I Swear This Post Deserves To Be Considered A Piece Of National History Or Something

So, let me guess– you just started a new book, right? And you’re stumped. You have no idea how much an AK47 goes for nowadays. I get ya, cousin. Tough world we live in. A writer’s gotta know, but them NSA hounds are after ya 24/7. I know, cousin, I know. If there was only a way to find out all of this rather edgy information without getting yourself in trouble…

You’re in luck, cousin. I have just the thing for ya.

It’s called Havocscope. It’s got information and prices for all sorts of edgy information. Ever wondered how much cocaine costs by the gram, or how much a kidney sells for, or (worst of all) how much it costs to hire an assassin?

I got your back, cousin. Just head over to Havocscope.

((PS: In case you’re wondering, Havocscope is a database full of information regarding the criminal underworld. The information you will find there has been taken from newspapers and police reports. It’s perfectly legal, no need to worry about the NSA hounds, cousin ;p))

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this is so beautiful

my favourite thing about history (and the reason why social history matters to me above anything else) is the reminder that there's no emotion i've felt, no grief or trauma, no joy or laughter, that hasn't been experienced by other people across time and space, and the idea of slipping into another life so different on the surface and yet so fundamentally similar to my own, and understanding them as a life like my own, with inner worlds that can't be easily articulated, with loved ones and favourite foods and days they woke up having slept wrong and the acute experiences of standing in a quiet room and watching the light catch on dust floating in the air, of the smell outside after it rains heavily, of mornings after having dreamt something feverish and strange, or the knowledge of an impending loss and trying to prepare for it emotionally. peeling fruit and giving a piece to a friend. being awake at an hour that feels like you're the only person alive in the world. that feeling when you know you need to eat and that you're hungry but you just don't find it appealing at all and it kind of makes you feel nauseous. i like imagining people in all different places and times experiencing those things, it makes me feel less alone and afraid of myself and my experience feels less daunting if that makes sense. others have lived with experiences like this too, and do, and will.

actually, no, you no what? the funniest part of the elden ring dlc discourse isn't the Mohg situation (though that was pretty good). the funniest part of the dlc discourse was that EVERYONE, without hesitation or exception, fell in love with igon everyone really said

new story on the sister blog officially dropped! go check it out!

an old project i wanted to share. maybe I'll finish it one day when I'm less of a coward.

I'm calling this little story The Well, and the Thing Inside it. I started it way back when the Israel-Palestine situation broke out, and may have channeled a lot of my thoughts and reflections regarding it into the early drafts. I figured it would be a good time to post this little story now as opposed to later.

Please, enjoy. Thank you for reading!

Chapter One: The Boy

In the midst of the Forest there walked a boy.

Now, this in itself was not unusual; many a young boy has taken a walk through many a forest. Sometimes for the adventure, sometimes to escape the troubles of civilized life, and sometimes simply for the peace and quiet of the natural world.

However, such a boy as this, in such a Forest like this one, was utterly out of the ordinary.

He was a small, scrawny thing, dressed in worn, mismatched clothes and a frayed red winter cap sitting atop his dark, messy hair. He carried a walking stick in his hand and a full knapsack on his back, and at his side was a dog, small and scrawny as well, little more than a puppy. They both had the worn, exhausted look of something that has been walking aimlessly for a long, long time. Every now and then, the boy would glance behind him, expecting to hear the distant sounds of gunfire and bombs echoing into the sky, past the trees, and into his heart.

The war had officially been going on for a few months, but it was the product of decades of enmity and conflict that the nations of the world had stubbornly refused to put an end to. The boy didn't know much about it, he wasn't even twelve years old yet and was still focused on frivolous, innocent matters that occupy one's mind at that age. Yet even he, at eleven and a half, could tell when a conflict was his fault or not, and he knew with absolute certainty that he had nothing to do with what had happened.

For months he and his mother had gone about their lives with a steady unease, wincing each time another shootout occurred in a distant city or a government leader gave an impassioned speech to the ends of chaos and anarchy, but otherwise they did their best to just live, as they always had. So when the planes came one hot summer's day, dropping death and fire like birds with their droppings, they were distraught. Forced to evacuate their home, the boy and his mother had managed to survive the majority of the bombing for over three weeks. Most of their friends and family had been killed, much of the city had been reduced to rubble and ruin, and when the soldiers came, slaughtering civilians and resistance fighters without discrimination, it appeared there would be no escaping then.

The boy still remembered the scents of blood and metal, the dust clouding his eyes and the constant ringing in his ears, brought about by screams and explosions alike.

The boy would never forget the mind-numbing, heart-crushing sense of fear that seemed to fill the entirety of his small form.

He would never be able to bury the memories of bodies, strewn across the streets like a rowdy child's dolls, mangled and misshapen.

And, for the last three days, he hadn't stopped thinking of his mother's last words to him as she fastened a small pack of stolen provisions to his back, placed a walking stick in his hand, and adjusted the cap on his forehead, bruised from a fall he'd taken hours before:

“....you go to the woods, and you run! You don't look back, you don't stop, you run, and you run, and you run! Until the darkness can't find you anymore.... do you understand?”

The boy, shaking from nerves and fear, hadn't been able to do anything to respond. His mother, once so beautiful with her silky dark hair and big brown eyes softly glowing with warmth, looked thin, tired, and dusty. Her hair was disheveled, her breath was stale, and her eyes were pooling with tears as she gripped his shoulders tightly.

“Do you understand!?” his mother hissed, giving him a little shake to wake him from his terrified daze. Finally, he'd been able to croak out a response.

“Y-Yes, mama.”

His mother had then pulled him into a tight hug, squeezing him as though it were the last time in her life. Then, she'd kissed him on his forehead and both cheeks, and pushed him away.

He'd ran then, hating himself with every step, knowing the soldiers were getting closer to him with every moment, praying to all the angels and saints that he'd escape.

He'd met the dog along the way, a bedraggled, wretched creature, whimpering at him pathetically while he took refuge in the toppled remains of a museum. There, surrounded by desecrated reminders of the history of the greatness of mankind, the boy found himself moved by a sudden burst of pity, and he'd tossed a half-eaten hunk of rodent to the dog. It had accepted it gratefully, and had followed him ever since.

By some miracle, they'd made it to the Forest. A few other refugees had tried to make their way there, but they hadn't been seen since. It wasn't particularly large, but it was dense enough that one could potentially hide out for weeks without being found.

So hide they had, though no soldiers had been seen, no planes had flown overhead, and the explosions seemed to have stopped. Uncertainty, that special flavor of fear, had kept the boy from returning back, though he would have called it “prudence” or “caution”. He wasn't sure how long they'd been there, even though he was sure it had been at least a full three days.

Thus, the boy and his dog walked through the Forest. Two refugees, cast aside by a world that cared nothing about them, wandering through a Forest that seemed to never end. Trees in every direction, species and varieties the boy realized he'd never seen before, even if he'd spent hours running around these very woods as a child.

Those days seemed so far away now to the boy, he realized.

So long it had been, since he had felt safe, since he had felt happy, since he had felt loved. He wondered if this was the end of all of it, thousands of years of bloodshed and war to culminate in his useless birth and pathetic death.

He froze, feeling a sudden weight on his heart, and he fell to his knees. Emotion filled his chest, hot and powerful, like a foul claw, and his small body quivered as he attempted to hold in the tears that were sure to begin falling any moment.

But they never came. The heat in his chest remained, a burning flame of anger, despair, and a dozen other emotions singing his bones and searing his soul.

The dog came up to his face, nuzzling him with its wet nose and washing his face in its hot breath. The boy tried to push the dog away at first, but it only repeated its advances. The boy reluctantly let the dog approach again, gently petting its head and neck. The fire faded slightly.

He sighed, and got to his feet once again, scratching the dog behind its ears before starting again through the Forest. He couldn't lose focus. He had lived this far. There had to be some reason for that. He shouldered his back, and began anew, walking through the great Forest.

Yet a small voice seemed to whisper in the back of his mind, that there was no point. That his efforts would all come to nothing. That he was dead from the beginning and this was just him delaying the inevitable. That he ought to just lay down and die.

He pushed the thought aside, and kept walking.

eternity is real and everything you do matters

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

C.S. Lewis is one of the most culturally relevant and important authors for western society and Christians in general and i will die on this hill

I always kind of laugh when people get into the “Susan’s treatment is proof that C.S. Lewis was a misogynist” thing, because:

Polly and Digory. Peter and Susan. Edmund and Lucy. Eustace and Jill. 

Out of the eight “Friends of Narnia” who enter from our world, the male-to-female character ratio is exactly 1/1. Not one of these female characters serves as a love interest at any time. 

The Horse and His Boy, the only book set entirely in Narnia, maintains this ratio with Shasta and Aravis, who, we are told in a postscript, eventually marry. Yet even here, the story itself is concerned only with the friendship between them. Lewis focuses on Aravis’ value as a brave friend and a worthy ally rather than as a potential girlfriend–and ultimately, we realize that it’s these qualities that make her a good companion for Shasta. They are worthy of each other, equals. 

In the 1950s, there was no particularly loud cry for female representation in children’s literature. As far as pure plot goes, there’s no pressing need for all these girls. A little boy could have opened the wardrobe (and in the fragmentary initial draft, did). Given that we already know Eustace well by The Silver Chair, it would not seem strictly necessary for a patently ordinary schoolgirl to follow him on his return trip to Narnia, yet follow she does–and her role in the story is pivotal. Why does the humble cab-driver whom Aslan crowns the first King of Narnia immediately ask for his equally humble wife, who is promptly spirited over, her hands full of washing, and crowned queen by his side? Well, because nothing could be more natural than to have her there. 

None of these women are here to fill a quota. They’re here because Lewis wanted them there. 

Show me the contemporary fantasy series with this level of equality. It doesn’t exist. 

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

CLOUDPOSTING!

People are like “it’s so beautiful no clouds at all” it could use a little clouds if I had to be honest.