I like when the bus stops directly in front of you out of the line of waiting people and opens its doors. Chosen by the dragon

I hate this post. Ever since I read it I can't help but think "chosen by the dragon" whenever the bus stops in front of me or "denied by the dragon" when it doesn't. Every. single. time. That's a minimum of ten times a week. Do you know how annoying that is

I have started working as a bus driver and I think of this whenever I drive up to a group of people. Yess, the dragon (me) has chosen you!

a couple snippets from a presentation i gave at school this past week on storyboarding!!

‼️DISCLAIMER: I am still a student and have only worked on student and indie projects! This is just stuff that I personally find helpful as an amateur, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt!

Happy boarding, friends! ✍️💕

notes on tracing mindfully (aka "how to draw Anything")

Contrary to popular belief the biggest beginner's roadblock to art isn't even technical skill it's frustration tolerance, especially in the age of social media. It hurts and the frustration is endless but you must build the frustration tolerance equivalent to a roach's capacity to survive a nuclear explosion. That's how you build on the technical skill. Throw that "won't even start because I'm afraid it won't be perfect" shit out the window. Just do it. Just start. Good luck.

NEVER GIVE UP

Anything created by human hand with intent and creative personality is better than ai >:3

🍄🌿🍄🌱🍄🌿🍄🌱🍄🌿🍄🌱🍄🌿🍄

You! Have been visited by the gnome of executive function! Reblog to send them along to make sure they visit the next person in need!

🍄🌿🍄🌱🍄🌿🍄🌱🍄🌿🍄🌱🍄🌿🍄

since there’s apparently some sort of confusion on the matter (read: people are idiots)

i am seeing a lot of reposting lately, so here i am reblogging my own post. also, reverse google tends to only work for stuff like deviantart or twitter, so if you want to find a pixiv artist, use saucenao.

i cannot stress this enough, y’all need to stop supporting blogs that steal art. i don’t care how pretty the art is or how badly you want it on your blog.

Also: Rebloging is not the same as reposting!! If you see an artist on tumblr post a piece that you like SMACK that reblog button. But do NOT save/screenshot an image and post it on your own blog without getting permission

an art i made 10 days ago got reposted to Instagram a few days later.

the notes i got? ~300 on Tumblr, ~200 on Twitter. and it’s one of my more popular arts.

the notes the repost has? ~15.000 and still growing a few hundred every hour. traffic, likes, comments, interaction, recognition, praise, all of it going to a person who, with one click, stole something i spent hours making and years learning.

you wonder why artists quit fandom? this. this is why.

If you really want to share someone’s art and you don’t have permission, can’t get it due to language barriers, or otherwise it’s a pain to get this permission, just link to the piece without posting the image itself.

That way, you are not only sharing the piece in its natural habitat, you also give exposure to the artist themselves.

only thing that comes to mind today.

the fad of putting these little blurbs in TTRPGs was probably the most embarrassing bit of useless wanking the little industry scene has ever done, besides the time Warmahordes put a "this aint your daddys tabletop game!" in their rulebook.

does this serve any purpose other than to make the publisher feel like they're Doing Something, and to help consumers feel like their purchases are meaningful political engagement?

At the absolute minimum you could make a game which actually is a meaningful cultural expression of your ideals, or which is politically anti fascist in any way.

So this is actually I can reassure you, the exact opposite of self indulgent wanking with no impact. It’s aggressively impactful in a very specific way—by making the nazis in the room very loud about the fact that they’re nazis.

I’m going to tell you about how a discord banner that was put up for pride month in the Lancer ttrpg official discord was so successful at getting bigots to out themselves, that it’s been the permanent official discord banner for 4 years now.

This is the updated version. It’s animated now.

But pride month 4 or 5 years ago, somebody made the server banner a Goblin mech dabbing in front of a trans flag.

And for your average person who joined the server, they just kinda went, lol cool.

For the trans people who joined the server, it made them feel extra safe.

And for the bigots who joined the server? They’d fucking bitch about it IMMEDIATELY. And promptly get banned.

And that month saw so many bannings of dipshits that they decided to keep that banner, because every single time a bigot joins the server, there is a high chance that they will out themselves IMMEDIATELY and be promptly banned.

While including text like this in a book is different than a community space, the reality is, fascists do not like being embarrassed or confronted about their beliefs; they have fragile egos.

So imagine you are going through the book with a group of friends, and you get to this block about “fascism bad,” and somebody is like, “I don’t know how I feel about this. It seems a bit stupid,” it immediately gets to raise a red flag for everybody that maybe this person isn’t, as cool to have at the table as they thought.

Similarly, you know how many bigots went and burned their beers/hats/shoes because some corporation supported trans people/gay people/Collin Kapernick?

This is performative, yes. But it’s not performative to puff up themselves as heroes. It’s performative, aimed right at the fragile skinned assholes who will boycott Oreos and Budweiser for “supporting the gays.”

It’s one of the FASTEST ways to reduce the number of virulent bigots in a community for ZERO COST.

Like, maybe the experience of the lancer discord is atypical, and fascists are learning to have thicker skins and lie about their beliefs better.

It’s still PROFOUNDLY CHEAP AND EASY to include this blurb.

So, it’s free, zero effort nazi repellent.

Frankly with that in mind, I’d regard anybody who ISNT doing this, as maybe a tiny bit cowardly.

It doesn’t fix the world— anyone who thinks the table top scene will magically save the day is a fool—but it does increase the odds that the hobby will be a safer place for more reasonable people, and not become a bastion of fascism like the wh40k fandom has.

It may be atypical but it's certainly not unique. Another example is the Heraldry discord I'm on, with an icon that is animated to switch its original colours and two other versions, displaying gay pride and transgender pride colours.

Bigots join, bigots mouth off, bigots get banned.

Sometimes we get a different flavour of bigot, ones who tolerate us queers but are racist as hell. They tend to out themselves, too, because it's a heraldry server. That fact alone makes them assume that we're all "European culture is best" and other racist bullshit. They get banned.

See also the Godot discord, with an icon that scrolls through pride colours in a beautiful way.

One of the most important things to unpack and unlearn when you’re part of a white supremacy saturated society (i.e. the global north) and especially if you were raised in an intensified form of it (evangelicism, right wing politics, explicit racism) is the urge to punish and take revenge.

It manifests in our lives all the time and it is inherently destructive. It makes relationships and interactions adversarial for no good reason. It undermines cooperation and good civic order. It worsens some types of crime. It creates trauma, especially in children.

Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!”

Imagine dealing with a problem or conflict from the perspective of “how can this be solved in a way that is just and restorative” instead of “the people who caused this are going to pay.”

How much would that change you? How much would that have changed for you?

Please.

OP: Imagine approaching unexpected or unacceptable behavior from a perspective of "how can this be stopped, and prevented" instead of "you’re going to regret this!” [emphasis mine]

Punishment enthusiasts in the notes: "so you're saying we should never stop anyone from doing bad things? and we should just sing Kum Ba Ya until they stop being mean? you're an idiot and you should be punished, probably"

contemplate, for a moment, that you just might be able to stop someone from harming people while also taking care to minimize the harm you do to them

and if you don't think you should have to worry about that: why not?

I teach Intro to Psych, and I’m lecturing on operant conditioning next week. I always tell my students this story:

When I took this class, lo these many years ago, I remember thinking, if punishment doesn’t work very well on animals (because it doesn’t), why does it work on humans? Specifically at the time I was thinking about spanking kids, which I had grown up with as normal parenting behavior in the 80s, but also punishment in general.

And it wasn’t until years later that I realized that the answer is - IT DOESN’T. And research absolutely backs that up.

Punishment is one of the least effective ways of changing behavior in humans, too! The behavior change you do sometimes get is people trying to avoid punishment, but that doesn’t mean stopping the behavior you punished - it often means just finding ways to do it that are less likely to get you caught. Lying, hiding things, being sneakier about it. And that’s when you get any change at all.

Spanking, of course, has whole other issues - namely that it turns out children learn by watching others, not simple conditioning, so spanking them makes them more likely to be violent themselves.

Look, the behaviorists were wrong in that they thought conditioning was the be-all end-all of learning, when in fact life and psychology are far, far more complicated and messy than that - but even they knew that punishment isn’t nearly as effective as rewards. (Neither is as effective as addressing the underlying motivation behind the behavior, which they wanted to ignore entirely, but even they knew this much.)

If you’re telling yourself that your desire to punish people is rooted in wanting to change their behavior, please accept what decades of science has told us: IT DOESN’T.

EXACTLY!

it pisses you off to see a faggot be so happy

#so correct#similar w straight women hating butch lesbians#you see a woman not shaving not wearing make up wearing comfy clothes and still being loved and desired#and remember you've contorted yourself into the shape of a Real Woman in exchange for soc acceptance & power#and denied yourself the gentle acceptance of doing what is comfortable on this earth#people needa stop taking out their own shit on gender nonconforming & trans people and start LEARNING from us#cause it is very obvious when cishet people are miserable and mad that we aren't (via @closet-keys)

To truly, successfully eroticize the monstrous you must be brave enough to make the object in question actually ugly. At the heart of the fantasy is a person whose very form is so profoundly unacceptable that there is significant social stigma attendant upon finding them attractive - a person who feels deeply their own repulsiveness, who expects universal rejection for their appearance - and, crucially, another person who treats them as if they are beautiful.

For this to be effective, the monstrous character can't just be plain - they have to be wildly, fascinatingly unacceptable - prodigiously, fantastically, sublimely ugly. If you're anxious about the character not being hot you'll never pull it off because the entire fantasy is about not being afraid.

catfished by a guy who said he was something unutterably monstrous in his bio then turned out to be yet another normal muscle twink with some mildly unsettling features again?

I thought he was the one. 😔

The narrator would have had much better luck with his reward ending if he had PROPER ENRICHMENT IN THE BIRD'S ENCLOSURE!!

Mirrors alone that may or may not exist are NOT proper enrichment!!

Finally some good fucking enclosure.

Hey fellas! I'm in a bid of a bind due to a wide variety of stuff combined with recent unemployment :')

So! Commissions are open!

I do: Character portraits, animals, fantasy creatures and full sci-fi/fantasy illustrations. Mechs, multiple characters and complicated outfits or scenes cost more, feel free to contact me for more details, either here or LeahMArts@outlook.com

I'm bringing this back around again though it's a bit out of date. I've got bills to pay and too much free time, so come on down!