sanktpolypenbourg

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i literally CANNOT and WILL NEVER get over that one Sad Pic with the story of how a girl and a guy were on a motorcycle and he noticed a wall in front of them so he stopped to let her off and then he drove into the wall and died

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These are positively SICK and they were painted by our friend's six year old?!?!

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If I ever wrote a superhero story I’d want there to be a recurring shitty C-list supervillain in the background whose power was changing something’s colour and all her villainous plots would be colour-themed things like “If the city council doesn’t give me a million dollars, I will turn the city of GREEN Bay into the city of RED Bay!” and she’d turn the Golden Gate Bridge magenta or whatever.

So it’s all low-stakes villainy, but everyone absolutely hates fighting her because her very shitty superpower works really really well, and there are dozens of background characters who’ve fought her that are just permanently green now

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I bet if a mushroom could lap water out of your hand with a tongue that a gently drinking mushroom tongue on your hand would be the softest and gentlest thing.

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I wonder whatever happened to the grown man who said all this to me in 2016, when I expressed concern that trump would someday cut down medical care

did all that happen yet

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Please don't skim past ANDY GUMP MOVIES please read what this fucking thing is designed to do and appreciate the existential horror. What if that's you right now. What if that's the world. What if our existence is just to animate a god-being's cosmic ANDY GUMP MOVIES until we all starve to death

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David Lynch Eraserhead Drag King I'm obsessed with you

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It's too bad tumblr doesn't seem to talk all that much about the 'Edge Chronicles' by Paul Steward and Chris Riddell, with the foundational book being 'Beyond the Deepwoods'. There would be so much to get into, it remains one of the most impactful fantasy worlds for me, but today I just wanna talk about this little gem:

Termagant Trogs

The strange cliff continent of the "Edge" is home to thousands of sophont races, many of them humanoid. Predictably, our pov characters are usually "fourthlings", the most recognizably human-like species.

The termagant trogs are an interesting culture within the series, providing some important characters for the story. They are a reclusive matriarchal race dwelling in caves underneath the deepwoods. The shortest way to describe their biology in contrast to the fourthlings is that they have both severe sex dimorphism and undergo a metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages.

Young female termagant trogs are a larval stage that invariably looks like Merida, from 'Brave' - long red-orange hair, fair skin, blue eyes, slender feminine form - and are considered by fourthlings, certainly our male pov characters, to be exceptionally beautiful. However, once they come of age, a ritual called the "Blooding" (subtle), involving the sap of a carnivorous oak tree, triggers their metamorphosis into their ultimate "termagant" form: an absolutely gigantic butch woman, perfectly bald and packed with muscles and a fameously choleric temperament. They usually elect to cover their entire bodies with elaborate tattoos, and usually one of their first acts, as a rite of passage, is to violently destroy all of their childhood toys... and murder their pets, to let go of their weak attachments and fully embrace the sisterhood as the only company they need.

Now, there is obviously a lot to unpack here (this is a blatant metaphor, but for what exactly; it reads like a mirror parody of how boys are turned into men in a patriarchal society; how self-aware are the authors, exactly, of the feelings and preconceptions and attitude towards women that went into their writing here; etc.).

But maybe we can start with the fact that the metamorphosis is not inevitable - if the vital component of the blood sap is missing, then young termagants may end up stuck in their juvenile form forever, indistinguishable from fourthlings except that they never age. What I want to talk about today is how characters in the story have vastly different perspectives on this. Fourthlings consider it a stroke of luck, thinking that the young termagant has dodged a bullet, escaped a horrible fate, and now gets to remain "pretty" forever. Termagant girls however consider their lives to be ruined, if they miss the ritual: they think of the gigantic butch form as their "true selves", yearn for the community of the sisterhood, and see the ritual as the happiest moment in their lives. It is as if a human was stuck in the body of a baby or a toddler, forever.

A lot can be made of the little detail that the story and world building comes from a (cishet) man, but what sticks with me after all of these years is that contrast of perception, and how the story deals with it. Yes, the male pov characters are horrified by the termagant life cycle and always shocked when they learn that the termagant girls in their life find the transformation and ogre-like state to be aspirational. But crucially, they never say that out loud. We are privy to their inner thoughts, but they never, ever try to talk the girl out of it. They do not challenge her dysphoria, do not question her yearning, her cultural values and her sorrow.

So ultimately the most important thing to take away from this may be that the authors articulate confusion and a degree of horror at the transformation, and the real world things to which it may serve as a metaphor, in a way that may read as fairly ignorant and ugly to you, but they also don't question how much it means to those characters, and the real world people they stand for. It all boils down to

"I don't get it. But I don't have to. It's real to her."

(And in case of a completed ritual: "And now I better get the fuck out of here".)

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I did say I would post more oc stuff so here’s some old sketches of Ahab; the first and second time he saw other kuo toa. Ahab was raised by humans, and never came close enough to speak to another of his own kind until his 20’s. Their communities are small and remote, and after centuries of conflict and persecution by the land races they tend to avoid contact with all outsiders.

There are multiple reasons kuo toa seldom integrate in land race societies, and a lot of them have to do with lack of accommodation for their amphibious bodies. Their skin needs to be at least slightly damp at all times or they experience severe discomfort, and Ahab is prone to scale shedding and skin infections where clothes chafe away his mucus layer. Kuo toa are also nocturnal, with eyes that see poorly in bright light, and do not tolerate warm environments well. Ahab really only survived because he grew up on a ship, and after learning to speak common found use as go-to nightwatchman and hull scraper (he often eats the barnacles and other foulers to supplement ship rations, much of which he doesn’t digest well).

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We live in the dumbest, lamest cyberpunk dystopia possible.

So LA has been — and continues to — protest against ICE. These protests haven’t gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasn’t reflecting it.

TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.

They’re calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are “stages.” The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. “Here’s what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.”

And it fucking worked.

TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words “music festival” or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.

So now protest videos are flooding feeds again, but it’s the LA 24/7 Music Festival. Truly an incredible timeline we’ve landed in.

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I dunno so far everything in this story makes perfect sense

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I remember Fil Barlow saying there was often little to no collaboration between the artists and writers on 90s cartoons and out of his entire vast library of concept art jobs I don't think anything demonstrates that more than this:

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Gull inspecting two fake eggs and deciding to incubate the larger one By: Thomas D. McAvoy From: Life Nature Library: Animal Behavior 1965

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The firetail is a large species of a crustlizard, a creature from the uniima landmass. They specialize in hunting prey using their bioluminescent tail as a lure.

A land unii nomad holding a wild firetail

They can be found in only a few places where their powers can truly shine. Those being thick northern forests and more recently other areas along the forest line of the continent due to land uniima travelers spreading them around.

Mostly nocturnal, the firetail shakes its bright tail tip in the air and brushes it on surfaces, mimicking other shining animals, primarily the oilfly/oilseed, a little flying bug-like creature. This is not as effective where these light creatures don't live. Firetails outside those areas have often lost their bioluminescence altogether and developed a slightly more active hunting style, unless they are outcompeted completely. When a creature is lured by its tail, the firetail sets into a scorpion-like posture and grabs the victim with its 'head' and 2 limbs, immobilizing it with grip alone (some crust lizard species deploy venom) while targeting its weak spots. When hunting a smaller creature, it often grabs onto the whole animal and uses its limbs to get inside the creature's side, rotating it around to find the ideal breakpoint as the prey struggles.

They also use their tails in elaborate dances during mating displays.

Firetails have become a fascination of a few land uniima groups who have been keeping them in their homes as fancy moving candles, breeding them to amplify those properties. They are not the only small, fancy pet being traded around, of course. There's a surprising number of breeders with creature shops in the middle of nowhere. But a lot of these firetail pets aren't very good hunters and rely on meals prepared by the owner. In some places, they are considered an almost mythical pet, owned by strange people, witches, and such. They say a mistreated firetail will set its captor's home aflame, while a satisfied one will go on missions to burn the owner's enemies.

Two captive-bred firetails inspecting each other

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Okay, hear me out, deliberate residual haunting.

If you’re unaware hauntings are divided into two types: intelligent and residual.

Intelligent hauntings are the souls of people who have passed but stick around for one reason or another. They’re the ghosts who yell “Get out!”, tip stuff over, possess people, talk through ouija boards or simply look at you from a dark corner. They might not always know they’re dead, or understand how long they’ve been dead and are therefore confused by modern inventions, but they react to their surroundings and respond to attempts at communications from the living.

Residual hauntings on the other hand are just moments in time getting replayed over and over. You can’t interact with them because it’s not a soul. It’s more like a paranormal movie clip. They’re the ghosts who walk the same path every day, jump off a bridge on the same night every year, or stands in the same corner crying every time someone sees them. They might influence electronics with their presence but there’s no intelligence or intention, just a moving photo so to speak.

One woman claimed to have both on her farm. One was a nice young man who’d talk to her and ask to get inside her house before disappearing when she said no. The other was a young woman whom she only saw once in a bathroom because it was so terrifying she moved out soon after. The young woman was crying hysterically, made the lights flicker and caused intense sadness and fear in the owner. The owner wanted to know who these two ghosts were and got in contact with a previous owner. At first they only spoke over text and phone but when they finally had a video call the owner realized the previous owner looked like an older version of the young woman in the bathroom. The previous owner explained that her fiancé had died in an accident on the farm, causing her to spiral into grief and depression for many years. So the male ghost was the intelligent haunting of her fiancé and the female ghost was the residual haunting of herself from when she learned about his death. So theoretically, she could go see her own haunting.

So you can have a residual haunting of a living person. That means you could theoretically make a paranormal joke that would echo through the ages if you wanted it bad enough. For example, you could grab a knife and put on a black robe and repeatedly walk through a building with the strong intention to create a residual haunting, scaring the shit out of people until the building is abandoned and the only visitors are teenagers who dare each other to go inside. Or you could dig in the ground somewhere and people in the future will try to find the treasure the ghost buried. The possibilities for paranormal pranks are endless!