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Beta reader applications are open for Now Shake It, Baby!

Now Shake It, Baby! Is a Black sapphic romance novelette following a T4T lesbian couple in their thirties who find love and adventure together! This might interest you if you like:

🪩 Black Cat x Golden Retriever

🎧 First Times (kisses, dates, and more 😉)

🪩 Low Stakes, Pure Vibes

🎧 A Dash of Spice🌶️🌶️

Applications close on May 26th! Fill out the form [here] if you're interested ✨️

Art by the lovely @feliville !

Commission for @authormicahflowers, of their characters Jaivyn and Plexi from their upcoming novelette "Now Shake It, Baby!" 💜

"Now Shake It, Baby!" is a short and sweet romance with a little bit of heat about two Black lesbians in their thirties finding love and adventure.

YYEAH 🫡🫡 if I recall, I wanted to write more stuff to my personal lore/story about them, but the setting of Minecraft felt too restricting to me, and there was nothing in my story that I couldn't tweak if i took em out of minecraft.... SOOOO

☝🏽 uhhh here's one of my first "zombie when he was alive"/Zayd prototype drawings (I wish I had the very first one, I remember not saving it because I assumed I would end up scrapping the idea of ever having him as a human.. 😒)

And one of my last Steve drawings Before making him into an OC, I wanted to play dressup with him SO bad, but without The Colors, he's no longer recognizable as Minecraft Steve (thts one reason why I never posted this one drawing)

These r also basically the prototypes for Paulina, Candela and Azalea, (who used to be an enderman, a skeleton, and minecraft Alex, respectively).

Candela was the only one to keep her name from when she was a minecraft OC, btw.. Paulina was named Poppy as an enderman, and Zayd didnt have a name as a minecraft zombie.

I remember being Very unhappy/unsatisfied with them as minecraft ocs, but now tht they're completely separate from minecraft, its so much fun to write what theyre like and what they do etc (even if writing is so fucking difficult in general : -1)

THE MAN, THE MYTH, THE LEGEND

amethyst

So I asked my guy Felipe @feliville , master of color, to make me a Whitewashed™ Patroclus. You heard right! I wanted to see what he looked like, and as an aside I said it'd probably prove that he was a white guy painted brown. And y'all-

Tbh, I almost miss the original 🤣🤣🤣 das a Hwite Man, all right!

To quote 🎤:

"ALRIGHTY, SO, From time to time I make simple Black edits on mediocre or bad Black character designs for funsies, but whitewashing a character on purpouse felt Vile and Horrible to do, it even made my stomach hurt 👎🏽 ,, I hate the end result and I hate that his design is so bad that once the dark grey skintone is gone, there's no traces left that he's Supposed to be Black."

What's wild to me is how good this looks. Not as in attractiveness, but as in this is such a sufficient white guy character design. It's why I be saying I wish people would just... Draw another white man if they're not gonna put in the effort to depict us. No one would have flinched if this was the millionth white Patroclus in the rotation. Well I would have, but no one that companies care about would have.

Anyway, when I asked what he did and if it was possible to use the same technique for Black character design:

"I ONLY CHANGED THE COLORS, NOTHING ELSE... OKI, I MEAN, I DID LIGHTEN IT UP, I used 3 effect?blending? layers.

[from left to right; Patroclus edited to have an Actual Brown Skintone, the Original sprite, and the whitewashed edit.]

Happy to help with this Fucked up Painful edit🫡🫡!! I'll be sure to see white Patroclus in my nightmares

The rest of you can (and really ought to!) reblog, but it's not your turn to talk. Just listen and reflect!

What DOES a good apology for antiblackness look like, to you?

Not a shitty twitter apology that dodges accountability. Not a genuine apology made to white fans to soothe their embarrassment and egos and maintain white solidarity.

What does an ACTUAL apology for antiblackness consist of, to you?

What actions do you need to see from people who claim to be better, to deserve your support despite a history of being unsafe?

Why do you think nonblack people feel they're entitled to grace, and what would actually EARN them your grace? What makes you not want to offer it at all?

Dates: June 1st - June 13th*

*If you send me anything after the 13th, I am going to delete it! Pay attention!

Y'all been asking about this one forever, and I admit that I had to really think about how to make something like this possible without dying due to overwork 😅 but I think I got it!

The rules for this one are long and specific, under The Submissions, The Critics, and Things to Expect from Ice. So I'm putting them under a read more.

PLEASE READ THE RULES! Y'all were not reading the rules during the character polls and it drove me nuts 🙏🏾