Hermit in the City

I have some older art tips that I keep forgetting to post here. I'll add a few in the next few days, at least those that aren't too outdated!

This one is about giving an extra feel of weight to your characters.

mythbusters was so good because it wasn’t a killjoy show. they didn’t just say “see, it doesn’t work” and leave it there

whenever they find that the stunt doesn’t work as portrayed in the movie, they immediately ask “what would it take to make this happen?”

“we know it takes this amount of explosives to work, but what if we doubled it anyway?”

Some myths I’ll always remember:

* Are elephants scared of mice? (They only did that because they were in Africa and had access to elephants.)

* Will a bull run amok in a china shop?

* Is it better to run zig-zag or straight when chased by an alligator?

I love these because NONE of them turned out the way they expected. They went into all three with pre-conceived ideas of how it would go, and each time they “failed.” Elephants WILL cower from mice. A bull moves very gingerly through a china shop. It doesn’t matter how you run because ALLIGATORS WON’T CHASE YOU.

And each time, they reacted with just… pure glee. “Holy shit, we were wrong! Oh my god! This is great! We were so wrong!”

And that, to me, is what science is. Being excited about being wrong because either way it’s information.

What if Scotty is not actually Scottish, though? 

Like, what if his name just happens to be Montgomery Scott, so all of his friends started calling him “Scotty,” and then every time he was introduced to a new person, they would be like “Oh, are you Scottish? My uncle was Scottish!”

And finally, he just gets sick of explaining the situation, so he starts replying with “aye, laddie!” But then it turns out that the person he said that to was Captain Kirk, and he doesn’t want to admit that he lied to his new commanding officer, so he has to keep speaking in a ridiculously over-the-top brogue and commenting constantly on how much he loves drinking Scotch, and by the time that he realises that Kirk would have found humour in the situation, he’s in too deep and can’t stop pretending, and it gradually just becomes his normal speech pattern.

Then, years later, the Enterprise is being inspected by a Starfleet engineer who’s actually Scottish, and Scotty takes him on a walking tour of his warp engines and is all like “Auch! Here be me wee bairns!” and the other engineer is just like “what the fuck is wrong with you?”

I take the fact that James Doohan is Canadian as evidence of this theory.

Scotty hacking into his Starfleet personnel file to alter his place of birth.

Scotty soundproofing his quarters on the Enterprise so that no one can hear him teach himself to play the bagpipes from instructional videos.

Scotty making a great show of taking a shuttle down to Aberdeen to “visit his family” every time the Enterprise is in Earth orbit and then, once on the ground, discreetly site-to-site transporting himself to Vancouver or whatever.

None of these things are out of character or beyond his technical ability.

Yeah, but also in character: Jim Kirk has known since Day 1 that Scotty is not, in fact, Scottish, but is just sitting there waiting to see how far Scotty is willing to go to keep the story going. It started out as an “enough rope” situation but now it’s one of Jim’s greatest ongoing sources of entertainment and he wouldn’t admit at gunpoint that he knows. 

Honestly, Kirk would actively claim to have met Scotty’s Extremely Scottish Family/visited them in Aberdeen just to keep it going.

Frankly, as someone who’s paternal side is all Scottish, I simply can’t see any Scottish person not seeing this situation and running with it. Next thing Scotty knows, half of Scottish Starfleet is claiming to be his brother’s sister-in-law’s half cousin twice removed and the Loch Ness Monster has been painted on the door to his quarters. Kirk is busy dying of laughter.

…Willing to accept all the above as headcanon, on at least some level. :)

(With an unusual level of meta underneath: I spent an hour or so chatting with Jimmy Doohan on an excursion secondary to a Trek cruise in the 80s, and we came to the conclusion that we might possibly be moderately closely related [as both our paternal lines had suffered immigreation-associated changes of spelling en route to North America]. …We never went on to verify this after the fact, so… whatever. But who cares? it’s always fun to run into a new “relative.”)

...ya know, considering William Shatner is *also* Canadian (French Canadian, I think?) my new head canon is that Kirk does a "Well, French Canadians happen, why not Scottish ones?" at first blush, and the first year or so of "playing along" is entirely earnest (because cultural erasure is no joke, of course) and somewhere along the way he realized his "mistake" and is in too deep to backpedal now! XD

The main bundle has 69 (heh) games for $60. The sister bundle has 66 games for $10.

The sale runs Feb 10-24, 2023

The thing that I really don’t get about Harry Potter fans who are desperately trying to justify playing the incredibly antisemitic new game is… why aren’t y’all the most mad about this? Like the correct response to “they turned my favorite piece of wizard school childhood nostalgia into literal blood libel” is “WOW FUCK THAT”, not “oh ok, then I guess I like blood libel now :)” How do you diehards not see turning your fandom into actual pro-genocide propaganda as a betrayal? Why aren’t those of you who still love Harry Potter mad as hell that Hogwarts Legacy exists, and shouting that from every possible rooftop that no one should play it?

(…I mean, I guess I know why, but still.)

We *are* mad.

But we are also sick and tired of the endless betrayals as, one by one, people and things we loved as children are revealed to be problematic.

Some of us have turned cynical and jaded as a result, adopting a “Every Damn Thing Is Problematic So To Save Our Peace Of Mind We Have Stopped Caring” attitude.

Consume media critically? Not any more! We take everything at face value now! A trans character named Sirona? Seems like awesome representation to me! Goblins are anti-semitic caricatures? Not to me; a goblin is just a goblin (a cool mythical creature from fairy tales)!

And maybe to you this is a bad mind-set. But for some of us, it’s all we’ve got.

So please let us make our inner-child happy in peace. We aren’t morally bankrupt. We do care about the trans and Jewish communities.

I don’t know about morally bankrupt, but if your response to people saying “Please boycott this game because it’s harmful to our communities,” is “But playing it would make me really happy though ☹️” then I think I think it’s pretty clear that you only “care” about those people when it’s easy for you to do so.

Yeah, look, I’ll be honest here @onimi18 : if given the choice, I’d rather someone who plays the blood libel game but shows up for us and takes a stand against antisemitism every single other time than I would someone who just boycotts the game but refuses to stand against antisemitism in any other situation. But in practice, that’s not even remotely the binary that’s emerging? In general, people who are willing to happily play a game whose primary theme is antisemitism are, shocker, generally unwilling to stand against antisemitism in other situations as well.

And that’s the crux of it, honestly. I’m not trying for some sort of moral purity test here. I don’t care that you have complicated love for something that’s problematic - point to someone alive who doesn’t. But the attitude of complete nihilism at the expense of vulnerable minorities that you seem to have adopted is disturbing, and it shouldn’t surprise you if it makes members of those minority groups feel profoundly unsafe around you. Your inner child is completely irrelevant to the rising tide of antisemitic and transphobic violence - and if you choose to actively forget that this game is a part of that rising tide just so that your inner child can enjoy it, then how can any of us trust you to choose to take those same blinders off for the rest of it? Imagine a timeline stretching from where we are now to literal cattle cars, and tell me honestly: where along that continuum would your inner child stop encountering things that it wanted to enjoy? We know the answer because it’s happened, and the answer is never; if you’re willing to ignore blatant antisemitic propaganda for the sake of your id, then there will always be good art that you can pretend is “worth it”, no matter how vile the propaganda that you’re ignoring may get.

You say you’re not morally bankrupt and you do care about the trans and Jewish communities. Well, to be blunt, I’ll believe it when I see it – if you can’t be assed to take a strand for us when we ask you to do so now, then I can’t be assed to check whether or not this is your one singular guilty pleasure exception, or whether you’re like 99% of the rest of the people playing this game, and it’s indicative of a larger pattern of selectively ignoring antisemitism, and passively contributing to bigotry.

What always gets me about responses like this is like… don’t you think that trans and Jewish people (and Black people and and and) also feel betrayed when things we loved turn out to be shitty and transphobic and antisemitic?

The difference is that we can’t just ignore it and go on and pretend that a trans woman character named Man Malename McPenisGuy is good rep, or that Chains Slaveperson is good Black rep, or that PointyNose Goldstein KillingGoyBabies is anything but promoting hate against us. We can’t pretend that HIV Allegory Werewolf isn’t promoting homophobia because actually, within the narrative, look, he really is dangerous to children!

We were betrayed, too. We just can’t ignore it like you can.

This is the lowest possible level of “take a stand.”

This isn’t “talk to your elected officials.” It’s not “show up at this march.” It’s not “confront your racist uncle at Thanksgiving.” It’s not “write to the publisher of this book telling them that their examples support oppression.” It’s not “donate money to this worthy cause.” It’s not even “reblog to share the message.”

It’s, “please AVOID SPENDING MONEY on this racist thing. Please AVOID PUTTING HOURS OF YOUR LIFE into it.”

It’s, “Find something else to buy” - and there are no shortage of games, even if you want brand-new games released this month because the tens of thousands of existing games are all boring.

It’s, “Find something else to occupy your time” - whether that’s a game, a tv series, a book, a podcast, a twitch stream.

Nobody’s even being asked to DO SOMETHING. They’re being asked to refrain from jumping on the “New Shiny AAA Game (who cares if the devs are racist)” bandwagon.

And y'all know - if the game were actually good, the objections would not be “hey I can play whatever I like.” They’d be “yeah well racism I know but THE BROOM FLYING IS SO AWESOME.” Or “yeah I guess it’s got some bad symbolism but WOW THOSE COMBAT MECHANICS; THERE’S NOTHING ELSE LIKE THEM.”

…Nobody’s saying that. Nobody’s talking about how good the game is, just how unfair it is that people want them not to play it.

Wired gives it 1/10:

It comes down to: The ONLY reasons to play this game are either

The Wired review is honestly worth reading in it’s entirety.

I was shocked to see that score from a major publication.

I'm looking for some artists for a TTRPG project I'm working on. We have money. It's cyberpunk, character drawing stuff. No backgrounds. 90s anime vibes a plus. Message me here, reblog, or tag a friend!

HEY FRIENDS ONSLAUGHT PAYS FAIR PRICES & IS RELIABLE hit him up

here’s a fun new way of responding to anon hate, just post this pic

A friend of mine shared this fantastic resource over Discord, so did a few studies in-between working on homework!

So the problem with designing characters who become popular is that, if you’re a needy bastard like me who tracks the Lutece tags when you’re bored, you’re suddenly exposed to a ton of art of said characters in various states of undress.

I’m not one to discourage this sort of thing- no no, I have sketchbooks full of Remus/Sirius stuff from high school- but I figured I might as well give everyone a leg-up with a more detailed guide to Rosalind Lutece’s potential underthings.  I’ve seen a ton of drawings of her in corsets from a good 50 years before her time and I…  I needed to step in.

Think of this as a primer!  Not a be-all-end-all of Edwardian underthings (heck, I’m still learning this stuff), but it might teach you some new fashion terms/ideas you weren’t previously aware of!  Go forth, young padawan, and draw historically-accurate Rosalind porn to your heart’s content.

…I do not know if this counts as fanart or not since I’m the one doing it?  Whatever.  RESEARCH OR DIE MOFOS

Gotta love when the artist actually pays attention to the foundation garments! It makes such a difference to the silhouette!

I grow our own vegetables. Many hybrid and heirloom varieties are bred for flavor rather than for commercial appeal and travel. There are entire species on the allotment that you can’t easily buy in stores because of this - like salsify, a root vegetable that tastes of fish and shellfish. Our neighbours happily take it to make vegan latkes of alarming similarity to fishcakes. You cannot sell it in stores because - despite looking like a white parsnip - it turns brown when you pick it if you scrape/bruise/cut the white root in any way, or damage the delicate little hairs, for some reason, it BLEEDS RED and is very upsetting to look at.

There are whole classes of foods like this. Foods that just don’t ship well or look good on supermarket shelves. Forbidden fruits. Vegetables that bleed and taste like meat. Sorry about this

This website is one of my fav places to find interesting heirloom stuff! I ordered a bunch of seeds to try growing next year I’m really excited about! 

https://www.rareseeds.com/

@angelsaxis

I’ve gotten and plants seeds from that site, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, and they grow fantastically well for me.

I’m really looking forward to next season

Baker Creek Heirloom has good seeds but bad politics. They were going to host Cliven Bundy of the Occupation of Malheur National Wildlife Reserve who’s also pro the Capitol Riots and has made a lot of racist nastiness, although backlash made them cancel their guest list (which included other racist folks) Good sources of heirloom seeds:

^^^

Highly recommend Native Seed/Search and Truelove. Baker Creek has an amazingly large catalog and has some very cool and rare stuff, but they are also Mennonites and as you might expect, they do have terrible politics as listed above, although they do some decent work preserving heirloom seeds from threatened communities.

An organization that does really interesting work preserving seed from threatened communities (and larger companies like baker creek often piggyback off of some of the work done by orgs like this and NS/S) is the Experimental Farm Network. They are very explicit about their (left-leaning) political views and you don’t have to worry about them being Problematic. They have lots of interesting and rare varieties and species you really cannot find anywhere else.

If you are looking for a wider selection of heirloom seed varieties, these two companies are very good resources as well, and carry many of the same things as Baker Creek. Afaik they are not expressly political beyond their general mission to preserve heirloom seeds (although southern exposure does a good job of preserving some very traditional african-American heirlooms from the Southeast US in particular).

Omg I hadn’t heard of the Experimental Farm Network and I am delighted! I am also completely thrilled to see people other than me remember that Baker Creek is a bunch of lying fash. They claimed they did not know about Cliven Bundy AFTER VISITING HIM IN JAIL. He was literally in jail for his anti-social bullshit when they first talked to him about the watermelons he and his mentor stole from Indigenous people and made their name on. They also take seeds from Indigenous communities globally and profit from them without sharing those profits with the communities they took the seeds from.

…I am blocked by them on Twitter after publicizing the Cliven Bundy crap, full disclosure, I have an actual feud with these people and their unethical practices.

i am so delighted when i think about how easily the leverage writers could’ve made parker this sexy international super thief and instead they said “well what if she was just really fucking weird”

parker is autistic; fight me

From this Tedx Talk by writer by Jay Edidin:

Full transcript of the talk is here.

i know unicorns are usually silver or lavender with those skinny horse legs built for running but id like to see more unicorns with natural colouration built like tanks like these beasts

we need like a scale of unicorn. on one end you have amalthea last unicorn who is the peak of elegant otherworldly unicorns with silver and lavender colours. we need the opposite of that. we need a unicorn who looks like the horse version of a trucker

like this

This isn’t Dark Academia, this is Desperate Academia. Girl help, I’ve been in the stacks for 30 minutes now and I don’t want to admit to myself that while the library claims to have every copy of this journal, vols. 3, 15, and 45 are missing, and I need vol.45 for my essay due in two days.

#girl ask the reference staff #🙏

Girl this journal was last printed in 1910, and the reprint costs £250. The reference staff can't help me now

this. this is the actual curse of any niche subject, especially in the humanities/ancient studies departments if you ask me

for my last birthday i asked for a book that was published in 1992 which isn’t even that old, but it’s not digitalized (legal or illegal), only available in the university library in Amsterdam, was lost in my own university library, and was sold for 100,- in an antique shop in Amsterdam. My entire family pitched in and then I deigned to look one shelf over and found it in entirely the wrong spot in my uni library. I’m still overjoyed that I own it myself now because evidently it’s rare, even though it’s invaluable to my area of research. 

Oh yeah rare books, or 'seldom print run' books are the bane of my life. I have a copy of Faulkner's Coffin Texts vols.1-3, which when I bought it was about £75 (seems a lot but reasonable for what it is). I didn't realise that when I bought it, it had just had a print run of about 50 or so. So when a friend needed a copy for her PhD maybe 5 years later, we looked on Amazon for it and it was going for £3000 for a 'used' copy (I know I have a screenshot of it somewhere but I can't for the life of me find it). Currently it's about £200 on Amazon for a copy printed in 2004.

woe and misery!!

I love to do long-distance lending but one book was denied, but luckily I could get on a train bc another university near-ish had it, so this is how I ended up spending an entire day in that picturesque little town last year only to photograph 200 pages in their crammed little classics library department.

may i also add the idea of ‘rare’ books. it’s not just that the books are old or niche or expensive. sometimes the book is a(n academically) respectable 80,- but your department is so small that they maybe have funding for 3 paperbacks a year and then the first years sparagmos the book to bits because the most important undergrad course makes it core reading

Ohh yeah I once needed a book that was £600 and we couldn't get it on Inter Library Loan, so the library department for my subject had to go to committee to get approval for spending £600 on a single book. It wasn't a 'rare' book just difficult to get hold of and it still took 5 years for it to appear in the library. We had 'short loan' books that were only for 24hrs, but for us there'd only ever be one copy of each book. So we had an essay set 2 days before the Christmas break and all of us had to write the same essay which required all 9 of us to get and use the ONE COPY of the short loan book for it in the 48 hours before we had to leave. I think we decided as a group that we'd scan parts of it individually (because of course the library scanners had the 33% rule to avoid 'stealing' books) and then we all sent each other the different parts.

HEY THIS IS IMPORTANT whats your favorite place to find drawing references?

so far we’ve got

if you have any more please reply!

As someone who draws a lot of faeries, Faestock is godlike.

A wonderful addition to the list!

Okay updating and consolidating lots of info here; as well as adding links for ease of access. Adding a brief description for some too; as is the case that not all of them have descriptions above. (Warning that some of these links contain nude refs, I will try to mark where possible which ones have more prominent ones.)

Posing Sites and Apps:

Stock Photo Sites:

Museum and Institution Open Access sites:

wow its been a while since ive seen this post, im so glad more useful info has been added!

yknow ever since people realized tumblr isnt dead and have decided to flock here from twitter and tiktok ive seen a huge influx of people in fandom spaces who dont reblog anything. at all.

like, i used to have an art blog with 340 followers. not a ton but not a small amount either given how this website works with creators. and in my experience back then even the ones who only left likes still reblogged other things or at least posted their own stuff. literally the only empty blogs were clearly bots.

but on this New art blog, i've had so many people with fandom-specific headers and icons with actual usernames as urls and some kind of title or description, but have. Nothing. no posts. all they do is like things. and it's always public, too. their following list and their likes list.

and honestly all it makes me think is that these people are New and also don't know how tumblr works. how likes don't give exposure. not even in a "oh, i know it doesn't give exposure, but i'm still going to reblog anyways" way, but in a genuine honest to god straight up doesn't realize tumblr likes don't work like twitter's.

PLEASE please if you're from tiktok or twitter or whatever please reblog people's art both fandom and original if you like it!! and maybe actually pad out your blog's content in some way so people won't potentially see you as a bot and block you.

REBLOG ARTIST'S WORK. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY THEY GET ANY ATTENTION ON THIS WEBSITE OH MY GOD. PLEASE. I BEG of you

WAIT THEY'RE REAL PEOPLE?! I've blocked several accounts so far because it was just "blanks space" and I assumed it was a bot.

FOLKS if you're new, please, please, this is not like Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. Reblogging is the way to go. This is how we network on here. This is how you make mutuals. This is how you share new stuff with others.

You are also:

i learned about Tim Wong who successfully and singlehandedly repopulated the rare California Pipevine Swallowtail butterfly in San Francisco. In the past few years, he’s cultivated more than 200 pipevine plants (their only food source) and gives thousands of caterpillars to his local Botanical Garden (x)

Sometimes, people are really great.

an example of how focusing on one specific cause to focus on is more effective than trying to fix all of the world’s problems

John Brosio (American, 1967) - Two Earthlings (2003)

i'm fucking shrieking with laughter. It sounds like his dick is a deranged yard sprinkler or a terrified pigeon turned loose in an apartment.

Vibing so hard with the “this cured my imposter syndrome folks” above!

Whale Shark Gliding Through Bioluminiscent Algae _ Mike Nulty

SPACE SHARK

[ID: A silent black and white video showing a whale shark swimming through black water studded with small dots of white, or bioluminescent algae. Combined with the white spots along the whale shark's entire back, the video gives the strong impression that the shark is a being swimming through space. End ID]