kmlaney

[kmlaney]

You are never letting a WIP rot. You are doing it a service. Your WIP is a sourdough starter and the five words you wrote that one day were all it needed to sustain itself. It will bubble and be ready when you are.

[kmlaney]

In the D&D campaign I'm running with my wife's siblings, one of them learned about how trolls regenerate within minutes of any damage not caused by fire or acid, and then asked why people don't just like. Cage them and eat them, forever. Why there aren't troll meat dungeons in the king's castle as a safeguard against sieges or famines.

And you know, I thought it was a fair question, so I said that if you eat enough troll meat, you start getting troll-y. And then I went further and just treated it like troll flesh is a general contaminant - if you eat enough troll, you'll turn into a troll, but if you bury enough dead troll flesh in a forest, the trees will start growing in strange ways, and will scream and heal and bleed when you hit them with axes.

I liked this idea. So as we played further, I just played around with the idea of Troll Origins, and I came up with something sort of like the Odyssey, but instead stealing Helios's cattle, it was Hathor's, and the horrible, awful, unending immortality was her curse of the army that pillaged her lands. A god of healing does not condemn you to die, she condemns you to live.

And then I got this fun idea for maybe the king that led the army is still kind of alive in the troll taint. Like a sort of literal fisher king. The kingdom is sick because he is, literally, the kingdom. The trees that bleed, bleed his blood and their screams are his screams. He is both the faintly green bear running down the mountain and the faintly green deer and there is no way past this without suffering. He is the entire ecosystem, and he eats nothing but himself and he dreams nothing but death and yet still, on and on and on and on, he lives.

Anyway they're traveling next session so I'm throwing this shit at them. I already have some gross ideas for like. Describing everything like it's a body (flowers red as blood, white as bone, pink as meat, grass fine as hair) then finally throwing horrible living things at them. Trees that grow eyeballs that turn and stare at them, or flowers with teeth instead of petals and trolls that speak in long dead tongues about how they wish they'd never tried to rob a god.

Anyway I'm passing this on because this is my new troll lore and I want it to become canonized in the way that all D&D lore becomes canonized: By having eople read it and go "oh, neat" then start doing that too.

[kmlaney]

Lasers ceased to exist that day

[kmlaney]

went to my best friend’s house last night and saw a little plushie dog and plushie cat that had been sewn together down the middle into a two-headed chimera. I said, “did you do that?” she said, “yes, I saved them.”

turns out at her old job when the last two plushies hadn’t sold and became deadstock, her boss told her to cut them up and throw them out. so she cut them each in half, preserved their heads, and then rebuilt them together.

cannot stop thinking about the way these little plushies were approached with the instinct of a Vampire or some sort of ancient god. “Let me save you [turn you into a monster].”

[kmlaney]

The other creepy thing is the compound eyes.

Check out the bonus panel on the site!

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print!

[kmlaney]

I feel like a lot of people don’t quite get what a butler is. The role tends to get rounded off to ‘male servant’ pretty regularly in some media, whereas actually butlers are typically not just servants but chief servants. The butler was generally in charge of either all male servants or just all servants, period, in the household of an aristocrat or other very wealthy person. This meant that butlers have often been fairly powerful and influential people, and sometimes even had a manservant or two of their own.

(Also, fun fact: Mary Roberts Rinehart, the early 20th century mystery writer who is widely credited with popularizing the whole ‘the butler did it’ trope was nearly murdered by one of her own servants, a chef whom she had passed over for promotion to butler. He came at her with a pistol, but it jammed, allowing her chauffeur time to wrestle it away and restrain him.)

[kmlaney]

[kmlaney]

July 20th is Moon Day and I want it to be way more obnoxious!

I'm sick of all the boring normie summer holidays. We need a new big blow-out thing that we all actively look forward to every year, and I nominate Moon Day.

July 20th is the anniversary of when humans first landed on the moon- one of the greatest achievements in our species' history, and I cannot believe we don't make a bigger deal out of it. We landed on THE MOON.

We should be taking July 20th every year to celebrate the beauty of our celestial sister-world, the drive and perseverance of the human race to actually make it there, the jaw-dropping genius of the women who wrote towers of mathematical formulas to make it possible, the bravery of the astronauts who went there and came back in one piece, the cool rocks they found!

Moon Day shouldn't just be a day where we go "oh that's cool," and move on. It should be a day where we we get to ignore the idiots in power who are trying to ruin our good name and scream to the sky "HUMANS ARE AWESOME AND WE CAN DO AWESOME THINGS"

Anyway, as much as I love gushing about the moon and moon day, I'm drawing a blank on what new traditions I'd actually want to attribute to it. But if I ever get the chance, I would really want to start some new traditions in the local community (On the grounds that it's been a while since I've seen anyone do that).

In an ideal world, I'm envisioning an excuse for a nighttime summer festival, showcasing lunar symbolism and rituals from around the world, moon-rock candy, alien mascots or something, people showing off cool science projects, idk.

Sound off in the comments or tags what kinds of things you would want traditionally done on Moon Day! Big or small! I'm making a list!

[kmlaney]

This moon landing day let's also celebrate Viking 1! This was the first successful landing mission on mars! Viking 1 was supposed to land on July 4th but NASA couldn't find a good landing place by then. By chance, the first day with favorable landing conditions was July 20th! So a big cheer to Viking 1 as well as the Apollo 11 moon landing today! Space is cool

[kmlaney]

5 0    Y E A R S    A G O

[kmlaney]

Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?

[kmlaney]

YOUR EMAIL FINDS ME ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE

[kmlaney]

Yeah, I’d watch Muppets Lord of the Rings

[kmlaney]

The paperclippification fetishists however are just loving it.

Check out the bonus panel on the site!

SMBC ◆ PATREON ◆ INSTAGRAM ◆ BLUESKY ◆ STORE

Buy this comic as a print!

[kmlaney]

i really like looking at google image searches for “firemen rescuing cats” or something because you get super cute pictures like

AND THEN THERE’S THIS ONE

[kmlaney]