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Petition for artists to stop calling their art 'sketches' and 'doodles' unless it's actually a sketch (quick, unfinished pencil on paper or the digital equivalent). It probably sounds like I'm kidding but I'm genuinely not; as an artist who used to tag lots of stuff this way, I thought it was a humble way of saying 'eh it's not that great' but then I'd turn around and see some artist whose skill is WAY out of my league saying the same shit about their gorgeous, full color art. And whether or not the intent is self depreciating (which is bad in itself), the takeaway I'd always get is 'this was easy and I didn't spend very much time on it'. Cuz that's what a sketch IS, it's something low effort and unfinished. And not to sound salty but it's a bit of a 'fuck you' to people at lower skill levels who would probably chop off a limb to turn out something that good. It then slowly dawned on me that I must be the 'fuck you'-er to some people, cuz we're all our own worst critics and I know some people really do like my art, regardless of how I might feel about it.

Anyway I highly doubt anyone's intentions are really 'fuck you', I'm sure yr all doing it for similar reasons as mine were, but it's a bit hurtful and disheartening nonetheless. If you put effort into your piece, be proud of it! Otherwise ppl are gonna think 'wow if THIS is just a doodle, what the hell am I even doing?'

A gift to the Metal Gear fandom - a clean copy of the ‘Poor Little Froggy’ unused codec from MGS2 Tanker.

Also, I love that we as a fandom have all decided that Otacon’s favorite animal is a frog.

[BEAST DETECTED]

[SEARCHING...]

[SEARCHING...]

[BEAST SIGHTED]

[EXTERMINATING]

Stealing someone’s heart takes on a whole new meaning in Be Kind, My Neighbor…here’s an animated sneak peek for something special coming up 

“Nice day out.”

“Yeah, sure. Horrible night to have a curse, though.”

“It’s some small comfort that the Curse at least caught some pleasant weather in its loop.”

“The Corsairs say the weather was always nice here. It was however they wanted to make it.”

“Suppose so. Still, these flowers might not’ve been in bloom. It might’ve been overcast.”

“Something tells me mild weather and pretty flowers don’t mean much after almost three years trapped here, reliving the same three weeks over and over, helpless to do anything differently while the rest of the world just moves along.”

“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve spent all the time I can fighting here since the Curse set in, helping keep it at bay—like you. I talk with the Corsairs, too. They can’t change what they do, but I can. So I try to do things for them, bring them things.”

“Like flowers?”

“Yes, like flowers. One Corsair friend I’ve made spends the whole three weeks in a cliffside cave, pinned down by the initial Scorn attack. For the first few cycles she was just alone in there, eventually knowing exactly when the Scorn would come out of the dark, but unable to do anything to prepare. In the third week she runs out of water, gets dehydration exhaustion, and gets wounded—not by the Scorn, she killed them all. She stumbles and gashes her side on a rock. She waits the last two days, and doesn’t quite die before the Curse brings her back to the beginning to go through it all again.”

“I know lots of stories like that—and worse.”

“No doubt. For some of our friends here, it’s all we can do to fight with them, even if it doesn’t change anything yet. For her, though, I’m glad to be able to do more than that.”

“With flowers?”

“Flowers, vids and news from outside, and just talk, when I can spare the time.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to help her avoid hurting herself?”

“I’ve tried. The Curse responds strangely to our intentions. When I position myself in place to keep her from falling into the jagged rock, she still stumbles and falls—but the fall happens earlier or later than when I’m there. I think even if I spent the whole three weeks in that cave with her, I couldn’t prevent the course of what befalls her, not with all my power.”

“…You’re right. Early on, I decided to pitch camp, just skip out on Vanguard duty and stay here. I grouped up with a Corsair squad on the far side of the mists, out toward the Watchtower. I learned where every enemy would come from, and when; the trajectory and timing of each shot; the placement and severity of every wound. I fought like hell with them, over and over, but even with perfect foreknowledge of how the attacks would come…”

“You somehow couldn’t stop them.”

“…No. It’s as if their actions would change because I knew what they’d do when. Everything would end up happening the same, just… slipping around what I did, no matter how I intervened.”

“That’s the Curse. That’s how it touches us, even though we can come and go, and act freely within its grip. And that’s why I bring my friend flowers and tell her what’s going on beyond the Reef. Until we finally break the Curse, I think the small comfort we can try to give may be worth more than all the fighting we do over and over again.”

(Spine of Keres, Dreaming City)

numbers 18, 34, 62, and 98 for anarchisma character prompt you posted recently?

boy boy boy you got SO lucky you have no idea !!!!!! also hey its u i havent seen u in my notes for a while!! welcome back!! :)

ok so number 18 is a young woman named ede! she's a bio-engineer (pak expert and technician basically) who has some interesting ideas about defects- her dissertation was all about how wefy coding, a form of defective coding where a task is complected but in a roundabout way and/or on a technicality, is actually a good thing and if machine learning AIs develop ways of doing things irkens consider "defective," then perhaps they learned to do it that way for a reason and it should be analyzed and, in some cases, left as-is. she's not very popular and in her fermi fic, she's struggling to find a job and drowning in debt.

irken housing works like this: you can live somewhere rent-free, but unpaid rent will accumulate as debt, and the caveat is you can't move until you at least start paying it off.

sounds good, right? well... there's one big problem with it. y'see, ede here is trying to find a job in her field, and there are height maximums on drone work, so she can't exactly do that in the meantime. there are only so many bio-engineering labs near her, and eventually she'll run out of places to apply to.... what then? she's stuck where there aren't jobs! and she can't move anywhere to get a job because without a job, she can't begin to repay her debts!

but its okay! she eventually gets a job... though she starts to notice some. weird things with it. but youll want to remember her because she has her own arc and a feature fic (i.e. a non-anthology multichapter) she's the protagonist of!

also fun facts: ede was meant to be a very minor character, but one of my friends liked her a lot so i started featuring her more and more until she landed in her current role! so thats cool, thanks xryn shes the best character because of u

number 34 is a minor character to break the whole thing up, his name is jeek and he's one of zim's roommates on foodcourtia! he's not very important, just a fun side character ^^ he's a bit grumpy but not outright hostile. not much to say about him, he truly is Just Some Guy lmao,, him and zim (and the rest of the foodcourtia gang) are really close though! and he gets to tell people that he was roommates with one of the tallests for a little while! (bc remember in fermi 1, red lived with zim? :3 ) nobody believes him tho rip

and again with the bangers!! number 62 is pax, and he's honestly like. one of my favorite characters ever lmao. he's a rare hybrid type, half irken and half peikan- most peikans were obliterated during a war with irk and its resulting organic sweep- pax's father was one of the only few left. he looks like a normal irken externally, but he has very different internal biology, the most striking being blue blood, which in turn gives him a blue tongue! he's also omnivorious with a preference for meat and other savory foods

his experiences being a strange hybrid-type led him to being a medic- before he did that, though, he went through specialized biology schooling to become a certified exobiologist- not only is he an expert on his own species, he's an expert on non-irken biology as well! he then went through medic training and joined the irken army as a special type of combat medic called a stealth medic- it's an irken strategy used where a medic dresses in a standard elite uniform, in order to make it harder for the enemy to tell which irken is the medic and where the medic is at any given time. of course, this makes stealth medics not protected by wartime ordinances that forbid shooting at medics, but it's a small price to pay

one day, pax was doing standard combat medic duties (i.e. HE WAS WEARING WHITE and PROTECTED UNDER WAR CRIME LAWS) and he was deliberately lured into an open area via the enemy nonlethally shooting at an irken soldier so he'd come and help them, then shooting at him, blowing his arm off in the process. he tried his best to save his platoonmate but it didnt.... work. for his dedication in battle and also the sacrifice he gave for his empire, he was awarded a medal. yay for him lmao. at this point he was pretty done with the empire's shit, especially due to him insisting he needed a peikan doctor to install his new bionic arm's socket and eventually getting one from the resisty, being forced to get a highly invasive and painful "fish-hook" socket since it anchors the arm in so it wont be ripped off in battle, and the general lack of care over his own mental wellbeing after it, just "oh got your new arm? good! start relearing how to do medic stuff so we can put u back into battle kthx enjoy the parade"

anyway. he had to attend trial for the War. Crime. he was a victim of, but probing his pak memories of the accident also revealed that he was defective and therefore should not have even been in the military. panicked, he fled and ended up on cyberflox as a fugitive. he currently works at a warehouse selling perfectly normal wares, just perfectly normal smeets- items. items. they sell items!

anyway he's currently an extremely jaded ..... ""candy"" addict, who keeps everyone at arm's length and is unable to process the trauma that he went through in the army and his subsequent fleeing- the love of his life was later killed in action due to being shot and the new combat medic being unable to dose painkillers properly- his lover was also an addict and therefore needed a different painkiller dose- if pax was there, he would've lived. he's been through horrific trauma and all he can do about it is stay at a job he hates in order to somehow take it down from the inside, and do heroin at night to keep the nightmares at bay.

did i mention he's fifteen?

number 98 is titch! he's a zimlike heretirken who screams at the top of his lungs due to being near-completely deaf. he's currently developing an irken sign language called gesturespeak, and is interested in other languages and their nuances as a result! he wanted to be in the military but his father insisted he shouldn't, due to his inability to hear any threats. (it's a lot more complicated than that, but that's the excuse he's going with for now) his father did give him a heavy weapons flamethrower as a consolation prize though, and he loves that thing to death! we actually meet him in h-word as one of the heretirkens red runs into at some point! so look out for that lmao!!

anyway i hope u liked ur picks!! like i said in my other post, u picked ur numbers well because u got TWO protagonists and two of my favorite characters!!!!!!!

relearning them 

we as a society need to put more focus on robotic love interests who are quite literally just giant fucking computers. this girl is a big blocky machine. takes up a whole room. not a single limb in sight. everything she says is barely comprehensible because her voice sounds so weird. yes it does make her 50x sexier