in honor of ace week id like to shoutout every asexual who first thought they were bi/pan because they looked at all the genders and felt no difference and zero is equal to zero so they said "huh. must be bisexual" and then shoved their sexuality back under the rug for 3-5 years
One advantage of not really having a strong sense of gender identity is that you’re very [shrug emoji] about how people gender you. Sometimes people call me by she/her pronouns and sometimes they go with he/him pronouns and on the internet people often default to they/them, and neither option is entirely right but also, fuck if I know what would be right, and I don’t particularly care. Therefore I’m perfectly happy to outsource my gender identity to the people around me who actually need to figure out which box to put me in. I don’t need to talk about myself in third person, so really my pronouns sound like a you problem.
Very fond of macrolabels, like “queer”, that provide zero extra information. Is it genderqueer? Is it romantic/sexual orientation queer? Is it queer as in “none of your fucking business what’s in my pants and what I do with it and with whom”?
This is actually probably the first time I’ve ever read something that accurately describes my relationship with gender–ie, ‘my gender is me and my pronouns are a you problem’–so thank you for that!
in honor of ace week id like to shoutout every asexual who first thought they were bi/pan because they looked at all the genders and felt no difference and zero is equal to zero so they said "huh. must be bisexual" and then shoved their sexuality back under the rug for 3-5 years
Rectangle cape: the type of cape American superheroes wear. They consist out of a simple rectangle that can be tied or clasped at the neck. Use gathered fabric for extra fullness. This type of cape won't give you a lot of warmth as it will only cover your back.
Quarter circle cape: slightly more flared than a rectangle cape, but will still only cover your back.
Half circle cape: will cover both your back and shoulders and some of your body, which will give you extra warmth. Great for drama!
Fitted half circle cape: similar to a half circle cape, but made out of three separate pieces to fit around your body better. It won't cover you completely, but it will cover your back, shoulders, and more of your body than a normal half circle cape would.
Full circle cape: this cloak will cover your full body and keep you nice and warm.
Savvy sewists will notice these cape types are similar to circle skirts. The idea's basically the same. Instead of making a skirt, you leave your circle open in the front, and cut a hole that fits your neck rather than your waist.
(Image source) [ID: drawing showing five types of coats: rectangle, quarter circle, half circle, half fitted circle, full circle. Text: "Capes and cloaks. www.facebook.com/aliceincosplayland".]
Aside of volume, you can also play around with length. A floor-length cape has a very different effect and function than a cape that reaches your hips, or even a capelet.
(Image source) [ID: a pattern diagram showing four different cape lengths: floor length, hip length, waist length, and a capelet. Text: "6535 Front and back views. Newlook."]
Details like a hood or armholes can make your cape extra comfortable, and you've got a wide range of options when it comes to fasteners, too.
(Image source) [ID: back view of a long gray half circle cape that's been pleated at the shoulders.]
(Image source) [ID: a purple capelet with a hood, frills, cat ears, and lace, tied with a bow at the front. Text: "Gray. Alice and the Pirates."]
(Image source) [ID: a person wearing a brown monogrammed hip-length cape with front pockets and arm slits at the sides.]
(Image source) [ID: a person wearing a long gray hooded cape, standing in a forest and holding a sword.]
Materials:
Before deciding what fabrics to make your cloak or cape out of, ask yourself what you're trying to achieve first.
Warmth, drape, fabric price, comfort, aesthetic, wearing context,... are some examples of things that can influence your decision.
Some examples:
A cosplay cloak has to look good but doesn't necessarily have to be warm. Choose a fabric that's suitable for your character's outfit, but also keep the circumstances in which you plan to wear your outfit in mind. For example, a warm cloak might pose issues if you do a lot of indoor photo shoots, but convention halls can be pretty chilly.
A fashion cloak intended for winter really does need to be warm! Wool, tweed, and velvet are good options.
A cloak intended for historical re-enactment preferably uses period-accurate materials and therefore won't be lined with fabrics like polyester and such. Which fabric to use depends on the period and region you're working in.
Tutorials and patterns:
Here's a few tutorials/patterns to get you started:
Capes and cloaks make for fun sewing projects. They're pretty easy to make: if you know how to draw circles, you know how to draft a cape pattern.
Capes are a versatile garment, and can range from a great last-minute Halloween costume to an every-day winter cloak. Play around with materials, lengths, shapes, design elements, decoration,... to achieve different effects.
Ok so I don’t ramble about doll things much any more but I am loving the new Luts Senior Delf Muse body~ aaaaaaa! If only it came in Delf or Kid Delf size!!
so a while back I made a “how-to” for how I render gold for shits-n-gigs. Recently, I had to reference this myself because I straight up FORGOT how I paint gold in the middle of working on a commission.
Figured it would be fun to share, if yall want to know my gold painting secrets (spoiler, im very lazy and just want the fastest and dirtiest way to get something done. and for me, this is it)
Here is my no-fail, 10 step (it sounds like a lot, i swear its not) method:
1) Draw thing
2) Ink thing. When inking I draw big “I” shaped black chunks on metal stuff. Usually I’ll put one thick and one thin next to each other. If I’m being especially lazy, I will literally just draw a black scribble in a vauge I-ish shape.
3) Flat color block. I usually go for a mid-tone yellow-ish color. Not super saturated.
4) Shading. Use a more saturated color several shades darker. I focus the shading around where I inked those black “I” shapes. I wrote to be mindful of a light source, and this is what you should do. But I’ll be honest, I usually just shade around the edges.
5) LIGHT. Use a bright saturated yellow color. I usually pick one and then color adjust as necessary once it’s blocked in. Catch the rims/edges of objects. I usually use more of those double “I” shapes in the middle.
6) SPECIAL EFFECTS BAYBEEE. Douplicate highlight layer. Set it to “Add.” Use gaussian blue until it glows to your liking. Adjust opacity as you like.
7) ONE MO ‘GAIN. Repeat step 6. Set to “Color Dodge.” Adjust hue/opacity as you like.
8) Futz around till you like it. I like to add more color dodge above the ink layer to brighten some spots. This is optional.
9) Corrections. Assuming you’re working on a non-white background, those Add and Dodge layers will show over the edges of your lineart. This is where I take a soft airbrush eraser and remove what I dont like.
10) Final futzing. Sometimes I’ll add a dark blue Overlay layer to reduce saturation and increase contrast. Added some “shinies.” To do this draw some thin cross-shaped lines that taper at the ends. Duplicate layer. Change layer mode to “Add.” Use Motion Blur in the same direction as the cross long-ways.
AND YER DONE CONGRATS. Are there better ways? Eehhhh probably. Do I use them? Nah. This is what works for me and my work-flow, so feel free to try it out if you want! ✨✨✨
What's your advice on writing when you have a setting, characters and a premise but... no plot? Do you just start writing and hope lightning hits or do you wait for inspiration first so you don't write yourself in circles?
You could do that. (Sometimes it works. Often it doesn’t.) Or you could take your characters and your setting and your premise and then ask yourself questions like:
So what sorts of thing would happen if I had those characters in that setting given this premise?
What do each of the characters in this story want? And what’s stopping them getting that?
If that premise was really happening what would it mean for the characters? How would they react? Which characters are going to get in the other characters’ way?
What is the single coolest thing that could happen then?
What would I love to write about in all this? What are the scenes that I’m excited to write about?
Is there something I could do in this kind Of story but nobody has ever done in this kind of story before?
Why should we care?
How can I make people care?
What is going to make me keep turning the pages as a writer?
Damnit, I’ve been unable to goddam work this week because Photoshop wouldn’t open and if this is why, I’m gonna set shit ON FIRE. At least let me export all my settings, custom shapes, brushes, and patterns.
seems that Chrome has around 60-65% market share, so it’s not totally dominating the market yet but it’s worrying that we’re basically reliant on Apple and Microsoft to hold the line.
PLEASE install firefox as a mobile browser and then run adblock on your mobile browser it’s so good I promise.
Look.
Look.
I know I’m a total grind about open source stuff but browsers are the PERFECT place to learn to love open source software and for so long FireFox was a major part of the browser market and sometimes if you want to see what kind of fuckery google is up to it helps to see the kinds of things they block in firefox and just
There’s an organization that makes free, excellent, safe software that doesn’t collect and market your data but for some reason two thirds of the world uses a google product and most of the leftover population uses apple and just
I promise, firefox is so good - the extensions are incredible look - I can use lightbeam to see what sites I use and how they connect to other sites (bottom right should give you an idea how much time I spend on tumblr)
or I can look at ublock origin and see that it’s blocked over 2 million requests since I installed it or I can run the facebook container extension and stop facebook from tracking me and you know what I bet you can do a lot of that on chrome too but you’re doing that while chrome itself is tracking you and gobbling up your activity for google and
firefox is so fuckin great and it’s such a great ambassador for other open source projects please be a big old fuckin nerd with me and use firefox and run a bunch of funky extensions and customize the fuck out of your web experience.
Firefox used to have a big part of the browser market but it has been by FAR surpassed by Chrome, which is a bummer. Firefox is free and open source and has been since 2003, they don’t track or sell your data and have built in privacy protections as well as many excellent extensions to customize your browser. Additionally you can install firefox on android devices and use extensions like ublock origin to block ads on your cellphone, which is great!
I’ve used xkit on Firefox for years and have never had a problem
Even if it didn’t work, you realize this is an “xkit supporting Firefox” problem, not a “Firefox supporting xkit” one. Browsers don’t change their entire designs for niche add-ons. If you’re having trouble using xkit, talk to xkit
nonbinary-hawke
Firefox isn’t perfect. It has quite a few bugs, and it crashes a lot for me on both desktop and mobile. But the only way it can improve is if people use it, report issues, and make suggestions for improvements.
The built-in privacy settings are no joke either. Even the built-in ad blocker is great; it took me literal months to figure out what was blocking ads on duolingo after disabling all of my privacy extensions lmao
Uninstall chrome and replace it with firefox, I promise it’s worth it.
(Also xkit absolutely works on firefox and I’ve had no issues with it.)
“Unless you are following the dialogue with an action and not a dialogue tag.” He took a deep breath and sat back down after making the clarifying statement.
evildorito
“However,” she added, shifting in her seat, “it’s appropriate to use a comma if there’s action in the middle of a sentence.”
“And–” she waved a pen as though to underline her statement–“if you’re interrupting a sentence with an action, you need to type two hyphens to make an en-dash.”
jawnwats
You guys have no idea how many students in my advanced fiction workshop didn’t know any of this when writing their stories.
“The speech tag is still part of the previous sentence,” she explained, ‘so it isn’t capitalised.“
“What do you mean?” he asked. “But there’s a full stop as part of the question mark!”
She nodded gravely. “I know!” she said. “A lot of people find this confusing. But the speech tag belongs to the line of dialogue, it’s still part of the sentence, so it’s wrong to capitalise it.”
She reblogged the post again, because she had recently read far too many potentially enjoyable stories marred by poor dialogue punctuation.
jaskierist
I’ve only seen this post in screenshots till now..
“There are two more ways"—she pointed to the blackboard—“to punctuate interruptions. One is with the em dashes outside the quotations marks to indicate continuous speech. The action occurs at the same time as speech. The other—” she sipped from a glass of water “—is em dashes within the quotation marks to indicate interrupted speech.”
All of these books are queer, but they all have back blurbs that don’t say they’re queer. While this can be a pain if I’m scouting for queer SFF, it can come in handy for people in a situation where they don’t want to be reading queer books openly.
Please do note that I don’t have hard copies of the books on hand so it’s possible that an author quote or something mentions one being queer (I feel like this isn’t super likely, but I don’t want to rule it out). Some might also have author biographies mentioning that the author is queer. Also, some may be shelved as LGBT on Goodreads or categorized as queer on Amazon. So if you’re planning on asking for any of these as holiday gifts, I would suggest going to the Amazon page or where ever your relative is likely to buy it from and double check that it’s something you’d be comfortable with sharing openly.
I wish I had more pansexual books, but the ones I know of tend to mention queerness in the back description.
With the exception of The Spy with the Red Balloon, these are all books I have read or are currently reading. If you want to recommend others, feel free to do so in the replies!
Links to the queer books database (or Goodreads if the book hasn’t been added yet) are available below the cut. You can find information on content warnings there.
