weevil is my name and evil is my game

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.

Not like, the sanitized and “easily marketable for the GA” kind of representation. Not the “one of them dies to teach the audience a lesson” kind. Not the blink-and-you-miss-it kind. But the messy, slow-burn, emotionally intimate kind. The kind that looks like longing and devotion and years of shared history. The kind that feels REAL and RAW.

Because every time it happens, there’s this familiar cycle.

First comes the excitement. The careful optimism. The way you tell yourself not to expect anything, but still start noticing the framing, the parallels, the lingering looks, the narrative weight placed on this relationship above all others. You notice how their arcs mirror each other. How their growth is intertwined. How the story itself seems to insist that this matters.

And for a moment, it feels like maybe, FINALLY this time it will be different.

But then comes the inevitable disappointment.

Sometimes it’s tragedy. The story decides that queerness must be paid for in suffering, that love like this can only exist if it’s cut short, punished, rendered untouchable. Sometimes it’s vagueness n ending that hovers just shy of confirmation, carefully crafted to invite “multiple interpretations,” as if ambiguity is somehow more acceptable. And sometimes it’s the slowest, cruelest version: years of development that simply go nowhere. Threads dropped. Promises implied and then quietly abandoned.

And what makes this hurt so SO bad is that, it doesn’t happen once. It’s that it keeps happening. Over and over and over again.

There’s a very specific kind of heartbreak in realizing that the depth you’re seeing the devotion, the intimacy, the narrative centrality, was allowed precisely because it could be denied later. That the story could borrow the aesthetic and emotional language of queerness without ever having to commit to it. That your investment was acceptable because it was never going to be validated.

And it’s just so fucking exhausting, because queer audiences are constantly told we’re “reading too much into it,” even when the text itself invites that reading. Even when the writing, the acting, the framing, the symbolism all point in the same direction. We’re told to be grateful for subtext, for implication, for scraps while straight relationships get clarity, closure, and canon without having to beg for it.

So yeah. It hurts.

It hurts to recognize the pattern even as you’re falling into it again. It hurts to feel foolish for hoping, even though hope is a completely reasonable response to the story you’re being told. It hurts to watch creators and studios benefit from queer audiences’ passion while never quite meeting us where we are.

And maybe the worst part is that, despite knowing all this, we still let ourselves believe. Because the alternative, never hoping, never engaging, never seeing yourself in anything, is worse.

So we keep watching. We keep analyzing. We keep loving these characters fiercely, even when the narrative won’t love them back in the same way we do.

And every SINGLE time it ends the same, we’re left holding this very specific, very familiar kind of grief. One that comes not from imagining queerness where there is none, but from being shown just enough of it to know exactly what we’re being denied.

So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.

We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.

And then I look up.

And holy shit.

There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”

And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.

I was trained in the dark arts of the cover letter by my mother, who is a hiring manager. And her training has paid off: I've been consistently told my cover letters are excellent. Let me pass on the wisdom.

The job of a cover letter is to give a prospective employer strictly more information than is on the resume. This is where you take the resume contents and put them into context. You look at the job requirements (you are looking at the job requirements before applying, right?) and look at your resume and ask the question (in your head) "why would a person think this candidate would be good for this job?" and your cover letter is the answer to that question. If you don't answer that question, the hiring manager is going to have to do it themselves, and you have way more information to work with than they do.

This is especially important if you're moving from one industry to another, because then the relevant connections aren't obvious. It's also very important if you're overqualified, because then you can use the letter to say "I know it looks like this job would be too entry-level for me, but I'm interested to pursue it for reasons x, y, and z". You can also use this space to explain away something that might otherwise be disqualifying, like job-hopping or a long break in employment. The tone to strike here is always matter-of-fact and constrained to topic - don't go into detail about health stuff or personal tragedy, just tell them what they need to hear: that this period of your resume was affected by [bad thing] but that it's now in the past and you're looking forward to the next chapter. Remember, one of the things they're trying to learn is whether you'd be content in this role, or whether you'd be miserable and leave after 2 months, which would force them to do all the work of hiring again. You're trying to establish that you will fit right in and not cause problems. Knowing what drew you to this job in particular (and don't just say 'money', that's true for everyone) helps with that.