Frog.

Frog, but now in motion.

TWO HOURS AGO: an incredible photo taken by a ut austin student capturing something deeply poetic in my opinion, a line of state troopers eagerly waiting to arrest student protesters standing just behind a sign that reads "what starts here changes the world. its starts with you and what you do each day."

Today's aesthetic: cosmic horror tabletop RPGs from the 1980s whose creators wrote the "madness rules" by simply plagiarising a list of disorders and their descriptions from the DSM-II and turning it into a d100 lookup table, except the DSM-II still listed "homosexuality" as a mental disorder (it wasn't removed until the DSM-III), with the result that there are several published tabletop RPGs where there's a small but non-zero chance that seeing Cthulhu will make you gay.

(Amusingly, one such game was later re-used as the core system for a licensed Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, and the madness rules were carried over verbatim, with the result that seeing Cthulhu can also make your ninja turtle gay.)

god i love making animatics in my head i wish drawing was real

Light projections in Forest by Javier Riera

Obsidian Resources Masterpost

This is a masterpost of all the useful resources I’ve collected for using Obsidian. Hopefully some of them will also be useful to you, and I’ll try to keep this post updated whenever I find new and exciting stuff!

General Obsidian

Youtube

Vault Showcases & Use Examples

The best way to get an idea of what you can do in Obsidian is to look at what other people have done. This is a collection of articles, videos, and Obsidian Publish Vaults showing various setups and processes so you can get inspired!

Markdown

Obsidian uses markdown to format text, so these are some resources to help you out with that.

CSS & Styling

You can just use Obsidian as-is, but it’s so much fun to customise it and waste all the time you should be doing work on making it look pretty. These resources cover various plugins and ways of prettifying your vault, as well as some CSS resources, since Obsidian uses CSS for styling.

Plugins

A highly opinionated collection of plugins—all of these are ones I either currently use or have used. Organised loosely from simple to complex. Links go to the github pages, which have install instructions, but the easiest way is to install them directly from the plugins manager inside Obsidian.

check out my obsidian tag for more posts / got questions? want to say hi?

My brain: You have so many tight deadlines. So many things on your weekly schedule. So many important jobs. You have to get important work done!!!

My hands:

being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five

someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help

me: my what

What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.

when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much. 

Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential. 

So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’ 

1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust! 

2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:

a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it! 

In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support. 

I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose

b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me! 

c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface

d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)

e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them

f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics. 

g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper. 

h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more. 

And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc. 

This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah. 

Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks. 

so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings! 

How on earth are you supposed to draw from a sholder? might as well tell me to draw from the foot. It makes no sense

https://youtu.be/pMC0Cx3Uk84

https://youtu.be/NBE-RTFkXDk

:3

Reblogging to save a wrist

sometimes my friends send me good reels

(op)

I think I stumbled upon some kind of ichthyological forbidden knowledge. Opened up a book of names that were never meant to be read.

You've probably heard of "can-opener smoothdream", right? It's practically a meme by now.

But the thing is, it's a deep-sea fish. And deep-sea fish have historically not had English names because nobody drops them into the conversation over a hot cuppa. Sure, there's generic stuff like hatchetfish and barreleye, but when you want to refer to the actual fish you're probably saying such euphonious phrases as Diretmus argenteus, Sternoptyx diaphana, or maybe even Opisthoproctus soleatus.

So whence "can-opener smoothdream"? Certainly no non-ichthyologist has ever used that name. It's not even a direct translation of the scientific name Chaenophryne longiceps - that would be "long-headed gape-toad". Which to me is even cooler than "can-opener smoothdream".

But I digress. The "dream" bit comes from the anglerfish family Oneirodidae, from oneiros, "dream", because those marvelous fishes look like they came out of a dream (Pietsch, 2009).

Note that Pietsch (2009), more or less the anglerfish bible, uses English names at the genus level only. So Chaenophryne is the smoothhead dreamers genus but no mention is made of "can-opener smoothdreams". So no luck there.

Wikipedia, root cause of a lot of misinformation, has this to say.

"Longhead dreamer" is a far more accurate name. And in fact, despite Wikipedia prioritizing "can-opener smoothdream" (because it's funny?), the links listed use "longhead dreamer" and "smoothhead dreamer" as the name and "can-opener smoothdream" as an alternative.

So. Again. Where did "can-opener smoothdream" come from?

The answer, as it turns out, lies with McAllister (1990).

In the book A List of the Fishes of Canada, ichthyologist D. E. McAllister sought out to list every single fish known to Canadian waters, providing both an English and a French name.

And when there wasn't an English name, like for most deep-sea fishes, he arbitrarily gave them a name. And his names "differ in many instances from the widely accepted names" (Holm, 1998)

This had varying results. This is his name for one of the netdevil anglerfishes.

The humpback anglerfish or blackdevil anglerfish becomes a werewolf (????).

This one is just confusing.

The white-spotted lanternfish or Rafinesque's lanternfish instead becomes...

And most embarrassingly, the Mediterranean spiderfish gets saddled with something that "violates the tenet of good taste" (Holm, 1998).

This then is the original source of "can-opener smoothdream". It was invented by an ichthyologist in 1990, and has seen little to no use outside of how bizarre the name is.

Maybe McAllister's goofier names will catch on. Who knows? They certainly aren't very popular in the scientific community though.

References

Holm, E. (1998) Encyclopedia of Canadian Fishes (review). The Canadian Field-Naturalist, 112, p. 174-175.

McAllister, D. E. (1990) A List of the Fishes of Canada. National Museum of Natural Sciences, Ottawa.

Pietsch, T. W. (2009) Oceanic Anglerfishes: Extraordinary Diversity in the Deep Sea. University of California Press, Berkeley.

This is the hot tumblr discourse that I’m here for.

My piece for Golems & Graveyards, a D20 zine about spirituality and religion ✨

I have a lot of thoughts about Saccharina's experience in the Abbey vs. her supernatural connection to Lazuli

(via meanboysclub)

The last one

Also good on these people for taking the aggressively petty route instead of falsely registering their pets as service animals

I love how everyone intentionally interpreted this not as “your dog must be small” but “your dog must be in a bag”

“aww cute!! big doggies in ba-”

*cry-laughing as i hit the reblog button*

I’m going to point out that this sounds like the system working as intended bc if your dog is actually currently in a bag its not going to like, run off and bother other passengers or piss/shit where is not supposed to.

Like, yep. This works. If your dog’s well behaved enough to stay in a bag, THAT’s when it’s allowed on the subway.

That last comment was my EXACT thought.

This is actually one of the most effective kinds of laws, because it tricks people into complying with the spirit of the law by making them think theyre rebelling against the letter of the law.

i asked an angel what the deal with lichen was and they got really skittish and told me they could give me the answer to anything in the universe but to please not ask them about the lichen