Ren

My newest masterpiece. Maybe I'll draw the cool S next.

#Art #MastoArt

Meteors are cool and all, but if you think about it, Earth is a space rock too.

Overthrow the roosters!
Let there be a chicken coup!

What happened to naming people things like “Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim?”

So much better than Jayden or whatever.

Book acquired!

I am a creature because I must be.
I must be because I can’t be human.
Heck.

Love some illuminated manuscript illustrations.

Give me more art of rabbits on snails having jousting matches.

Melon collie and the infinite sadness is the mood for tonight.

I don’t like the Smashing Pumpkins really. I just like the album title.

“Redemption” is not a useful concept. Good and bad do not counteract each other.

But by the same token, I think that also means you can’t say someone is worthlessly bad.

I’ve seen a lot of people who, like me, are trans, queer, asexual among other things and who want to view the world as a binary good and bad as a result. The people who made things hard on us are bad, and we’re good for recognizing those power dynamics and fighting against them. And I gotta say it’s nowhere near that simple; I think that mindset leads to a severe lack of forgiveness, empathy, and understanding of others that does not allow for them to grow and better themselves.

One of the first ways I realized I was not like others was in being aro/ace. I did not know those terms or that others like me really existed. And I grew resentful of amatonormativity and sexual normativity, though I would not have called them those things then or even made the distinction between that and just regular romance and sexuality. I had no one to talk to about it, no concept of what it meant to not be a straight cis man, despite not being one myself. And I took out that resentment on others when I was young. I was also young and hormonal and didn’t understand the pain I was creating by getting mad at others for being interested in romance and sex. A lot of the ways I lashed out I later realized were especially harmful to women and queer people.

A small part of what changed was growing up. But a large part of it was finding others like me online I could talk to. Even if I never felt like I really belonged in the LGBTQ+ community (I still don’t), simply having the knowledge and experience of others who have gone through the same things accessible to me changed me quite a lot. It widened my perspective beyond just my own pain and let me see the ways I had hurt others.

For some people (who I suspect grew up with access to this community and never felt like an outsider to it), I can see a tendency to view all such harm as strictly evil and a sign of being a bad person. Almost ineffably and intrinsically so. And I see so often those same hurting people calling for harm to those they view as evil.

But that’s the same thing I did when I was hurting and had no support, from the other side.

I don’t think any of the things I said at that point in my life were justifiable, nor do I expect them to be canceled out by any good I do now. But I do know they wouldn’t have happened if people who understood would have just reached out and said “hey, we know what you’re going through, and we’ll help you get through it.”

For this reason, I don’t think Punishing Evil is the way to create positive change in the world. Because the way people learn important moral lessons isn’t through being yelled at, hit with a milkshake, or being punched in the face. Oftentimes, what actually gets people to change is love and compassion.

And if you decide that others are evil and therefore incapable of change, you are not showing the compassion that actually will allow them to change.

I’ve gotten criticism from cynics over this viewpoint many times. Some think I’m too soft and will be taken advantage of. Some are afraid of others taking advantage of what they perceive as weakness. If you think this is naive, so be it. It’s the truth that I’ve learned throughout my whole life time and time again.

Grackles are not crows, but they are definitely good and pretty birds.

Feeling wild and untamed and feral and heckin' creaturey.

Cocknitive Ballhavioral Therapy.

I do not know how professional artists keep going.

I feel sometimes like all the creativity is gone from me.

I might have figured out a project to work on now. The upside is that it's one that excites me.

The downside is that it's overly ambtious and I doubt I'll finish by the month's end.

Just an illustration of a scene from my old Cycles idea.

Basically just expanding the first three panels of this page into a *wide* landscape illustration. I'm talking 30x6 inches at 300 dpi.

Ah yes, the sixteen genders.

I read today the phrase "Genre-fluid" describing a band as "Gender-fluid."

Heck. I think I need to learn about weather patterns on planets that are tidally locked to their parent star.

Did you know that music is an arcane art and it even comes with its own magic circle?

You can do some really complex and powerful magicks with this.

I wanna be a deific beast.

I think I finally figured out what I want to do with the next linocut.

Close-up grey fox face, similar to this old pen drawing of mine.

Walmart, what are we doing here?

We need 364 more "Trans Days of..."

Where's my Trans Day of Staying Inside Eating Ice Cream?

Where's my Trans Day of Remembering to Put the Clothes in the Dryer?

Where's my Trans Day of Divine Transfiguration?!!

Found this today, and I must share it.

The person who made the site has been relaying Bulbapedia descriptions of Pokemon to their mother, who has been drawing them entirely based on those descriptions.

The results are wonderful.

https://pokemum5.wordpress.com/

People out there being creepy on the internet asking "ASL?" (Age, Sex, Location) when they could be asking "NQF?" (Name, Quest, Favorite color / Flight speed of an unladen swallow)

Drawing in progress!

Taking a break from the big piece to work on something a little more self indulgent and a little different than what I normally do.

This needs some creature claws on the instrument though. Can't have a human playing it.

Drawn with a photograph I took as reference.

#WIP