i think one of my favorite things about hopepunk is that it shows hope as what it truly is. hope is not mindless optimism. hope is not always soft. hope is aggressive. hope is defiance. hope is an act of resistance. hope is fighting back. hope is staying alive out of spite. hope is spitting in the systems eye. hope is going "fuck it, there ARE good things in this world". hope is choosing to be kind & loving despite everything. hope is community. hope is seeing the world is broken & making the small pieces of it that you exist in better. hope is not just wanting for something to happen, it's making it happen in any way you can. hope cannot be destroyed, no matter the cruelness of the world. hope is always there, aggressive & kind.
the worst is wanting to create and create and create but being trapped in a body that is so so so so tired
I scribed all the spells my wizard learned in our last D&D campaign!
30 Days of Art Improvement Challenge
Are you tired of feeling like your art just isn’t improving? Do you want to do a 30-day challenge that’s actually useful? Welcome to 30 Days of Improvement Hell. >:D
I made this because I’ve been feeling super ‘blah’ about my art these days, and I needed something to kick-start myself. Who wants to do this with me!? Start now or whenever you can (now you procrastinators!). Challenge yourself and have fun at the same time!
Tag your posts with #Improvement Hell so everyone can follow along and see each other’s awesome artwork. I may even create a blog and reblog them! :D
What are you waiting for? START!
- Self-Portrait - Introduce yourself
- Draw a figure using a reference - link to reference
- Draw a figure that’s in action, using a reference - link to reference
- Draw a part of the human anatomy you have trouble with. x20, with atleast 5 being skeletal/musculature studies.
- Draw more figures. Quick gestures and silhouettes. x20, with atleast 10 different body shapes
- Let’s have some fun. Design a character from either This or This character generator! Be creative and bring something to life!
- Pick the weirdest object in your house/room. Draw it. Shadows and Highlights.
- Find 2-3 objects, make a scene with them. Draw it. Bonus points for creativity. Double points for dramatic lighting.
- Draw a landscape of a place you’ve never been or drawn.
- Draw a BG with 1pt Perspective. Negative points if it’s a railroad or an empty street.
- Draw a BG with 2pt Perspective.
- Look out a window. Draw what you see. Bonus points for adding something interesting.
- Draw an interior setting with the character you designed on Day #6 in it.
- BG with either bird’s eye or worm’s eye view.
- Halfway there! Draw three 'action’ scenes with different compositions in each. Quick sketches are fine, just make them interesting and understandable! Bonus points if it’s the same scene, but different composition.
- Draw a single page comic with 5-7 panels (the story begins and ends on one page).
- Draw an animal you’ve never drawn before. x10 Link references.
- Draw a car. Negative points for whining. Hint: Use a perspective grid.
- Think of the thing you hate drawing the most. Guess what? Draw it! Negative points for lying to yourself.
- Pick an object in your house/room. Now design a character from it, using the shapes, forms, textures, purpose and colors as inspiration. Also link/post the object you used. Negative points for using a humanoid action figure.
- Draw a character/object/scene, and shade them using ONLY solid blacks and whites. Bonus points for good use of lights/shadows
- Draw a different object/scene/character. Shade using hatching, crosshatcing, and/or pointillism. Bonus points for lights/shadows and textures.
- Colors! Pick a color palette, and paint a scene/character/object using only those colors (some blending allowed). Bonus points for good use of lights/shadows.
- Draw and color a scene/object/character - no lines allowed! (aka - lineless art). Don’t forget light and shadows!
- Draw a scene/character in a style you’ve never drawn before. If emulating an artist, credit+link. Bonus for color style.
- Draw a character. Draw 10 emotions/expressions. Bonus points for 'uncommon’ emotions. (i.e. anxiety, guilt, despair, loneliness etc.)
- Draw three random shapes using your opposite hand (or your foot). Now design characters from those shapes.
- Turn on the tv (or load your illegally downloaded movies). Pick an actor and draw them.
- Almost done! Let’s have some fun. Draw some fanart. Bonus points if it’s super obscure and unknown. Make people guess what it’s from.
- Last day! Find a drawing you did within the last year. Now draw it again using what you’ve learned! Link it for comparison!
Look at all that amazing improvement! Congrats!
[Update] There is now a sequel challenge, Draw All The Things!
Source: pencilcat
doodle compilation of the empires dresses saga i will most likely never finish apologies
opens box that reads "i wanna draw again". inside lies a note. the note says, "mental illness and difficult circumstances have taken years of interest, accessibility, and skill away from me. i want to forgive myself for that. i want to heal my relationship to my hobbies. i want to feel connected to something that once made me feel good, but the cyclic discouragement is difficult to overcome." i turn over the note. on the back it reads "wannta drawe sexy bodies awooga"
seems like this one really resonated with the artists who dont do art fandom
In recent years, Google users have developed one very specific complaint about the ubiquitous search engine: They can’t find any answers. A simple search for “best pc for gaming” leads to a page dominated by sponsored links rather than helpful advice on which computer to buy. Meanwhile, the actual results are chock-full of low-quality, search-engine-optimized affiliate content designed to generate money for the publisher rather than provide high-quality answers. As a result, users have resorted to work-arounds and hacks to try and find useful information among the ads and low-quality chum. In short, Google’s flagship service now sucks.
And Google isn’t the only tech giant with a slowly deteriorating core product. Facebook, a website ostensibly for finding and connecting with your friends, constantly floods users’ feeds with sponsored (or “recommended”) content, and seems to bury the things people want to see under what Facebook decides is relevant. And as journalist John Herrman wrote earlier this year, the “junkification of Amazon” has made it nearly impossible for users to find a high-quality product they want — instead diverting people to ad-riddled result pages filled with low-quality products from sellers who know how to game the system.
All of these miserable online experiences are symptoms of an insidious underlying disease: In Silicon Valley, the user’s experience has become subordinate to the company’s stock price. Google, Amazon, Meta, and other tech companies have monetized confusion, constantly testing how much they can interfere with and manipulate users. And instead of trying to meaningfully innovate and improve the useful services they provide, these companies have instead chased short-term fads or attempted to totally overhaul their businesses in a desperate attempt to win the favor of Wall Street investors. As a result, our collective online experience is getting worse — it’s harder to buy the things you want to buy, more convoluted to search for info
Cory Doctorow has a similar concept of enshitification:
Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
…
This is enshittification: Surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.
…
Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: Enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other.
-Cory Doctorow. The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok (archive link)
To add to this, I believe Tumblr has evaded some of this because of it having always had a niche audience and an abundance of porn. But the first steps of enshitification on Tumblr are the 2018 porn ban and the release of Tumblr live. Let’s be loyal to the community and not to the platform.
it does feel a little bit like being gaslit that the internet is slowly getting worse in barely perceptible ways- it’s validating to see an article that says, “yes, it’s not that you’re getting old and somehow losing your google proficiency, GOOGLE IS WORSE THAN IT USED TO BE.”
Amazon literally shows you fewer search results if you sort by user reviews instead of “Amazon recommended”, and I remember that it didn’t used to do that
Source: Business Insider
I want to eat the chao fruit so fucking bad
these would fix me
@pabloernesto said:
I don't get it :(
every browser except firefox runs on chromium. they are just chrome reskins. firefox is the only good browser. install firefox
- How to install Firefox
- How to import data from a different browser to Firefox
- How to install Extensions
- Link to Ublock Origin Extension
Firefox does a ton of cool shit but just out of the box, fresh install it does less tracking and dataharvesting than Chrome (in that it does essentially none while chrome's goal is to crawl all the way into your asshole and monetize the data of the unique features of your intestinal lining) and does not contribute to the chromium near-monopoly (Firefox and Safari are the only non-chromium browsers with any notable market share).
Also you know how Adobe fucking sucks and is really annoying and it's frustrating to have to use their PDF reader? Firefox now comes with a built-in PDF reader AND editor. Check this shit out:
Firefox also has a feature called Multi Account Containers that allows you to log in to accounts in different containers so that you don't have to open up an incognito window or log out of various services to use a different account. For instance, I have my Work container and my School container and I can log in to office 365 in either one of them without having to log out of the other, or I can have seven tabs logged in to seven different tumblr accounts (not sideblogs, separate accounts) in the same window if I want to do that for any reason.
Also fuck google.
you get used to it, but it's tiring, because they need you to understand your own life as a series of goalposts. what college are you going to, what's your major going to be, whatcha gonna do with that, oh where will you settle down, when can i expect grandkids.
for the longest time my goals have been so blurry that they track into each other, their undefined edges slipping quietly back into the soft night. today i want to be a writer; tomorrow i will want to be a doctor, later i will wish i took that law school free ride. how the fuck do people just know what they want to do with their life?
where do you want to be in five years? i want to be alive; which is a huge step for me. ten years ago i would have said i want to be asleep and meant i hope that i'm dead by then.
but i want a yellow kitchen and a stand mixer. i want a garden and a fruit tree (cherry, if i can make that happen) and a big yard for my dogs to play in. i want to come home and read poetry out loud to someone and have them close their eyes to listen. i want a summer watergun fight. i want to make snowmen. i want to be the house to go to for halloween. i want my life to settle around me in a softness, for it to lay down gently. if i am very, very, very lucky, i want to travel; finally go someplace overseas.
of course i don't know what i want to be doing professionally. what i actually want to be doing is curling up beside my dog, settling in to read. i want to be making myself a cup of good coffee.
i can't answer the other questions. whenever people asked me what do you want to be when you grow up, i used to say i hope i'm happy.
i hope i'm still kind, five years from now. i hope i never get jaded and mean. i hope i have stayed in therapy. what do you picture yourself doing? when will you actually be an adult about this? why are you so afraid of being ambitious?
am i not ambitious? the other day i rearranged my furniture which doesn't quite fit into my apartment. i watered my plants. i'm going to try to propagate a cherry seed. my five year goal is to spend more time laughing. to lie down in a patch of sunwarm moss. to relax for a minute. to close my eyes and think oh thank god. this is why i stayed. this is finally it.
Oddly specific. Got a deposit for 6,837 today
fuck it, i never ever do those “reblog for X, this one really works!” posts, but this one doesn’t have any of that BS, this is just straight up wishing us good things; and then the comment doesn’t even say any of that either. Zero claims on this post, all positive vibes
May you end this week feeling ever more certain of a future you’ll love
last life is a comedy series.
(volume up!)
here's a compilation of memorable or stupid moments from last life!! i miss it alot :(
song: the can can song
storyteller
sometimes I forget that I'm just a teenager writing a webcomic in my spare time, so I shouldn't hold myself to the same standards as, say, a feature film with an entire team of professional writers, or Hiromu Arakawa. Writing flawed stories is okay, and even necessary in order to write better ones :)
(if you want to read aforementioned amateur webcomic...)
“But if you forget to reblog Madame Zeroni, you and your family will be cursed for always and eternity.”
not even risking that shit
codyslipring
scrolled past this, re-evaluated my life, then SCROOOLLLED back up and hit the damn reblog button.
- She ain’t no games in real life so I take her serious all the time
- Anyone with a name that starts with a “Z”, ends with an “i”, and isn’t some kind of Italian pasta, IS SERIOUS
- I’m not climbing no mountain with a pig on my back, 🙅🏽🙅🏾🙅🏿 Negative.
reposting this bc i thought it was really sweet
Splatoon has always been an invitation for self expression, no matter if it fits gender norms or not. The players forge their own safe space where they're happy to exist. But what's important to mention is that even in-game, characters are inviting you to be different, to be you.
I'd say that the squid sisters are pretty "basic" in a sense that they were meant to portray japanese idols. They're meant to be perfect and act perfectly, in a sense. But despite that, there's a little detail that stands out. One that shows that the girls are imperfect. Marie's smile.
A lot of people mistake it for a smirk. But it's not. Marie's smile always looks like that. It's crooked. Despite how perfect she is, Marie's smile is always a little bent. And NO ONE ever comments on it in-game. It's a part of her that just defines her as someone different, as unique. And to me that was just the beginning of Splatoon making their idols stand out
Pearl and Marina stand out in all possible ways. But that makes them welcoming. I've seen many cishet people first react to pearl with disgust, saying that her design was ugly, that her huge forehead was a bad design choice ... But all of the LGBTQ people I've seen love her. Why ? Because she doesn't look conventionally attractive. Because she's surprising. Because she wants to be something that doesn't fit other's vision of "looking good". You like pearl because she's unique.
Even outside of that, Pearl and Marina stand out as comforting because of their relationship. They're gay, of course. Having lesbian idols really helped to make it a safe space for LGBTQ youth. But even outside of that the bond between Pearl and Marina is all about unconditional love. Marina was outed to be an octarian and Pearl's first reaction was to reassure her that this didn't change her opinion of marina in the slightest, that she felt sorry about learning that against her will and that she loved her anyways. Now imagine her learning by accident that someone's gay. I'm willing to bet she would have the EXACT SAME reaction. It's deeply comforting to know that this character you love so much would support you. Pearl was even revealed to be punk when she was younger and punks culture at its core is all about acceptance and fighting for other's rights.
And finally, you have deep cut.
Deep cut is all about embracing your culture and sharing it with others. And remember how much people criticized Pearl for her huge forehead ? Well the Splatoon team looked at these reviews, smiled, said "fuck you" and gave us an even BIGGER forehead for Frye. BECAUSE SPLATOON IDOLS DON'T NEED TO LOOK CONVENTIONALLY ATTRACTIVE. As for shiver, she wears a sarashi, a cloth that is most often worn by Sukebans, a type of very violent feminine delinquent in Japan. It used to be worn by samurais and has been claimed by these women as a way to show off their masculinity and their power. Therefore, Shiver is made to be gender non-conforming and to defy the rules, so much that many thought she could've been non-binary at first. As for big man ... Everyone wanted a sexy first male idol. We got a goofy and adorable pancake. Once again, Splatoon just wants to have fun with its representation.
Splatsville is the city of Chaos. Here, bigots get banned, but LGBTQ folks thrive. It's a place that grew out of the wish to see this world constantly evolving and keep getting better. It's a place meant to change with its players. And if we keep making it queer and accepting, this world can only grow up to be more and more like that.
