I'm not here anymore

tanuki/raccoon alterhuman moodboard with themes of stars!!

Sometimes classics can be improved upon.

The Tree Who Set Healthy Boundaries : an alternate ending for Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree by Topher Payne 💯🌳❤️

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.

but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.

triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:

- if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.

SCAM ALERT!! Told Magazine Inc / New Media International are scams targeting vulnerable creatives. 

They lure you in with a very professionally worded email promising an interview with their magazine, saying you were nominated for it by one of your followers. Their website is also very professional on the surface, but if you look closely you’ll notice weird things about it. Lots of photoshopped stock photos of models wearing their logo, no real content or articles, blurry images of text where articles might be.

If you say yes, they send you a link to a questionnaire where they get your personal information, along with some questions about your art peppered in. Then they’ll ask you for money so they can mail you a copy of the magazine with your interview when it’s out, and that’s where the biggest part of the scam is. Once you send them money, they disappear.

I made it to the interview phase before going NAH, (I asked them a ton of questions about where the heck their articles were and why their magazine didn’t appear in any Google searches - they ignored me and just sent their next copy/paste email in the scam - a real editor would’ve addressed my questions). Then I found more artists talking about this scam on Twitter, but I haven’t seen anything about it on Tumblr. So, here you go.

There’s a lot of scams aimed at creatives right now because many us are more vulnerable than ever. Of course I’d love a sweet interview to boost my online shop sales while my entire convention schedule is canceled. But we can outsmart them by doing research, asking questions, and warning others.

I’m not sure how seriously I should take it, since it’s a bunch of very harsh emotional threats and doesn’t come off as very… professional? On one hand, I’m still 100% convinced Told Magazine Inc is a scam organization, (as of today, googling them still doesn’t bring up anything unless you do so in quotes, their website doesn’t even load, and the third hit is my tumblr so lol). On the other hand, if they’re horrible enough to try to scam small artists out of some money, then they’re horrible enough to try to sue a small artist for exposing them as a scam. I won’t be removing this post as of yet, and will be reaching out to several local lawyers for consultations on the matter.

EDIT: At the suggestion of another tumblr user, I’ve reported Told Magazine Inc to the US Federal Trade Commission for attempting to scam small indie artists. I don’t think anything will come of it, but I’m glad something is officially in their records now! Since I’m not confrontational, I’m just going to ignore TMI’s fake C&D and collect any other emails they send in the future as potential evidence against them.

EDIT 2: Well… it’s been 24 hours. :)

Apparently they used to be High Alliance Magazine. After some digging, I can tell most of the images up on their website, (now changed to toldmagazine.com and working again) come from renamed covers and “articles” from High Alliance Magazine, another scam doing the exact same thing Told Magazine Inc is doing. The “top stories” page on their website is a parade of Instagram models they successfully scammed when they were High Alliance. Also this 5 star review for High Alliance on Scam Alert looks oddly familiar…

I bet they would also hate it if you reported High Alliance’s Instagram page for being a scam under ‘…’ > report user > it’s inappropriate > report account > posting content that shouldn’t be on instagram > scam or fraud. https://www.instagram.com/highalliancemagazine/?hl=en

This was not crystallized by the ocean. People. No. This is why artist credit is SO DAMN IMPORTANT THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE MISINFORMED HERE.

Alexis Arnold is an artist who creates crystallized books. Her work is amazing and beautiful, she’s made dozens of these.

This particular one was not made by her, however, it was actually created by Catherine McEver - who was inspired to try it after seeing a show of Alexis Arnold’s work. It’s literally the first picture on Google image results if you search for “crystallized books” and she posted about it on her blog showing other process shots as she made it.

“Congratulations,” a genderless, lightly accented voice says. It doesn’t make sense, but it sounds like it’s coming through the light, echoing and warm. “You’ve been chosen to embark on a magnificent–”

I lunge before it can finish, heart thundering against my ribs, and wrap it in the black trash bag. It’s warm to the touch, even through the plastic, but once I get it properly bundled, I can’t hear or see it which means I’ve managed to contain it.

For now.

I abandon my cleaning cart, shouldering the bathroom door open too quickly. It nearly takes out a high schooler lurking behind it.

“Watch it,” the girl snarls, shaking out the hand that had caught the door before it connected with her face. 

“Be grateful,” I tell her, shoving the garbage bag bundle under my shirt. “I’m, like, basically saving your life right now.”

She scrunches her nose. “What?”

I don’t answer, instead hurrying towards the principal’s office. Sometimes the sorcerer or witch or whoever sticks around after planting them and I definitely do not want to run into them.

“Principal Flag!” I skid past the receptionist and kick the door open, arms wrapped around the quest scroll under my shirt. “We’ve got a problem!”

Principal Flag nearly throws her brush across the room at my sudden entrance, a blush rising furiously along her cheekbones. “I told you to knock!” Her horse hindquarters stamp in irritation and she hastily smooths her long, centaur skirt back over them.

“Sorry,” I pant, coming to a stop in front of her desk. “But this can’t wait, we’ve got a problem. I found a–a quest in the girls’ bathroom.”

“It’s actually a gender-neutral bathroom now,” Principal Flag corrects, seemingly on reflex. “The students voted and I think it’s quite wonderfu– did you say you found a quest?” She pales. “Was it–was it activated?”

“No,” I say. I carefully pull the bundle from out under my shirt, dropping it onto her desk. “I’m the first to come in contact. It tried to give me the Chosen One speech.”

Principal Flag’s hands hover over the black plastic. “God, it talked? Did you feel a compulsion? Depending on the strength, we could be facing quite the adversary here.”

“I don’t know.” I pull up the visitor’s chair, legs still shaking. “I’ve already been a Chosen one, you know that, a compulsion wouldn’t work on me.” I shake my head. “We can’t let whoever did this try again. A quest scroll ruined my life, our lives, I don’t want that to happen to a kid.”

“I remember,” Principal Flag says grimly. “I’ll be damned if I let some thousand-year-old warlock make off with one of my students. Not. In. My. School.” She trots around her desk to the cabinet. From there, she removes a black, metal box. “First, we’ll destroy it. It’s times like these that I’m thankful we have so many helicopter parents on the PTA. They practically give us the money for these.”

I watch as she opens the box. Dark, rolling steam pours from it and across the desk. When it touches the trash bag, the air begins to smell of burning plastic.  Principal Flag picks it up, wincing as the heating plastic burns her fingers and drops it into the box.

“A CURSE,” the scroll shrieks from inside the box. “YOU HAVE DEFIED THE ANCIENT–”

Principal Flag slams the lid back on, locking the thing down. The thing is still shrieking, but the words are muffle and neither Flag or I are susceptible to half curses. Not since our childhoods.

“It had to be an inside job,” I say after the screams begin to die out. “You’ve got the school locked down and I would have noticed anyone sneaking in.”

“I agree,” Principal Flag says. She’s still glaring at the box, mouth a thin line. She looks back at me, grey eyes sharp. “Whoever planted it is a monster. There’s no way they didn’t mean for a kid to find out.”

“Giving quest scrolls to minors is against the law,” I say. “We could call the police?”

Both Flag and I stare at each other for a long moment. Then we burst into laughter.

“A Successful?” Flag howls. “Oh my god, can you imagine what a Successful would say?”

I wipe tears out of my eyes. Successfuls were people who completed quests, generally the light and fun ones that made good day time drama. “Oh,’” I say in a falsetto, “’I’d have killed to have a scroll as a kid. It’s such an honor. They’re starting off right!”

We laugh more, the sound verging on hysteria. Neither of us had the good fortune to be quested with a return the stone to the mountain scroll. We’d gotten something much, much worse.

“Oh, that’s good,” Flag says, dotting under her eyes with a tissue. She sobers slowly, chuckles dying out. “No, we won’t go to the police. I think that us two Unsuccessfuls will do the job nicely.” She grins and there’s something dark in it, darker than one might expect from a highschool principal.

I know that darkness is reflected right back in my smile. “I’ll get on it.”

There are Successfuls, heroes and martyrs who come back stronger and better after getting a quest scroll.