funniest thing I’ve ever seen is a scan group that got an ask like ‘are you dropping [series]?’ and their response was ‘we’re so sorry it’s been taking so long, the manga references a lot buddhist text that haven’t been translated so our translator has been studying that to maintain accuracy’ LIKE
she asked me if i believed in god and i told her that when i was four i almost drowned in a public pool and in my panic mistook a stranger for my father. i clawed my way up his leg. four years later he’d send my parents a picture of the scars alongside a tin of cookies. he said, “i hope she’s still okay. i carry her with me. it isn’t every day you save a life. it isn’t every day you feel like you were here for a reason. when it does happen, you have to cherish that memory. for once, i had a purpose. just being there was enough. she tore me open but she taught me a lot about love.”
"I sigh for you at every hour, at every moment, like a hungry little bird."
“Since I’ve had to be without your sweetest presence, I have not wished to hear or see any other human being, but as the turtle-dove, having lost its mate, perches forever on its little dried up branch, so I lament endlessly till I shall enjoy your trust again. I look about and do not find my lover — she does not comfort me even with a single word.
Indeed when I reflect on the loveliness of your most joyful speech and aspect, I am utterly depressed, for I find nothing now that I could compare with your love, sweet beyond honey and honeycomb, compared with which the brightness of gold and silver is tarnished. What more?”
if you knit or crochet you need to know math. "oh, because you have to count the stitches?" you'd think so wouldn't you. well it's actually because sometimes the yarn gets so messed up you can't untangle it without becoming an expert in the field of topology
What if they came back loving? What if they came back in love. What if the necromancy worked and you cheated death and it's everything you've ever wanted, but now they love you in a way they never did before and you cannot know if that is because they finally know the lengths you are willing to go for them, or because something in this deathless magic bound their soul to yours to guide them home and it left them no. choice.
Many parasites takeover the minds and bodies of insects, spiders or other creatures, making them like zombies. You’ve listed some in spider-ween and other places. Do you know any parasites that take over bees? I know wasps lay their eggs in their larva, but haven’t really found anything about those that pilot a bee’s body.
Strepsiptera!
These are the weirdest most alien insect group in existence. What you're seeing are the head ends of the mature females; their bodies are just bags of tissue that absorb nutrients from the host, so they no longer have any trace of limbs or wings and their flat little heads no longer have mouths or eyes.
The only reason the female's heads stick out of the host at all is because the head evolved into the end they mate with. The short-lived mature male is a very tiny flying thing (whose anatomy is unlike any other insect alive today - a totally unique type of wing, unique eye arrangement, we have NO idea what these evolved from!) who mates by breaking through the female's featureless armored face with his bladed genitalia and then he dies.
And Strepsiptera can be found infecting all sorts of arthropods, even apparently some arachnids, but none of those arthropods really tend to sit still when a little tiny flying man tries to land on them, so the females usually do something to their hosts (we aren't sure what exactly) to make them slower and more complacent.
Social Hymenoptera like bees are especially common hosts though, and when a worker bee or wasp is infected by a Strepsipteran, she actually abandons her colony and her duties for extended periods of time to just perch in one place while the parasite broadcasts its mating pheromones. This is especially eerie from the bee's perspective; a worker bee is a female bee that wasn't allowed to become a queen, so all the anatomy and behavior associated with mating and laying eggs is gone, but now she's sitting around waiting for a male just like any other bug that wants to be a mom. It's just not a male of her species and she's not the one who gets to reproduce. Is the parasite tapping into buried queen behavior? Does the bee's little brain think it's calling for a drone to help it start a new hive?
Or does the parasite just make the bee a lazy slob who stops caring about her hive and just feels like chilling out on a flower all day? We might never know.
Here are those unique eyes of the male for anyone wondering. Not "multifaceted" as in other insects, but clustered, still clearly separated eyes like we see in much more ancient arthropods like trilobites and in a few more basal insect larvae! This suggests that Strepsipteran eyes date back to when insects were first beginning to evolve towards true compound eyes, but there still aren't many insects in the fossil record that have anything else in common with these animals.
The fact that both of zukos abusers used lightning against zuko and instead of learning to use lightning himself like he could have he learned how to redirect the lightning and let it pass through him and then straight clean out of him… Do you ever think about how that is literally physically representing how instead of absorbing his father and sisters abuse he lets it pass through him and instead of soaking it in and letting it destroy him he redirects it away from himself… I just want some peace in my life
Another scifi short, inspired by (and originally posted on) this art by @the-elf-draws. Dear artist friend, thank you again for making that piece. It inspired all these words and more.
The Earth rises in pieces over the curve of the moon.
So the astronaut unfurls their map – because there’s always a map, and always a plan, preflight checklists and safety protocols, each variable lovingly, fearfully calculated. The paper makes no sound. There’s only white-noise in their suit, like a sigh escaping. Dust that will never move again settles at their boots.
It’s cold. So very cold, and lonely.
The astronaut traces a gloved finger along a trajectory they do not recognize. Up, past inky orbits and soft, graphite nebulae, spirals and columns and the infinite black. They look away. Past the cyan mosaic of home, and into the void.
There stands the angel.
A child, but only because that’s what’s needed. It tilts its head – no helmet, no gloves, no bulky suit to hold back its feathered wings – and blinks at them.
“Hello,” says the astronaut, because they were always taught to be polite.
The angel approaches. It walks as one would in higher gravity, its bare feet leaving no prints on the lunar plain. Not like it isn’t here. Like here means something different to it. Carefully, the astronaut offers the corner of the map they don’t understand.
“I think I’m lost,” they say. “Could you help me?”
The angel studies the map, the light of its halo splintering softly against their helmet. At last, it turns eyes replete with the swells of cosmic oceans to the astronaut.
“Where do you want to go?” it asks.
They look up. The Earth is a single drop of water. If they reach out, they could cup it in their hands, and they almost do. Even if they tried, what then? It’s so small. It would run through their fingers for the rest of time.
“I don’t know,” says the astronaut. Their head is getting light. The white-noise is getting louder. “Home, I think.”
“Where is that?” asks the angel.
The astronaut turns. Away from an infinitely blue, infinitely small planet, to the lunar expanse beyond. Empty, and not. Desolate, and beautiful. Past the cratered gray curve, and into the unknown, the vastness, where distances are decades, not kilometers.
Time weighs on them now. A flicker in their chest, and a reflection in their helmet. A man takes one small step, and the universe gets a little smaller, too.
“I don’t know,” the astronaut says.
“Don’t know now,” says the angel, “or never have?”
“Don’t know now.” The astronaut shakes their head, dizzy. “I remember laughter, and silence, and crying, and crying out. I remember it was heavy, and I wanted that. It was warm. I remember it was so warm.”
Which strikes them as a blow; they stagger, the map crinkling in their gloves. The angel steadies them. Braces them, shades them with a wing. They gaze out upon the Sea of Tranquility, and there is a crater where there should not be. There is something inside it. Something huddled, and human.
“I think I’m dead,” says the astronaut. “Am I dead?”
The sea in the angel’s eyes laps quietly against a dark, starry shore, and they know what its answer would be.
Slowly, the astronaut sits. The moon is no different. They press their palms to the gray rock and leave handprints. Real, imagined; it doesn’t matter. Not when they can still feel the grit beneath their gloves.
“What happens now?” they ask.
The angel sits beside them. A wind from the void stirs its long hair, pale as white-noise. It smiles, and it is so, so sad.
“That depends,” it says. “What do you wish to happen?”
“I don’t understand. Is there a choice? I didn’t think I would get a choice. Especially not up here, alone.”
And the angel lifts its hand, its skin a gossamer membrane, holding back the quicksilver currents within. Its fingers splay, and it frames a void that is no longer so empty. The hiss within the astronaut’s helmet begins to ascend.
“You are not alone,” says the angel.
“Who else is here?” the astronaut asks.
In answer, the angel presses the tips of its fingers to their helmet. The white-noise stops. For an instant, and an eternity, the cosmos holds its breath.
Then there are sparks, and static, and as the earth turns toward its next dawn, a voice cries “CAN YOU HEAR ME” over the sea. It ripples out into the far, far emptiness. More voices follow, and dots, and dashes, and the globe bursts to life broadcast. The astronaut is a pebble in a radio stream. The earth is a pebble in the river of space, and all around it crash the waves of symphonies and baseball games and happy birthdays and emergency alerts and news – always good, and always bad, and concerts and gunfire and hope and defiance and dying-light desperation, and at the end silence. Silence. And all of it so loud. And all of it saying the same as the first: can you hear me. Can you hear me?
The astronaut listens. They are awash with it, and the angel holds their thick-gloved hand. As its wings, soft as forgotten songs, spread over their helmet, a countless hundred specks of light wink into rotation around the earth. Satellites, stations; debris from shuttles and a little dog’s space capsule. Those who slipped the surly bonds of home.
“We’ve said so little,” the astronaut says.
The angel smiles. “You’ve done so much. See – you have told your children, go forth and quantify. And they have.”
It guides them back to the map, now thick with silk-thin orbits. One peels away from the earth, all solar cell and gyroscopes, and on its way into the beyond, it gives Venus a Mariner’s kiss. Another follows; it captures Mars on digital tape. Another, another, and seven brave stars turn their eyes upon the earth’s neighbors, Mercury and Jupiter and on, and on. Telescopes blink open from land and void. The Great Observatories rise, Hubble and Chandra and their myriad siblings, and their scanners measure the Pillars of Creation.
"We just wanted to understand,” says the astronaut. “We’re so small. Can’t you see how small we are?”
“It’s okay to be small.”
“But what if we’re never heard? It could be such a long, long time. I don’t know how to read this map on my own.”
“Look,” the angel says. “Listen.”
A countless hundred points of light. The white-noise hiss in the astronaut’s helmet. They look over the splintered curve of the earth, and it’s their faceplate, they realize, their faceplate that’s cracked after all; not this. Never this. Because the world is a single drop of water, and as they frame it in their gloved hands, they watch their hopes fly free.
And they are each one of them cheered, and lauded, and personified. Perseverance brings ten million names to another world. Across its rust-red ridges, Curiosity sings quietly to itself. Opportunity whispers my battery is low into the encroaching storm. And from the deep darkness the Voyagers cry, hello from the children of planet Earth, hello from the children of planet Earth.
Can you hear me. Can you hear me?
Can you hear us?
“I hear you,” says the astronaut – and they’re already gone, but it doesn’t matter. There is no breeze to erase their footprints. The earth will turn, the sun will fade, and they will remain. Gravity has no hold on them.
Vision blurs. All they wanted was to understand. All they wished was to reach out. And what they had was good, while they had it; they only lacked for time.
“Will they remember me?” asks the astronaut. “Back home, I mean.”
“They will,” says the angel.
“How?”
“In the same way they remember others. Our friend has gone, they will say. We will miss them. We will remember them. Thanks and farewell, faithful little explorer.”
The angel bends, scoops up a handful of dust. Gray motes pour between its slender fingers, and against the endless black, each grain is a star.
The astronaut watches them fall. Watches, and lets the map slide from their fingers. Dust pours down, obscuring checklists, and protocols, and fearful, loving calculations. Signs that their life was precious. To others, and to themself.
“I’m afraid,” they say.
The angel stands, in its hair the luminescent streaks of comets’ tails. It tilts its head, and its wings, and offers the astronaut its hand.
“To fear is to be human,” it says.
The astronaut looks up at the angel. Looks past it, to the gloaming towers of nebulae, and the searing, churning stellar nurseries, and the shore of the cosmic sea that laps against the backs of the angel’s eyes.
They wanted more time. But even more so, they want to go home.
They grasp the angel’s hand and let it pull them to their feet. The astronaut stands as one would in higher gravity.
“To be curious is, too,” they say.
And the angel smiles.
Hand in hand, they walk to the crater’s edge. A countless hundred songs orbit a quiet world. As one, they turn their backs to the earth, and the astronaut – dusty, small, and no longer alone – faces wonders no map can divine.
“Remember that you are stardust,” says the angel, “and to stardust you shall return.”
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