The More You Know!

It's officially Banned Books Week, so now is as good a time as any to remind everyone that libraries still get frequent challenges to books on our shelves. Books continue to be challenged, banned, and even burned. I'm a librarian in a blue state, yet one of my neighboring libraries has recently been the target of book bannings and threats of violence (they had to shut down an all-ages LGBTQ event due to these threats too).

Please support your local libraries. If you want more books by queer and disabled authors and authors of color, TELL US. Give us recommendations. Check out books and ebooks when we get them in. Tell us when you write books too. We're here to make information and stories accessible.

P.S. And if you notice patrons or staff acting like assholes (particularly managers) please let someone know. Library government is weird, so a lot of libraries aren't union and also don't have any sort of HR. Trust me, if you frequently notice someone being a jerk, chances are good everyone else has to and has been stonewalled.

Too easy to do, this forgetting, but remembering and building anew is ever possible.

beep beep sometimes when you have been in survival mode for a long time the parts of you dedicated to Wanting Things atrophy and you forget how to envision a future that feels rewarding because you are busy with the business of staying alive, and it can seem like your life must be pointless because you can’t imagine any long term goals. sometimes even when you leave survival mode you can’t remember how to Want Things. that doesn’t mean you need to give up on having a good and fulfilling life, it just means that Wanting Things is a muscle you need to gradually strengthen. the part of you that has dreams and aspirations is still there, it just fell asleep, but if you wiggle it enough it can and will regain feeling. it’s okay to start small

Hello all! I have learned that a website called Live Heroes has multiple versions of my Princess Mononoke illustration available for purchase. The kicker is that I had no knowledge that the image was being sold and I do not give them my consent to have it on their website. The image was uploaded by a user going by Coffeecatsandcigaretts.  Please help me get this image off of this site!!! This is completely disrespectful/illegal! You can help me by following the link provided below and completely then bomb the comments section with aggression. Here is the link: DESTROY THE EVIL And it would also help if you Reblogged this post!! I’m glad people like my art, but this isn’t flattering to me. It just makes me feel cheap. Unfortunately, I am I one of thousands of victims of this situation. If you see someone’s art being sold and you think it’s being done without their consent please notify the artist!  In addition, if you do want to purchase this image, and love Princess Mononoke as much as I do, then you can purchase a print of it on my printshop: Princess Mononoke Print For Purchase I’ll look into selling other versions of this image since it seems to be so popular! Thanks so much for you support!! In the meantime I have emailed the website, and hopefully will have this issue resolved. It looks like the user made a pretty big profit off of my image. Hope it can be given to it’s rightful owner.  Thanks! :) www.daniel-shaffer.com danielh.shaffer@gmail.com

If you’ve been thru a phase of your life feeling hopeless, depressed, broken, scared, suffering pain that you didn’t believe would ever stop, or having your whole will to go on eaten away by something devastating that happened to you, and you were alone and abandoned and ashamed of feeling this pain, I want you to know that it wasn’t okay.

Every human, especially young humans, can get overwhelmed and devastated and drown in their dark thoughts and fears, and nobody deserves to go thru that alone. If you were living close to other people, and they failed to notice, or ignored your state, or tried to make sure that you feel guilty for it, ashamed of it, deserving of it, or responsible for it, that wasn’t okay. That’s not what’s supposed to happen. Human society isn’t built on kicking someone when they’re down. Humans are not supposed to see someone suffering and deteriorating and then go ‘serves them right’ or ‘it’s their own fault’. That’s despicable.

You were not supposed to be left alone in your pain. You were supposed to get help and support. Even if you couldn’t imagine how that support and help would look like, if you couldn’t believe you deserved any, even if you felt so worthless and unimportant that taking someone’s time and energy would have felt horrible and selfish to you, you still deserved help and support during the worst period of your life.

Someone should have checked up on you. Someone should have made sure that you don’t spend all or most of your time alone, drowning in your own fears and pain, neglected. Someone should have offered you conversation and reassurances, even if they wouldn’t have fixed the underlying issue. You shouldn’t have been going thru it alone and unchecked. Someone should have taken measures to make sure you know you’re cared for, that people are going to put an active effort into changing your situation for the better. You should have been reminded, with actions and words, that you are still lovable, that you’re desired to be a part of society, that you’re not something to leave behind in a room until you either get your shit together or fail and be forgotten. You should have never feared for your relevance or your value while already suffering from everything else. You shouldn’t have been left to your own devices, with your social needs completely unfulfilled, with society turning their entire back on you.

That kind of situation makes you feel alone for a long, long time. That’s the kind of thing that makes you lose hope in people, and it should have never come to it. You should never have been in so much pain and alone in it. You never deserved that kind of cruel and contemptuous abandonment. You should never have been thru something that makes other people feel like a threat or a dead end. Your problems should never have felt so large that your place in the world your humanity and would be revoked over them.

AWWW! 💓

s/o to the artists on tumblr that spend hours making art and only get three notes if theyre lucky. youre still awesome and your art is still fantastic

Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

Reassurance Masterlist

My blog is mostly harsh to read, so here’s every reassuring post I made:

When you feel it “wasn’t that bad”

How loving parents act towards their kids

You’ve done enough to try and understand your parents

Abuse towards you cannot be justified

Abuse and trauma have no benefits

When you feel you weren’t abused enough

There was nothing you could have done differently to avoid abuse

It’s not your fault you feel like you don’t belong

Talking about abuse isn’t whining

Craving abuse is not your fault

Self-harming is not your fault

Intrusive thoughts are not your fault

Nobody in your situation would be able to get it together

Needing attention, comfort and validation is normal and human

You’re allowed to feel your feelings

You cannot provoke abuse, and you did not ask for it

Abuser’s point of view is not valid

Abusive parents can’t tell you who you are

Responsibility for abuse lies on abuser, not on you

Your pain is not a burden on others

When you struggle to call yourself a survivor

You do not deserve abuse even if you feel addicted to it

Your abuser didn’t have to hurt you

Nobody made them abuse you

Your future won’t be lost even if you can’t move forward right now

You are alive because of yourself

There are good things in you even if you don’t see it

Your problem isn’t that you’re not good enough

You can make up for everything abuse damaged in you

Relapses are not your fault and can be time-related

Craving abuse can mean you’re only craving comfort

Survivors of abuse will strive to create an environment of compassion

For anyone who wants a free pose-able human reference for drawing

The other day I came across this awesome program by accident (I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.

It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.

There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79. I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well. 

Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the features available in both versions.

There are three features the free version doesn’t have:

Can’t save OBJ files for export

Can’t download models and poses from Doll Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)

It can’t load saved files

The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and close the program, you can’t load that pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you. 

But, the default model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a pose tag that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.

Even the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See, like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:

The morphing tag is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and choose from a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones. Don’t like the options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider that lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design. 

So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii Muscle-chan!!

The scale tag lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different joints. This feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body shape variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more digitigrade model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)

Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.

The ability to pose hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers. 

And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like. 

In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.

Basically, this program is awesome and free and you should totally check it out if you want a good program for creating pose references.

reblog if you worried about your abusive parent more than they ever worried about you