#but I'm doing a lot of things for a lot of people outside of Tumblr

[aayakashii]

I received a super cute ask requesting a hc of the Jabberwock boys getting a plushie from the MC, but tumblr effed up my post for some reason?? So I'm posting again!

ANON THAT WAS SUCH A CUTE REQUEST AND I LOVED WRITING IT!!! ⸜(*ˊᗜˋ*)⸝ Thank you for sending it!! I based each plushie on the animal that's been assigned to their chibis, I hope that's okay!

How Jabberwock boys react after receiving a cute little plushie from MC

Otonashi Towa – bee plushie

Towa is a little bit confused because plushies aren't a huge part of his life and he never really played much with any.

But receiving anything from you makes him very happy because you're one of his favorite people, so he loves it regardless!!

He loved getting a little chubby bee because bees like flowers and he likes flowers so!! They're basically the same!

Towa likes his new little friend so much that he keeps it on him 24/7, even when he's frolicking in the Jabberwock meadows.

Which in turn makes the plushie all damp and dirty, but please don't be upset!

He tries giving it a bath every now and then, but having fun outside is one of the things he loves the most...

So the fact that he takes your gift with him every single time just means he treasures it a lot!!

He keeps on putting dandelions on the bee though, so keeping it clean is a hard task. But it's all because it remembers him of you! He has no regrets.

Speaking of regrets, be ready to get a teary-eyed Towa handing you the plushie, asking you to sew it back together after some bad encounter with an anomaly from time to time...

He will take a lot more care next time!! He promises!

Shiranami Ren – shark plushie

At first, he's gonna look at you like you grew three heads all of a sudden.

Why would you give him a cute gift like that? Do you want something from him???? Also does he look like someone who likes plushies cmon MC-

Yes. Yes, he does love plushies. And he is absolutely in love with your gift.

Ren will mostly keep his new friend inside his room, away from prying eyes (Haru's eyes, he means).

But after a while, he might stuff it inside his backpack whenever he has an exam or something hard he gotta do, because he considers it his moral support (also it is adorable and looking at cute things is great for your health-)

Mostly, however, they'll hang out together inside his room. Ren will hug it while playing one of his mobile games, and he swears the plushie is giving him a little bit more luck when he pulls the gacha...

After a while, Ren might begrudgingly ask you if you know how to sew little clothes, because he saw online how some people buy tons of clothes for their nuis and he kinda wants to do the same...

Don't laugh though! It took him a whole lot of courage to come ask this of you! He'll kick you out of his guild if you laugh!

Please sew clothes for his shark friend. Ren wants little cosplays of his favorite games and you're the only one who gets him.

Sagara Haru – kangaroo plushie

Oh no MC. YOU ARE GIVING HIM A NEW CHILD?????

"Why didn't you tell me you were expecting our kid?! I will take full responsibility, let's get married and take care of him together and–"

"Haru. That's literally just a plushie I sewed for you."

"Haha, I know!! I'm just joking, I'm just joking!! You ARE the other parent, though."

Needless to say, Haru absolutely loves it to death, and he WILL keep making jokes like that forever, even if you two are just friends and never even smooched.

He also takes it everywhere, but mostly because Peekaboo loved the plushie just as much as him and is convinced he is a big brother.

Like father, like son...

Peekaboo insists Haru puts the little plushie right beside him on his baby wrap, just the head peeking out so it can "breathe and watch everything" properly.

With all the hard work Haru does, the plushie also gets a bit dirty, but he cleans it thoroughly almost everyday! Can't have his youngest son dirty, right?

Haru lets Peekaboo keep it during the day, but during the night, he takes it to bed with him, on the rare occasions in which he sleeps for more than 3 hours

He loves cuddling his plushie son and might ask you someday to make more friends for it!

Of course, he does that by joking about how you two are ready to expand the family, and how he would like to have more kids. He's just a silly goofy guy like that.

[murderofcrow]

Open letter to Sleep Token tumblr

Hello eepy friends, due to the situation that was shared by the anon earlier, I decided to share something that has been bothering me for a while.

I'm obviously generalising here, but st tumblr tends to ignore any kind of negativity and also has a tendency to write everything off as petty drama that does not concern us. I personally don't think that this is a good approach at all.

Petty drama is when some bitter cunt calls Vessel ugly. Doxing, impersonation, spreading lies about their personal life, hypersexualisation, harassment and threats of any kind of violence are not. And it bothers me that a lot of people call it drama and keep ignoring it. It's not drama, it's dangerous! It doesn't matter if it happened on another platform, it does concern every single one of us. Outsiders that are not in a specific group within the fandom do not differentiate between tumblr, twitter, discord, tiktok, etc. We all get lumped in together because we are part of the same fandom.

Discourse and criticism within a fandom are not bad things. Out of experience, speaking up about issues does not make a fandom negative. Ignoring everything is what makes it negative. It can create hostility and the feeling that you can't speak freely when something bothers you. I think it's sad that any type of serious discourse here only happens anonymous because people don't want to be accused of spreading negativity in the fandom. I don't want this fandom to implode one day because ignored issues start piling up until you can't ignore them anymore.

We should and need to speak out when we see dangerous behaviour. We should always give a heads up when there is someone that is actually bringing negativity into the space because of their behaviour towards the band or the fandom. This DOES concern all of us. We need to be able to speak freely about these issues.

I just want you all to keep that in mind. Thank you for reading.

-Crow.

[positively-peachy-143]

Guys rq, if I'm doing an RP with you and I haven't responded yet, please LET ME LIVE MY LIFE. I will get back to you eventually I swear, but repeatedly reaching out about it will not get a response faster. I'm busy with school, I have mountains of work to catch up on, and feeling like responding to an RP is just another *task* I have to do just makes me distance myself from it more. Please give me more slack, I understand it's frustrating, but I am like this with EVERYTHING social atm. I am periodically responding to all rps when I have time and motivation to do so, and I'm even limiting irl things too. Please be patient with me.

[useramor]

>:/

[sera-wasnever]

I really do wonder how much the fact that all the Americans we meet outside the US had the money for a holiday many of us couldn't ever afford in reverse leads to misunderstandings in the 'americans getting touchy about their bad reputation' discourse

[cowardlycowboys]

those "are you lgbtq+ polls" are so silly honestly because of course almost everyone is gonna vote yes.... that's the audience you've curated like and the chances of it "breaking containment" is unlikely even if you had all your followers reblog it because they probably also run in those same circles

[running-in-the-dark]

I've spent over four hours with a bunch of people, and I don't know most of them, and now it feels like my brain is trying to crawl out of my skull. Fun!

[noxtivagus]

hmmm. oh my god my mind is a mess i rlly can't write what i want to rn but i will just Dump

[volostan]

Volo blues hitting hard tonight. Sometimes I wonder why I do all this, it makes me feel helpless. But I know it's meaningful for lots of people so I'm doing it for you fine folks

[theladygazingatemptiness]

I feel like part of the reason why it’s difficult for me to form connections like I used to is bc I still only use Skype to IM people and back then most people used Skype too but nowadays everyone is on Discord now and Discord kinda frightens me tbh

[neverendingford]

.

[kowabungadoodles]

How to spot a (heart wrenching sad cat) Charity Scam

So I've been get a lot of requests for money in my askbox lately, from users I have never seen before! Usually sad cats, sometimes gender affirming medical bills, a queer person being made homeless etc etc... and guess what? None of them are real! It's scammers who have learned how to work tumblr's userbase and prey on our general sense of community and charity.

Here it is, so sad! So tragic! But let's note a few things:

It's generic. They don't know me, I don't know them. it's addressed to 'friend', no use of nicknames or usernames.

Even the cat and the problem are generic 'little kitty' who has 'urgent needs'. This is not how real people talk, this is because this scam is being used over and over with different accounts a different 'cats'.

Praying (uh huh.)

Asking you to reply privately- This is so people don't spot the scam and point it out the mark and because if too many people posted replies to the same message it would beome really obvious that this is a scam. If they're looking for 'boosts' so badly, then why do they need you to reply privately?

Now that I'm suspicious, let's investigate.

Sent me an ask and then followed me! Sounds like they're just hitting up anyone and everyone, but even more likely they have a list they're working from.

(I get so many, I'm probably on a mail-out list a mile long, just being hit up for cash. Likely I fell for one of these once and got my name added to every scam list for miles, but oh well.)

So let's see if they're a bot or a real person!

The blog looks genuine enough, they've got a bio, a fandom etc. And it says they're an artist!

And of course there's that sad cat post, pinned right to the top, so I don't have to look any further through the blog for verification... Looks super legit, pics of the cat, pics of the bill... of course anyone can print out a bill and take a picture of it...

As I do scroll futher, it's full of reblogs making this look like an active user. So how can I tell it's not genuine?

Well, if they're an artist they probably post right? Doodles? Pictures? Let's have a look at their origional posts.

The fastest way to do this is by using an outside tool like Original Post Finder.

just type in the suspicious username and go...

Voila! As suspected, the only post this bot account has ever made is Sad Cat Post.

Confirmed: Scam. Do not give your money to these guys, it looks so real but they're just here to make you feel like a bad person for not handing over everything you can. Charity is wonderful, supporting friends is wonderful, but tbh save it for people you actually know irl/ mutuals you have an actual relationship with. Don't believe any rando who comes knocking!

Love and kisses, stay safe out there.

[maniculum]

Medieval Scorpions Effortpost

So yesterday I reblogged this post featuring an 11th-century depiction of the Apocalypse Locusts from Revelations, noting the following incongruity as another medieval scorpion issue:

The artist, as you can see, has interpreted "tails like scorpions" as meaning "glue cheerful-looking snakes to their butts".

Anyway, it occurred to me that the medieval scorpion thing might not be as widely known as I think it is, and that Tumblr would probably enjoy knowing about it if it isn't known already. So, finding myself unable to focus on the research I'm supposed to be doing, I decided to write about this instead. I'll just go ahead and put a cut here.

As we can see in the image above, at least one artist out there thought a "scorpion" was a type of snake. Which makes it difficult to draw "tails like scorpions", because a snake's tail is not that distinctive or menacing (maybe rattlesnakes, but they don't have those outside the Americas). So they interpreted "tails like scorpions" as "the tail looks like a whole snake complete with head".

Let me tell you. This is not a problem unique to this illustration.

See, people throughout medieval Europe were aware of scorpions. As just alluded to, they are mentioned in the Bible, and if the people producing manuscripts in medieval Europe knew one thing, it was Stuff In Bible. They're also in the Zodiac, which medieval Europe had inherited through classical sources. However, let's take a look at this map:

That's Wikipedia's map of the native range of the Scorpiones order, i.e., all scorpion species. You may notice something -- the range just stops at a certain northern latitude. Pretty much all of northern Europe is scorpion-free. If you lived in the north half of Europe, odds were good you had never seen a scorpion in your life. But if you were literate or educated at all, or you knew they were a thing, because you'd almost certainly run across them being mentioned in texts from farther south. And those texts wouldn't bother to explain what a scorpion was, of course -- everyone knows scorpions, right? When was the last time you stopped to explain What Is Spiders?

So medieval writers and artists in northern Europe were kind of stuck. There was all this scorpion imagery and metaphor in the texts they liked to work from, but they didn't really know what a scorpion was. Writers could kind of work around it (there's a lot of "oh, it's a venomous creature, moving on"), but sometimes they felt the need to break it down better. For this, of course, they'd have to refer to a bestiary -- but due to Bestiary Telephone and the persistent need of bestiary authors to turn animals into allegories, one of the only visual details you got on scorpions was that they... had a beautiful face, which they used to distract people in order to sting them.

And look. I'm not here to yuck anyone's yum, but I would say that a scorpion's face has significant aesthetic appeal only for a fairly small segment of the population. I'm sure you could get an entomologist to rhapsodize about it a bit, but your average person on the street will not be entranced by the face of a scorpion. So this did not help the medieval Europeans in figuring out how to depict scorpions. There was also some semantic confusion -- see, in some languages (such as Old and Middle English), "worm" could be a general term for very small animals of any kind. But it also could mean "serpent".* So there were some, like our artist at the top of the post, who were pretty sure a scorpion was a snake. This was probably helped along by the fact that "venomous" was one of the only things everyone knew about them, and hey, snakes are venomous. Also, Pliny the Elder had floated the idea that there were scorpions in Africa that could fly, and at least one author (13th-century monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus) therefore suggested that they had feathers. I don't see that last one coming up much, I just share it because it's funny to me.

*English eventually resolved this by borrowing the Latin vermin for very small animals, using the specialized spelling wyrm for big impressive mythical-type serpents, and sticking with the more specific snake for normal serpents.

Some authors, like the anonymous author of the Ancrene Wisse, therefore suggested that a scorpion was a snake with a woman's face and a stinging tail. (Everyone seemed to be on the same page with regards to the fact that the sting was in the tail, which is in fact probably the most recognizable aspect of scorpions, so good job there.) However, while authors could avoid this problem, visual artists could not. And if you were illustrating a bestiary or a calendar, including a scorpion was not optional. So they had to take a shot at what this thing looked like.

And so, after this way-too-long explanation, the thing you're probably here for: inaccurate medieval drawings of scorpions. (There are of course accurate medieval drawings of scorpions, from artists who lived in the southern part of Europe and/or visited places where scorpions lived; I'm just not showing you those.) And if you find yourself wondering, "how sure are you that that's meant to be a scorpion?" -- all of these are either from bestiaries or from calendars that include zodiac illustrations.

11th-century England, MS Arundel 60. (Be honest, without the rest of this post, if I had asked you to guess what animal this was supposed to be, would you have ever guessed “scorpion”?)

12th-century Germany, "Psalter of Henry the Lion". (Looks a bit undercooked. Kind of fetal.)

12th-century France, Peter Lombard's Sententiae. (Very colorful, itsy bitsy claws, what is happening with that tail?)

12th-century England, "The Shaftesbury Psalter". (So a scorpion is some sort of wyvern with a face like a duck, correct?)

13th-century France, Thomas de Cantimpré's Liber de natura rerum. (I’d give them credit for the silhouette not being that far off, but there’s a certain bestiary style where all the animals kind of look like that. Also note how few of these have claws.)

13th-century England, "The Bodley Bestiary". (Mischievous flying squirrel impales local man’s hand, local man fails to notice.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (A scorpion is definitely either a mouse or a fish. Either way it has six legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Wait, no, it’s a baby theropod, and it has two legs. (Yes, this is the same manuscript, that’s not an error, this artist did four scorpions and no two are the same.))

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Actually it’s a lizard with tiny ears and it has four legs.)

13th-century England, Harley MS 3244. (Now that we’re at the big fancy illustration, I think I’ve got it — it’s like that last one, but two legs, longer ears, and a less goofy face. Also I’ve decided it’s not pink anymore, I think that was the main problem.)

13th-century England, MS Kk.4.25. (A scorpion is a flat crocodile with a bear’s head.)

13th-century England, "The Huth Psalter". (Wyvern but baby! Does not seem to be enjoying biting its own tail.)

13th-century England, MS Royal 1 D X. (This triangular-headed gentlecreature gets the award for “closest guess at correct limb configuration”. If two of those were claws, I might actually believe this artist had seen a scorpion before, or at least a picture of one.)

13th-century England, "The Westminster Psalter". (A scorpion is the offspring of a wyvern and a fawn.)

13th-century England, "The Rutland Psalter". (Too many legs! Pull back! Pull back!)

13th or 14th-century France, Bestiaire d'amour rimé. (This is very similar to the fawn-wyvern, but putting it in an actual Scene makes it even more obvious that you’re just guessing.)

14th-century Netherlands, Jacob van Maerlant's Der Naturen Bloeme. (More top-down six-legged guys that look too furry to be arthropods.)

14th-century Germany, MS Additional 22413. (That is clearly a turtle.)

14th-century France, Matfres Eymengau de Beziers's Breviari d'amor. (Who came up with that head shape and what was their deal?)

15th-century England, "Bestiary of Ann Walsh". (Screw it, a scorpion is a big lizard that glares at you for trying to make me draw things I don’t know about.)

I've spent way too much time on this now. End of post, thank you to anyone who got all the way down here.

[crustaceousfaggot]

An outsider's knowledge of The Locked Tomb series, based on what I've seen from Tumblr.

So it's a series of books. Idk how many they are (at least 3? And they're still coming out) but I'm pretty sure they all have the suffix "the ninth". Idk what this means.

One of the books is called "Nona the ninth" but I feel like I never hear people talking about a character named Nona so idk what that's about

The two protagonists are Harrowhark and Gideon. They're very much in love but also I think there's some elements of Toxic Yuri at play. Not like enemies to lovers but more of like a codependency thing I think?

At some point one of them eats someone I think?

Harrow is the little goth one and she's like. Angry and bitey and very wetpathetic like a gutter cat.

Gideon is the taller ginger one who's a bit more butch. She's also angry and bitey but less so? I am attracted to her.

Harrowhark and Gideon are part of like... An order of space nuns who do necromancy. It seems like Harrow takes this responsibility more seriously and Gideon just wants to fuck around and look at tits.

That's why they have the skull makeup. Because they're Necro Nuns

Idk why Harrow is always drawn with the Bone Corset thing but Gideon isn't. Idk if this is just because she's Like That or if it's like... A separate uniform she has for whatever reason.

There's a lot of angst derived from how Harrow is like... Indoctrinated and controlled and lacks agency in her own life.

Harrow and Gideon are separated at some point and fans are very keen to see them reunited. Maybe. I might be making that part uo

There's a blonde woman named Ianthe? Idk what she does though. That's the only other character I know about.

As far as I know there are no men. Or at least no men worth talking about.

I'm not sure what the titular Locked Tomb is all about. Presumably something to do with necromancy.

You know for a series that people call the "lesbian necromancer series" I feel like I rarely hear people discussing the necromancy parts.

I'm also unclear on the time period and setting. I think it's set in space but idk if it's like a far-future thing or an alternate universe or...?

There's a lot of perspective-hopping. I think it also switches between 1st and 3rd person POV which is neat I suppose

I heard somewhere that it's loosely based off of a Homestuck fanfic but idk if that's true

[neil-gaiman]

Hi Neil. I’ve let a lot of my questions go unanswered or stuck to my own speculation because I know you’ve got quite a full inbox, but there’s one scene that I can’t seem to make any sense of even after doing outside research. When Crowley and Aziraphale go to the pub in S2E2 and Aziraphale asks Crowley if he knows who Jane Austen is, Crowley says that he’d never forget her because she was the “mastermind” behind the 1810 Clerkenwell Diamond Robbery. When I first watched the episode, that reference did seem familiar to me but I couldn’t place my finger on where it was from. So I did some research on this supposed heist and all that comes up is text posts of people on Tumblr quoting that conversation from the show, or the Clerkenwell Crime Syndicate in the 1980s-‘90s. The Clerkenwell Diamond Robbery isn’t a real thing that happened, is it? What is Crowley alluding to with that? Or who is he getting Jane Austen mixed up with?

I'm surprised that enterprising people haven't created an entire website by now telling in detail the story of the 1810 Clerkenwell Diamond Robbery. Perhaps it was hushed up.

[noxtivagus]

afternoon happy random rambles c: