One Day We Will Meet Under The Stars Again

LMAOOO someone needs to get me this sign man I'm a pro yapper

How Bokuto got through college is beyond me, but I’d still like to think he did His Very Best ™️

Lots of thoughts recently. Everything feels plastic.

I could go on and on about why all that AI "art" is bad. I could mention theft, lack of creativity, it's impact on the work field and environment, but countless people have already said all that. I wanted to touch on something that to me is the most utterly wrong about all of it.

Art is more than just something pretty to look at or listen to. It's therapeutic. It's a form of communication. A tool for human connection. It's a pure, human need.

Support real artists ☀️

Recently, and partly for personal reasons, I've been thinking of Jo's grieving process after Beth's death in Little Women.

Namely the fact that just before Beth dies, Jo seems to have beautifully come to terms with the pending loss, but afterwards, she regresses into despair.

In Jo's poem My Beth, and in her conversation with Beth after the latter reads it, she says she realizes that she's not really losing Beth, because Beth's memory and influence will always be with her, making her a better person, and because she has faith that Beth will be watching over her in heaven. The last paragraphs of "The Valley of the Shadow" seem to set up Beth's death as sad, but not a soul-crushing tragedy, because the family has already done so much preliminary mourning, because they're relieved that her suffering is over, and because they have their precious memories of her and their religious faith to comfort them.

But then after Beth actually dies, Jo does fall into deep, soul-crushing grief and depression, which includes struggling with her religious faith, and it takes her a lot of work – through talks her parents, through her writing, and eventually by finding love with Friedrich – to finally emerge from the abyss.

I guess it shows that you're never really prepared for a loved one's death, even if you think you are.

But I suppose it's not just about Beth. It's that with Beth's death, all of the same-age companions Jo grew up with are gone. That's why the chapter of her depression is called "All Alone." Meg is married, Amy and Laurie are in Europe, and Jo may have lost Laurie's friendship (she hasn't, but she doesn't know that yet) since she rejected his marriage proposal. If they were still with her, then Beth's death might not have been so shattering. I suppose that's the book's essential, bittersweet message about growing up: siblings and friends drift apart as they all build their own separate lives (and as some die young, which was more common in the 1800s), but new relationships, i.e. spouses and children, fill the void.

(A slightly depressing message for those of us who genuinely don't want to get married or have children. As much as I like Friedrich, I almost would have liked to see an ending where Jo stays a "literary spinster," not because I think it would have been more feminist, but just because it would have shown her finding happiness with her surviving family and friends. It would emphasize that she doesn't "lose" them after all, and show that you don't need to "replace" those relationships with romance or else be lonely forever.)

But I don't think it's just about that either. Beth's death also leaves Jo without a fulfilling purpose in life. Since her writing career failed in New York after she gave up sensation stories, she made caring for Beth her life's purpose, so with Beth gone, she's aimless. She thinks she has no choice left but to "take Beth's place," as Beth urged her to do, and live a quiet, domestic life of keeping house for her parents. But while Jo does those household duties well for a while, and learns their value, she isn't content with them. It was a lovely life for Beth, but it isn't who Jo is. So beyond Jo's grief and loneliness, another cause of her depression is that she's unfulfilled. This explains why writing again, and finding literary success, is such an important part of her healing process, and why she finds her ultimate joy in the very active, un-quiet life of running a boarding school for boys.

For personal reasons, I've been feeling uneasy lately about Jo's backward swing from acceptance to depression between "The Valley of the Shadow" and "All Alone." It does feel slightly as if Alcott was saying "You may think you're ready to accept a loved one's passing, but when it actually happens it will break you." But it does help to remember that the situation is more complex than that.

@littlewomenpodcast, @thatscarletflycatcher, @fandomsarefamily1966

AMBROSIA pt. I This is a world where all daily life relies on the magic of this mystical honey known as ambrosia. However, magic is starting to disappear and a princess goes to track down the origins a magic A concept project

Breeze 🎏

Cooked up smth on my other blog teehee

This has all my art and writing! Also where I go insane over Caleb (more to come soon I SWEAR ONCE I AM FREEEEE)

Finally decided to draw my OC Avalie in the LaDS AU my best friend and I are cooking up haha- I'd long promised my friends I'd be redesigning her outfit to match the game but kept putting it off and had had enough yesterday!!!

Chat, you are warned- deciding to do a 'simple' sketch while you are being crushed by five million other MORE important things to do is a folly. Your brain will try to tell you this, too. Listen to it at your own risk.

Anyways, I had so so SO much fun with this! Planning to render this differently from my other artworks, so let's see how that goes! For now, have this cutie!

Her name's Avalie Sattari (the last name means star, totally NOT related to how she wanted to belong to the same skies that called Caleb away from her nosiree) and she's a pun-making menace with a heart of gold! Said heart of gold also makes her beat people up but hey atleast she looks cute while doing it (even if she comes back injured to the annoyance of her gege)

ALSO PEEK THE LITTLE STICKERS HEHE TOTALLY NOT INFLUENCED BY MY BIASES HERE NOPE (hell the sweatshirt she's wearing is a dead giveaway if the apples around her weren't enough lmao)

There's also little duckies!!! I love my drama queen bbg Rafayel :D he and I are menaces and that is how it should be!!!!

Childhood trio Pt. Ominous positivity

MC: Everything will be ok. You can not stop it.

Caleb: Everything will be fine. You have no choice.

Zayne: What kind of pep talk is that?

Caleb: Ominous positivity.

I'm just gonna use this as my idea board now.

Prompt

Two love rivals end up spending time together while trying to impress their romantic interest. Instead, they end up impressing each other.

- submission by soft.soliloquy on Instagram

Let's go VIT!!! Not that I have any connection to it, but I'm glad to see it getting recognition. I've always seen projects like these reaching close to this but never this, and was excited to see when it would actually happen, which is actually a lot sooner than I expected!!! Priyanjali, you've done an amazing thing here and I hope it goes forward and becomes mainstream cause this is so big 🥳🥳

A computer science student named Priyanjali Gupta, studying in her third year at Vellore Institute of Technology, has developed an AI-based model that can translate sign language into English.

Me whenever I post anything anywhere (unless I forget then I remember it after five billion business years)

me: I write for myself, not validation

also me after posting a fic *refreshes ao3 every five minutes*

(two things can be true)