five-ooooo:

“That means he likes you!”

closet-keys:

My brother was diagnosed with depression years before I was, and because of that he started therapy years before I did.

I still remember when I was a young teen and he was playing a Nirvana song and he stopped it at this one line: “I miss the comfort of being sad”

He told me that when you start to get better, there’s a part of you that misses being sad and that if you start feeling that way you have to be extra extra aware and careful because if you indulge the feeling you’ll go down a self-destructive spiral

And even though that was years and years ago, I think about it all the time. Especially when I’m reading discourse on the idea of getting so attached to mental illness as an identity that you don’t want to improve things because you feel safe in it and don’t know who you are without it

I always think of that line “I miss the comfort of being sad” and my brother’s warning

banshees:

metalbatteryzone:

Software Creations: *in the middle of development for Solstice* Okay so we need an intro theme to set the mood. Something folky, like medieval times. Think you can try your hand at that?

Tim Fucking Follin: Yeah I got ya, check this out.

Software Creations: *barely seconds in* Ohhh yes finally, something that isn’t an overwhelming banger. You done good, Mr. Follin.

Tim Fucking Follin: *waits for it*

Software Creations: *ten seconds later*

Originally posted by nous-sommes-folklore

lunarmoon94:

lackadaisycats:

Character design and drawing are tome-sized topics and even if I had all the answers (I don’t - I have a lot to learn), I’m not sure I could communicate them effectively. I’ve gathered some thoughts and ideas here, though, in case they’re helpful.

First, some general things:

 - Relax and let some of that anxiety go. This isn’t a hard science. There’s no wrong way, no rigid process you must adhere to, no shoulds or shouldn’ts except those you designate for yourself. This is one of the fun parts of being an artist, really - have a heady good time with it.

 - Be patient. A design is something gradually arrived at. It takes time and iteration and revision. You’ll throw a lot of stuff away, and you’ll inevitably get frustrated, but bear in mind the process is both inductive and deductive. Drawing the wrong things is part of the path toward drawing the right thing.

- Learn to draw.  It might seem perfunctory to say, but I’m not sure everyone’s on the same page about what this means. Learning to draw isn’t a sort of rote memorization process in which, one by one, you learn a recipe for humans, horses, pokemon, cars, etc. It’s much more about learning to think like an artist, to develop the sort of spacial intelligence that lets you observe and effectively translate to paper, whatever the subject matter. When you’re really learning to draw, you’re learning to draw anything and everything. Observing and sketching trains you to understand dimension, form, gesture, mood, how anatomy works, economy of line; all of the foundational stuff you will also rely on to draw characters from your imagination.
Spend some time honing your drawing ability. Hone it with observational sketching. Hone it good.

• I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone do this sort of thing better than Claire Wendling. In fact, character designs emerge almost seamlessly from her gestural sketches. It’d be worth looking her up.
  
  

- Gather Inspiration like a crazed magpie. What will ultimately be your trademark style and technique is a sort of snowball accumulation of the various things you expose yourself to, learn and draw influence from. To that effect, Google images, tumblr, pinterest and stock photo sites are your friends. When something tingles your artsy senses - a style, a shape, a texture, an appealing palette, a composition, a pose, a cool looking animal, a unique piece of apparel, whatever - grab it. Looking at a lot of material through a creative lens will make you a better artist the same way reading a lot of material makes a better writer.
It’ll also devour your hard drive and you will try and fail many times to organize it, but more importantly, it’ll give you a lovely library of ideas and motivational shinies to peruse as you’re conjuring characters.

- Imitation is a powerful learning tool. Probably for many of us, drawing popular cartoon characters was the gateway habit that lured us into the depraved world of character design to begin with. I wouldn’t suggest limiting yourself to one style or neglecting your own inventions to do this, but it’s an effective way to limber up, to get comfortable drawing characters in general, and to glean something from the thought processes of other artists.

- Use references. Don’t leave it all up to guessing. Whether you’re trying to design something with realistic anatomy or something rather profoundly abstracted from reality, it’s helpful in a multitude of ways to look at pictures. When designing characters, you can infer a lot personality from photos, too.

And despite what you might have heard, having eyeballs and using them to look at things doesn’t constitute cheating. There’s no shame in reference material. There’s at least a little shame in unintentional abstractions, though.

Concepts and Approach:

- Break it down. Sometimes you have the look of a character fleshed out in your mind before putting it to paper, but usually not. That doesn’t mean you have to blow your cortical fuses trying conceive multiple diverse designs all at the same time, though. You don’t even have to design the body shape, poses, face, and expressions of a single character all at once. Tackle it a little at a time.

The cartoony, googly eyed style was pre-established for this simple mobile game character, but I still broke it into phases. Start with concepts, filter out what you like until you arrive at a look, experiment with colors, gestures and expressions.

- Start with the general and work toward the specific. Scribbling out scads of little thumbnails and silhouettes to capture an overall character shape is an effective way begin - it’s like jotting down visual notes. When you’re working at a small scale without agonizing over precision and details, there’s no risk of having to toss out a bunch of hard work, so go nuts with it. Give yourself a lot of options.

Here’s are some sample silhouettes from an old cancelled project in which I was tasked with designing some kind of cyber monkey death bot. I scratched out some solid black shapes then refined some of them a step or two further.

• Here’s an instructional video by Feng Zhu about doing much the same thing (only way better).

- Shapes are language. They come preloaded with all sorts of biological, cultural and personal connotations. They evoke certain things from us too. If you’re ever stuck about where to go with your design, employ a sort of anthroposcopy along these lines - make a visual free association game out of it. It’ll not only tend to result in a distinguished design, but a design that communicates something about the nature of the character.

Think about what you infer from different shapes. What do they remind you of? What personalities or attitudes come to mind? How does the mood of a soft curve differ from that of a sharp angle? With those attributes attached, how could they be used or incorporated into a body or facial feature shape? What happens when you combine shapes in complementary or contrasting ways? How does changing the weight distribution among a set of shapes affect look and feel? Experiment until a concept starts to resonate with the character you have in mind or until you stumble on something you like.

If you don’t have intent, take the opposite approach - draw some shapes and see where they go. (It’s stupid fun.)

• You might also find it helpful to watch Bobby Chiu’s process videos in which he feels out his character designs as he paints.
  
  

- Cohesion and Style. As you move from thumbnails to more refined drawings, you can start extrapolating details from the general form. Look for defining shapes, emergent themes or patterns and tease them out further, repeat them, mirror them, alternate them. Make the character entirely out of boxy shapes, incorporate multiple elements of an architectural style, use rhythmically varying line weights - there are a million ways to do this

Here’s some of the simple shape repetition I’ve used for Lackadaisy characters.

- Expressions - let them emerge from your design. If your various characters have distinguishing features, the expressions they make with those features will distinguish them further. Allow personality to influence expressions too, or vice versa. Often, a bit of both happens as you continue drawing - physiognomy and personality converge somewhere in the middle.

For instance, Viktor’s head is proportioned a little like a big cat. Befitting his personality, his design lets him make rather bestial expressions. Rocky, with his flair for drama, has a bit more cartoon about him. His expressions are more elastic, his cheeks squish and deform and his big eyebrows push the boundaries of his forehead. Mitzi is gentler all around with altogether fewer lines on her face. The combination of her large sleepy eyes and pencil line brow looked a little sad and a little condescending to me when I began working out her design - ultimately those aspects became incorporated into her personality.

I discuss expression drawing in more detail here (click the image for the link):

- Pose rendering is another one of those things for which observational/gesture drawing comes in handy. Even if you’re essentially scribbling stick figures, you can get a handle on natural looking, communicative poses this way. Stick figure poses make excellent guidelines for plotting out full fledged character drawings too.

Look for the line of action. It’ll be easiest to identify in poses with motions, gestures and moods that are immediately decipherable. When you’ve learned to spot it, you can start reverse engineering your own poses around it.

- Additional resources - here are some related things about drawing poses and constructing characters (click the images for the links).

Lastly…

- Tortured rumination about lack of ability/style/progress is a near universal state of creative affairs. Every artist I have known and worked with falls somewhere on a spectrum between frustration in perpetuity and a shade of fierce contrition Arthur Dimmesdale would be proud of. So, next time you find yourself constructing a scourge out of all those crusty acrylic brushes you failed to clean properly, you loathsome, deluded hack, you, at least remember you’re not alone in feeling that way. When it’s not crushing the will to live out of you, the device does have its uses - it keeps you self-critical and locked in working to improve mode. If we were all quite satisfied with our output, I suppose we’d be out of reasons to try harder next time.

When you need some reassurance, compare old work to new. Evolution is gradual and difficult to perceive if you’re narrowed in on the nearest data point, but if you’ve been steadily working on characters for a few months or a year, you’ll likely see a favorable difference between points A and B.

Most of all, don’t dwell on achieving some sort of endgame in which you’re finally there as a character artist. There’s no such place - wherever you are, there is somewhere else. It’s a moving goal post. Your energy will be better spent just enjoying the process…and that much will show in the results.

Awesome stuff to remember

thathopeyetlives:

pirateorprelate:

thathopeyetlives:

PSA since it’s going to be spring and then summer soon, and people graduating school are going to be looking for jobs even more than they already are.

Sadly there is a certain amount of misinformation out there.

- It’s disturbingly common for school career centers (even in college) and other organizations to have no idea how the culture around hiring works. In general you should not make nontraditional resumes, video or multimedia resumes, etc. If you’re not applying to a creative position, you often won’t/shouldn’t have a portfolio either.

- There’s also a big problem with the older generation (i.e. your parents) having ideas that simply aren’t accurate anymore. Perhaps the most (in)famous example is offering to do all kinds of crazy stuff to show off how dedicated you are / how much you want the job.

In most cases you shouldn’t try to walk into a company’s office uninvited, deliver paperwork in person (unless you just put it in a dropbox provided for that purpose or something), repeatedly contact / borderline stalk hiring managers.

- Follow the instructions the potential employer gives you!

- If you’re more than a year or two out of college or high school, most activities you did in school are not of much interest other than what you studied and academics like published papers. There are, of course, many exceptions to this.

- Don’t overestimate how much hiring is done by robots. This is an easy mistake to make, since hiring systems often seem very perverse and are demoralizing, but it tends to result in Word Salad Resumes.

- Don’t write Word Salad Resumes. Don’t try to put Every Single Skill on the resume, you’ll just end up with a wall of text.

- Relatedly: It’s true that “requirements” for most jobs are optimistic and they would never hire anybody if everyone had to fit them exactly. However, that doesn’t mean that you should apply to masses of jobs that you don’t even approach meeting the requirements for: this will mostly just annoy the hiring managers.

Good Advice.  

I’ll add a few more tips:

1.  Get used to using the phone.  For voice calls.  Phone calls are faster and more efficient, and avoiding or being afraid of calling, answering, and listening to voicemails is a really ridiculous way to handicap yourself.  

2. Employers are prohibited by law to ask questions about your social life in an interview, but nothing protects you from online discovery.  When you’re locking down your fb party pics, pruning embarrassing friends, and disconnecting your horrifying tumblr, also consider stripping from public view: age, birth date, race, religion, political affiliation, sexual orientation, and any medical or psychiatric details. You might even decide you just don’t want employers to know anything about your demographics, or social or personal interests that you don’t explicitly reveal. Have an idea of your privacy rights, options of disclosure, and how you want to handle anything personal that does come up in an interview. It’s perfectly acceptable to decline to answer. Well-defined boundaries are good and polite evasion is fabulous lifeskill (very good for teamwork when Brenda from accounting is a nosy busybody.)

3. The anxiety of job seeking can make you vulnerable online. While you’re trying to get yourself seen, don’t forget that even your professionally scrubbed data contains personal information.  Be wary of non-essential information gathering, and look out for scams (lookin at you, craigslist). Don’t share your social security number, address, financial data, credit card numbers (duh.), usernames or passwords (double duh.) online. ever.  And keep an eye on what of the information you do decide to submit is made publicly visible on job boards and websites, especially smaller local or niche ones that might not be robust in security. A legitimate company can have a lax privacy policy or web security that others can exploit.  This stuff is always true, but job seeking in particular can have you eager to share where you might normally be more vigilant or less willing to supply your data.

I’m going to add a few more things: 

- I’m not sure that employers are actually  forbidden to ask questions about your social life in general, but pretty much any question about your membership of protected classes is illegal. However, if you give this information away they realistically may still judge you on it. 

- If somebody asks you for your password for social media, DON’T GIVE IT TO THEM. This should be obvious but sadly may not be to everyone. You are forbidden to give them this by the contract you signed with the social media platform. This is a crazy request!

- It’s very important to get some idea of what’s normal policy, what’s unusual but not absurd, what’s kinda crazy, and what’s ILLEGAL. 

remember-youremadeoflove:

hustlerose:

hustlerose:

here’s a new ideological movement for you: internet iconoclasm

• stop putting random internet people on pedestals because they’re funny or quirky or for any reason at all actually
  
• self examine and self criticize: are you putting too much stock in parasocial internet relationships? are you being mindful of the humanity of others?
  
• never lay down your pride to defend someone you’ve never even talked to
• remember that the person and the persona can be very different
  
• if an online celebrity or influencer deserves to be torn down, then let them be torn down.
  

i’d like to address the 3 types of responses this post is getting.

Keep reading

This is a much more composed version of what I was going to post. Read this, and read the second part too. It’s really important, especially if you’re a young fan–it may hurt to hear, but this is something you need to learn sooner rather than later.

theaudientvoid:

iwatobiokageyama:

p-curly:

isthistakenalready:

p-curly:

yeah ok but what does weaboo even mean

like who just said one day 

“YUP AND THEY WILL BE CALLED…

…the WEABOO.”

and everyone else went along with it

ok quick history lesson

so on 4chan the word “wapanese” was used to refer to dumb anime nerds. white boy wannabe japanese. makes sense.

A mod got pissed at it being used so much and said that the next person to use it would get banned, so the boards decided to use a silly nonsense word to replace it. 

by complete general consensus, the boards picked the word “weeaboo” from a perry bible comic.

henceforth, “weeaboo” was used in replacement of “wapanese”. 

the end.

I have learned so much

this should be taught in history class

An object lesson in how attempting to censor words always fails.

jesuschristtheprinceofpeace:

One thing I’ve noticed on tumblr is the amount of Christian images that are completely unrelated to the verse put on top, so I had a go at making one: