord.

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again and again and again and again

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Aaah, forgot I had these chairdogs from Heretics of Dune.

Along with my take on a Guild Navigator

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Looking at fonts and some of them are nice and consistent all the way through, but for some of them you look at the special symbols and go "hoo boy, zero effort went into that ampersand"

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this is supremely stupid i dont know what else to say

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More artposting today

My DM wanted me to make a sprite that matched the style of those used on Foundry. Really not my usual style re: Pixel Art and I never want to do this again, but I probably will eventually. Learned a lot.

Working some art for my ICON character. Original character and clothing design is by MyJaw @ DA

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I've started playing a modified game of RISE with @cadaver1ne and it has me drawing again, so I figure I might as well document the story of it out here. We will be playing two deific siblings writing letters back and forth on their respective journeys, and I'll post updates here as the map above changes and is explored.

Related IC letter under the snip.

To: Mine & My Own Brother. Will this message find you? I am told I have awoken. From what rest, I hardly remember. My eyes opened (did you know they could shut!?) in the upper channels of the pool of souls. I rise to... I do not know. It is dark, admittingly, Brother. The lip of my pool glows on the cavern rooftop of some bleak underbeneath. Do I remember the pool ever on the surface? Do I remember the souls like stars? Anyway, Brother. I opened my eyes to the glow, and to the paws of a Haberdasher gripping the water's edge. It tells me I am worshiped (of course) and that I have been asleep for ten thousand years (what!?). Brother, I didn't even know years could get that high. But there are men who would follow me. Haberdasher men, of course. Haberdasher women and vil and em, too, I would assume. ... Or maybe not. I don't know. I am doubting everything, now. Anyway, brother. I must advent. Exeunt. I must leave. My body did not want to leave the pool. The souls did not want me to leave, either. They clung to my body like flesh and I pulled my sorry limbs onto the rocks. Hugged me like a shawl I could not keep. The Haberdasher flinched at its deity's naked form (of course) and it did offer to make me coats. But I do not remember if I wear coats. Do you remember me, Brother? Do you even yet live, after ten thousand years on this new world? Yours & Your Own, your Sister, Vile

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Working some art for my ICON character. Original character and clothing design is by MyJaw @ DA

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This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

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on self-love

?// @heavensghost // @roach-works //Richard Bach //?// @bakwaaas // @llleighsmith // Clarice Lispector// Anonymous

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some people are so used to mostly consuming media where the women and people of color are static set dressing in stories about white men that they can't wrap their heads around the concept that female characters and characters of color can have arcs of their own. they'll see a character who's not a white man display a personality flaw that is clearly being set up to be overcome and they see it not as the setup of what promises to be an enticing character journey, but as an essential defining trait of their being, and proceed to demonize such characters for it. white men get to be dynamic and complex, women and people of color get essentialism and a pressure for likeability over good storytelling.

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probably it will be summer again by Catherine Pierce

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My lips chap so often my brain has finally retrained itself into associating the feeling of them splitting with smiling/positivity what in good fuck