Mike reblogs

Questioning Eva Stratt at the Detention Center. Sorry Thena, she’s super guilty I don’t think we’re winning this one

I periodically think my milk is filled with slugs and larvae, even though I know rationally, that's not the case. Most days, I can work through that by reminding myself that I live with other people who also drink the milk, and if there were bugs in it, someone else would have noticed, so it's more logical that I'm just hallucinating.

However, the worse psychosis gets, the ability to logic like that can become more difficult. I might start thinking things like "they're only pretending to drink the milk to trick me" or something. They're not, and the milk is fine, but... the brain fills in the gaps of the logic with whatever it can to preserve the delusion.

Delusions often sound completely ridiculous on the outside, but when you're in the delusional state, it feels completely rational, often in ways you can't fully explain.

I've been getting back into comics while I wait for more info from my concept job, and I thought I'd make a post about something very important to me, which is COMIC PANEL VARIATION and HOW TO THINK ABOUT IT.

Also, yes, before you ask, these rules can absolutely be broken. I strategically break them to create a noticeable shift or flow in the storytelling, like so:

Let them call you difficult. The ocean never apologized for it's depth.

Self-sacrifice

Simon Blackquill spent seven years in prison for a crime he didn't commit to save Athena Cykes, showing self-sacrifice. The unselfish surrender of well-being for the welfare of Athena Cykes. He feels great responsibility over little Athena, that's why he sacrificed himself in order to protect his mentor's most precious 'treasure'

People caught in this cycle often find it difficult to accept support or express their own emotional needs, which we see during the game when he resolutely refuses help from his sister and Bobby Fulbright.

But of course, his self- sacrifice brought him great trouble.

Aggression

Environmental Stressors & Trauma: Ongoing triggers like chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and past experiences with violence can significantly lower a person's threshold for frustration, turning minor annoyances into major outbursts.

Jinxie points out his eyebags during her testimony, she says: "I meant your bags. The one's under your eyes. You must have trouble sleeping." And gives him a charm which Blackquill replies with: "Ah. Thank you." This proves that he's struggling with sleep deprivation. We know Simon Blackquill was obsessing over the phantom and with his upcoming execution date it all points to him having too much pressure on his back and being under stress all the time. These factors probably caused most of his outbursts such as breaking his cuffs and attempting to slice the defence and witnesses.

psychological manipulation and intimidating interrogations.

Blackquill uses psychological warfare against defendants and judges to turn the court in his favor. He analyzes personality traits and uses manipulation, intimidation, or flattery to compel reluctant testimonies. This is a technique he has learnt from Metis Cykes and used for his benefit in court.

Lack of self-esteem

He keeps claiming he's "beyond redemption, a cold hearted murderer". He didn't even told anyone about his execution date and made Fulbright promise that he wouldn't tell anyone which shows us that he doubts anyone cares so he brings himself down with his own hands. He doesn't believe anyone would care if he were to die even though they show clear distress about the situation, take his sister, Aura Blackquill, as an example. The day before he was supposed to get executed she shows up and tells him they have to do something, Simon brushes it off and tells her to not get involved. In the end Aura has to take matters into her hands by taking people hostage and forcing the court to reopen his case. If it weren't for her Simon would simply have died because he didn't valued himself as someone who was worth saving.

P.S from the author

Social media is bad for fandom. This is something you likely already know, because despite their names, social media are horrible for any social activity. Algorithms promote ragebait over any other social interactions. Accounts can get terminated at the whims of the staff. Most social media are built for small-form text posts rather than images or long-form text posts. In recent years, there's been a rise in posts along the lines of "we need to bring back mailing lists" "we need to bring back fansites" "we need to bring back forums" and so on and so forth.

Well, great news!

You 🫵 can do your part to help fandom move away from social media!

The technology for mailing lists or fansites or whatnot still exist! Most of these are accessible even to those who don't have five PhD in computer science.

Sharing fanstuff you've made

If you make fannish content, you're gonna want to make a fansite. Aka, your own website where you can post whatever you want.

How to make a fansite

There are many, many, many templates out there for people who aren't familiar with coding. Some are made to be copy/pasted without a second thought, others are a bit more thorough in explaining how it works and how to customize it. Here are a few examples, but if none of these vibe with you, feel free to google up "website template" to find more!

44×50 templates for writing archives, character wikis, and galleries

Zonelet's blogging template

Kalechips's templates for minimalist websites

If you're willing to code some stuff yourself (or if you used a template above and realized you needed to add a few things) I recommend W3school as a resource for html and css tricks. Whatever it is you're trying to add to your website, someone out there has surely figured out how to do it. It's only a matter of finding them.

Publishing your fansite

Neocities and Nekoweb are the two names for indie site hosting, though you can surely find more elsewhere.

What to put on your fansite

Anything you want! Here is a non exhaustive list of fannish things that would fit perfectly on a fansite:

Meta analysis

Watching/reading guides

Liveblogs

Headcanons

AU ideas

Character shrines

Ship manifesto

Fanart galleries

Fanfiction rec lists

Fantheories

Fanfiction (yes, ao3 ISN'T the only place you can post fics to!)

I also highly recommend MarineHaddock's zines, Let's make a fansite (and populate it) and Webshrines for People Poisoned By Microblogging if you're running out of ideas as to what to post.

Finding other fans

Fanlistings

Fanlistings are, as the name implies, lists of fans of a given thing, from shows to characters to ships. The Fanlisting Network lists an absurd amount of them, so you can start here to look them up.

People who sign up to fanlistings often list off their socials, website, or emails. So you can check if anyone is posting about your fandom, or email them directly if you want to strike a friendship with them. And likewise if you sign up to a fanlist. Maybe someone will message you through a fanlist!

Webrings

Webrings are lists of personal websites around a specific theme. There are webrings for various minorities, webrings for people who code a certain way, and of course, webrings for fandoms.

This one is very much oriented towards fansites, but hey, if you want to see more sites about your fandom that's the place to be. And if you do make a fansite, adding yourself to a webring is a good way to improve your site's discoverability.

Finding webrings relevant to your interests is usually a matter of googling up "(thing) webring," but for now here is the Smooth Sailing webring which covers enough topics that you're bound to find something of your interest here.

Openbook

Openbook is a search engine which exclusively searches for small websites (such as the sites you'd find on neocities.) Using it to look up a fandom of your choice is a quick way to find webrings, fansites, and the likes.

Building community

Forums

Forumotion is an easy way to create forums, and myBB is a software that requires a bit more tinkering but allows much more freedom in setting up your forum.

Mailing Lists

Listserv is widely considered the best software to enable mailing lists, though there are certainly many more.

Discord and alternatives

A lot of fandom discussions have moved to discord in recent years. A group chat is a fairly okay option for those who want the interactivity of a forum while keeping things more private. You can make a fandom discord or seek to join one to meet fellow fans. Disboard is a pretty extensive list of public discord servers on a variety of topics, fandom included.

For those who dislike discords, there are a bunch of alternatives. There is no consensus yet as to which is The Best Alternative Everyone Will Move To, so alas you're on your own in deciding which one you want to pick to try out fandom endeavors.

This reddit thread is a non exhaustive list of discord alternatives, with extensive explanations as to all their pros and cons.

Conclusion

Fandom does not have to remain on social media. The tools to get out of social media still exist, and they are more accessible than you think. We can bring back mailing lists. We can bring back fansites. We can bring back forums. It's only a matter of getting enough people to move out of social media for fandom matters.

another time: END

Just spent a long time replying to an anon who asked me about how to improve at anatomy and likeness, and then tumblr just decided to delete my answer </3, so I'm just gonna make a proper post out of it.

My biggest advice for improvement is to just get really, really, REALLY obsessed with something and then draw this certain thing non-stop until your hands fall off (please don't, do your stretches). Of course, doing proper anatomy studies is super important, too, but the second you decide to follow your heart and draw that yaoi ship that won't let you rest 24/7, you will see improvement in no time. And when you do sit down to do those boring studies? Draw your favorite character shirtless. Make those boring studies fun!

Here's some anatomy books I highly recommend:

Anatomy for Sculptors

Drawing Pose & Form

Every single Morpho book

These books have been the most helpful to me, especially Anatomy for Sculptors! Highly recommend just religiously copying every page from it. (These books can be found as free pdfs online, you do not have to purchase the physical version unless you want to. I know they're not exactly cheap.)

Here's some helpful websites/programs for studies:

Line of Action Insanely helpful website with lots of study material. They even have an integrated timer and randomizer for all their reference material!

Grafit Studio on Gumroad They offer a huge amount of anatomy reference packs of all kinds of poses and people. I've been using their reference for my studies for years! They do cost a little bit, but they also have a bunch of free test packs.

GestureDrawing! A timer and randomizer for your references! Works the same as the one from Line of Action, though with this program you can use your own references.

How to capture likeness:

It's incredibly easy to fall victim to "same-face-syndrome" but how does one avoid it?

Do studies of all kinds of faces! Old faces, young faces, asymetrical faces, round faces, long faces, square faces etc. You gotta draw faces that might not fall into our modern understanding of "beauty". I know, drawing conventionally hot people is super fun, I enjoy it as well, but if you want to improve at capturing likeness, you gotta understand all the little details that make a human face unique. Those deep wrinkles around someone's eyes, that little bump on someone's nose, that nice fullness to someone's cheeks. There's so much beautiful uniqueness to human faces, I highly recommend properly studying them. Look at an actor you like or a friend/partner you love and figure out in detail what makes their face the way it is, and try to think about how you would capture them on paper.

It's also incredibly important to understand the structure of a face. Where do the muscles sit that cause all of our expressions and how do they influence each other? What does the structure of the skull actually look like?

Here's two youtube tutorials that go into this more:

How I learned to draw better faces in a week by pikat

How I study heads/faces by Ullaiin