PINNED POST, FAQ, INFORMATION

Hi, I'm TBSkyen. I make videos on YouTube sometimes. This is my main tumblr blog, the "brand" blog as it were, where I maintain my Social Media Presence™ on this site.

I use the ironic ™ to signal my personal discomfort with the work of being a minor media personality even while I still do that work and make a living off it.

I have a sideblog called @tbposting, mostly for shitposts and reblogs, and in my opinion I have pretty darn good taste in reblogs, so you can follow that if you want. It's also where I'll do random personal posting, microblogging, etc.

This main blog is primarily for 1) answering asks, and 2) posting my Original Content™, usually my main channel videos, as well as the occasional longer essay or critique. Sometimes I'll reblog an interesting or useful thing, or boost a friend's work, but I try to keep the spam to a minimum.

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About Me

I am a thirtysomething content creator whose primary expertise is character design.

I have a bachelor's degree in English, never finished my master's, did most of a bachelor's degree in history, and that's it. These are my academic qualifications, no more and no less.

My professional experience is primarily being a freelancer and self-employed creator. I spent the better part of a decade working as a commission artist, running webcomics, drawing fanart, and the occasional animation work and not safe for work commissions, and I have at this point a decade of experience and self-study in the subjects I cover. I have also done online community management for, god help me, almost twenty years, so that's a part of my skillset I'll never escape.

I do not have any particular professional creative industry experience, although given what I hear from my professional friends, sometimes that seems like a blessing.

Please maintain a critical distance when engaging with my work. I am a critic. My work is very rarely meant to be taken as authoritative or didactic, and when it is, I will make it clear in my writing. Just because I speak with confidence doesn't mean I am trying to assert objective truth.

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TAGS (to follow, or filter)

Yes, I know the spaces are inconsistent. It's not on purpose, I just typed them in haphazardly when I started using them and it's stuck.

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FAQ (before you ask)

Q: Will you ever do a video about ____ ? A: The answer to this question is almost universally "maybe someday, if I have time, and if I feel I have anything worthwhile to say." And the more realistic answer is "no, because I already have far too much on my plate and I have burned myself out too many times." In general, please don't ask me this question, I will most likely not answer it because I have given the same answer a thousand times, but I still feel guilty about not answering them.

Q: Will you continue your series of videos about ____ ? A: Yes! I will continue the let's plays I started, I will finish the Boss Designs series, I will do another What's the Deal With, I will do more shorts about the subjects I've got going on. The main obstacle is, again, my tendency to overload myself.

Q: Do you have a PO box? Can I send you something? A: Not yet, but I'm looking into it. It may be a while before I get it set up.

Q: Do you have merchandise? A: A little bit, yes, at crowdmade.com/collections/tbskyen

Q: What's your opinion on [game/movie/comic/book/etc]? A: I struggle to answer very open, broad questions like this. Most things I have opinions about, I have multiple opinions, and different ones depending on the perspective and specific element in question. I'm much more likely to answer specific, bounded questions.

Q: Can I send you fanart? A: PLEASE. Askbox, tag me on bluesky, send it to my email! I love seeing every piece of it!

Q: Why do you never appear on camera? A: A forest witch cursed me to look not quite but ALMOST like Paul Giamatti in all photos and videos ever taken of me, and his laywers sent me a cease-and-desist.

Q: Are you gay/straight/bi/other? A: The decision I've made for myself, at least for this period of my life, is that privacy is precious, and once given up can never be reclaimed on the internet. I am open about being aromantic (not asexual), because it's a sometimes invisible and underdiscussed identity, and I know it would have helped me a lot to see someone speak about it when I was younger.

The rest of it is for me to know, and for you to speculate about, although preferably somewhere I can't see it. I accept that this is a part of being a Personality, but it still feels weird, y'know?

Q: Is it weird if I find your voice kinda hot? A: I've put a lot of work into developing this voice and making it nice to listen to, so that's not weird at all and I find it quite complimentary, thank you.

I generally don't mind people doing flirty/thirsty posting about or at me, just so long as we all understand that 1) you should never give a stranger like me information which could be used to harm you. Nicer-seeming YouTubers than me have turned out to be monsters.

And 2) it will never go beyond playful online flirtiness. I like to fluster my live chat, I'll flirt back in an ask or a post maybe, but I am not flirting with you, or inviting any kind of closer intimacy with you, the person I responded to.

Think of me like a comedian doing crowd-work at a show - you can chat to me in the bar after the show, but when I asked you what you do for work I wasn't looking for a personal connection, I was doing my work as an entertainer. Please no sending me nudes, or propositions, or confession letters in my email inbox. We are strangers, and I am always performing a persona in public.

I was out of milk and eggs so I decided to pop out to the shops. in your head.

That's very kind of you to say - I'm really proud that something I made that long ago is still finding people who enjoy it :)

Sorta, kinda. Like, they were clearly not INTENDED to be a couple, early on, it was supposed to be much more of a hostile buddy cop vibe. Caitlyn is all uptight and "by the book" and British, and Vi is a loud dumb American who charges in and smashes things for fun, hahaha, all of her ability names are jokes about police brutality, woo. That kind of thing.

But also you can't really make an oppositional "I hate you but I'm stuck with you" comedy dynamic without literally everyone identifying the shipping potential IMMEDIATELY, so it really did not take long before Caitlyn and Vi were girlfriends in a LOT of people's minds, even if Riot wasn't confirming or pushing it.

And then they started teasing it and leaning into it in various skin themes, and their lore stories started focusing more on their mutual respect and close working relationship and care for each other, they started showing up on League of Legends Pride marketing, and then they fucked in a jail cell in Arcane and now we're here.

Mind you, I fully believe that Riot would have kept their relationship in the "tee hee we're teasing it but we won't say it" queerbaiting Phantom Zone for another five to ten years if not for Arcane and Fortiche absolutely body-checking the relationship into the undeniable, and if Arcane hadn't been as huge of a success as it was, I'd give you even odds that Riot would have tried to just ignore it and pretend it didn't happen.

Yes, the Redbubble store has been deleted, as I moved my merchandise to a different service. I've not updated the links in the video descriptions of all the old videos and posts yet, though (there are so many).

It's at http://crowdmade.com/collections/tbskyen if you're looking for it.

I still want to do those videos, but it almost certainly won't be about League of Legends characters. The one I have planned in my notes is on Fire Emblem: Three Houses, although I'll need to replay the game to gather footage for that, and that will take a while to do.

I mean, in theory I have hundreds of subjects I want to make videos about, and I don't really care that much whether they're popular or not.

In practise I only have so many hours in the day, and I have a disability I am learning to navigate, and that's the main reason I only release the videos that I do.

I don't know that Wyman would bother with the logistics of a drowning, that man could simply pop my head like a grape in his giant hands.

I have a lot of rather complicated feelings about the end of Arcane, and how Riot has handled the characters of the story, and some very bitter feelings about what Riot is willing to let Arcane mean.

There's a lot of bad feelings and exhaustion mixed in with it brought about by my decade-and-a-half toxic situationship with Riot Games Inc., whose continuous squandering of their employees' amazing efforts are a particularly pestilent wound in my heart. I also must cop to some sore-loser foolishness, in that I projected expectations onto the show that it was neither able nor willing to deliver on.

I did not want to release any videos immediately following Arcane's conclusion, because I thought the negative emotions would take over and color my review and reaction far too much - more than what I would be able to actually stand by in the long term. And once you release something on YouTube, people will hold it against you for fucking ever, which is exhausting and not worth it for a hot take you're going to cool down from anyway.

Craig Ferguson has a bit in one of his comedy specials where he goes "before you say anything, ask yourself three questions:

and if the answer to all three of those questions isn't "yes" then don't fucking say it."

I've found that this is... if not universally true, then true often enough that it's good to keep in mind, and while I think there are things that need to be said about Arcane, and they might need to be said by me... they don't need to be said by me now.

I want my own feelings to have settled, and I want to re-watch the show at least a couple of times, and I want the feelings of the Arcane fandom to settle down, before I gather my thoughts and say whatever I think needs to be said.

It might, eventually, turn out that I feel that nothing needs to be said at all. We'll see.

I shall treasure this dearly, thank you.

There's a colossus wandering the desert, in the Lands Between. On a dying horse, with his feet rotted away, and with the spears of war stuck in his back, somehow still he holds back the passage of the stars themselves.

... so what's all that about? Who the hell is "Starsourge" Radahn, what's he doing riding that tiny dinky little horse, and why do I keep thinking of that one damn poem every time I see him?

I like the parts of it that aren't Diablo 2, 3 and I absolutely hate the parts that are Diablo Immortal.

having your voice cloned by AI and used to make videos on someone else's channel is the sort of thing that only really needs to happen to you once to make you EXTREMELY paranoid about the future, I tell you what

I've not taken a close look at her, but the vibe I get is that people are reacting so strongly to her more because she is a Hex Maniac than because of the actual features of her design.

Like, the vibe is that it is more excitement that a favourite character has a new outfit and design, and excitement to play with those features, than it is a strong reaction to the quality of the design itself.

Which is not a knock on the design, mind you, I just think it's more that Hex Maniac has a lot of fans who are excited for the character.