ELSEWHERE

One of my goals this year has been to start drawing again! I've made the conscious decision not to post anything anywhere public unless I want to (meaning mostly I'm not going to stress about posting any artwork to Twitter &tc), but this one I wanted to share here because I think it turned out well! For now I'm keeping to a more cartoonish style because I really like that in art and I don't think it would spark joy for me to achieve realism, although I'm still working on my anatomy and whatnot because that's always relevant. Can't break rules without knowing what they are first, and the like.

Anyways! This is my D&D character Rex as a boy on the day he meets the Goliath woman who ends up adopting him.

Maevik picked the boy up and felt him nestle against her, fragile and small as a baby bird. She held him like that for a moment, unsure what to do next. Certainly she liked children well enough, but never held one in such a way that she remembered, and even a half-Goliath the boy’s age would be twice his size.
The knife-sharp points of Rex’s hip bones as he wriggled into place reminded the Admiral that his upbringing thus far wasn’t doing him any favors, either.
But then the child murmured an incomprehensible noise, reaching his arms up to place them around her neck. As he gripped the fur collar of her coat, Maevik felt a strange instinct take hold. She shifted her weight, floorboards creaking underneath her, and rocked her strange new friend back-and-forth. Hummed, too, because this seemed the sort of thing that should be set to music. It was a nothing tune, pulled from half-remembered bits of something her mother used to sing and the less bawdy parts of a shanty she liked from her naval days.
Rex went limp almost immediately, and once he started to softly snore, the aging Admiral thought only:
Well, I suppose that’s that.

I enjoy having a FF14 community to hang out with but if one more person tries to mansplain basic video game concepts to me I am going to break them in half like a twig

erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Mon Mar 06, 2023 6:47 pm

I enjoy having a FF14 community to hang out with but if one more person tries to mansplain basic video game concepts to me I am going to break them in half like a twig

If I have expressed I do not want to do X thing in the video game you like, that is not an invitation to explain the content to me or to explain the benefits of playing it! I comprehend what a high difficulty raid is and did not ask you! I am allowed to casually decide I am not interested in doing something because it turns out I'm a grown goddamned adult with a keen sense of what I do and don't enjoy in a video game! I will bite you!

My petty rage aside, wow, I have had a mega ultra stressful weekend!

The tl;dr is this --

erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Wed Mar 01, 2023 4:29 pm

I did take an additional day off for a three day weekend because [top secret]

was me picking up a dog for a trial run adoption! Before I tell you how it went (spoilers: badly!), I want to clarify a few points:

1) I signed no contract
2) I paid no fee
3) this was expressed, in writing (e-mail), between myself and the rescue group, as a trial run over the weekend to see if the dog would be a good fit in my household
4) the dog herself was described to me as a dog about 2 yrs old with a gentle/timid temperament and average activity level

I picked the dog up and immediately felt like it wasn't going to work out. I'm not any sort of expert on assessing dog age, but I think she was barely a year old -- her toe beans were still puppysoft and she had the gangly look young dogs have before they fill out. And instead of a gentle demeanor, she was kind of a hellbeast! I am not sure she had ever actually been walked on a leash before, for starters, and while I expected her to be rough around the edges I wasn't prepared for a super extroverted and romping puppy with not even a baseline for good behavior. I would've been starting from scratch (and against the wind, fighting her already learned rude behaviors) and to be honest, if I wanted to do that I would just adopt an actual puppy and raise them from little. Baby was similarly unimpressed; she tried to play with her but the dog just wanted to bully Baby out of her toys.

So I went ahead and notified the rescue lady that hey, this isn't really working out, and approached it from the angle of the dogs not vibing vs. arguing the dog was misrepresented (which she was, but I didn't want to have that argument). I figured no hard feelings, I've been a slight inconvenience but it's what's best for the dogs.

The rescue lady! Lost! Her! Mind!

I won't go into all the details but it took me almost three whole days to force her to take the dog back and she alternated between outright hostile and passive aggressive the entire time. After our business was concluded I blocked all her contact information, including her rescue group on social media, and am going to have a long hard think before I try to adopt a dog again. I may not, at all. I stayed polite and held my ground and did not give into her shenanigans (I trauma-joked with Sophie that this lady didn't stand a chance because I am battle-hardened against someone who uses her same techniques but is both meaner and more cunning and yes, I mean my mother), but it absolutely emotionally exhausted me.

Today I'm just recouping spoons as best I can, and I am very tired of people.

I let myself just exist yesterday, which involved a lot of video games and a honkin' huge nap in the middle of the day, but today I'm getting back to my usual baseline. "I had a stressful weekend" is good for one day of recovery shenanigans, but after that an Erika needs to get her shit together.

Besides, I get grumpy if I'm out of my routines for too long.

I'm still somewhat in shock over how poorly the weekend went, and sour I wasted a long weekend on pure conflict-anxiety, but, eh! Life goes on and I'm overall none the worse for wear. I have about 30 more minutes of Sit at Desk time so I'm gonna work on some art, then I need to tidy up and exercise and get ready for the work day. Hope everyone is well!

I drew my socially awkward fish son

I just had a spontaneous visceral memory of way back when I was a young teenage Erika on the Gaia Online writing forums (I know); I was in a worldbuilding thread and mentioned that I wanted my world, which at the time was a sort of snow-covered high fantasy situation, to have Large Animals kind of like in Princess Mononoke --

Anyway, some chad answered with a lengthy and "gotcha!" explanation of how [something something science about how mammals don't get that large because they need X, so I would have to account for Y] and I didn't have the words or the experience to express my reaction correctly so I think I just got flustered and stopped posting in the thread, but if that happened to me today I would just make the animals even bigger, out of spite.

Wow, fuck that guy. Princess Mononoke animals aren't even super big, like, there are mammals that size that exist right now in real life. God give me the confidence of a man being wrong on the internet

erikavonkaiser wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 7:42 pm

I drew my socially awkward fish son
27Feb2023 Merillian Reference.png

Sophie sent me this I'm wheezing

mek wrote: ↑Tue Mar 07, 2023 11:40 pm

Wow, fuck that guy. Princess Mononoke animals aren't even super big, like, there are mammals that size that exist right now in real life. God give me the confidence of a man being wrong on the internet

I just want wolf to be Big!!!