#if anyone knows the species let me know

[sorrcha]

garter snake & rhododendron

[salamie-baby]

This bug larva in the stick I found

[hopeinthebox]

tagged by the effervescent @cordiallyfuturedwight and @jiminsproof for the november receipt <33 thanks lovelies!!

just a touch late to the party, but if you haven't already: @dearedwardteach @pauls-mccharmly @thvinyl @btscontentenjoyer @kimchokejin @jihopesjoint @eoieopda @monismochi 💜 MWAH

[saintgabe]

By Miguel Martínez

[sofipitch]

That Daniel line “white master, black student, but equals in the quiet dark” honestly felt so reminiscent of the way some white people will often have the audacity to try and school POC on racial politics. My sister’s with a white man and a few years ago we were out with some of her friends for her bday, we see a cute kid at a table nearby and my sister excitedly says she can’t wait until she has cute babies with her bf. Her white dusty ass friend at the time says ‘you know that’s fetishizing mixed race babies right?’ Like????

bfhjldbsfljvbsdlhbvlhcwlebjdb

I love how white ppl will just completely misinterpret some cultural thing. Like I'm sorry but fetishizing mixed race babies only applies to someone not of the race in question, not someone's potential kids T_T

Yeah my first thought in that scene was that it def was not something Daniel had any right to say or interpret in that way, but I think the point was that Daniel was trying to be a dick bc Louis is clearly trying to intimidate him and ups the ante with how he eats the fox creature/whatever that thing is

[here-there-were-dragons]

what i’m getting initially from the lore is that the arcane flight in ancient times had a decent burgeoning capacity for aethernaut technology and there is a non-zero chance there are other unfathomably ancient early space age artifacts of a fallen past dragon civilization in the sky, and that following the astrolab’s launch the entire planetbound aether civilization was wiped out with little trace by some unspecified cataclysm, likely warring with another primal race, leaving the scientists on the makeshift generation ship as the only survivors.

perhaps aether was not their original name, but over untold tens or even hundreds of thousands of years isolation the remainder of their species, descended from their lost landbound counterpart’s trained aethernauts, shortened the title further and further into simply “aether” and with enough time (and book-eating) further simply forgot there was ever more?

and they get all their battle tactics knowledge from their poorly organized larp sessions of old-enough-to-be-fossilized tapes saved from their lost groundward civilization of ancient dragon star trek and name things like they work for god damn aperture science. “material emancipation grille”. and they’re literally sparkledog mary sues. who the fuck let them name themselves. why did they start naming themselves “xxxdarkstarxxx” i can’t decide if it’s numbly dismaying or numbly fucking hilarious (as all emotions are numb and distant for me these days) that that’s canon and there is now a canon mary sue sparkledragon breed like have they literally just been doing nothing but spinning their wheels creating warrior owlcats rp forums up there since the rest of their species died. when they sent all their best and brightest up there was it like how the entire modern real world tech infrastructure is held up by about 30 furries that if any one of decided to disconnect their pager for a few hours the entire internet and literally civilization itself would collapse in a fire and now all that’s left of their breed are all descended from that.

their culture seems to be clan-troupes, likely descended from specific maintenance teams, of distorted half-religiocized echoes of random portions of long-forgotten ship repair safety training and shakily clung to jumbled impressions of some sort of lost pseudomilitaristic crewed vessel hierarchy, and it’s strangely giving me a combination of the movie passengers vibes and a wikipedia summary i skimmed once of one of the later books in something called the xeelee sequence, which described a long-future descendant of humanity on a generation ship in which these remnants of humanity had devolved so much that they now no longer had much sentience, preforming ship repair and maintenance by pure instinct as a way of attracting mates and having no real understanding of what they were doing or why.

a am however at a loss as to why, of all things their lore could be, their entire gimmick seems to revolve around compulsively eating paper.

after seeing a trailer for something called hyper light breaker, i assume an alleged sequel to something else called hyper light drifter, i have made the retroactive decision to assign them a synthwave-ish, hyperreallife pulsating sleek slanted laser light energy beams making roadways for sleek glowing similarly fizzling near-digital lightcraft sort of aesthetic, vaguely cyberpunk but made from faintly magitech parts, sans any sort of digital artifacts visual additions. the actual aesthetic i am thinking of is not in any way based on the game itself, but instead is based purely on the feeling of the name alone taken out of context of the game it applies to. what type of imagery and feeling of the words “hyper light drifter” on their own with no knowledge of the game inspire. i will likely forget what i meant by this in three weeks time.

[valiant--art]

Follower Meme

Lord Zovereign || The Fallen Assassin

Class: Deception Assassin

Weapons: Double-bladed Lightsaber; The Force

-

Selection Lines:

"I knew you couldn't stay away from me."

"Follow my lead and we'll rip through anything that bars our path."

"Still not strong enough to work alone? How...charming."

"I'm coming, I'm coming."

Dismissal Lines:

"Perfect timing; I was getting bored."

"You'll call me back soon enough."

"Try not to have too much fun without me."

-

Battle Lines:

"Finally, a fight worthy of ME."

"You'd think they'd learn after the first dozen down, mm?"

"Don't be shy; beg."

"See how quickly they fall before us!"

(Laughter) "Don't think you can run from me!"

Exiting Battle:

 (Sigh) "They really could have put up more of a fight."

"What a rush."

"I hope that dispelled any lingering doubts about my skill."

"No survivors. Good."

-

KO’d/Low Health:

"Don't you dare leave me behind!"

"This isn't- this isn't how it's supposed to go-!"

(Weak cough) "Ungh...there's blood pooling inside the mask..."

Resurrected:

"...I've had better performances."

"Don't expect me to thank you."

"This never happened."

"All part of the plan. ...What? Don't look at me like that."

-

Misc. Click Lines:

"Let's go."

"Hands off."

"Do you count your kills? You should."

"No, you can't take the helmet off. Pretend it's fused to my face or something."

"So were you never taught that it's rude to stare, or do you just not care?"

"You'd tell me if you were planning to betray me, wouldn't you? Common courtesy and all that."

"Never thought I'd miss a Dromund Kaas party, but this place is dull enough to make them look like prime time entertainment."

(Rare) "It's...nice having someone to fight beside again." (Pause) "Just don't make it weird."

Planet-Specific Lines:

(Korriban) "Home. I didn't miss it."

(Korriban) "Would you like a tour? I know these tombs like the back of my hand- I could even point out the exact places where I got to kick my fellows in the teeth."

(Dromund Kaas) "Remind me to see if my apartment evicted me yet."

(Dromund Kaas) "For all that the rain and the muck makes it difficult to do my job here, it's really fun to find workarounds. Adds a challenge."

(Tattooine) "Oh yes, bring the man in all black to the desert planet."

(Tattooine) "I knew you wanted to get rid of me. I didn't think you'd be so rude about it though; dying of heatstroke isn't a good way to go."

(Nar Shadaa) "I still can't tell if this place is hideously gaudy or the most captivating planet I've been to."

(Alderaan) "If you really can't deal with the nobles, hand them to me. I know how to deal with their types."

Additional Stuff

Favorite Gifts: Luxury ♥♥♥ / Trophy ♥♥ / Weapon ♥, Courting ♥, Imperial Memorabilia ♥

Gift Lines:

[Like] "...Huh. It's not bad, actually."

[Like; Courting Specific] "Did you really...? HAH! Oh, that's cute."

[Favorite] "Could do something nice with this."

[Love] "How did you-? I mean this is- ...thank you."

Likes: A dark sense of humor, violence, revenge, indulgence, questioning authority, personal gain.

Dislikes: Working with nobility, the greater good, adherence to rules and regulations, showing mercy, blindly being pro/anti-Imperial/Republic.

Bonus

Zovereign's recruitment is self initiated. He seeks out the PC and claims that a temporary alliance will serve both their interests, though he refuses to elaborate on his point. He initially presents himself as a completely irreverent, self serving man with a taste only for furthering his 'entertainment,' however he chooses to define that word in the moment. Loud, talkative, brash, and unequivocally cruel, he seems to delight in painting himself as the antagonist no matter the circumstances.

And while he's certainly all those things and more, at high approval, the PC will begin to catch him with his (metaphorical) mask down. He slips up, eschews antagonism for the more subtle trappings of camaraderie, and begins to allow some details about himself to be known. He offers to show the PC just how many instruments he's been trained to play, or perhaps they'd rather he teach them to dance...? Ah, and of course there are the stories he tells, reframed from 'I'm only saying this to piss you off ♥' to something more amicable- though no less gruesome. He likes the gory details. While he'll never delve too deep- the mask never comes off, nor does he make mention of his species, his family, or his true name- he does grow to consider the PC a companion, if not a friend.

-

Zovereign has flirt options available to all PCs, and picking them will, unfortunately, fill him with a disgusting amount of self satisfaction. He reciprocates easily, but ends up brushing aside any genuine romantic or sexual offers with nonchalant dismissal.

[twunksuf]

Enjoy some cool pictures of this rad spider eating a fly 🪰 😎

[thedisablednaturalist]

Terrarium Tour (Microscope camera)

Meet my isopods! A viewer (one of you lovely followers I assume) helped me identify their species. It seems I have A. Vulgare, A. Nasatum, and a Porcellio species! We also discovered some baby snails and spiders! The first part shows a dead isopod so please skip to the 20 minute mark if you don't want to see that.

[goldshadows]

@ensnchekov / new year, new sc.

oh, she was yet again somewhere she was not supposed to be. she could tell from the vaguely questioning looks she was starting to get that made her decide to be more sneaky about it. she can only hope nyota wasn't going to hear about it before she could explore a little more. a glance back over her shoulder as she rounds a corner and thud ! the girl stumbles back a bit and brown eyes wander up to look at the other. blink, blink. quick, think of something ! " i'm supposed to be here. " that was certainly not her most believable lie. plan b. " if you don't tell anyone you saw me, there might be a chocolate bar in it for you. "

[swampwizards]

the best worm that’s not a worm

[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.

[husbo-venus]

.

[angelltheninth]

Hey idk if you take requests for monster lovers, but I liked the werewolf one so I would like to request one if possible! Can you write something where reader stumbles upon an abandoned castle and she meets the owner of the castle who is a vampire? Normally he wouldn’t tolerate trespassers, but he’s been very lonely these past decades and the new person is rather cute…

Omg this reminds me of Dracula and Lisa! I loved them in Castlevania.

Pairing: Male!Vampire x Fem!Reader

Tags: fluff, meet scary, first meeting, crushes, falling in love, domestic fluff, touch starved, kissing, neck kissing, drinking blood

A/N: Here's the thing about vampire bites in my headcanon, they actually feel really good when they're from a vampire you're in love with.

Touch-starved!Vampire who closes his doors to everyone, turning them away, scaring them or if they're really stubborn he will drain them of their blood entirely for bothering him too much. He doesn't want anything to do with... well anyone really. He's happy being on his own, for the most part. Or so he thought.

Touch-starved!Vampire who sees you lost near his castle and at first he wants to shoo you away like everyone else. He sends his bats to do the job. But... you're not scared of them. You think they're cute. Oh. Now that he looks at you again, you're pretty cute too.

Touch-starved!Vampire who doesn't know how you'll react to seeing his fangs so he keeps his hand over his mouth until you move it away for him. Are you actually curious about them? Most people scream bloody murder when they see them. Then again they more then likely to end up dead moments after so it's justified.

Touch-starved!Vampire who can't believe how warm your hands are on his cheeks. He's felt humans before but he never let them get close quite like this. Is he cold for you? If you follow him to the castle he can stand next to the fireplace if that would make you more comfortable.

Touch-starved!Vampire who doesn't understand what the hell is happening to him right now. He's rarely felt like this even around his own species, let alone a human woman. Very curious. He'll have to keep you around more, or at least have you visit more often until he figures it out.

Touch-starved!Vampire who can smell when you're approaching his castle and waits for you at the door, offering you his hand to welcome you in. This becomes something of a routine for you two, so much so that your friends ask about the handsome new man who walks you home every night. Very late at night, or just before the sun rises.

Touch-starved!Vampire who loves it when you eat in front if him. He doesn't eat human food, or rather he doesn't need to, but if he knows that you're the one who made it then he will try it. He will even let you use his very underutilized kitchen and cook with you just to be close to you.

Touch-starved!Vampire who panics when you cut your finger. He will leave if you want him too, he will get you first aid supplies too. He can't control the fact that his fangs elongate when he smells how good you are but its in his nature, so hopefully you don't hold it against him.

Touch-starved!Vampire who stumbles over his feet when you offer him your neck. Understand that for him this will be a big step in your relationship, a new dynamic. Are you sure you want to take this step with him? Because if not he would still love to have you around, your company is always welcome in his castle.

Touch-starved!Vampire who moans when he gets to taste your blood for the first time. He feed a few days ago but it wasn't like this. Is this... yes, he knows now, he's in love with you and from the noise you made when his fangs pierced your skin and how you're pressing against him and sighing contently he would say you feel the same.