Your Purpose In Life Is Not To Love Yourself But To Love Being Yourself.

Happy Pride!

15-year-old Rolesville student slammed to ground by school officer: “I was in shock”.

In a video posted on Twitter by a Rolesville student, a school officer can be seen lifting 15-year-old Jasmine Darwin and slamming her to the floor.

Jasmine says she saw her sister fighting another student and rushed to break up the altercation. Then the officer grabbed her from behind and slammer her on the floor.

Ruben De Los Santos, the officer seen in the video and a member of the Rolesville Police Department has been placed on paid administrative leave. 

Sources (x/x)

no but being told to use your communication coping skills when talking to abusive people is bullshit. abusers do not listen to their victims no matter how reasonable we are.

like. anything that shows we're an individual with thoughts and feelings is going to make an abuser double down. using "i feel" statements isn't going to help if your abuser lashes out at you for showing feelings. speaking calmly isn't going to help if your abuser is threatening you. gently stating what you need isn't going to help if your abuser neglects even your simplest needs.

also so many of us hide our anger and rage. we dont speak our mind, because it's dangerous. it's the most threatening thing to an abuser... but it's also the most empowering for us. anger is the feeling that tells us something is wrong, and we need to embrace it. because our anger is not the danger - our abuser's reaction to it is, and that reaction is not our fault.

Find a soul that doesn’t lose appreciation once they are used to you.

this korean butch lady is so cool she legally changed her name to lesvos, a variation of lesbos the birthplace of sappho. which is also the name of her lesbian bar, the first one ever established in south korea in 1996.

link to article here

I want all nonblack people to watch this video, especially white people.

This is the best video IMO that displays the depth of what it feels like to be Black in the midst of white supremacy.

This is the rage that burns in so many Black people and eats at us when it is not sufficiently soothed by our self restraint and years of learning to cope with and sit with us. This is the pain that shortens Black people’s very lives, that we smother each day. This is the justified yet unjustly ignored anger we have learned to hold and to aim and to deal with without breaking (too much).

This is the fire that those of you who are just showing up on the scene are learning to sit beside.

When you ask us ‘how we’re doing’, understand that this is the real core of it, every single day, and we have had to learn to laugh, to sing, to dance, to work, to grieve, to heal around heavy, heavy pain. I don’t get the feeling that y’all are expecting nor could you handle if we answered you like this. But I do feel like you should already know how we’re doing: we’re Black.

So y’all, sit with this video for a hot minute.

Kimberly Jones, you are a warrior. I feel every moment of this, every diaphragm flex, every tenuously tempered shout. And I hope that you are taking a break, and experiencing a moment of peace, because you deserve it.

Truth 💓

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.

-James Baldwin

Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents

For anyone who wants a free pose-able human reference for drawing

The other day I came across this awesome program by accident (I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.

It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.

There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79. I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well. 

Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the features available in both versions.

There are three features the free version doesn’t have:

Can’t save OBJ files for export

Can’t download models and poses from Doll Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)

It can’t load saved files

The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and close the program, you can’t load that pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you. 

But, the default model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a pose tag that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.

Even the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See, like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:

The morphing tag is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and choose from a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones. Don’t like the options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider that lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design. 

So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii Muscle-chan!!

The scale tag lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different joints. This feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body shape variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more digitigrade model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)

Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.

The ability to pose hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers. 

And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like. 

In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.

Basically, this program is awesome and free and you should totally check it out if you want a good program for creating pose references.