#i like elephants and god likes elephants

[xrenegadexangelx]

i suppose my programming is void of promiscuity. however i cannot eliminate the possibility

[egophiliac]

he did it! 🐍 and it only took...uhhh...well, there probably could've been less punches, but why hold back!

PUNCHES FOR EVERYONE

[p4nishers]

can u believe this was published in 1999

[elodieunderglass]

I know an adult skunk would be too big, but in my heart this fluffy ball of anger and fear is Bee:

[ID: a picture of a baby skunk in defensive posture with erect and puffed tail. end ID]

[ID: a baby skunk adorably sleeping curled up in a little ball in a person's hand. end ID]

Safely tucked in Chil's neck warmer

(In reference to the Dungeon Meshi daemon-AU fanfiction in which one guy has simply decided to be secretive about his daemon to the point of it being deeply weird)

Thank you so much!! that is the perfect creature and a really, really clever choice and I love her so much.

I really regret that we do actually have to physically meet Bee at some point because it is so much funnier not to.

I also have to say, I don’t know why people who sell their writing get so mad when people guess their plots! Like when you hear about the Game of Thrones/ Star Wars etc guys changing their plots because people were guessing plots and having theories based on the FORESHADOWING THEY PUT IN.

I am completely surprised and excited by how people’s guesses for Bee have gotten closer and closer and how many have landed on the mark. Genuinely very exciting and satisfying and not what I was expecting. The feeling is very good, and it feels collaborative and motivational.

I don’t know what the point I’m trying to make here is, but I think it’s that foreshadowing is fun to set up and also fun to pay off, and that I like it when people guess what’s going on! We are all playing a game involving lying with words and it is collaborative! I think paid media would be more fun if people had more fun making it!

[ratatatastic]

sasha and matthew on the same page in concerns of going for another cup <3 (x)(x)

[ancha-aus]

RealAgeAU Drabble - Curious Sight

What is this?! Two Drabbles?! @spotaus It is more likely than you think.

Mostly because i was REAL impressed you guys managed to keep it equal. like how? Also because i really wanted to do both so here you go! both!

This one is a lot shorter though hihi

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*--------------------*

Just his luck.

Why did he have to have a favourite pie in a whole other universe?

The Toriel looks very apologetic “I am very sorry. They just sold out very quickly this time. I will have new ones tomorrow morning!”

Blue smiles as he pushes down the disappointment “It is okay! I can always try again later.”

Toriel smiles before motioning towards the other goods she has for sale “Anything else? The cupcakes are amazing today.” she smiles.

Blue shakes his skull “No that is alright. Thank you so much for checking!” he waves and leaves the small bakery.

He sighs as he stands outside.

Damnit.

His luck sucks today. He had hoped he could cheer himself up with some nice pie but it seems like they are out after all. Ugh. Then again, maybe it is his own fault for liking things outside his own universe so much.

Blue looks from side to side. Maybe he can look around a bit? See if there is another bakery. He doubts it because the town, and well this very universe, is very small and he hadn’t seen it when he visited this place with the Stars all that time ago.

But well. He doesn’t really have anything planned today.

He looks left and right and decides to go right for now. He wanders down the street and waves at people along the way.

Okay. So he can’t get the cherry hazelnut pie he wanted. Which is a shame. But he can do something else to cheer him up!

It had just been rough in his underground. Alphys had been very distrusting of the human this time around and it had been exhausting to get her to at least try to get to know them. That is not even the multiverse mess.

At least people don’t demand his help at every turn anymore. Sure he loves helping others but before it got so bad. Back when Dream was still doing the positive guardian thing. People had also demanded help of Blue. And Blue loves to help! But there had been the fear that if he said no it would reflect badly on Dream and Ink.

There is a reason he hardly travelled the multiverse alone before. It was just easier to give himself rest that way.

But now with Dream officially having a new god goal and Ink still being MIA it means people stopped bothering Blue all the time!

Blue tries to ignore the hurt that thinking about Ink brings. He had done so much to help Ink and had thought they had been friends! That Blue meant something to the other! Apparently not. Seeing as Ink hasn’t even shown his face anywhere yet, aside from meetings but Blue doesn’t really count that. They don’t even hang out afterwards. Ink just leaves again.

Blue shakes his skull and keeps walking. It is fine. Ink is also a god and probably busy with god stuff. Reaper was going to talk with Error and Ink about their godhood after all. Ink is probably just busy.

Blue just… he hopes Ink didn’t just… forget him…

Blue shakes his skull and pats his own cheeks twice. Come on Blue! Snap out of it! You got this! No need to dwell on the negatives. Especially if you don’t know what Ink’s reason is! There is no reason to worry or feel sad about things you don’t even know yet!

Blue sighs as he grabs his phone. His phalange hovering over Dream’s icon. No. Dream is dealing with enough. And asking him to track down Ink just so Blue can ask him why he doesn’t want to hang out anymore is just… a lot.

Blue scrolls through his contacts and pauses when he sees Red’s name. Huh. It has been a while since he hang out with Red. Maybe the two of them can go to some motorcross universe and drive a set of bikes around? Just go fast and have fun with a friend? He taps a message and sends it.

Blue grins at his phone as he waits. Oh this is going to be great. Just him and a friend having fun and talking about motorcycles!

A ping and Blue grins before it falls. Red says he can’t at the moment. Bad run going on in his universe and that his brother is very stressed. Apparently the last reset had gone very badly and Red had died and apparently Edge had gotten somekind of memory or dream about it and is hovering a lot more than usual.

Blue sighs but types back that he gets it and if he needs help just to let him know. Red answers with a thumbs up and a thanks.

Blue sighs and just looks up. Huh. He recognises these streets but can’t quite remember where from. Maybe all these areas just look alike? Blue shrugs and looks back at his phone.

Maybe he can ask Sans, or whatever everyone decides to call him. Sans is a bit… strange. No one is quite sure why, Sans least of all. It is just weird how everyone just decided that no nickname really fit him. They tried Comic and Classic. But in the end everyone just ends up referring to him with Sans.

Which is weird as fuck with all of them originally being Sans. Yet Sans is the most Sans.

It is hard to explain.

He finds the number and grins as he is typing a message.

A moment later he answers that he is down to hang out.

Blue grins as he starts typing, not really paying attention to where he is going. He texts his friend about maybe going to Outertale to just hang out at the café. Or even to try and find a new universe.

Sans says he is down and asks if he wants to meet wherever he is now to travel together or to meet at Outertale and search for each other there.

Blue thinks and is about to type for Sans to come to him as he looks up for a reference for Sans to teleport to. Only to freeze.

That is the Cuddly Cat.

More importantly.

That is the back of Killer’s jacket leaving around the side of the building.

Blue doesn’t even answer the text as he runs towards the other road.

He gets there just in time to see the portal melt shut. Blue searches for the right app on his phone and holds it near the slowly fully closing rift. Praying he was fast enough to manage and get there in time.

It takes a moment and the signal the app is picking up disappears. But it is still loading and Blue stares at the program as it slowly slowly loads.

Then it pops up with coordinates to an universe!

Blue stares in shock before seeing another message of Sans appear at the top. He quickly texts him that he is very sorry but that he just spotted the gang out and about.

Sans’s reply is mostly confused. Asking why it matters as Sans thought that was all already solved? So why try and track their movement?

Blue is thorn. Does he share that Dream doesn’t actually know if Nightmare is dead? That Dream is actually looking for Nightmare?

Blue ends up typing that Dream still wants to personally apologise for the gang and Sans says he gets it and just let him know when he got time to hang.

Blue sighs as he opens the right chat window and starts to type. But then removes the message as he tries to type one again.

Over and over as he struggles over what to exactly say before he settles on a message.

“I saw the gang. I know to which universe they went. We got a lead if you want to check it out?”

And he waits.

His phone pings.

“Please.”

Seems like he got plans after all.

*--------------------*

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[gallusrostromegalus]

AEIWAM: Why DOES the God Machine decay, anyways? It's operating outside of time and space. For that matter, I have Other questions about it. Why does it generate existence in the first place? Does it change its composition over time? Does it communicate with others like it? Did someone make it?

Strictly speaking, there is no reason for life to exist, here or in the fic. This is all just a very fun accident. Life exists in the 4 dimensions we're familiar with not because there is a reason FOR life to exist, but because there is no particular reason for life to NOT exist. I think it's the same in twelve or two hundred forty-seven dimensions. There's no reason for life to NOT exist outside of our understanding of time and space, so there's not particular reason to think it does not exist.

So the life machine exists, not because it was made, but because there is no reason it should not exist.

One thing that does seem to be true across different dimensions (and by "dimensions" I mean "measurable spectrums in which reality can exist", not "Alternate universes") is that death, or at least, entropy *does* exist. The universe we live in will eventually experience heat death. Time unravels under specific conditions and indications are that those conditions will eventually become dominant. All things, even the laws of physics, eventually die.

So the Life Machine dies, because for some reason, all things do.

...But also Things are born for no particular reason.

The big bang happened for no particular reason other than nothing was stopping it (kind of literally). Some people think that the universe will not experience heat death at all, but a dimensional collapse that crushes it all back together, before it explodes again, like a cosmic inhale and exhale.

Perhaps the Life Machine is not dying at all, so much as this version of it is reaching the next phase of it's life cycle, and it departs it's mortal coil not for oblivion but it turns to goop to reform into a body measured in entirely different dimensions.

Which is a bit of an upheaval for its microflora.

The Life Machine generates life in the same way you and I 'generate' the conditions of our intestines that support bacteria. If you ask most people, they do not think their primary purpose in life is to play host to billions of microorganisms, but that is very much something we do, and depend on.

Likewise, the Life Machine is misnamed, because it's got purpose beyond human understanding, like how humans have purpose beyond the understanding of eyelash mites. It's doing it's own thing, we just live here. but if all our microflora and fauna were to leave, it'd be a major problem for us, and if all life were to stop, it'd be a problem for the Life Machine.

In the Tarot, "Death" symbolizes change, and the Life Machine is Dying in the sense that it's definitely changing. Whether that change is the change from caterpillar to butterfly or from whale to whalefall is beyond the comprehension of Mortals, or even things like The Soul King.

Soul King's job is to keep the souls alive through this, and they achieve this by exploiting the fact that this change is also when the Life Machine reproduces. Regardless if the current Life Machine becomes a butterfly or a corpse, it's offspring will have suitable conditions for life to continue. Maybe this is a gift form parent to child- the life machine passes her internal flora to her offspring like a mother transfers her own colonies and antibodies to her child via colostrum. Maybe the Life Machine isn't thinking of it's offspring at all and this is all just the machinations of the parasites to propagate themselves into a new host for the sake of future generations.

Either way, neither action is planned or designed, but are still acts of love from a parent to child. Woman and Nematode alike loves her daughter.

TL;DR: As Above, So below, in the gooeiest and most incomprehensible but deeply loving way possible.

[len-yx]

Twitter got to see this so so does tumblr

But not TikTok… my irls have my TikTok… I cannot say this on TikTok…

[shoezuki]

naming the doctor fic after a song was a mistake. cold cold cold by cage the elephants just started playing and i had such a physical reaction and now i must write

[field-guide-to-mud]

Happy Pride!

[xrenegadexangelx]

tribute to a classic

[p1nk-pallas]

freak of nature I hate him /affectionate

[housepilled]

hilson coded jason isbell songs…save me..

[des-fangirl]

attention please in werewolf au Vimes & Angua are even COOLER!!!

[moonmoonthecrabking]

"i love lgbtq people, i just don't support them" yet the fruit of what you call love is death.

[batsplat]

from the stuff i’ve heard marc’s former honda teammates (dani jorge and pol in their media careers but joan also i guess) say about him now that they’re racing is generally quite positive, both on a professional/riding level but also seemingly on a personal level? i’m wondering what you make of that given that, yeah, marc doesn’t seem like a very good teammate (unless you’re alex who i’ve left off this list). like MARC wants to separate on and off track stuff and it seems like all of these guys are willing too at least in retrospect, so he can’t have truly burned bridges with them. do you have any thoughts on that

(x, x) most riders are quite good at not burning bridges with each other! it's not like marc's competitors don't know that this stuff is kinda part of the game. I mean, all of marc's past teammates were also trying to assert themselves within the internal hierarchy... you can say that certain teammates engage in 'worse' behaviour than others, but, like, these people do understand they're supposed to be fighting each other! a baseline degree of nastiness is factored in and will be accepted to a greater or lesser extent by your rivals - especially when it comes to asserting yourself in intra-team power struggles. you might hate the other guy in the moment, but generally speaking once the active part of the rivalry is done with... you will probably get over it. marc's fellow riders are aware of how ultra-competitive marc is - and to a certain point they do respect it, not least because they're aware that this is part of the reason why marc has ended up with all those titles. it's like dani said, right, it's marc's strong suit. and in general, you do have to say that there's relatively few teammate pairings that devolve to the level of toxicity that it completely destroys the interpersonal relationship. you might need some level of preexisting animosity... most of the purely competitive sins can be healed with a little time

on the 'separating on-track and off-track' thing... well. this is kind of a question of how you define these things, you can say that marc generally speaking isn't going to massively hold grudges over isolated on-track incidents or whatever... but he doesn't just leave his fighting to the track, and personally I've also never felt he can entirely separate these things out in his mind. can you really say his professional and private relationships with other riders are completely detached from one another? mostly, he's opted to be pretty disengaged from his fellow riders as a collective, and obviously that's a good way to not take things too personally... it's all part of the game, isn't it? sometimes it's good to go with the straightforward approach: marc tells you he will make your life hell, he does indeed make your life hell, and then you both move on with your lives and can maybe actually have a pretty amiable relationship with him in years to come. he's not really defying your expectations at any point here, is he now? it's still a question for each of them as individuals as to whether they think that kind of behaviour is above board and acceptable or not... but everyone by now knows that marc plays these games, so it's not like they're going in blind

and it's not like other former teammates are constantly badmouthing each other. I mean... look, let's just cut to the chase here and bring in valentino as our reference point (as he is for the sport as a whole, which by the way does also help create a certain baseline of acceptability for marc's antics - maybe goated riders are just supposed to be dicks who knows). vale's premier class teammates were 1) nobody (2000-01), 2) tohru ukawa (2002), 3) nicky hayden (2003; 2011-12), 4) carlos checa (2004), 5) colin edwards (2005-2007), 6) jorge lorenzo (2008-10; 2013-16), 7) maverick vinales (2017-20), 8) franco morbidelli (2021), and 9) andrea dovizioso (2021). of these eight men (let's just exclude 'nobody' for now), do you know how many had serious complaints at any point about valentino as a teammate? that's right, it's one guy. one. some of valentino's other teammates, like hayden, checa and edwards, were even quite actively positive about their whole experience. this is the thing - you do need some specific circumstances for teammate rivalries to escalate from 'being kinda bitchy every other month' to 'actively fantasising about stabbing each other'. not accounting for natural interpersonal animosity, let's list some circumstantial factors that you need to get a bridge-burning-worthy level of feud:

you need a competitive bike. it is possible to beef about development direction when you're in the trenches (cf late 2010's yamaha, 2020's honda)... but generally speaking this is going to be quite low-level petty stuff, not actual war

you also need something that approaches competitiveness between teammates. if one teammate is unquestionably stronger than the other one, then it is very unlikely that you are going to get any open hostilities. the tension comes when the two sides are close enough to each other for the internal hierarchy to actually be a contentious issue (this is also basic self preservation... if you're the far weaker teammate then you do not want to make the situation troublesome, because then you will be the one to be fired)

following on from those first two things... well, it doesn't hurt to have a title fight in the mix. there are also other ways you can generate competitive stakes, like, for instance, if you and your teammate know that one of you will be out of a job soon. basically, it helps to have something to squabble over

it is maybe easy to forget how rare it is this century for teammates to be fighting directly for a title, let alone over the course of multiple seasons. only two 1-2's since the year 2000 and they're both for the factory yamaha's (though 2006, 2011-13 and 2017 did all prominently feature two factory hondas). which means that for valentino, the prerequisites were met just the once in his premier class career... and yes, the results were pretty memorable, but (topic! for! another! post!) it's worth pointing out that even that relationship was pretty much 'fine' whenever there was a sizeable disparity between the two of them performance-wise (2008 and 2013 are the most clear cut examples). I think the way I'd frame it with marc is that he has a bunch of mildly dubious strategies up his sleeve to assert himself within the team, which don't really deviate that far from what you'd expect from a rider of marc's calibre and only need to be escalated under specific circumstances. that doesn't mean he doesn't have the potential to be ruthless, but up until now it's mostly been a fairly 'acceptable' level of ruthlessness on the intra-team level... and not something that is likely to make other riders actually hate him

taking marc's teammates one by one... dani was the closest to meeting the bridge-burning prerequisites, though he was only a title rival in marc's rookie season. and marc did go further with him than he did with anyone else, and dani has made some pointed comments about marc's style as a teammate... but yes, he is fonder of marc these days. partly I'd just emphasise again that this is a fairly natural progression when you've stopped directly competing for long enough, and partly it's also just a question of individual personality - dani's not massively into holding grudges. then there's jorge, who... I mean, they might as well not have been teammates, given that jorge was either too slow or too injured to even be sharing any track space with marc. you have to put that one down primarily to circumstance, seeing as jorge's own track record on the teammate front isn't exactly spotless. marc and jorge beefing in 2019 would have been pretty dumb and also a massive waste of everyone's time in a year in which marc singlehandedly won the team's championship. even those two needed more to get things going

moving on to the dark years, pol and marc had an extremely stop-and-start partnership on a honda that was generally pretty uncompetitive... so the only stuff they could get ever so mildly irritable about were riveting incidents like 'marc saying pol wasn't the biggest championship threat' (neither of them were) or 'pol saying he'd copy marc's set up' (which proved entirely useless). not exactly title decider territory, is it now, and marc very much had pol covered as a challenger throughout their partnership. also, those two do have a longer history! they've known each other since they were kids and hold a pretty significant place in each other's careers. now that pol's more or less retired, it's natural there'll be quite a lot of sentimentality there - which will paper over any small cracks that appeared during those two years. and joan was a one year teammate at a time in which the bike was consistently close to offing them both. they only managed to start a sunday race together as teammates on thirteen occasions. it would take some serious effort to engineer a feud with that little opportunity, and, really, why on earth would you bother. maybe if honda had gone for rinsy rather than joan for the factory seat, it could've been a bit more prickly, but it's unlikely that it would have escalated beyond that

this is the thing, right, the only one of these partnerships that would have been worth burning bridges over was dani, and even there marc pretty much had him handled after the first season. in general, marc has been pretty clear on how he's not interested in making friends with the other side of the garage while the teammate relationship is ongoing... which is fine! there's some prominent-ish teammate pairings that are actually good friends, some teammate pairings where one of them is actively helping out and advising the other one, but some riders prefer to just keep their distance. it would have been a little silly of marc to start a feud with a teammate who is galaxies away from being a competitive threat, let alone a title rival, but generally it is possible to toe the line between 'attempting to suppress your internal rivals enough to stop them from becoming a problem for you' and 'taking radical enough action to make your internal rivals despise you'

especially in the post-dani era, marc never really had any need to push things too far... and, let's face it, how many of your teammate relationships end up with burnt bridges is also quite frankly a question of luck and circumstance. do you want to guess which top rider on paper has the worst track record this century with premier class teammate feuds, in terms of a) how many they've had, and b) how little public reconciliation there has been since the end of the rivalry?

yes, that's right, it's the first name that comes to mind when you're thinking of toxic and conflict-prone riders: andrea dovizioso. that old devil, constantly causing trouble. just couldn't stop undermining his poor, innocent teammates. can somebody please stop this ruthless bully before it's too late

I think you get the point. I would personally suggest that dovi is not in fact the worst teammate it is possible to have in a motogp top team. he just happened to find himself in a situation where he was teammates with two separate guys he did not click with at all, in situations that involved a pairing of riders who were (or had the potential to be) competitive with each other, as well as some proper stakes attached to the rivalry. in general, situational factors are going to determine this stuff more than anything else... and marc more often than not does have a reasonably good feel for picking his battles. he's flirted with the line, but he's mostly avoided crossing it. he hasn't had to