Latest Posts by chickabot - Page 2

dear campanella

technodad has some good advice.

Parasite and Girl

Tell me a soft memory

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 :/

the concept of the admirers of knights giving them tokens or "favors" to show their love before a tournament or battle has me so fucked up today. like it's such a small gesture but it speaks volumes. i cannot be there in body next to you in the dust and blood and pain to share your victory or defeat, your suffering or your celebration, because honor and duty and social convention requires that i be elsewhere, so wear me over your heart so that my own might go with you. i cannot keep you safe but if you wear my love perhaps the world and its people will be kinder to one it knows has another waiting for it to rejoin them. nobody else might even know who the ribbon tied to your arm or flower tucked in your breastplate belongs to unless they saw us exchange it, but you and i know. and they will know that we exist. they will know that our love exists.

ohhh october be kind. on god be kind

I think passion as humanity's driving force is widely misunderstood. Like sure, people driven by their love and passion for what they do have made more individual advances to art and sciences than people driven by milder, more rational motives, but claiming that passion is the most efficient driver for human progress would be like claiming that the water-cooled 7.7mm Vickers medium machine gun is the most efficient way to heat water for tea. That's really just not how it works, and thank goodness it isn't.

Most people just don't have that kind of a passion. That's a good thing. Most people don't have six fingers, either, and not being born with an unusual quirk doesn't mean that you're lacking or incomplete. You're lucky if you don't, because most of the time, the successful people who were driven there by passion for what they do are a not a fair selection, it's 100% survivor bias.

People who are passionate about one thing and one thing only don't get to choose what they're passionate about. If you ask them, they'll tell you they wouldn't trade their own thing for anything else in the world, and of course they wouldn't - just like a parent in a birth ward being handed their own baby wouldn't trade that one for any other baby in the world. It's special and you love this one because this one is yours.

And having something you're passionate about doing means you can't be stopped from doing it. Even you can't stop yourself from doing it. Even if it isn't useful, if it isn't productive, if it isn't profitable, your tracks still can't get turned any other way. If your passion cannot be turned into a career, the best that a therapist can do is get you to grudgingly agree it's best to get a day job that you don't care about so you can do the one thing you want to do on your free time.

The people with a passionate fixation on hard sciences, who become astrophycisists or theoretical mathematicians purely because they are passionate about doing it are rare outliers. Not equally rare, but far lesser known ones, are porn artists. Not even shitting you - there seems to be an absolutely bizarre amount of them out there who originally started drawing because they personally happened to have a fetish so bizarrely niche and specific that they couldn't find any porn of it, and saw no other choice than to draw it themselves. And then cultivated remarkable skills over the years, because they fucking love drawing that one specific thing.

Anyway, I have theories about the sources of the remarkable amounts of money that clearly frequently exchange hands in the furry community.

tattoo design i did for @coucheddie ! this was such a fun project 💗

aww, they got married <3

“蔵焼けて 障るものなき 月見哉 (Since my house burned down I now own a better view of the rising moon)”

—

Mizuta Masahide, 17th Century Japanese Poet & Samurai (via

missjodi)

Chao Xing and the Tigers series!

the happy sunshine whumpee having their past shown to their team, and it’s the most violent, brutal torture anyone has ever seen. “it was a long time ago” they try and say, “don’t worry, i barely even remember it” they try and soothe. but the recordings keep playing and playing, with every scream their eyes grow more and more distant, and the careful persona they’ve crafted slips away. by the time the recordings are finished, the team are eyeing them with worry, whumpee wont talk, and their eyes are clouded over. their knuckles turn white as they ball their fists, leaving the room before anyone can say a thing.

This was meant to be a quick warm up, but it turned into a comic that I’ve wanted to draw for a while. This is something that is extremely important to me, and I appreciate it if you read it.

A while ago, I heard a story that broke my heart. A family went a cat shelter to adopt. The daughter fell in love with a 3-legged cat. The father straight up said “absolutely not”. Because he was missing a leg. That cat was that close to having a family that loved him, but the missing leg held him back. Why?!

Many people have the initial instinct of “nope” when they see an imperfect animal. I get it, but less-adoptable does NOT mean less loveable. 9 out of 10 people will choose a kitten over an adult cat. And those 10% that would get an adult cat often overlook “different” animals.

All I want people to do is be open to the idea of having a “different” pet in their lives. Choose the pet that you fall in love with, but at least give all of them a fair shot at winning your heart.

Don’t dismiss them, they deserve a loving home just as much as any other cat. They still purr, they still love a warm lap, they still play, they still love you. Trust me, next time you are in the market for a new kitty, just go over to that one cat that’s missing an eye and see what he’s all about!

Fandom is not an obligation.

It is not a job.  It is not school.  It is not a contract.   Participation in fandom is voluntary and it is not binding (commissions and paid work aside).

Yes, within fandom you should be bound by some sense of ethics or general decency: don’t steal art and fic, don’t willfully deceive people, don’t be a jerk or a garbage human, and so on and so forth.  But everything else?  The writing fic and the doing and the participation?  It is voluntary.

So if you are writing a fic and you’re seven chapters in and you have eight chapters to go and you’re just tired and you don’t want to do it any more?  You can stop.  If you’ve been running a blog and writing about every single episode of every new anime show that’s come out and you can’t for three weeks?  Don’t.  If you told your 5 billion followers you were gonna post a piece of fanart and you’re just sick of it and you don’t want to do it any more?  Give it up.

Sure, people will be disappointed and upset and some will complain.  But life is disappointing and upsetting sometimes, and it goes on, and no one can sue you for not finishing a fic that they were enjoying the hell out of for free.  No one can accuse you of not living up to the terms of your contract when you don’t post that fanart you mentioned three weeks ago.  Because fandom is voluntary.  It’s something that you participate in because it’s fun or fulfilling or important to you, and when it stops being those things, you should stop, too.

You are not bound by the asks in your inbox.  You are not bound by comments on a fic or a piece of art.  You are not bound, in fandom, by other people’s disappointments or their expectations. 

Fandom is voluntary.  Don’t let people pressure you into thinking that it is anything else.

"Let the red dawn surmise / What we shall do, / When this blue starlight dies / And all is through"

This is a long scrolling comic I started in 2019 that won't look good uploaded here as a complete image. I'm sure I could divide it up in a way that Tumblr would like, but I also have worked on this for a long time and would like to post it and yeet myself off to read a good book. So HEY! Follow one of the two links here to see the complete comic (or download the full PNG from the Patreon post)!

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/cassildas-song-72323431

Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/post/Cassildas-Song--Critical-Role-comic-B0B2F6Y32

for real once you realize that you can actually wear whatever you want and call yourself whatever name and pronouns you want and have whatever interests you want and be whatever gender you want your life gets so much better and more fun

The Wild Hunt (tumblr post)

My art for The Wild Hunt, in collaboration with @sparxwrites​. I had a lot of fun working on this : )

Like whump? Like Percy? Like badassery, or have a hankering for an epic c1 oneshot? If any of these qualifiers catch your attention, this is the story for you!

New more mature way of dealing with being bad at things I thought i would be good at

tozozozo

This video made me cry so I wanted to put it here

sometimes, it dawns on me just how incredibly happy i am that fanfic exists as a medium. like, the amount of experiences had, the excitement and thrills and tears and joy—and more—that writers of fic can give to so, so many people... it's immeasurable; it's wonderful.

and just. what an amazing thought, you know? in a world where we're all struggling to get by, recognising this beautiful thing we have created, knowing that we're all sharing in taking some sort of pleasure/lesson/comfort etc from reading and/or writing it?

that's really special.

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.  

laser tag places are always like “no running, no laying down, no touching, waah waah we can’t afford the liability insurance.” boring. where do i go for the  underground full-contact laser tag where i can tackle people from on top of the crates.

Whenever a new fantasy/historical drama comes out I eagerly look forward to the rants from the handful of people I follow on here who are deeply into historical fashion and costuming. It's like

??

BROOOO TUMBLR CHEWED AND SNEEZED ON THE QUALITY OF THIS WTF

not to oversimplify an extremely complex discipline but if i had to pick one tip to give people on how to have more productive interactions with children, especially in an instructive sense, its that teaching a kid well is a lot more like improv than it is like error correction and you should always work on minimizing the amount of ‘no, wrong’ and maximizing the amount of ‘yes, and?’ for example: we have a species of fish at the aquarium that looks a lot like a tiny pufferfish. children are constantly either asking us if that’s what they are, or confidently telling us that’s what they are. if you rush to correct them, you risk completely severing their interest in the situation, because 1. kids don’t like to engage with adults who make them feel bad and 2. they were excited because pufferfish are interesting, and you have not given them any reason to be invested in non-pufferfish. Instead, if you say something like “It looks a LOT like a tiny pufferfish, you’re right. But these guys are even funnier. Wanna know what they’re called?” you have primed them perfectly for the delightful truth of the Pacific Spiny Lumpsucker

Look, I know facile trope inversion is for weenies, but I still really want to see a JRPG-style game where the shouty teenage boy who gives long speeches about the power of friendship is the fragile healer and the girl with the gentle piano-and-strings theme song and self-sacrificing “must save everyone” attitude is the melee tank. I don’t think I’m being unreasonable here.