on one hand, tumblr has had a lot of dying scares to the point that I’m not overly worried just yet
on the other, the remaining staff being around 25 people total and the general state of the world, tumblr being largely nonprofitable, etc. I am still more worried about it than I’ve been with past scares.
I’ve been on this hellsite as my main haunt that I genuinely do not know what I’ll do with myself if it goes. I was around for the livejournal crackdown and that shit sucked. but this feels bigger because I’ve been here far longer. my other places I’d frequent over the years have degraded or are just not options at all anymore, and tumblr has been my go-to for… 14 years or so now. I have several blogs, I have a lot of drafts across them all, and figuring out how to export it all in a way I can still read stuff is… daunting.
I’m not jumping ship until this site literally goes down completely.
that being said, you can find me at BlueSky under @acrosanti.bsky.social but at this point in time I’m not very active there. it’s the nicest alternative I’ve come across but it’s still very Twitter 2.0 and I was never a huge twitter fan.
Was digging through my files, found some concepts I was working on that have been in limbo for a year or so.
First one has a few species from the Tauric world - a small-ish livestock creature that is bred for both meat and produces something equivalent to honeydew, another tackling of the common ancestor that the sapient Taurics share with a few other species, something "ground bird-like" (maybe also livestock, idk), and an aquatic variant of a Tauric that may or may not be sapient. I wanted to do mobile eyes a-la ghost crabs. :v
And the second one is a very rough attempt at figuring out an organ system. A fair amount of arthropod-based internal systems, but again, rough concept that's been gathering dust for a bit.
Here they are, my dumb little attempt at Eridian fauna, specifically something that has become widespread as a pet. All because I wanted to work @glasseyeartspy's and my cat into our Eridian-sona verse.
They are called (by Grace) bat-crabs. Because they resemble crabs but hang from things like a bat. They're small ambush predators that at some point in the past, Eridians kept around for pest control and it evolved into companionship, and they're most comparable to cats.
Bat-crabs have a giant olfactory orifice and use it to their advantage when hunting, or seeking out others of their own species, or any other reason something might be able to smell. Smell/taste isn't common in Eridian fauna, but bat-crabs have it.
Unlike Eridians, bat-crabs have somewhat mobile "mouth parts" and grind them when content, like how parrots grind their bills. It sounds awful to humans, but Eridians find it soothing and adorable.
The color variability is purely by chance, as Eridians can't see color. There was accidental breeding of certain colors into the "fancy" breeds (they were just going for varying shapes and sizes), and they had no idea until someone with eyes looked at them.
(featuring my Eridiansona Zenith and their bat-crab, which their partner Oxford stumbled upon as a baby and raised. it's a disaster child.)
And just in case, this is me giving my full permission to anyone to do their own spin on a bat-crab for whatever reason. (ദ്ദി ᐛ )
Here they are, my dumb little attempt at Eridian fauna, specifically something that has become widespread as a pet. All because I wanted to work @glasseyeartspy's and my cat into our Eridian-sona verse.
They are called (by Grace) bat-crabs. Because they resemble crabs but hang from things like a bat. They're small ambush predators that at some point in the past, Eridians kept around for pest control and it evolved into companionship, and they're most comparable to cats.
Bat-crabs have a giant olfactory orifice and use it to their advantage when hunting, or seeking out others of their own species, or any other reason something might be able to smell. Smell/taste isn't common in Eridian fauna, but bat-crabs have it.
Unlike Eridians, bat-crabs have somewhat mobile "mouth parts" and grind them when content, like how parrots grind their bills. It sounds awful to humans, but Eridians find it soothing and adorable.
The color variability is purely by chance, as Eridians can't see color. There was accidental breeding of certain colors into the "fancy" breeds (they were just going for varying shapes and sizes), and they had no idea until someone with eyes looked at them.
(featuring my Eridiansona Zenith and their bat-crab, which their partner Oxford stumbled upon as a baby and raised. it's a disaster child.)
And just in case, this is me giving my full permission to anyone to do their own spin on a bat-crab for whatever reason. (ദ്ദി ᐛ )
I am scheming working our fucking cat into this Eridian-sona thing me and @glasseyeartspy have going.
this is my current 15 minute brainstorm. very very subject to change. I am trying to make this deviate enough from the sapient Eridians visually but still believable as fauna from the planet, and unfortunately for me, I suck at consciously designing things so I'm going to have to let my subconscious brain mull things over on its own.
anyways.
I refuse to believe that the olfactory sense does not exist in Erid life, so whatever this little thing is, has a big ol' olfactory vent on its head to "smell" with.
at first I wanted to figure out wings of some sort so it would effectively be like a spider-bat, but I'm thinking it just clambers around in the dark and has a few specialized almost raptorial limbs for hunting with.
Zenith and Oxford have one and it is a horrible little gremlin of a creature that likes to perch on them and makes horrible nails-on-chalkboard grinding sounds that, to the Eridians, is like adorable purring. it's probably grinding its actually-movable mouth-parts together.
to go along with @glasseyeartspy's Eridian-sona, I had to make one for myself as well. a doodly concept, but enough to work with.
I took some inspo from septarian with the big "eye" marking, and the rest is sort of the color vibe I get from a cold rocky beach because I love cold rocky beaches.
the green marking is a sliver from @glasseyeartspy's Oxford. I think whatever the equivalent of Zenith's "dermis" is that white coloration, which is why there are whiter areas around the vents on their sides and top. whether or not those marks are all scars or just thinner areas in the "epidermis" of the rocky Eridian carapace is up to debate.
Zenith is probably something along the lines of someone that researches and manages Eridian fauna. I don't know what they specialize in, but they are absolutely fascinated by the knowledge brought back by Rocky about Earth and its life, as well as the living leaky space blob that now lives there in a giant terrarium.
Some doodles from my work notebook I've been sitting on and doing nothing with. They're very quick n dirty bc I technically shouldn't be doodling at work and whenever I'm afraid I'll be seen, away the notebook gets stuffed into my scrub pocket.
First up - Skongsona. Probably a hybrid between a Weaver and something from the Steel Kingdom. I basically took a Servitor and stretched it out. Alder's there too being dramatic. As is @mixterglacia's OC Krump, which was done before he was finalized.
Second- Green Prince, obviously, playing with a different style (heavily influenced by @personostient, done from memory bc at work). And then I realized I've never actually drawn the Cogwork Dancers and threw a crown on the bigger one so it was technically one of them.
And of course Alder doodles. Of which there are very few.
intended to be a flat-colored doodle. decided to use it to do some loose shading practice on it, even though it's not the kind of linework I like to render on. wound up liking parts of it okay, but overall less than when it was flats. eh, might as well post both. :v
Lampik revisited! I've been meaning to touch up her sheet, and in the process I changed around some of her proportions and features.
Plus information about her below the cut, to spare everyone.
Lampik is older, mid-to-late 30s, she stopped keeping track when she actually hit her early-to-mid 30s, and especially now that she's in the Circus. She's quite withdrawn about herself and comes off as calm, but occasionally her emotions slip through and it's apparent she's just very, very good at keeping a lid on herself despite what she actually might think or feel. Might be left over from whatever it was she did for a career, where she needed to be calm and collected. She may sigh, or her eye may twitch, but she has a very resigned energy about herself. The very few times she has lost her temper are... intense. It's a good thing nobody can actually get hurt for real with those teeth.
Unlike Zooble, who experiences body dysmorphia due to their body, Lampik is actually more okay with her body than she was her human one, and had dysmorphia in her old life. She does miss some things, like feeling more solid, but all in all she's fairly okay with her form.
Lampik is fairly withdrawn and doesn't care much for socializing, and would much rather just watch everyone else get up to whatever rather than engage in it herself. It's something she misses from her before-life, just watching and reading about people rather than interacting, and maybe having one or two other people to bounce observations off of.
Caine is initially confused as to why she doesn't want to go on adventures but quickly pivots into being thrilled that she suggests she hang with him instead. Unless it’s an adventure specifically interesting to her, she usually sticks behind to basically armchair gossip with Caine (and Bubble) about everyone as they go about the adventure of the day. It was actually borne from a desire to just sit out and watch everyone else rather than to specifically hang out with Caine in the beginning, not that he knows this.
From time to time, he specifically designs adventures for her to be involved in and she is made to go, whether she wants to or not. He finds that he misses having her be his co-spectator. And vice versa, Lampik misses being able to just watch and gossip, even if Caine doesn't seem to really be listening all the time and is just talking to talk. Like Caine at some point was trying to vy for Zooble's attention and approval specifically, he begins to do the same with Lampik to try and get her to spend more time with him instead.
Like Gangle, Lampik likes to draw, and like Kinger, she likes bugs. Not just bugs, but weird animals and invertebrates, the weirder the better. She misses being able to access references like back in the real world. She may have sent Caine into an excited freak-out one day when he found her drawing bees from memory, and further so when he learned she was doing it specifically because he had been doodling bees and she'd noticed. When he catches her one day doodling him (among other circus members/objects) he, in his over-the-top way, suggests she be his portrait artist. She doesn't actually... but she still doodles him here and there and he takes it just the same.
When she's not watching adventures with Caine, Lampik can be found in either her room, or Kinger's pillow fort. It's quiet and a place of solace, and Kinger himself is fairly easy for her to be around compared to the others. He feels more grounded than the others. When Kinger's interest in bugs came to light and Lampik's own interest in not just entomology but weird animals in general came out, they further grew closer. When she does go on adventures, she tends to hang back around him. In downtime, it's not uncommon to find her trying to draw bugs and other inverts from memory with Kinger watching.
She predates Jax's entry into the Circus but not by much. She sees most of the other members as "kids" to some degree.
I've known about Rocky prior to the movie and I thought I was ready for how much I knew I'd love him, but I still got gobsmacked by the animated pile of rocks
So not that I wrote it down or posted much about it anywhere at all, but I imagined in the beginning, Lampik liked to hang back from adventures but specifically spectate them with Caine in whatever room we see him doing so in with Bubble, bc she likes to observe. They bond that way, even though Caine continues to be Caine and it can be an exasperating relationship.
Enter the Big Breakdown of Episode 8. Caine may or may not have shoved Lampik into her own personal hell for a bit, but ultimately opts to keep her very, very close so that she can't really be "just like the rest of them" and also keep watching things with him. And that place happens to be a cage of his own jaws. Which ironically, is a personal hell for her, because being unable to remain fully unobserved and having to share a space with someone, literally touching them, is a nightmare.
He's like a child shoving something in their mouth because they don't want to share it, regardless of if it's food (speaking from my own experience as a child around kids that did such a thing).
Lampik is also close with Kinger, so I imagine there's an extra layer of jealousy and keeping them separated because Caine has that sense of animosity towards him.
on one hand, tumblr has had a lot of dying scares to the point that I’m not overly worried just yet
on the other, the remaining staff being around 25 people total and the general state of the world, tumblr being largely nonprofitable, etc. I am still more worried about it than I’ve been with past scares.
I’ve been on this hellsite as my main haunt that I genuinely do not know what I’ll do with myself if it goes. I was around for the livejournal crackdown and that shit sucked. but this feels bigger because I’ve been here far longer. my other places I’d frequent over the years have degraded or are just not options at all anymore, and tumblr has been my go-to for… 14 years or so now. I have several blogs, I have a lot of drafts across them all, and figuring out how to export it all in a way I can still read stuff is… daunting.
I’m not jumping ship until this site literally goes down completely.
that being said, you can find me at BlueSky under @acrosanti.bsky.social but at this point in time I’m not very active there. it’s the nicest alternative I’ve come across but it’s still very Twitter 2.0 and I was never a huge twitter fan.
