Cyggie Stardust and the Spyders from Märs

This is beautiful ❤️

Cr: checkoutafrica : IG

@cyggiestardust

!!!

Cystolepiota fungus! The most babygirl of all mushrooms. Just a coquette tumblrina trying to find her way in this cruel world🎀

Fact: The earliest reliably dated use of the phrase “fucked up” appears in the court records of a US Navy court-martial case from 1863; the way the phrase is used suggests that its meaning was already well known at the time, but this is the first known printed record of it that we can confidently put a date to.

Additional fact: Bram Stoker’s Dracula is set in 1897.

Conclusion: It would not anachronistic for your Dracula fanfic to have a character describe the Count as a fucked up old man.

official linguistics post

Lilac coral fungus but make it a magical girl. For day 2 of Funguary!

#funguary day 1, Mycena subcyanocephala! Or Blue Bonnet mushroom. A newly discovered mushroom from Taiwan - it’s only been seen about 8 times.

I need y’all to understand just how SMALL this mushroom is

It's a baby!

i don't really like when people say dungeon meshi is accidentally good autistic representation, because while i understand not wanting to make conclusions without explicit confirmation from the author, there's always the weird assumption that non-western authors somehow don't know about things like neurodivergency/queerness/etc. (on top of the assumptions that east asian authors are somehow more naive or oblivious to "western" social issues).

given that dungeon meshi started being published in 2014, it's not really a "work belonging to its times"—it's as contemporary as any other media we discuss on this site, which means it should be fair to assume it engages with contemporary topics (and at the very least, you shouldn't say that the representation is accidental with so much confidence)

but anyways, the chapter "perfect communication" in ryoko kui's "terrarium in a drawer" is some of the most straightforward autistic representation I've seen, and from now on I'm going to assume that laios's character writing is absolutely intentional in that regard:

Yeah accidental my black ass...this is literally being autistic 😅

She was born like that, with claws and horns and sharp teeth that tore, thick fur on her snout and bristles down her spine.

Her family and town didn't fear her for it, for one couldn't help the curses one carried through the world and they were a practical sort, knowing too well that cruelty could come back to haunt them. She was treated kindly and loved as well as any other child.

But she still looked in the mirror and saw someone else.

"Your claws are beautiful," her mother would say, "deft as any fingers and they'll serve ye well should you ever need them," but that wasn't what she needed to hear.

"Your snoot is lovely," her father would say, "fine suited to hunt any beast or plant, any mushroom or treasure ye could desire," but she didn't like to hunt, good as she was at it, would have rather learned embroidery like the other girls.

"Go to the witch in the deep woods," her aunt advised, seeing her face when her horns were complimented next. "She'll set you aright one way or another."

So she packed payment and food for the journey and made her way to the house deep in the woods, roof rickety and too tall and the plants around more alive than they ought to be.

The witch listened to her complain thoughtfully, elfin ears twitching.

"Jon, come here," she called, and a beautiful young man pushed his way into the room from deeper in the house, stopping when he saw the she-beast.

Beautiful, yet shrinking in on his own body somehow.

He colored a little at the sight of her, and she looked away.

"Auntie, is this the one?" he asked, soft, shy.

The beast stood. "I beg your pardon?" she demanded. If this was some--

"My dear, I should like to propose a trade," the old witch said.

Any spell takes time, but this had been half prepared, waiting only for the right beast to come along. She offered her bristles, he offered his hair, and the potion was complete.

And when the smoke began to disappate, she had not claws but delicate hands. Not a barrel chest but a slender frame. Not sharp wolf's teeth but blunt white human teeth. Not bristles but long white hair cascading down her back. Her ears were long and pointed still, elfin like the witch's, but she had never minded that as much.

"You did it," she breathed. "Where's-- where's Jon, is he--?"

"Wow!" came Jon's voice from above, and she looked up to see-- sharp teeth gleaming in a long snout, thick fur on his face and curved horns arching towards the high ceiling, round ears pricking happily.

"You're beautiful!" he said.

And all she could do was smile.

"So are you."

Art! I think I'd iterate Bea's design a little more; I imagine her beastly form as having a wolfish face and Jon's having more of a bearlike face

And I was going to put some Weird Plants in the pixel art and ended up deciding I liked it how it was.

Yes the witch's house has a roof shaped like a witch hat

I'm actually in love with this.

Nicolas Haeni, Bunnies at the Office, 2022.

*stewing at home* i can't believe i don't know latin. i can't believe i did this to myself. i can't believe this fucking bone headed dip shit that lives in my house doesn't know latin. unbelievable. god i should take night classes. how did it come to this

Latin isn't too hard to white knuckle into as an adult. You don't need to speak it, which carries own difficulties but means you can treat it as a codebreaking exercise.

Here is what you do to codebreak Latin. Acquire a dictionary. Cassell's is good. Open the Wikipedia page on Latin grammar. Familiarize yourself with basic sticky grammatical terms. It's good to find yourself a Latin grammar but you can fill in with Wikipedia and Wiktionary and the Perseus Tufts Latin word study tool for a while. Then take your target text. And

You

Write

The

Latin

Sentence

Like

This

going down a sheet of notebook paper (or in excel)

And on the other axis you write

dictionary form, type, gender, number/person, case/case governance, tense, mood, voice, principal parts, definition, cognates (if you're inclined)

Not all of these boxes will be filled out.

The best way to start filling out this grid is to find the finite verb in the clause. But if you're just starting out you can go straight down. It is totally okay to just copy and paste from a Latin word declining tool, you'll start recognizing the patterns whatever you do.

Our basic sentence: Cæcilius est in horto.

CÆCILIUS proper noun - masculine - singular - nominative - Cecil

EST - FINITE VERB/sum - irregular verb - singular - third person - nominative governance - present - indicative - active - esse fuī futūrus - is

IN - preposition - dative - in

HORTO - hortus - second declension noun - singular - masculine - dative - garden (horticulture)

CECIL IS IN GARDEN -> cleanup -> Cæcilius is in the garden

Another example

Olim lacūs colueram, olim pulcher exsisteram, dum Cygnus ego fueram

OLIM - conjunction - once

LACŪS - fourth declension noun - masculine - plural- accusative - lake

COLUERAM - FINITE VERB/colo - third conjugation - singular - first person - pluperfect - active - accusative governance - colere coluī cultum - I had inhabited

PULCHER - adjective - singular - masculine - nominative - beautiful

EXSTITERAM - FINITE VERB/exsisto - third conjugation - first person - singular - pluperfect - active - exsistere exstitī exstitum - I had existed

DUM - conjunction - while, when, during

CYGNUS - second declension noun - masculine - singular - nominative - swan

EGO - pronoun - first person - singular - I

FUERAM - FINITE VERB/sum - irregular conjugation - first person - singular - pluperfect - active - I had been/

ONCE LAKES I HAD INHABITED ONCE BEAUTIFUL I HAD EXISTED WHILE SWAN I I HAD BEEN -> cleanup -> I dwelled, once, in lakes: I had, once, been beautiful, when I was a swan!

Do this for fifteen minutes every day. Like playing solitaire. After several months, you will know Latin.

james is always one motto away

He has the most gorgeous eyes I've ever seen in a cat. Unfortunately there is nothing but empty space behind him.

Unmute this!!

You are a small god, with very little power or influence. But you are happy, and take care of your few worshippers as much as you are able. An extraordinarily powerful being stumbles bloodied into your sacred place, and cries “Sanctuary.”

thanks to @writing-prompt-s for this prompt!

—–

I sense them coming from a thousand miles off. They move like a tear through the fabric of reality, stitching and unstitching, leaving a trail of fifth dimensional embroidery in their wake. Lots of Great Ones pass this way—Death is not so far over my horizon, and many seek their lands for rescues and redemptions and respite. Few return. But that is not my concern. 

What is my concern: this Great One is not heading down the well-trodden path to Death. They are heading towards me. Towards my little temple, safe and sequestered at the edge of all things. Defensible. But not particularly escapable. 

Ten minutes later and my acolytes can feel it too. The few temporarily sheltering here cluster around my altar. They are all too well-practiced to tremble or cry, even as the approaching onslaught threatens to pop their ear drums and crack the marrow from their bones. Instead, calloused hands curl around favoured weapons. “Boss?”

“Yeah, this one’s not for you guys. Not sure it’s for me, either, but I have a slightly lower chance of going ‘pop’. Get your butts to the catacombs and prep for evacuation.” I scrabble together enough power to materialise, so I can look each of them in the eye. “Which means if you feel me die, or flee, you run. Got it?”

A chorus of affirmatives that only half of them mean fill the cloister, the echoes still bouncing as they file down through the secret passages in the floor. I lock the trapdoors behind them. It won’t keep them out forever, but hopefully it’ll hold long enough to keep them from doing anything completely stupid. Like coming back to rescue me from certain death. 

Like they haven’t done that before. 

The Great One hits the foot of my mountain, brushing through the meagre wards like fragile spider webs. They jerk up the rockface, not quite walking, not quite climbing, just…moving upward. Raking pitons and claws and wings through the fabric of space-time, and sealing it behind them in flares of sunlight and gold. Still, they don’t clean everything. I can feel their blood splattering my domain. 

It tastes like an offering. Like a sacrifice. 

Hmm. 

Keep reading

Aziraphale’s phone rings.  He answers, expecting it to be Crowley.  But to his surprise, it’s a demon he’s never met.

“I’m Crowley’s replacement,” the demon says.  “He’s not done anything impressive lately, and Downstairs doesn’t like how ineffective he is at keeping you in line.  So now he’s shuffling paperwork and scooping up hellhound shit while I do his job for him.”

“Ah… I see,”  Aziraphale says icily.  “Well, I most assuredly do not look forward to working with you.”

The demon laughs.  “Feeling’s mutual.”

Twenty-four hours later, the demon is very surprised to find himself discorporated in his sleep.  He can’t explain what happened, he has absolutely no idea.

“Don’t let it happen again,” Beelzebub says, annoyed, and sends the demon back up.

After a mere three days, the demon ends up discorporated again.

A new replacement is sent up.  This one lasts for a week and a day.

A third replacement is sent up.  This one lasts for exactly four hours.

Three demons are sent up next time.  Two manage to stay alive for at least five months.  In that time, they botch four very important temptations, and the citizens of London inexplicably find their daily lives much improved in thousands of little ways.  Traffic and pollution are nonexistent, injury and illness are miraculously avoided.  Church attendance is up five hundred percent, and every politician and CEO is struck by the urge to donate as much money as possible to charity.  There’s a general feeling of contentedness and goodwill in the air that wasn’t there before.  It feels downright heavenly.

Suddenly, Beelzebub is having a very hard time finding anyone to take Crowley’s post.  Bribes and threats make no difference.  The rumors have spread and only grown more disturbing in the telling.  Not one demon is willing to go up there and face the cold, calculated, merciless wrath of the angel known as Aziraphale.

Crowley absolutely loses it when someone gets around to telling him.  “Y’know, I could’ve warned you,” he says gleefully.  “Been working with him for thousands of years.  I know exactly how much of a bastard he can be.”

After running the numbers and seeing how many souls they’ve lost to Heaven in the past year, Beelzebub gives up and concludes that trying to replace Crowley is a massive waste of resources Hell can’t afford.

After one year, Aziraphale receives another phone call.  He answers, with bated breath, and nearly shouts for joy when he hears a familiar voice.

“Hi, angel.  Lunch on me?”

OP this is exactly, completely, my kind of Aziraphale characterization I’m in love with this little fic

Random demon: I’m Crowley’s replacement

Aziraphale:

(Image here by @petimetrek )

“X bodily fluid is just filtered blood!” buddy I hate to break it to you but ALL of the fluids in your body are filtered blood. Your circulatory system is how water gets around your body. It all comes out of the blood (or lymph, which is just filtered blood).

“Okay but why is it always so chemically roundabout and unnecessarily complicated” well buddy, that’s because your blood is imitation seawater. See? It’s very simple.

Blood is what now?

It’s imitation seawater what part is confusing

#are you telling me#humans are just sentient aquariums? 

Buddy if anything is living in your blood (except for more parts of you) in detectable amounts then you have a serious microbial infection and need to go to the hospital.

Humans are seawater wastelands kept sterile of all but human cells, with microbial mats coating their surfaces.

Thank you that’s…very disturbing

It’s not my fault you’re human.

Ok but “It’s not my fault you’re human.” Is the best comeback ever.

You can use it against anyone except children that you biologically helped to create.

#/blood is imitation seawater/ is the part that’s confusing 

Picture this: you are a Thing That Lives In The Ocean. Some kind of small multicellular animal a long time ago, before proper circulatory systems existed. “Wow,” you think, metaphorically, “it sure is difficult to diffuse chemicals across my whole body. Kinda puts a hard limit on the size and distance of what specialised organs I can have. Good thing I have all this water around me that’s the same salinity as my cells (they have to be that way so I don’t explode or shrivel up) so I can diffuse and filter chemicals with that.”

“Wait a minute,” you say a couple of generations later, because you’re not actually a small animal but an evolutionary process personified and simplified to the point of dangerous inaccuracy for the purposes of a Tumblr post, “instead of losing all these important chemicals to the water around me, how about I put it in tubes? I can keep MY water separate from the rest of the world’s water! Anything I want to keep goes in my water! Anything I don’t, I dump back into the outside water! I’m a genius! An unthinking natural trial-and-error process that’s a GENIUS!”

“Wow,” you think a great many generations later, “being able to have such control over such high concentrations of important chemicals is so great. Look how big I’m getting. I even have a special pump to move my seawater around, and these cool filter systems to keep the chemicals in it right, and that control and chemical concentration has let me grow so many energy-intensive, highly specialised organs! Being big is so hard. I need special cells just to carry my oxygen around now, to make sure my enormous, constantly-operating body has enough of it.”

At this point you are embodying a fish, and eventually, fish start straying into water with different pressures and salinity levels. (I mean, they do that since befor ehty’er fish, but… look, I’m trying to keep things simple here.) “What the FUCK,” you think. “My inside water is at a different salinity and pressure to the outside water?? How am I supposed to deal with that? I can’t have freshwater inside my seawater tubes! My cells have a set salinity and they would explode! I need to start beefing up my regulatory and filter systems so that my inside seawater STAYS SEAWATER OF THE CORRECT SALINITY even if the outside water is different! Fortunately, adding salt to my seawater is a lot easier than removing it, and I want to be saltier than this weird outside water.” At this point you beef up your liver and urinary systems to compensate for different salinities. (Note: the majority of fish, freshwater and saltwater, have a fairly narrow band of salinities they can live in. Every fish doesn’t get to deal with every level of salinity; they are evolved to regulate within specific bands.)

You also, at some point, go out on land. This is new and weird because you have to carry all of your water inside. “It’s a good thing I turned myself into a giant bag of seawater,” you think. “If I wasn’t carrying my seawater inside, how would I transport all these important chemicals between my organs and the environment?” As you specialise to live entirely outside of the water, you realise (once again) that it’s a lot easier to add salt to water than to remove it in great quantities. Drinking seawater in large amounts becomes toxic; your body isn’t specialised for removing that amount of salt. Instead, you drink freshwater, and add salts to that. The majority of your organs are, at this point, specialised for moving your seawater around, protecting it, adding stuff to it, or taking stuff out. You have turned yourself into an intelligent bag for carrying and regulating a small amount of imitation seawater, and its salinity (and your commitment to maintaining that salinity) is based entirely on the seawater that some early animals started to build tubes around a long time ago.

And that’s what a human is!

Well, there’s another few steps, of course.

Because at some point, operating along lines of logic that worked out perfectly so far, you did decide to be a mammal.

A mammal is a machine for adapting to Circumstances. A mammal is a tremendously resilient all-terrain life-support system, with built-in heating, cooling, respiration, and incubators for reproduction. Mammals internalise everything (grudges, eggs) and furthermore are excessively, flamboyantly wet internally. Sure, everyone’s a bag of chemicals; but mammals slosh. Mammals took the concept of an internal ocean and took it in an unnecessarily splashy direction, added aftermarket mods and a climate-control system,

and just to show off, you leaned across the metaphorical gambling table and said: “my internal ocean is so good-“

“Bullshit,” said the shark, keeping it salty (ha)

“My internal ocean is so brilliantly resilient, more so than any of YOURS,” you said, holding their attention with a digit held aloft, “that for my next trick, I shall artistically recreate the ballad of evolution as a performance. I shall craft a complex chemical ballet depicting the origin of multicellular life - using some of my own material, of course-”

“Oh, ANYONE can lay an egg,” yodel the fish, and the ray adds: “ontogeny does NOT recapitulate phylogeny!!”

And you’re like, “yeah no, it’s an artistic rendition, not a literal thing. Basically I’m going to take some cells and brew them up-“

“Like an egg.”

“Like an egg. An egg but internally.”

“Yeah,” said the viviparous reptile, “yeah, like, that can work really well. I’ve always said it’s the highest test of one’s chemical know-how. It’s a lot of work. And forget about support from your family - forget about support from your PHYLUM - all you get is criticism.”

“I’m gonna do it on purpose forever,” you said. “The highest chemical, thermoregulatory, immunological, everything-logical challenge. It’s gonna be my thing.”

“I’m with you,” said a viviparous fish, stoutly. “Representation.”

You kindly don’t point out, once again, that you’re planning to do this outside the ocean, in a range of temperatures; carrying the dividing cells in a perfect 37.5• solution of saline broth in all terrains, breathing oxygen in a complicated matter, you know, bit more difficult; but you need your allies.

“It’s solid,” says the coelacanth.

“But is it metal?” says the deep-vent organism.

“Oh, it’s metal. I will feed the young,” you say, magnificently, “on an echo of the mother ocean. The first rich feast of cellular matter, the first hunt for sustenance, the first bite they sip of our liquid planet-”

Everyone waits.

“Will be a blood byproduct. My own blood byproduct.”

Everyone looks uncomfortable.

“But,” a hagfish says carefully, “don’t you outdoorsy guys still need your blood?”

You cough and explain that if you stay wet enough internally and hydrate frequently, you should be able to produce enough blood byproduct to sustain your hellish new invention until they can eat your peers.

The outrage that follows includes questions like “is this some furry shit?” And: “milk has WATER in it?”

And you won the bet. “My inner ocean is such a perfect homage to the primordial soup that I can personally cook up an entire live hairy mammal in it. And then generate excess blood byproduct from my body and give it to the small mammal until it gets big.”

That is an absolutely bonkers pitch, by the way, and everyone thought you were a showoff, even before the opposable thumbs. When the winter came, and the winter of winters, and the rain was acid and the air was poison on the tender shells of their eggs and choked the children in the shells; when the plants turned to poison, and the ocean turned against you all; when the climate changed, and the world’s children fell to shadow; your internal ocean was it that held true. A bet laid against the changing fates, a bet laid by a small beast against climate and geography and the forces of outer space, that you won. The dinosaurs fell and the pterosaurs fell and the marine reptiles dwindled, and you, furthest-child, least-looked-for, long-range-spaceship, held hope internally at 37.5 degrees. Which is another thing that humans do, sometimes.

Every town and city has A Guy. That guy you know by a name people have given him, based on what, exactly, makes him That Guy. The one that makes people visiting the city say "I saw some man walking around with a fursuit tail strapped to him, no like full costume or anything, just the tail."

And the city residents go "ah yes, you saw Tail Guy. He's always wearing that tail", because that is what he does.

Now imagine your town has a Guy, who's mean as shit, but there does seem to be a sort of equality to his hostility - he's not sparing the meanest of what he spits out to those who are vulnerable or already hurting, but he's like that to everyone equally. He is unkempt, always seen on the streets doing something weird, and if you stopped him to ask what he's doing, he'd tell you, but you'll find out at the cost of the insult he'll swing at you with the answer. A lot of the time he seems to be doing his weird shit specifically to bait people into asking him.

He won't target anyone specifically, nor does he act any nicer to someone who can, will, or has beat his ass for it. He's spiteful and heinous, obviously, but clearly as a matter of his own personality, not something he personally has against you. Telling people to fuck off and go fuck themselves is just the sound he makes when he's awake, like the rumble of a car engine or the yipping of small dogs. He doesn't like anyone, but you learn to either ignore him, or develop some sort of a vague, grudging respect. While he has insulted everyone, there's legends of bigger incidents, like time he punched a cop hard enough to knock out two teeth, but you can't tell how many of them are only myths.

And then you hear someone casually mention that he is a tenured professor of a famous university, and everyone who's been to his lectures agrees that he is brilliant.

And that is roughly how I feel about Diogenes, being only familiar with the memes, when a perfectly respectable philosopher mentions him and his teachings by name.

Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

I am in love with you /p