#even my feelings

[ace-and-ranty]

I gotta say, one of the greatest achievements of my 20s was that I learned (mostly) to differentiate between:

"I truly do not want to go" and

"I'm just feeling the Demand Avoidance, and I will like it once I get there."

#I have learned in my 20s #sometimes I DO just gotta make myself go places even if I don't feel like it #I'll like it once I get there.

[captainsaltypear]

IS ANYONE ELSE GONNA TALK ABOUT THIS OR

#hazbin hotel #huskerdust #hazbin husker #hazbin angel dust #hazbin angeldust #angeldust #husker #hazbin husk #look man im all for overlord husk but EXCUSE ME???????? #WHERE DID THIS COME FROM #I LITERALLY YELLED W H A T AT MY COMPUTER SCREEN WHEN HE SAID THIS #I KNEW HUSK WAS STRONGER THAN HE LET ON BUT AN OVERLORD??????? #GURL?????????? #DAMN SON #THIS new piece of information caught me so offguard that i was still reeling from it even after the emotional bomb that was loser baby #anyways huskerdust truthers how are we feeling #HOW DOES VICTORY FEEL #NO LONGER CRACKSHIP BROTHERS #WE'RE REAL #AND IM FEELING SO GOOD ABOUT IT #anwyways im doing very emotionally good how are you guys #im...gonna put a hiatus my own personal webcomic to cry over this for the next 6 months #girls help #keith david...........im so sorry i ever doubted you he ATE THAT UPPPP #hazbin hotel spoilers #pear post #scheeze art

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

#shut up e #long post #Saturday thoughts #this has been in my drafts for a week haha #also this is the heart of why AI art feels so wrong #forget the discussion of copyright and theft etc - even if models were only trained on public domain they would still feel very wrong #because they’re not art. art is the labor of creation #even commercial art and art commissioned by the popes and kings of history: there is humanity in the labor of it #unrelated: I did not know living in the Bronx was now something to brag about. How the fuck do y’all New Yorkers afford this city???

[stil-lindigo]

lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)

if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.

--

no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.

I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.

I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.

If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.

#cw: suicidal ideation #cw: suicide #cw: self harm #cw: mental health #cw: depression #i made the balloon the main representation of my self destructive urges for a reason but im not going to explain it #i tried to keep a lot of the details in this vague #it would be my worst nightmare if this comic encouraged someone to hurt themselves #so. please dont #for a long time even the thought of making this comic felt so insipid and narcissistic #with the state of the world as it is #having the only threat to your life be yourself felt so privileged and trite and shameful #but doing this comic made me sit down and process things in full #and im just. very grateful i didn't give in to my thoughts back when i sincerely felt i'd be more useful to the world dead #i also feel the need to say that this wont represent everyone's battle with mental illness. its unfortunately different for all of us #there is no fix-all #and im afraid this might be one of those comics that either resonates a lot or misses the target by a mile #i made it for myself foremost. and now that its done im glad i did it #thank you for reading #and please stay alive #stillindigo art #stillindigo comics

[nouverx]

Louise never heard about puppy love, cause they don't know that term in France 💔

---------------------------------------------

Lyrics are from Louise by TV Girl ! I was listening to it yesterday and that specific line on the second page screamed Alastor I just had to draw something about it

#hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel fanart #hazbin alastor #hazbin vox #radiostatic #one sided radiostatic #digital art #comic #autodesk sketchbook #alastor #tv girl #my art #first time drawing Vox wouhou sorry in advance if he's not accurate ahah #I love the fact that the entire fandom agreed Vox is pathetically in love with Alastor #Alastor would be such an asshole with people having romantic feelings towards him #especially men #that line from the song is so freaking cruel but goes SO hard #“I'm aroace but even if I wasn't I wouldnt even touch you with a stick :)” #aroace alastor #asexual alastor

[satanicdollx]

they should invent friends that do not live so fucking far

#I'm less sad today but still sad #we're not even that far even from a European point of view like 400kms is okay-ish 🥹 #it's just complicated in terms of public transportation and it's expensive #anyway gonna play DAO (bc BG3 is still bugged) and chill all day feel free to invade my asks #nyx.txt

[braisedhoney]

two glorious anniversaries in a month. you go king.

#undertale #undertale fanart #utdr #utdr fanart #ut sans #sans the skeleton #tumblr sexyman #ney’s art #sans undertale #ut sans is usually the only tag i use but… c’mon man. this is The sans undertale day #i feel like every time i draw him it changes how he looks lol #so glad my undertale phase returned just in time for this #been too exhausted to fully render but. i had to #even if messily

[july-19th-club]

seriously have been thinking about this all night long. call me autistic but the fact that 90% of workplaces the point is not to get your work done and then be done doing it but to instead perform an elaborate social dance in which you find something to do even when you're done doing everything you need to do in order to show your fellow workers that you, too, are Working . because you are at Work . disgusting why cant we all agree that if there is no work immediately to be done. we just dont do anything

#i personally like to not be doing things constantly at all times. it stresses me out #i know there are ppl who thrive on cosntant activity #but me i like to chill out. #and the problem then becomes that i only ACTIVELY remember to do work and Find More Work To Do when im stressed #at the thought that others might want to see me working #if im ever relaxed i just dont look for stuff to do #catch 22 of modern work culture which permeates even ostensibly noncapitalist structures like public libraries #for instance: will it really kill anybody if the books get shelved by me now after a very busy day? #or shelved tomorrow morning by. well probably me since i'll be the one at the desk #not in the slightest #but it was work that wasnt being immediately done by me. therefore it was incorrect behavior #that i failed to identify because my instinct is to relax when not immediately presented with a Situation #this got me labeled as 'having no initiative' by my dad from a very early age #and even as an adult i still feel like im a child with no initiative

[inkskinned]

you're in the habit of denying yourself things.

if someone asked you directly, you would say that you love a little treat. you like iced coffee and getting the cookie. you drink juice out of a fancy cup sometimes, and often do use your candles until they gutter out helplessly.

but you hesitate about buying the 20 dollar hand mixer because, like. you could just use your arms. you weren't raised rich. you don't get to just spend the 20 dollars (remember when that could cover lunch?), at least - you don't spend that without agonizing over it first, trying to figure out the cost-benefits like you are defending yourself in front of a jury. yes, this rice cooker could seriously help you. but you do know how to make stovetop rice and it really isn't that hard. how many pies or brownies would you actually make, in order to make that hand mixer worthwhile?

what's wild is that if the money was for a friend, it would already be spent. you'd fork over 40 without blinking an eye, just to make them happy. the difference is that it's for you, so you need to justify it.

and it sneaks in. you ration yourself without meaning to - you don't finish the pint of ice cream, even though you want to. the next time you go to the store, you say ah, i really shouldn't, and then you walk away. you save little bits of your precious things - just in case. sometimes you even go so far as putting that one thing in your shopping cart. and then just leaving it there, because maybe-one-day, but not right now, there's other stuff going on.

you do self-care, of course. but you don't do it more than like, 3 days in a row. after that it just feels a little bit over-the-edge. like. you can't live in decadence, the economy is so bad right now, kid.

so you don't buy the rice cooker. you can-and-will spend the time over the stove. you can withstand the little sorrows. denial and discipline are practically synonyms. and you're not spoiled.

it's just - it's not always a rice cooker. sometimes it is a person or a job or a hug. sometimes it is asking for help. sometimes it is the summer and your college degree. sometimes it is looking down at scabbed knees and feeling a strange kind of falling, like you can't even recognize the girl you used to be. sometimes it is your handprint looking unsteady.

sometimes it is tuesday, and you didn't get fired, and you want to celebrate. but what is it you like, even? you search around your little heart and come up empty. you're so used to denying that all your desires draw a blank.

oh fuck. see, this is the perfect opportunity. if you had a mixer, you'd make a cake.

#warm up #this isn't good #writeblr #this is complicated by the fact i can't stand up too long or i fuckken pass out and <3 hit my damn head <3 #but i did take a deep breath and buy myself the stupid rice cooker #and!!! a very cheap sushi kit!!! i have been wanting to try making sushi for literally YEARS #the kit was only like 15 dollars!!!! and i haven't purchased it bc?!!??!?!?!?!!? #..... i didn't get the mixer tho that felt. like a lot. like too much. #on my list is a kitchenaid. one day when i get a check and i have paid off my student debt #and medical debt #i will put that first little bit of cash #into a kitchenaid 5qt stand mixer (with attachments) #i really do just go into their refurbished section and stare lustily at each option #but yeah i feel guilty about the rice cooker even tho i know for a fact this damn thing is gonna be a lifesaver #oh shit also fuck i forgot to mention . poached eggs

[etchif]

#genuinely curious how people feel about this #I do it and I neither care if Im being annoying nor do I think I am #the ppl who followed me for my art are not going to get annoyed at me for showing them my art #though sometimes i get worried for like 1 millisecond if i come across as pushy then i remember this is the art website abd i stop caring #polls #art #can I tag this as that even if there's no actual art in the post #well. it IS about art

[uncanny-tranny]

I think so many people are so deeply alienated from themselves that they have no clue how to exercise their free will and autonomy. For some, this alienation runs so deep that they are afraid of their own autonomy and humanity. It is completely understandable why one would have those feelings, but it can be worrisome.

I want to help others who feel this way, so here are small things I have done to exercise my free will:

Add "guilty pleasure" songs to playlists and actually listen to them (I have a ton of late 1990s-early 2000s music I listen to now proudly that I never listened to in the past out of shame)

Getting the décor item, bath set, bed spread, ect. in the patterns you like, even if it's "childish" (I got a dinosaur-themed wastebasket from the kids' décor section and I adore it)

Taking a new route to get to a place you go to often

Eat dessert first

Celebrate well, and often

Collect things that are "odd" or don't seem like an "acceptable" thing to collect (somebody on my "for you" page collects dandelion crayola crayons and it was so cool!!!!!!)

Incorporate one new piece in an outfit you wear frequently (e.g., a new chain, a necklace, ribbons, bracelets, ect.). Challenge yourself to add onto the outfits if you feel up for it.

Sing along to songs without worrying that you sound "good" or your intonation is completely accurate

Read a book from a genre you weren't allowed to read as a kid (comics, thrillers, mysteries, anything!)

Walk without having a specific destination or goal

Pick up a new craft without expecting yourself to master it or to ever be "good" enough. Get your hands messy.

I don't want to shame anybody for not feeling as though they have free will or that they are exempt from exercising it. However, I wanted to give ideas so that you might read this list and find your own ways to express your intrinsic autonomy and will. You deserve to be a person, to feel alive, not just living. That is what our lives are for.

#mental health #mental health support #positivity #if anybody has ideas of their own definitely include them! #i just think being stuck with this feeling that you don't have autonomy and that you ultimately aren't an equal person or a person at all.. #...in comparison to other people can be a really troubling and dangerous place to be in... #...and that isn't the person's fault for feeling that way. they didn't pluck those thoughts out of thin air... #...like i have felt that exact way all my LIFE because i have been abused for. probably 2/3s of my life... #...only within these past few years have i even FELT alive. frankly it's going to take a while to repair what i have been left with... #...so i know the feeling and i want to help others feel even a LITTLE bit alive. you deserve it... #...you deserve to take in a deep breath before slowly realizing 'oh my gd this is what it feels like to be alive' and SMILE about it #i want that for you even if it is brief. even if it is small. even if it is a whisper. i want you to feel alive #unironically getting rid of the idea of 'guilty pleasures' has made my life SO much better

[freitag1607]

1.05 / Battle of the Labyrinth

#I FEEL SO NORMAL ABOUT THIS #percy jackson #pjo tv show #percy jackson and the olympians #pjotv #percabeth #pjo #screaming crying #mine #100 #500 #1k #5k #im in the middle of packing and this sent me frantically looking for my copies of pjo #anyway #i feel so insane i feel like im gonna die can anyone hear me. CAN ANYONE HEAR ME #annabeth has been so disconnected from the mortal world and just so fundamentally unable to enjoy her childhood #it makes me want to sob like seriously #i hope her and percy go on so many movie dates. like #not even just her and percy i hope percy tells grover and word spreads around camp and movie nights just become a thing at camp #because all these babies deserve it #god im gonna die. im seriously gonna die #WE KNOW THERE'S AN ORIENTATION VIDEO #SO THEY HAVE A PROJECTOR AND A SCREEN #MOVIE NIGHTS COULD HAPPEN!!! #okay bye. i'm going to go scream about percabeth some more

[ultravioletness]

I’ve been making gay knights (and ladies) collages on my phone at work

(Part two)

#gay knights #knight x knight #knightcore #medievalcore #pre raphaelite #john william waterhouse #haz asked me to post them #these are in the order that I made them and it’s not even all of them…. #I’ve been having feelings.. about knights and all of that #i can’t tag all the painters I don’t remember them all #the app I used is the one in the watermark #for all your phone background needs #that was my initial goal and then it spiraled out of control #hold on let me add some more silly tags

[bumbleboa]

I saw one scruffy older Cora-san design and had to draw my take on it immediately, with a bonus Law to fill space.

You can say a lot of things about One Piece Odyssey, but it did give us a Law & Cora tag-team fight in which Law shambled to the location of Cora's bullets and that is just objectively cool.

#one piece #trafalgar law #trafalgar d. water law #donquixote rosinante #my art #one piece height differences are a wild time #I also gave everyone eyebrows because I can't believe Oda keeps robbing his characters of them #I also gave Cora only a feather collar because I did not want to draw an entire feather cloak #first ever cora I have drawn and he isn't even on model #that feels about right for me

[shadowtraveled]

"mithrun is the only real monsterfucker in dungeon meshi" is objectively the funniest bit you can get out of his everything, but in all seriousness i think his attraction to his love interest is deliberately overstated—and that makes sense, because romantic jealousy is a classic and digestible motive, which is explicitly what kabru was aiming for in condensing mithrun's backstory, and also because until chapter 94, mithrun wasn't willing to admit to the true nature of his desires.

but because romantic envy is both classic and digestible, it probably isn’t a unique enough or complicated enough desire to tempt a demon’s appetite. mithrun’s wish, as far as we can figure from kabru’s reduced retelling, was to have a life in which he had never become one of the canaries, and that carries like 3857 implications and desires within it. that’s delicious. his love interest acts as sort of a red herring to his motivation for making it, though. (side note: i'm saying "love interest" here because, keeping in mind that i barely speak japanese on a good day anymore, "想い人" is something i'd usually take as just kind of an old-fashioned and romantic way to refer to a lover, but in context i wonder if both the connotation of yearning and the vagueness are intentional, and i think this phrasing gets those aspects of it more effectively. anyway.)

mithrun considered his love interest to be untrustworthy. there was a minute where i thought that comment might be about a similar-looking elf (yugin, one of his squad members), but comparing the two…

the "sketchy" arrow is definitely referring to the elf we know as his love interest—the bangs go toward her right, she only has the one forehead ornament, and, most notably, her ears aren't notched.

every time she’s given a full-body depiction in his dungeon, she’s drawn as a chimera, with the body of a snake from the waist down. (side note: the “what if a dungeon has chimeras before reaching level 4?”/“then the dungeon lord is unstable” exchange just being mithrun grilling his past self alive is so funny. he’s so. but anyway) there are a couple things about this.

first, the snake part of the chimera appears to be modeled after some species of coral snake mimic

which, in the biology-for-fun manga, i… doubt is a coincidence, especially with the added context of the “untrustworthy” comment. the dungeon’s conjured illusion of mithrun’s love interest was a harmless copycat of a venomous original. for whatever reason, he felt this person was a threat and made up a "safe" version of her to be in a relationship with, and while it’s definitely possible to be attracted to or even love someone you find to be toxic and/or intimidating, when you take that into consideration alongside the configuration of her body, you get some interesting implications.

which brings us to our second point: if we assume that mithrun was not in fact fucking a snake, then sexual attraction, at least, was so far removed from his idea of a relationship with this person that he did not even bother to keep her dungeon copy human enough to maintain the illusion of the option of a sexual relationship. this is somewhat echoed in the depictions of their interactions, which also imply a frankly unexpected romantic distance. she kisses his cheek and he doesn't seem to react; she's at the edge of a narrow bed with only one set of pillows, on top of his blankets while he's underneath them.

the kiss is particularly interesting because it seems to contrast the text. kabru's narration tells us this was everything mithrun could have asked for, but mithrun is there looking unreadable to pensive, likely because this is right before the panel that makes it clear things in the dungeon are beginning to go wrong.

walking through this backwards for a minute, we have the physical barrier of his bedding and the spatial separation inherent in a bed made for one person, the emotional barrier of his mounting anxiety getting in the way of his ability to enjoy the affection he sought, and... the snake, which historically carries the connotation of temptation, yes, but also mistrust, barring physical intimacy. okay. ok. if a dungeon reflects the mentality of its lord, all of this might suggest that mithrun was not able to have any real desire for a relationship with this person. his unwillingness to be vulnerable or let another person in was insurmountable. but in that case, why was she such a focal point that she remained to the end, after his dungeon had stopped creating iterations of his friends to come and visit him? why would he get so upset over her meeting with his brother that he became lord of a dungeon about it?

well. mithrun's brother was also interested in her, probably genuinely. and mithrun had to win.

you have an older brother who your parents completely ignore, probably in part because he is chronically ill/disabled and almost definitely in part because he received a ton of recessive traits that resulted in rumors that he was an illegitimate child. you are aware, most likely because those same parents fucking told you, that you actually are an illegitimate child. but they keep you around because you had the good fortune of looking just like your mother. what can that possibly teach you but that you, like your brother, are disposable?

it's utterly unsurprising that mithrun, under these circumstances, developed a pathological need to be better than everyone around him. people don't keep you otherwise. i'd argue this is also why he says he looked down on everyone he knew while milsiril claims his dungeon reeked of feelings of inferiority—he sought out people's worst traits and prioritized them in his mind to protect his already extremely fragile sense of self-worth, and all the while he tried to be as likable and high-performing as he possibly could be. his parents disposed of him anyway, but even then he tried to keep up the performance. he was kind to everyone. he never once lost to a dungeon.

when he saw his "love interest" meeting up with his brother, what he saw was himself being replaced by a person his parents had always treated as worthless, and if that was what they thought of the child they'd kept, what value could anyone possibly see in the bastard they'd given away to die? mithrun and kabru tell the story like he wanted to win this unnamed elf's heart, but it was never about being with her. it was about cementing his worth, proving that he didn't deserve to be thrown away.

and so it's particularly cruel that his demon discarded him, too. but maybe it's also particularly gentle that, in the end, there was someone who refused to even consider giving up on him.

kui laid it out in three panels better than i could hope to.

yeah. it's love. you wanted to be loved, even when the only way you were able to understand it was through the desire to be wanted, and you wanted that so badly that the idea of being consumed felt like the promise of finally mattering to someone.

#dungeon meshi spoilers #mithrun #dungeon meshi #this has been rotating for a while but i wanted to check my evidence before getting into it thanks user angelspenance for posting that meme #half of this is just the text and the other half i'm sure has been said before but it's making my brain [radio static] so here this is #someone did for sure mention this but i do find it very cute that in his fucked up conjured world meant to portray his ideal reality #his teammates came to visit him. like part of the fantasy was then explicitly that they cared about him and were his friends. even though #he says he tried to see the worst in them. #hm it does feel important to note that i do also believe 100% in mithrun suicidality--his desire to be eaten does seem to focus a lot on #wanting it to be Over. wanting not to be left incomplete and empty anymore. #but that loops back around a bit to the hole in your heart that appears when you feel unloved. it's many things and the same thing at once #snakes #long post #severe problems #meshy

[skellydun]

who wants to lay on top of me like a weighted blanket and fix me

#i can't use actual weighted blankets bc it feels suffocating but another person? 10/10 #not even in any kind of way i just need someone to crush my body back into some sort of shape that is not exhausted and aching #need me a bear hug and a bear to crush me tbh #the cabin will fix me. i will be secluded and alone and get high one of the nights and have smores. i will take stupid nature walks and read