A Mess Of A Blog

goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

Yes, because the Washington state government activated like a sleeper-cell and ruthlessly, systematically hunted them down and annihilated them.

“Y2K came to nothing amirite?”

Yes because an army of software engineers working around the clock, losing sleep, and busting ass till the last minute prevented it from happening.

“Remember the hole in the ozone layer?”

You mean the one that was fixed through rigorous world wide government action?

One of the root problems of our society is a refusal or inability by media to articulate that all those “it’s gonna be an apocalypse” disasters were not disasters because we collectively did something about them.

The good news is this is actually quite correctable. I maintain my firm belief that we as humans are capable of solving almost all of our problems, when we decide to do so.

And I still think that’s going to happen. I don’t know when or how, but I do know that abandoning hope won’t help bring it about.

like. it's still big and sharp, you can put it to other uses if it's what you've got, but it isn't very good for them. especially a double-edged sword, which can't be put to many of the 'giant knife' uses that a single-edged one can, because you can't brace anything against the back for greater precision.

it can sort of function as a shitty machete. it will not stand up to being used like an axe.

if a large dangerous animal is coming at you, you want something much bigger, like a boar spear, that lets you put more of your body behind any strikes and gets you more distance. and if you're trying to hunt for food, you're better off with something that doesn't require you to get close enough to touch before you can land a hit.

handguns are very similar. they are manufactured to kill people, specifically. they are not much good for anything else. that is the point of them.

you don't hunt with a handgun if you've a rifle. if you're competent with it, a decent bow will usually serve you better than a pistol, for meat. a shotgun is better for hunting birds and even for threatening violence against other humans, than a handgun. (because you can load it with the kind of scattering shot that can menace more than one person at a time.)

and of course for serious combat, semi-automatic rifles are the thing.

Design Notes; The Seven Deadly Sins

Greed points at everything they want and grasps anything they can. Their true form is unseen. Their own hand partially blinds them. Different eyes puncture their crown, stolen from others. They float, detached from all. Their stick is sharpened at both ends

It is the first and oldest design, dating back to 2023

The stick sharpened at both ends is a reference to Lord of the Flies (in the book, one end of the stick goes into the earth while the other holds a severed head) I wanted it to symbolize violence

Sloth exists in a wrapped cloth that provides comfort but muffles all sensations. Sloth doesnt see, speak nor hear. The cloth overwhelms them. They are bound by a rope whose edge reaches inside their confinement, giving them the ability to free themselves if so desired.

I made an extra effort to put the rope within Sloth's control, to avoid associating inertion from mental illness to laziness

I wrapped my Blajah plushie with a bed sheet and used my robe's belt as rope to get a picture reference for the upper body. Despite eerie origins, my designs come into paper with a lot of silly methods.

Pride exists inside a golden, hollow statue. Their gaze is set upon a cracked book of pages set in stone. Their laurel crown is sharpened to the point of horns. Pride can be set free if they break the outer shell that binds them with the gavel they use to condemn others.

The pose and clothing is a reference to the painting The School of Athens, by Raphael.

Being mettalic, the book only reflects back themselves. Even if you interpret it as stone, it would still work since the pages remain static

I like to imagine the rotten legs dragging their heavy statue shell around. Ever since I was little I have a strange fear of statues moving

Gluttony is a stomach, living and consuming themselves within their confinment. They’re not represented by an underweight or overweight person; it had to be something everyone has. Their scale is purposefully unspecified; because everyones is different.

The design resembles the Horseman of Famine because gluttony and famine are connected; the excessive hoarding by some people causes famine to others. They're like two different plates on a scale

While the basic representation is just fat, I never considered drawing an underweight person to counter it and appear subversive. When talking to a friend recovering from an eating disorder they mentioned how cheap and uncomfortable it is when people use extreme thinness just for the sake of horror and I have to agree. I always avoid drawing real bodies for horror

Lust is the only one who tries to disguise itself with a human appearance, tho it has too many hands. One hand to beckon, one to threaten, and one to silence you. It kneels because not all of its victims are adults. It lives undercover and invites you in as well

Many asked about the fourth hand: it's the one you only notice afterwards and are left wondering what it means, whether it's an innocent gesture or not. How it made you feel.

It has 2 other variation designs. While what I made before is beautiful, it is not unsettling enough. It has the artstlye of an angel rather than something human and dangerous

I settled on the design after a passage in the book Second-Hand Time, by Svetlana Alexievitch. It was a passage about a teen abused by a military squad, killed when she got pregnant, and mocked over how underveloped her body was. Because of that my original idea was to have Lust wearing military boots, but that would restrict the concept too much. I thought that drawing would make that passage less haunting to me, but to no avail.

Envy is a slowly burning and constricted heart. It covers its identity with a mirror; the more it seeks to resemble the reflection of others the less it will resemble itself. But even the reflection is broken, inaccurate, and unsatisfactory.

Many have said the concept looks like a chrysalis or a flower bud, unable to flourish. I like when people interpret my drawings, they often find beautiful meanings that escaped me

I pondered whether to paint the mirror in front of them black, to symbolize phone screens, but decided against it because it would blend into the background

Least popular design but one where people have told me ''I cant stop thinking about it'' the most, which made me cherish it a lot

Wrath is not a beast acting ravenous, but a human thing slowly crawling towards you. All of their actions are justified by the halo they claim to be righteous. The closer they get, the more they shed their humane appearance

It was a challenge to make wrath differ from someone being rightfully angry. It applies to all designs; how to portray dangerous excess to very common and not entirely wrong emotions.

Wrath has no legs. Nothing to stand on

''Little by little, it turned into that wild fury in which the eyes camouflage with a black veil, the fists contract with a tremedous force and your very teeth find the enemy'' Roughly translated quote by Nikolai Gumilev that I kept in mind while designing it. Amazing writer

My horsemen of the apocalypse! I will add the original commentary and some extras, less about the symbolism and more about what brought me to design them the way I did.

The symbolism is for you to chose, there is no wrong answer.

WAR

I can't bring myself to represent war with a cool knight. It's horror. War is a bound child crowned with shrapnel, tied to a wounded horse that is being pulled forward by unseen people.

I've read a handful of books regarding war. A lost quote said that it should be shown as horror, it should make generals vomit, it should make you sick. I haven't seen war but my family has.

It was the first horseman I've designed, and it was in my sketchbook for months (maybe over a year, maybe even more) before I had the courage to draw it. I was really scared about how people would react to a mutilated child.

Recommended reading: The Red Crown - Mikhail Bulgakov, a short story about a man coping with the loss of his brother in the war

FAMINE

Someone who lived thro a famine shared that their head was only occupied with thoughts of food. Famine consumes your mind. All animals were eaten. Neighbors gave their pets away cuz they couldn't do it themselves. People walked around town as if in a dazed dream, slowly

Recommended reading: The Last Witnesses - Svetlana Alexievitch, a collection of testimonials of people who were children when WW2 began. Some quotes below;

'''A cat! A cat!' Other children saw it and started chasing it. The educators were local habitants, looked at us as if we were insane. In Leningrad there were no living cats left...A living cat was a dream. Food for one month...We talked about it, but they didn't believe us.''

''During the first year of evacuation, we didn't notice nature, everything that was nature provoked in us only one desire - taste to see if it's edible. Only a year later I noticed the beauty of the Urals''

''I dreamt of catching a sparrow and eating it...''

''A candle burns and the shopgirl cuts the bread pieces. People follow her with their gaze. Her every movement...with burning eyes...crazed...and all that in silence.''

''People walked slowly through the city like shadows. Like in a dream...a deep dream...As in, you see it, but you think you're seeing a dream. Those sluggish movements...floating...As if a person walked on water and not on land.''

''In Leningrad there are a lot of monuments, but one is missing that should exist. They forgot about it. The monument to the dogs of the seige. Dear doggy, forgive me...''

I don't like talking about it. It made no sense to draw Famine with a horse.

PESTILENCE

Based on the notes of a doctor who said the most frightening thing about viral disease was how it didn’t frighten. People didn’t know or didn't care. They lived and spread until it was too late and they became another name on the record

The clothing being made out of shredding plastic is no coincidence; pollution is a form of pestilence too

Recommended reading: Notes from a Countryside Doctor - Mikhail Bulgakov. Roughly translated quote below;

''Ah, I verified that here syphilis was frightening precisely because it did not frighten. That was why I evoked that woman.* I remembered her with a kind of affectionate respect: because she had been afraid. But she was the only one!''

*Early in the chapter, doctor mentions a woman that appeared in the clinic with a letter from her soldier husband, where he wrote that he had syphilis and told her she should go to the doctor too.

DEATH

Recommended reading: Voices of Chernobyl - Svetlana Alexievitch. The Death of Ivan Ilitch - Lev Tolstoi

“Death is the fairest thing in the world. No one's ever gotten out of it. The earth takes everyone - the kind, the cruel, the sinners. Aside from that, there's no fairness on earth.”

Death is the only horseman that doesn’t need to mount their horse; they will reach everyone eventually. Who is the saddle for then? Open ended question because this one you have to figure out personally

Many people pointed out how the horse is a Clydesdale. Good eyes! I purposefully asked a friend to guide me towards what type of horses are the sturdiest and most-friendly looking. I drew the horse grazing. It's not injured, it doesn't gallop. It's grazing peacefully because life moves on.

This is the only design that had a painting serve as a base - The Reaper, by Alexey Venetsianov. Not much or nothing at all is written about, I saw it in a book. It is a literal reaper but it haunted me, as if it's portraying more than a person.

The choice to make it a woman was due to a book about a crematory (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes - Caitlin Doughty) that connected women to death because everyone born is bound to die.

Ahhh, I don't want to give it all away. It's fun to figure things out. About them all. From the enviroment, to the movement, to the horses themselves. Many people even mentioned details that I did not notice and didn't add purposefully that were so inspired and amazing. I truly mean that the interpretations of the public enrich the works even more than my own words. And it's an honor to share that work with everyone.

Theoretically I was just supposed to list off the numbers.  Except. Very early I started parsing the figures and give my own analysis.  Apparently engineers and geophysicists got a bit freaked out by a ten year old going ‘It’s not that good, the flow’s really slow compared to last week, and there’s gas pockets really screwing up the flow in the east pipe judging by the pressure report.’

Dad still got that yelled at him at conferences: ‘This is the fucker who used child labour to do well analysis!’

‘Was it wrong?’