Im curious.

awful and horrible color palette challenge from my beloved friend @engagemythrusters <3

one last lesson

cal please chill out, you're making it hard to teach

(donation doodles! // tip jar)

My favorite Tolkien illustrations by Cor Blok in no particular order:

Bilbo and Gollum. Bilbo is the moon for some reason which is cool i guess

Smeagol and Deagol. I love the seaweed in the background, great attention to detail

Frodo serving Robin Hood-realness at his and Bilbo’s birthday party. Literally iconic

Isildur taking the ring from Sauron. Its great but I would like to see more of Sauron than just his hand, because I think he has the potential to look really cool

Pippin jumping into the bath at Crickhollow… no comment

Bilbo gives the Mithril coat to Frodo. Great poses, very stiff and awkward. I like it.

The fellowship. This one is a classic.

Gandalf and the balrog. Amazing

Boromir trying to take the ring from Frodo. I love the way he reaches for his sword, it looks very natural

Merry and Pippin and Treebeard. I like his legs and the fact that it looks like he’s wearing shorts.

The battle of Helms Deep. This one is just great for a lot of reasons. I like how the orcs in the background are just happy and sad smileys. Gimli is throwing a rock at them. I don’t know who the guy with a red hat is in the background, but I love him.

Gandalf, Theoden, Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli finding Merry and Pippin in Isengard ft fucked up Shadowfax. Look at them smiling!

Sam, Frodo and Gollum. Frodo got rid of his Robin Hood hat which is a shame, but Gollum with a beak makes up for it.

Eowyn protecting Theoden from the Witch King. The fellbeast is a crow or perhaps a raven. Merry is hanging on the side, stabbing Witch King in the leg and he looks amazing

Mt Doom. Frodo looks very chill about getting his finger bit off, and Sam is just kind of floating there. I love everything about Gollum

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

Guest comments temporarily disabled

Due to an influx of abusive spam comments, we've temporarily turned off the ability to leave comments while logged out. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope to have guest comments back on soon! (16:06 UTC April 21, 2024)

Doodled my daughter in law, Hera Syndulla🫶🏿😍

Pls save me, Star Wars Rebels

You have bewitched me, body and soul, and I love, I love, I love you. I never wish to be parted from you from this day on.

Don't know how many times I've showed a non-Tumblr person a Tumblr post and had the whole thing derail because the poor soul actually read someone's user name.

"Why does it say--" *squints at the screen* "....aziraphale's flaming cock??"

"Oh no uh, ignore that."

“Don’t forget that, Idiot.”

“Never.”

My favourite kind of poll is ones where OP clearly made a VERY incorrect assumption