#clawing at the floor. chewing on the curtains. looking forward to hopefully seeing people there!!!

[starfacedstudio]

Image ID: A logo featuring a round, grinning, crow-like character with leaves for its tail holding a green pencil. Curved text at the top reads "Crowberry Comic Connection." The crow is surrounded by a purple and blue rope, tied with berries and leaves, and there are two branches of berries to either side. Beneath this, the Discord logo appears next to text reading "Community Discord Server!" End ID.

We did a bit of teasing about this before, but @doedreamiing and I are excited to announce our opening for Crowberry Comic Connection - a community Discord server!

Created as a casual meeting place for artists and their communities alike, we hope to inspire a positive and productive environment to chat and chill with fellow artists, post your work, get helpful feedback, and have fun with participating in our challenges and server-wide events. Though our primary focus is on comics, we welcome artists (both visual and literary!) of all sorts to our server! You must be 18+ to join.

As was shared last week, we're opening our server with a small prompt list event in spirit of October! Check the post here, or check it out in the server itself :) Joining is NOT required to participate.

OUR SERVER OFFERS:

Places to chat, share memes (and pets, food, or that cool rock you found on your walk), share commission info, and (for comic folks) a place to link your latest comic updates!

Critique Forum: ask for constructive criticism or advice, or give advice or constructive criticism to others!

Challenges: a forum dedicated to user-created challenges (limited palette, timed, prompts, culinary??) that others may participate in!

User-Submitted Art Resource Forum (categorized with tags!)

Colored names, selectable roles, and custom emotes

Low number of channels to hopefully not overwhelm. Channel lists can be customized and things can be hidden as you see fit!

Voice channel + no-mic channel for folks who don't have mics or don't wish to speak!

More Events! (We hope to possibly host things like critique sessions, art jams, zines, or similar in the future)

More to come!

Image ID: Banner of 8 multicolored crowberry creatures on a rope. End ID.

WHY WAS THIS CREATED?

Community among artists is something very important to both of us, as people who grew up with places such as deviantART (rip) and it is something we (and many, many others) have been struggling to find as social media continues to point its focus away from artists (as well as the over-emphasis on professional portfolio socials). As our name suggests, we wish to help foster those connections between fellow creators and their communities once again!

Though perhaps not an ideal solution as Discord certainly has its own problems, we wanted to try and create a safe, accessible space for people to come together in this way. We both sincerely miss the sense of community that once was among artists.

Information on how to join can be found under the cut.

HOW TO JOIN:

Our server is a community server that uses the Onboarding feature, meaning you will be brought to a bit of a different screen than normal Discord servers may have. You must read and accept our rules as you join.

You will also be asked questions such as your interests or occupations, your pronouns, and your preferences on receiving DMs, pings, or having tone tags used for you (and the color of your name)!

Additionally, there will be a few tasks to complete:

Introduce yourself!

Say hi in general :)

Familiarize yourself with our rules and guidelines!

Check our filter guide for info on what is allowed with a filter.

OUR RULES:

You must be 18+ to join.

We do not allow pornography or extreme gore, but certain mature subjects are allowed with a filter.

Be respectful and kind towards one another. Harassment, bigotry, and bullying are not tolerated.

We do not allow proshippers, TERFs, zoophiles, or pedophiles.

We do not allow venting, spamming, AI images or NFTs (use, creation of, advertisement, etc.)

Asking for money directly though Paypal, Venmo, Cashapp, etc. is not allowed for privacy reasons. Links to fundraisers are fine.

Flashing images (gifs, emotes, stickers, etc.) must be censored, or avoided altogether.

Leetspeak and censoring words with numbers/symbols should be avoided in the server. Use Discord's censoring instead.

Check our full rules channel, and any pinned messages for specific rule information.

JOIN LINK: https://discord.gg/HGJh2cFwSh

We hope you decide to check us out. Stay connected, friends!

#froxposting #crowberry comic connection #described #discord #discord server #comics #webcomics #cannot understate how excited i am for this YIPPEEEE we've been planning something like this for quite a while #again while we're focused on comics - any artist (visual. literary. auditory??) is welcome to join!!! we love interdisciplinary overlap her #clawing at the floor. chewing on the curtains. looking forward to hopefully seeing people there!!! #tumblr ate this post At Least Twice while i was drafting it but. we stay sillyyyy

[ecotone99]

[MF] Nosedive

Emma was up in the air about her position up in the air.

Being a flight attendant just wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was no longer the glory days of the classy Pan-Am stewardess, adorned in her robin blue dress and cap, long legs and aura of elegance. There was no more mingling with wealthy jetsetters in those luxury liners in the sky, those flying spectacles of glitz and glamour, jetting off to the globe’s most exotic locales. Now it was all about waiting on the impatient masses. The ever-impatient masses.

“Just a second!” Emma hissed. The fat man in 36C was trying to monopolize her attention again. He leaned back on his neck pillow, folds of sweaty red flesh billowing out the sides. Earbuds in, he snapped his fingers above his head as if the plane would nosedive straight into the ocean if she didn’t come serve him. Right. That. Moment.

She clamoured past Margaret, her near-octogenarian co-worker. Fifty years and a hundred pounds ago, Margaret could’ve been one of those glamorous Pan-Am girls that a young Emma had pictured in her dreams. Margaret pushed a clunky metal service cart, loaded with reanimated frozen food (“chicken or pasta?”, the modern attendant’s catchphrase). Her oversized rear-end nearly sent Emma tumbling into a row of French businessmen, pattering away on laptops.

“Sorry love” Margaret purred. Her rosy cheeks and sweet old lady demeanour masked her gross incompetence. Emma liked her slightly better than the other attendants though, a bunch of middle-aged chain-smokers with skin like leather. And Craig.

Cursing her life choices, she finally reached the fat man, who resembled a raging toddler. He was watching some lame action movie, Tom Cruise sprinting across the miniscule screen as a hoard of thugs and dead pixels closed in.

“Yes sir?” Emma asked in her customer service voice. Despite her extreme disdain, her paycheque mandated that she attempt to remain pleasant.

The man swished something around in his cheeks, and proceeded to spit a chunk of half-chewed food into the plastic platter on his tray-table. It was flanked by a small cup of water, a roll from the Middle Ages, and something the airline deemed a ‘brownie’.

“I ordered the pasta.”

“And what is that?

“It’s chicken!”

Dammit Margaret. Emma wearily glanced around. Margaret was headed into first-class, backside squeezing down the cabin, begging for a hard kick. There were rows of seat-backs and human scalps as far as the eye could see. She didn’t like breathing the same recycled air as these people. Only one thing to do.

“Craig!” she called out. Craig, the only other attendant her age, spun around, spilling a stream of orange juice across the lap of the woman with the sleep-mask he was serving. Craig had always had a massive crush on Emma, mainly because there as no one else to really have a crush on. He was kind of cute, as one would describe a puppy or a small squirrel as cute, with a soft baby-face and patches of adult acne.

“You got any more pastas?”

Craig fumbled through his cart, unsheathing a tray of regurgitated dogfood with steam-soaked plastic wrap over the top. He tossed in some packaged utensils.

“My lady” he cooed, passing it over the passengers’ heads between them.

“Thanks” Emma muttered, cringing.

“Don’t mention it!” Craig said excitedly. “I’ve got so many pastas. And chickens. And pastas. And chickens. And vegetarian pastas. And…”

Emma smiled at him, and he visibly swooned. That did the trick. She placed the new meal atop the fat man’s tray-table.

“There you go, one pasta.” She resisted the urge to add your majesty.

The man poked at a congealed glob of tomato sauce with his fork. “How long til Paris?” he sneered.

Emma glanced at her watch. “Just a couple hours.” The man could’ve easily looked at the virtual map on his TV. One of the few conveniences of modern air travel.

He grunted.

“Are you traveling with your wife?” Emma asked, mistakenly advancing the conversation. An equally-obese woman pooled in the seat beside him, dead asleep, slobber leaking from an open jaw. She wore a football jersey and Cheetos dust.

“Yeah” he sighed. “It’s our anniversary trip. She always wanted to go to Paris.”

“And what are you most excited to see? The Eiffel Tower? Notre Dame?”

“Euro Disney” he answered. “I’m gonna try to give her the slip in Frontierland.”

Emma nodded with the most plastic smile she could muster. Thankfully, she was pulled away by the monotone ding of a ‘call attendant’ button a few rows down. In fact, there were multiple ‘call attendant’ dings, an entire ear-piercing symphony. Emma shuffled down the fuselage to find an exasperated mother in a middle seat, yelling with a strained voice, two shrieking gremlins darting around her. They slipped through her arms whenever she attempted to snatch one. Deep crayon strokes were embedded in the seat-back. The old man in front of them, nose in the latest Dan Brown atrocity, was growing more agitated with each kick and jab.

“Uh, hi” Emma muttered, with a quick wave.

“Sorry, sorry, look, I didn’t press it, they’re just…” the mother started. A gremlin resumed spamming the ‘call attendant’ button, the ding blaring, the little light flickering. “JASON! STOP PRESSING THAT! YOU’RE WASTING THE NICE LADY’S TIME!”

“Shhh!” hissed the old man from ahead.

“Emma! Emma!”

What now? Emma spun around from one train-wreck to the next. Margaret stood at the border with business class, leaning out the iron curtain, trying to get her attention. Emma swallowed her wits and hurried forward, vaulting over a pair of bare legs stretched across the aisle.

“What Margaret?”

“We’ve got a teeny bit of a problem up here, love” Margaret explained. “8B brought a chihuahua in her handbag. Very adorable of course. But he seems to have gotten loose and had a little tinkle on the floor- the chihuahua that is, not the passenger.” She glanced back behind her. “A wee more than a tinkle I’m afraid.”

“…And?”

“And it’s my break time. I was hoping you could be a dear and swab it up?” Margaret tossed a roll of paper towel, which Emma caught before she could react. “Thanks love!”

Looking at the paper towel, Emma felt something that certainly wasn’t job satisfaction bubble up inside her, pushing towards the surface. She swallowed it with a few deep breaths before slipping into the nearby lavatory, flicking it locked, and taking a seat on the closed high-suction toilet. She turned and looked at herself in the mirror, stained with God-knows-what. Heavy bags hung beneath her eyes. Leaning closer, she could even make out a few faint wrinkles, commencing their journey across her cheeks. Her lips throbbed from fake-smiling. Was this really what she wanted to do with her life? A glorified babysitter stuck on a Transatlantic tube, at the beck and call of every ridiculous tourist and their nonsensical demands? She briefly wondered if any Pan-Am girls had ever stooped to scrubbing up chihuahua piss. Probably not. Too classy. Emma fantasized about storming into her manager’s office once she finally made it home, slamming a big fat resignation letter on her desk. Maybe this would be her final flight after all.

As she soaked in her fantasy, she was interrupted by a sudden jolt. More than a jolt really. All at once the plane lurched abruptly sideways, sending Emma crashing into the sink, knocking the wind out of her. Just as she started to get up, smoothing the front of her stewardess uniform, there was a sudden thrash the other way, knocking her over the toilet, her knee bashing on the side. The lights flickered with a questionable buzz.

Pushing out the lavatory, Emma came upon utter chaos.

“Uh, this is your captain speaking, you may’ve noticed that we’ve hit a wave of turbulence” came Captain Ronaldo’s voice over the static-y intercom. “Should hopefully clear in a few minutes, but the seatbelt sign has been turned on and oxygen masks have been deployed for your safety. Please direct any questions to a member of our cabin crew.”

Nope!

Ignoring the prehistoric-sounding mess in the cabin as passengers scrambled for their masks- biting, clawing, kicking small children- Emma ducked into the galley where Margaret and Craig were already seated. She tugged on her dangling mask from overhead, her steady breaths soon inflating the small bag at the end.

Craig, his bag widening at a much faster rate, gripped her arm. She carefully pried him off like an unwanted Band-Aid.

“We’re going down…we’re going down…” he gasped between breaths.

“Oh, don’t worry love, we have Captain Ronaldo at the helm!” Margaret cheerily exclaimed. “This will be over in a few minutes! Everything is going to be fine, tip-top, we…OH SHITTTTTT!”

The plane plunged suddenly downward. Turbines screamed as it collapsed into a dizzying spiral, dropping hundreds of feet per second, the icy black waters of the mid-Atlantic rising to meet it.

Emma lurched forward, body straining against the seatbelt, clinging with white knuckles to the edge of her chair. She glanced around. Time seemed to have stopped. A coffee pot, knocked from the adjacent counter, hung in mid-air, a ribbon of black decaf floating out the lid, like something out of the space station.

This was how it ended, she supposed. Trapped in a plane with all these stupid people, Margaret and Craig her seatmates for eternity, no legacy but a name on a forgotten memorial plaque on a blustery seaside somewhere. She should’ve quit while she had the chance. Lived a little. Experienced life outside the tube. She never got to fall in love, never got to find herself, never got to have an adventure. Never got to see Paris beyond the overpriced airport hotels huddled around the tarmac. It was, indeed, her final flight. A weird sort of irony.

Emma braced for impact.

Suddenly, yet another jolt shook the craft, and it somehow leveled out. The dimmed lights reignited in full force. Emma watched the floating coffee pot shatter across the floor. Margaret was muttering “oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear” under her breath. Craig looked catatonic. Then came the bland tone of the seatbelt sign switching off, and Emma knew it was going to be okay. She brushed her windswept hair back into place, gingerly pulling off her oxygen mask and unclipping her seatbelt, filled with utter awe.

She’d been given another chance to live. And maybe the flight attendant life wasn’t so bad after all. Serving a few unruly passengers was sufficiently better than plunging to a freezing death in the middle of the ocean. Most of them were quite nice anyway. A few bad apples, rotten from travel stress and general indecency, ruined the bunch. That was it. None of it was personal. None of it was defining. Emma strode towards the cabin with a restored passion. Perhaps the very same passion that those retro Pan-Am girls had felt.

Upon arrival, every ‘call attendant’ button was screaming, the flashing lights like a sea of strobes. Feeling something bubble up inside her again, Emma wearily headed for the fat man in 36C, frantically snapping his fingers above his head.

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