piece-of-the-pie

[piece-of-the-pie]

hot artists don't gatekeep

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Height Weight Chart. You ever see an OC listed as having a certain weight but then they look Wildly different than the number suggests? Well here's a site to avoid that! It shows real people at different weights and heights to give you a better idea of what these abstract numbers all look like. Free to use.

#for future reference

[piece-of-the-pie]

oh fuck *falls back into old habits* *screen fades to black* *level loading* TIP: your belief that you are incapable of changing for the better will become a self fulfilling prophecy if left unchallenged

#perfect day for this to appear on my dash.

[piece-of-the-pie]

if I forgot your favorite subgenre or misclassified a band feel free to argue in the replies 👍

[piece-of-the-pie]

it is so incredibly sad to constantly see kids on instagram and tiktok who are younger than my brother have to literally beg for shelter, food, water, medicine, and their right to exist as human beings

i mean, this young girl is only ten years old, yet she is essentially responsible for convincing random people scrolling through instagram that her and her family’s life are worth fighting for

on top of that, their gofundme is not even 10% funded and time is running out, please if you can’t donate, just share

please don’t let this little girl die begging

[piece-of-the-pie]

What were early 2000's webcomics like?

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. Kids who grew up in the 90s manga boom weren’t old enough to get scanners and the like, so the first webcomics were Newspaper comics based on nerdy things.

Like General Protection Fault, which was an even nerdier version of Dilbert. 

And, of course, 1999′s Penny Arcade. Penny Arcade’s success would inspire a million “two dudes on a couch playing video games” clones.

A dude saw Penny Arcade and convinced his artist friend to make a comic with him. He wanted a standard 4-panel comic just like in the newspaper. But his friend was a huge weeb, and wanted to have four vertical panels like in Japanese 4koma comics. So they found a compromise format and started a comic in 2000.

Megatokyo had a lot of video game jokes early on, but quickly morphed into being about anime stuff, which happened to be pretty popular. In lieu of video game jokes, it introduced some light sex humor, a woman with huge boobs who wanted to fuck the gamer dude, and a sentient android that everyone accepted as normal because it was a silly comic and a lot of early-2000s internet humor tended towards randomness.

So you had these two really popular webcomics with elements that had obvious appeal: Dudes on a couch playing video games, sexy chicks with huge boobs who wanted to bang the MC, robots, and a weird square format that happened to be easier to read at lower resolutions. But could these elements be combined? One man dared to dream they could. And in 2002 he made his dream a reality

Given what a joke it’s rightfully since become, I feel the need to emphasize that CAD was one of the big early webcomics, and helped inspire it’s own share of imitators. It’s probably fair to say that it was more influential than even Penny Arcade, in that it had more elements that could be slavishly copied and passed around.

(If you ever wondered why it took so long for anyone in Questionable Content to acknowledge the weirdness of all the robots, it’s because random unexplained robots were really popular in webcomics in the early 2000s)

Meanwhile, it its own little isolated corner of the internet, Bob and George was popularizing “sprite comics”, a genre that consisted of itself,8-Bit Theater the next year, and a trillion shitty comics not worth mentioning. These were less influential than the Penny Arcade ==> Megatokyo ==> CAD ==> Questionable Content progression, but even this early the tiny webcomic scene was start to grow and split. Questionable Content was much more grounded than other webcomics at the time, and it’s rom-com plot was a big step away from the gag-a-day strips, but its influence was dulled because a bunch of other comics were starting to spring up. In the early 2000s, everyone was reading the same things because there were so few comics worth your time, but by the mid-2000s you were starting to see some quality. 

You were also starting to see people getting serious about monetization. Scott McCloud’s dream of selling your comics for ten cents a pop and making bank in volume had crashed into the twin peaks of “most comics are also good and they’re free” and “credit cards charge fees, idiot”. Some of the better, more respected comics started joining together into one site with all of them that you needed to pay to access, kind of like how Slipshine works now except without the porn. 

This didn’t work out financially, and it also meant that the best webcomics of the mid-2000s like Digger and Narbonic had really small audiences because you couldn’t read them without paying a fee first. Advertising was less useless then than it is now, but times were tough for the webcomics business in the pre-Patreon days. But some webcomics realized that they could find a profitable niche by appealing to new audiences. Instead of the straight white boys who made up the general webcomics audience, they’d reach out to a new demographic:

Perverts! 

And, more specifically, 

Furries! 

Because furries really wanted furry content, and they were willing to pay for it. Pay a lot for it. Furry cheesecake comics prospered, and even though they didn’t have mainstream success, they were pulling it the big bucks compared to your average video game comic. People were starting to realize that 1000 hardcore fans was better than 100,000 casual fans, and a lot of comics started searching for a niche. (This is kind of related to webcomics becoming more progressive/inclusive a bit later, but that’s a whole ‘nother essay that I’m not the one to write)

These webcomics were pretty tame PG-13 stuff like you’d see in the shounen manga its creators were fans of, with nary a nipple to be seen, and a lot of them would die out in favor of straight-up porn.

In the late 2000s, art students realized that making a webcomic was a great way to build a portfolio, and we were hit with the Great Boom Of Webcomics By People Who Can Actually Draw. In 2003, that TwoKinds art was not only acceptable, it was top-tier for a free comic

By 2006 it was not the top tier

By 2008 it was no longer acceptable. 

The world of webcomics became flooded with high-quality work by actual artists who’d gone to school and everything. The first generation of webcomics creators no longer ruled as the comics everyone read. Doctor Fun, the first-ever webcomic, ended in 2006. So did Narbonic and Mac Hall. Applegeeks, one of the most successful PA clones, ended in 2010 alongside 8-Bit Theater. Ctrl+Alt+Delete ended and rebooted to the interest of no one. 

While in 2001, a bad artist could build a following just by updating regularly and slowly improving, that became a lot harder to do as the Bush Administration ended. There were too many brilliant artists making great content for someone to break onto the scene with simple art or sprites. And one day a lot of people gave up on ever being able to make a successful webcomic if their panels didn’t look like a magic the gathering card.

And it just so happened that that day, the 13th of April 2009, was a young man’s birthday…

[piece-of-the-pie]

Sudan still desperately needs aid--it needs a lot of things, but it is approaching a dangerous point with famine and mass death due to hunger imminent.

These are the kinds of headlines we're getting now:

Here's an ongoing fundraiser:

I linked it before, to help with Ramadan, but it's an ongoing initiative, the need has not stopped.

I picked this gofundme because it's been boosted by people I trust and you can see pictures online of the food they've provided, e.g.:

But I also picked this because you can see the amount of donations. It's 2pm ET on Saturday, April 20th right now? For the next week, whatever's donated, I'll match for a total up to $2,000 (we'll say 2,750 CAD, since the gofundme is in Canadian dollars).

You don't have to send me a receipt, I just ask that you donate and boost.

[piece-of-the-pie]

Volume 3 is finally OUT! The theme this volume was focused on was the Trading Post. You can view and download it with this link here!

Special shoutout to having one of the applicants creating the cover for this volume as well! Thank you @tigercomplexes!

With this release, we will also sadly announce that this will be the final volume we will be working on. The two mods on this now have full time jobs and we couldn't give our full focus on this fun project. So we would like to thank our applicants and the FR fandom for giving us the opportunity to do THREE volumes of FR focused pages! <3

[piece-of-the-pie]

Dealing With Executive Dysfunction - A Masterpost

The “getting it done in an unconventional way” method.

The “it’s not cheating to do it the easy way” method.

The “fuck what you’re supposed to do” method.

The “get stuff done while you wait” method.

The “you don’t have to do everything at once” method.

The “it doesn’t have to be permanent to be helpful” method.

The “break the task into smaller steps” method.

The “treat yourself like a pet” method.

The “it doesn’t have to be all or nothing” method.

The “put on a persona” method.

The “act like you’re filming a tutorial” method.

The “you don’t have to do it perfectly” method.

The “wait for a trigger” method.

The “do it for your future self” method.

The “might as well” method.

The “when self discipline doesn’t cut it” method.

The “taking care of yourself to take care of your pet” method.

The “make it easy” method.

The “junebugging” method.

The “just show up” method.

The “accept when you need help” method.

The “make it into a game” method.

The “everything worth doing is worth doing poorly” method.

The “trick yourself” method.

The “break it into even smaller steps” method.

The “let go of should” method.

The “your body is an animal you have to take care of” method.

The “fork theory” method.

The “effectivity over aesthetics” method.

[piece-of-the-pie]

Mona Hatoum, Grater Divide, 2002 Mild steel, 204 cm x variable width and depth

[piece-of-the-pie]

actually no one is allowed to make fun of transmasc names anymore. i dont care if it's a 13 year old trans boy named after his favorite cartoon or whatever you're not allowed to make fun of trans guys' names

[piece-of-the-pie]

finished custom fella for moop on toyhouse

[piece-of-the-pie]

i'm in a digimon phase

#insp

[piece-of-the-pie]

BEST QUEER MEDIA TOURNAMENT FINAL ROUND!!!!!

[ propaganda masterpost]

[piece-of-the-pie]

Things that work in fiction but not real life

torture getting reliable information out of people

knocking someone out to harmlessly incapacitate them for like an hour

jumping into water from staggering heights and surviving the fall completely intact

calling the police to deescalate a situation

rafting your way off a desert island

correctly profiling total strangers based on vibes

effectively operating every computer by typing and nothing else

ripping an IV out of your arm without consequences

heterosexual cowboy

[piece-of-the-pie]

elements as robots

[piece-of-the-pie]

greasy hair is like the poisoned condition in a video game. but more evil

[piece-of-the-pie]

Master doc that contains different resources and support for many countries including Palestine, Congo, Haiti, Hawai’i, etc ((op is underneath the link))