...holy Shit Man

...holy shit man

has anyone thought about what happens to the players PHYSICALLY when they enter the digital circus

because we know their minds are transported into the digital world, but what happens to their bodies?

they ALL put on the headset and immediately got transported inside, so I doubt they'd have time to take it off - does that mean they're still at least partially connected to their bodies, enough to stay alive but not quite conscious?

if we go off that idea, i feel like they'd just collapse on the spot when they put on the headset

imagine finding some cool headset in the back of an alley or maybe even in that C&A office with the computer and you put it on and just like faint

imagine FINDING some random mf unconscious in a sketchy place with a headset latched onto their head

is jax even comfortable

glad that im not popular enough to have an evil shadow version of my blog that exists just to make contradictions on my posts

some tips that helped me/stuff I found out while experimenting with shit (mostly digital art):

Use light lights and dark darks, but focus on where you put them. If you're drawing, say, a sphere or smth, dont use one dark color and one light color around the whole thing. Give the shading more variety than that - add the almost-black furthest from the light, and put highlights at the very edge, but use middle tones for shading and lighting in the larger middle areas

Use multiple layers! Not just 1 color, 1 dark, 1 light - space it out further. Maybe you want 3 shading layers for more depth, but only 2 for highlights. Or vice versa. There doesn't have to be an order or pattern - match the amount with how light/dark you want the final product to be

Experiment with opacity. Layer opacity, brush opacity, alllllll that stuff. You can create a lot of depth with it

If you're drawing a shape that isn't basic (something OTHER than circle/square/rectangle/triangle/whatever) think about what that shape would like in real life. Clothes, for example - they aren't basic shapes, even if their lineart looks like it. They have folds, they have wrinkles, they twist and curve around the body, and the size of the clothes vs body size makes a HUGE difference. Focus on shading a big shape, sure, but don't be afraid to zoom in and shade some folds in there too, even if they look out of place.

When picking colors for shading/lighting, change the tint! If you're rendering a person and struggling with skin color, make the darker shade a little more on the pink side, and move the lighting a little more on the yellow side. BUUUUT if the entire picture has a certain lighting color (eg. blue lighting, red lighting, etc), change the rendering colors to match that! (And maybe change the skin color to that shade too, or at least put a layer of that color over it)

Feel free to just, like, stick random colors in there. Oh, you have a rendered cube? And it's RED? Nah bro add some random purple in there. Doesn't need to make sense. It looks interesting and it's fun, sue me. (I've done this while drawing a horse before, added green AND purple to the darkest shadows and I don't think I've ever been happier with shading in my life)

It doesn't HAVE to be blurred and it doesn't HAVE to be hard lines. It can be both. Maybe you want to blur the overall rendering, but add light/dark shapes and not blur them. Maybe you want to have hard shadows but let that whole shape be a gradient. All up to you

Lastly, and most importantly, ITS JUST FOR FUN. You're not going to be burned at the stake if you fuck up one rendered drawing. Not if you fuck up two. Not if you fuck up a million. Not if you fuck up every rendered drawing you've ever done, because your art is YOUR art. Don't focus on producing art for others, make it on your own time because you LIKE to. Have fun with the process, experiment, throw random shit in there. Don't like what you have? That's okay! Want to throw the results into the void so nobody will ever see them again? You do you! You don't have to post everything, you don't have to listen to everyone's criticism, you don't need validation for your own hobby. Just. Have fun.

serious question: how do i render, like give me the most BASIC rendering tips and also not basic rendering tips please

i didn't know what rendering was until today

help me please artists

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?

tbh I don't care what happened to Gabe I've just always wanted to see him come back as a minor antagonist solely bc of angst potential

like kill him or let him live but whatever happened it happened wayy too soon he needed more time to fuck around with the Jacksons

please tell me im not the only one who can't stop thinking about their trauma. about Gabe showing up at the apartment or just some random place. about Sally trying to keep Paul from noticing how much this man affected her. about Percy's heroic, "I'm undefeatable" facade crumbling once he sees his abuser. about him immediately stepping between his mother and the threat he thought was gone. about-

I made a post where I said Gabe doesn't deserve to have been turned to stone. I stand by that post now, but I also get why it offended people. Gabe is a horrible person and a scummy human being. He's an abuser who deserves nothing but the worst. That being said, petrification feels like the wrong answer. It's like the death penalty. Sure it solves the problem, but aren't there much better ways of bringing someone to justice?

Imagine for a moment of Gabe had not been turned to stone. Instead, imagine he had instead lost his job, Sally divorces him, he loses everything. Doesn't that sound like a much more satisfying punishment for someone like him? And if they had gone that route, they could have brought him back as a minor antagonist later in book 5 or something!

I'm actually beginning to sell myself on this whole idea now! I feel like it was a wasted opportunity. Who knew this would all start because I had a moral objection to the idea of petrification?