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Career Suicide

(available on amazon)

[Image IDs: All the images are photos of clouds at sunset/rise, with beautiful high-contrast orange and dark blue color palettes. In all of them the moon is visible and there are airplanes with long, lit up contrails.

ID1: In this one the clouds are huge thunderheads clustered mostly in the bottom half of the image and to the left. The moon is a waning crescent in the close to the center of the image. The contrails of the airplane cut through the higher clouds on the left, moving diagonally up and to the right, ending just under the moon. There are stars in the sky.

ID2: Just the top of a large thunderhead is pictured in this one, with a very bright waxing crescent moon just above it. The airplane is this one is a bit bigger and more visible than the others, its contrails cutting across the image to the right/top diagonally, disappearing behind the cloud. The sky is a slightly lighter blue in this one, but there are still stars in the sky.

ID3: This is the only image that shows the ground, which is hard to see because of the low light, but appears to be an parking lot overlook on the top of a mountain with a city below and to the right. The clouds in this one are more scattered and wispy, but are still huge and cover most of the sky. The sky is bright yellow near the horizon, turning to a rich, starless blue at the top of the image. The contrails strikingly travel straight up from the horizon, behind the clouds and up to the moon; which is a thin waxing crescent.

ID4: Dark clouds billow up and to the left, a dimmer contrail cutting through the peak of them diagonally up and left. The moon is a bright waxing crescent. It’s so bright the shadowed side is still visible, and it’s also off-center, resting just above the highest point of the clouds. The 3 stars of Orion’s Belt are the only ones visible.

/End IDs]

Thin-Spined Jumping Spider (Tutelina elegans), female, family Salticidae, Illinois, USA

photograph by KJ Bluma

just found out about this cute little birdy and i am in love

I have some advice to writers in fandom: if you start to feel like fandom is making you dislike your own writing, get the hell out. Do not wait, do not pull halfway out, fucking go. Fandoms are vicious and there are people out there who make themselves feel better by tearing others down. Waiting for likes teaches you to externalize your sense of self-worth. Reblogs and follower counts become unspoken competitions.

Leave with your sense of self-worth intact. Loving your writing is worth more than anything you could possibly get out of fandom, I promise you.

My gift to you: An Atlas of Insect Morphology free pdf

I am just, a dumb little goblin. I cannot do Math. I just want to eat some leaves from the ground and befriend the rats .. maybe go rabid but that can wait

Picasso Bug aka Zulu Hud Bug (Sphaerocoris annulus), family Scutelleridae, found in much of Sub-Saharan Africa

photograph by Daniel Rosengren Photography

I rlly love your art! I like to draw too but I'm having trouble with chubby/fat characters. Is there any advice you could give? (Sorry if this is weird or annoying, if so you don't gotta answer it.)

I get this question a lot, and for once I’m going to try to give a proper answer. 

I what most people get wrong is how to distribute fat. People gain fat in different parts of their body, but no one gains fat in only one part. I often see people draw “fat” characters by just drawing a skinny character and making their belly stick out, like in the picture below.

as you can see, the first drawing  looks kinda weird and unnatural, and it certainly does not look “fat”. in the second drawing the fat distribution is more natural, with fat on the characters’ sides and chest as well as the belly. if you want to get better at drawing fat you should practice adding fat to those areas, as well as the arms, face and neck. another thing that makes the first one look strange is how “hard” the fat looks. there’s a really visible border between the “skinny” part of the body and the “fat” part. fat doesn’t work the same way as muscle. fat is soft and doesn’t have any strenght - meaning that unless you physically lift it up its going to hang and sag. a lot of people are afraid of drawing fat that looks fat - as in fat that bulges, sags and gathers in rolls. that is a shame, because you can’t really skip that stuff if you want to draw natural looking fat.

like you see in the drawing above, adding rolls and visible sagging makes the fat look, well, fatter. all I can say is; don’t be afraid of making your fat look like real fat!

The Grackles

are also still around, and some are still feeding babies, but molting has also begun, giving some of them the best and most dramatic looks. As if they couldn’t already do that with their plumage fully intact!