Not only are the Comedy Wildlife Photo Award winners all excellent, the banner announcements are glorious when taken out of context.

EVERY single one of these is memeable

YES!!

Every single one of these penguins has a totally different personality and more personality than any of the lions in the 2019 3D animated Lion King

Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

Encouragement and acknowledgment are so much more effective than punishment.

One of the moments that I think about a lot when I think about how much I love my Dad, is that once when I was a teenager prone to spending long hours alone in my room I emerged to spend time with the family, he joked “Oh look, it’s the lodger!”

And before I’d even processed what he meant (that I was behaving more like a tenant than a family member), he went on some kind of internal flashback journey, and said “My father used to say that to me and I hated it, I don’t know why I said it to you,” and he apologised, and never made a joke like that again.

It’s like he did a speedrun on overcoming generational trauma.

underrated part of petting a cat is when you reach over their head to scratch their back and they bonk their head on ur arm

that’s the stuff………………

This to me is the cats equivalent of when I kisses the forehead

My gosh.

This sounds heavenly

this is so not what i expected at all. it's like a cheesy 80s movie love scene soundtrack, but also...good.

Uncaring

I had a pet house centipede for a few years in Durango. By which I mean, there was a large house centipede in my apartment that I named and would sometimes make direct eye contact with and point at the silverfish and yell "GET HIS ASS!" because the total ineffectiveness of that was amusing.

...until one day, she started approaching me while I was pointing out a silverfish, and found it. After a few weeks, she would come out from behind the cabinet and stare at me until I pointed out a silverfish. I don't think she understood the pointing because she was just sort of orbit me until she found it, but she definitely understood that that pose meant "there are snacks about".

We were friends for both years I lived there, and I made sure to take her to the apartment of a bug-loving friend before I left because I was worried the next occupant might kill her for being friendly.

Twilight Princess is living rent-free in my head after I recently got to play it for the first time, so ofc I had to make something instead of just gushing and screaming about it into the abyss

Prints of this piece are available in my shop! There's also a video that took me way too long to make about how I drew this in which I also rant about cheese and socks... hope y'all enjoy it if u give it a watch!!

How to plan a long-term creative project for serial publication:

1. Make a firm decision about how big a single update is going to be, and estimate your sustainable update frequency based on that. This estimate should be based solely on your own demonstrated performance; you may anticipate that future productivity will exceed past productivity, but never make long-range plans on the assumption that future productivity will exceed past productivity. That is called the Planning Fallacy, and it will eat you alive.

2. Estimate how often you’re likely to miss updates. As a rough guideline, if you’re physically and mentally healthy and have no major commitments that would interfere with your ability to work on the project, figure that you’ll miss about 10% of your updates for various reasons. If you have health issues or frequent Real Life commitments, make it 20%. If 20% sounds low to you, you weren’t being honest with yourself about your sustainable update frequency; return to step 1 and re-assess.

3. Figure that you’ve got about two years before you lose interest in the project, gain some new commitment that will preclude continuing to work on it, or your art style evolves enough to make creative continuity impractical. If there’s some upcoming major life change that you’re able to anticipate – like, say, graduating from school – use either two years or that event as your soft deadline, whichever is less.

4. Use the figures from steps 1-3 to estimate how many updates you’re likely to be able to squeeze into this project, and write your outline/script based on that. You don’t need to wrap up every tiny little loose thread by that point, but ideally it needs to reach a point where you could stop and be satisfied with whatever conclusion has been reached. If you get there and you’re still enthusiastic about continuing, fantastic – return to step 1 and re-assess.

So, as a simple example: if you’re planning a webcomic, you figure you can reasonably manage about 1 page a week, and you’ve got a lot going on that’s likely to get in your way, that’s (2 years * 52 weeks/year * 1 update/week * 80% success rate on updates) = around 83 pages to work with, or about the length of a four-issue miniseries. What kind of story can you tell in 80-odd pages?

(Hint: it’s not a story that involves fifty-page combat scenes!)

This is great advice.

When I was making Lunar Maladies (my 464 page webcomic–I will never make a comic that long ever again, it truly could have been a tight 250 if I’d know anything about editing at the time… but what can I say I started it when I was 19) I knew I could reliably take 3 pages from thumbnails to final art every week. So I only updated the comic with 1 page a week. I had over a year of buffer at one point. Because I had built in that security for myself. I know I’m a fallible human & I try to set up my workflow in such a way that I don’t feel bad/guilty/beat myself up about being a normal person with normal obligations that sometimes eclipse drawing comics.

Anyways, working within your limitations is great & allows you to create for longer without having a disastrous level of burnout.

And here's the whole series. I'm kinda proud of myself - when they all put together I can see the amount of work - and I love my characters a lot. :) Now, I wonder, which one is your favorite? My personal favorite is 2nd - I think I did Lyra justice with those wings. Since this is gonna be a long post anyway, I'm gonna add a few sketches for some of them below.

favourite christmas story 🌿

scenery in suzhou and hangzhou of china by 陈帆fotochen