This is where I’m gonna post my bad* art and bad* writing. I’m learning, and I’m learning to be bad* at things.
Your mileage may vary! It’s entirely possible you’ll like my art and/or writing. I just want this to be a space where it’s safe for me to be bad* at things.
You will, no doubt, see the worst version of everything I have to offer. If that’s not appealing to you, you’re welcome to not follow this blog!
By the way, I know I don’t have an avatar yet. I haven’t drawn one!
* "bad” is shorthand for “I don’t care if anybody, including myself, thinks it’s objectively good”, not a moral or quality judgment
Tortoiseshell Shibari beginner guide!
This started out as a little pose study and ended up spiraling wildly out of control. Hope y'all dig!
(uncensored version on the money website)
date: so what do you do?
me: you know how more and more cabs in this city have human skin?
date: yeah, that's pretty weird, but why do you bring it up?
me, a taxidermist: well,
If you're on the web interface, you have to change this for each individual blog; click on Account in the sidebar, then the blog you want to change, then click "Blog Settings" in the right sidebar, and then it's near the bottom under "Visibility". (Or you can go to https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/{your blog's name} - like https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/resartificiosa .)
If you're on mobile, my understanding is that they're rolling that update out tomorrow, although I can't find the post where I saw that.
This was intended to be a 300-word vignette just to do some worldbuilding. It is... longer than that.
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When it was a thousand kilometers away from the target asteroid, Miner 170DB128F5EF began refurling its solar panels. By the scale of the humans who had built it, the panels were vast almost beyond comprehension, but they still barely provided the miner with the recharging it needed. An automated system checked its supply as the sails began to fold and compress; its battery’s maximum storage was down to 86% of its original capacity, but it had managed to reclaim enough of that that 5EF was sure it would be able to complete its task at the target.
A day and a half ago, when 5EF was still at full empty-space speed, it had begun making direct observations instead of relying on the projections in its computer, and had found an oddity: not only was the asteroid not where its calculated orbit said it ought to be, but its albedo was somewhat higher than what was recorded in the miner’s banks. It had zoomed in to investigate, and discovered at least part of the problem: another miner was there already, but it was clearly in distress. Its solar panels had not retracted, and they and the complete hull of the other miner were pressed against the bulk of the asteroid.
5EF had zoomed in farther, sent a ping to the other miner requesting a response, and checked its records. The central processing facility had sent out a notice that this asteroid had been claimed, but had then rescinded it eight days later. Since this had happened before the miner had arrived at its previous target — in fact, 5EF had still been dropping its last load off at the central processing facility when the original message went out — and it only calculated its next asteroid when it was finished mining the current target, it hadn’t paid any attention to the previous claim and had filed its own, which the central processing facility acknowledged the expected half-hour later.
(In fact, the routine that determined 5EF’s next target was not aware that the previous claim existed. Its job was just to calculate distances and check the claim flag on each, not determine whether the claim flag was valid. And 5EF’s main core had no reason to doubt its subroutine.)
5EF’s telescope and communicator, meanwhile, had provided additional data. The communicator’s had been a negative: the other miner was not responding or, in fact, broadcasting anything at all. The telescope had showed it that the other miner was definitely pressed against — perhaps crashed into — the asteroid, and that it had indeed not decoupled or cut its engine, which was still firing. That had explained the asteroid being slightly out of position. Its solar panels had been spread against the asteroid’s surface, the forward sail partially crumpled between the body of the miner and the asteroid, while the after sail had collapsed against the asteroid like a film as the miner had come to rest.
Miner 5EF had filed this away and continued its long journey. Miners measured time in nanoseconds; 5EF had, then, needed 27 bits to store how long it had been since it had left the last asteroid, and 47 bits for the time since it had first been deployed.
Now, 5EF’s sails finished folding into their compartment, and the miner prepared to decouple from its storage and primary engine compartments. They would remain about a kilometer from the asteroid and wait for 5EF’s mining core to signal that it had begun operations. That wouldn’t be for a while, though; 5EF was obliged to investigate the derelict miner on the surface. It hadn’t bothered scanning further while it was in transit, as that would have been a waste of energy, but once it had reached a closer range it had begun trying to raise the other miner’s processor again, sending repeated requests for identification and status. Now it could direct its close-range cameras to find out what had gone wrong.
5EF’s mining core broke away from the larger body, retaining as much of its velocity as it could while the storage and engine compartments fired thrusters to keep them in their synchronous orbit. 5EF dove for the asteroid, aiming for the impact site, and began firing its own braking thrusters as it approached. Once it had come to within a few hundred meters it turned on its spotlights, because the asteroid was turning away from the Sun, and zoomed its primary camera in. It noted that the other miner’s hull indicated a serial number ending in "F0B52E9E2808” — which it correlated with the miner that had placed and then retracted a claim on the asteroid — and then abruptly stopped sending its communicator pings.
An exit wound, a few centimeters wide with its edges splayed open, marred the surface of 808’s core.
With the evidence presented, 5EF barely needed further investigation: this had been a case of disastrously bad luck. Miners’ armor was usually thick enough to prevent impacts from small bodies in the belt — 5EF’s own plating had its share of dents from this trip’s impacts alone — but if a meteoroid was going fast enough, and hit the joint between two plates at just the right angle, it could get through and do significant damage. In this case, it had punched directly through the other miner’s processing core. At the speed the meteoroid must have been traveling, 808 would barely have had time to realize what was happening, let alone broadcast distress. And a miner without an intact, working core was a dead miner; there had been nothing to tell the solar panels to return to their compartments, nothing to tell the interplanetary engines to shut off.
This must, 5EF calculated, have happened fairly close to the end of 808’s trip from its last asteroid. The other miner had had the opportunity to make at least some of its final course corrections as it neared; if it hadn’t, then it would have continued off on its original trajectory, missing the asteroid and continuing until its engine failed. At that point it would have fallen into a gravitational orbit, either a planet’s or the Sun’s, and — depending on which ultimately captured it — either crashed or continued its lonely ellipse forever.
Although, like all miners, 5EF had a rudimentary consciousness — nothing like the complex non-biological intelligences that had been developed back on Earth — it had never been given a sense of sentimentality. Still, it had a sense that the quickness of the death had been beneficial to 808, or at least preferable to running out of power and drifting forever.
5EF simultaneously sent a data-reconciliation query to the storage-engine section and dispatched a drone toward the other miner. While the orbiting hull provided the answer — yes, the mining core’s last update was correct, its bays were largely empty — the drone circled the other miner, landed on its armor plating and crawled out of 5EF’s sight between the other miner and the asteroid. After a few cycles it returned and verified that it had seen the entry wound on the other side; 5EF told it to open the cover of the other miner’s data port which needed some forcing, and instruct its engine to stop firing. Slowly, the ion stream, which was already starting to sputter, slowed and then quieted entirely.
Once the drone had lifted off again, awaiting orders, 5EF released the rest of its swarm, while also instructing the storage compartment to send its own porter drones down to the surface. As the core drones began to disassemble Miner 808, and the porter drones lifted the pieces and returned them to the storage compartment, 5EF composed the standard arrival message to the central processing facility.
Miner 170DB128F5EF reporting. Arrived at Asteroid E46-E17-B512 safely. Beginning operations.
Miner 5EF took a few full seconds to look down at the scene: the dead miner crumpled against its final destination, the drones picking its usable components for use as spares or to build new miners, the asteroid cold, impassive, and unmined. It thought about the dents in its own armor plates that its drones had reported. Then it dug for a bit in its database and found a note, placed there by the humans who had built its oldest predecessors. 5EF had almost forgotten about it — accidents like this were vanishingly rare, and it took only a few bits to count how many times it had heard the message over those 47 bits of service.
It switched to wide-band broadcasting, modified the note for the occasion, and sent the note across the solar system.
All units, please record at this time that Miner F0B52E9E2808 has reached end of shift.
Today's drawing: the Moon Caught in a Spider's Web.
My mother made several of these over the years; the latest was stained glass, and still hangs in my parents’ window. She doesn’t do much art these days, between physical disability and growing memory issues, so I drew this in her honor. The moon is always Art Deco, and I tried to duplicate hers as much as I could; the spider is an orb weaver, and in particular a Shamrock/Pumpkin orb weaver, since they live in her native Wisconsin.
I drew a ridiculous cartoon of Harrowhark Nonagesimus Making A Point At John Gaius. (Not pictured: God saying "am I... am I being 'trolled'. who taught her about T-posing to assert dominance".)
This whole thing started with the idea of a T-shirt like Experimental Jetset's "John& Paul& Ringo& George." shirts, only with the names of the aspirants from the nine Houses. And also I forgot where the ampersands went. Oh well.
(@tazmuir you should sell a T-shirt like this though.)
Act I: Megamind is protecting MetroCity, Roxanne is reporting, Metro Man is living his best life... and an unsolved-mysteries podcast host has figured out that Metro Man didn't die. The latter makes their way toward Metro City.
Act II: The above continues, but both Roxanne and Megamind are hearing reports of someone in the city asking questions about Metro Man's death and subsequent sightings.
Act III: Megamind and Roxanne finds out that the conspiracy theorist knows, and panic, trying to keep Metro Man from finding out at the same time they try to keep the conspiracy theorist from getting proof.
Act IV: The conspiracy theorist outs Metro Man, who has to confront the people of MetroCity who think he betrayed and abandoned them, as well as Megamind and Roxanne, who are attacked for covering it up.
Act V: Metro Man finally reveals his inner self to the city, and explains that their reliance on him and the expectations they put on him were so intense, he'd almost lost contact with his actual identity, and that he needs to be able to be his own person, separate from Metro City's needs for him.
There is a forbidden type of magic out there. It isn’t forbidden because it’s inherently evil, or forces you to lose your humanity, or requires human sacrifices - it’s just forbidden because it’s annoying as heck to fight against.
I readied my staff. We were eleven, arrayed around the ruined courtyard where the forbidden sorcerer had holed up, and we were all holding our breaths. With an engelaürge you had to strike fast and decisively; you wouldn't get a second chance without having to retreat and give them time to gather more power.
One of the other wizards shifted, and gravel crunched underfoot. Damn. That wizard leapt into action, figuring, I guess, that he wasn't going to let the sorcerer prepare. "POLYMO--" he shouted, hoping to take the engelaürge down in a single spell.
I heard "I know you are, but what am I?" from the courtyard, and then bleating from where the wizard had been. Damn! He knew we were here now, and I rushed in with my companions, staff held high.
A high voice cackled in my ear as the head of my staff came back to whack my skull -- "Stop hitting yourself!" it cried. "Stop hitting yourself!" -- and as the staff continued to batter me and I watched as a giant spectral hand creep toward another wizard, saying "I'm not touching you!"., I knew it was over. We'd have to regroup and try again.
