Seeing as this thread is still active, instead of continuing to reply to people throughout, gonna go ahead and put this out here.

If you’re not finding an active community for something (safe for work, that is) or any community whatsoever for your interest, you’re welcome to post about the topics that interest you in [email protected] till you find enough likeminded people to get a separate community going. This was always allowed tbh, but I’ve tried to make it more explicit and clear that it’s cool.

You’re welcome to post about papers and discuss them over in [email protected] to try to get this going for more specific communities!

You might give the programming.dev instance a try for the first couple subjects, as they have an open [email protected] community that may work for them.

Given the absence of specific communities (or active ones so far), if people would like they could start these conversations over in [email protected].

I recognize it’s not the same, particularly for getting to those deep dive points you mention with ATLA, but gotta start somewhere, right?

Also I can easily give this go-ahead being one of the mods there. Up to now I’ve hesitated popping into threads like this and pointing people there because I’m not a fan of consolidation, but it’s become apparent some simple meeting area may help to get more niche communities spun off and going.

You might try different media if you haven’t already, as in, instead of pencil/pen and paper, maybe colored pencils or markers. Maybe even try getting some black paper and trying to draw with white color pencils instead.

I’m sure you may have tried a variety of things over the years, so I’m just spitballing, but also if you’re trying to dive into the deep end with more complex drawings, you might revisit and really hone the fundamentals. Fundamentals being like getting clean lines by practicing drawing those over and over till you can get a nice, sharp line (which often isn’t a single pencil/brush stroke!).

Once you have those down you may move on to the simple shapes, squares, triangles, circles, and try to recognize how those are put together for more complex forms. It’s a tough skill to get down, without a doubt (I’m not some proficient artist personally), but it’s just that: a skill that takes not only practice but learning methodologies. One of the toughest parts with drawing is that there’s so many methods to go about it to figure out which helps you improve.

when you get cc’d on an email and wait till the right moment to send the CharCoal image you’ve had waiting for this moment

i’ll tell ya how to undo this, but it’ll involve going over their heads, and you won’t believe this but then you’ll be…

this is too perfect

teach a person to make memes and they’ll never stop meming for their life?

This gave me a sort of questionable idea, but it’d be sweet if at the start to some bike trails they had a little parks & rec office or something where folks that don’t have bikes (whether for financial or basic space reasons) could rent them/lend them out to ride along the trails. Maybe some more well-funded areas already have something like this?

I know some places will rent out bikes to folks, but I dunno how affordable that tends to be.

Remember, doing terrible things is a-okay if you do it with professional attire, polite speech, and the right tone. Mess up any of those and you’re okay to reject and write off for being unprofessional and, if you’re of certain demographics, too emotional.