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The Terrarium.

https://instagram.com/cochlea1313

ⓒMio Im

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I know that some British people take umbrage at Americans calling the Great British Bake Off relaxing, but it's just because GBBO is such a different kind of stressful from American baking shows.

American baking shows will be called something like "Cupcake Knife Fight", there's horror movie lighting everywhere and dramatic stings every 5 seconds. All of the contestants are shit talking each other and fist fighting over the one single deep fryer provided by production. It will show the judges all whispering to each other at their super villain table overlooking the whole kitchen, and one will be like, "Oh my god. Everyone look at Brenda right now. She's straight tanking it." And it will cut to Brenda, who is running around covered in flour and crying and also bleeding for some reason. Then you get a clip from an interview with one of the contestants, and they're like, "I really need to win this. Without this award money, I'm gonna need to close my restaurant, sell my dad, and live out of my car. AGAIN." Then the giant digital doomsday clock overhead lets out a horrid klaxon, the judges tell half of them that their cupcakes taste disgusting, and one of them gets eliminated and sent to walk down the dramatically-lit shame hallway never to be seen again.

Meanwhile GBBO is in a lovely, brightly colored tent, there are delightful and friendly hosts/jesters there to keep everyone entertained, and all of the B Roll is of like... a bumblebee going into a flower, or a lamb running in a field. And yes, there will be moments where someone will mess up their timing or something, and they'll be looking at their bake through the oven door like, "oh gosh I don't think this will rise in time!" Then they stand up to find Paul Hollywood directly behind them ominously. His creepy whitewalker eyes will glow white, and he'll say something like "the 12th of June. 2035. Drowning." And his eyes will go back to normal and he'll walk away. Then the baker gives a playful grimace to the camera and says "that didnt sound great, did it?". Cut to a sweet looking older woman sipping tea on a stool and she says "oo I do hope that Prue enjoys the taste of my sugary, sticky baps!". Then, at the end, someone gets a gold star for doing good, and the loser of the episode gets in the middle of a giant group hug. You see all of them at the end of the series at a giant carnival with their families and the post credits informs you that all of the contestants have become a Partridge Family-style traveling band and stayed friends forever.

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learning about some genders

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Hiding with mama

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Lowkey we should create a giant manmade blood device to attract ticks away from humans and its a giant blood container that pumps like a heart and emits phermones that attract ticks and mosquitos and we should call it Mother

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The cure to anxiety is completing all the tasks you have to finish for the day early and doing them phenomenally and being physically perfect and on everyone’s good side preferably even their favorite.

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Magic the Gathering is doing an original outer space magical sci fi setting next and dropped preview art of what APPEARS to be the sickest fucking dragon that will ever exist in media ever again, and I know you're thinking, "nah, it can't be that cut and dry, there's a LOT of raw as hell dragons out there, and I, a more experienced dragon aficionado, already have a counter-example locked and loaded for the contentious comment I expect to leave once this dragon of yours fails to knock my socks off as much as the blorbo in question," but while it is okay to think that, you might actually stop thinking that and instead think the same thing I just said about this dragon once you have looked at it. at the picture of the dragon.

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One cool thing about Caspar Wijngaard's attention to visual detail in The Power Fantasy is that, rather than having a specific trademark hairstyle or a single Important Haircut moment (TV Tropes link), everyone is characterized by their overall relationship to their hair. All six Superpowers change up their hairstyle, whether that's day-to-day or year-to-year- but they each have unique approaches to how they look, that offer clues to who they are as people.

As far as we can tell, Valentina's had the exact same haircut her entire adult life, but she styles it differently on different days, and in different contexts. I think she's known for a long time who she is and who she wants to be- specifically, she knows she's a Superpower, a hero or a danger or both, but she wants to be human, someone who can be kind and friendly and have loved ones. For her, that's manifesting as conventional femininity, which shows up in her overall sense of style as well as her hair.

That said- her hair was shorter as a kid, probably just for practical reasons. And when she goes full angel-self, it changes both color and texture- pure white, and a more stylized texture than the detailed strands of her usual hair.

In contrast, Eliza's changed her hair a whole bunch of times, and I feel like she doesn't have any consistent throughline to what she's going for. It's been all different lengths, usually worn loose but one time in a ponytail, usually kept straight but one time permed. Eliza switching haircuts so many times feels to me like she's never satisfied with who she is- she's hungry to be something else, something more. It's the opposite of Valentina having a very clear idea what her hair is expressing. Eliza's searching for something with her hair that a haircut alone is never going to give her.

However, she's repeated haircuts a couple times. Her long hair the day she said no penitent sinner would burn is similar to the long hair she received right after selling her soul to hell. And also, her chin-length bob the day Magus passed her over for promotion is similar to her 1999 hair, when she's so far been pretty antagonistic towards Magus. (Although the haircuts aren't identical. Like Valentina, Eliza's hair changes color and texture from her fully-human form to her descended extradimensional form.) Is the visual echo significant? It'll probably never be confirmed one way or the other that it is, but it's an interesting way to look at things. (Credit to someone on the Discord for sharing the insight that Eliza's 1999 haircut matches her 1986 one!)

Heavy is kind of the midpoint between consistent look and continual change- he's always had long hair, but the context keeps shifting. He's switched subcultures a couple different times, always conveniently to a look where it's fashionable for a man to have long hair- which means the exact style of his long hair varies.

Instead of chronological order, I laid this image out to show that Heavy also puts a lot of effort into styling his hair day-to-day- which is really a showcase of Caspar's attention to texture. The top row of images are ones where I'd say he hasn't done anything to his hair except maybe wash it- and so it's just slightly wavy, drawn with a crinkly kind of texture.

The second row is him the first scene he appears in, where his hair is incredibly silky-smooth at first, and then a little wilder after getting shot and flying around. I can't actually prove that he had someone blow-dry it for him that morning, but I choose to believe that he did. (My full headcanon on that is that having his hair done is a comfort thing. Like, he'd never admit out loud how stressed he was that day, but he'd have someone take care of him without having to directly ask for it... that's all just speculation and personal gratification, though.)

And the third row of images is all the other stuff he does with his hair. In order: he's gelled it back for Masumi's exhibition, then he sleeps on it with the gel in and it turns into a mess. Then you've got his tightly-curled perm from 1981 and a looser perm from probably the seventies. More than anyone else, Heavy's the one who's willing to put day-to-day time into his hair looking good. (For a certain definition of period-piece "good", with that perm.)

Etienne gradually moves from very short hair to locs, but I think the interesting part is how he grows out his beard. These are in chronological order, and you can see him go from a patchier beard when younger to a full, bushy beard by 1999. My read on this is that he's trying to look sophisticated- which means mature, a grown-ass man- and he's trying to compensate for the receding jawline that's more visible when he's a clean-shaven teenager. (Again, full headcanon mode is that he feels compelled to compete with Heavy's ridiculous lantern jaw. But again, that might just be me.)

Masumi, the character most openly inspired by anime and manga, comes very close to having anime/manga-style Expressive Hair (TV Tropes link again), meaning that it almost seems to move based on how she feels. The first row is three panels in order from the same scene- messy hair while she's grumpy, transitioning to smoother hair as she starts to relax. The second row is three panels from a different scene- hair that's been straightened at a time when she's trying to hold herself together, getting messier as she loses composure. Neither of those hair changes is completely impossible under the circumstances- maybe her bedhead is resolving itself, and maybe her styled hair is coming loose from sweating and moving around. But those changes just conveniently parallel her emotional arc.

And at other times, she puts her hair up in mini-ponytails that make her look young and cute. When she actually was younger, her hair was longer and naturally black. Ironically, I think that actually looks more mature... maybe she's made a move towards looking cute and nonthreatening over time?

Magus* has also always had long hair, but it was a bit shorter in 1978 than it has been since. I think it's interesting that he bothered to keep that neatly trimmed beard even though most of the world didn't see it- it was for the sake of himself and his inner circle. I think it symbolizes him being a little scruffy, a little countercultural- but not a total mess, as he clearly takes care of it.

By 1999, his* hair texture has changed a bit, messier and lanker... my original theory was that he stopped washing it, in line with how he's gotten too thin and he's not buying new clothes. In retrospect though... yeah I'm not taking any bets until next issue.

* it's complicated

And then there's Tonya, Isabella, Kid Ignition- I could say stuff about their hair too but I think I've gone on long enough. Even walk-on extras have visual characterization that extends to every part of their design, head to toe. It's kind of mind-blowing the amount of thought that's gone into just that one aspect of character design in TPF, and the amount of drawing skill it takes to carry the ideas through.

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met a woman today whose original real actual given-at-birth first name is "Vendetta." ma'am are you aware you are a videogame protagonist and/or a character in a skullduggery pleasant novel. real quick sorry to bother you miss but who exactly were your parents expecting you to avenge in their name

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Botryoidal Hematite

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↑ My comic for "Make a Terrible Comic Day".

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this line delivery has lived in my head for 10 years

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i havent stopped thinking about this tiktok and wanted it on my blog

[VD: A TikTok from @/soupygarbagejuice. It starts with a clip captioned "Biggest Croissant In Malaysia", of a waiter bringing out a large plate with a massive croissant on it out to a woman at a table. Voiceover says "Today I wanted to eat a Croissant–". A man stitches the video, greenscreened over the final frame. Transcript is as follows:

"A few months ago, this was the last TikTok I saw before falling asleep, and I didn't dream about croissants, I didn't dream about her. Every single dream that I had for a while took place in a reality where Billy Joel– one of Billy Joel's greatest hits was called 'The Biggest Croissant in Malaysia'. It just existed, it played on the radio, people would talk about it in the background, 'He played it at The Garden last night'! So at one point I woke up and did my best to recreate exactly what it sounded like in the dreams. [Singing over piano and drums] She ordered the biggest croissant in Malaysia! She ordered the biggest croissant in town, cause Daddy's not around anymore! He's in Singapore, he's in Singapore!"

End VD]

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i havent stopped thinking about this tiktok and wanted it on my blog

[VD: A TikTok from @/soupygarbagejuice. It starts with a clip captioned "Biggest Croissant In Malaysia", of a waiter bringing out a large plate with a massive croissant on it out to a woman at a table. Voiceover says "Today I wanted to eat a Croissant–". A man stitches the video, greenscreened over the final frame. Transcript is as follows:

"A few months ago, this was the last TikTok I saw before falling asleep, and I didn't dream about croissants, I didn't dream about her. Every single dream that I had for a while took place in a reality where Billy Joel– one of Billy Joel's greatest hits was called 'The Biggest Croissant in Malaysia'. It just existed, it played on the radio, people would talk about it in the background, 'He played it at The Garden last night'! So at one point I woke up and did my best to recreate exactly what it sounded like in the dreams. [Singing over piano and drums] She ordered the biggest croissant in Malaysia! She ordered the biggest croissant in town, cause Daddy's not around anymore! He's in Singapore, he's in Singapore!"

End VD]