#do not look ar the proportions

[cherrycon2011]

i fucking hate 3/4 anglr

#had to compress imafe so that tumblr wouldnt freak out over the size 🪦 #i feel like my art lacks flavour idk #ranfren #randal ivory #ранфрен #fanart #art #digital art #sebastian de tomato smith chicken legs #ranseb #sebran #do not look ar the proportions

[kerakitty]

Adam’s Creation and Appearance

So there’s a lot of nitpicking surrounding how Victor made Adam and how Adam should be portrayed as a result of that (e.g. should he have stitches, varying skin color, etc). I find this kinda weird because we don’t actually know how Adam was made. Victor intentionally omits this information when telling his story to Robert Walton for fear of someone managing to reproduce his work.(1)

We do have a few, scant details, but they’re hardly enough to draw any solid conclusions from. Here’s a list of all the facts given about his creation (relevant quotes with page numbers at bottom of post):

Making Adam big allowed Victor to work faster.(2)

It took Victor months to gather the materials he needed.(3)

Some materials were gathered from dissecting rooms, charnal houses, and slaughter-houses.(4)

Victor was able to choose Adam’s features (e.g. hair color and texture, tooth alignment).(5)

The whole process, both gathering materials and actual construction, took a little under two years.(6)

That’s it. That’s all we know. We don’t know how these “materials” were used, we don’t know what caused them to go from inanimate to living, or even what exactly they were. Yes, Victor mentions collecting his materials from the places listed above, but aside from mentioning bones(4), he doesn’t say what exactly he was taking. Were they intact organs? Pieces of tissue? Entire limbs? We don’t know. Confusing things further, Victor mentions that he “dabbled” with graves and “tortured living animals”(7), but doesn’t clarify whether these were additional sources of materials or simply research into the mechanisms of life and death.

General consensus seems to be that Victor used organs and whole body parts from cadavers to create Adam, but there's plenty of evidence that that’s not the case. Aside from the fact that it would’ve been difficult to create an 8ft tall body with proportional limbs out of pieces of humans averaging under 6ft, there are a few lines in the novel that indicate that this wasn’t Victor’s method. Victor consistently refers to the materials he used as “lifeless” and “inanimate”, but never dead. He also consistently speaks of imbuing new life into the materials rather than renewing or restoring life. In fact he outright states that reanimating the dead was, as best as he could figure, impossible.(8) Whether this only refers to raising a dead individual as they’d been in life or to any organic tissue is, like so much of Victor’s research, extremely vague.

So where does that leave us in terms of Adam’s appearance? Well, with not a whole lot to go on. Does he have stitches? Maybe. Does his skin color vary? Also maybe, though probably not given that Victor describes his skin and makes no mention of any variation in tone.(9)

The closest thing we have to a canon appearance for him is probably the illustration included in the 1831 edition of the novel.

There’s no stitches or other scars visible here, but since we have no idea how much (if any) input Shelley herself had on this design, that’s not necessarily confirmation one way or the other.

Ultimately, aside from a handful of details, we don’t really know what Adam should look like. We know he has thick black hair, watery yellowish eyes, yellower skin, straight white teeth, thin black lips, and is 8ft tall with all features proportional to that size.(9) Outside of that, and the fact that he looked ugly but not horrifying right up until he started moving(10), it’s up to the reader’s imagination. And given that the novel was intended to be a horror story, I suspect that’s intentional. In horror it’s often our imaginations that supply the most frightening imagery and any good creator of horror is aware of this fact.

So portray Adam however you want, and maybe don’t nitpick other people’s portrayals of him. So long as neither of you are going against the few explicitly described details the novel provides, they’re probably not any more off the mark than you are.

Source quotes and page numbers below the cut.

All quotes and page numbers are taken from this upload of the 1818 text.

”I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted; that cannot be. ...I will not lead you on... to your destruction and infallible misery” pg 23

”As the minuteness of the parts formed a great hindrance to my speed, I resolved... to make the being of a gigantic stature;” pg 24

“...having spent some months in successfully collecting and arranging my materials...” pg 24

“I collected bones from charnel houses... The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials;” pg 24

“I had selected his features as beautiful.” pg 26

“I had worked hard for nearly two years...” pg 26

“...I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave, or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay[.]” pg 24

“...if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time (although I now found it impossible) renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption.” pg 24

“His limbs were in proportion, and... [h]is yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips.” pg 26

“I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then; but when those muscles and joints were rendered capable of motion, it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived.” pg 27

Side note on that last line: I always felt Victor was rather underselling the creativity of Dante here. Dante came up with some trippy shit. I doubt the Uncanny Valley was something of which he “could not have conceived”.

#frankenstein #frankenstein or the modern prometheus #the modern prometheus #adam frankenstein #frankenstein's creature #frankenstein's creation #frankenstein's monster #victor frankenstein #mary shelley #gothic literature

[littleclownopinions]

The Haunting Perfection of Ballora

Slight Content warning: Mentions of child murder

With Five Nights at Freddy's: Help Wanted 2 releasing sometime next month, we will be seeing the return of everybody's favourite ballerina, so I thought this would be a good time to start talking about her again. Now, as much as I hope this will mean the inclusion of some much needed lore for our girl, this is not what I wish to solely focus on today. Although we will touch on the topic, I'd mostly like to talk about Ballora's overall design and how she left such an impact on me in the short amount of time we had with her.

Ballora is arguably the single most humanoid animatronic in the game's canon. While Circus Baby is obviously human-like, Ballora is especially human because of her proportions. Her figure, her hands and her facial structure all really bring her to life. Now, here is where I will briefly interject to mention the "who/why" of it all because I think regardless of how little we know about Ballora, these questions play an important part in understanding her human appearance. Circus Baby is the only other humanoid animatronic we have in the game, but we know her place. Being modelled after and later killing William Afton's daughter, Elizabeth, she is an important character to the story and lore. So then, who is Ballora and why is she so human? Well, although I don't have any definitive answers, many have speculated that Ballora is, in some way, connected to/representative of Mrs. Afton. As a result, it's become difficult for me personally to separate her from the image of a motherly figure, which I think adds some layers to her creep-factor. I mean, a mother is supposed to keep children safe, right? ...Right?

Now, in Sister Location we get the following blue prints.

Points B and C are pretty self explanatory. Ballora can stabilise herself and alert herself to any objects that may cause a collision to prevent accidents. However, points A and B are a little trickier to discern any actual meaning from at first glance. For a full run down of all the Sister Location blueprints as well as theories on how the animatronics work together to fulfil their 'purposes', I'll refer you to this post by an unfortunately deleted user. The important takeaway is as follows: Ballora is all about audio. She can sing, play music and she herself can even hear. However, she doesn't use these features for killing, at least not primarily. She, like Funtime Foxy, is more of a lure for kids and adults alike, to gather them away from Circus Baby and/or Funtime Freddy as they are the designated killers. She uses her voice and her music related functions as bait to aid them. I highly recommend checking out the post if you get the chance.

Moving on, I wanna talk about Five Nights at Freddy's AR: Special Delivery. Scott Cawthon said on a steam post in 2016 "I would imagine that she actually glides on a track most of the time, but after leaving the track she uses all four limbs to crawl more like a spider." This is exactly what we see in Special Delivery. Ballora is one of the only animatronics to crawl at the player, rather than the usual walk/run. As Scott mentioned, it gives her a spider-like quality that I think contrasts her elegance in a super neat way. She becomes this really unsettling, distressing creature, rather than the dainty and beautiful ballerina we came to know in Sister Location. We also see in both games the long, sharp teeth that fill out her mouth under her face plates which I think add to what I mentioned above. Here's a lovely image of what her crawl looks like for any previously lucky readers than might have never seen it before. :)

I think Ballora is a really intriguing character to talk about. On one hand I do think there's a point to be made about her having some connection to the Afton family. Afterall, the other Funtime Animatronics are pink, the colour most associated with ballerinas. So, why was Ballora given a purple and blue colour palate instead? She was also built around the same time as Circus Baby, a character that was modelled after the likeness of a specific someone, so, surely she, being so humanoid, must have been modelled after someone too? Don't even get me started on her song. The amount of ways you can interpret the first 4 lines alone is something I think we all still struggle with. That said, I do understand people not buying into the theory. There hasn't been much tangible evidence to properly give the theory legs, none of what I've said can sustain it alone.

Regardless of where you stand with her in terms of the lore, I still love Ballora's design and overall aesthetic. The sad ballerina left dancing through the halls of an empty gallery, struggling to find her place in the story or the world she was born into. She has a melancholy about her but, as we see in Special Delivery, she also has this animalistic nature that makes her incredibly nerve-wracking to come face-to-face with. Overall, I think Ballora has a bone chilling design and I hope we see a lot more of her in Help Wanted 2. I don't think she was given the time of day to truly shine and reach her potential, but here's to the future of FNAF, I cant wait to see what it has in store!

#fnaf #five nights at freddys #ballora #media analysis #essay writing #help wanted #special delivery #sister location #fnaf theory

[identifying-guns-in-posts]

Submission from @onegami:

I don’t know if this is in your arsenal (*wink wonk*), but I would so appreciate if you could identify these little guys

These are a bit blurry (and obviously aren’t real guns) and many of them are in that Generic AR15 Category, so I can’t give definitive answers here, but I will try my best. It’s also hard to squeeze in factoids for ten weapons in one post, so I will probably be pretty brief.

Up top we have some form of DMR conversion kit for an AR15, not entirely sure which or what kind due to image quality and camera angle. Could be a LWRC REPR (chambered in 7.62x51mm NATO). Has a really wonky looking muzzle device at the end; size-wise it makes me think it’s a suppressor, but it has holes in it, so apparently it’s supposed to be an obscenely large muzzle break??

The proportions of the second one and the appearance of the magazine lead me to believe the second one is the Heckler & Koch HK53A3 (chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO), which is just a super-compact form factor version of the HK33, their MP5-esque assault rifle series.

Our third rifle looks to be the Enfield L85A1 (part of SA80 series, chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO), except it’s bizarrely mirrored, with the covered cheek rest side facing the camera, when we should be seeing the ejection port and charging handle in the back. Still, it’s also mounted with a standard issue SUSAT scope.

The fourth is tricky, possibly unintentionally so. The boxy foregrip, wire stock, and barrel and gas tube positioning all seem to suggest it’s an IMI Galil ARM (chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO), however the receiver is very different, almost AR-15 like. On a hunch, I looked up Counter-Strike listings on IMFDB and I think I have an answer: the receiver might be leaning towards the IWI Galil ACE 22 (5.56x45mm) design, like in CS:GO. I’m still not entirely sure, though...

The fifth is, I think, an M4A1 Block II (chambered in 5.56x45mm NATO) judging by the elongated foregrip with full rail systems on all four sides. It’s specifically fitted with an ACOG sight here. Could also be one of those Daniel Defense / Knight’s Armament clones but I’m not too sure and can’t be bothered to parse it down.

This next one, though, is a mystery. Like, the very first thing that totally screws with me is the bizarre thumbhole stock. It looks almost like an M16? Like, you can clearly recognize the carrying handle in there, but... I dunno. I’m passing on this one, it’s driving me insane.

Seventh is a very clear-cut Colt M1921A Thompson (part of the Thompson series, chambered in .45 ACP) with an extended box magazine. Good ol’ classic rattler.

I swear these guns are going to drive me insane. Eighth one immediately had the Benelli M4 Super 90 (part of the M series, chambered in 12-gauge) come to mind because of the pistol grip and stock construction, as well as the design clearly being that of a semi-auto shotgun, but the barrel being longer than the shell tube, and the foregrip seeming to recede into the receiver, are both tripping me up. And of course, yet again, we have no ejection port or charging handle on the right side where it should be...

Finally, we got two easy ones. Penultimate one is an AKM (Avtomat Kalashnikova series, 7.62x39mm) judging by the stock style and what I’m assuming is a stamped receiver... hard to tell given the lack of details and OH MY GODDESS THE RECEIVER IS MIRRORED AGAIN.

Last one is the FN SCAR-L (SCAR series, 5.56x45mm NATO), likely the CQB variant. Easy to tell from the distinctively shaped folding stock. The iron sights are folded down to make way for what appears to be a reflex sight and flip-down magnifier optic.

I’m not sure what the (*wink wonk*) is supposed to suggest. If you’re asking if I’d pick these keychains up... let me know if they do any actual sniper rifles or PDWs.

#submission #gun id #onegami #toy or prop #ar15 pattern #lwrc repr #heckler & koch #hk33 #sa80 #l85a1 #israel military industries #galil #m4a1 #unidentified weapon #colt #thompson smg #benelli #m series shotguns #Avtomat Kalashnikova #akm #fn herstal #fn scar

[asma-al-husna]

Allah calls Himself Al-Kareem— The Generous, The Honourable, The Beneficent— on two occasions in the Quran. He is Al-Kareem in both His essence, being the source of all virtue, good and honor. He is Al-Kareem in His dealings with His creation; He forgives, He follows through and His continually giving forth of the most precious bounties exceeds all expectations!

The Most Generous, Most Esteemed and Beneficent

Kareem,  Akram, and Ikraam come from the root kaaf-raa-meem, which points out to two main meanings. The first meaning is to be generous, giving, and beneficent. The second main meaning of this root is to be highly esteemed, honoured and valued. 
 This root appears 47 times in the Quran in eight derived forms. Examples of these forms are al-akram (“the Most Generous”), kareemun (“noble”), kiraaman (“dignified ones”), al-mukrameen (“the honoured ones”)  and al-ikraam (“and Honor ”).

In the Arabic language ‘kareem’ does not just mean generous but the term embraces many meanings. ‘Kareem’ includes being forbearing, kind, gentle, patient, noble, pure and beneficial. In other words each and every laudable thing is being described as ‘kareem’.
Examples are a precious ‘kareem’ stone, a beneficial ‘kareem’ letter and a noble, good-looking, a ‘kareem’ person.
Al-Kareem Himself says: O man! What has made you careless about your Lord, Al-Kareem (the Generous), Who created you, fashioned you perfectly and gave you due proportion? In whatever shape He willed, He put you together. [Quran 82: 5-8] and… Read! And your Lord is Al-Akram.[Quran 96: 3]

Al-Kareem Related to other Names

The name Al-Kareem implies all that is honourable, good, and virtuous and therefore is strongly related to various other Asmaa was-Sifaa (names and attributes) of Allah ‘azza wajal.

Al-Kareem is related to Al-Wahhaab (The Giver) and Ar-Razzaaq (The Provider) in the sense that He initiates favors to His slaves, beyond what we deserve. Al-Kareem brought you into existence even though He was not obliged to do so. Al-Kareem gives us the whole world, as He tells us: It is He Who created for you all that is in the earth. [Quran, 2: 29] Our book, the Quran, is not only an instruction but also a cure. Our prayers are not only rituals, but also treasure chests of multiple rewards. Our food is not just one kind, but an amazing variety of tastes, structures and flavours; this is the giving of Al-Kareem!

Al-Kareem is related to Al-‘Afuw (The Pardoner) because even when you sin and forget about it, Allah deals with you generously and makes you live comfortably. It is He who covers your sins and when you turn to Him out of His amazing generosity He doesn’t just forgive but completely erases your bad deeds and on top of this turns them into good deeds. He is At-Tawwaab. What a generous Lord!

Related to Ash-Shakoor (The Appreciative), Al-Kareem rewards you generously when you only present to Him little sincere acts of worship. The ultimate example is Jannah: everlasting pleasure for a couple of years of worship in this life!

Al-Kareem is also related to Al-Haleem (the Forebearing), whenever He gives He gives most generously and when Al-Kareem is disobeyed, He forgives most forbearingly, subhanAllah. He has the most generous and gracious way of forgiving.

Al-Kareem is related in meaning to Al-Wadood (The Loving); us being worthy of His divine love is truly a generosity we should recognize! Al-Kareem says: Verily, those who believe and work deeds of righteousness: the Most Gracious shall bestow love upon them. [Quran, 19: 96]

His Attribute of karam truly is beyond our imagination!

How Can You Live By This Name?

1. Be generous to be close to Al-Kareem.
Allah’s names and attributes are of two types: those that are attributed only to Him ( e.g. Al-Khaaliq, The Creator) and those that can and should be strived for to be attributed to ourselves, one of them is Al-Kareem. Be generous with your belongings, time, and even your words.  The prophet salallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam said: The generous one is close to Allah, close to people, far from the fire; a stingy person is far from Allah, far from people, far from Paradise; and the generous ignorant person is more beloved to Allah than a stingy worshipper. [At-Tirmidhi]

2. Develop a relationship with the Quran al-Kareem.
Allah’s book, the Quran, is kareem because it is full of benefits and guidance, good things and blessings, it includes not a single error or contradiction. Open Al-Quran al-Kareem at least every single day; even if you read one ayah a day, understand it and let it transform your character, mind and heart and see how it will make you more kareem, insha’Allah!

3. Spread the message of Islam.
Al-Kareem honoured (karram-na) us as human beings and specifically honours us as Muslims. Recognize the worth Al-Kareem gave you in being a human being with intellect and use it to benefit the Ummah. Share the ayaat of the Quran with others, teach someone else, even if it is one hadith and spread the message of Islam by showing beautiful, honorable manners to non-Muslims.

4. Don’t forget the fire.
Indulging in all the blessings Al-Kareem gave you, don’t forget about hellfire. The Prophet salallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam said, The people will be thrown into Hell ( Fire) and it will keep on saying, ‘Is there any more?’ till the Lord of the worlds puts His Foot over it, whereupon its different sides will come close to each other, and it will say, ‘Qad! Qad! (enough! enough!) By Your ‘Izzat (Honor and Power) and Your Karram (Generosity)!’ Paradise will remain spacious enough to accommodate more people until Allah will create some more people and let them dwell in the superfluous space of Paradise. [Saheeh al-Bukharee]

5. Study about Al-Kareem.
Al-Kareem says: O man! What has made you careless about your Lord, Al-Kareem (the Generous). Study about Allah, learning about His names and attributes and what they mean to you. Do not be deceived by this world and by the Shaytan. Know that Al-Kareem will never let down those who spend their lives obeying Him, even though others might say practicing your deen is not “cool.” Don’t ever think those who have much in this life but are denying Him, will have any share in the Hereafter. You are here because of Him and for Him; use the intellect and skills Al-Kareem gave You to work towards His pleasure and His ultimate generosity: Paradise!

Wallahu ta’alaa ‘alem.

O Allah, Al-Kareem, we know that You are the Most Generous and Most Esteemed in Your being and dealings. Guide us to be generous to others, aid us to develop honouroble and noble manners, adorn us with understanding and practicing of Your book.  Guide us in spreading the noble message of Islam and return the honour to the Ummah. Make us reflect Your attribute of karama by always being thankful for Your favors which are beyond our basic needs and only turning to You when we ask and enter us into Your greatest generosity, Jannatul ‘Alaa without reckoning, ameen!

#allah #islam #revert help team #asma al husna #revert help #muslim #ayat #daily #allah’s name #dua #pray #prayer #salah #muslimah #hijab #religion #reminder #mohammed #new muslim #new revert #new convert #how to convert islam #converthelp #convert islam #become a muslim #welcome to islam #daily ayat #proohet #god #revert

[the-enzyme]

I repainted my fan-art Ken Kaneki (MYou Bettina male) for the second time. I had enhanced the 1st face up I gave him previously. However, I decided to attempt painting him the way I learned to do 1:6 sculpts, form that one (15 episodes) tutorial I watched. I was impatient however, which I regret to no tomorrow. So, I was able to get most of the pigmented skin texture on there with mostly acrylics. Then I grew impatient, because I was taking too long (it was dumb of me, terribly so!). 

I am still super happy with how he looks despite using pastels and ruining the beautiful subtleness I had going on. I did take progress photos, but they ar more awful than these. I am of course heavily disappointed in my hair strokes -- my eyebrows and eyelashes are horrid. However, I am happy with how much more mature he appears, due to the heavy dark brows, so I’ll probably be keeping them for a while (before I start obsessing and repaint him again!). 

I need to get a new pointy brush, because I managed to already ruin the one I was using to paint my Sephiroth and Leon 1:6 head sculpts. Bettina has much, much larger eyes, and I was still not able to get not-so-clean, but kind of sharp lines like on Sephy. I wasn’t able to do a better job on Leon either, but he has tinier eyes and they were sculpted way off, so I kind of have to cheat with the way I shade his lower eyelid to make it look like they are a more accurate shape. Leaving me to having to pain the lashes on an area that is hard to do so (and yes, I also suck, so there’s that too!). 

Still, I am super happy with my Kaneki fan-art doll so far. I wish he had broader shoulders, and overall, more lean-young-male body proportions, like Kaneki has in the anime. Instead of noodle arms and child-bearing-hips. Besides the proportions, I am in-love with this tiny face! He’s so pretty and has great lips, as he as intended to be female, but can be a very versatile sculpt! (: Now I just need to start making some actual Kaneki inspired clothes and maybe a more accurate wig, as painful as that will be. I was thinking of this wig as his default one, but it makes him look cone-headed. Lol! DX

#myoubjd #myou #bjd #abjd #asianballjointeddoll #myoubettina #photgraphy #toyphotography #dollrepaint #repaint #toycustomization #dollphotography #doll #coldcastresin #proartist #pro-artist #legit #authentic #legitimate #kenkanekifanartdoll #kenkaneki #kanekiken

[minthe-lover]

Chapter 223 analysis

So another chapter that I have a lot of mixed feelings for, I do like a bit of the banter between hades and persephone.. and hades protecting persephone was alright. Plus I always welcome plot that isn't related to HxP... because it tends to be alot more interesting.

Also there is a huge problem with just... really fail to make the faces look serious. Maybe it's just me but... their faces just look more goofy then either angry or seductive. Rs is really good at drawing neutral faces, along with over the stop goofy faces but serious emotions just aren't done well.

Now one thing that I do decently like about this chapter is how hades stepped up and was an actually decent partner to Persephone. Though it sort of icks me how like.... his first reactions is to be angry instead of like.. checking in on persephone but eh I don't really mind this scene.

Now another thing that I really don't mind is the whole Ares plot... Though as stated before is how most of the plot of the side characters basically every single one if more interesting then the hades and persephone plot. Even the solo plots of persephone and hades are far more interesting then them together.

though I have to say that the scene with ares and hades falls apart in seriousness with just how wack the male body proportions are.. like I'm decently used to wacky large boobs from anime but just... they looks so bad I can't help but laugh.

Now lets talk about Persephone trauma! So I do like how rs shows Persephone thinking about her assault, it's distorted and fuzzy but still burned into her brain. It honestly sort of resonates with my own viewing of my sexual trauma... my problem is how persephone just... isn't effected by her trauma.

Ares turning up was supposed to be a triggering event.. but persephone doesn't have a panic attack or even that big reaction. At most she just looks a bit shaken which fine being triggered isn't an always a huge big reactions but persephone doesn't react. She just walks around... looking a bit bored, and with a bit of internal dialog where she has a tiny bit of selfdoubt before just... saying "nah It's good to let people help me".. and just moving on.

She doesn't even look a bit shaken.. or even just looks a bit frozen from her trauma being brought up. When first reading it I held out hope that hey.. maybe yes it's a small reaction to her trauma right now but later when hades and persephone try to fuck she'll be triggered again and they'll just end up cuddling or something.

But nope! they have some banter.. then watch a movie and fuck.. with barely a discussion about how Persephone was just triggered because of her SEXUAL TRAUMA.... It's a big reason why I hate how rs deals with this.. because Persephone isn't effected by it.. it's another drama thing to throw in every now and then but doesn't actually have lasting effects that would disappear the moment rs needs to have romantic moments with hades.

It sucks and undercuts the how deal with the trauma, rs can do some great visual story telling with how someone remembers and views trauma.. but can't do the follow through to the characters reactions and actions. The trauma being brought up in this episode just feels like rs trying to remember that it happened.

Also like persephone eye is gonna get poked out with hades wacky nose that just... it covers half her face. How can I take this seriously.. these colour coded hetero-normative designs are really ruining any serious moments that rs tries.

Now last thing I'm going to talk about is persephone very inconsistent stretch marks and cellulite. They are extremely faint and this is the first time I remember seeing them in awhile... which like persephone is constantly wearing booty shorts and tank tops. She seems to only have stretch marks on her ass and legs.. none on her arms or even like on her boobs. She has some extremely large boobs that are always almost shown, and they are perfectly round and smooth at all times with no stretch marks.

Now I only remember this panel for having her streatch marks which again their very faint aren't that big nor do we really see them again whenever she puts on like booty shorts. We really only seem them when she's in her underwear or naked. now I thought that maybe I just missed the other shots with the stretch marks... so I looked it up and found a few post of fans praises rs showing the stretch marks... lets look at those panels.

These are two shots that should have persephone stretch marks VERY prominently since their is nothing that should be covering them.. and like... they are the lightest smallist lines. If this is body positivity why aren't they actually being shown actually proudly. It feels more like something that rs wants points for but is to ashamed to actually include in her art.

That's not even talking about the amount of panels that should very clearly show at least a bit of her stretch marks but just don't.

Lore olympus can't even get stretch marks done decently... it isn't body positivity it's Rs wanting points without them effecting her "beautiful" main character

#lo critical #anti lo #lore olympus critical #anti lo art #anti lore olympus

[blog-imtsupdates]

week 2

expanding on previous concepts and creating new mood baords for new concept (mouse POV) + dino refrences

story boarding these concepts + story baording 360 scene

had not story boarded before, great opertunity to also practice writing, perspective and enviroments

I used this video to understand story boarding better. I chose it because its someone with experience and its a movie i care about a lot, i think it builds suspense really well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPrkxj2MyZI

the story boards werent very detailed in these videos because thier team already has a story and a setting they are going with so they know what the characters look like and where they are but they just need to know who does what when. We dont have that yet, i want it to be clear what the enviroment looks like, what the lighting should be like and what the general mood should be so while still applying story boarding methods i will add more detail.

I dont get to work with camera movement much as the player will be positioned in one spot but i can mess with perspective

mouse POV:

prey POV

+ concept art Prey POV & thalasophobia

With the last render i did with the wounded herbivore i felt like i really didnt do a good job of conveying the mood with that drawing. so i decided that to try and set a mood better it migth help if i dont work with color first to make it less confusing and cluttered for now. I remebered a group project from a while ago where one of the artists sketched the scene first in gray scale. a big inspiration of mine is RJ Palmer so i trurned to his artstation for some inspiration and looked for a couple of gray scale tutorials as i have never done this before. i do render my art sometimes but usually not with backgrounds and generally with colours immediately.

(the last render i have done. It works for what i was trying to do but its low on contrast, a bit bland and definitely not what I need for what i want to achieve now)

Grey scale paintings work great to show the lighting conditions. So to make sure the client and my team understood my concepts i set out to create grey scale paintings of posible scenes in the experiece.

i found these vidoes helpful when trying to undertand what i should be looking for (ussualy, depends per piece ofcouse ): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8rL_0Fl06U dont have it be to cluttered, have the values from the fore ground and background differ (breaking this rule for the thalasaphobia, just a little bit)

that video is great but i didnt want to start my process how she did, its too harsh for what i was going for, i migth aswell just make a rough sketch instead. So i looked for another method and found one more to my liking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN2BggfFTgk

he starts with a sketch and builds the mid tone first and then throws the shadow ont there and sculps forms out of those base shapes.

As mentioned, this is my first time painting like this. i started with the shark as water disperses light in a way that is a lit softer and i thought it would make for a good starting point to get a bit more confident. I felt it was lacking some movement so i added fish that could add a nice shimmer. I used refrences for anatomy and proportions for the animals from google images, readablitly, aireal perspective (values based on distance, thing sget lightter the further they are from the camera)

then i started on the carnotaurus and how it could look as it aproaches you with the look of a hungy lion. i was excited to try some harsher lighing and a background. i did the first sketch with hardely any refrences and realised he looked far too much like a T.rex when carnotaurus have far slimmer heads.

after finding a couple of skull refences i rebuilt the head and adjusted some more proportions. which was better but it was still lacking mood and atmosphere so i looked back at RJ Palmers work and looked at some grey scale painting tutorials from people that create art i find apealing and that have experience. You might also notice that im using high contrast lighting on the animal aswell as the other objects, breaking the readability rule a little bit. I did this because i was reminded of tigers and how they camouflage and i thought that would look really cool, i still made sure he stood out from the background ofcourse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8rL_0Fl06U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bN2BggfFTgk

Though its not done it was great practice. I will finish it in my free time later as i have to move on and do other work and its sufficient as concept art that conveys the lighting and mood i was going for for now.

[hehehehehenrik]

waaah hi!!! how do you draw old men??!! (and since you ar taking art reqs could you draw my termina oc??!! https://artfight.net/character/3925636.isko)

Heyy, hello!! Finally someone get to the ask box, thanks a lot, love contacting with people through internet y’know. Okay first of all here’s you’re guy just being clueless himself. Do the proportions and face in my way a bit, hope it’s ok, and made pompadour smaller because I’m not sure how to make hair physics on the bigger one?? Sorry 😔

And now to the question, which I really like, ‘cause I honestly don’t know? It’s the way my hand draws, it just that I’m being into old men’s for, idk, 4 years perhaps and I fucking can’t draw anything else lol. Like seriously, now I think that young face without wrinkles looks incomplete and now that 11 yo kid looks like he’s fucking 20 or whatever, thanks God I’m not drawing kids that usually haha.

But anyway I can say few things that helped me understand something. Obviously the way persons face getting older is rooted in the genetics, they life style, health, etc etc, but I singled out some main wrinkles in different age, I usually see it in anime so I call it anime technique haha, here’s the visualization:

I use it as a base wrinkles when I’m not sure about more unique details, pretty good way to handle it I think.

But the most important is to form the visual library in the brain, idk if that phrase is used in English art community, but in Russian it means to look at a lot of photos of things so that you wouldn’t need to look at the references, you have them in memory! For that I use Pinterest, just looking at actors, musicians, any other old people with a lot of photos of them and analyze the way their wrinkles goes.

Oh and also fun fact, let’s call it that, my mom once said that the most accurate way to understand the persona age is not by looking at their face, but it’s by looking at their neck and arms. The skin sags at neck no matter what, as much as I know, and hands also getting more dry and thin, also veins is more visible, while face wrinkles and skin sags different from person to person ‘cause genetics, health and other things.

And also a gray hair is pretty important, but this shit is even more personal and unique, some people may get first gray hair in the 20s, and some may not have a single strand of them at 40s at all! So yeah in that thing the best way is to read some medicine articles about it, and of course remembering the context of character background and life, yeah.

I can’t say many things about making unique wrinkles because there only two way that I do it; first, the character model or art already have all the needed details so my work is just to mimic it as close as I can(the way I drawing Caligura yeah); second, I just made it up based on the face silhouette I imagine character to have, in that case I just use my brain visual library(Domek moment because by some reason there barely any wrinkles in the game sprites and his portrait? Even thou the portrait description says that he’s face have wrinkles the way that it looks like he had the frown all his life, my brother in Christ, when person frowns a lot he’d get forehead wrinkles first of all! But nope, Domek don’t have any of it, ok?? And yeah I usually do the forehead wrinkles based on that fact of character).

Yeah, idk if there anything more I can say, nothing useful anyway so yeah thanks for the question and request!! (Ask box always open so feel free to write thing folks, I don’t bite. Usually.) Byee!!

#the fuck am I supposed to tag it #uh #hehenrik talks? #let it be it I guess

[whileiamdying]

What Was So Special About Greta Garbo?

An enigma onscreen and off, the actress only magnified her celebrity by suddenly renouncing it.

By Margaret Talbot December 6, 2021

“If only once I could see a preview and come home feeling satisfied,” Garbo said.Photograph by Edward Steichen © 2021 The Estate of Edward Steichen / ARS, courtesy the George Eastman Museum

Fame is so powerful that renouncing it can seem like the supreme power move. Celebrities who retreat from the public eye (Howard Hughes, J. D. Salinger, Prince) will always be legends, no matter what else they may be. Rumored comebacks tantalize. Paparazzi circle. The mystery deepens. In 1941, at the age of thirty-six, Greta Garbo, one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, stopped acting and, though she lived for half a century more, never made another film. For a star who, more than any other, “invaded the subconscious of the audience,” as Robert Gottlieb writes in his new biography, “Garbo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), this was an abdication, a privilege of monarchical proportions. But it was also a decision made by one particular, peculiar person who had never been temperamentally suited to celebrity in the first place. There was a reason, beyond the exertions of the Hollywood publicity machine, that a single line she uttered in one movie—“I want to be alone”—became so fused with her image. What can look like a strategy for keeping the public interested can also be a sincere and committed desire to keep it at bay.

Few other performers have ascended as quickly to mononymic status as Garbo did—she started off the way most of us do, with a first and last name, but the first soon fell away, like a spent rocket booster, in the ballyhoo surrounding her. When she appeared in her first sound picture, “Anna Christie,” the ads proclaimed, “Garbo talks!”; for her first sound comedy, “Ninotchka,” it was “Garbo laughs!” Quite why she became such a phenomenon is a puzzle to which film critics and biographers keep returning. Garbo made only twenty-eight movies in her lifetime. (By comparison, Bette Davis made close to ninety, and Meryl Streep has made nearly seventy and still counting.) That slender output could be part of the mystique, compounded by her disappearing act. But Garbo had acquired an enigmatic mythos even before she ended her career—the Hollywood colony treated her like royalty. Nor has it seemed to matter that only a handful of her movies are much watched or admired today.

What Garbo had to offer, above all, was her extraordinary face, at a time when the closeup, with its supercharged intimacy, its unprecedented boon to the emotional and erotic imagination, was still relatively new. Many of the shots credited as the first closeups were unlikely to have set hearts aflame, since they were often of objects—a shoe, a wrench. But filmmakers soon grasped the centripetal seductions of the human face in tight focus. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader picks as a turning point the moment in a D. W. Griffith film from 1912, “Friends,” in which the camera comes in tight on Mary Pickford’s face, revealing her ambivalence about which of two suitors she should choose. “A real close-up of an actor is about going in for an emotional reason that you can’t get any other way,” Schrader writes. “When filmmakers realized that they could use a close-up to achieve this kind of emotional effect, cameras started coming in closer. And characters became more complex.”

A face as beautiful as Garbo’s—the enormous eyes and deep-set lids, the way love or tenderness or some private, unspoken amusement unknit her brows in an instant, melting her austerity—was almost overwhelming when it filled the screen. She belonged, as Roland Barthes wrote, “to that moment in cinema when the apprehension of the human countenance plunged crowds into the greatest perturbation, where people literally lost themselves in the human image.” This is not to diminish her craft as an actress. But her acting was perhaps most effective in her silent films or in nonverbal scenes in talking pictures in which her face is the canvas for emotion. In the famous last shots of “Queen Christina” (1933), Garbo’s androgynous Swedish ruler stands at the prow of a ship bearing her away from her country; the body of her lover, killed in a duel over her, is laid out on the deck. Garbo stares into the distance, her face a kind of mask but no less eloquent for it. The film’s director, Rouben Mamoulian, had told her that she must “make her mind and heart a complete blank,” empty her face of expression, so that the audience could impose whatever emotions they wanted on it. The scene would then be one of those “marvelous spots,” he said, where “a film could turn every spectator into a creator.”

She was skilled at inciting such projection. More than one contemporary in Hollywood noted that her magic truly showed up only on celluloid, like a ghostly luminescence undetectable until the film was developed. Clarence Brown, who directed Garbo in seven films, recalled shooting a scene with her, thinking it was fine, nothing special, then playing it back and seeing “something that it just didn’t have on the set.” On her face, he said, “You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn’t have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other.” Garbo herself, with a kind of arch, adolescent indifference, never wanted to look at the rushes. According to Brown, she’d watch only when sound pictures were played in reverse: “That’s what Garbo enjoyed. She would sit there shaking with laughter, watching the film running backward and the sound going yakablom-yakablom. But as soon as we ran it forward, she wouldn’t watch it.”

Much has been written about Garbo over the years, but Gottlieb, a former editor of this magazine, has produced a particularly charming, companionable, and clear-eyed guide to her life and work—he has no axe to grind, no urgent need to make a counterintuitive case for her lesser movies, and he’s generous with his predecessors. By the end of the biography, I felt I understood Garbo better as a person, without the aura of mystery around her having been entirely dispelled—and, at this point, who would want it to be?

The actress who came to embody a kind of unattainable elegance, who would someday wear sumptuous period costumes with a grace so offhand that they might have been rumpled p.j.’s, grew up in a cramped apartment with no indoor plumbing, in one of Stockholm’s most impoverished neighborhoods. She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson on September 18, 1905, to parents from rural stock. Her mother was, in Gottlieb’s description, “practical, sensible, undemonstrative”; her father, an unskilled laborer, was handsome, musical, and fun, and Greta adored him. But he was stricken by kidney disease, and Greta, the youngest of three children, made the rounds of the charity hospitals with him. “She never forgot the humiliations they endured as poor people in search of live-or-die attention,” Gottlieb writes. She was fourteen when he died, and she dropped out of school, leaving her with a lasting embarrassment about her lack of formal education. She went to work to help support the family, first at a barbershop, where she applied shaving soap to men’s faces, then at a department store, where she sold and modelled hats. She said later that she was “always sad as a child for as long as I can think back. . . . I did some skating and played with snowballs, but most of all I wanted to be alone with myself.”

Alongside her shyness and her penchant for solitude, Greta harbored a passionate desire to be an actress. As a kid, she’d roam the city by herself, looking for theatres where she could stand at the stage door and watch the performers come and go. The first time Garbo was in front of the camera was at age fifteen, in an advertising film for the department store that employed her. Sweden had a thriving film industry, and she soon quit her day job to appear in a couple of movies. At Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, to which she was accepted at seventeen, the young actors were instructed in a system that “scientifically” analyzed the semiotics of movement and gesture. Remarkably, some of her lecture notes from that time survive—she jotted down that “the head bent forward equals a mild concession” or a “condescending attitude,” and that “the throwing back of the head” conveys “a violent feeling such as love.” Barry Paris, an earlier biographer whom Gottlieb cites approvingly, notes that “Garbo in silent films would employ that system of gestural meaning to a high degree.” She did so in her sound pictures as well. When she plays the Russian ballerina in “Grand Hotel” (1932), her body language is jittery, neurotic. Depressed, she lets her head droop as if it were simply too heavy to hold up; surprised by delight at the prospect of a romance with John Barrymore’s gentleman jewel thief, she tosses her head back at giddy angles. It might have been laughable, but instead it’s riveting.

In the spring of 1923, the gifted film director Mauritz Stiller approached the Stockholm theatre looking for actresses to cast in his new movie, an epic based on a Swedish novel, “The Story of Gösta Berling.” Stiller came from a Jewish family in Finland; orphaned young, he had fled to Sweden to avoid being conscripted into the tsar’s Army. Garbo and he were never lovers—Stiller preferred men—but their relationship was perhaps the most important in both of their lives. With his commanding height, his taste for luxury (full-length fur coats, a canary-yellow sports car), and his domineering style with actors, he had more than a touch of the Svengali. But Stiller believed in Garbo at a time when, as one veteran actress put it, Greta was “this little nobody . . . an awkward, mediocre novice,” and he loved her. (He also seems to have been the one who suggested replacing “Gustafsson” with “Garbo.”)

When Hollywood came calling—in the form of Louis B. Mayer scouting European talent for M-G-M—it wasn’t clear whether Stiller was the lure or Garbo; the director was certainly better known. In any case, Stiller made sure that they were a package deal (and, Gottlieb adds, later upped Garbo’s pay to four hundred dollars a week, an “unheard of” salary for an untested starlet). The two sailed for the United States in 1925, arriving in the pungent heat of midsummer New York. (Garbo’s favorite part of the visit seems to have been the roller coaster at Coney Island.) Then it was on to Hollywood by train.

The studio moguls gave an unknown such as Garbo a very short runway. M-G-M signed up the Swedish girl for two pictures, “Torrent” and “The Temptress,” and, as the film historian Robert Dance writes in his smart new book, “The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood” (Mississippi), “if those first two films were unsuccessful financially M-G-M would not renew her contract for a second year.” As it happened, both were hits. Motion Picture was among the industry outlets declaring her début “a complete success.” (“She is not so much an actress as she is endowed with individuality and magnetism,” it said.) Garbo became a fan favorite, even though she was almost uniquely averse to the kind of goofy stunts and mildly salacious photo shoots that other stars put up with. When she got to be as famous as Lillian Gish, she told one interviewer early on, “I will no longer . . . shake hands with prize-fighters and egg-and-milk men so they will have pictures to put in the papers.” Instead, she worked with consummate portrait photographers who lit her gloriously. Eventually, her films were earning enough that she was able to negotiate an unusual contract, one that gave her the right to veto scripts, co-stars, and directors. And she shunned interviews so consistently that in the end her privacy became its own form of publicity.

Despite such badassery, she never really adjusted to her new country or her new destiny, at least beyond the movie set. What looked like carefully cultivated hauteur was partly the product of awkwardness, disorientation, and grief. She hardly spoke English when she first arrived, and, within a year, she learned that her beloved sister, an aspiring actress herself, had died back home. Stiller did not make a smooth adjustment to Hollywood and, in a blow to them both, he was not chosen to direct Garbo’s first American picture. Garbo wrote to a friend in Sweden about how miserable she was: “This ugly, ugly America, all machine, it is excruciating.” The only thing that made her happy, she claimed, was sending money to her family. At a young age, Gottlieb writes, she found herself “trapped in a spotlight extreme even by Hollywood standards,” and with no psychological preparation for grappling with the kind of fame—movie stardom—that was new not just to her but to the world.

Athletic and physically restless, she soon took up the long nighttime walks that became a refuge; with her hat pulled low over her head, as it customarily was, she would have been hard to recognize. Stiller, who probably felt that his young protégée no longer needed him, returned to Sweden, where he died in 1928, at the age of forty-five, reportedly clutching a photograph of her. “He never seems to have resented her dazzling ascent to fame,” Gottlieb writes, “only wanting her to be happy and fulfilled.” Back in Sweden to mourn him, Garbo went with his lawyer to the storehouse containing his possessions, where she walked around touching his belongings and murmuring about her memories. Gottlieb says that this episode must surely have been an inspiration for the scene in “Queen Christina” in which Garbo’s character moves around a room at an inn, touching all the inanimate reminders of the lover she will never spend another night with. On sets, she would sometimes talk softly to herself about what her mentor might have told her to do—one director she worked with referred to Stiller as “the green shadow.”

Garbo appears to have been emotionally stunted in certain ways, damaged by the loss of her father, her sister, and Stiller, abashed by the limitations of her English and her education. Though she had a sense of humor, she emerges in Gottlieb’s portrait as prickly, stubborn, and stingy. The sudden onslaught of celebrity made her more so. She never married, had children, or apparently wanted to do either; she had brief romantic relationships, mostly with men (the actor John Gilbert, probably the conductor Leopold Stokowski), and likely with women, too (the leading candidate seems to have been the writer Mercedes De Acosta, the “ubiquitous lesbian rake,” in Gottlieb’s words, who had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and many others). Her longest-lasting relationships were with friends, especially, as Gottlieb makes clear, those who helped her logistically, advised her devotedly, and steadfastly refused to spill the tea about her. In these, she had pretty good, if not unerring, taste. Probably the closest and most enduring friendship was with Salka Viertel, the intellectually vibrant woman at the center of L.A.’s remarkable community of refugee writers, composers, and filmmakers from Germany.

From the start of her Hollywood career in silent pictures, Garbo was often cast as a vamp—the kind of man-eater who shimmied and inveigled and home-wrecked her way through so many nineteen-twenties movies. (See the entire career of Theda Bara.) As Robert Dance notes, “Adultery and divorce were catnip to post World War I audiences.” The parts quickly bored her: “I cannot see any sense in dressing up and doing nothing but tempting men.” Off the job, she eschewed makeup and liked to dress in slacks, men’s oxford shoes, and grubby sweaters. Her closet was full of men’s tailored shirts and ties. She often referred to herself as a “fellow” and sometimes signed her letters “Harry” or “Harry Boy.” The movie role she seems to have liked best was the learned cross-dressing seventeenth-century monarch Christina; it allowed her to stride around in tunics, tight-fitting trousers, and tall boots, to kiss one of her ladies-in-waiting full on the lips, to declare that she intended to “die a bachelor!” (As plenty of gender-studies scholars will tell you, this is one queer movie.) She expressed a longing to play St. Francis of Assisi, complete with a beard, and Oscar Wilde’s vain hero Dorian Gray. In today’s terms, Garbo might have occupied a spot along the nonbinary spectrum. Gottlieb doesn’t press the point, but remarks, “How ironic if ‘the Most Beautiful Woman in the World’ really would rather have been a man.”

Her third American film, “Flesh and the Devil” (1926)—the ultimate nineteen-twenties title—transformed her into an international star. It’s about a love triangle involving two best friends, played by the magnetic John Gilbert and the handsome Swedish actor Lars Hanson, with Garbo at its apex. It, too, is a pretty queer movie, though it seems less in control of its signifiers than, say, “Queen Christina.” As Gottlieb points out, the two male leads are forever clasping each other fervently, bringing their faces close together, as if about to kiss. (It heightens the vibe that, in silent-movie fashion, Hanson appears to be wearing lipstick some of the time, and Gilbert eyeliner.) “Flesh and the Devil” also features some of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever encountered on film. There’s one, in a nighttime garden, in which Garbo rolls a cigarette between her lips, then puts it between Gilbert’s, her eyes never leaving his, as he strikes a match and illuminates their gorgeous, besotted faces. There’s one where she lies back in sensual abandon on a couch, Gilbert’s head lolling against her lap, and he lifts her hand and drags her fingers across his mouth. And then there’s my favorite: she and Gilbert are at a Communion rail in church. By now, Gilbert’s character has killed her first husband in a duel, and she has married the other friend, but they’re still crazy about each other, natch. Gilbert sips from the chalice just before she does, and, when the priest hands it to her, she turns it around to drink greedily from the side her lover’s lips have just touched. Her expression is one of slow-burn ecstasy.

Gilbert and Garbo fell in love while they were making the movie, but their story is a sad one, mainly because Gilbert is a sad figure. He is often offered up as an example of an actor who couldn’t make the transition to sound—his voice was said to have been too reedy or something. That turns out to have been an urban legend: his voice was fine. The trouble was that he was best at playing boyish men undone by love at a time when, as Gottlieb observes, Depression-era Hollywood was more into “gangsters, snappy dialogue, musicals.” Garbo and Gilbert lived out a “Star Is Born” trajectory. When they made “Flesh and the Devil,” he was a big-name actor at the height of his powers, and he helped Garbo by making sure the camera angles were right for her and each take of her was the best it could be. One story is that he planted a stand of trees on his property in the Hollywood Hills to remind her of the woods in Sweden, and he apparently proposed to her repeatedly. (She professed herself puzzled that she kept refusing a more permanent bond, but she did.) By the time she made “Queen Christina,” in 1933, she had top billing, and she insisted that Gilbert, who was then married to someone else, and professionally on the skids, play her romantic interest—rejecting the studio’s choice, a young Laurence Olivier. Gilbert later remembered that she was tactful and considerate with him on the set, though he was drinking heavily, throwing up blood, and nervous about his performance. “It is a rare moment in Garbo’s history,” Gottlieb writes, “when we can fully admire, even love her, as a human being, not only as an artist.” Gilbert died three years later, at the age of thirty-eight. Garbo was characteristically unsentimental. “Gott, I wonder what I ever saw in him,” she remarked while he was still alive. “Oh well, I guess he was pretty.”

Why did Garbo stop acting? It wasn’t as though her star was truly on the wane. It had been years since she’d made her successful transition to talkies, with a dialogue-heavy adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.” (From the moment she uttered her first lines, “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby,” her accent proved to be a sexy asset.) She’d been nominated for four Best Actress Oscars. In 1939, she’d made “Ninotchka,” the romantic comedy in which she played a Soviet apparatchik on a mission to Paris who falls in love with a playboy count and discovers, as the pitch for it went, “capitalism not so bad after all.” It was a huge hit—more than four hundred thousand people went to see it at Radio City Music Hall during a three-week run, Gottlieb says. Garbo is very funny, deadpanning her way through the first half of it in boxy jackets, rationally assessing Melvyn Douglas’s charms. (“Your general appearance is not distasteful.”) As one biographer, Robert Payne, wrote, the performance worked so brilliantly because it satirized “Garbo herself, or rather her legend: the cold Northerner immune to marriage, solemn and self-absorbed.”

The next and last movie she made, “Two-Faced Woman,” a clumsy attempt to re-create comedy magic with Douglas, was a turkey, but she could surely have survived it. Instead, she considered projects that fell through, turned down others (offered the female lead in Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case,” Gottlieb writes, she is supposed to have sent her agent a telegram saying “no mamas. no murderers”), and slowly drifted away from the business of moviemaking. She had never liked the limelight and, Gottlieb says, lacked the relentless drive that animated contemporaries such as Marlene Dietrich or Joan Crawford. She doesn’t seem to have been particularly vain about her beauty, but she was practical enough to know its precise value, and to anticipate the cost of its fading. And, though she seems to have enjoyed acting, she was never satisfied with the results. “Oh, if once, if only once I could see a preview and come home feeling satisfied,” she remarked after one film screening. Garbo was no Norma Desmond, viewing her old films over and over to admire her own image. Screening some of them years later, at moma, Barry Paris reported, she got a kick out of imitating herself: “R-r-rodney, when will this painful love of ours ever die?” She once told the actor David Niven that she’d quit because she had “made enough faces.” The analysis was typical of her—unreflective, cryptic, deprecatory.

She was, Tennessee Williams thought, “the saddest of creatures—an artist who abandons her art.” Yet Garbo doesn’t seem to have seen herself that way. Perhaps attuned to the perils of growing old in Hollywood, she moved to New York, to an apartment on the East Side, spent long stretches of time in Europe with friends who were wealthy or witty or both, went to the theatre, collected a bit of art. She did not reinvent herself as a memoirist or a philanthropist (though her estate was valued at roughly fifty million dollars when she died, in 1990) or an ambassador of any sort of good will. People loved the mystery of it all; photographers were always chasing after her. But she wasn’t in hiding; she got out. One wag called her a “hermit about town.”

Did Garbo have a rich inner life to sustain her for all those years? There isn’t much evidence of it. She was not a remarkable or notably confiding letter writer, journal keeper, or conversationalist; she does not seem to have had a surfeit of intellectual curiosity. In the movies, she had always been able to convey a sense of hidden depths, of memories and emotions lighting room after interior room, never quite surfacing to be articulated. Were those feelings complex, interesting? We were persuaded they must be. The relationship to fame that she enacted in the last decades of her life was something similar: it looked profound, perhaps even spiritual—a renunciation of celebrity’s blessings as well as its scourges. But who knows? Maybe she was just tired of making faces. ♦

#Greta Garbo #Greta Lovisa Gustafsson

[rolling-restart]

hi! i really appreciate your genderbends, i love seeing that in the fandom. your style is very unique, i was just wondering if you use ai in your art? not that that's a bad thing, i'm just genuinely curious.

Haiii, thanks so much!

So that’s a valid question for a realistic designs so i’ll explain what i do from start to finish:

1. I find the reference portrait of the subject and use faceapp to change the gender (more like dear @mickcedesagenda does it for me bc I still don’t have the app)

2. I find an appropriate body model from sketch model websites that fits the subject’s face, lighting and neck position (we affectionately call this “boob shopping”)

3. When all are found i mend them together mostly using a blending brush and i change skintones with an airbrush if necessary. Otherwise face and body look so silly together.

4. Then, I trace the body and start sampling the colours. This is very important. Every colouring work starts with sampling the colours in even the tiniest ares. I either do the fill with a filling tool because brushes are too harsh for that small areas (literally 2x2 pixels at times) or use very tiny brushes. I draw the lines and shadows with pretty opaque brushes and keep filling the colour areas. After that filling action, the work looks p much like this

After that, I chose larger areas of colours that are p much consistent and start another layer under this and cover the holes with those large colour areas with a big big opaque brush. I usually do this separately for skin, hair and clothes bc later step can get very messy otherwise.

5. BLENDING BRUSH. With appropriate brush size changes, I blend everything according to the movement of the skin, hair and fabric. Movement direction is crucial because otherwise it’ll look terrible.

6. I add airbrush touches for blushes and mismatched tones to equalise them, much like retouching a selfie. I put the opaqueness very low for this.

7. According to colours of the subject, I choose an appropriate background and a head frame. This is more of a composition decision and not compulsory but background can make or break a piece.

8. I choose explicit and non-explicit proportions, mostly with basic 3x3 grid composition.

And ta-daaa!!!

Only ai involved with this process I think is the faceapp step. I’ve been drawing for 12 years and I got colour theory and composition classes. Even though colour work is still not my best suite, fill tools help immensely (which just basically colour an area with borders).

Thanks for your question, hope this answered it!

#answered asks #my art

[mayarparker]

Of All the Gin Joints;

@wolfontheloose

Exhausted and starving, Maya walked into the first food establishment she could find. The sign proclaimed it "The Den". If the rumors about this town were true, she had a guess what they were hinting at. Given how early it was, only 4 in the afternoon, the place was fairly quiet. As quiet as any bar was. She wore jeans that hugged her hips and an old university shirt that hung off her thin frame differently now than when she had stolen it from a one night stand. Her ratty backpack she'd left in the motel. Despite the fact she was supposed to be safe, Maya's gaze darted around. She noted the exits as well as everyone in the place. It all seemed safe enough. She sat at the bar, pulling out her wallet to see how much cash she had. It wasn't much.

Hearing a strangely familiar voice, she looked up to see none other than Ryden Bolt. She laughed and said mostly to herself, "Of all the fucking gin joints." She shook her head. When she had left Boston, she had assumed she wouldn't see anyone from that part of her life again. She had assumed she wouldn't see anyone again if Shaw caught up to her. Now that she was faced with it though, Maya wasn't sure how to feel. She had to look different now. She felt different now. She had to wonder if he would know somehow what she had done.

What Maya had heard and recognized as a familiar baritone from what probably felt like a lifetime long ago especially to her, was currently arguing over something insignificant yet very blown out of proportions that had happened in the kitchen and thoroughly displeased the manager of the place with the mess it had left behind. The said manager was none other than Ryden Bolt, in flesh and blood, a man hard to miss if for nothing else than a body full of ink and a presence that promised a very physical encounter of a violent kind should he be rubbed the wrong way.

Of course he was winning the argument, albeit not with violence because in the years he’d been attempting to settle down, Ryden had in fact learned plenty of self control. It was for the mere fact that he was usually right and it just took some rough coaxing for everyone else to see that too. Grumbling employee retreating to clean up the said mess as they should, leaving Ryden to pinch the bridge of his nose for a moment because how come no one could ever do anything right, the wolf was left to resume tending to the bar, glancing up only to catch a sight of what he thought was a ghost. Silver orbs stared, a frown of confusion and delayed recognition placing his brows even lower than they otherwise were. Was he seeing this right?

Tattooed hand rose and fingers motioned the woman over, pointing at a free bar seat. He had to get a closer look, make sure this was for real.

Maya managed a nervous smile and a wave when Ryden motioned for her to come over. It was definitely weird. At first, she had thought he might not recognize her. That would be okay. It would probably be easier. But then recognition had dawned on his face. She had no idea if he had gone back to Boston after she left or if he had tried to contact her. Her phone was in a ditch somewhere in the Boston suburbs. Getting rid of it had been her first order of business after getting on the train. It would be far too easy for Shaw to track her that way. Which meant she hadn't talked to anyone from her previous life in over a year.

"You probably have questions," she said. Ryden seemed angry. He'd always seemed a little angry. He had been arguing with someone in the kitchen. She just hoped he wasn't too angry with her. After all, Maya had to leave like she did. It was the only way to protect people. She added, "But I don't know if I can answer them sober and I only have like ten dollars."

Ryden's thick, scarred eyebrows rose in mild surprise, as if he'd not expected any apprehension from this unforeseen reunion. "Not really. But I'll git ya a drink anyway." He gave her a good long stare before he'd unfolded his arms and stepped away just for a moment to bring about a bottle of whiskey and a glass to our it into, which he did, no ice, leaving it on the counter for Maya to take or leave, whichever she preferred. The man himself leaned his elbows over the bar top, just watching the woman whom he thought he'd probably never see again in this lifetime. "When did ya arrive?"

That was good, him not having questions. She didn't know how to answer questions at the moment. "Thanks," she said, picking up the glass. Maya didn't take a sip right away. Instead, she swirled the amber liquid, watching it as Ryden watched her. She tried not to think too much about what he might see in her now, the fading bruises, new scars and overall gauntness that had settled over her. His first question, she could answer. "Literally, like, 30 minutes ago," she said. She looked up from the glass, now looking him over to see what differences she might find in the man she had known what felt like a lifetime ago.

"No way." More of an expression of surprise than disbelief. Ryden himself had not changed, at least definitely not for the worse; as a matter of fact he seemed like he'd gone through some mysterious improvement one wouldn't exactly be able to point a finger at. He was still a mountain of a man, with enough confidence to toss around, taking up the space he was in like he owned it, stern expression under a low placed brow bone and a wickedly wolfish smirk that slanted into a revealing glimpse of unnaturally sharp, white teeth. Whatever he did with himself in this town, he obviously thrived with it. "Ya hungry?" He asked, a seemingly random inquiry.

Maya nodded. It was surprising to her too, that she was here and she was, she hoped, safe. The latter still felt impossible. Ryden seemed well. If anything, he seemed better than she had last seen him. She was glad for that. She'd always liked him. "A bit," she replied, "Could I just get some fries or something?" She was more than a bit hungry, but she was thinking with her wallet. Fries she could afford. They were better than nothing. Of course, her stomach chose that moment to growl, betraying her. She took a sip of the whiskey, hoping he wouldn't comment on it.

Of course he'd heard the growl coming from her belly, not commenting on it past a brief, low chuckle. "Imma git ya a turkey sandwich with those fries." He announced, leaving no room for further argument on that. A coworker was called over to take in Ryden's order for Maya, disappearing back into the kitchen to get right on it. "How long did ya travel for wherever you was comin' from?" he asked conversationally.

As he left, Maya chewed on the inside of her lip. She didn't think she could afford that. Maybe they could make some kind of deal though. She could do dishes or something. His second question was more complicated than his first one. She had been travelling for months, ever since she left Boston. But Maya worried what other kinds of questions that information might lead to, questions it was probably better if she didn't answer. Instead, she settled on something that was true, but less complicated. "10, 11 hours on the road, but maybe 15 total." She had hitched a ride to Billings from the hospital and then a bus, a train and finally another bus to arrive here.

"Oh wow, didya hitch er sumtin' or were ya, like, sumwhere really fuckin' far away from 'ere?" Ryden mostly guessed, totally alright with just musing to himself if she decided she'd rather not provide a response to that. "Guess ya don't got a place t'stay tonight eh?"

"Part of the way," Maya replied, "I came down from Montana." That was true. She had come here from Montana. She shook her head though when he asked if she didn't have a place to stay. "I paid the motel through the end of the week," she said. At the end of the week, she hoped that she could find somewhere more permeant. Of course, her credit was probably shot. There had to be something though, somewhere in this town. "Have you been back to Boston?" she asked, keeping her tone light and conversational.

Ryden looked up, trying to place the area in his head on the map and failing so he just gave up. "Yah, sounds far away." He nodded when she reassured him that she got a motel to stay at for now. "Yah, I've been, once. Andrei, that guy I went t'visit there, moved to Europe tho so I haven't gone since then."

She shrugged, "Couple hundred miles." By now, a couple of hundred miles didn't feel all that far to her. She must've travelled thousands. She nodded. What Maya wanted to do was ask after their few mutual friends, to know what they said about her leaving and if they hated her. They probably hated her. The night she left she'd been terrified what Shaw might do to anyone he thought had information about where she had gone. In sleepless nights in between then and now, Maya had wondered if that was the right thing. Maybe she should've made up a lie. She couldn't fix that now though and she couldn't know if it had been the right decision. "And everyone was good? When you last went?" she asked.

"I guess." Honestly, Ryden only cared about Andrei. The rest were people he met through him, including Maya. Just a random group he tagged along with as Andrei showed him around Boston and invited him places and bars he thought Ryden might like during his visits. "Nothin' seemed like it had changed, 'sides from you and Andrei leavin'. I ain't in touch with anyone besides him though."

Her turkey sandwich arrived, the coworker leaving it in front of Maya along with a generous portion of fries and a can of coke.

It stung and Maya couldn't pinpoint why. She had lived in Boston for five years. But she had also always kept herself a bit separate from the people she cared about. None of her friends had even been to her apartment. She had tried though. In the last year or two before she left, Maya had tried to open up and be a better friend. To hear that it didn't seem like anything had changed since she left felt like maybe it was better to stay closed off. Of course, this was also secondhand information from someone who had always been a friend of a friend. "Me neither," she said.

"Thanks," she said to Ryden's coworker as they dropped off a sandwich. She picked up a fry and took a bite before speaking again. "So," Maya asked, "This is the mysterious town you're from?"

"I'm from across the pond, if the accept don't make it obvious. But yah, I live 'ere now. Been 'ere for six years," Ryden nodded taking a moment to stick his hands into his pockets in search for his pack of Marlboro reds. Upon fighting them, he lit up, blue smoke curling out of the freshly lit cancer stick. "It's magical an' shit." He added, like that explained anything.

Maya rolled her eyes as they fell back into more of the rhythm they'd had back in Boston. "Yeah, I did get that, but you came to Boston from here," she replied. She watched with surprise as blue smoke curled from the end of his cigarette. It wasn't the smoke that surprised her. Rather the casual and open way he talked about magic. She sighed, tension leaking out of her shoulders. The rumors about this town were true, it seemed. She could be safe here. At least from hunters. "I can see that," she said, "Does this mean we have to talk about how we both know about magical shit?"

"Good job, Captain Obvious," Ry grinned his wolfish smile, smoke seeping through razor teeth. "Yea, we can talk now if ya wanna." Naturally, Ryden said nothing of what he was when they were up in Boston, which was about as magical as a can of worms. But since Maya was now here, this meant she knew enough of magic or was something magical enough to be here. "So, what's yer deal? I'm a werewolf." He ran the tip of his tongue over a sharpened canine which, very likely did look odd before, without the explanation of what he was. His teeth were always unnaturally white, healthy and with prominent sharp points on some. In the dark, the shine of his eyes was akin to an animal caught on camera in the dead of the night. And he never seemed to tire, run out of stamina or have no strength to spare for a jar opening or something more demanding than that.

Maya laughed, something she hadn't done in a long time. "Well, I am as smart as I am pretty," she replied. Back in Boston, she'd had her suspicions about him. She had grown up around werewolves and knew the signs of one. But she hadn't known for sure. She hadn't known Ryden that well, certainly not well enough to assume. "Witch," she said. There was little to hint at that. After her parents' deaths, she had spent years learning how to hide who and what she was. Sometimes, in the privacy of her own apartment she would experiement with her magic. In the wider world though, she seemed as average as any other human. That was very much on purpose.

Maya picked up the sandwich and took a bite. It was really good. Or she was really hungry. Or both. "This is delicious, thank you," she said, setting the sandwich down again.

Ryden grinned back as she laughed, glad to see that even though she looked like she'd been through shit, she still had it in her to laugh at random banter. At her confession that she was a witch, he wrinkled his nose, like that revelation was a mild disappointment. "I ain't a fan o'witches. But don't hex me and we're good." He said, always blunt and honest, even when it wasn't in anyone's favor.

"I didn't make it." He shrugged about the sandwich, taking a long drag off his smoke. "Eat up, s'on me." He added, in case she was worrying about those ten lonely dollars in her wallet.

Maya's head titled slightly, observing him for an extra moment when he mentioned not being a fan of witches. She had to wonder what experience had led to that feeling, but didn't want to pry. She shrugged, "Too cute to be a bad witch, so you don't have to worry about me," she said. One of the few lessons her father had managed to teach her before he'd died was that magic was a gift and should only be used to help. Once in her life had she hurt someone with her magic. Once that she had yet to forgive herself for.

Her brow furrowed though when he told her that the sandwich was on him. It felt like a trap. Then again, after the year she'd had most kindness felt like a trap. "Thanks," she half mumbled around another bite of fry. While he smoked, Maya lapsed into momentary silence. Eventually, she asked, "Do you know if anyone's hiring?"

It made Ryden grin, the false confidence. He was a good judge of character, instincts never failing him, and it was good to get a confirmation of what he was pretty sure of anyway. Maya was a good person - troubled, but good. She would not abuse magic for harm, that much he figured.

He just shrugged to her thanks, continuing to smoke as silence stretched between them, occasionally interrupted by someone waving a hi from further back in the pub or a question or two in the passing as Ryden was obviously the manager of the place and therefore there for those exact things - known by all who visited the Den and there to make decisions or give out instructions where needed.

His attention returned to Maya when she broke the silence. "Prolly plenty o'places. Depends what ya wanna do."

The longer Maya sat the more her exhaustion settled into her body. She had been travelling for fifteen hours, on high alert for most of that. Before that she had been in the hospital, body a bit more than battered. Still, she observed the space around her shrewdly. Ryden clearly had some sort of authority here. That much was obvious both from his casual confidence and the way others interacted with him. He didn't seem completely different from the man she had known, but it was like someone had shone a different colored light on him. She saw something different in him now. This place, The Den, there was something about its regulars that suggested they were more than simply regulars. They all seemed to know each other, greetings given freely with warmth and affection. It felt more like a clubhouse.

Finishing off the whiskey, she set the glass down on the counter. The burn down her throat was a reminder she was alive. Maya adjusted how she was sitting, grimacing as the movement upset her still wounded shoulder. She had to be careful now, think about how she moved to avoid reinjuring herself. She let out a half laugh when he asked what she wanted to do. "Have money mostly," she replied. In Boston, she had worked as a baker. It had been a good job. She was an excellent baker. It wasn't something she wanted to go back to though. The longer she baked professionally the less she found herself baking for her personal satisfaction. She missed that, being able to experiment and give anyway what she made. The only problem was she didn't know what other skills she had, at least not legal skills.

“We’re always hirin’," Ryden mumbled around the cigarette between his teeth, squinting so smoke didn’t get into his eyes. He pointed a thumb over his shoulder, at a cork board on the wall next to the shelvings with bottles and glasses, practically covered to the point that almost none of it remained visible with all sorts of pamphlets, flyers, lists, paperwork and pictures pinned or stapled on it. Somewhere amidst that chaos, just barely peeking through, was a ‘currently hiring’ sign, printed out simply on a plain piece of paper, probably in Comic Sans or other such generic font, key words bolded red to draw attention.

Maya followed the gesture of his thumb, eyes widening. In her mind, it was quite an offer. After all, "You don't know me," she said. That wasn't strictly true. They did know each other. Not well though. "I mean, I could be shit," she added. In all likelihood, Maya could probably not be a good bartender. She wasn't exactly know for her friendly and open personality. She also had no references and a pretty long gap in her employment history. She then added a touch quickly, "I'm, like, not saying I don't want a job. I just…could be more trouble for you."

Ryden shrugged noncommittally at that. “If ya ain’t no good, I’ll jus’ fire ya.” He reached for the bottle of whiskey on the side to pour Maya another glass. “Think about it. Can’t hurt t’give it a go.”

Maya was still in shock. In the last year, people had given her small kindnesses: a meal, a ride, somewhere to sleep for a night. Rarely did she ask for more. Asking for more meant putting people in danger. At least it had, before. There was a part of her that was still afraid, still waiting for Shaw to reappear. But he couldn't. She was safe. Her coworkers would be safe. "I mean, yes," Maya said, "I'll take the job." She didn't have to think about it. The likelihood anyone else would take a chance on her was low or at least felt low. Besides, the vast majority of work experience was in food service. "But you have to stop giving me things. I can't repay it," she said, pushing her glass across the bars.

“Cool. Then come in whenever ya wanna this week. Le’ssee how you’ll do.” Ryden suggested casually - if she ended up appearing, awesome, if not, no harm done. “I ain’t given’ ya shit cause ya can repay it. I’m givin’ ya shit cause ya need it.” Ryden stated, a firmness to his tone although he looked pretty casual as he was saying it. “F’ya think ya don’t need it, I’ll take it away.” He reached for the glass Maya had just pushed away.

"Okay, thanks," she said with a nod. She had no specific plans for the week. Now that she was free, she needed to re-set up her life. Get a phone, maybe start looking at places to rent, that sort of thing. Maya needed to sleep too. Most of her time on the road had been spent awake. It was unlikely that she would sleep well though; she hadn't in years. Maybe if she came in tomorrow to let him give her a trial that would help. It would at least mean she had some money for all those other things she needed to do.

Maya wanted to bristle. She didn't need help. She could handle herself. Her shoulders tightened, ready for a fight even if there wasn't one. Of course, she knew it wasn't true she didn't need help. They both seemed to. Her pride, whatever was left of it at this point, didn't allow her to stop him from taking the glass. Even if she could use another drink. "If I could just get some water, please," she said. She picked up the sandwich in front of her. That she did need. She was starving.

“Sure," he shrugged again, not caring either way, and downed the glass of whiskey she refused to take back, not minding that she’d drank from it only a moment ago, and took it away with him along with the bottle that refilled it. He put those away and came back with a glass of ice water to replace the whiskey. If Maya wanted to fight him, then he was a brick wall and she could do it all she wanted because, it would change nothing. She’d only pound at him pointlessly. Brick walls did not move.

He left her to her turkey sandwich, having noticed just how starved she was, not distracting her from it with any further small talk. He lit up another cigarette, just something to do in the silence between them. A patron came in to request another beer. Ryden provided lazily, enjoying the slow night at the Den, which wasn’t something that happened often enough. By the time he was done with the patron, he was back to the corner where Maya sat eating her sandwich, phone in his hand and a smirk on his lips as he typed away.

She ate quietly. Her gaze still flitted about, never settling too long in one place. She might remind someone watching closely more of a frightened bunny than a person. There had always been something of that quality to her. Maya had always catalogued exits and escape routes. But clearly something had caused the instinct to go into overdrive. She watched people too, Ryden sometimes but not always. Her posture was carefully casual as if she was relaxed. It might be a strange contradiction without knowing what had happened to her in the last year.

Her eyes flicked up when Ryden returned to stand by her. A furrow creased her brow. "Are you hoping I'll go home with you or something?" she asked. That made sense. She could fit his behavior into a story that made sense if that was his motive. He had given her food, a drink, a job. It endeared him to her. It might explain the smirking too. It was a pessimistic explanation and possibly an unfair one. But Maya needed to make it make sense. She need to understand what he wanted from her. He had to want something from her, everyone did.

If Ryden noticed her behavior, he didn’t let it show, perfectly comfortable to just hang out nearby and let her do whatever she wanted, no judgment or unnecessary observations involved. He found this tactic worked with nervous new werewolves too. As abrasive and irritating as Ryden could be when he wanted to behave that way, he could also be a very calming, anchoring presence when someone needed it, and he used that well. At least he believed he did, although he didn’t put too much thought into it. He let it come naturally and if it did good, great. If not, then it is what it is.

“Why’d ya go home with me? Ya got a place t’stay," he drawled lazily, not even looking up from his phone, pausing the typing so he could speak. He had enough trouble spelling words as it was.

The furrow in Maya's brow deepened. It made reasonable sense. She had a place to stay. But she hadn't meant it literally. She was asking if he wanted to have sex wit her. Something that he historically was clear about when he did want. It meant things didn't make sense again. Maya didn't know what he wanted from her or why he was helping her. She had also noted that he stopped typing to talk to her, so she fell into silence again. The sandwich was gone, leaving her to pick at the fries. It was nice to sit in silence with him, to not feel like she had to keep up an appearance of some kind. Something in her was relaxing the longer she sat there.

When he had finished texting, Maya said, "You can ask things, if you want." She felt a little silly to say it. Maybe he didn't care. It wasn't as if they had been best friends. "I don't know, I know I'm a bit different and I just disappeared," she added before chewing on her bottom lip. Even if he had said she didn't owe him anything, it still felt like she did, like she had to explain herself and her sudden appearance somehow. Of course, there were parts of it she didn't think she would be able to talk about. She didn't think he would badger her about specifics.

As another round of silence stretched between them, Ryden continued to focus on his phone, typing away as messages came one after another in a rapid fire, the silent mode giving only vibrations felt in Ry’s hands which held the device. At some point, he put it down, saying his goodbyes for now to the person on the other side of the texting line. To be continued there. After all, they’ve texted almost daily for four years now, and it only got worse lately.

“Kay.” He said, never breaking the noncommittal tone he upheld with her - a tone that left plenty of options to back away, should she choose to. There were no corners in this interaction. If Maya didn’t want to do something, she did not have to. He wasn’t there to force her to do anything, even talk. “Ya jus’ look like you’ve been through shit.” He stated, because he knew that look. After a year of wandering, he had that look for a while too. “Ya healthy, tho?” He asked because that was the most important thing of all. Folding his arms over the countertop, he gave her his full attention this time, since she’d decided they could talk seriously.

Maya nodded when he said that she looked like she had been through shit. It was true. At some point, it had become impossible to hide the side effects of being on the run. Especially if the person looking at her had been through something similar. Maya had to consider her answer to his question. Was she healthy? She wasn't dead. That was a plus. Her leg and shoulder were set, at least enough to be discharged from the hospital. "Mostly," she settled on saying, "Lost a bunch of weight, busted my shoulder, and my leg, but nothing irreversible I think."

“Yeesh," Ryden sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Good thing healthcare’s covered ‘ere. Didya go for a checkup at the hospital?” More of a suggestion than a question, since he assumed she hasn’t gotten to it yet. After all, she was freshly arrived. “How’d ya bust yer shoulder and leg?”

"In the last…" Maya glanced up at the clock, "hour? No, I haven't. I might though, if it's covered." She probably should. If it was covered there was no reason not to. Except for her fear of the questions a medical professional might ask. "I had to bail out of a car. Shoulder hit the pavement first," she replied.

Ya should.” Not in the next hour of course, that’s not what he meant. But maybe tomorrow or in the next couple of days. Ryden cringed again, sympathizing with the pain she went through by jumping out of a moving vehicle. Been there, done that. Was not fun. “What did ya do dat for?” He had to ask. Bailing out of cars in motion wasn’t exactly a thing done at random.

Mentally, Maya added it to the list of things she should do now that she was settling somewhere. It went at the end of the list. But it did make the list. She shrugged, "Had to get out of a bad situation." Again, it was true, but not specific. It hadn't worked either. The sound of the tires screeching against the pavement still haunted her dreams. It probably would for a long time. Shaw had wrestled her back into the car. Her shoulders tightened. The memories were threatening to surface again. Beneath the bar, her foot had started to bounce up and down as nervous energy started to fill her. She took a sip of the water before swallowing. She was okay, she was safe now. It was over.

“No shit,” Ryden snorted. Certainly she didn’t fall out of a car to get away from a good situation. Even if he had been looking away, he’d still be able to feel the nervous energy rising within her. Her heart rate changed and Ryden could hear it, hear the sound of a leg bouncing off the floor too. “That bad of a situation, eh?” He probed carefully, ready to back away if he saw so much as a sign of her anxiety worsening.

She had to give him that one. In addition to being true and not specific, it was obvious. Considering the injury it had caused her, it wasn't something one would do on a whim. Maya nodded at his question, worried her voice would shake if she spoke. She looked away from him, trying to bring herself back in line. Taking a deep breath, she forced herself to appear calm. Her leg went rigid under the bar as she stilled herself. But her heart, fluttering like a caged bird in her chest, gave her away. She brought her gaze back to him. "It was a pretty rough year," she said, expression and tone calm. It might've fooled a human. It had fooled humans before.

Ryden was pretty sure that Maya had just made an understatement of the century. ‘Rough year’ didn’t sound appropriate. He hummed, taking a moment to inhale smoke off his cigarette, bring it closer to burning down to the filter. “Okay. New year, new leaf. Mebbe this one won’t be as rough. Sounds like a plan.” After all, this was what Greywood was - a safe haven. Maybe Maya will find hers here.

Maya swallowed, still holding herself carefully. Her sharp eyes never left him as she tried to assess if he had taken her words at face value. She couldn't quite tell. But she nodded at his words. "That's the hope anyway," she said. It had to be. She didn't think that she could survive another year like the last one. She added, "And I did get a place to stay, food and a job pretty quick, so things are looking up." She tried to sound hopeful. She almost felt it too, but she looked down at her mostly empty plate as she said it. Taking a deep breath, she shook her head slightly. "Anyway," Maya said, bringing her gaze back up, "How'd the last year treat you?"

“Yer one lucky bastard,” Ryden asserted, lips slanting into a cheeky smirk. He then shrugged humbly, like his year hadn’t been much, which wasn’t exactly true. “A’ight. Busy. I’m a busy man.” Which was hard to believe seeing him in an almost empty bar he managed, having plenty of time even while on the clock to chat with her. But Ryden was, in fact, busy. He had the pack, the Den, the car shop and now a small family too. It was a handful, but the wolf had never been happier. Well, he had been once, but that seemed like forever ago, like another Ryden in a parallel universe. “I got nothin’ t’complain about. I got it good.” He concluded and this was true enough. He was finally breathing easy.

She managed a smile, "First time for everything." She didn't feel lucky. But she didn't think he meant it seriously anyway. When he said he was busy, Maya assumed he didn't mean at the moment. After all, at the moment he seemed to have plenty of time to talk to her. Although, it was still early in the night, so it might very well be busy later. The first unhindered smile of their reunion came to her face when he said he had it good like that was true. "Good, I'm glad to hear it," she said and meant every word. He was a good man from what she knew and he should be happy. His statement also wasn't terribly specific. It only seemed right to give him the same space he had given her and not pry.

“As sumone who’s had shit luck all his life too, ya learn t’count yer blessings," Ryden concluded, putting out his cigarette and standing up straight with a little stretch to his lower back which he didn’t really need. He glanced at Maya’s now empty plate. “Ya gunna drink sum more or ya wanna ride home. Er the motel, er wherever ya goin’.” He offered, this meaning he also offered to be that ride if she needed it.

"Believe me, I am," Maya replied, "And thank you." She should probably go. Her bad shoulder and leg were starting to go stiff. Plus she needed to sleep. "I should probably go," she said, "But I'm good to walk. It's not that far." It wasn't that far. At least not in comparison to other places she'd had to walk. Anyway, he had already given her too much. She couldn't accept a ride on top of it. Standing, Maya rolled her shoulders. "It was good to see you and I'll be back to work tomorrow," she said.

#ryden bolt #of all the gin joints: ryden bolt #read more really for length #but #injury tw

[marissaofunderground]

https://at.tumblr.com/dearest-starboy/vvsiepoop-also-drew-art-making-fun-of-homeless/b13ncu6579vc

https://at.tumblr.com/what-the-hazbin/positivelydetectivecomics-pitbullsandpenguins/lvarvqrilx1w

https://at.tumblr.com/what-the-hazbin/vivziepop-and-her-hatred-of-jewish-culture/dv588rxgs5fp

Here's some that go into the racism antisemitism and also making fun of homeless people, as someone who was homeless for 4 years making it a punchline is disgusting, I can't find this one post that goes into the racist stereotype nitzy? I think? Is because she died in the 50's, yellow skinned, cleaning lady, whole thing

First off, she has a lot of haters accusing her of everything under the sun due to mistakes she made when she was younger. They blow this out of proportion saying she’s exactly like JKR when this is false.

THAT BEING SAID

I absolutely CANNOT defend the appropriation of voodou symbols. (However you spell it). Granted, Alastor is supposed to be Creole himself - but still….I’m hoping going forward for the full series this mistake will be corrected as this was just in the pilot.

Another thing we have to keep in mind is what we see in the pilot is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to canonical lore. The series proper should hopefully reveal all the canon lore that has been confirmed by Vivzie in the future - everything from Alastor being Creole and sinners being unable to leave the Pride Ring should come up in the show, among other things. Likewise with Helluva Boss, a lot of the canon still hasn’t been shown yet, but slowly over the course of the series, the things that have been officially confirmed (such as the social stigma of an Ars Goetia sleeping with an imp) took some time to show up.

A lot of the accusations come from people who haven’t even seen the show or have any desire to watch it, let alone know any of the canon the shows have yet to pick up.

As for the homeless person in the HB pilot - he was more or less a background element I think….not a joke….

As for the Sausage party stuff…I looked into that Twitter thread and some of those drawings don’t even look like her art style. I want even more proof for this one. Nothing is unbiased but I need a lot more evidence. Lilith though - yeah I can understand that. I have to say I’m no expert on either Jewish or Christian scriptures. From what I can guess - and correct me if I’m super ignorant here - is that there’s a lot of overlap. I do need to do some homework here, but while I can show concern over, say, goblins and Mr. Pinch in Pizza Tower, and decry anti-Semitism over the goblins in Harry Potter - ESPECIALLY Hogwarts Legacy, Lilith in Hazbin Hotel is a bit more complicated. I know way less in the case of Lilith, unfortunately.

In short this is a complicated mess, especially when people accuse her of everything under the sun - some of which are past mistakes she apologized for because we all do stupid stuff when we’re younger, things done out of ignorance - and then there’s things that are complete reaches and grasping at straws.

Also - with all the bullying and hate she gets, I think she’s sick of it and it really does a number on her mental health. So her blocking “critics” is probably because she just can’t deal with all of this. I get it. I hate that so many people will hate you over past mistakes because every mistake you make online is forever. And then those people will accuse you of being a flaming bigot and grasp at straws for your current projects when there is no real damning evidence.

I bet a lot of people are gonna be thinking that of me now that I’ve written this post. Or hell, even the shit I did here in 2015/2016 when I was a real depressed individual. But that’s the nature of the internet, sadly. It can’t be helped.

#it’s tiring #gonna lose a lot of followers for this but idc tbh

[phoebesarts]

Mother of God

Today i had a small hyperfocus on Mastodon and dumpted the plot of my favorite Story so far. I don't know if i will ever have the time and ressources to make this story come true.

But the world turns darker everyday and with this story i cope.

The year is 21XX. Global warming is in full swing, but at least the fascist regimes of the world are getting tired.

Our protagonist Mila lives in the ruins of Berlin and studies "something to do with media". At her university, she is known as an angry woman who stands up for social justice too much. She has a reputation for being annoying and pushy. But Mila has no intention of letting it get her down.

One day she accompanies her best friend to a witch located in the Spreewald. There, the friend wants to try out a fertility spell (she and her husband are desperately trying to get pregnant). But something goes wrong during the spiritual session: the witch receives a vision and prophesies to Mila that she will become the mother of the god-king. The king who will unite all the gods and bring the long-awaited peace to the world.

One small problem: as Aro-Ace, Mila is not even thinking about bringing a child into the world.

Although Mila keeps this prophecy a secret, all the gods quickly ambush her and want to fight over the right to become the child's father. At the same time, the human media become aware of Mila and begin to exploit the story.

But although the gods endanger lives and destroy buildings in their love-struck frenzy, the people's hatred is increasingly directed at Mila. She confidently announces in an interview that she will never give birth to a child.

In the end, she has no choice but to look for shelter in her home town of Marburg. Back into the bosom of her bizarre big family.

Mila actually wanted to stay away from the family dramas, power struggles and tragic backstories. But now the situation forces her to come to terms with it all.

Unexpectedly, she not only finds unconditional support from her family, but also gets to know her biological father Ares.

Three themes have always been important for the story:

the bodily autonomy of women and queer people. No reason, no matter how sacred, justifies the loss of one's own decision-making ability.

instead of the neoliberal narrative of "me alone against the world", the focus is on community: only together can we confront injustice and make a difference.

a healthy way for broken families to find each other. By meeting each other at eye level and dropping the power struggles.

I would like to see the story realized as an animated film or series. With a high proportion of musicals. I always imagine the animation style to be a mixture of Ghibli, Across the spiderverse and vox machina.

The most importaint song would be based on Billy Talents "Cure for the Enemy"

In a Song like "Surface Pressure" Ares would show Mila the greatest heroic deeds and worst battles in human history. He also shows how he sees himself: as a monster who cannot save comrades and loved ones. And yet he goes into battle again and again because he believes he owes it to his divine siblings.

The final song would be based on Watergun. Mila decides to break the eternal cycle of violence. Or at least to make her contribution to it.

#my writing #writers on tumblr #lgbtqia #writing #original story #musical #ideas #art #aroace #writerscommunity #aromantic #Youtube

[asma-al-husna]

Allah calls Himself Al-Kareem— The Generous, The Honourable, The Beneficent— on two occasions in the Quran. He is Al-Kareem in both His essence, being the source of all virtue, good and honor. He is Al-Kareem in His dealings with His creation; He forgives, He follows through and His continually giving forth of the most precious bounties exceeds all expectations!

The Most Generous, Most Esteemed and Beneficent

Kareem,  Akram, and Ikraam come from the root kaaf-raa-meem, which points out to two main meanings. The first meaning is to be generous, giving, and beneficent. The second main meaning of this root is to be highly esteemed, honoured and valued. 
 This root appears 47 times in the Quran in eight derived forms. Examples of these forms are al-akram (“the Most Generous”), kareemun (“noble”), kiraaman (“dignified ones”), al-mukrameen (“the honoured ones”)  and al-ikraam (“and Honor ”).

In the Arabic language ‘kareem’ does not just mean generous but the term embraces many meanings. ‘Kareem’ includes being forbearing, kind, gentle, patient, noble, pure and beneficial. In other words each and every laudable thing is being described as ‘kareem’.
Examples are a precious ‘kareem’ stone, a beneficial ‘kareem’ letter and a noble, good-looking, a ‘kareem’ person.
Al-Kareem Himself says: O man! What has made you careless about your Lord, Al-Kareem (the Generous), Who created you, fashioned you perfectly and gave you due proportion? In whatever shape He willed, He put you together. [Quran 82: 5-8] and… Read! And your Lord is Al-Akram.[Quran 96: 3]

Al-Kareem Related to other Names

The name Al-Kareem implies all that is honourable, good, and virtuous and therefore is strongly related to various other Asmaa was-Sifaa (names and attributes) of Allah ‘azza wajal.

Al-Kareem is related to Al-Wahhaab (The Giver) and Ar-Razzaaq (The Provider) in the sense that He initiates favors to His slaves, beyond what we deserve. Al-Kareem brought you into existence even though He was not obliged to do so. Al-Kareem gives us the whole world, as He tells us: It is He Who created for you all that is in the earth. [Quran, 2: 29] Our book, the Quran, is not only an instruction but also a cure. Our prayers are not only rituals, but also treasure chests of multiple rewards. Our food is not just one kind, but an amazing variety of tastes, structures and flavours; this is the giving of Al-Kareem!

Al-Kareem is related to Al-‘Afuw (The Pardoner) because even when you sin and forget about it, Allah deals with you generously and makes you live comfortably. It is He who covers your sins and when you turn to Him out of His amazing generosity He doesn’t just forgive but completely erases your bad deeds and on top of this turns them into good deeds. He is At-Tawwaab. What a generous Lord!

Related to Ash-Shakoor (The Appreciative), Al-Kareem rewards you generously when you only present to Him little sincere acts of worship. The ultimate example is Jannah: everlasting pleasure for a couple of years of worship in this life!

Al-Kareem is also related to Al-Haleem (the Forebearing), whenever He gives He gives most generously and when Al-Kareem is disobeyed, He forgives most forbearingly, subhanAllah. He has the most generous and gracious way of forgiving.

Al-Kareem is related in meaning to Al-Wadood (The Loving); us being worthy of His divine love is truly a generosity we should recognize! Al-Kareem says: Verily, those who believe and work deeds of righteousness: the Most Gracious shall bestow love upon them. [Quran, 19: 96]

His Attribute of karam truly is beyond our imagination!

How Can You Live By This Name?

1. Be generous to be close to Al-Kareem.
Allah’s names and attributes are of two types: those that are attributed only to Him ( e.g. Al-Khaaliq, The Creator) and those that can and should be strived for to be attributed to ourselves, one of them is Al-Kareem. Be generous with your belongings, time, and even your words.  The prophet salallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam said: The generous one is close to Allah, close to people, far from the fire; a stingy person is far from Allah, far from people, far from Paradise; and the generous ignorant person is more beloved to Allah than a stingy worshipper. [At-Tirmidhi]

2. Develop a relationship with the Quran al-Kareem.
Allah’s book, the Quran, is kareem because it is full of benefits and guidance, good things and blessings, it includes not a single error or contradiction. Open Al-Quran al-Kareem at least every single day; even if you read one ayah a day, understand it and let it transform your character, mind and heart and see how it will make you more kareem, insha’Allah!

3. Spread the message of Islam.
Al-Kareem honoured (karram-na) us as human beings and specifically honours us as Muslims. Recognize the worth Al-Kareem gave you in being a human being with intellect and use it to benefit the Ummah. Share the ayaat of the Quran with others, teach someone else, even if it is one hadith and spread the message of Islam by showing beautiful, honorable manners to non-Muslims.

4. Don’t forget the fire.
Indulging in all the blessings Al-Kareem gave you, don’t forget about hellfire. The Prophet salallahu ‘alayhi wa sallam said, The people will be thrown into Hell ( Fire) and it will keep on saying, ‘Is there any more?’ till the Lord of the worlds puts His Foot over it, whereupon its different sides will come close to each other, and it will say, ‘Qad! Qad! (enough! enough!) By Your ‘Izzat (Honor and Power) and Your Karram (Generosity)!’ Paradise will remain spacious enough to accommodate more people until Allah will create some more people and let them dwell in the superfluous space of Paradise. [Saheeh al-Bukharee]

5. Study about Al-Kareem.
Al-Kareem says: O man! What has made you careless about your Lord, Al-Kareem (the Generous). Study about Allah, learning about His names and attributes and what they mean to you. Do not be deceived by this world and by the Shaytan. Know that Al-Kareem will never let down those who spend their lives obeying Him, even though others might say practicing your deen is not “cool.” Don’t ever think those who have much in this life but are denying Him, will have any share in the Hereafter. You are here because of Him and for Him; use the intellect and skills Al-Kareem gave You to work towards His pleasure and His ultimate generosity: Paradise!

Wallahu ta’alaa ‘alem.

O Allah, Al-Kareem, we know that You are the Most Generous and Most Esteemed in Your being and dealings. Guide us to be generous to others, aid us to develop honouroble and noble manners, adorn us with understanding and practicing of Your book.  Guide us in spreading the noble message of Islam and return the honour to the Ummah. Make us reflect Your attribute of karama by always being thankful for Your favors which are beyond our basic needs and only turning to You when we ask and enter us into Your greatest generosity, Jannatul ‘Alaa without reckoning, ameen!

#allah #islam #revert help team #asma al husna #revert help #muslim #ayat #daily #allah’s name #dua #pray #prayer #salah #muslimah #hijab #religion #reminder #mohammed #new muslim #new revert #new convert #how to convert islam #convert help #convert islam #become a muslim #welcome to islam #daily ayat #prophet #god #revert

[citrusreadstoa]

Reading The Dark Prophecy: Chapter 1 (SPOILERS)

We're only at the second book and the title is already this ominous.

"Lester (Apollo) / Still human; thanks for asking" You're welcome. I like to show that I care.

"When our dragon declared war on Indiana, I knew it was going to be a bad day." Starting off strong. I wonder how Indiana is going to fight back. Do they have an army at standby?

"Cyclopes of Pittsburgh" Are those the same cyclopes the Lost Trio fought? No, I looked it up. They were in Detroit.

"Potina, the Roman goddess of childhood drinks, who pursued us in the form of a giant red pitched emblazoned with a smiley face." I thought my friend was just kidding when he said they fought the Kool-Aid man. Anyway, did Zeus/Jupiter send Potina to just make his son's life a little bit worse?

"the cupola of the Indiana Statehouse" CUPOLA (n.): a small dome, especially a small dome on a drum on top of a larger dome, adorning a roof or ceiling

"would not respond to over-the-counter zit medicine." He had time to try? Clindamycin and Benzoyl Peroxide Gel from Walgreens is somewhat effective for me.

"You're the one who's been having visions" Ohoho! He's been visions? While awake? Is he pulling a Hazel now? "the city you dreamed about" Aw, never mind.

"Not the yummy kind of licorice, either; the nasty variety that sits for eons in your stepmother's candy bowl on the coffee table. And, no, Hera, why would I be talking about you?" Canonically, Hera is a fan of licorice? As if I needed any more reason to hate her.

Apollo's description of Indianapolis... man, I feel sorry for anyone living there who reads this. "one proper New York neighborhood . . . stretched out to encompass the entire area of Manhattan, then relieved of two-thirds of its population and vigorously power-washed" He makes it sound like even the people who live in Indianapolis don't want to live there. Can any Indianapolians confirm?

"Capture Apollo before he can find the next Oracle." I find it cool that Apollo's BFF in this series is also the one trying to capture and kill him. "She also happened to be my demigod master, thanks to Zeus's twisted sense of humor." Apollo, I don't think Zeus specifically chose Meg for you. You walked into that yourself and if it were anyone's plotting that led to this, it was Nero's.

"as restless as Festus." Hey, a rhyme.

"CAFE PATACHOU" He named the café! The café's going to be important, I betcha!

"At Three Mile Island in 1979, the mortals somehow failed to realize that their partial nuclear meltdown was caused by an epic chainsaw fight between Ares and Hephaestus." Yo, what?

"Their faces were too placid. Their dazed smiles" THIS IS THE SAME SPELL LUKE HAD ON THE CRUISEGOERS. Is the entire city of Indianapolis brainwashed?

"Festus projectile-vomited a column of flames" Aw, no! But maybe he doesn't hate Indiana after all. Maybe that was a warning that he was about to get sick again. "Valdez was fireproof. His clothes were not." I guess Calypso hasn't gotten around to making him a fireproof wardrobe yet.

"I imagined walking into a T.J. Maxx" Do books work like movies with companies paying for product placement?

"something about her proportions seemed off." Monster. She's a monster. A resident of the uncanny valley. "What if they erected a statue of me in my present form--a giant golden Lester in the center of their city?" I think the more plausible welcome you're going to get is being stuffed in a sack and dragged to their headquarters.

"the sound of finger bones breaking." She hurt herself trying to punch this lady? Nanette's got a solid face. "Her head toppled off her shoulders . . . Its base was as smooth as stainless steel." Oh, she's a robot. Don't tell me now that all the inhabitants of Indianapolis have been replaced by automatons. Were the people with Capgras right for once? "Its voice came from its gut area, which meant..." That she's one of the people without heads! Those people whose face are on their torso and who don't need a head.

Do blemmyae have special powers, though, or are they just gonna wrestle them?

#reading trials of apollo #reading the dark prophecy #reading toa #reading tdp #toa spoilers #trials of apollo spoilers #trials of apollo #the dark prophecy #percy jackson and the olympians #apollo pjo #apollo #leo valdez #calypso pjo #calypso #festus #festus the dragon #festus the happy dragon #nanette #nanette the blemmyae #pjo #toa #pjo hoo toa #rrverse #riordanverse