#i feel like a giant bug

[birdybumbles]

getting older is just realizing you have a lot in common with Franz Kafka

[dazzelmethat]

Anteater Weevil. Smaller than a great anteater and more arboreal, the species combo would eat more termites and sap from trees than ants on the ground.

@weevilsdaily Hope you don't mind me tagging you. Your blog is what got me to get down and fully design an idea I've had for a while.

I love both great anteaters and weevils so so much.

[blujayonthewing]

mostly I prefer to play in the space and explore/ build on flavor text given by the books rather than outright reject or contradict it wrt things like races and classes in dnd but once in awhile I'll suddenly remember that canonically lizardfolk don't experience emotions and only respond to threats by logically assessing them as such because they're too primitive to feel fear

[coolskeleton3000]

Just put eyedrops in my eyes and thought about how disasterous and divorce-inducing it would turn out for John and Arthur.

Don't really remember if John feels Arthur's eyeballs since he (imo) doesn't control them. Just want the guy go through why in the actual fuck your eyes feel like there's sand in them -> this is very fucking weird and uncomfortable process -> okay.... that actually feels better... pipeline. They'll get divorced 5 times trough this.

[whumpy-wyrms]

yk i was having trouble writing tllr chapter 12 because Dew is sick with a fever in the beginning and i just,, idk felt uninspired or something because im not the biggest fan of sickfics or whatever

well now i’m sick with a fever and it’s helll so sorry Dew im gonna have to put you through this now my bad 👍👍 at least i am now inspired

if this post makes no sense it’s because my brain hurts and i’m tired 👍👍👍

[pitske]

JASPER MY BOI!!

[risingsunresistance]

some real cicadas btw. if you even care

[exilley]

if 1 more big blog follows me back i'm gonna die a premature death will this website stop giving me heart attacks 😣

[ratcandy]

ate soup with giant water bug in it today ! It was bad

[flame-shadow]

I never get tired of people drawing Mossy in the colosseum. A majority of the art fight attacks that include him involve him fighting in the colo, and I love all of them.

[ganondoodle]

been playing the new pokemon thingy, and so far .. i liked arceus way more :I the character customization is really neat in this one but i miss the more active and dynamic fight/catch system, really made it all feel more "real"

i want to dodgeroll around and wap pokemon from behind with a pokeball to catch them, not start a battle every single time with no way to actually aim it yourself either

also ... raid battles ... ugh

[thecastlesaredamp]

I don't need much just the sun blushing my cheeks, and the tadpoles swimming around my ankles will do.

[iiscpr]

more bullshit

[starshine-selfships]

YOURE ALSO SHIPPING WITH AN ANGEL NAMED GABRIEL!?? TELL ME ALL ABOUT IT!!!! 🩷🩷🩷

GOD GOD YES!! Also fun fact I lowkey knew you specifically would see those tags and got excited to see if you would say anything hfjgrgj

Here's the guy of the hour, the week, the YEAR

(The art with the oranges is my own lmao)

I got the game he's from as a gift for Christmas from a friend who really likes it (and I was like yeah!! I wanna play the game too!!) so everything I'm saying has a grand total of a month and a half behind it, and I feel like the short time duration is important to highlight the insanity here kdjffk

ALRIGHT SO spoilers for the entirety of ultra.kill as a game bc he's integral to the overall plot, but some background before Gabby, the game is centered around a robot (controlled by the player) descending down through 9 layers of hell a la dante's inferno style, bc this particular machine is blood powered and mankind has been completely wiped out (partially by war, partially by something that hasn't been made 100% clear yet), so you're just going around slaughtering everything in sight, with the chunkiest graphics known to man along the way.

Gabe's role here is to step in and try to stop you bc you're basically a walking abomination to all that is holy, Gabe is the angel that sends people to hell and is also the one chosen to carry out the will of god so he's also done a lot of killing to do that; he loses to the machine, gets so mad he curses at you (calls you an insignificant fuck) and then leaves, but we see a little behind the scenes, where we learn he's never lost a fight like this and the rest of the angels call it heresy; they sever his connection with divinity and tell him he has 24 hours to fix everything or he'll die. So naturally, next fight he's pissed as hell, and starts out MAD, yelling and threatening, but as it goes on, he starts having fun and laughing and taunting, and when he loses again, he says he feels relieved and needs time to think. He starts introspecting and starts questioning everything he's been told after he realizes he wasn't feeling hatred, but a sort of passion in the challenge of the fights. He starts asking himself if the angels he followed were actually in the right, and ends up killing them all, accepting that he's going to die but that he'll die not only having been freed from the constraints placed on him, but also having freed heaven itself from the angels that basically held it hostage with their power.

He's also as close to trans as you can get without explicitly calling him such! The devs discussed angels and pronouns in a recent stream and said they wanted angels to have no pronouns if possible, but then realized that they needed to gender Gabe when another character wrote a diary entry about him, so they settled on pronouns as a mark of angel status, which means that he didn't originally use he/him, but picked it up later and continued to use it no matter what; the other angels called him "it" after the took his divinity, but the overall narration still uses masculine pronouns for him, so it comes with the implication that he's still exactly who he knows he is, no matter what is said about him, which. as a trans man. good lord fhsjg the trauma of his arc hits very close to home for me and that was part of what propelled him into the spot he has on this blog.

The other thing that got him here was. and there really isn't any other way to say it. This man turned everyone into rabid animals, I have never seen so many people look at a character and desire him so violently, everyone wants to do unspeakable things to this man and it is so funny hdsjgks his VA will also voice pretty much anything in-character as well, so there's a lot of unhinged bullshit that makes for an absolutely incredible image of this man. He's a little uptight at first and throws a fit when things don't go his way, he seems like the exact kind of man that would be kind of silly, this man would struggle to peel an orange, throw it at a wall, and then later hang his head in his hands about it. This man would be able to speak multiple languages but would somehow mispronounce every single word as he goes. He's an astounding character and he's also kind of pathetic and something about all these factors just. lobotomized me. There is a gay little angel where part of my brain should be and I've just accepted it. I had a gay dream about him one single week after I saw him in game, the grip he has on me is UNREAL and I've fully accepted it.

He gives the very fun aspect of "is not human and has no idea what humans need or how they act", which makes him utterly hilarious to me, I wanna see this man try to preheat the oven, he is trying so hard to cook something for me and he is burning it so badly, he does NOT know what a car is and is frankly too wary of it to even consider getting in it. People also arrived at the consensus that he's probably very tall, it's been confirmed that there are no canon heights in the game, but everyone has agreed that Gabby is at least 7 feet tall and it is the funniest thing on earth to me. Very large and somewhat confused angel who means the best trying very hard in his new environment. Oh my god wait when the developers had that stream I mentioned they also talked about Gabe for a bit in regards to his personality bc in-game he saved someone from being swept away in the river styx (now an ocean after an influx of souls), and they were so grateful they added a fully functional hologram of him onto their ship, saying the lines he'd said when he'd saved them, and the devs said that they'd wanted that to be a glimpse into what Gabriel is like when he's not immediately targeting you as an enemy or fighting, and the specific words they used were "he's kind and loving" and that short-circuited my brain immediately upon impact.

He is The Guy Ever, he's basically trans and 70% of the people who drew him gave him top surgery scars even before the devs talked about gender, he's got religious trauma and guilt, he's too tall and has probably never read a book outside of the bible, he giggles and whimpers, he is considered to be one of if not the most wifeable character in the entire game, he has an official body pillow, I want to put him in pretty little outfits, I want to hold his hand and take him to the beach, I want to pin him against a wall, he is. Such A Guy,, thank you so much for asking me about him he makes me feel so insane hsgjsdl

[aroaceleovaldez]

i think i’ve pinned down one of the things that’s bugged me about the recent series/books - over time there’s been a slow over-saturation of the mythological aspects, at least in how they’re presented to us. The first series and TKC balance the mundane and mythological really well, but as things go on there’s more and more emphasis on mythological things as separate rather than merged with the mortal world. The best two examples I can think of for this are Tartarus (We’ll ignore Tartarus in mythology versus how it is in PJO for now, that’s a topic for another day) and MCGA -

[Under cut for length]

in the first series, Tartarus is scary and ominous because we don’t know anything about it, we’re just told it’s bad and the only things down there are Kronos and reforming monsters (who can actually relatively easily escape Tartarus, it just takes them a minute), essentially. All we ever see of it is glimpses in the first book of the edge of it and a little bit later in the Labyrinth when there’s some cracks that lead to it. In the beginning of HoO it’s still scary because we still haven’t seen it, but we know Nico went down there and it was extremely bad for him. We still know nothing else! This also adds something special - Nico now has the unique trait of being the only mortal to have passed through Tartarus and survived. All of that then immediately falls apart when Percy and Annabeth fall into Tartarus and... it’s not that impressive. They actually get through it relatively fine. They run into a friendly giant who gives them soup and we get a literal deus ex machina as Iapetus/Bob shows up out of nowhere to help them out too. So now we’ve revoked the fact that it’s a special trait to have been able to survive Tartarus, that apparently means nothing, and apparently there’s enough friendly/useful things in Tartarus to make your life easier while you’re there AND now with TSATS we’re revisiting it again and now Will gets to have survived Tartarus too, I guess, because just anybody can do that now. Not to mention the whole “Oh, btw, Nico actually also has Super Special Tartarus Vision but Percy also temporarily got that too so that’s also not special.”

With MCGA, the series is supposed to be set in Boston, right? Except, it’s not, really. It’s set in the Nine Worlds. And it’s set in the Nine Worlds in such a way that we the reader are essentially just on a convenient guided tour of the Nine Worlds for some reason. We didn’t need to see a guided tour of the Nine Worlds! It’s just shoehorning in mythology for the sake of showing it off. PJO and TKC being set in New York worked because we actually see New York and New York is important to how the story functions. The mythology stuff is in New York! Camp Half-Blood is on Long Island Sound! Olympus is in the Empire State Building! The Grey Sisters drive a taxi! Camp Jupiter works because it’s in California. TLH and SoN work because we are in different real-world locations, but mythology stuff is happening in those spots. That’s what made PJO unique! And that’s what starts falling apart later in the books - Team Statue’s trip is memorable because we get some details about the places they end up. That one scene where Hazel, Frank, and Nico are wandering through Venice is memorable because we see Venice! Most of the rest of HoO we don’t get that same description. In TOA we lose it even more - yes, we’re in these different spots, but they feel disconnected because it’s less “We’re in this location! and there��s mythology stuff here too!” and more “OMG MYTHOLOGY STUFF and we’re like, vaguely in this location, I guess.” You could essentially interchange the mundane location of those scenes in HoO or TOA or MCGA without disrupting the story at all because it doesn’t play into it at all. In the first series it matters that we’re at the Gateway Arch and the Hoover Dam and Las Vegas and Manhattan. In TKC it matters that we’re in London and Brooklyn. In TLH it matters that we’re at the Grand Canyon! In SoN it matters that we’re in California or Alaska! Heck, it matters that the Princess Andromeda was a normal cruise ship with mortal passengers still on it! But in MOA-BoO and TOA and MCGA it doesn’t! You can interchange any random place with Greco-Roman ruins because we’re just apparently on a tour of Europe anyways. You can interchange the setting of TOA because for the most part between Camp Half-Blood, Camp Jupiter, and the Labyrinth, we’re either just vaguely somewhere or some new randomly introduced demigod-or-mythological-related place. You can interchange the setting of MCGA to any large North American city because we barely see the city, it’s just a backdrop for Hotel Valhalla and spots are chosen at complete random as access points to the Nine Worlds.

It takes away some of the meaning, to me, to over-emphasize the mythological aspects of the universe when it’s supposed to be this big special thing. The entire first series emphasizes how the mythological world has merged with modern mundane life, and especially that demigods struggle to locate and interact with a lot of these mythological locations. Trips to Olympus are rare and special occasions.Trips to the Underworld are difficult and extremely uncommon unless you have specific access or are summoned there, so every time we do go there it’s exciting! In TKC it takes effort and difficulty and specific circumstances to gain access to many mythological-related things and places in the first place, which in turns makes it rewarding when we do see it. There are absolutely some mythological locations we see in the series that it makes sense to repeatedly visit or have easier access to - the camps and nomes, obviously, are safe havens we expect to return to. The Labyrinth has access points everywhere. But the cool part of the Labyrinth in the first series versus TOA is that in PJO, where the Labyrinth was entered and exited was important and created interesting scenarios - such as fighting Kampe in Alcatraz, or having to guard the entrance into CHB because it was dangerous. In TOA it’s always just kind of... somewhere?

There’s also a lot of rehashing of places and monsters and beings we’ve met before - it doesn’t make sense to return to Ogygia a whole two times after Percy’s trip (which is supposed to be, yknow, impossible to reach unless you get hopelessly lost) or for Calypso to even show up again after the first series since part of Percy’s deal at the end of TLO was supposed to be for Calypso to be freed. Returning to Ogygia’s island and reintroducing Calypso there feels like a retcon more than anything at that point, when if you wanted to reintroduce her you could have just had her show up somewhere else, having been freed from her island and gone traveling to see the sights of the world. Why revisit Ogygia? Or Tartarus? These places that are supposed to be impossible to reach or survive? Every time you go back it just invalidates the intended feeling and structure of those settings. Why not revisit like, Triple-G Ranch? Which is just kind of there and a perfectly open spot with a known location that’s not difficult to find at all? Or the Amazon headquarters, which is also a known and easy to access building. Neither of those were totally explored when we were introduced to them! And we haven’t seen them again! Heck, we could even revisit the ruins of Circe’s Island, see if anything’s going on there now! What happened to all the sorceresses and pirates? Did the sorceresses become pirates and take back the island? That’d be cool to see! That’s an interesting revisitation of past mythological-based locations, not going back again and again to these impossible-to-reach places. It’s why we never went back to the Garden of Hesperides - we know where it is and under what circumstances to gain access it, but we only went there once and saw it maybe twice and that’s good! Because the less we see the mythological places the more special they are! And the more we see the mundane places and how mythological things have taken root in these modern mortal spaces, then the more grounded the universe feels! Not a random private building entirely occupied by Nero’s forces or magic grottos hidden in already magic summer camps, but furies and centaurs hiding as teachers and satyrs disguised as students. That was what made the universe feel so unique. And I’d like to see more of that instead of things feeling so disjointed like they have recently.

[selfdiagnosedeyemotif]

i do wanna say that Deepnest is perhaps the greatest feat of ambience i have ever seen because they really did nail the vibe they were going for. unfortunately that vibe is one of abject horror and i need to get THE FUCK

OUT OF HERE