Gyahhh

And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”

Her response was, “Well, are you?”

My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.

The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”

I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.

Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular - but guys, value your allies. Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.

Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.

Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place - when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.

Disney’s Mulan

That’s right! Hey, did you like White Sky?

Would you want to see a happier game with better graphics, involving a lot of adorable dogs? Come on, everyone loves dogs!

Would you want to VOICE ACT for said game? :))

WELL NOW YOU CAN!!!

There’s no painfully long lines of dialogue, just little exclamations like “Hi!” and “Oh?” that sound when you talk to a character. And there’s going to be a LOT of NPCs, so if you try out for an NPC you’re basically going to get the part.

CLICK HERE TO TRY OUT FOR THE FIRST SET OF CHARACTERS!!!

Above is just a pre-production image, it’s going to look way better later on!

A lot of times when I let kids play on my phone, they go for the drawing app. I watched a girl on the bus write a silly poem about her friends and then laugh as she made Siri read it I hear children say to their friends “hey, FaceTime me later” because they still want to talk face to face even when they’re far away. I see kids sitting, who would feel lonely and ignored if it weren’t for the fact that they’re texting their friends who are far away. Children still climb trees. They might just take a selfie from the top to show off how high they’ve gotten. They can immediately read the next book of their favorite series on their Kindles. Most kids would still be up for a game of cops and robbers. Or maybe they’d google rules to another game they haven’t played yet. When children wonder why the sky is blue, they don’t get an exasperated “I don’t know” from tired adults. They can go on Wikipedia and read about light waves and our atmosphere. They show off the elaborate buildings they created on Minecraft.

So many people have asked me for character design tips over the past couple of years. Here’s a whole list of rules I keep in mind with my own character designs.

In no specific order:

Simple is good. Streamline your design to its essence. The more shit you add on your character the more you make it about what they are wearing, and not who they are.

Popular ideas of beauty are limiting. There are only so many ways to make a character conventionally beautiful before you start noticing they all have the same face (i.e. “Six Faces Syndrome”). What most people consider “ugly” or undesirable is actually features that make your character unqiue. Who would you likely remember more: A perfect-faced model or that model’s twin with buckteeth?

Understand typical archetype designs and visual stereotypes to use them effectively. What are characteristics found in a “hero” character? In a “villain” character? In a “child” character? What can you do to mix them around, or play it straight?

Don’t draw the lines of the character, rather: draw the character in the lines. In other words: if someone told you to draw a horse, don’t just draw a plain old horse—draw the personality in the horse. A Royal Noble Horse has a much different character from an Old Sickly Stubborn Horse, for example. There’s a difference between Hark! A Vagrant!’s Fat Pony and Tangled’s Maximus, for another example.

Make your characters relatable. Making a character as wildly unique as possible (a pink-purple-blue haired goth wearing nothing but Hot Topic gear, for instance) actually is one of the most alienating thing you can do for your audience. It’s trying too hard to make your character a special snowflake. Limit this extreme to very specific characters and roles, be calculating and precise about going crazy. It will be more effective.

In addition, find what makes a person special through the boring features. Not everyone has crazy tri-colored hair, but there are a lot of people who have short brown hair. Can you draw five different characters with short brown hair and make them all unique? Try it out.

Silhouettes are important. Are you varying body mass? Are you utilizing basic shapes? We are able to recognize people and objects just from their shadow, and we do it so often we don’t even notice we do it! If all your characters have the same “shadow,” challenge yourself to mix it up more.

If you drew your characters naked and bald, could you tell them apart?

Be consistent in the ‘tone’ of your design style.

artists know the risk they are taking when they post their art online. people are inevitably going to take it apart, color edit it, flip it around or otherwise post it uncredited.

saying that an artist shouldn’t post their work if they don’t want it bastardized is probably the stupidest stance on this subject you could take. if all artists followed this line of reasoning, there would be no art on the internet. 

when an artist posts their work, they are trusting you to enjoy it respectfully. and when you betray that trust either knowingly or unknowingly, it’s like saying the artist’s time, skills and thoughts aren’t worth anything.

you are NOT entitled to an artists work just because they decided to trust you enough to share it with you.

an artist is within their right to feel upset that someone has used their work in a way they never intended it to be used. they are within their right to ask for it to stop and not happen again.