I Need Waffle

It ain't like everyone is living in a car-centric society where learning how to drive is a requirement.

"have you learned how to drive yet" i have the spirit of friendship in my heart. the joy of lifes little things in my soul. the whimsy of magic. the beautiful enjoyment of nature. the answer is no though

I want some nice cereal

During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

hey @pukicho i saw your art and i thought it was super cool! you improved so quickly (really impressive btw), and i was wondering what resources used to study art? and what app/website you digitally draw on? and your brushes if your okay with sharing them? and literally ANY other information you had because i would love to learn how to draw?

i feel like a victorian street rat asking for more bread

I use an XP-Pen Pen Tablet and Clip Studio Paint as my program of choice, but any pencil and notebook will suffice for learning, and may even be better. As for learning, I use books, baby!!! BOOKS! I'll even be nice and tell u which ones, because I am a lover of shared knowledge:

How To Draw by Scott Robtertson - deceptively complex book on perspective. It tells you how to draw a box, I then suggest you draw a fuck-load of boxes in correct perspective before moving forward. Having a strong grasp on planes and perspective allows you to properly grasp the volumes and shape of almost anything. It's the baseline principle to visualizing what u wanna draw. Without simple forms understood in perspective, you merely lack the skills necessary to draw from imagination.

Carlson's guide to landscape Painting - A good book, even if u don't intend to draw landscapes. Tons of clever explanations on lighting and value. Tons of useful relational shortcuts to understand complex scenery in smarter ways. I like the way he explains things, it makes me go ohhhh.

TACO point character drawing 1 & 2 - Two NEAT anatomy reference books. It's mostly just a collection of simplified, anime-esque proportional figure drawings. They're a great reference, but I absolutely wouldn't use it as my only set of books on anatomy. It's still useful to use and learn, but in a more general way - and I can't currently apply everything the book tells me yet, because I haven't learned the forms in more detail first.

The Human Figure by Jon H Vanderpoel - this is a short, but VERY useful anatomy reference book. The Author is from the early 1900s - real oldschool, which is good. He has a very useful, matter-of-fact writing style. This is the better starter book to use in order to remember the proportional relationships of the human body (even then, it's still not enough)

The Practice of Oil Painting & Drawing by Solomon J. Solomon - I'll be honest, this one makes sense to me conceptually, but I cannot fucking execute some of his practices. This dude is from the victorian era, his paintings are in museums and they're too good. It only makes sense that his views and approach to art are headier than some of the other suggestions on this list. The book is still useful, and I presume will only grow in usefulness as I learn. It does still have some cool ideas in the first-half of the book that you can easily apply to your art studies! But the second half is a series of master-derived schools of learning that I have yet to dare touch.

(also check out loomis books. I hear they are good)

ENJOY

Gay

Why is she literally me

thinking about the japanese racehorse who was such a failgirl she became a folk hero for losers

A history and mythology lesson reminding you that trans and non-binary people have always existed! [Long post]

Maybe if I keep on lying to myself eventually I'll start telling myself the truth

1000 likes!

Imagine if King Charles III started singing You'll Be Back rn

People often say LOTR is a story about hope. (I'm reminded of it because someone said it in the notes of my Faramir post.) And that's true, but it's not the whole picture: LOTR is in large part a story about having to go on in the absence of hope.

Frodo has lost hope, as well as the ability to access any positive emotion, by Return. He is already losing it in Towers: he keeps going through duty and determination and of course Sam's constant help.

For most of the story, Sam is fueled by hope, which is why it's such a huge moment when he finally lets go of the hope of surviving and returning home, and focuses on making it to the Mountain. To speed their way and lighten the load, he throws his beloved pots and pans into a pit, accepting that he will never cook, or eat, again.

When Eowyn kills the Witch King, she's beyond hope and seeking for a glorious death in battle. It's possible that in addition to her love and loyalty for Théoden, she's strengthened by her hopelessness, the fear of the Nazgúl cannot touch someone who's already past despair.

Faramir is his father's son, he doesn't have any more hope of Gondor's victory or survival than Denethor does, he says as much to Frodo. What hope have we? It is long since we had any hope. ... We are a failing people, a springless autumn. He knows he's fighting a losing war and it's killing him. When he rejects the ring, he doesn't do it in the hope that his people can survive without it, he has good reason to believe they cannot. He acts correctly in the absence of hope.

Of course LOTR has a (mostly) happy ending, all the unlikely hopes come true, the characters who have lost hope gain what they didn't even hope for, and everyone is rewarded for their bravery and goodness, so on some level the message is that hope was justified. But the book never chastises characters who lost hope, it was completely reasonable of them to do so. Despair pushed Théoden and Denethor into inaction, pushed Saruman into collaboration, but the characters who despaired and held up under the weight of despair are Tolkien's real heroes.

(In an early draft of Return, Frodo and Sam receive honorary titles in Noldorin: Endurance beyond Hope and Hope Unquenchable, respectively. Then he cut it, probably because it was stating the themes of the entire book way too obviously, because this is what Tolkien cared about, really: enduring beyond hope. Without hope.)

Also, people who know more than me about the concept of estel, feel free to @ me.