#Story ramble

[lunaticpsyker08]

5 scientist

So I wanted to draw them all, uhhhhh my top 3 Adds tho uhhhh, can't you tell? Also MMMM still fiddling with Monstera’s outfit. But he looks good, he is suggesting Doomhemoth to take a sip of a special concoction he brewed up. It's green. Mad paradox is holding onto Doomhemoth’s forearm as the deal starts to settle in, he is grinning so massively, and drooling a black substance as usual.

In the distance Domi is taking interest in the specimen, and funnily enough shoves his clipboard at Overmind’s chest and so he could get a more focused posture of the beast from afar.

Poor Overmind

Basically, umm, green stuff and magenta stuff is a thing hahh

Great example of consuming Magenta brew~> burning desire is unleashed in a monster format.

Great example of a sip of the green vile~> a humanoid form, this tones down the Monster deformity...tho not diminishing It completely.

Para waters Monstera...

[artsywinter13]

The God of Soil and Wisdom is the youngest of the 3 Elder or Eco gods, comprising of: Mamá Mayna, Goddess of Flowers and Art, and Alagbede, God of Rock and Craftmanship. The name of this god is Nabu Maat, but their people have given them the title of Ozymandias Misr. They have 3 children, being the 3 Deital Pharaohs that rule over the Nahda Kingdom. They are:

Kemet, Deity of Knowledge Hedjet, Deity of Writing Deshret, Deity of Truth

Each rule over a portion of the Nahda Kingdom’s land. The lush and fertile land of Kememphi to Kemet, where lush forests and black soil flourish. The slick and muddy land of Hedjebai belongs to Hedjet, where the river deposits sediments. The dusty and arid land of Deshara belongs to Deshret, where the hot desert is your home.

In the image of his children, Nabu Maat created different races. In the image of Kemet, they created the Sphinx and the bastaens or felems. In the image of Hedjet, they created the Knu and the baens. In the image of Deshret, they created the Anubi and nyuwi or canems.

[vasira96]

it's always "immortals always lose the ones they love!" and never "this family has had this incredible, powerful, loving figure present through generations of their lineage, all because they are descended from someone the immortal loved long ago" and i think that's a shame!!

[foldingfittedsheets]

Mattresses, unbeknownst to many, are a lot like cars. Every year new ones roll out, they’re always tweaking and innovating and you’ll never find the same one you loved decades ago when buying a new one.

Where I sold mattresses had a three month return or exchange program for this reason. New beds take a while to break in, and they’re a big expense. Your body is used to the old one. So we made sure people were loving it. If a bed got returned we’d take it back, sanitize and clean it, then sell it again on clearance.

To sell these we always had to disclose what clearance meant to customers, and they had to sign that they knew what they were getting. (FYI, not every company is as… forthright about the used bed situation)

In clearance we had beds that were floor models, we had returns, and more rarely we had old models whose line had been discontinued. These clearance beds were always final sale, so a bed could only be sold twice.

Now, the manager at the store I was working at had realized a vital fact. Clearance beds in the warehouse didn’t sell, especially old models that salespeople weren’t familiar with. And even more especially in odd sizes, like twin extra longs. So he set up a split king on the showroom floor to exhibit clearance beds, pulling all those forgotten twin extra longs out onto the showroom.

Almost all of these were brand new discontinued models. Beds I’d never learned in training were exhumed to be displayed. The manufacturers had moved on to new lines and they’d been left behind. Why would he take such in interest in selling old stock, you might wonder? Because we made double commission on the sales margin of clearance beds, and if we’d had a bed long enough they dropped the cost in the system so it was a fucking cash cow to sell these. Even with huge discounts the commissions were wonderful so it was a win win.

When I got started I was jazzed about this program, I was so on board to sell weird old brand new beds and make a ton of money. I had a wonderful older couple come in, looking for a split king adjustable set. This was a white whale sale.

The current clearance models on the floor were a latex mattress that was brand new despite being of an age to start first grade, and a tempurpedic floor model. The couple laid down and it was like magic. They each loved the bed they’d laid down on. They wanted to buy the whole shebang.

I. Was. Thrilled. I told them about the clearance program and what that meant, and they weren’t bothered in the least. I wrote up the sale then dashed into the back, fizzing with excitement to tell my manager what I’d done.

“You sold the death bed?!” He asked in delight.

I pulled up short, my smile freezing in place. “What…?”

“Didn’t you check the notes?”

I hesitated for a long beat then slowly shook my head. You see, dear reader, all beds had a personal history. Every clearance bed had logs written up by the person who took the return, as well as warehouse crew after sanitizing. It helped us know what to expect when selling them. “Wasn’t it just a floor model? You said it was a floor model…”

He slowly shook his head. I checked the notes.

It turned out, it had been sold as a floor model. The first time. But the company had made an exception and taken it back as a return two months later. Why? Because it’s owner had passed away.

I stared at the computer in horror and my manager shrugged. “They signed the clearance form. Technically it was a floor model.”

“We know for a fact that a man died in that bed!”

“What they don’t know can’t haunt them,” he said philosophically.

The man came back a week later for more sheets, utterly delighted to tell me how well they were sleeping. I clamped my teeth down around the secret of the deathbed, choosing to let them love their new bed without the stigma. Only one person would be haunted by that deathbed, and it was me.

[wasabi-gumdrop]

local ladies man’s signature move totally useless against autistic monster enthusiast. more on Kabru’s fumble era at 6

[aesethewitch]

When I was a kid, we moved into a house that had a huge lilac tree out front. It was mostly rotten, and it needed to be taken down before it fell. It took a while, but eventually, it was gone.

Mostly. A couple years later, little lilac babies popped out of the ground in its place. My mom was determined to get rid of them, because she'd planted a beautiful flower garden there, and the lilac trees would overshadow and kill the whole garden. I insisted on saving at least a few saplings. She said fine, but I had to dig them out and put them in pots myself.

So, I did. I spent days digging little lilac bushes out of the ground and putting them into pots. Some couldn't be saved, but some could. When all was said and done, I had five brand-new lilac saplings. Seven or eight years old, and it was my absolute pride and joy.

Three died due to sun scorching, severe drought that no amount of watering could save, and perhaps just being moved from their place in the ground. But two survived, and I was awfully proud of them! I'd go out and talk to them every single day. I watered them by hand and made sure they were fertilized properly. I learned all about their favored environments, and I was determined to make sure they lived.

One of my mom's friends saw what I was doing with the lilacs. She asked if she could have one to put in her backyard, and I agreed on the condition that she take very, very good care of it.

It's now fucking enormous. I'm talking ten feet tall and bursting with beautiful purple flowers every spring. My mom still gets updates each year as they start to bloom, which she forwards to me. And all I can think is, "That's my friend! Thriving some twenty years on, there it is."

The other tree nearly died, too. It lived in a pot for far, far too long. I wanted to plant it somewhere in my parents' yard, but my mom was reluctant. Eventually, we agreed to put it in the far back garden. It grew okay for many years, despite the shade, but in all these years, it's never bloomed.

Last year, the massive tree casting massive shadows over the lilac and the garden cracked in half and fell. It tumbled into the garden, crushing part of the nearby shed and destroying a few plants beneath it.

It missed my lilac by inches.

The clean-up is long done. The rest of the tree has been cut down, and my lilac has full sunlight for the first time in fifteen years. It won't bloom this year, I know. But it's got new shoots up. It's taller than ever. I spent half an hour a few weeks ago praising it for surviving all this time, dreaming about its future and telling it how I believe it'll become the tall beauty it's always been meant to be.

I think next year, I'll see flowers.

[moomoorare]

I love nautical and seaside town horror stories. Tell me more about the fog and water that eats people

[autumnleaves1991-blog]

This is why writers abandon stories. It’s not that we don’t love them, it’s because we don’t want to love them alone.

[crowkip]

yeehaw, baby!

[five-rivers]

Group of friends who are close because they all have the same superpower except no they don't.

[goldensunset]

people who go through the main tags of big and tumultuous fandoms looking for new fresh good posts to reblog are essential to any circle. they’re like true hunter gatherers leaving the safety of settlement and braving the unknown wilderness to find food for the flock. they risk their lives every day and will come back with a few scratches at best and severe psychological damage at worst

[tariah23]

The manga industry, especially JUMP, needs to hurry up and do away with weekly scheduling for mangaka. There needs to better regulations put into place for their health and safety because this is pitiful. Two weeks - monthly updates should’ve already been the standard for the manga industry at this point. These money grabbers will only continue to put the lives of these artists at stake for the sake of capitalism unless some serious changes are implemented.

[artsywinter13]

Onisona: The importance of accessories

Onisona has a huge affinity with markings and accessories. It is an intricate part of their culture and deeply engraved. In their culture, your accessories and markings can determine your background, family, and sector that at you grew up in.

Starting with the accessories, there are 3 big ones that are the most used all over the nation:

Beads

Metal accessories

Jewelry

The amount of the accessory use is a huge indicator on what part the individual came from. If the accessory is mostly beads or wooden pieces, they most likely came from a background of bead-makers and wood-carvers. If it’s metal bracelets, rings, earrings, and the like, they most likely came from a background of smiths and welders. Lastly, if it’s jewelry, then they most likely came from a background of jewelry makers and miners.

If the individual has a combination of these accessories, then thy came from a region or sector in which both skills were used in tandem. Whichever is the most wore is the one that the family mostly practice.

Markings also serve a similar purpose of determining the person’s background. Markings can be either face paints or tattoos, although the grand majority uses face paints a lot more then tattoos. Whatever pattern the markings have is what determines the background of the person.

There are some patterns and symbols that are universal and that do not determine the background, but instead determines the individual’s core values, beliefs, or what simply something they like. These symbols are:

Heart- learning from mistakes; patience

Swirls with a diamond in the middle- strenght and stability

Lizard- adaptability

Crescent moon with the sun- faithfulness

The eye- universe

Symbols mostly used by smiths and welders are: lines, stripes, and squares, which can mean fortitude, strength, excellence encouragement, and leadership. Bead-makers and wood carvers mostly use circles, swirls, and dots, meaning wisdom, loyalty, greatness, or perseverance.

Lastly, the miners and jewelry makers used triangles and diamonds, which came mean safety.

[cosmic-chemist]

DUDE the minecraft movie trailer pisses me the FUCK OFFFF DUDE IT LOOKS SO BAD 😭😭😭😭 this is why minecraft story mode is PEAK everyone should play mcsm 💚💚💚it’s the best Minecraft movie yall will get that isn’t that live action slop with jack black🙏🔥🔥

Anyways I’m reallyyy upset that the mc movie is going to be LIVE ACTION of all things.. the movie being live action just takes away the entire charm of Minecraft it just doesn’t WORK in my opinion and it sucks that we have two really good Minecraft 3d animation styles to work off of 💔💔

I’ve said this so many times but a 3d Minecraft movie would have just worked so much better??? Especially looking at some of the amazing 3d animated movies we’ve gotten in the last couple years

[bizarrelittlemew]

i can't wait to be 30+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 40+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 50+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 60+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 70+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 80+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to be 90+ and still in fandom and i can't wait to look back on my life and know that i loved things deeply and passionately and was inspired to create and was part of communities with incredible people from all over the world brought together by the stories that touched us

[aethersea]

another thing fantasy writers should keep track of is how much of their worldbuilding is aesthetic-based. it's not unlike the sci-fi hardness scale, which measures how closely a story holds to known, real principles of science. The Martian is extremely hard sci-fi, with nearly every detail being grounded in realistic fact as we know it; Star Trek is extremely soft sci-fi, with a vaguely plausible "space travel and no resource scarcity" premise used as a foundation for the wildest ideas the writers' room could come up with. and much as Star Trek fuckin rules, there's nothing wrong with aesthetic-based fantasy worldbuilding!

(sidenote we're not calling this 'soft fantasy' bc there's already a hard/soft divide in fantasy: hard magic follows consistent rules, like "earthbenders can always and only bend earth", and soft magic follows vague rules that often just ~feel right~, like the Force. this frankly kinda maps, but I'm not talking about just the magic, I'm talking about the worldbuilding as a whole.

actually for the purposes of this post we're calling it grounded vs airy fantasy, bc that's succinct and sounds cool.)

a great example of grounded fantasy is Dungeon Meshi: the dungeon ecosystem is meticulously thought out, the plot is driven by the very realistic need to eat well while adventuring, the story touches on both social and psychological effects of the whole 'no one dies forever down here' situation, the list goes on. the worldbuilding wants to be engaged with on a mechanical level and it rewards that engagement.

deliberately airy fantasy is less common, because in a funny way it's much harder to do. people tend to like explanations. it takes skill to pull off "the world is this way because I said so." Narnia manages: these kids fall into a magic world through the back of a wardrobe, befriend talking beavers who drink tea, get weapons from Santa Claus, dance with Bacchus and his maenads, and sail to the edge of the world, without ever breaking suspension of disbelief. it works because every new thing that happens fits the vibes. it's all just vibes! engaging with the worldbuilding on a mechanical level wouldn't just be futile, it'd be missing the point entirely.

the reason I started off calling this aesthetic-based is that an airy story will usually lean hard on an existing aesthetic, ideally one that's widely known by the target audience. Lewis was drawing on fables, fairy tales, myths, children's stories, and the vague idea of ~medieval europe~ that is to this day our most generic fantasy setting. when a prince falls in love with a fallen star, when there are giants who welcome lost children warmly and fatten them up for the feast, it all fits because these are things we'd expect to find in this story. none of this jars against what we've already seen.

and the point of it is to be wondrous and whimsical, to set the tone for the story Lewis wants to tell. and it does a great job! the airy worldbuilding serves the purposes of the story, and it's no less elegant than Ryōko Kui's elaborately grounded dungeon. neither kind of worldbuilding is better than the other.

however.

you do have to know which one you're doing.

the whole reason I'm writing this is that I saw yet another long, entertaining post dragging GRRM for absolute filth. asoiaf is a fun one because on some axes it's pretty grounded (political fuck-around-and-find-out, rumors spread farther than fact, fastest way to lose a war is to let your people starve, etc), but on others it's entirely airy (some people have magic Just Cause, the various peoples are each based on an aesthetic/stereotype/cliché with no real thought to how they influence each other as neighbors, the super-long seasons have no effect on ecology, etc).

and again! none of this is actually bad! (well ok some of those stereotypes are quite bigoted. but other than that this isn't bad.) there's nothing wrong with the season thing being there to highlight how the nobles are focused on short-sighted wars for power instead of storing up resources for the extremely dangerous and inevitable winter, that's a nice allegory, and the looming threat of many harsh years set the narrative tone. and you can always mix and match airy and grounded worldbuilding – everyone does it, frankly it's a necessity, because sooner or later the answer to every worldbuilding question is "because the author wanted it to be that way." the only completely grounded writing is nonfiction.

the problem is when you pretend that your entirely airy worldbuilding is actually super duper grounded. like, for instance, claiming that your vibes-based depiction of Medieval Europe (Gritty Edition) is completely historical, and then never even showing anyone spinning. or sniffing dismissively at Tolkien for not detailing Aragorn's tax policy, and then never addressing how a pre-industrial grain-based agricultural society is going years without harvesting any crops. (stored grain goes bad! you can't even mouse-proof your silos, how are you going to deal with mold?) and the list goes on.

the man went up on national television and invited us to engage with his worldbuilding mechanically, and then if you actually do that, it shatters like spun sugar under the pressure. doesn't he realize that's not the part of the story that's load-bearing! he should've directed our focus to the political machinations and extensive trope deconstruction, not the handwavey bit.

point is, as a fantasy writer there will always be some amount of your worldbuilding that boils down to 'because I said so,' and there's nothing wrong with that. nor is there anything wrong with making that your whole thing – airy worldbuilding can be beautiful and inspiring. but you have to be aware of what you're doing, because if you ask your readers to engage with the worldbuilding in gritty mechanical detail, you had better have some actual mechanics to show them.