love is such a nice word

A little tutorial about how to draw pecs! 

Many asked me in the past so I hope it can help many! 

this might be a hot take but i actually don’t think humans were meant to know what is going on in everyone’s lives all over the world every second of the day and constantly be available for conversations or collaborations or call-ins for work and texts and phone calls and social media posts without end. i think we were supposed to just help the people around us and spend time with our family and friends and eat yummy bread and berries and relax

A new teal color and lotus head ornament has just been added to my Koi Lantern Kickstarter! Thank you all for supporting this project and helping us surpass the stretch goals! There’s one last stretch goal left, and if we surpass that one, every backer will get a mini star kit like the ones seen in the 2nd photo :D

Bring home your Koi 

This is an ai “artwork” hate blog now

like look you have this soulless thing that has anonymously and indiscriminately cannibalized years of hard-earned learning and discipline and struggle and creativity.

and you type in a little thing and it just. spits out some mashed up amalgam of other peoples inspiration, other peoples skills and dedication and livelihoods. and you sit there and smile and tag it “my art” like its not a horrible spit in the face of every artist who made that shitty little program possible. and now you think you have no NEED to pay an artist, you can just make it yourself. as if you’ve made anything??? fuck you and fuck ai “art”

Black Sesame Milk

Talking to people about your characters really is a game changer. You'll start saying things about them you didn't even know you knew.

Op how could you forget this

Yum

Hi artists if you’re reading this I need you to know that it’s EXTREMELY necessary to have a folder on your phone called “bragging” where you save the screenshots of your favorite comments and sweet messages and shares and artist follow backs. So when you feel like your art sucks and you’ve only ever received praise out of pity, you can look back and realize that that feeling is wrong. The best way to combat imposter syndrome is to record your accomplishments. Keep reminders of your hard work and its reward. Actively try to be self-obsessed. Ok that’s all, go eat some fruit while you’re at it!

oh yeah this applies to writers too

the one problem i have with people my age and younger is that a lot of us do not have hands on hobbies. like i have spoken to so many people my age who go to work, go to school and then fuck around on their phone/computer for hours and then ???????? like no wonder ur depressed and have low confidence in urself. u need to get ur hands on something, feed those dopamine receptors! learn how to play guitar, garden, scrapbook, fucking make model trains. i don’t give a shit, MAKE SOMETHING!!

it feels better than drugs when i finish making a thing—and then show it off or gift it.

and then so people my age say to me ‘well—i can’t draw/paint/knit/etc. like you can. my stuff would be terrible.’ yeah, well duh—a part of developing skill is sucking at something and then practicing it over and over and over again until you suck less. u’ll have a hard time feeling lonely or bored when you can’t stop thinking abt a technique you want to try or something you want to make for someone else. making things has SAVED MY LIFE. it gave me a reason to keep living day after day when i wanted to die.

making things have improved my generational relationships (when i worked for the newspaper i would talk to customers abt jamming recipes or cross-stitch, one of my grandmas always gives me pattern books and tell me abt when she knitted things for mom, my other grandma is giving me a wedding quilt that HER grandma gave her 50 years ago because she knows i will appreciate it). it also got me likeminded friends who also make things.

take a ceramics class! pick up water colors, bake cakes! learn to work on cars! make soap. DO SOMETHING THAT DOESN’T INVOLVE STARING AT A SCREEN.

Hobbies cost money, Helen.

Do you eat? Then you can have a hobby.

Can you see green outside? Can you get some dirt? Then you can have a hobby.

Do you have a pen and paper? Hobby.

Something with a keyboard? Hobby.

The ability to walk? Hobby.

Get creative and don't be a pessimist is step one Barabra. 

Acting like it’s easy or simple to have an ENJOYABLE hobby on zero budget is a puerile view that shifts the blame for the unhappiness of people trapped at the bottom of a dehumanizing, vicious system. Its possible of course. There are people who are into things that can be done cheaply, and that’s great! But not everyone takes joy in the things that can be done on a budget of next to nothing, and we shouldn’t EXPECT people to!

Might as well lie down and die then! God forbid anyone try to better themselves.

Have two feet and a heartbeat? Go for a fucking walk, do some pushups, volunteer to play with shelter dogs.

Have two hands and a heartbeat? Sketch. Napkins are free, steal a pen from your job, voila! Picasso.

Have one hand and a pacemaker? Might I recommend composing music on garage band?

The Y offers low-cost social classes. There are also coding classes online. Turn a hobby into a job!

Your computer has a microphone. Start making podcasts.

Crafty and bedbound? Try watercolours; they’re available at the dollar store.

Granola hippy? Get a towel, find a floor, queue up a yoga tutorial on YouTube. Namaste.

Garden witch? Dollarstore pot and a small bag of potting mix. Take your old head of lettuce, keep the bottom wet for a day, put butt of lettuce into dirt. Voila. Salad. Mint works well and is likewise indestructible.

Not into sports? Read books online. There are thousands of classic titles available. Internet got cut off? Library. Illiterate? Perfect — there’s your project. Or: books on tape, available at your local library, for free.

Look — I don’t take joy in my commute and I wish I had a helicopter to take me everywhere I wanted to go. But whining about my misfortune doesn’t solve my problem, and neither does this defeatist attitude.

If you have the time and tech to scroll this website, you have the time to develop a fulfilling hobby.

Anything else is just wallowing in your own misery because the alternative — trying and failing — is too daunting.

Oh well. Life is daunting. So either get it done or get it over with; it does not get any easier.

Lmao y’all are really over here assmad at the very idea of bettering your lives in any way. It’s kind of pathetic.

“Have you guys considered doing something worthwhile that makes you happy? :) ”

Tumblr: no, and I will not, and you’re ableist and classist for suggesting such a thing fuck off

Knot-tying & macramé - you can often find yarn at thrift shops or dollar stores (not always but with some frequency).

YouTube tutorials, websites, and learn to mend your clothes. Some outlay for thread, needles, scissors, and maybe patches and buttons. But spending less money buying new clothes..

Dollar stores often have coloring books & pencils, too. Go wild. Color the sun blue, grass purple, & trees red. Go outside the lines. Add stuff to the picture.

Sharpie pen & rounded rocks - draw pictures and happy messages and give them to people or leave them to be found.

Cotton string, paint, & paper. Dip string in paint & drape it on paper. Repeat with other colors. It doesn’t matter if your hand shakes, in fact it’s better.

Some craft places & senior centers & community centers have classes for free or for the cost of the materials. Try the craft with just enough materials for 1 project, instead of investing lots of money.

Look up crafts aimed at kids. Those are often simple with inexpensive materials. Get your foot in the creativity door.

I will teach other depressed fuckers to knit because nothing defeats nihilistic fatalism like wearing the sweater you made from scratch!

Seriously.

I sympathize with it feeling impossible to get started and with some versions of a hobby being out of reach, but that’s not every version.

If you like plants other than the aforementioned mint, you can often take cuttings from ones beside the road somewhere and get them to grow roots in a glass of water before transplanting them to dirt.

If you like fiber crafts, you can often find odd assortments of yarn for cheap. If you have a local Buy Nothing or other neighborhood giveaway thing, crafters are often decluttering their stashes and giving away nice quality stuff, just in small amounts that you couldn’t make a whole project out of. Maybe you can’t get every size and variety of tool, but a lot of people would be happy to pass on a single pair of needles. I’ve been shocked at how much interesting stuff people just put on the sidewalk because they’re overwhelmed by stuff.

Also like. I get it. The world is bleak sometimes and maybe you have it really rough right now and everything feels pointless. No one is suggesting that a hands-on hobby is going to save the world or cure your depression or solve all your problems. But my god, what’s the alternative? I can’t fix everything, so I deny myself any small scrap of joy? If it doesn’t solve all my problems it’s not worth doing at all? I can’t be the best and have all the most elaborate tools so I might as well not even bother?

Let me tell you, if that’s your approach to life, you’re in for a miserable time.

Know what I did last summer? I impulse bought a bottle of bubble solution at CVS for $1.99. And whenever I had a rough day I went outside and sat down and blew bubbles for a few minutes, experimenting with different ways to hold or dip the wand or get air through it to make different types of bubbles. Trying to make bigger bubbles, or recapture bubbles on the wand without popping them.

It was so small. So silly. It didn’t make anything lasting. It didn’t necessarily build any marketable skills. It wasn’t the hobby I would choose if I had unlimited space and resources. I had nothing to show for it at the end of the day but a slightly less full bottle of bubble solution.

But my god, did I feel better each and every time. For $1.99, an entire summer of time set aside to myself every other day or so, out in the sun, doing something that brought me joy. It was SO SMALL. But it made such a huge difference.

#sometimes wrenching yourself out of a shitty life is doing small things one step at a time

You all know singing is free, right?

Writing is also basically free

for almost every hobby that’s been commercially overinflated with kits and high-end materials to the point where you could easily drop hundreds of bucks just to get started, there’s the original core of that hobby. people have always done interesting and creative things with little scraps of material, because people have always been poor. there have always, always been poor people.

if being poor is your excuse for not seeking whatever happiness you can scratch up, you’d be a defeatest sad-sack even if your bank account was seven figures.

scrapbooking used to be done with scrap paper, not expensive stickers and rolls of washi tape and curated packs of ephemera…and the world is full of discarded newspapers, magazines, old books. quilting was done with little bits gleaned from garments worn past any repair, not charm packs that cost forty bucks a pop… and there’s still people throwing out sheets and clothes and skirts today! gardening is a way to get free produce out of kitchen scraps and whatever tiny patch of dirt you can keep clear of weeds and animals…and you can just start composting and collect seeds and cuttings today. sculpture used to be done with mud, from the river near the cave. you don’t have to even leave your cave if you want to make saltdough or paperclay.

hobbies enrich your life. if they’re bankrupting you, that’s not the hobby’s fault, that’s capitalist brainrot fucking you over. you don’t have to make something worthy of instagram in your enormous well-stocked craft room full of custom-engineered high-quality tools. you can just pfuck around and find something cool to do.

don't read into this statement too much because it's a vague theory of existence from my own perspective but it's WILD how people can genuinely think autism is a modern thing that is "increasing" in response to some toxin or social contagion or some shit

My guy if autistic people were as "rare" as they supposedly were in the 70's we wouldn't be having this conversation. society as we know it wouldn't exist. we would have barely developed tool use by now

It's 200,000 BCE. You're an early Homo sapiens living with your band in a tropical forest. You spot your brother next to a cluster of boulders, humming to himself in his throat, swaying aimlessly back and forth.

This isn't unusual—whenever your band stops near a rockfall or boulder, he sits next to the rocks for hours, sometimes staring at bumps and ridges in the stone, sometimes banging rocks together—Clack-clack-clack. He has never shown any interest in foraging or hunting. If you hand him a rock to crush a nut or throw at a predator, he will stare fixedly at the texture of the stone until someone snaps him out of it.

When you reach him you notice something unusual—he has sorted the rocks. In one group of piles, there are paler, more irregular chunks of stone. In some other, smaller piles, there are smoother, darker bits of stone, fractured in clean, curving pieces. You pull him back to the rest of the group so he can eat and rest—he has been banging the rocks together all day, and he typically forgets everything else when he finds particularly interesting rocks. You pick up one of the darker pieces. Its edge is sharp, sharp enough to cut. You skim it along a thin green sapling and watch the bark peel off like fat.

You have used sharp rocks as tools in the past, even found rocks with such sharp edges; you wonder if there's a way to find more. The next time your band moves its camp, you search the area for other rocks that look like the one you picked up, but find nothing.

You decide to follow your brother down a stony riverbank to the shore, watching him bang different rocks together and arrange them into rows and piles on the sand, humming happily. Some rocks seem to make him very excited and happy; he sets them aside in their own piles. Others are less significant, though he still deliberates about what piles to put them in.

You show him the shard you picked up earlier. He stares at it for a while and then, silently, searches the riverbed until he finds a dark chunk of stone. He presses it into your hand.

You point at a similar-looking rock. He looks angry and frustratedly kicks the water, then hands you another piece of dark stone, as if you should know better. This repeats for some time. But by the end of the evening, you are starting to notice that every rock is different, that many are beautiful, and that some are useful.

At another place, in another time, someone else is fascinated by snakes. She always closely examines snakes others in her band have killed, and can be seen observing them when they are alive.

Her family members notice that she can immediately distinguish a snake that is venomous from a similar snake that is safe, and she always, always sees snakes before anyone else does. Once, when they were about to make camp, she became upset and was inconsolable for hours, and no one realized why until one of the elders was nearly bitten by a deadly snake hiding in some fallen leaves. The group decides that she must have known there were snakes nearby, even without seeing one, and from then on, she surveys all potential campsites before anyone settles down.

Another person whose name we will never know loves the sounds of birds. All day long he echoes the birds' songs as they walk through the forest, imitating the noises of whatever bird he heard last. Even a glimpse of a bird will set him imitating the bird's song. Hunters in his group notice after a while that even the birds seem to be fooled by him, and practice bird calls until they are skilled enough to lure their quarry close.

Much later, someone feels more at home with the flighty goats her clan herds for meat than with other people. The goats flee from others, but they become so habituated to her that they respond to her calls, and regard her as one of their own. They let her treat their injuries and sicknesses, allowing members of the herd to recover from what would otherwise have killed them.

Yet another person somewhere else picks the wool of wild sheep off rocks and tree branches where it has been shed, rolling it in her hands until it sticks together. She loves the touch of the soft wool so much that she notices that enough wool, if it is worked enough, can be felted together into single pieces like hides, or twisted together into strong threads. She tracks the fluffiest sheep to their favorite scratching spots and soon the hunters won't pursue the tracks that belong to her favorites, instead leaving them to produce fluffy lambs.

Our species is shaped by the contributions of people who paid a little more attention to the world than usual.

There is, of course, no way to find out how these developments actually happened.

But listen. I've been learning to identify plants and I don't think some of this stuff was noticed by a person who stared at leaves a normal amount.

if you lived in prehistory and you were autistic, your special interest would be like, rocks. or the moon. or mushrooms. or one specific wild animal.

Like I HATE the idea that "every single neurodivergence was adaptive at some point NO exceptions" because obviously disability just exists sometimes. But it's obvious to me that special interests would have served a really useful purpose in the early history of the human species, because...

...well, which makes more sense: that humans obtained all their knowledge of the natural world and of making and using technologies through basically a series of random accidents and observations, or that we had humans back then that were just really driven to pay attention to rocks, just like we have those humans now?

Like, stop asking "Did autistic people exist back then?" because there's no reason to think they didn't; start asking "What were autistic people doing back then?" and the answer is "serving as a walking treasure trove of hyper-detailed information about a very specific aspect of the natural world, probably"

Whenever you catch yourself wondering, "How the hell did people in prehistoric times figure this out?" remember that for any given thing, there is a human out there who is, for unknown reasons, compelled to think about and learn about that thing 24/7

“shit tier ugly ass elf” is Up There in terms of internet phrases that make me laugh every time i remember them

arguably the funniest post ever made

Btw if I say things like “by god” or “good lord” in posts please be aware I don’t mean it in a catholic way I mean it in a 1950s scientist reacting in horror after they create an evil creature in the lab set in the distant future year of 2005

Viking traveler’s amulet, based on the Lillbjärs picture stone. The back reads: “Unharmed Go Forth, Unharmed Return, Unharmed Back Home”, Frigga’s blessing to Odin, possibly from Vafþrúðnismál.

How does this have almost 10,000 notes ?

Because the world is full of trouble and every little bit of help counts.

I hate it when people say u need to learn the basics of art before u go into it...the true way to learn art is actually going directly to drawing what you like, then being so attached to it that you have to go back and learn the fundamentals in order to make the art of what you like better.