I Do Not Want To Be Here.

A bit of a strange question, but if there were any of your videos you were to "remake" today for any reason (ex: you feel like you misrepresented the original text or spread misinformation), which would it be and why? None of them is a perfectly valid answer

Again: bit of a strange question, but I've been thinking about my own creations and how I could have done so much better with some of them, but I also know that is a sign of my growth and constantly chasing "what if I did this instead" isn't always healthy for nurturing a creative mindset, and I was wondering what your opinion might be as a Creator of Things with a bit more experience than I

There's been a few trope talks where I've thought later of other angles I could've explored that might warrant sequels or part 2s, but I don't dislike any of the summaries enough to justify a rework.

I always find "I could've done this better if I made it now" to be a bit of a fallacy. I'm only better at making things now because I made all those earlier things. If I knew everything I'd learn from making a project before I started the project, it wouldn't come out the same.

I think when it comes to the "rework remake perfect" instinct, it helps to zero in on what the impulse is really grounded in. In my experience, more often than not, it's not actually about making the art better, except incidentally. It's usually about showing that you are better. It's demonstrating your competence and your higher standards and your skills, and more importantly it's overwriting the proof that you were once less than perfect. If people look at your old work and think that's all you're capable of, they'll be judging you poorly!

If that's the motivator, it's a very unhelpful one. You can't control for being harshly or incorrectly judged. It's a fruitless effort to stave off potentially upsetting outdated criticism, and it's not even going to work. Fear of critique is an unreliable and untrustworthy motivator.

If it really is about making the art itself better, perfecting your magnum opus with your newly leveled-up skills, that's a little more solid. But from where I'm standing, it's always better to use those skills to make something new instead of polishing something old. The older, unpolished work has already acquired its audience that finds it appealing for reasons that might never occur to you. Trying to bury or overwrite it just deprives that audience of the thing they like, and maybe makes them feel bad for having liked it in the first place. Also, usually when you look back on the older work, you'll conclude that the problem is everything and it'll need to be torn down and started from scratch. I know when I revisited the first three chapters of the comic, when I let my critic brain spin up, it wasn't shading or lineart I wanted to fix - it was panel composition, overall pacing, the entire structure of the chapters as a whole. I would've had to make them all over again to be happy with them, and they wouldn't be the same story by the end.

I've been thinking a lot about the Discworld through this lens lately. It ended up over 40 books long, but everyone agrees that the first two are not what you should start with, because they're the worst ones. They're entirely parodic, purely referential of at-the-time major fantasy series, and borderline mean-spirited in places. If you haven't read Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and Dragonriders of Pern, you're not gonna understand like a full 50% of The Colour Of Magic.

It's clear that when he started in on them, Pratchett was entirely focused on taking the piss out of a genre he found mostly shallow and unimpressive. But the Discworld wouldn't leave his head, and everything he made fun of he clearly eventually found himself overthinking. He'd make little one-off jokes in the early books about Dwarves having no women and a hundred words for gold, and then twenty books later he'd have a Dwarf gender revolution make waves across the Disc, and then he'd write Thud!, a book that delves deeper into the nuances of Dwarf societal structure than Tolkien ever did.

If you look for them, there are continuity errors everywhere in Discworld. In his introductory book, Carrot defused a dwarf bar full of rowdy brawlers by guilting them all into writing to their poor lonely mothers back home. Shortly thereafter, Carrot will be outraged at the mere concept of an openly female dwarf. Pratchett even eventually wrote Thief of Time, a book that loosely explains that the Disc makes no sense because history has been broken and put back together incorrectly twice, and therefore any continuity errors are because of that.

He's the writer. He could've gone back and fixed it, edited the reprints to be less disruptively discontinuous with the later books. Instead he continuously moved forward and allowed the world he made to grow without cutting it off from its roots. And because he didn't bury his older, far worse work, we have the privilege of following the Disc's evolution from the very start, and seeing how this shallow, stock fantasy world parody became something incredibly rich and complex without ever pretending like its early installments never happened.

Anyway, that's why I think it's better to move forward. You make more good stuff that way.

It’s a shiny rock, what’s not to like?

this is it. the dumbest thing I've ever drawn.

bonus (technically a spoiler for an unintroduced character)

Does it count as a shitpost if you spend a total of 10 hours on it?

I call this one ✨The model squad✨

Apologies about the quality, I have been trying to fix it but Tumblr fa***ng keeps on degrading it.

How do you manage to motivate yourself when you're feeling tired or depressed?

Usually I try to give myself time to rest until those feelings lessen, since they're generally symptomatic of having pushed too hard, but on occasions where tiredness seems to be getting a little too cozy with depression, there's a few things I do.

I've observed in myself a habit of sort of… waiting in a holding pattern for something to push me into action. "Something" isn't defined clearly, but it becomes a real problem on depressed or low-executive-function days. This might just BE what low executive function feels like, tbh; like there's some invisible trigger and I can't Do The Thing until something trips it. When I notice I'm stuck in a holding pattern, I have a few tricks to snap myself out of it:

Flip a coin. Heads I get up and Do The Thing, tails I don't. The simple act of challenging myself is enough to motivate me sometimes, regardless of the outcome, but sometimes this makes me realize that I am legitimately tired, so I stay put and recharge a little until I want to flip for it again.

Set a five- or ten-minute timer and do whatever I need to do until the timer runs out. An artificial deadline can bypass the holding pattern. Sometimes this gives me momentum, and when the timer runs out I keep going. Sometimes this does NOT build momentum, and I crash after the timer runs out - but I crash with five more minutes of progress done. Any progress is better than no progress.

Assume Direct Control. This one only works sometimes, but sometimes it's as simple as breaking down a list of individual units of tangible progress - Get Off Of Bed, Put On Pants, Plug In Tablet, Etc Etc - and just grab the manual controls in my brain and make myself do each thing in turn. Sometimes I'll assume direct control to make myself take a Stupid Mental Health Walk, which has thus far worked every time to improve my mood and energy even though when I am in a Low Mood the last thing I want to do is subject myself to the mortifying ordeal of wearing pants and dealing with people.

I also find that sometimes it's helpful to pull the thread of what you're waiting for. Sometimes I'll realize I've locked myself into a weird paralysis because I've accidentally made something a prerequisite for other tasks. For example, I might realize I'm feeling weirdly frozen and uncomfortable because I haven't taken out the trash, and I've told myself I can't do X Y and Z until the trash is taken out, but I don't want to take out the trash, so I've locked X Y and Z behind Unpleasant Task in a subconscious attempt to motivate myself to Do The Task but instead I've just dramatically reduced the number of things I feel I can do. Often just noticing this pattern is enough to break out of it.

I also find that sometimes the invisible trigger I'm waiting for is just waiting to want to do something. That is unfortunately a trap. There are many things you can enjoy or benefit from without wanting to do them beforehand, because the thought of it is unpleasant or scary or anxiety-inducing or otherwise loaded down with what-ifs and caveats. I will never WANT to have a doctor's appointment, but I feel very good AFTER arranging and going to one. I very rarely WANT to exercise, but after the fact I feel very rewarded and more confident in my abilities. I've only WANTED to go on like a third of the walks I've taken this year, but every single one of them has been pleasant and beneficial to my mental health. Sometimes you just gotta say "I don't WANT to do it, but I'll be glad I did it" and manually pilot yourself into Doing It.

Here is a more lighthearted one: Either Sanguinius or Fulgrim is helping Magnus fix his tangled hair.

Venting time...

Doodle requests are open!

The way VR-LA becomes a Cleric is so hilarious when zoomed out at the right angle. Mans literally said 'consider it a prayer' and ACTED SURPRISED when Mystra gave him a littol pat on the head and began treating him like her special littol pet cleric boy. Like VR-LA you HAVE to know Mystra's modern worship primarily consists of 'Dear Mystra: I would appreciate if you did not let my spell fuck up, please and thank you.' and 'Dear Mystra: I am in need of some divine inspiration for this spell, if that is okay.' Then you turned around and just HANDED HER THE COMPASS ON THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN YOUR GODDAMN LIFE and said 'You. I want You to help me. Consider this a uniquely religious act of outreach. Also I Do Not Trust You.'

Interplanar goddess sees some robot peering through The Weave, a thing no one else to her memory has done because How And Why The Fuck Would You Do That??? Decides to appear before him to get a good look at this guy and says One Word to him, then a week later he cosmically pages her personal phone number saying 'Okay don't freak out but I found your number because I need your help with something Incredibly Personal To Me. If you'd please. Also I've functionally already contractually obligated you to do this.'

Girl raises an eyebrow, thinks 'Oh, this little dude's exactly the right flavor of fucked up', and proceeds to hold his littol hand through the big scary mission he asked her to hold his hand for and trusting him to be a good boy who makes good decisions. He would say he asked for her help and guidance, a completely different thing from holding hands. He has not let go. He has actively gotten More Invested in this relationship to divinity.

And then AS-TR spells out the big important lesson he learned that led him to lean into the Cleric thing and he just goes '... Oh. Yes.'

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

His Name.