Some Froggy Affirmations For You🐸💚

Persistence

When you see it, you will think it strange and pitiful, but you will flee all the same Because it stares And flight has always served you well before. You will run for awhile, and it will be gone so you will return to your business.

When you see it again, you will think it foolish. How can it be so optimistic? But you will flee again, as before Because it still stares and Because running is easy for you.

You will run fast this time, and far. You will run until you are tired, and think Surely that is all. And you will return to your business You may even forget, for awhile.

But there it is, again And it stares, again. So you run, again. And run. And run.

You run until you have run farther than you’ve ever run. You run until your blood is fire And you cannot take another step. You cannot know, how could you? You were doomed from the moment it saw you.

2&3 / 30

read all 30 

15/7 hu tao birth 🥺🌰✨🎂

"he was all alone for so long. and then... a little cat appeared." shut the fuck up this is literally what everything ever is about forever

shoutout to the slow artists. the artists with hardly any time for art. the artists who reach the end of the day with no energy for art. you got this i believe in you and you are no less valued than anyone else

reblog this to place a small, rotund ceramic animal in the palm of the person you reblogged it from

There's this weird tendency among fandom types where they'll take a character, and insist that they are fans of them, before changing their design, age, pronouns, backstory, blood type, species, hometown, favorite color, zodiac sign, medical history, and every other facet of their being.

They will then violently insist that this version is superior to the canon one and act like they "fixed" them and it's like. Buddy that's not the same character anymore. That's just your own oc commiting identity fraud. Like. I get the desire to experiment with different interpretations of a story. But first of all it's okay to just make an original character if that's what you really want to do. And second of all, are you even really a fan of the character you "fixed" if they're a completely different person afterwards?

Like. Idk dude for somebody who claims to be a fan you sure don't seem to like them as they are :/

Happy Pride!

I have only drawn Taliesan’s characters apparently 

on trust and manipulation

Back in early high school, I knew a girl - we were kinda friends by virtue of having multiple friends in common, but in hindsight, she never much liked me - who had this purebred dog. I’d met him at her place, and he wasn’t desexed, which was pretty unusual in my experience, so it stuck in the memory. And one day, as we were walking across the playground, this girl - I’ll call her Felice - said to me, “Hey, so we’re going to start using my dog as a stud.” And I’m like, Oh? And she’s like, “Yeah, we’ve been talking to breeders, we’re going to get to see his puppies and everything,” and I made interested noises because that actually sounded pretty interesting, and she went on a little bit more about how it would all work -

And then, out of nowhere, she swapped this sly look with another girl, burst out laughing and exclaimed, “God, you’re so gullible. I literally just made that up. You’ll believe anything!”

And I was just. Dumbfounded. Because I was standing there, staring at them, and they were laughing like I was an idiot, like they’d pulled this massive trick on me, and all I could think, apart from why the fuck they felt moved to do this in the first place, was that neither of them knew what gullible means. Like, literally nothing in that story was implausible! I knew she had an undesexed, male, purebred dog! It made total sense that he be used for a stud! And it wasn’t like I was getting this information from a second party - the person who actually owned the dog was telling me herself! And I felt so immensely frustrated, because they both walked off before I could figure out how to articulate that gullible means taking something unlikely or impossible at face value, whereas Felice had told me a very plausible lie, and while the end result in both cases is that the believer is tricked, the difference was that I wasn’t actually being stupid. Rather, Felice had manipulated the fact that she occupied a position of relative social trust - meaning, I didn’t have any reason to expect her to lie to me - to try and make me feel stupid.

Which, thinking back, was kind of par for the course with Felice. On another occasion, as our group was walking from Point A to Point B, I felt a tugging jostle on my school bag. I didn’t turn around, because I knew my friends were behind me, and my bag was often half-zipped - I figured someone was just shoving something back in that had fallen out, or had grabbed it in passing as they horsed around. Instead, Felice steps up beside me, grinning, and hands me my wallet, which she’d just pulled out, and tells me how oblivious I was for not noticing that she’d been rifling my bag, and how I ought to pay more attention. This was not done playfully: the clear intent, again, was to make me feel stupid for trusting that my friends - which, in that context, included her - weren’t going to fuck with me. As before, I couldn’t explain this to her, and she walked on, pleased with herself, before I could try.

The worst time, though, was when I came back from the canteen at lunch one day, and Felice, again backed up by another girl, told me that my dad had showed up on campus looking for me. By this time, you’d think I’d have cottoned on to her particular way of fucking with me, but I hadn’t, and my dad worked close enough to the school that he really could’ve stopped in. So I believed her, a strange little lurch in my stomach that I couldn’t quite place, and asked where he was. She said he’d gone looking for me elsewhere, at another building where we sometimes sat, and so I hurried off to look for him, feeling more and more anxious as I wondered why he might be there.

I was halfway across campus before I let myself remember that my mother was in hospital.

I felt physically sick. My pulse went through the roof; I couldn’t think of a reason why my dad would be at school looking for me that didn’t mean something terrible had happened to my mother, that her surgery had gone wrong, that she was sick or hurt or dying. And when my dad wasn’t where she’d said he would be, I hurried back to Felice - who was now sitting with half our mutual group of friends - only to be met with laughter. She called me gullible again, and that time, I snapped. I chased her down and punched her, and the friends who’d only just arrived, who didn’t know what had happened or why I was reacting like that, instantly took her side. Noises were made about telling the rest of our friends what I’d done, and I didn’t want them to hear Felice’s version first, so I ran off to the library, where I knew they were, to tell them first.

I walked into the library. I found our other friends. I was shaky and red-faced, and they asked me what had happened. I told them what Felice had done, that I’d hit her for it, that my mother was in hospital for an operation - something I’d mentioned in passing over the previous week; multiple people nodded in recognition - and how I’d thought Felice’s lie meant that something bad had happened. And then I burst into tears, something I almost never did, because it wasn’t until I said it out loud that I realised how genuinely frightened I’d been. I sat down at the table and cried, and a girl - I’ll call her Laurel - who I’d never really been close to - who was, in fact, much better friends with Felice than with me - put her arm around my shoulders and hugged me, volubly furious on my behalf.

And then the other girls showed up, and Laurel said, with that particular vicious sincerity that only twelve-year-olds can really muster, “Prepare to die, Felice,” and I almost wanted to laugh, but didn’t. A girl who was a close friend, who’d come in with Felice, took her side, outraged that I’d punched someone, until Laurel spoke up about my mother being in hospital, and everyone went really quiet. Which was when I remembered, also belatedly, that Laurel’s own mother was dead; had died of cancer several years previously, which explained why she of all people was so angry. I have a vivid memory of the look on Felice’s face, how she tried to play it off - she said she hadn’t known about my mother, I pointed out that I’d mentioned it multiple times at lunch that week, and she lost all high ground with everyone.    

Felice never played a trick on me again.

Eighteen years later, I still think about these incidents, not because I’m bearing some outdated grudge, but because they’re a good example of three important principles: one, that even with seemingly benign pranks, there’s a difference between acting with friendly or malicious intent; two, that ignorance of context can have a profound effect on the outcome regardless of what you meant; and three, that getting hurt by people who abuse your trust doesn’t make you gullible - it means you’re being betrayed. 

And I feel like this is information worth sharing.