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bixbythemartian · 10 months

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This is About Oceangate

...kind of. Like, heads up for people who are sick of hearing about it or are too disturbed by this, just scoot on by, that's fine.

Like everybody else my age who had a middle school special interest in the Titanic that was further fueled by the James Cameron movie (and that sounds very specific, but I absolutely know I'm not alone), I've been following this story fuckin voraciously.

I think everybody I know IRL and online is fucking sick of me talking about it. I have been actively trying not to blog much about it here because I'm so obsessed with it that I'm annoyed with myself. I would like to not be this interested in it.

But a lot of the stuff I can think of to say has been said by a lot of people already, I don't want to add to an already noisy environment if I've got nothing new to say.

So, instead, I want to talk about what I haven't seen very many people talking about- something that's stood out to me about the way the media has been handling this story from the get-go. So, finally, I'm inflicting my days long media binge on you.

The media's handling of this was bad. Like, comprehensively fucked.

For the uninformed, a primer on the situation- feel free to skip down if you know all this, there's a bulleted list right after I get done with this part, look for that. But some of this is important to the terms I use, so I wanted to lay it out. (Also I just want to get a lot of this out of my system, please just let me have this.)

The Titan is a 'cyclops-class' submersible. As far as I can tell, 'cyclops-class' is unique to the people who made this submersible, it's not a widely recognized thing.

The Titan can carry up to five passengers. It was supposed to be rated to reach depths of up to 4000 meters below sea level.

The Titan is/was owned and operated by a company known as Oceangate. There's a lot of questions regarding the safety of the submersible, where the math came from on their depth rating, and- basically everything about the Titan is in question, at this point. There's a lot of questions, but that's not what I want to talk about.

Right now. Maybe later.

A submersible is distinct from a submarine in that it requires a surface support ship for many things- the Titan moved too slow to leave port under its own power and go to the site, it didn't have enough life support to do that kind of thing, etc. A submarine is self-supporting and can operate independently. Kind of pedantic, I know, but the Titan is a submersible, not a submarine.

The Titan had a planned expedition to the wreck of the Titanic on June 18, 2023- this past Sunday, at the time of writing. The expedition was supposed to last around 10 hours. It chartered a ship- the Polar Prince- to act as mother ship, the on the surface support that the Titan requires. (The Polar Prince is owned and operated by a different company than the Titan.)

1 hour and 45 minutes into the expedition, as the Titan was still making its way to the sea floor, the Polar Prince lost all contact with the submersible.

The Titanic wreck is at just under 4000 meters deep, right around 2.5 miles.

Now, my understanding is that the Titan was not fully at the ocean floor at the point contact was lost, but it's not clear how deep the Titan was at that time. We may not ever know this for certain.

When the Titan was reported as missing to the coast guard is kind of unclear, to me- I heard 6 hours after they lost contact, I heard 12 hours after they lost contact, I saw something that indicated they reported it missing immediately- I don't know for sure. When the coast guard report comes out, I'm hoping we'll get a more accurate timeline.

However, as soon as it was reported missing, a massive search and rescue operationg was started. Complicating the search efforts were the fact that the submersible seemed to have no type of emergency distress locator beacon (I'm not sure what the precise nautical terminology would be for this).

The search included visual searching of the surface, dropping buoys with microphones, and ROVs (unmanned remote operated vehicles, deep sea robots operated by crew on ships at the surface) searching the floor, and probably some other stuff I'm forgetting. Deep sea radar etc etc, every tool they had access to.

The search and rescue concluded on Thursday (June 22, 2023) around midday, when they definitively found pieces of the destroyed submersible's pressure vessel (the part of the submersible that held pressure and kept the people safe and alive) in a debris field, approximately 1600 feet away from the Titanic.

The destroyed pressure vessel and reports from the Navy on hearing sounds consistent with implosion at the time the Titan lost contact indicates that the submersible underwent what is being called a 'catastrophic implosion'.

It is now an investigation and recovery operation, while they try to figure out what exactly went wrong.

The five men in the sub are dead. In all likelihood, they died so quickly that their nervous system didn't have time to process what happened. What happened to their bodies during this was probably gory and kind of horrifying, but it's unlikely they experienced any awareness of this.

There were five extremely wealthy men on the submersible- they were not all billionaires, but those that weren't were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. If you want a rough sketch of their biographies, there's a link here. Other than them being pretty wealthy, who they are doesn't play that much into what I want to talk about, so I don't feel the need to go into it right now. (Again, as more information comes out, I may come back for another swing.)

So, my complaint. The number of times I saw a news interview with an expert that went like this is not small:

news host interviews deep ocean expert of some variety (who is not involved in rescue)

host asks expert what chances are that the dudes are alive and will be recovered alive

expert, being honest, says something like 'slim to none'

host responds with some amount of sincere-seeming disappointment, then after interview, pivots to the ongoing search for the definitely still alive people

There were news programs with clocks counting down how much theoretical oxygen was left. There were frequent updates to news stories with nothingburgers of additions, just to pad it out. It was, if they were alive at that moment, fucking ghoulish. That they were dead makes it even more horrible.

And I cannot emphasize enough how many experts said, to generalize and paraphrase here: "Unless they are found bobbing on the surface in the next n hours, they are dead. Even if they are alive right this minute, on the bottom of the ocean, there is no hope to rescue them in time."

This is not a failure of any of the rescue entities involved, by the way. The environment they were presumed to be in- 4000 meters under sea level- is so extreme that there are very few vehicles in the world with the capability of even getting to that depth. Like, 10 or less. As far as I know, none of them are designed to do any kind of deep sea rescue- which would have involved carefully scooping up or netting the Titan and hauling it up very slowly. There's no way to transfer personnel between ships at this depth, and the Titan had the largest passenger allowance at this depth, afaik. Like, the odds were incredibly, vanishingly small that these men would live.

The media, at large, never ever really allowed that to change the way they talked about this story or treated the participants in the story. At around 11 am or noon (central daylight time) on Thursday I saw them talking about how 'oxygen is critical'.

Oxygen was critical 24 hours prior. Even by the most generous of expectations, they were out of breathable air. Given how, to put it mildly, janky the submersible seemed to have been, there was absolutely no guarantee that they had even the 96 hours that Oceangate claimed.

Their likelihood of being rescued alive from the ocean floor was minimal on Monday. By Thursday, they were dead- again, unless they were found on the surface somewhere and had managed to carefully preserve their air somehow, they were already dead.

The media didn't really allow for the reality of the situation to be clear until Oceangate and the USCG came out and said 'yeah, they're dead'.

"Well, what's the problem with that?" you might ask. "The United States Coast Guard was the one who was saying it was a rescue up until that point."

Sure. That's their job. Their job is to treat it like an urgent rescue until it is certain that it is not. A significant amount of what they do is to rescue people from doing damnfool things in the water, and keeping hope alive until they find bodies, or evidence thereof. They were doing exactly what they should be doing.

(Whether they do this to this extent for everybody lost at sea is another conversation that's absolutely worth having, as well as their role in border patrol, but I have no bone to pick with the USCG in this particular instance. They did their all until they could do no more, that's the whole point of them, this is how they're supposed to operate.)

The media was not doing what they should be doing. There's an old quote somewhere that I think is just a journalism truism (everyone I've heard talk about it says their journalism professor said it)- if someone tells you it's raining, and someone else tells you it's not, your job isn't to report that, your job is to go outside and see if it's wet.

James Cameron- director of the aforementioned Titanic movie, as well as being a Titanic and deep sea submersible expert, knew they were dead on Monday.

He reached out to some people, he found out that the mother ship lost contact with the crew as well as their location at the same instant, and that the Navy heard a sound consistent with an implosion at around that time.

The information that the Navy heard the implosion was not classified information- they heard it via a listening system that was declassified in the 90s, I believe. Like, I knew about the system just kind of casually because I know random Navy stuff. (My dad was in the Navy, it's mostly osmosis.)

The people on the scene were informed as soon as the Navy knew. (When that was, I'm not sure, except it was before Monday. Probably they had someone go back and listen to it and weren't actively monitoring it, but it's hard to say.)

The deep ocean submersible community knew, well enough that James Cameron could call a buddy and find out. He was telling people on Monday to raise a glass to them.

The media could have had this information, if they did not have it. Either they didn't want to know, or did know, and didn't say it. And I can't say for certain they were suppressing information, but I do know that they frequently downplayed any evidence that these people were dead.

I know on CNN they ran a story about FADOSS- the FlyAway Deep Ocean Salvage System- that was shipped out to Newfoundland. It arrived Wednesday afternoon. Description in the alt text, link here.

At the time this story was published, the people in the sub would have theoretically had less than 24 hours of breathable air. They hadn't even chartered a ship for the FADOSS, at this point. And the port in Newfoundland is hundreds of miles from the site. I'm not sure how many hours away but, like, hours away. I think I heard it's a 6 hour trip, but I'm not certain on that.

This system was referenced in the news as if it was going to be part of the rescue process. Very clearly, this was never going to happen. The quote, 'a process which can take a full day' is a mild understatement, here.

It could, theoretically, be done in 24 hours, but was much more likely to take longer, unless they had enough crew in Newfoundland to do round-the-clock welding.

The response to the question about recovering someone alive is a polite way of saying 'that's not what we do'. They were not part of the rescue operation and were never intended to be, as far as I can tell.

(If you're wondering what part the FADOSS is going to take in the recovery and investigation process, it's not. It's used to lift heavy objects off the floor, and the Titan broke into small enough pieces that the ROVs are believed capable of handling it. FADOSS is on its way back to wherever it is kept. I suspect it was brought out in the edge case that the submersible was found intact with dead crew, to retrieve the vessel whole, so that the families would have bodies to bury.)

Setting aside the 'oh they definitely blew up' news that seems to have been available the whole time, every single piece of evidence and expertise pointed to these people being dead, and yet the news persisted in sort of breathlessly (sorry) talking about the rescue efforts and how much time was left. They persisted in talking about how definitely still alive these people were until they could not do that anymore.

Other examples of this issue are the knocking thing. There were reports of some of the buoys picking up something that could be described as 'knocking'. Some said it was 'every thirty minutes' but we don't know how precise a measurement that was. As soon as they started talking about the knocking, I looked into it.

As it turns out, this is just a thing that happens. The sea is very noisy, and it's hard to determine the source of a sound. Some geological things sound manmade, vice versa. They had a lot of ships cooperating together to work the search area, it's possible that they were hearing noise from those, or something from an oil platform a jillion miles away, because noise travels far and is hard to pinpoint. They had this issue while searching for the sunken USS Thresher and it was one of the ships doing the searching. Given how many different moving parts there were in this search operation, it's hard to say what the knocking was. This is just a thing in the ocean, there's a lot of fuckin noise and experts can't always pinpoint it down in location or even what it might be.

This is why, even though they heard sounds that were consistent with implosion, at the time that the Titan lost total contact with the mother ship, it was still treated as if there was a live rescue operation. Because they couldn't be certain.

But the odds were extremely poor that these men were alive, and almost everybody involved knew that fairly early on. Again, the rescue operation had to go forward like they were looking for someone alive because that's how that works. The media, on the other hand, handled this in a very irresponsible way.

And, like, I know, news media is bad at being news is not some like hot new thing, I've just been building up frustration for days and so it had to come out somehow.

I'm not sure how much of this was just because they're very wealthy men- only one of whom I've ever heard of before- and how much of it was because it was a very bizarre and unique ongoing situation, how much of it was the intersection of that.

But pretty much everybody with enough knowledge to be worth talking to about this knew, like, Monday that even if they weren't dead right then, they were very unlikely to make it out alive, and watching the news wind a bunch of people up over the hopeful outcome was revolting.

Okay. We'll see if I can go 24 hours without talking about this. If you made it to the end of this absolute fucking novel, congratulations and/or I'm sorry.

#oceangate #titan submersible #this is just a personal rant about the media involved

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119riize · 20 days

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HEARTS BETRAYAL - S. EUNSEOK

SYNOPSIS .・゜゜・ you and song eunseok are known for being academic rivals, it was no secret. the whole school knew you guys always fought for the number 1 spot, which also led to the public assuming you both hated each others guts. but, did you guys really hate each other?

PAIRING .・゜゜・ eunseok x fem! reader

GENRE .・゜゜・ school au, fluff

TROPE .・゜゜・ academic rivals to lovers

START - END .・゜゜・ 03.31.24 - ongoing

TAGLIST .・゜゜・ feel free to ask!

02. KNOWING EACH OTHER

YOU AND EUNSEOK BOTH spent the remaining break time together studying, something you thought would never happen, ever. it was surprising enough that eunseok lent you his notes, but even more surprising that he stayed by your side and made sure you understood the unit well. you two were sat next to each other instead of far apart, and you could feel eunseok staring at you as you wrote down important parts from his notes.

“is there something on my face or what?” you spoke out, breaking the silence and the other soon snapped back into reality. you turn to him as he looked embarrassed and avoided eye contact.

“i was just zoning out, sorry.” eunseok responded as he shook off the random feeling he had and turned back to you; “it’d be highly appreciated if you could be any faster. class starts soon and i’m not trying to be late.”

you scoffed at him before returning back his notebook, “i was just finished anyways, thanks.” eunseok put away his notebook as you got up from the seat and packed your things up as well. the bell was gonna ring in just a few seconds and neither of you guys wanted to be late. as soon as it rang, you quickly got your bag and was gonna head out until eunseok spoke to you again.

“we have the same class, don’t you wanna walk together?”

you turned around and stared at your academic rival in complete shock. was he being serious right now? “maybe if you hurry and get your ass up, i wouldn’t mind.” the boy snickered as he rushed over to you, and you guys both walked to class together. you expected him to start a conversation on the way there, but it was silent. he didn’t say a word, and neither did you.

you and him arrived to class and some students were quite shocked that you two were together, as everyone assumed you both hated each other. you felt lots of glances coming from certain people as you made your way to your seat.

“alright guys, as you may know the math exam is coming up so today i’ll put you guys in study groups becuase i obviously want all of you to do good.” the teacher announced as she grabbed her papers.

“okay, y/n, anton, wonbin, and…eunseok; you all are in a group together.” you froze at that exact moment and turned to look at eunseok who seemed to be already staring at you. he smirked as he saw your face. you also looked back at anton and wonbin who were also staring back at you. ‘is anyone gonna move?’ you mouthed, and the two boys shrugged which made you look back at your rival. ‘you guys just come sit by me already’ eunseok mouthed.

you followed wonbin and anton who got up and walked towards eunseok’s desk. “this will be interesting..anton, we’re paired with the two academic rivals.” wonbin said and smiled when eunseok rolled his eyes jokingly.

“oh shut up guys, let’s just study.”

you took out your notes and noticed eunseok staring at you. ‘what?’ you spoke to him with your eyes and he surprisingly seemed to understand you. anton stared at both of you guys, “what is going on with both of you? we’re supposed to be studying math, not each other!”

“i don’t need to study.” eunseok replied suddenly, leaving anton face palming himself and sighing.

༉‧₊˚.

“hey, what’s up with you? knowing you, you always study regardless if you’ve memorized the whole unit or not..” you caught up to eunseok after class and grabbed his arm to talk to him.

“what do you know about me? all you know is that we’re academic rivals.”

you looked at him not knowing what to say. gosh how he really knew how to make you speechless. for some reason, you were frustrated with him, and the way he just blankly stared at you wasn’t making it any better.

“fine, you’re right. i don’t know much about you but it’s obvious you study 24/7.” you say, and eunseok tilt his head in response. “hey, are you stalking me or something?”

“what?” you respond to him, confused.

“nevermind.” eunseok was about to walk away but you stopped him, once again.

“wait…can i get to know you?” you ask softly, kind of embarrassed that you were asking this question. you stared at the other, who stared back with a smile. though it was very subtle, you could tell on eunseok’s face his answer was a yes.

༉‧₊˚.

“so, y/n, what made you want to get to know me?” eunseok asked. you guys were currently sitting on a table across from each other next to a window in the school library. you thought for a few seconds. you didn’t really know why either.

“i was just curious what my academic rivals personality is, you know? because you don’t seem like the mean type…” you said to him. the boy leaned forward towards you, making you blush a bit at the sudden movement.

“how do you know i’m not mean?” he suddenly asks you.

“…well, i don’t know…ugh, eunseok! this conversation is about getting to know each other; you can’t possibly be putting me on the spot right now!” you raised your voice slightly, but you were also aware of where you were at so you didn’t wanna be too loud. eunseok signaled you to be quiet with his finger before speaking again.

“ah, right. sorry, i totally forgot.”

you only stared at him in frustration. was this really what you were gonna get after willingly trying to get to know your rival?

“okay okay, don’t be mad. tell me about you, pretty girl. i’m curious as well.”

you sighed and was about to tell him a few things about you, until you realized what he had just said…

“w-wait…pretty girl?!”

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taglist. @starwonb1n @kyusqult @teddywook @renjuneoo @lecheugo @seunghancore @sunwoosberrie @b-riize @ilovechanhee @yyangj3lly @07yujin

#hearts betrayal #riize #riize fics #riize imagines #riize scenarios #riize fluff #riize x reader #riize eunseok #eunseok x reader #song eunseok #kpop #kpop x reader #kpop fluff #kpop fics #academic rivals #lovers #school au

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trungles · 1 year

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Hello, long time follower just on other platforms and I love your work. I am currently getting my Masters in Comics and Graphic Novels, and do tell me if this an inappropriate question but how much do you make? Like a month doing comics and art? Also what do you do on a day to day basis? I'm worried about my future after I graduate.

Thank you so much! This is a great question, and I wish more people would be candid about answering it because I'd like creators to demand more money. This will be a very long post! Keep reading if you're interested. MASSIVE info dump below.

I think earnings in comics and books can look wildly different for almost every creator, and it depends on a lot of things. With that in mind, I make a slightly different amount every year. I view my finances mostly through page rates, contracted projects, and passive-ish income. Because I'm terrible at math, I'm just going to tell you how much I make per contracted projects, plus some relevant information in terms of Life Stuff. This will be very long, and I will highlight some important details that people maybe don't like to talk about very much.

Please also bear in mind that I live in Minnesota, away from all my major publishers and editors who are situated on the coasts, so my cost of living is much more manageable.

Background: Building a Foundation (2012-2018)

I graduated from college in 2012 and lived with my parents until 2018. I did not have to pay rent or worry about food, so I got to save up a lot of money to invest in developing as an artist–paying for printing zines, making merch, travel to conventions, table costs, and secure hotel accommodations. This helped enormously, and I would not have been able to spend six years developing my portfolio and connecting with comics peers and professionals without my parents. They were very supportive, even if they had no idea that I was developing professionally as an artist (LOL, they're very proud of me now, but they truly just thought I was being a weird internet gremlin the whole time). They're also not wealthy people by any means. My parents immigrated to the US in their 20s as refugees with absolutely no money and one baby (it me, I am the baby), but they each became pretty successful small-business owners in their own right and were able to help put me through school with minimal debt, even through the financial crisis in the late aughts.

I started making art in 2012-ish as well, but only semi-professionally, and barely on purpose. I was employed full-time in a non-art job between 2013 and 2018 at a local non-profit that specialized in pediatric therapy. I occupied a role as their front office person/corporate assistant. I made about 40k a year at that job, with benefits, and I made a negligible amount of money doing art and making comics. I should also note that throughout this time, I was working 40 hours a week at my day job, commuting between 2-4 hours a day depending on the weather (my commute was an hour for each direction in good weather and up to three hours if it snowed), and then working on comics for 3-4 hours in the evening, every evening. This meant that I would frequently be working anywhere between 65-85 hours a week for five years, and I do not recommend this! I burned out pretty bad! I didn't go to art school or learn about comics, either, so I felt like I had to spend time building my portfolio to make up for lost time. I didn't even know I wanted to make comics until maybe two years after I graduated from undergrad.

I did manage to build a nice portfolio and connect with people who were making the sort of work I liked to make, so the portfolio-building did help. I posted regularly online in different platforms and steadily grew an audience over the years via Tumblr (heyyy!) Instagram (which I personally loathe), Patreon (stressful, but necessary and also getting more comfortable to use!), and Twitter (which I have very mixed feelings about, but I'll miss it if it dies). I did a few short comics with writers whose work I admired. The Fresh Romance Anthology in 2015 was my first major published work, and it was with writer Marguerite Bennett, who remains one of my absolute favorite people. I was so inexperienced at the time, and she would check in with me to make sure I got paid for my work, and then she would follow up with everyone responsible if I was not properly compensated. Not everybody is this on-the-ball about making sure their colleagues are treated well, and she absolutely set the bar for me going forward.

Doing It For Real + Some Numbers (2018-2021)

In 2018, I put together a pitch document for The Magic Fish (if you'd like to see my pitch document, here is a Dropbox link to it! It's just a book report for a book that doesn't exist yet, and I hope you find it helpful if you need it), shopped around for an agent, and found one I'm very happy with (Kate McKean at Morhaim! She's amazing! She runs a newsletter where she gives you the lowdown on how the publishing industry works, so if you're interested in Books, you can check out her writing over at Agents and Books). Then my agent shopped the pitch around to editors and publishers, and Random House Graphic won out. Also, every time she negotiates a contract for me in my home market (the US), she gets 15% cut, which is entirely worth it to me. She does so much. It's incredible.

Random House Graphic's offer wound up being for two books at $45k each, with pretty standard royalty rates, I think around 10% in general, though there are stipulations around royalties that I can't remember off the top of my head (and also bear in mind that you do not earn royalties until your book sales have earned out your advance, and not all published books earn out). To me, this is a lot of money! BUT the graphic novel took two full years to make, so that $45k needed to last me until 2020, which is not livable if you're on you're own. Also, the advance is paid out in chunks at certain milestones of project completion. I'd get a few thousand at a time for the script, another few for the thumbnails, more for the inks, and on and on until the book is done. I would not start to get paid for the second book until I started working on it.

Earlier in 2018, I'd moved in with my partner, so we managed paying the bills and groceries together. Luckily for me, I had also completed a full tarot deck as a separate personal art project to help build my confidence as an illustrator, and my agent sold the tarot deck project (The Star Spinner Tarot) to a different publisher for a $15k advance, so I had some extra wiggle room in 2018. I quit my day job because this was a rare instance in which a book deal provided me with enough money to live on making art, with the caveat that I shared financial responsibilities with my partner. By this time, my Patreon, which I started back in 2015 I think, was also earning anywhere between $800-$1000 a month, which was really great semi-passive income. I'd post process shots and WIPs a couple times a week, and that really helped from month to month.

In 2020, The Magic Fish was published and got a lot of really lovely press. It debuted on the Indie Best-Seller list, and it got pretty popular in schools and libraries. Suddenly, my responsibilities expanded to also being a public speaker (side note: if you make a book about topics of some academic interest, make a generic powerpoint presentation about it now! I'm so serious!). I stopped tabling at conventions (the pandemic), but I would also be paid for speaking gigs in between. I'm not an enormously in-demand public speaker, so I usually asked for an honorarium of about $500 from schools and institutions for online appearances, though I'm about to ask for a lot more because it's cutting into a lot of the time I need to make comics and hit my deadlines. As people are more comfortable meeting in person, I usually ask for a speaking fee of at least $1500, and it must be after they've already taken care of my travel and accommodations. I'm not very well versed in the standards for speaking fees for debut authors, so this might not be standard! It's just my best estimation of the value of my time and effort for that instance.

Speaking of comics and deadlines, I sometimes take on smaller projects for DC (you might have seen these) and Marvel (shhh it's not been announced yet), and the page rates for those, as they've paid me, are usually as follows: $90 per page for writing ($45 for plotting and $45 for scripting), $160 for pencils per page, and $90 for inking per page. I've never colored or lettered, so I don't know those rates. I do regularly talk to other writers and artists, and the rates for writers are all over the place and seem to depend on whether you've signed an exclusive contract with either of those companies. I don't know what a contracted penciller or inker is paid by them, or if that's even a thing that happens? I also sometimes do comics cover work, and I usually charge between $1200 and $1500. I tend to charge a bit more for covers these days because I personally don't like doing covers all that much.

Starting to Reap the Benefits Maybe? (2021-2022)

In 2021, I started getting royalty checks for both Star Spinner Tarot and The Magic Fish. These payments will vary wildly, and I think they will naturally peter off as time goes on, and I'll need to make more books and projects. In both cases, I was surprised. I think at one point a random check hit my bank account for like $20k and I nearly fainted, but some of the other royalty checks will be much more modest. This process of getting paid is also immensely eased by having a good agent! I cannot stress this enough!

Then both the Star Spinner Tarot and The Magic Fish got foreign language licenses, and those come with small advances of their own, each between $2k and $3k, from what I can recall, with varying royalty rates depending on the publisher who acquired those rights. Those royalty rates are, in my limited experience, more modest than my American publisher's, come to around 7% or 8%. The Star Spinner Tarot got an official French edition, and The Magic Fish has been licensed for publication in Italian, French, Korean, Brazilian Portuguese, and Spanish so far.

Since 2021, I've also signed on to draw two more graphic novels for other people, and my agent is able to demand higher advances for me, even when I'm only doing the drawing part.

My Day-to-Day

I think that's about as comprehensive as I can be about numbers. On a daily basis, my schedule depends on whether I'm writing or drawing. Graphic novels are long projects. I'll be writing for months at a time and then drawing for even more months or even years after. I spend a lot of time answering emails for speaking requests, and my agent will sometimes pass along emails about legitimate project requests (another advantage of having an agent is I don't have to sift through scam emails or shady collaborators). I spend way more time answering emails and trying to iron out my calendar than I'd like.

I'm currently working on my second graphic novel for Random House Graphic, and I'm extremely excited about it.

Another thing I've learned is that I like to bounce between projects, but they have to be between a paid project and a personal project. If I'm juggling paid projects, I get overwhelmed and stressed. If I can work on a paid project and then also make personal art, I can feel some relief and maintain a positive relationship with my work. If you can ever get to a point where you can manage to do this, I highly recommend it. I never want to hate making comics, and this balance of personal-to-paid projects helps me keep loving the work.

Closing Thoughts

My only hesitation in talking candidly about all this is that I'm not sure my professional trajectory is applicable for most people. I think I've had a uniquely positive experience once I got off the ground, and I know most people's journeys are very much not this smooth. In a lot of ways, I got very lucky. And along the way I had help, especially before I got my foot firmly in the door. I don't think I make stratospherically high amounts of money, but I know this is still an atypically stable amount for a lot of artists and authors. And even so, I anticipate that some years will be better or worse than others.

Obviously, I couldn’t cover absolutely everything, but my hope is that this will be a good starting point for you to figure out what you need to plan for the future. Best of luck! Thank you for your question! I’m sorry it’s so long.

#comics #publishing #the magic fish #star spinner tarot #business I guess?

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matan4il · 4 months

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My darling @daphnesvalley! Thank you for your ask! *HUGS*

You know I'm so sick of everyone just believing Hamas math. I literally just found out today that a filmmaker the festival works with was murdered on Oct 7th, protecting his wife and daughter. I'm not saying I'm a great wealth of knowledge, but look how long it took for me to get that information. For it to be released to us all about a contribution fund and special screening of The Boy. Israel is one of the most technological countries out there, and it's taking this long to get accurate information. You're telling me that Hamas can just magically get accurate information in hours. Ridiculous!!!

The way I knew you were talking about Yahav Wiener even before I got to the end of the paragraph... I don't think I will ever forget seeing his wife, when she got the news that he was murdered in the middle of an interview, and she completely fell apart... :'(

But yes, you're spot on! It's been 77 days (over two months!) since the massacre, and we're still not done identifying everyone murdered on that day. We still don't have the final figure of how many were killed.

But I think one of the biggest pieces of proof that Hamas numbers can't be trusted remains the al-Ahli hospital parking lot explosion. The one where Hamas said within 10 minutes of the explosion that Israel bombed the hospital, that the hospital was destroyed, and that 500 people were killed. Then it turned out it wasn't Israel, it was a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that fell on the hospital, the hospital still stands, it was the parking lot that was hit, and there is no credible body that believes that many people were killed in that explosion. Out of all estimates I heard, the US gave the highest one, saying it was somewhere between 100 and 300 killed, and likely at the lower end. And that's the highest estimate. Hamas "revised" the number and took it down to... 471. And that's STILL a part of the "official" total number of Gazans killed according to Hamas. If that doesn't tell someone that Hamas lies, I don't know that anything will.

Also, thank you for the report about the sign war! XD I'm glad to hear that the fight between you and your neighbor ended with your decisive victory.

I feel like you're probably sick of me thanking you, but I really am so grateful for you, so I hope it's okay to do it again, for being interested in my housing situation. God willing, there's still some stuff to work out, but hopefully everything will be figured out soon. And in the meantime, I'm doing my best in this temporary place I'm in. And yes, there are hundreds of thousands of people who have been displaced, and it's throwing so many of us for a loop. And it's still one of the smaller problems to have following Oct 7, but it exists, it's hard to deal with, many are affected by it, so I do think it's worth mentioning.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

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liamtheshark7 · 1 month

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My essay on my Fanny button might be autistic

Note: I have been thinking about this so much and now want to share it because I 1) seen others say the same thing 2) seen that the bbc ghosts fans won’t get mad over headcanons about autism and have a lot of them so that’s cool I will say now

Why Fanny button might be autistic

In this essay I will tell you why I think Fanny button from ghosts is autistic and I think she’s a high masking autistic. It won't be a great essay but hopefully will get my point across. I researched high masking in women for this because that’s a specific thing and I really think it’s her I think it really explains a lot of her because Fanny can sometimes be misunderstood by other characters In the show and people who watch the show and there is a reason for this, fanny puts up such a character sort of like she acts so intense all the time and then it’s hard for people to really see past this but what I think happened to make her like this was that when she married George she started masking a lot more because we see in the Christmas special “he came” she was very different before she is very talented at math autistic people can be very talented in something and love it a lot a special interest perhaps* but she was told she can’t do this it’s for men now when I’m thinking about this I’m thinking a lot of this was impacted by the time she was in and being a woman in this time which is why I researched autism in women specifically masking is alot more common in AFAB people because of society alot so it can still apply here it’s just worth noteing the context and differences in society speaking of the time she was in an how society was then okay a common thing alot of autistic people say or feel is “its like everyone was given a book on how to be human at birth and mine was lost” that didn't attuly happen but that's just what if feels like and this is mainly referring to socialy but fanny did attuly get this book there where rules told to everyone then about how to act how to communicate and act around people how your ment to seem etc so when she married George and he did not love her she thought “I need to follow there rules better if I follow them completely he will love me” and she did she learnt these rules and followed them masking. What makes alot of people who may think Fanny is autistic think this is how hard she finds it to accept change now I have looked at the criteria for getting an autism diagnosis and she dose fit it the only thing is that traits had to have been there since you where a child and we can't know that because we never see her as a child for the sake of this we will assume she did so this here is the first part which is social.

A. Need to have persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction across multiple contexts, as manifested by the following, currently or by history

Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity, ranging, for example, from abnormal social approach and failure of normal back-and-forth conversation; to reduced sharing of interests, emotions, or affect; to failure to initiate or respond to social interactions

Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction, ranging, for example, from poorly integrated verbal and nonverbal communication; to abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures; to a total lack of facial expressions and nonverbal communication.

Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships, ranging, for example, from difficulties adjusting behavior to suit various social contexts; to difficulties in sharing imaginative play or in making friends; to absence of interest in peers.

So to fit the first part of the autism criteria you need to have or have had persistent struggles I'm each of those areas as it says above so I will go through them now

On this one I want to go back to thing thing about “it feels like everyone was giving a book at birth on how to be human and mine got lost” referring to social interactions but Fanny did literally have this book there where rules for social interactions and if you followed them then your doing good which is why I think she used these rules to mask but even if someone who is autistic is following all these rules sometimes and I dont actually know how i just heard that people who aren't autistic can still just tell that there is something different there is no way we can see this unfortunately because we only have bits of her life but we know she did have friends who she would mainly talk gossip with but moving on to her death which we have of course much more to go off she dose say very out of pocket things one example which I think alot of people think she was purposely trying to insult Alison but I think she was not really trying to do that she was saying amd making a point of how Alison seemed and that she was not lady like and following the rules whatever but i don't think Fanny saw an attualy problem with what she was saying and this is the “when you first arrived here I though you where a prostitute” she doesn’t really see how this could upset or offende someone she just speaking her mind with no filter she dose not have a filter even when following the rules she was given she still says things which she didn't realise she could not or would not be appropriate so I still think yes to this she dose communication in a strange way with the other characters she can be quite blunt and rude not knowing she is being because it fits within her rules that she knows. Another thing worth noting here is that fanny is closest with the captain who is also quite obviously autistic I think*2 and neurodivergent*3 people tend to become friends with eachother like that.

The main thing I can think of for this is In fanny's body language she always has the same pose same face on she dose notice others body language because she does give out to Alison from doing things not like a lady but again that is most likely learnt she learnt this is how a lady is meant to have her body language and she learnt exactly what to do and look out for when they did the panto for Alison she could not do a different character for fairy God mother and evil step mother the tone the body language was exactly the same despite them being obviously very different characters.

Fanny shows little interest in forming friendships with her fellow ghost, Martha Howe Douglas even says on the podcast that she doesn't like any of them I don't think this Is fully true but it is worth noting also note that many things said on that podcast where also not fully correct I think so it is to be taken with a grain of salt, Fanny definition of friends is “peers and intellectual equals” but a better definition is “a person with whom one has a bond of mutual affection” so she dose not understand friendships fully, I also think she tends to misinterpret others relationships for example when you read the book you can see how obvious George's affair with the butler and gardner was she also panicked a lot when she was briefly attracted to Mike she made it alot more dramatic than it really was it took her a while to catch on to the fact that she was being just as bad as Betty in the final and she did not notice the captain being gay either most of the ghosts noticed this. She again dose not fully know when she's being rude I don't think she doesn’t know what is and isn't appropriate to say to Alison and the other ghosts, she also viewed Alison as her own daughter which I did notice that but some people did not it was not the most clear on account of how rude she was to Alison so alot of people did not notice she dose not know why this matters and maybe thinks she's being A lot more obvious as a mother then she really is. Said before but diffrent context when they where doing the panto she could not do a difference between he fairy God mother and evil step mother very different character.

As well as that you also need to have three of the four traits I will put next

B. Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities, as manifested by at least two of the following, currently or by history

Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech (e.g., simple motor stereotypes, lining up toys or flipping objects, echolalia, idiosyncratic phrases).

Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior (e.g., extreme distress at small changes, difficulties with transitions, rigid thinking patterns, greeting rituals, need to take same route or eat same food every day).

Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus (e.g., strong attachment to or preoccupation with unusual objects, excessively circumscribed or perseverative interests).

Hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interest in sensory aspects of the environment (e.g. apparent indifference to pain/temperature, adverse response to specific sounds or textures, excessive smelling or touching of objects, visual fascination with lights or movement).

I will now go through if and when I think she shows these behaviors

So a lot of the ghosts do things like this more obvious ones would be the Captain, Mary and Robin I am being honest I don't notice these as much in Fanny but let's go through it, one of the main things people notice is in the captain and all the noises he makes mary pat and fanny do this also (+Robin echolalia) Mary more than Pat but Fanny does this also!! Listen to her there's a video somewhere on YouTube titled the sound of fanny or something she does the same sort of stimming noises that they do another thing this is a bit of overthinking perhaps but the way fanny stand her posture the way she holds herself if you look at it she does almost the same one all the time and it's like she holds her own hands and has then on front of her and she sort of moves around the hands now if you copy this posture and you hold your hands tight and you sort of move around the hands it's like hers so I think she's holding her hands tight she's trying to keep still but still moving around that suppressing stims??? Maybe I think so she also if you look close at her hands her thumb moves every so often and sort of very small strokes her hands this could be the stim that got out of her trying to suppress it if you look at her and if you look at the captain in that scene where havers gives him the letter about France surrendering and he runs to the window he is quite obviously If you watch it then you watch him as a ghost, suppressing stims the feel of that scene is very similar to the feel of fanny's scenes. Also when she was combing robins hair could also be a stim thing feeling textures can be a stim.

This is why people usually if they do think Fanny is autistic think it, she can not handle change like at all it can not affect her ons bit and she can't deal with it she get really stressed and really annoyed about it she can not handle it, she does come around to change eventually for example the land being sold she gets very upset about it then she goes off she calms down she talks about it to Thomas and then she is okay she has a big reaction is very upset by it and then she regulates and eventually accepts it. I also think her insisting Alison follows all her rules to be a lady could be part of this. It is common in autism to care a lot about rules and get stressed if they are not followed but not everyone is like this. I definitely think that's part of this as well as other things. When mary got sucked off she panicked alot she first did not process it which delayed processing can also be a thing with autism I do think she shows this sometimes for example when Alison got pushed it took her a bit and then she got mad but that was also her thinking alot and being lost in thought, she doesn't really process it until Mary's moving on starts bringing up change in her life and now she realize something is missing this is going to be different and her friend is gone she has no idea what to do with herself after realizing this she just panics.

Fanny most definitely has fixations I think one of them was murder she wrote which she was very fixated on for a while so much that she brang it into her own life (death) if it weren't for that they would not have known about Lucy I do this also I try bring whatever I'm currently fixated on into every aspect of my life every project I do I learn new things because of it it really makes its way into your life, I also with Dante Dante the stuffed dog I'm not sure is that an object because it was a dog but now is it still a dog or an object dog or and object/dog? But yes, saying you love a stuffed dog more than anything In the world I think is an unusually strong attachment to a thing. Another note is that she is very good with animals. She had a lot and I think I heard that that is common with autistic people but I'm not sure.

Now this one is a bit harder because she is dead but I said before but combing robins hair sensory seeking feeling textures she very much did not like it when she had to go I'm the basement because she did not like the plague ghosts or the environment for sensory reasons could be both this one is more hard because they don't feel everything In death so I do not know.

So Fanny Button dose fit the autism criteria the best I can try prove that I am not a doctor I just really love ghosts and i think this explains a lot about her character

In conclusion I believe fanny button is autistic I believe she fits the criteria for autism and I think she is specifically a high masking autistic I think without that detail it doesn't make sense but I love this theory because it makes her make sense and it helps you to think about her character better.

Goodbye

Notes 2

*the maths thing was never mentioned after that though but you can have multiple special interests so I could be that and something else like maybe all her ladylike rules or her pets gossip don't know

*2 I also think mary is autistic specifically they all have traits lots of them and I'd say I could do this for most of them but it is worth noting, noting that's all we can completely ignore it after this but in TV shows the characters they are people but they are different then people so it's much easier to see autistic traits and traits of anything like for example personality disorders that maybe if they were a real person it would not be the same but that's it I love all the theory's regarding this and they all fit and make sense

*3 yeah they are all neurodivergent probably also I think Fanny and the captain are very similar and show a lot of there autistic traits in the same way or similar

hopefully all this information is correct thank you for reading if you have anything to add I would love to hear it

#bbc ghosts #fanny button #bbc ghosts fanny #lady button

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vaspider · 2 months

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Yo, so this is less so a specific ask and more me having the need to verbalize some stuff with the option of getting input from someone with a more knowledgable perspective. I have been thinking a fair bit about Judaism and dabbling with the idea of converting to it. I don’t think it’s something for me, but I am tentatively thinking about the option.

The thing is. I assume you’re familiar with the difference between hard magic and soft magic systems in writing. (If not, the tldr is hard magic is defined with hard rules and limitations and soft magic is more ambiguous and fluid.) And I think my basic thing is that I am very open to what you could call soft spirituality and faith, but unable to jell with any hard beliefs.

For example I can never get myself to really entertain the idea of an afterlife being set up in a very specific way with specific rules and where you know what is happening and why. But I saw that tweet that went around a while ago that was like “I hope that death is like being a child at a party and falling asleep, so somebody carries you to bed and I hope when I die I can still hear the laughter from the other room” and that fucked me up beyond words.

I have gone through a couple religions and beliefs over my life and never found a framework that really fit with me, but in the past couple of years I have developed a lot and realized I have a yearning for spiritual things. My current view could probably best be described as a pantheist leaning agnostic enamored with the idea of belief and experience shaping purpose and giving structure… sort of. As well as the power of belief and to change the way you see the world for the better. It’s hard to explain specifically the angle I like.

The reason I am caught up on Judaism rn is that in a lot of ways it seems to be based around a lot of soft spirituality. I am absolutely in love with the idea that god, or the divine, or spirit, whatever one may call it is not something concrete, not one existence, but more of a force like the laws of physics, or the rules of math. I adore the idea of little rituals and rules to bring god into your life and through that connecting you to culture and history and people and community and spirituality. I love the idea you talked about some time in the past of the four kinds of jews, based on studying the scriptures and following the rules, and that even those who do neither are still a vital part of the jewish people and are needed for it to be whole. There’s so many little details that appeal to me so strongly, because they’re exactly the kind of stuff I am yearning for.

But I feel like the hard aspects keep me away. I love the idea of rules and rituals to shape your life, but I don’t think I could follow the rules of Judaism, because having a preset set of rules feels too hard for me. Similarly I love the idea of studying the texts and the never ending pursuit of decifering the meaning and arguing about it, but I don’t think I could get interested in ever doing it, because having a specific text to do it with is too hard.

So I feel very conflicted, because the way Judaism feels to me from the outside, it shows me both the soft aspects of spirituality I absolutely adore and yearn for, and at the same time the hard aspects that keep me away from religion. And they feel very connected and interwoven.

And it feels like especially as a convert being a part of it is connected with a huge amount of the hard aspects and a lot of work that goes into those. I’d have to first figure out if there is even any jewish denominations (is that the right word?) near where I live that don’t do circumcision and that aren’t on the conservative side (I have no idea how the situation is where I live) and then do all the studies and the entire process involved in converting (which I admittedly don’t know very much about either, so I might be overstating this) to be part of something I would immediately take a half step away from because I’m only really interested in the ideas behind the actual elements of it and not as much the elements themselves if that makes sense?

I guess this is pretty rambly, but maybe you have some input, or something smart to say and if not I hope I’m not coming across as this guy right now:

I think that in the process of writing this ask, you seem to have figured out that this isn't for you right now. If you get to a point where all of those things aren't standing in your way but are a to-do list, that will be when you know it's for you.

And they're generally called movements, not denominations.

#very old ask #Judaism

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moonschocolate · 4 months

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Tom Riddle headcanons!!

because lately i've been thinking about this tragic little human <3

tw: mention of torture as a topic

first of all I wanted to clarify that in this there's no Voldemort, no interest in practicing dark magic, just a teen who goes to Hogwarts soo... :)

proud slytherin. no matter how much other people can say 'slytherin = bad' he just doesn't care, he will not argue with you if you think or say that cause he will find it pointless

I don't now where I read this, but if I'll find it I will tag the person who said this before me: he has autism!!

which means he is not a very social person, and he has little/no friends

and he is deeply attached to an object/topic

the topic in question is dark magic

he doesnt want to practice it, he just finds the whole thing interesting

which deeply concerns professors

he knows everything. about horcruxes, the three unforgivable curses, origin and all

he simply thinks that knowledge is knowledge

IF HE READS?!?! OH DAMN

i strongly believe he has one hell of a library in his dorm

the most dramatic myths ever? knows them

he's just a nerd

read books about t0rture, c0mmunism, n@zism, because knowledge is knowledge

also reads light books of course i dont want to scare you

maths is not his thing

like yes he's good at it but he doesnt really care

did i say hes dramatic?

and an absolute pessimist

since i do not believe that his hair is like that just because it is, he HAS to have a hair routine (DROP IT TOM)

has an infinite collection of bookmarks

no person is allowed to touch his books

doesnt write on books even with pencils

listens to DRAMATIC classical music

EXAMPLE

(also y'all have to teach me how to put spotify songs with the blue rectangle cuz i dont have a clue on how)

JUST THE START

Idk it reminds me of him (and regulus but this is not about him)

this goes against the fact that he's dramatic, but i think that in a relationship he would be a good-old fashioned lover boy

flowers, love letters, POEMS, kissing in the rain, handing you his jacket when you're cold

and of course he wears suits

NOT a sports kid

mf doesn't know a single sport

he just learned how to swim

that's it

is defo the kind of person who is SOSOSOSOSO SKINNY

He's skeptical af on food

like i believe he's a picky eater

and i dont think he eats a lot

like he will go through the day with some coffees, some water, breakfast and a snack in the afternoon

is always gentle doing anything

when he's mad he's even more mad that he can't throw anything because then he would be even more angry that it got broken

has NO PHYSICAL FORCE AT ALL

Like his arms are spaghetti

im sorry but imo he's short

like 1.70 cm (5'5''-5'6'')

which is not really short

I CANT SEE HIM AS A TALL BEING

will not admit it but hates the sea

like as long as he can reach with his feet the "land" below then it's no problem

if he can't he'll try to act cool and say he's tired and immediately get out of the sea

it gives him a sense of pure confusion because he doesnt know what he could run into

which annoys him

because when he cant know something it hurts him physically emotionally psychologically

he knows plenty of languages

english, french, latin, russian and german

why?

because it's cool

also knows how to play the piano and the flute and the viola

"never judge a book by its cover" he does exactly the opposite

especially with books he judges the book by the cover, if he likes the cover he'll like the book too

and people can gain his interest only at first sight

he hates how lots of people can easily change their opinions as long as their group/loved ones have a different opinion

or how people always follow the crowd

people who judge mudbloods just because they're mudbloods are too stupid for him

i think we all know that he is THE teachers' pet

he's the Hermione of his generation

which means that while there are plenty of people with their hands raised the only one who will be listened to is tom

is a MANIAC in cleaning

his bed and his overall room is always tidy af

he hates getting his uniform dirty

he has plenty of nightmares about his past

which he never talks about with anyone

is the kind of person to have 4 or 5 cats

he is absolutely quiet

i got a strong feeling that this man was bullied before hogwarts at the orphanage

he has a cute little stuffed animal in really bad shape which he has from his years at the orphanage and it's hidden at the end of his wardrobe

he strongly despises children because he doesn't have a clue how to deal with them

acts like he has patience

lacks patience

in a modern au, the only thing he'd have going to school would be a black pen

not because he didnt care or was too lazy to get other things but because he didnt find having 3985729947 pens and highliters necessary

dada would be boring for him because out of curiosity he would've already learned most of the spells or wtv

i dont remember if i said it but quidditch is NOT something he likes

or just flying on a broom in general

(remus lupin behavior)

(I had to say it)

studying consists in him burying his face in the books for like 4 or 5 hours straight (my man has some serious issues)

you could tell im completely delusional because he became a killer and nothing's good-old fashioned lover boy about canon him but oh well🥰

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silvermoon424 · 1 month

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OMG, thank you for the chicken apocalypse rec (or... anti-rec?) it was so amazingly absurd. So many dire closeups of chickens being horrifyingly... chickeny. (Definitely had some content that was not for everyone but I'm pretty impervious) Are there any other memorably off the wall horror manga you know of?

I'm so glad you actually took the time to read my recommendation post! And don't worry, I have more recommendations!

Human Ranch: Elves kidnap a school bus full of Japanese teenagers because apparently human meat is a delicacy in the elf world.

Doku Mushi: A group of people wake up in an abandoned school building that has been totally sealed. They have no food, and the only thing they're given of note is a butcher knife, a big pot, and cooking utensils. Do the math on what their captor wants them to do lol (it's cannibalism).

Tonarimachi no Catastrophe: This one actually isn't that bad, but you did ask for off the wall manga. The manga is about a town where, one day, the sky and the ground inexplicably invert. The manga follows different citizens trying to survive while also trying to uncover the source of this phenomenon.

Children (by Miura Miu): tl;dr- a bunch of orphans living in a super remote area have the "job" of killing people and disposing of bodies. Pretty heavy on the gore, but for you in particular I think it would be fine since you- like me- are impervious to a lot, lol. This manga had some potential but unfortunately it's pretty obvious it got axed early on, leading to a rushed conclusion.

Shibuya Goldfish: Full disclosure, I have not read this one myself, but I think you would love it since it's basically the chicken apocalypse manga but with giant goldfish.

Scumbag Loser: Another manga that isn't too bad, but has an interesting premise. It's about a social outcast who is obsessed with smells and can identify people by their scents. After meeting someone who claims to be his childhood friend- which is impossible because she died 5 years ago- he begins noticing how his fellow "scumbags" disappear before reappearing with entirely different scents and personalities.

Signal 100: A death game-type manga where a class is hypnotized into committing suicide. Before they die at their own hands, they must complete the tasks given to them.

And finally, if you want an off-the-wall horror manga that's actually good and clever, I can't recommend Franken Fran and its sequel Franken Fran Frantic enough!

#btw I'm working on a spreadsheet with horror manga recs #however those are only GOOD horror manga recs lol #manga recommendation #manga #horror manga

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tideswept · 2 months

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15 questions for 15 friends

I was tagged by a few people, so~here we go!

1. Are you named after anyone?

Kinda! I was supposed to be born a boy, and absolutely nothing was prepared for me when I turned out to be female. And mom went "I like my sister's name" and named me that. (This caused a lot of drama.) So I wasn't named after her per se but....

I ... I was almost a Peter.

2. When was the last time you cried?

Few weeks ago.

3. Do you have kids?

4. What sports do you play/ have you played?

None tbh other than what I was forced to in school. Oh. OH WAIT SWIMMING IS A SPORT. Okay. Yeah. I did a lot of that. I just, uh, never view it that way?

5. Do you use sarcasm?

... having a small crisis upon the realization that I rarely do these days. god what happened to me I was such a sarcastic little demon I'm all EARNEST now

6. What's the first thing you notice about people?

Hair. Weird thing, right? Mostly because I'm always impressed by how people can keep their hair tamed. (me, with curly hair: [despair]) Followed quickly by body language.

7. What's your eye colour?

Brown! I'm told it looks green up close but ehhhh. (doubt)

8. Scary movies or happy endings?

Scary movies! Or, you know, scary movies with (relative) happy endings are also good!

9. Any talents?

I have a knack for detecting accents/identifying languages and having a general, if not specific, idea of where people are from. I also have a scarily good aim. (though my form is atrocious and under no circumstances should ever be mimicked)

I'm also a pretty decent cook! Bit hit or miss as a baker, though.

10. Where were you born?

Venezuela!

11. What are your hobbies?

Writing, gaming, reading, cooking, being a lil' nerdy about Disney comics and Disney history overall. Obsessively analyzing data.

12. Do you have any pets?

I point you upwards! Big one is Jupiter (ASH) and the small one is Saturn (Russian Blue). Both of them are about 13 years old.

13. How tall are you?

5'2... and a half. (It counts!) [158cm]

14. Favourite subject in school?

English, since it gave me an excuse to read and tune out everything else lmao. (I was often bullied, or, I guess, attempted, once I got into a book you could scream in my ear and I was full Helen Keller. Who? What? Don't care.) ♥ Depending on the teacher, I also really liked history and science! Basically, as long as I don't have to do math and the teacher wasn't a bitter monster, I enjoyed the subject.

15. Dream job?

Ethnologist! Oh my god, I'd be so delighted to get to nerd out like that! ♥ With the rise of various internet cultures I think, more than ever, we could really use more of them around. It's such an interesting thing to do to be able to delve in order to contrast and compare, to find links and reasons for variances, commonalities, schisms--all of them. There's so much data available online, and it paints such a colorful, and sometimes tragic, implications that extend far into our burgeoning global identity and--

I'll shush. 👀

Tagging: @scatteredheroes @irrationalsense @dark--whisperings @aigoos @gretchenzellerbarnes @qed23 @mollysunder @mari-lwyd-fannibal-blog @skyerie @minimal23 @ellelans @mutteringretreats1 and anyone who hasn't yet gotten tagged/wants to do it!

#berry.txt #behold the power of #friendship!

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donnerpartyofone · 9 months

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I signed up for this online class co-taught by a woman I find maddeningly brilliant, where she lectures on her experience working with and studying people who are on the cutting edge of whatever their professional field is. She discovered this common thread where many of them claim that they don't come up with their innovations on their own--supposedly, ideas just enter their minds spontaneously, or even in a dream, and they follow these disciplined lifestyles (versions of monastic practices, generally) that they believe make them more receptive to those kinds of messages. A good clarifying example is that of a mathematician (Pattie Maes I think? I forgot to write it down) who claimed that as a young student, she would just-know the solutions to math problems without being able to explain the reasoning, so she was always in trouble with her teachers; eventually she got into analytical philosophy, which helped her reverse-engineer and understand the answers she mysteriously received. So anyway the class I'm taking allows you to offer up your own projects for feedback and advice about how you can invite a breakthrough to happen. There are some extremely interesting people in the group, including a couple of guys who are doing futuristic-sounding sustainable farming projects, someone who studies black holes, and just all stripes of scientists and artists. I'm hearing some pretty interesting things, but...

The class is co-taught by this woman who is also obviously brilliant, she has these insane credentials I barely understand involving venture capital and AI, she works with and for extremely high level companies and luminaries and her self-selected title is something like "singularity expert". And like, all of that is inherently interesting whether or not it sounds somewhat sinister to your ears, but I quickly realized that she's one of these people who is just fundamentally excited by the basic concept of Success, and she automatically thinks that any measure of fame and fortune, no matter what it's in aid of or where it came from, is evidence of genius. Which to me is like this incredibly dangerous trap, for what I think are really obvious reasons.

So one of us students brought up a manuscript she's been working on for decades that isn't going anywhere, and the singularity expert told her to just throw it out and do something else, basically. And in her justification for this, she started saying "I know a lot of you probably don't like Elon Musk, BUT" in this really bitter, cold tone of voice that let you know immediately that she's a huge fan and she thinks the resistance to him is just a bunch of ignorant liberal bullshit. And her example of his genius, which we should all imitate, is that when he wanted to make a big update to Tesla/Twitter/(some other shit he acquired from actual innovators), he found that the update was incompatible with all of foundational code, so he just threw out millions and millions of dollars' worth of code to force his new thing into place. And I mean, on one level I heard something useful and true: Don't sacrifice your future for the comforting stability of the past, beware of the sunk cost fallacy, etc. But the fact that Elon Musk did something that *appears* to represent that, depending on how you spin it, does not mean that he is a genius you should seek to imitate. First of all, I didn't leave knowing exactly what the consequences of his actions were, and second of all...millions of dollars doesn't mean anything to that guy. He's impossibly rich and he basically started out that way, and he's never going to wind up homeless or whatever even if he drives every single company he bought into the ground. He's just not a good example of someone with a high risk, high reward mindset that we should all emulate because he could lose hundreds of millions of dollars almost without noticing. The fact that he did this thing that in isolation looks heroic, that's only a tiny part of the picture with him.

(And that's without even getting into the impact that it has on the rest of the world, that he has so much power; like personally I think he's such a negative presence in the world that it's beyond just material effects, actually he's so corrosive that even talking about him is bad. Just contemplating the idea of him brings out the absolute worst in people, it's bad for people's moral fiber to even argue about him, but ANYWAY)

Unfortunately I find that a lot of people who have some kind of overlap with the self-help field will eventually come around to admitting that they're so blinded by the glamor of public, lucrative success that they don't really care where it comes from or who gets it or what people do with it. Damien Echols is someone I really enjoy, I just think it's undeniably interesting to hear from someone who spent almost 20 years on death row studying spirituality (to be glib about it) and pursuing all kinds of monastic disciplines; I mean that guy has things to say that you don't get from circulating in normal society. He practices something that has roots as far back as ancient Sumeria, he's not rich and he's not trying to get rich, but he often reminds people that poverty doesn't have an inherent moral quality and it's not inherently evil to pursue financial success. He'll say that if you have a phobic attitude toward money, if the very idea of it is tainted by guilt and fear in your mind, then it becomes a destructive force in your life--but if you think about money as energy, a resource you can channel into doing what's important to you, then it becomes something positive and supportive. And I can totally understand that. But then Echols will extrapolate that to the point that he's praising megachurch guys who are absolute crooks and scam artists and who definitely rob people through a form of psychological blackmail that tells them they're going to hell if they don't help buy Jim Bakker or whoever a private jet. And I'm like, man...ok so it's worth while to say that having a positive mindset about money can change your life for the better. But that doesn't mean that we have to then lionize every single person who ever got rich no matter how they got there and no matter what they did with their power, that's just fucking insane, right?

I could go on and on actually, about various people I've heard speak about how to break through your subconscious limitations and take a more authorial role in your own life, and how often even the most apparently well-meaning one of these speakers will come around to praising like the Monopoly guy, or some tepid pop star with an incredible marketing machine behind them, as ground-breaking geniuses who we all need to emulate. I mean a lot of people who are visibly successful get there by accident, or nepotism, or coattail riding, or plain ruthlessness. Many people in the big-success category turn out to be inarguably, unfathomably stupid (ironically I spotted the Elon Musk Pop Tart story the morning before I took this class), and some of them are only geniuses insofar as they have an abnormally well-developed predatory instinct that makes them able to think thoughts and perform actions that you really can't conceive of if you aren't, you know, a psychopath. Someone recently posted a bunch of advice on teaching from John Cale, and one of the things he said was "Suspect charisma", and I think THAT is a much more important piece of advice than like, "find someone who is rich and famous and do whatever that person appears to be doing without asking yourself how they got where they are, or just what is the real reason that you personally are so compelled by them." It seems like a lot of people respond to the aura of "success" so intensely that they just don't want to have to question it, and they'll bend over backwards crafting these speculative backstories and dialectic arguments to make their animal reaction to the spectacle of power sound like something intellectually sound. It smacks of stockholm syndrome, of people who fall in love with their own bullies. There's complicated reasons for that, some of which are what got Trump elected I think, but I don't wanna talk about that. I have to go to the doctor's now anyway, and stop thinking about this.

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keganexe · 1 year

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D&D, The OGL, and a Better Future for Actual Play Content

So this is spinning out of a post I made on twitter about how I legitimately believe the future of Actual Play (or AP for short) is in working alongside indie rpg folks

You can see that thread here, but I'm gonna recap anyway

Lets talk about the OGL and D&D first

Thanks to some great reporting from journalist Linda Codega (@lincodega), we know the general shape of the new Open Gaming License (or OGL) that WotC is running for Dungeons & Dragons moving forward. In short it sucks, I am not super interested in getting into it here, especially because Linda (once again) did really solid reporting here. Generally this spells a very bad time for a number of bigger third party creators (Green Ronin, Paizo, Kobold Press, probably Critical Role if we assume they aren't in on it which I would not assume tbh), and it also spells out specifically that Hasbro's desire to monetize even harder is in full swing.

One of the more interesting bits to this whole thing to me though, is how Wizards is looking at Fan Content, and I think its very likely this is going to be a major rub for AP Producers in the future. The OGL is now much clearer that AP work needs to fall under the Fan Content Policy, which means in broad strokes there is to be no monetization of your content. This is an old policy, but one I think a lot of folks are blithely unaware of. Specifically

You can't require payments, downloads, subscriptions, or email registration to access your content

You can't sell or license this content to a third party

Your content must be free for others to view, access, share, and use without paying you anything, obtaining approval, or giving credit.

You specifically can run things like a Ko-Fi or a Patreon, but you can't hide content behind a paywall. It also is... unclear on the ability to do things like live shows for money? I'm not a lawyer.

Regardless I think its high time people left, and that brings me to part 2 here

D&D and APs

Fundamentally D&D has always been bad for Actual Play. It's a quagmire of conflicting rules and bubblegum fixes, it crunches in weird spots, it doesn't do half the things people play it for, and its expensive to get into. Furthermore, it requires a lot of prep, it doesn't adapt well, and fundamentally it makes bad radio.

Where we see the most successes in the niche of D&D APs is hyper edited, super slick, and wildly unachievable setups; with major changes in rules, players who can make a living doing it, and entire production studios working on them (looking at you Critical Role, Dimension 20, etc). Within these (and within a ton of other APs) we also see a wild amount of homebrew to bend an inflexible and inelegant system into something that tells the stories we're interested in telling in games. Be this the wild changes to death in Dimension 20's Neverafter, full new classes and mechanics across Critical Role, magic items and homebrew in every AP I can think of, etc.

Generally also D&D is bad radio. The exacting measurements on battle maps don't make great Theatre of the Mind (certainly not as well as games designed for it), the rolls + stat modifiers + misc. shit on your sheet requires a lot of boring and frequently had to follow math*, etc.

Point here being, when we see it done well** it's less on the hands of D&D being good at these things, and more because production is changing major aspects of gameplay to make a game make good radio.

We should also talk about the messy legacy of D&D, but honestly that would be a few thousand extra words from me, and I don't have it in me. If the OGL doesn't scare you, it's worth thinking about what you're cosigning by staying around. Here's some extra articles if this is the first you're hearing about Wizards having major problems tho

Why Race is Still a Problem by Linda Codega gets into a lot of it

Wizards is still making money off of Oriental Adventures (and an article on that)

Mike Mearls still works there, this was weirdly hard to find a good article on, but here's a reddit post where its discussed

A Better Future for Actual Plays

This brings me to the point of this thread, which is that I don't think the future of Actual Plays has ever... actually been in making 5e content. This is a thing I feel pretty strongly about as a person who makes non-5e ap content (and this is a bias, sure). To me a better future has always been in indie rpgs, and in making content hand in hand with designers and producers working together.

What does this look like though? In short it rocks, and it's a thing bigger folks in the AP sphere are clearly already looking it. I'll list some examples below, and then I'll talk more about what it looks like on smaller scale, and what my experience with that has been like

So first off here's a few examples of what this looks like on the higher production end of the scale. I'm specifically looking at examples of campaign APs, working with the designer of the system, and not one shots which are doing this a bunch already.

Dimension 20's Shriek Week with Gabe Hick's Mythic System

Yazeba's Bed & Breakfast Podcast getting made alongside Possum Creek (it is a series of one shots, but also a shared universe, so I'm counting it here)

Into the Motherlands moving to their own system eventually

Iron Edda: Puppet Strings with Tracy Hicks on the One Shot Podcasting Network (edited to add this example)

On the smaller end this is something I legitimately have some experience with, and this is where the thread was always heading. Let's talk about Renegade Racers, the game I made specifically for one person, what that has looked like for me, and why I think it's the future of APs to make content this way.

So a while ago I got on a Fast & Furious bend and watched all the movies. Not content to just watch movies though, I talked to some folks about if they had seen games based on it, and got linked to a video of @0sarahxfrank0 running a F&F inspired honey heist hack (I'm not gonna link it because the community it spun out of has had a lot happen and I don't wanna give them clicks tbh).

The short version of this is that I watched the game, built a system to better handle what folks were trying to do, and then sent it back to Sarah. She loved it. We made some changes, we rebuilt around the players and stories people wanted to tell, we released the game and the first AP together afterwards. Now Sarah and I do a lot of work together, we're planning bigger things like this for the future, and it's so far been a lot of fun and super rewarding for everyone involved.

We've seen some other stuff like this as well, even if not in campaign play. Offhand, Plus One Exp's home Down We Go system is a great example of working with a designer to stamp a system as the home system, and find community within it. We've been able to watch sorta in slow motion as DWG moved from a little one page OSR hack that potentially gets lost in the shuffle, to something big and exciting that both parties are happy to put a stamp on.

This is the exact future I see for AP campaign play, and not a wild dream I don't think.

What does Actual Play look like when it's tied to designers who want to help you tell your stories in the ways you want to tell them? What would it look like for a community to say "actually we've had enough"? What happens when we work with people who give a shit instead of faceless megacorps? What does it look like when we invest in people willing to invest in us?

I've seen the future and it's golden, we just have to reach for it.

*hard to follow in that if the players aren't saying out loud what exactly they're adding the numbers are nonsense **by well here I do mean "expensive and award winning" I do not mean I think they're particularly master classes in game running or production, but that's a whole separate topic

#this goes so many places #it lands where I wanted #but wow it went places first #in which kegan spends 1400 words saying “please want more for yourself”

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night-dark-woods · 8 days

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ok Exordia review time (not spoiler free!) since i finished it a few days ago. this is long and rambling and unedited.

4/5 i love Seth's writing and im glad they got to play with scifi again BUT i think they needed a better editor OR to split it more cleanly into sections- in one of the interviews they said it was originally a series of novellas each from a single POV, and i think the constraint of that would have made it a much tighter story.

one of the best things about their Destiny lore is how much they do with so little- thinking of this section from the Beyond Light CE:

Disaster at the worksite. Clearly we will not be moving Clarity Control like we did the K1 artifact. It reacted violently to the attempt. I have entered 19 casualties into the log, since 19 engineers from the Hannu team were caught in its reaction...though there were many more than 19 bodies when it was finished. I have sequestered the recordings. Especially the sensorium telemetry. Quite upsetting. Yet I do not believe it was an act of hostility. Even this outburst carried themes of duplication...as if Clarity Control wanted to show it could help me.

which i was originally thinking of as a first run at Blackbird, but i think these may have been simultaneous? i'm not actually sure. i know Exordia was started after the first Baru book was published, but i'm not sure how much lead time there is for the CEs.

or the clarity of Unveiling compared to a lot of what felt like similar ideas that took much longer to get thru in Exordia. primes. pink noise. math. alright lets fucking gooo oh wait. five more pages of ethics first. okay sure i'll do that for ya Seth bc i love your prose. which also. a) conway game of life mentioned!!! b) this part from Exordia made me LOSE MY MIND:

But that was impossible. The whole universe came from the same source: the same designers. I was part of one of them. If I could only remember... We were arguing, I think. Or maybe we were the argument, because gods cannot do things, they can only be them. We were in contest over the morality of infinities: the cardinality of all possible souls measured against the mere infinity of souls to ever be born...

(this is the part from Unveiling, for the optimistically two people who will read this who haven't read Destiny lore):

Once upon a time,* a gardener and a winnower lived** together in a garden.*** * It was once before a time, because time had not yet begun. ** We did not live. We existed as principles of ontological dynamics that emerged from mathematical structures, as bodiless and inevitable as the primes. *** It was the field of possibility that prefigured existence. They existed, because they had to exist. They had no antecedent and no constituents, and there is no instrument of causality by which they could be portioned into components and assigned to some schematic of their origin. If you followed the umbilical of history in search of some ultimate atavistic embryo that became them, you would end your journey marooned here in this garden.

at the same time, idk what i would remove- at very few points was i reading something that dragged, with the exception of spending a LOT of time with Erik and Clayton in the middle (this is when i put the book down for a month and a half or so). and i know so many people were like sickos.jpg about them However their dynamic did sooo little for me and i don't think Rosamaria was given enough time on the page (and i think having her Be the ship was weird- i recognize that Blackbird needs to have a voice to make the plot go, but i don't think this was the best or neatest way to do it, and collapsed a lot of what i found fundamentally so interesting about Blackbird into something akin to a standard scifi Ship AI).

again i think the restriction of each section of the story being from a single POV might have been the restriction needed to end up with a tighter story- at no point were the multiple plot threads & POVs confusing, per say, but i'm not sure what the structure did for the story bc we could switch to whoever could tell us the most about what was happening whenever convenient, instead of having to piece things together from a limited POV. i'm thinking again of the BLCE, this time the part where Clovis is talking about Maya Sundaresh behaving erratically- i'm no Ishtar group expert but i believe we are supposed to put together that these are all different iterations of her from within the garden). oh- i also wonder if Aixue and Chaya are another run at Maya and Chioma to some degree...

anyway. i also think i am also less the target audience for this book because seth loooves their trolley problems and i simply do not have the patience for it! i loved the hard scifi and the first contact aspects and the character work (Seth's character work is, as always, spectacular. their characters always feel deeply real and flawed in very human ways, while still being exaggerated in the ways characters have to be to function as plot fulcrums), but this isnt something like Baru where i can be like yes you should read this to everyone i talk to.

I think the language in the book is DELIGHTFUL, as always, especially how Seth plays with the idea of an alien translator that sometimes can get an English equivalent to something and sometimes can't! i think that's very fun. because it's on my mind bc ive been listening to the Shelved by Genre episodes on it, it makes me think of Book of the New Sun, and how the "translator" figure of G.W. talks about picking words that are close but they aren't being used like we would use them now- e.g. "metal" in BotNS isnt the same thing we think of as metal! its used more broadly! but its close enough in purpose and point to work just fine. the destriers have horns. i need to know if Seth has read these books.

but back to Exordia. here are some specific prose parts i fucking loved.

this part of the full-page loving, detailed, and technical description of 40 alien nukes detonating in atmosphere:

In the band of thickening atmosphere twenty-five to thirty-five kilometers above the Earth, these gamma rays slam into atoms of oxygen and nitrogen, stripping their orbiting electrons. The orphaned electrons hurtle away at 90 percent of lightspeed. They want to go in a straight line, but hold on now, it's not so easy to leave home. Earth's magnetic field bends their course. They begin to spiral down. When an electron moving near lightspeed has to turn, it emits synchrotron radiation. Poison light. And beneath each bomb there are 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 electrons swerving at once. The result is a blast of electromagnetic noise. No: not noise. A coherent pulse, spiking and faling in harmony. Shiva's own beat drop on electrical civilization. An EMP.

This part. i love Anna and wish we got more of her.

He gives her back her Glock. She accepts it with resignation. "You'd better get your men ready," she says. "It's going to be bad." "Women too," he says, trying for lightness. "The pilot's a woman. We've got a female forward surgeon, a psyops lead, a linguist- she's pretty badass, ran with SEALs in Afghanistan. And Lt. Gainer, she might have some advice for-" "For what?" Anna says calmly. "Advice for what, Erik? How to get killed in a feminine way?"

Seth has such a good and specific way of writing metaphors. a little bit Douglas Adams:

The upshot is: the air around the engine exhaust beam explodes outward with a sound like a tuning fork hit by a Space Shuttle launch. Lung-jellying power. Anything in the beam path suffers the short, severe influence of a needle faster and hotter than a vajra thunderbolt. Anything around the beam eats fireball.

& this part. again. i wish more of the book was Anna and Ssrin's fucked up kismessitude. or whatever.

She slides the barrel of the weapon into the uppermost crater on Ssrin's spine. Slick pain makes Ssrin hiss in psuvoluntary fury: psuvoluntary because it is reflex subject to veto- she could quash it, but the feeling is deliciously wrong, and it is so good to bare her fangs and to unleash that ancient khai instinct of pain-as-motivation. "Questionsss," Ssrin gasps. "I want to know how this story ends." Oh serendura. You'll wish you hadn't asked. You'll wish you'd gone in with your eyes shut and your tongue in your throat so you couldn't smell the poison til it was too late.

which also!!! that's something i love about the Ssrin POV like. Seth is always good at writing aliens and slipping in details that tell us about them. "tongue in your throat" to not smell the poison bc she is a snake alien and smells with her tongue!!! that rules!!!

#bookposting #exordia #this is sooo long sorry #before i reread this i am going to reread blindsight. bc i think a lot of it in in here.#also i cant believe i hadnt even finished exordia when i was writing the gunplay fic. that passage was sitting there waiting for me.#anyway.

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polar-solar · 5 months

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A conversation at a table where I do not belong piqued my interest. Five people, five strangers who may consider me a friend surround me. I interrupt the flow of the conversation by blurting out, “I used to live there.” They stop their discussion on god-knows-what, I stopped listening as soon as that one distinct word rang through the air, honestly I wasn’t really listening before then, either. “Really?” One of them asks, I assume in an effort to be polite. “Yup,” I pop the ‘p’ to buy more time, hesitating slightly before adding, “it is my hometown.” A few of them hum noncommittally, another person asks, “What is it like?” A loaded question. It’s a small town in Canada, a nameless one on a map. Minuscule in the grand scheme of things. A snowflake in a blizzard. I could tell them about the one lake everyone congregates at in the summer—the same one I almost drowned in when I was fourteen. I could tell them about the high school I went to—how I got drunk right behind it, then proceeded to blackout and face a math test the next day when I was fifteen. I could tell them about the one movie theatre that is just slightly better than the rest, the films are never that new, and the popcorn is always a bit too stale, but people like it—it’s the same one my friend and I got kicked out for sneaking into to watch the ‘newest’ film at sixteen. I could tell them about the parking lots my friends and I loitered in because it was the peak of entertainment—how I drove around one of them for the first time in my friends car and almost crashed it at seventeen. I could tell them about the first birthday party I went to with booze instead of balloons where I shared my first kiss with a nameless girl, and a house party that an exchange student hosted while her parents were out of town where I shared my second kiss with a nameless guy from Switzerland. I could tell them about the people and how everyone knew everyone’s name, but nothing about them. I could tell them about my old friend group that made it from elementary to high school—how half of them are in university on the other side of the country, and the other half are on the side of the road snorting cocaine, and begging for money. I could tell them plenty of things, but then I would be giving them a part of my soul I will never be ready to part with. “Cold.” I decide to go with, “It’s just cold.” Which might be an even more intimate reflection of what my hometown is like, and in turn, what I am like, if they just think about it for more than a second. They don’t, though. They nod and go back to their discussion, and I go back to pretending that place hasn’t followed me wherever I go.

#literature #poetry #prose #spilled heart #spilled ink #spilled poem #spilled poetry #spilled thoughts #spilled truth #spilled writing

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allisluv · 8 days

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heyy! could i request 🫶 for thg girls?

i'm lesbian, and i go by she/her but i don't mind she/they either. <3 i'm an infj, but i'm sometimes quite impulsive...(like the time i ate orbeez...they do NOT taste nice), and i can be a bit random and energetic, but usually I'm quite calm.

I like being hugged and cuddled- especially when someone squeezes me! but not too tight or i'll cry in SPD discomfort 😭. i'm usually quite nice to people, because i find it hard to be rude. i've been told that i'm really kind from most people i know, which makes me quite happy. I have quite a lot of activities (music club, maths tutoring, which is VERY needed, school play rehearsals and musical theatre lessons). I can't sleep without my blankets or cuddling up to my stuffed animals, even though it sounds babyish. I like to walk in fields and meadows! i play acoustic guitar and write songs! I like reading, mainly books like THG, the chronicles of narnia, and harry potter (my favourite character is luna, who i'm a lot like, so I've been told). I sometimes like to drawn and write stories too! I'm half-hispanic on my papa's side and love celebrating día de los muertos, especially for his late father, he passed before I was born, but still. i love music, mainly taylor swift and olivia rodrigo! sometimes i play games, mainly minecraft or roblox :p. when I'm comfortable around someone, I cuddle or rest close to them and don't feel scared to sing in front of them like I do most people (i love singing but have no confidence). i love dogs, cats (scottish folds are my babies), penguins, birds and koalas :D

i feel like I'm ranting, so I'll end it off here! sorry its so long and thank you! <3 💜🩷

babes never be afraid to rant!! i love learning about all my anons and followers! i feel like you would be such a good fit with lucy gray! both your interests line up and i see you vibing with her so much <33

#the hunger games #grace talks🐚🌷#thg #headcanons #wlw #lucy gray x reader #lucy gray #lucy gray baird x reader #wlw hcs #hcs #the ballad of songbirds and snakes #tbosas #thg tbosas

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tinywitchgoblin · 8 days

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Hello there, I seen that you were doing ship requests and was wondering if you could do mine? I've never had one done before so sorry if I missed anything.

I'm 22f and have long dark brown hair and brown eyes. I'm 5'7" and I usually wear long sleeved crop tops and baggy pants or short dresses with thigh high socks. I also wear glasses.

I'm very caring, humorous and shy person. I can be very quiet around new people but when I'm with those who I'm comfortable with I get playful and come out of my shell. I do have a bit of a temper on me and can get snippy with people but I try not to. I'm a loyal and honest person as well.

My hobbies include singing, playing slap bass, listening to music(mainly rock, metal and funk), sewing, and reading. I also really love science, math, and astronomy.

Thanks for participating! Also I probably shouldn't be admitting this out loud but oh well. You're one of my favorite followers and I love getting notifications about you <3

I ship you with...

Hunter!

Hunter loves music. It stimulates his senses in just the right ways, and it's sensory input that he has control over. One of his favorite stims is listening to his favorite songs while doing everyday activities. He really loves rock music, especially the strong beat and the electric guitar solos. When you and Hunter get together, you make him a playlist of all your favorite rock songs, he's floored. He hasn't received many gifts in his life, and to receive something so personal and thought-out is very, very meaningful to him. He plays it all the time and he will not stfu because his girlfriend gave him his own playlist!

When you introduced him to the concept of slap bass, Hunter was fascinated. He really wanted to learn, and when you offered to teach him, he was honored. He really looks forward to your weekly lessons, and to no one's surprise, picks (haha) it up pretty quickly. Sometimes you'll walk in and hear him practicing, and it makes you so happy that he's so interested in one of your favorite activities.

Initially, Hunter was a bit nervous to introduce you to the rest of his family because he knows you get shy with people you don't know well, and his siblings... can be a lot sometimes. However, you get along with them very well; especially with Tech. You and he bonded pretty quickly over your mutual love of math and the sciences, sometimes spending hours discussing whatever topic might be on your minds at the time. Omega and Wrecker are naturally very friendly, so they make sure to include you in activities and spend time with you. Echo enjoys spending time getting to know you while he's not busy doing hot girl shit fighting the empire with Rex & the gang. As for Crosshair, he's a bit hesitant at first, but once he sees everyone else getting along with you, he opens up eventually. Hunter values his family above all else, and to see you integrating into it means so much to him.

Thanks for reading! If you want a ship request like this one, drop it in my ask box, and don't forget to reblog <3 it may take a little bit, but I'll get to it eventually!

#the bad bois #the bad batch #hunter #hunter bad batch #sargeant hunter #hunter x reader #tbb hunter x reader #tbb hunter #star wars x reader

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