About

Basics

Ari, late twenties, she/her. 

My interests tend to fluctuate. I’ll try to keep my current fixations up-to-date in the updates tab I have on desktop, but here are some things you can expect to see pretty consistently around these parts: Marvel (including but not limited to the MCU), Taylor Swift (and other pop music), Zack Snyder, villains and antiheroes from various fandoms, Judaism, and any combination of the aforementioned.

Inclusionist, pro-media literacy education, anti-fiction policing. Trying not to post too much about these issues, though, for my own peace of mind. 

The meaning of my URL is that it looks like a keysmash and makes me unfindable, but you can remember it with this helpful, parasocially creepy pneumonic: Anya Taylor-Joy’S GirlFriend (or Aaron Taylor-Johnson, if you prefer.)

My icon is of the Bratz characters Roxxi and Nevra. Stan them.

Terms of Engagement

Please do not follow me if you are under 18. 

Aside from that, though, everyone is free to follow. If I really don’t want you around, I’ll block you (hardblock, I don’t softblock) but frankly, I usually don’t pay attention. 

Tag me in your OC posts! I really want to be more involved with the OC community. This applies regardless of whether either of us follows the other and regardless of whether we’ve spoken before! I will reblog OC content to @savemewattpad, but please tag me here on my main.

I’ve gone by a number of pseudonyms and URLs during my time on this hellsite and others. I won’t list them all, but if you suspect I’m someone you know or once knew online, feel free to shoot me an ask about it! (If you suspect I am someone you know or once knew IRL, mind your business.)

I like to keep my dashboard pretty minimalist, so I usually don’t follow people back. However, if you pop up in my notes frequently, I usually will go check out your blog from time to time. Like I definitely have people I consider honorary mutuals, my brain just doesn’t like having to catch up on everyone at once via dash. 

“Why can’t I reblog your post?” I never plan for my posts to blow up, and on the rare occasion that they do, it’s never the ones that I actually want to be reminded of as they demolish my notifs. I have a couple posts that I turned reblogs off of because I was overwhelmed by the notes. 

If one such post is one you really want on your blog, but didn’t get a chance to RB, feel free to screenshot or copypaste with credit. You don’t have to ask, the answer will always be yes, but if asking makes you feel better you’re welcome to do so. If there’s ever a post I don’t want this to happen to, I’ll add a mention of it on the post in question and here in my pinned, so you’ll know. 

Links

Ao3

FFnet

OC Directory (Outdated, being revamped)

@leilawhittaker (the sideblog for the Marvel fic universe featuring my OCs)

@savemewattpad (the more general writing sideblog)

@plumbobarella (sims 4 sideblog)

Indefinite Hiatus

(or maybe just like, leaving altogether? Idk)

Hey guys, it’s been a fun ride in the (checks notes) over a decade I’ve been on tumblr, but I think I’m ready to let this be not such a big part of my life anymore. 

This isn’t like “This is actively damaging and I need to stop or because it’s ruining my mental health” thing; my mental health is actually in a really good place right now (knock on wood). I’m just kind of, like…bored? But I also know that if I’m not structured about this I will keep coming on here just out of habit, and I’m just in a place where I’d rather be spending that time elsewhere. I have a lot of things I want to learn to do this year, and I want to get back into writing, and I’m also about to start school again and want to be able to focus on that and not just do the bare minimum. 

I’ll be logging off for the next week to see how it goes, as a sort of test run. Ideally I’ll get to where I only really pop up here to post fic updates. 

My discord is daaeleira, and that’s the best place to reach me now; feel free to reach out if we've interacted before. (Don't worry about annoying me or that we don't know each other well enough.)

If you don’t have a discord, but want to keep in touch, DM me and I’ll be back in a week and we can see if we have any other sites in common to keep in touch.

That's all, it's been real, hope everyone is doing good <3

Thinking of taking a break. Anyone who I'm not in touch w on other sites yet, do yall have a discord or skype?

There's a lot of like, discourse around skill vs talent when it comes to art. So disclaimer here: I agree that skill is more important than talent, I agree that someone with little to no natural talent can become a good artist, I agree that looking at an artist and chalking it up to talent as if they never had to put work in is insulting.

That said, it's absurd to pretend that natural talent doesn't exist, that art doesn't come more easily to some people than others. This, combined with the fact that teaching is its own skill, is I think at the root of why a lot of beginner art tutorials don't work for a lot of people. A lot of these tutorials assume an understanding of the language of drawing that comes naturally to the artist, but not the student.

What I mean by the language of drawing is that drawing involves creating a 2D image that tricks the human eye into thinking that it's 3D, and this is something that many artists find intuitive and many artists don't.

This is why I really enjoy Mark Kistler's "You Can Draw in 30 Days." This post is not sponsored, I just really like the book because it finally explained to me things that a lot of other art books seemed to assume that I would just know. Like "if you put something lower on the page, it seems closer to the viewer." Or "shading looks more natural if you base it around a defined light source, even if that light source isn't in the drawing itself." Things that seem very obvious to some people but just are things I did not know at all or never stopped to think about.

It is a good book and I recommend it for people who have tried a lot of other how-to-draw books and tutorials that haven't clicked.

someday i do wanna start a makeup line that has like all the like, blue lipstick and glitter and bright tacky blush you could ever want, and absolutely NO foundation or concealer

When I was a kid I almost killed my self accidentally by swallowing a sewing needle, after executing a devious and thought-out plan to distract my big brother/babysitter so he wouldn't stop me, and he found me just as I swallowed it and then I immediately passed out. Then I woke up in like a cat scan machine and everything was white and I was mad bc Jesus was not there. I had been promised Jesus. Then I fell back asleep and then woke up again at home in my mom's bed with the family dogs on either side of me. (They were worried bc the last time someone had left our home in an ambulance was my grandma, and she didn't come back).

So anyways this was the dumbest reckless thing I did as a kid but it was far from the only one and my mom was constantly taking me in for very stupid injuries (accidentally fell off a couch and got a glass lampshade to break over my head, jumping from furniture to furniture and missing and hitting my eye on a side table, giving myself a black eye by running directly into my dad's desk, and grabbing a hot pipe with my bare hands after being explicitly told not to were some of my other greatest hits). So the hospital actually almost called CPS on my parents and treated them with suspicion. My parents were very much not physically abusive to me, I was just really good at accidentally injuring myself.

Luckily they didn't actually call CPS on us although frankly they should have (I was fine. But they didn't know that) anyways a year later I gave myself a black eye from trying to jump from my nightstand onto my bed.

Also I had this tiny tv/VHS player combo in my room and one time it fell on my best friend's head and almost gave her a concussion. I feel like that was supposed to happen to me and only a fluke of fate made it happen to her.

Anyways today I'm an adult who is really good at accidentally falling down the stairs. People are like: why do you go down the stairs so slowly, so carefully? They don't know. They will never understand. Also I got dragged down a river once and bruised my whole body on the rocks at the bottom. (I have reason to believe this was because of a cursed amulet in the water, but that is a different story).