One time my dad came to family dinner all excited “you know that show Sherlock? I hear fans are writing whole new stories for it online”

And in perfect unison my sister and I yelled “DAD NO!” So vehemently he stopped in his tracks.

Then a look of dawning comprehension on his face.

“Oh, this is like Kirk and Spock, isn’t it”

And I died right then and there.

My mom was into fanfic back when it was still all in handmade zines passed back and forth in-person. My mother is the one who first told me what fanfic was. My mother used to print her favorite fics out on our home printer and stick them on the shelf to read again later. My mom had an Ao3 account before I'd ever heard of Ao3.

Fanfic is not some new millennial/gen z thing that nobody over 35 knows about. It's really not that weird for middle-aged folks and elders to be into it. The folks who were writing Spirk fic in the 60s are, like. Still around.

Yes they are. And some of them have given me actual money to write for them!

It's an amazing world we live in. :)

Signs like these are community-changing. They reframe the whole verge.

this sign + comment should be taught in literally every single graphic design course

wow tumblr really loves piracy huh. this didn’t break 100 on any other platform, but got 10k notes in less than 24 hours here. yo ho tumblrinas.

Piracy 🤝 Physical Media 🤝 Libraries

Physical media has two hands 😌

In the nicest way possible, if you see this as "basic" male anatomy and all other possibilities as variations on this, your art will be Not Good except in circumstances of dumb luck

99% of men Do Not look like this, ever, at all, and out of those that ever do, they Do Not look like this 99% of the time.

Abs don't appear defined unless you're tensing and flexing your whole abdomen, and they don't appear that defined unless you're unhealthily dehydrated. You don't get abs like that in the first place unless you're doing intense workouts, dumping protein in everything you eat, and probably restricting food unhealthily specifically to get that kind of look

But it's not a problem just because it's unrealistic, it's a problem because it betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what muscle is and does.

Like, drawing bodies in dynamic poses is not going to be very fun for you if you don't get that muscle is squishy when relaxed and you're imagining it as this tough, stiff pulley system

like, if you look at renaissance and baroque paintings of men, which were painted by masters of anatomy who did intensive studies including disections to learn how to depict the male body, the men in those paintings and sculptures DONT look like the above. they almost never have defined abs.

for instance, if you look at rubens abduction of ganymede,

an idealised figure of a man who is meant to be very attractive. hes literally ganymede! but not only does he not have abs, you can see rolls of fat where his trunk bends. his arms are clearly muscular but the dehydrating looking hyperdefinition is clearly lacking. below is michelangelo, who specialized in painting extremely muscular men and did more dissections than the average doctor (apologies for image quality but it shows my point)

so yeah please dont learn to draw men from tutorials that look like that. learn it from secret pope-sanctioned dissections