#drawing today wasn’t intended as vent art - originally I’d wanted to draw a ghoul lord inviting a wizard to an apparently feast, and she’d dispel the illusion to reveal body parts and entrails. This isn’t my usual deal. CW for drawn parts of corpses.
occasionally I think I'm superhuman right up until something triggers me and it's ridiculously easy to trigger me.
@erin_kitsune points out that I'm not human, but then neither's Superman and *he's* described as superhuman.
The Wild Robot, thoughts and some spoilers
So I got to see The Wild Robot. Visually it's gorgeous, and predictably I wound up weeping at points, but the story's kind of disjointed. It's sort of like Dreamworks trying to make a Studio Ghibli film so there are places they pull punches and it feels disingenuous where a Miyazaki film would hurt like hell.
The initial storyline about a stranded robot and her fox companion moving from taking care of an orphaned gosling until he can survive by migrating during the winter REALLY works. The robot's just seeking a meaningful task, the fox trying a new scam, and the gosling is limited by being a runt, and all of them actually grow beyond their "programming."
Then there's an added storyline about the gosling becoming some sort of brave goose leader and the island's animals joining together during a terrible snowstorm, then to help the robot fight agents of her less than altruistic manufacturer when they come to retrieve her, and afterwards the animals are united by those experiences, and it's just a little *too* happy an ending and sort of misses with me if that makes sense.
Colored one #drawing today using some new know-how about the fill tool, which shaved about an hour off the process. Coloring something with one very bright lightsource took a *lot* more time than I figured on initially.
https://youtu.be/vvTzbvbPLN4?si=prxKkpIqQoI8-mc4
and because it still counts as Metallica;
15 15 11 18 11 08
oh man this character ROCKS! Not quite good enough for 1e bard but this is definitely multiclass material
re: religion related stuff
further; this shit's HUGE. There is no Hollywood ending where everything gets nicely tied up after 2 hours (okay, 6-9 if you're doing a trilogy and include extra director's cut stuff etc). Regardless of what I now know to be much greater agency than I'd been accepting in myself, the big stuff is going to grind along for a long time, hurting people and I'll be included in that. To some extent, I'm stuck facing that next year I'll be right back here, asking forgiveness for having seen complex big situations through the lens of being incredibly pissed off, and saying Kaddish for even *more* people who went into the meatgrinder.
religion related stuff
in trying to accept Yom Kippur as meaningful (there are a lot of ways I could see the holiday as exactly the WORST parts of my issues, and I used to; I'm never exactly going to LOVE this holiday, it's not easy and it's not supposed to be, but I don't want to resent and hate it anymore) I've started seeing it as essentially forward looking.
ANY coming year is full of challenges and here facing them involves accepting my failings (lojong slogan "Drive all faults into one"), accepting or trying to remember connection to a larger world beyond getting caught up in my immediate experiences, and that part of the larger world is that people have a lot more going on than just the part I immediately see and judge. I can think of a fair number of places where I run right up against irritation, fear, fatigue and self hate on the regular, places where I could go reeling off into all kinds of mara.
However the year I'm about to go into is full of big places where I could be upset, and where I can be (and at some point WILL likely be) profoundly hurtful, thanks to a contentious election which yes, involves trying to most compassionately react to people I hate saying and doing things I hate (it's going to be difficult no matter who wins, since that's "trying to retain some sense of compassion while desperately scared" - it's just how the desperately scared aspect plays out); a horrifying war where it would be very easy to dismiss actual peoples' pain, grief and needs through taking a side (and I really worry about my gut level reaction to folks here); and on a far more personal level, my mother's declining health and my father's related role as caretaking making both of them simultaneously more difficult to be with and more VITAL to be with them.
Let's be careful out there.
Lots of random gunk, but some drawings and cooking talk too. Obsesses about DnD and related topics. Left-leaning/profoundly frustrated politics. Black lives matter; trans rights are human rights.
Occasionally NSFW art and discussion, please do follow if you're 18+.