I’ve Never Seen Any Shit Like This Before…

scheduling some posts with art i’ve done lately!

first one: hennessy, wingedmenace’s chara

[francis]

rushed (1 hr and 48 mins) thing i drew vaguely in the theme of my art fight team :))

i’m eh on how it turned out but considering how fast it took me i can live with it

Took my tiny child with me to the Halloween store. Walked in and immediately realized it would be a terrible mistake.

They had those jumpscare machine things everywhere, lots of spooky noise machines, scary looking animatronic things, crazy decorations, just the whole 9 yards and then some. I immediately went to turn around and leave when I heard a noise coming from my arms.

My one year old child who gets scared if we cough…. was laughing.

She makes this precious “eee!” sound and starts vibrating when she sees something she really likes, usually an animal or a balloon, and she points right at the big zombie thing by the door and does that. I carry her in past a huge 10 ft tall Pennywise inflatable, and she smacks me to tell me to stop so she can look. She ponders him for a moment, and his glowing light-up eyes, then points at his hand and shouts “BEEM!” Which is her word for “balloon.” She made us stand there under Pennywise for at least 3 minutes, which is a really long time for a one-year-old.

Then, she begs to get down, so I let her loose and she just books it all over the store. Finds the creepy demonic looking babies and shouts “BABY!” then gets this confused look on her face and tries to wipe the “dirt” off their faces. Decides it’s not worth it, goes and picks up a severed hand decoration, hands it to me and says “hand.” Yes, my dear, it is a hand. And yes, that severed foot has “toes,” you’re very right.

Finds the wigs, runs down the aisle shouting “hair! hair!” and grabbing her own sparse little headfuzz so hard I think she’s going to rip it all out. Then she found the speaker in the wall that was blaring Monster Mash and she demanded I pick her up so we could “DANSSSE”. But she got distracted by the big spider decorations, which she christened as dogs by running toward them and barking.

She ran up and down the aisles of costumes touching the fabric and making her little “tss tss tss” giggle that she does when she’s having Much Too Good a Time. Every so often she’d stop, look back to make sure I was there, and point at something and vibrate with her aggressive “EEEE!”

A man turned a corner wearing one of the creepy latex masks. He immediately started apologizing to me, saying “I’m so sorry, I’m looking for my friend, I don’t want to scare her.” Meanwhile my child is standing there looking up at him with the most confused look on her face. Not scared, just confused, like he is so dumb and she can’t figure out why he would want to make that stupid face for so long. But he rounds another corner all hunched over, she flaps her arms and sighs, and takes off to go scream at the creepy lawn decorations.

When it was time to go, nothing could convince her to come to me willingly, so I had to promise her one last look at the balloon man while I picked her up against her will. Pennywise placated her, and we left the store with a smile on her chubby little cheeks. She demanded we wait and watch the big inflatable-flailing-arm-tube-man out front, the one that was bright orange and had a jack-o-lantern face, and she bounced and wiggled and danced in my arms despite its fan being louder than the loud motorcycles that scare her on our walks. She waved bye-bye to it as we left for the car.

Basically, that was the cutest thing that’s ever happened to me in my life, and it’s so crazy how so many things are culturally taught and kids are just… immune to that. All she saw was bright colors and things she recognized and could name, in a place she could explore and touch. She has no concept of clowns being scary or zombies being A Thing or what constitutes “creepy” and “spooky” and “gross.” To her, a severed arm with gore hanging out the end doesn’t represent pain or violence, it’s just “arm,” and it’s got some weird stuff on the end that’s funny colors. They’re just things, there’s no context for it.

The world is weird and beautiful and it’s so cool to see it through the eyes of someone who is so New to this planet and hasn’t been influenced by society and culture yet.

how does it feel knowing tumblr is the only (i think) safe space with no ai

i’ll be real with you: there aren’t any truly ”safe” platforms out there while good, universal regulations aren’t in place. nothing’s stopping ai bros from going to tumblr and manually grabbing images to train their algorithms on. i feel like platforms not doing the same (or at the very least, making it a permanent easy option to opt out) is bare minimum for any platform that wants to respect its users (yes, including the users who don’t post art, since on instagram for example they’re scraping ALL posts, not just art).

i’m happy that to my knowledge tumblr is still a platform that wants to respect the artist community, but either way i’d still be posting. we aren’t gonna win against ai by running away from the platforms that don’t respect us— we’ll win by staying and supporting each other, continuing to use the current ai poisoning methods, and campaigning for our rights as artists and copyright holders of our work!

SOS

Hello. It’s Mahmoud Khalaf from Gaza. Unfortunately, donations to my family evacuation and reunification in Ireland campaign have slowed down significantly. I was wondering if you could please reblog my donations post and help me boost my campaign and achieve my final goal.

Be our lifeline of hope after we were deprived of it! Be the light for a better life for my family at the end of this dark, gloomy, gory long tunnel of death, pain and torture. I live in Ireland now far away from my family in Gaza, and I say it to myself every day: My family deserves better. As explained in my post, vetted buy el shab Hussein and nabulsi #151 on the Vetted Gaza Fundraisers List. Recent Post title: Help Me Evacuate My Family from Gaza and Reunite with them in Ireland. Link to my post: https://www.tumblr.com/supportgaza/762249046198009856?source=share

I hope that you and your family will be able to be reunited, as whole and happy as possible. Best of luck!

Read their full post here!

many thanks for inviting me to do one :)) !!

@caustic-caffeine and I did a collab!! :)

my art fight card!!! stardust FTW!!!

Art fight prep thread

i’ll be periodically adding to this as i, well, do my prep for what will be my third art fight! there’s a number of things i need to do:

make references for the ocs that will be on my page (francis, maddox, cecie, iarmys, inanna, and ayelet (ayelet is @boxxed-upkr ‘s)) (three are done, but i may redo two of them..)

make icons for the above characters

make lil chibis of the above charas to sit on my home profile page

after teams are announced, make borders for this year’s attack icons

hunt down a person to do an 800 level revenge chain with, to try to be in the top 3 longest chains of the year

if possible, revamp the toyhouse pages of the public characters there

strikedown = completed

————

caustic.caffeine’s art fight info

scene hitlist // revenge chain hitlist will be a long one!! aiming to be one of the top three longest chainers this year!

art fight profile: https://artfight.net/~caustic-caffeine

team: tbd! but i don’t mind friendly fires!

my characters: aside from one, all are humanoids! they exist within a dark fantasy/steampunk setting with healthy helpings of the occult, macabre, and otherwise potentially unsettling ✨on each of their profiles they have links to toyhouse pages with art storage and more info about their lore! references are a work in progress and a few characters i have hidden right now may be unhidden before art fight starts

who i’ll attack: in order of most likely to least likely! mutuals > characters on my hitlists > characters with themes i enjoy > beginner artists/people new to art fight/people with high attack ratios (hmu if that applies to you!) > people who attacked me first > bookmarks > everyone else

other notes: check out my socials for examples of my art! i occasionally dabble in animation, both frame by frame and tweening. if it means anything, i’m an autistic lgbtq+ disabled metalhead 😎. more about me on my site

examples of art range from late 2023 up to a few days ago

Bumping this now since Cecie’s sheets have been added!

Redoing my character references (including redesigns as needed). After I finish Cecie’s, I may reblog with more info on the three’s dynamic 😌

[Edit] Cecie’s is now attached! Now that I got the M3 completed I’ll be taking a break from sheets to do some scenes. Though many more reference sheets will be made in the future…

Cecie’s Lament Characters

Francis, the demonic warlock patron.

Maddox, the half-elf wizard-turned-warlock.

[Edit] Cecie, the elf soothsayer.

A brief note on elves and demons (under the cut):

Elves:

My elves age differently from humans, maturing far slower and then leading prolonged lives. The average elf’s life expectancy sits in the 500s, though some have far exceeded this thanks to good medicine and magic practices. In elf-dominant cultures, an elf isn’t considered an adult until their 80s, at which point they will leave the home and venture out into the world to gain broader experience (and find a specific skill to hone in on). Trips like these often take decades to complete, with 20 years being considered on the short side.

Half-elves live shorter lives, but have the same maturation rate as full-blooded elves. They are still expected to participate in the same customs as full-blooded elves (if they want to be “respectable”, anyway). For Maddox, that means that he left the home in his early 80s and became a mercenary until his 110s (at which point he returned home for Cecie’s sake).

Demons:

“Demon” is just a shorthand term for all entities who were created to be or transformed into the servants of a deity. There’s a lot I could share about them, but I’ll save that for a separate post in the future (if folks want me to share the lore, or if I feel like doing it myself.)

“Demons” in my worldbuilding are not connected to Christianity, or any other real-world religion. They share some superficial similarities, but with vastly different origin stories and mechanics.

I need to say something and I need y'all to be calm

if it isn't actively bad or harmful, no representation should be called "too simple" or "too surface level"

I have a whole argument for this about the barbie movie but today I wanna talk about a show called "the babysitters club" on Netflix

(obligatory disclaimer that I watched only two episodes of this show so if it's super problematic I'm sorry) (yes. I know it's based on a book, this is about the show)

this is a silly 8+ show that my 9 year old sister is watching and it manages to tackle so many complex topics in such an easy way. basic premise is these 13 year old girls have a babysitting agency.

in one episode, a girl babysits this transfem kid. the approach is super simple, with the kid saying stuff like "oh no, those are my old boy clothes, these are my girl clothes". they have to go to the doctor and everyone is calling the kid by her dead name and using he/him and this 13 year old snaps at like a group of doctors and they all listen to her. it's pure fantasy and any person versed in trans theory would point out a bunch of mistakes.

but after watching this episode, my little sister started switching to my name instead of my dead name and intercalating he/him pronouns when talking about me.

one of the 13 years old is a diabetic and sometimes her whole personality is taken over by that. but she has this episode where she pushes herself to her limit and passes out and talks about being in a coma for a while because of not recognizing the limits of her disability.

and this allowed my 9 year old sister to understand me better when I say "I really want to play with you but right now my body physically can't do that" (I'm disabled). she has even asked me why I'm pushing myself, why I'm not using my crutches when I complain about pain.

my mom is 50 years old and watching this show with my sister. she said the episode about the diabetic girl helped her understand me and my disability better. she grew up disabled as well, but she was taught to shut up and power through.

yes, silly simple representation can annoy you if you've read thousands of pages about queer liberation or disability radical thought, but sometimes things are not for you.