Squidlit

Alex from Squidlit Ink.! Your source of squippy, squidlity things! http://store.steampowered.com/app/799510/Squidlit/

[kujo1597]

I love Squidlit so I quickly made a Plip Christmas tree decoration. One side is purple, and the other side is grellow. Half of the decorations on my tree are homemade. It's a fun activity.

[supersquidlit]

Oh wow this is so cute! <3

I love all of the handmade ornaments on your tree!

[aquamon]

[mossworm]

When it rains, the bromeliad ostracods leave the water to walk around and explore the mysterious surface world. Probably an undescribed species, maybe the same one I already have from another part of town. Audio is Kobitan from Wand of Gamelon

[lainpsx]

[adequately]

クレゲでGETした

[supersquidlit]

Happy National Blueberry Muffin Day!

Love you all.

[supersquidlit]

Can I thank you for making my 2 favourite switch games out there. I genuinely love both squidlit games so much and I'm so grateful that you created them

Dawwwwww

Thank you so, SO much for reaching out. My day is so much better now. I’ll make sure to let Plip know too!

Sorry they take a while! Squidlit 64 is still a couple years out at this rate. Sam, my spouse who helped make the first two, is working on Diablo 4 now, so I’m on my own for this project.

~Alex

(Plip told me to tell you “howdy”)

[supersquidlit]

Squidlit 64 update!

Sorry it’s been a while. I had a collision bug that made it hard to get good footage. It’s all better now though!

I have several things to show, and first on the agenda is the addition of a personal favorite Squidlit enemy, wallop polyps!

There’s also updated attack swings, and the water isn’t purple anymore. Woo!

[ot3]

the idea that any enjoyment of children's media as an adult is somehow inappropriate, pathetic, or self-infantalizing is something i hate more and more every time i see it.

really what this belief suggests to me is that there are tons of people who think children's media either can't or shouldn't have any genuine artistic merit. and it's rude and cruel to the people who dedicate their life to making things to kids to act like nothing they make can have any real value since it's just for children. and it's rude and cruel to children themselves to act like nothing that's made for them should have any real value as, if the creative works you're exposed to as a child are just placeholders.

i think art made for kids can be good! i think art for kids should be good! i think you need to take a very different approach when creating/engaging with art made for children, but i don't think this somehow prevents it from being meaningful or worthwhile! and if you do think that i genuinely am not sure how you can justify that belief without also believing kids are too stupid for real art or not deserving of it.

[supersquidlit]

[supersquidlit]

I wonder if I’m the first person to eat Dinosaur Egg Oatmeal with macadamia nuts.

[creative-chaos-apparently]

I made a little friend last night

[strawlessandbraless]

Earth Day is for the Worms!🐛 🪱 🌎

You love to sea it 🌊

📷 credit: Alexander Semenov’s Underwater Photography & Ocean Exploration Project titled «Aquatilis»

[ospreyonthemoon]

@bogleech look, worms

[supersquidlit]

This is now the official dance to Squishy Road

[weevilsdaily]

i dont know what type this is but look… he has golden shoes…

Hes mr goldenshoe

[bogleech]

If you’re in the mood to drop bug knowledge, I’m sure Tumblr would enjoy an explanation for the jumping venomous “camelback spiders” that conservative social media is convinced have been attacking our brave soldiers

lol, again?! I remember this also happening when America invaded iraq back in like 2003. I think the name "camel spider" was even first coined then; in books the only common names I knew them under before then was "sun spider" and "wind scorpion," both of which are much cooler as well as more appropriate for something that runs as fast as the wind in bright, sunny places. But they do "chase" people in order to try and cool off in our shadows, leading to the belief that they're aggressive, and basically all the terror of them started because soldiers made up stories about them just to scare younger newer recruits as a prank, insisting that they're venomous or parasitic or that they'll chew your nose off while you sleep.

I think their tiny close-set black eyes and giant fat mouthparts give them an adorable sweet dopey face, though from the side it becomes sick and rad:

They can bite very hard and easily draw blood if you upset them, but they want to be left alone. Their jaws are only so big and strong because they're the arachnid version of a shrew: a fast-moving high energy predator adapted to quickly take down and devour everything else it comes across up to a couple times larger than itself, like lizards and centipedes!

They call this kind a teddy bear solifugid:

[bogleech]

Some interesting things about these, too, that I had incomplete understanding of until just now: So LIKE a shrew many species are absolutely frantic hunters when they’re active, just zipping around shoving everything they can into their stomachs. In captivity they usually only ever lived for a few months of this non-stop eating, so it was assumed that was what their lives in the wild were always like, very short and fast and violent. But if you space out their food a little more and give them soil they can burrow in, most solifugids will stop the carnage after about one month, seclude themselves in a burrow and stay there for almost a year without eating, drinking, or even really moving at all! They will also spend MONTHS at a time preparing for a molt, during which they remain deathly still with their legs in the air, and I don’t doubt a lot of people who tried to keep them just assumed they were dead. One person reports keeping several species alive for up to four years of these extended resting and molting cycles, while another says he kept a member of a larger species for an entire decade. This indicates that a solifugid, like many animals in harsh environments, evolved to eat absolutely every edible thing it encounters, no matter the volume and frequency, because if you live where long periods of famine and drought are a regular occurrence your odds of survival are better if you never waste an opportunity to eat. When you take in an animal, as a pet or a scientific specimen, your instinct is obviously to “keep it fed,” but unfortunately this is an animal that never evolved a concept of having eaten “enough,” so if you make food constantly available to them, they will wear themselves out, mature at an accelerated rate and eat TO DEATH in a fraction of their maximum possible lifespan. This probably happens to many of them in the wild, too, depending on ecological conditions, but they still reach reproductive maturity and get a chance to make more solifugids during that shortened life, so it's win/win; they just also have a speed run mode. This is true for other organisms in various ecosystems for various reasons, it's just not often so extreme. We see it most of all in the deep sea abyss, actually, where meals can be infrequent enough that many fish evolved ultra-stretchy jaws and stomachs to eat animals several times their own size, in case that's all they might encounter, and they too will overeat to their own demise; we find deep sea fish washed up with stomachs bursting open from too many fish at once. There's also very very little published scientific information on this, virtually none I can find online; only personal observations shared by people who have raised them, including both hobbyists and biologists.

[voynich-exists]

omg wind scorpion is a way cooler name

[bogleech]

Anyway while we're on the subject of public misconception towards living things (which is completely understandable because have you SEEN living things? There's like dozens of them!) here's a fresh rundown of some common mistakes about bugs!

Arachnids aren't just spiders! They're also scorpions, mites, ticks and some real weirdos out there

Insects with wings are always finished growing! Wings are the last new thing they ever develop! There can never be a "baby bee" that's just a smaller bee flying around.

That said, not all insects have larvae! Many older insect groups do look like little versions of adults....but the wings rule still applies.

Insects do have brains! Lobes and everything!

Only the Hymenoptera (bees, ants and wasps) have stingers like that.

Not all bees and wasps live in colonies with queens

The only non-hymenoptera with queens are termites, which is convergent evolution, because termites are a type of cockroach!

There are still other insects with colonial lifestyles to various degrees which can include special reproductive castes, just not the whole "queen" setup.

Even ants still deviate from that; there are multi-queen ant species, some species where the whole colony is just females who clone themselves and other outliers

There is no "hive mind;" social insects coordinate no differently from schools of fish, flocks of birds, or for that matter crowds of humans! They're just following the same signals together and communicating to each other!

Not all mosquito species carry disease, and not all of them bite people

Mosquitoes ARE ecologically very important and nobody in science ever actually said otherwise

The bite of a black widow is so rarely deadly that the United States doesn't bother stocking antivenin despite hundreds of reported bites per year. It just feels really really bad and they give you painkillers.

Recluse venom does damage skin, but only in the tiny area surrounding the bite. More serious cases are due to this dead skin inviting bacterial infection, and in fact our hospitals don't carry recluse antivenin either; they just prescribe powerful antibiotics, which has been fully effective at treating confirmed bites.

Bed bugs are real actual specific insects

"Cooties" basically are, too; it's old slang for lice

Crane flies aren't "mosquito hawks;" they actually don't eat at all!

Hobo spiders aren't really found to have a dangerous bite, leaving only widows and recluses as North America's "medically significant" spiders

Domestic honeybees actually kill far more people than hornets, including everywhere the giant "murder" hornet naturally occurs.

Wasps are only "less efficient" pollinators in that less pollen sticks to them per wasp. They are still absolutely critical pollinators and many flowers are pollinated by wasps exclusively.

Flies are also as important or more important to pollination than bees.

For "per insect" pollination efficiency it's now believed that moths also beat bees

Honeybees are non-native to most of the world and not great for the local ecosystem, they're just essential to us and our food industry

Getting a botfly is unpleasant and can become painful, but they aren't actually dangerous and they don't eat your flesh; they essentially push the flesh out of the way to create a chamber and they feed on fluids your immune system keeps making in response to the intrusion. They also keep this chamber free of bacterial infection because that would harm them too!

Botflies also exist in most parts of the world, but only one species specializes partially in humans (and primates in general, but can make do with a few other hosts)

"Kissing bugs" are a group of a couple unusual species of assassin bug. Only the kissing bugs evolved to feed on blood; other assassin bugs just eat other insects.