Thejunkdrawers - I Might Need It Later...

So, tattoo shop AUs are really popping off lately and personally I love it. What’s more romantic than bleeding for art? Nothing!

But as someone married to a tattoo artist, I have been experiencing some mild She Wouldn’t Say That regarding tattoo culture. So here’s a few quick tips that may help inform your AU. With a grain of salt for my mostly-second-hand knowledge:

NO ONE REPUTABLE SHOP WILL TATTOO A DRUNK PERSON. EVER. or even a person they suspect of any kind of inebriation. This is not just for Regret reasons, but also because alcohol is a blood thinner. If someone is on an acute dose of blood thinners, you generally do not want to stab them dozens of times per second.

Maybe this is regional, but in my experience most tattoo places don’t call themselves parlors anymore. It has a kind of seedy vibe. I see shop or studio a lot but rarely parlor.

Most tattoo artists are hot, yes, but none are as hot at my wife

Tattooing janks up your hands. Sometimes in a RSI way but definitely in a changing-gloves-every-five-minutes-fucks-up-your-skin way.

Artists themselves are rarely if ever employees of the shop. They will be independent contractors who pay the shop either a cut of their sales or rent on their station like a hair dresser. They are also (usually) responsible for taking care of their own supplies, tools, etc. except for the stencil printer. What kind of dweeb would have their own stencil printer?

There is always a line for the stencil printer. Always.

Artists generally spend orders of magnitude more time working on art, replying to emails, doing consults, etc compared to time with their needles in skin.

A typical schedule for an artist might be: wake up at noon and guzzle half her body weight in coffee, one appointment from 1-4, and another from 6-9. Home to eat one (1) real meal at 10 pm. Drawing until 5 am. This is good for her actually and good for our marriage and she’s so healthy all the time.

An ideal shop receptionist needs to be friendly, knowledgeable, and encouraging. They also need to be willing to get out the baseball bat that is kept behind the counter.

If a shop has to choose between “good people skills” and “will promptly rebuff Nazis and the obviously inebriated” the later is often a more important consideration.

At any given moment in any given shop there’s going to be at least one apprentice or someone bumming around hoping to be taken on as an apprentice. They spawn on tic and this feature cannot be disabled.

Again I can not overstate how hot my wife is

What are some resources for people who want to better get into and analyze character design? I’ve been seeing posts in relation to a franchise I enjoys character design, and unlike a lot of people, I’d like to have my opinion be a bit more informed.

I always struggle to answer this kind of thing because my answer is "read a lot of criticism and maybe get a humanities degree in something."

This is art, so it's not really... there isn't really a handbook for this stuff. Everything in character design is utterly contextual, basically every rule that's true in one place is reversed in another.

I wish there were some books I could recommend, but the trouble is every time I've tried a book claiming to be "about character design" they tend to devolve into art tutorial books, or only speak to one very specific genre, or are more like personal treaties from specific artists outlining their specific approach.

All of these can be useful, to be clear! I'm not saying they're not worthwhile books. But I've yet to find something that addresses what people usually seem to be asking for, which is something like a learner's guide, or a kind of "introduction to character design."

ngl about five minutes away from deciding to write a book on character design myself, at least the very, very basics, it bothers me that somebody smarter than me hasn't done it yet

Most of what you need in order to understand and critique character design, though, you will find in art and literary history and in media studies of various forms. Learning a bit about semiotics is useful, learning a bit about media criticism and critical scholarship is useful.

Character design is a big complicated soup of things, so there's a big complicated list of ingredients that go into it. Read broadly, study broadly, the more things you understand and are familiar with, the more complex your thinking about design can become.

Oh hey, do you know what time it is? It is highly specific resource time!

Today we have the Royal School of Needlework Stitch Bank! There are HUNDREDS of stitch types in the RSN Stitch Bank.

And more added regularly, let’s look at a recent addition

I picked the first one in the 25 recently added Elizabethan stitches, the Elizabethan French Stitch

The stitch bank provides written and photo tutorials as well as a video option to learn to do it yourself. There are examples of the stitch in use, resources, references, everything but a needle and thread!

rsnstitchbank.org

Hey runners (and walkers)! Thought this might be helpful :)

zoo-ika is here!!

at long last the silly little suika-like my friend @scookart and i made is ready to play!! it’s free to play on your browser, no ads, just cute animals and fun!!

itch.io

Zoo-ika by funwalker

Merge cute animals. How high can you go?

Concept: a JRPG-inspired setting where instead of star signs or tarot arcana or whatnot, bullshit personality typing is based on what elemental attacks you’re weak and/or resistant to.

(”She’s resistant to fire and weak to lightning? Ouch - you know that means major commitment issues.”)

catopumas are so interesting 2 me bc theres only two species so far in the genus, and its either

a very gentle looking asian golden cat

very kind looking, round. 10/10

and then the other in the genus is

the bay cat, or as i like to call them - the weasel cat. long, kinda weird looking, but still 10/10 despite the weaselness.

Another worldbuilding application of the "two layer rule": To create a culture while avoiding The Planet Of Hats (the thing where a people only have one thing going for them, like "everyone wears a silly hat"): You only need two hats.

Try picking two random flat culture ideas and combine them, see how they interact. Let's say taking the Proud Warrior Race - people who are all about glory in battle and feats of strength, whose songs and ballads are about heroes in battle and whose education consists of combat and military tactics. Throw in another element: Living in diaspora. Suddenly you've got a whole more interesting dynamic going on - how did a people like this end up cast out of their old native land? How do they feel about it? How do they make a living now - as guards, mercenaries? How do their non-combatants live? Were they always warrior people, or did they become fighters out of necessity to fend for themselves in the lands of strangers? How do the peoples of these lands regard them?

Like I'm not shitting, it's literally that easy. You can avoid writing an one-dimensional culture just by adding another equally flat element, and the third dimension appears on its own just like that. And while one of the features can be location/climate, you can also combine two of those with each other.

Let's take a pretty standard Fantasy Race Biome: The forest people. Their job is the forest. They live there, hunt there, forage there, they have an obnoxious amount of sayings that somehow refer to trees, woods, or forests. Very high chance of being elves. And then a second common stock Fantasy Biome People: The Grim Cold North. Everything is bleak and grim up there. People are hardy and harsh, "frostbite because the climate hates you" and "being stabbed because your neighbour hates you" are the most common causes of death. People are either completely humourless or have a horrifyingly dark, morbid sense of humour. They might find it funny that you genuinely can't tell which one.

Now combine them: Grim Cold Bleak Forest People. The summer lasts about 15 minutes and these people know every single type of berry, mushroom and herb that's edible in any fathomable way. You're not sure if they're joking about occasionally resorting to eating tree bark to survive the long dark winter. Not a warrior people, but very skilled in disappearing into the forest and picking off would-be invaders one by one. Once they fuck off into the woods you won't find them unless they want to be found.

You know, Finland.

Read more about trilobite beetles and larva here!

Photos by melvynyeo