got an ask recently about the way my digital art looks like traditional, so I tried to explain the steps on my self portrait, feat. some of my favorite artists and favorite brushes. sorry if it's incoherent, I'm not used to explaining my process besides "I've been professionally studying traditional art for half my life and I'm really bad at technology so I just paint digitally the way I do on paper"

FAVOURITE DOCTOR WHO CHARACTER PER MEMBER

Hannah (avalance) → YASMIN KHAN (2018-2022)

television peaked here

and of course, the thrilling sequel

Welcome to Night Vale episode 88: Things Fall Apart // Severance 207: Chikhai Bardo

I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything

No googling, curious about something

Things are going well

Spoiler

Okay normally I'm on the side of "words mean whatever we need them to mean".

but guys, I don’t like the suggestion that it’s what is happening here. Being unfamiliar with the term, and guessing its meaning based on vibes, doesn’t mean you have equal authority on whether it’s “correct” with the community who actively use this word in a technical sense.

please do consider that if you haven't been exposed to the word in the context it's used in, "both are correct" and "you can interpret it differently" and “there is no right or wrong answer” and “it feels like it SHOULD be X” cannot be a fully realised take. Sure, linguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but “laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better” isn’t one of them.

You can do that with most words, especially slang, and shape them to the needs of the majority, but this isn't like... a fanfiction word, invented for fanfic and, like, solely used for injured hockey players where it doesn’t matter if the injured limb swaps sides 4 times in a sex scene and phases through a stomach. It is, in its context, a bit more load-bearing (ha) than that.

It's fine to be unfamiliar with the context, and it's fine for words to change, but do just take a quick second to hear it in a native sentence!

One of the most common ways of using this word is to assess four-legged animals. "Favouring" is a specific grouping of behaviour - a hesitancy in gait, stiffness, reluctance to put weight on a limb. It’s often inconsistent, as the animal tries to compensate or conceal the pain. It may not be a full limp or obvious lameness, since prey animals especially will actively try to conceal this; favouring is a subtle reluctance, and a useful word for a very specific recognisable behaviour that the animal is usually trying to lie about. (That’s probably why it’s used in romance fiction, as it’s an interestingly romantic and stoic way to react to pain, and doesn’t mean the limb is inconveniently disabled. A fictional character favouring a wounded leg can wince attractively when it’s jostled, but it doesn’t matter too much if the author forgets and has them run to the door suddenly - “favouring” isn’t incompatible with “running” in horses either.)

The sentence “Favouring the off hind” is equestrian jargon: it means “pain behaviour on the back right leg.” It does not mean “opposite-pain in the not-on deer” and is not confusing in its professional register.

If you've only vaguely heard of "myeloma", and most people in a poll are guessing it's a skin cancer, that doesn't mean that myeloma and melanoma can now readily collapse into the same word - they're under active use in their native contexts, where the people frequently using them do need to communicate the difference between skin and blood cancer.

A poll of laypeople misunderstanding “myeloma,” or non-horse-people misunderstanding “favouring,” isn’t quite enough to indicate a full semantic shift and change of meaning of the term. The community that uses the term “favouring” in the context of “limb injury” - vets, farriers, farmers, commentators, equestrians - knows what it means and uses it consistently in the same way. They’re not confused. because to them, it isn’t a vibesy, sex-scene-hand waving word. It’s a cluster of pain signals.

If you aren’t familiar with that usage, then that’s really more about your own lack of familiarity. Not all interpretations DO carry equal authority, especially when one is just confusion/unfamiliarity. You just haven’t met it before, and that’s fine.

Tl;dr: I’m all for words changing meanings, but we shouldn’t be too quick to declare that when it’s based entirely on unfamiliarity and vibes-based readings.

"[L]inguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but 'laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better' isn’t one of them."

anyway. official linguistics post

I've gotta know alecto's thought process for why she gave john necromancy in the first place. the great mother earth saw this kind of cringe bisexual millennial having maybe a little mini manic episode and thought "hey I love your vibe. do you want death powers? you're getting death powers. you now have death powers. bitches love death powers."

she put that man in a situation and then oh no oh god oh fuck

Sorry to jump in on this extremely funny post to talk about the plot but the death powers thing was probably rather more the proverbial hammer problem than an intention of Alecto's: John can heal, he can grow plants, he can control rock and water, C— at least assumes he could manipulate weather or climate conditions.

We see him use those powers and express the fact that it's hard for him to remember to use them because he's so focused on

But he's not a necromancer (there's probably an equally terrifying AU where he opts for druid rather than necromancer). The hope, insofar as the corporate soul of the earth was capable of thinking in such granular human terms, was presumably for him to make use of the full spectrum of thalergenic and thanergetic abilities to heal the planet.

she was never dead she was never alive she's not here she's not anywhere she has no physical body she cannot be buried or touched she has no name or records she exists in memory alone. she was not abducted by aliens but she was! she was. because the x files is about grief and she is grief, she’s loss personified, she's the undercurrent to the entire thing, the mechanism that makes it work, she's the reason for every x file & for the endless chase to put a name to the unnameable and take a photograph of death, she IS aliens. and she's a regular 8 year old who calls her brother names. many of you so called narrative haunters don't hold a candle to samantha mulder

silt verses animatic because this story will forever haunt me

my first art of 2025 was butchfemme msr, I figured it'd be a good way to start this year too

a little addition on my patreon

THE X FILES - 4x10: Paper Hearts

The X-Files: S01E8 (Ice) | GIF Request: Checking for parasites + some gazing

—Ursula K. Leguin, The Left Hand of Darkness

THE MENU (2022) — dir. Mark Mylod

maybe i like it when a female character is deeply flawed and responsible for countless deaths and so on and so forth. more female characters should be deeply flawed and responsible for countless deaths

and to be honest it's Saturday