"it's just growing pains" -> "you're too young for that to hurt that bad" -> "you just need to get in better shape" -> "welcome to being old, everyone is in pain"
proud victim of the tumblr accent. it's fading out of public consciousness as the tik tok accent takes precedence; a linguistic evolution that makes the tumblr accent 85% funnier to unsuspecting civilians. it's like releasing a disease on a non-inoculated population. coughing baby versus hydrogen bomb.
once my therapist said I used very uncommon and creative phrases and adjectives and i just did not have the heart to tell that Old Lady From A Foreign Small Town that I was translating tumblr speech into our language. so I was like yeah... must be from the books I read...
like girl we have an army of scholars over at tumblr.com crafting our language it's not just little old me I swear
had a dream that there was this new tiktok trend called "scrubbing" where people would take images of fictional characters and put them in images of bathtubs and drag around transparent pngs of soap and brushes with their tiktok art tablets and like liquify tool their hair down to mimic giving them a shower. and people would get into flamewars in the comments of every single video over the types of soap they picked and if the images had decently removed backgrounds and if they got soap in their eyes. and it got onto the news because it turned out everyone doing the trend was doing it compulsively like they physically couldn't stop and each video was a solid few minutes long because they were just collectively obsessively recording themselves fake-showering these fictional characters and arguing about it online
for the record I have never used tiktok and like explicitly in the dream I learned about it secondhand from a discord server so there's that also which is funny I think
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Presumably, if adult humans are weird, then human kids must be weird as well. But of course, since aliens probably wouldn’t interact with human children too much, there might not be much about them in the human guide.
Imagine a human leaving her kid with an alien friend because her SO is sick and none of her human crewmates are able to act as babysitter and she’s got an important meeting. So she goes to the meeting and the alien takes her kid to one of the rooms in the ship that acts as a sort of play area.
Then, when the human comes out of the meeting, she picks her phone up and sees that she has some missed calls…
1st call: “Hey, Katie, it’s me, Grit. I know you’re probably in the meeting by now and can’t answer your phone, but I was just wondering… Jackie’s been chasing the other kids a lot, is she hunting them? Is that part of the whole predatory instincts thing? They all seem to be having fun— at least I think so, they’re all making that weird noise you guys make— but I just thought I’d let you know. And, um, listen… she’s not going to try and eat the ones she catches, is she?”
2nd call: “Hi, Katie, Grit again— look, I know that you guys are descended from tree climbing mammals and so your offspring need climbing equipment to satisfy those instincts— but there’s no way she’s supposed to be that high, right? None of the other parents are doing anything and I can’t go up and get her down because my hooves can’t get a grip on the frame. She’s right on top and— NO!<incomprehensible noises that sound like a cross between the moo of a cow and the bray of a donkey>— okay, so she’s swinging from the bars. One of the other humans just explained that that’s normal. He’s offered me some coffee, but I said no because I’m pretty sure that stuff’s toxic. I’ll try not to call again unless there is an emergency.”
3rd call: “I’m so sorry, Jackie’s been injured. She tripped over and seems to have lost a layer of skin from her knee. She’s making these noises and there’s liquid coming from her eye sockets and I don’t know what to do! Please pick up! There’s blood and the coffee offering human keeps saying she should suck the blood out or something. Is that a thing? Does your species’ saliva have healing properties? Shoud I call a medic?! Please pick up!”
4th call: “Sorry for that last message. Jackie seems to be doing fine now. I don’t know how— she should be laid out for weeks after an injury like that! Please, for my sanity, can you get a human babysitter next time?”
5th call: “Katie, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Jackie just handed me one of her mouth bones. Her eyes were not watering this time, but there was blood in her mouth, and the coffee-drinking human took her to get some water. I…. She will have a gap in her mouth unless you are able to get it fixed. The other humans tell me not to worry, but I know how your species need their mouth bones to begin breaking down your food. My insurance only covers at-fault interspecies accidents, and–<incoherent murmuring> What do you mean, it will grow back? Won’t it have to be reattached? <more incoherent murmuring, distinct laughter> I…. I didn’t realize this was normal for your species. It wasn’t in my handbook. I’ll try not to call again unless there’s a real emergency.
At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.
The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.
It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.
The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.
This map required:
North and South Vietnam in it
All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated
Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)
Has Laos and Cambodia in it
Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it
So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'
I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.
Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.
The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.
The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc
At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"
My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond
good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map
My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.
We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.
Low-level Dungeons & Dragons adventure where one of those big goofy skywhale things has died and crash-landed in the middle of town, and what initially appears to be a simple cleanup assignment abruptly takes a combat-heavy turn when the party gets to find out what feeds on skywhalefalls.
I've been thinking about this some more, and also looking through the notes, so here's what I have to add.
With a "normal" whalefall, we're talking about something (a dead whale, to be precise) that lands in an EXTREMELY nutrient-poor environment, the deep ocean. It's not the equivalent of "a truck full of free hamburgers lands from the sky in the middle of your neighbourhood". This is an environment where an important part of the food chain is "marine snow", aka flakes of organic matter (including feces) that drift down from above, and they eat that because it's possible to get nutrients from it. So when a whole-ass (or partial-ass, because it's already been nibbled on from sharks and the like) whale carcass arrives, it is something MAJOR. It starts a whole new localized ecosystem, an oasis of life; those that eat the dead whale, those that eat those that eat the dead whale, and so on. And as the whale is consumed, the creatures there shift, leaving when there's nothing left that they'd eat, arriving when parts of the whale that they DO eat are now exposed, and it continues until the very bones have been devoured.
Whalefalls are fascinating.
But to get back on topic… if we're looking at this as like a WHALEFALL, and not the equivalent of "dropping your fast-food order on the parking lot and now there's seagulls everywhere" (which also has promise but it's substantially less weird), then the town has to count as a "nutrient-poor environment". And since it's a TOWN, which means a settlement where people are able to survive and overall have enough to eat, then the skywhalefall-eaters must eat something other than what can be easily acquired in the area, so they're extremely rare there because there's not enough to support a larger population. Creatures that would only have been seen singly, and are rarely active because they need to conserve energy. Something like the local cryptid.
When you first see it, you try to memorize every detail, because it's a once-in-a-lifetime experience to actually encounter one of them for even a brief glimpse. And then, you see another (its mate?). And another. And another.
As the formerly-cryptids arrive, their presence -- combined with that of the skywhale carcass that's STILL there -- effectively shuts down the town. They don't even need to be hostile or frightening, it's just from sheer numbers, body mass blocking easy transportation. Some people leave, with plans to come back once things are less crazy. More people arrive, to see what weirdness is happening, or to try to harvest from the skywhale or the formerly-cryptids, or to try to make money off of those who are visiting. Normally you'd welcome the influx of visitors and their money, but parts of your infrastructure got squished by a giant dead skywhale, and a good chunk of the rest of the town's infrastructure is currently inaccessible due to formerly-cryptids having a feast.
And then, weirder things arrive. Creatures you'd never even heard of, creatures you'd been sure were just a poet's hallucinations, creatures you're not sure how they even exist. But they're there, and they feed. Some of them on the skywhalefall, some of them on the formerly-cryptids, some of them on others of the weird creatures. A visiting scholar is FASCINATED, and offers you more money than your family has seen in generations, to take samples. Your neighbour responds before you even have time to think it through, and rushes in. The creatures didn't intend to harm your neighbour, that's not the kind of food they desire, but that's faint consolation for one who'd gotten in the way of hungry jaws. You politely decline any further requests from that scholar.
Time passes. The skywhale carcass is unrecognizable from what it had been when it first landed. So is your town. Whole areas have been effectively abandoned, and damaged from the skywhale's original impact, or the frenzy of what has been eating it, or attempts to combat them, or simply lack of upkeep. Temporary dwellings and places of business, at what had been the outskirts of town, are now more built-up and permanent since it became clear that this wasn't going to go away in a few weeks. People have moved away, for more normal settlements. People have moved TO your town, for specialized resources that can be (carefully!) acquired from the skywhale and what eats it. It has become normal to you.
It's the now-resident scholar -- who'd learned a valuable lesson about the use of observation from a DISTANCE -- who notices it first. Certain types of the weird creatures are being seen less and less, then not at all. The creatures start taking up less room, because there's fewer of them. It becomes feasible to go back to some of the buildings that had been abandoned, even if it would be a lot of work to get them back in inhabitable condition again. The formerly-cryptids are now ACTUALLY cryptids again, with only rare sightings of them.
Time passes. The weird creatures are now restricted to only what parts of the skywhale still remain. These ones barely even look like "creatures", more like red flames, dancing on what's recognizably bones but not the bones of any normal animal. It's easy for the area to be fenced off, no hazard to anybody but those who would make direct contact with the not-flames.
Eventually, nothing is left. No bones, none of the weird creatures. Its effects are shown in the altered shape of the town, from where the town had been forced to build around it, and in the town's mascot, a cartoonishly-dead skywhale.
A skywale falls in a nutrient-poor environment. We know there are no uninhabitable land masses so for this to work its simply going to be large flat areas, cold spase grasslands, deserts and iceflats, where macrobiodiversity is limited.
humaniods track the whale migration to the best of their ability, and when one finally falls to the ground, nomadic groups are quick to form around it, first in gets the first cuts before the meat begins to rot, though with cold temperatures this is a much slower process than in the equator. even after the edible meat is stripped and stored, smoked ect, the pop-up town is still bustling around it. Animals come from all areas to eat, and the nomadic WhaleFall camps are generous, because while skywhale is good meat, you still need variety - and a gift from the gods, who ever they worship, should always be shared. What isn't eaten or stored or shared to the animals goes into the land, the blood and bone fertilising the dirt and feeding the worms for healthier soil. But it's a lot of work, and while you could call the tribe a town, it still will take a full year for the people to break it down, often longer as the younger ones leave to trade with settlement or move to the next skywhalefall. Abandoned or near abandoned whalefalls do attract cryptids, weird creatures people haven't identified, or wont. Creatures that come in the dead of night when everyone, even the night watch, has tucked themselves inside. The ribs can be used to create sailing boat ribs, if you can be paid enough to drag them to the coast, but if you don't harvest them fast enough, or your too far inland to bother, something else will take them, snapping them like kindling or just dragging them away. Scholars come, study what happens in the mornings after those visits, but know no one looks upon certain creatures and lives to tell the tale.
sorry i will never understand cis grief. your daughter is living her best life and going around with friends and feeling like a human being. your son doesn’t feel like he needs to crawl out of his skin anymore and can actually smile. your children are happy and no longer see their existence as the worst thing in the world. why are you grieving this lmao. grow up.
- The director of the library got back to me after a couple weeks of silence, the patron that wanted to make a donation to the library so i could paint the next mural approved my proposal and fully funded the project for a pricetag that is nearly double my current total bank account
- the Botanical Gardens I worked with before is expanding and they put out a call for work so I emailed them and they apparently have me on a list of artists they wanna work with.
- I reached out to my local zoo to see if they wanted any murals painted literally MONTHS ago and they just got back to me and we set up a zoom call for this thursday to see what could be done
When we were children, my sister had private music lessons at her violin teacher’s house. I only visited there once, but I still remember that afternoon. The teacher had an artificial pond in her yard, a large beautiful thing with lily pads and plant life. And in the pond, there were goldfish. I had never seen such enormous goldfish.
I spent several minutes just staring at them (and trying to convince them to bite my fingers.) When my sister’s violin lesson ended, her teacher came out to the yard and explained that these goldfish were the same small creatures that were often unfortunately sold in plastic bags at state fairs. They were only about two inches long apiece, when she bought them and put them in the new, empty pond. In essence, they were like every goldfish I had seen before, but they had been given a much larger, much richer environment in which to flourish. As a result, they had grown into some of the most remarkable, vibrant creatures my twelve-year-old self had ever met with. All because of a pond.
Funny what lessons children remember. My sister doesn’t play the violin anymore, but that was the first time I caught a glimpse of the overwhelming extent to which it matters, the way the world treats us.
Just watched Adam Conover (of Adam Ruins Everything) make such a solid point that I think we should spread far and wide. Yes, having AI write your emails is lazy, sure, but people love being lazy. We need to really emphasize that sending AI emails (or using AI responses on social media, or publishing AI flyers, or or or) is rude.
It's rude. You're making someone take their time to read something you couldn't bother to write. You're telling them they were so unimportant you couldn't be bothered to actually take the time to say something yourself. And frankly, you're lying about it while you're at it.
When I worked at the place selling oils and vinegars I’d sometimes get asked about food. I was, and remain, wildly unqualified to ask about food, but thankfully it was pretty rare. Usually our shoppers were fully aware they knew more than me and they were content to ignore me.
One day a woman in her fifties came in. She looked at the pretty amphora displays and the sample cups before she turned to me. “What would go well with steak?”
“Oh, some of the fruit vinegars would be a nice finisher,” I said, talking out my ass. Like, I’d eat that but whether it’s conventionally accepted to douse a steak in mango vinegar is up for debate.
“I’ve been a vegetarian for forty years, but my doctor suggested I might need more red meat. So I thought I’d get a steak tonight and I don’t know much about preparing it.”
I stared at this woman. This fully adult human woman. Who had just spoken to a doctor. And I said, “Do not buy a steak tonight.”
“What? Why?”
“You’ve been a vegetarian for forty years?”
“Yes?”
“Then your body has no idea how to process meat. You will get so sick.” It was pure luck that I knew this. I had a few hardcore vegetarian friends who had been exposed to meat at potluck dishes and told me about the ensuing horrors as their gentle veggie gut biome was overrun with flesh. And how consequently their toilet overfloweth.
“Really?!”
“Yes,” I said, emphatically. “If you want to try to incorporate meat I would start with a tiny portion of fish, and slowly work your way up, but your insides will not know what to do with steak.”
“Wow! I’m so glad I mentioned that to you.”
I was likewise glad, and ended up selling her a light vinegar that would go nicely with fish. I don’t know if she didn’t have any other vegetarian friends or if her doctor hadn’t said anything to prep her for a radical diet change but it still blows my mind that she didn’t know she couldn’t just cook up and enjoy a steak.
I WAS FUCKING WONDERING WHAT THOSE DIGITAL PRICE TAGS WERE ABOUT SUDDENLY i had hoped they were so the workers didn't have to finagle those little papers into the slider part anymore 😭
Hi, yes, that is the OFFICIAL excuse made to me by the guy replacing the paper tags with digital ones at my local Walmart, but the end goal is to remove the numbers off the shelf entirely, replacing them with QR codes that you have to scan with the app…. Which requires your login information….. and also stores your card information so even if you didn’t use your Walmart account at the physical checkout, if you used a card they recognize, they assign that purchase to your Walmart account purchase history.
I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.
Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:
Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.
No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.
So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:
Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:
Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.
Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.
POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.
When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)
If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.
In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.
Yes, call your reps. Yes, push for more legislation like this in more places. But also take an extra minute out of your shopping trip to MAKE IT HURT for companies to pull this shit.
It's been just over a year since Deltarune chapters 3 & 4 released! I did the 3D work, which mostly means Tenna 📺 I figured it's been long enough to share some "behind the scenes" stuff, starting with a look at the Maya file for his static poses...
I'd individually render the poses to get that early 3D shine ✨ Here's some of them at their original resolutions! I would work from text descriptions from Toby, and sometimes there'd be a Paint sketch to help out. Gigi drew the concept that I modeled from and some poses too!
I had a lot of fun pushing myself to match the dynamic poses Toby had in mind for Tenna - making him so crazy and expressive was something I couldn't have done without his prompts. He'd draw the faces on afterward too, which really brought Tenna to life!
(lots more after the Read More cut...!)
Here are some of the Paint sketches Toby drew to help me with specific Tenna poses! I love seeing his drawings LOL, genuinely really good and evocative 👍
There was a time when I was struggling to capture what he wanted for these specific Tenna poses… Until Toby acted them out himself, and I thought, "Ah, it's like that. I understand." and then I was able to make them just how he pictured them.
When looking through the renders and choosing what to share, I laughed at these two… Remember when Tenna had a gun? Remember when he bent over in a very specific way that might remind you of another, different image? No? Maybe you don't…? Well. Don't worry about it.
These ones are cute… Tenna is pretty cute sometimes! Has anyone ever thought this? Actually, before people knew he was going to be a strange 3D sprite the Whole Time, I was worried people wouldn't like the style and it'd sour people's views on him. I'm glad that didn't happen.
Toby thought it would be funny to have Tenna do some really smooth, mocapped animations sometimes - specifically free to use ones that often pop up in other things. An extra funny part to me is how many frames these take up in the game, and how his tails are stuck to his legs…
Speaking of mocap, Toby wanted Tenna to use custom mocap animations as far back as 2016 - Ten(na) years ago! I got an Xbox Kinect at the time and learnt how to set this up, but then never used it. Here's a look at messing with mocaped stuff again in 2022. So Normal.
Don't bother trying to help him here, he's just being dramatic 🙄
I particularly like these poses - I think I improvised most of these just based off the context they get used in… I always liked posing his tie and coat tails as if they were also parts of his body he could move. Which I guess they are?
After I rendered out the individual poses in high quality, I'd force the color palette to be limited to just a few shades and then I'd shrink the result down to pixel sized sprites. Like these! I'd tidy them up a little, but they'd really get improved on at the pixel scale by Clairvoire.
As well as Tenna's sprites, I also worked on his intro "movie"…! Seeing people be completely overloaded by this on first playthroughs would always make me laugh. In game, there's a ton of extra editing done by Everdraed, but my unedited cut looks like this ⬇️
This was the entire storyboard I had to work from, and I'm realizing now that there's the note "put him in car etc" that I never did and actually don't know what it would mean exactly. Working on this had me listen to the accompanying audio many times, but it's good so it's okay.
Here are a bunch of random clips of the Maya project for Tenna's intro movie. This is how movies get made, I think!! Yeah… Just like this.
Say it with him, folks!!
For the 3D Ralsei clip from the intro, Toby really wanted it to look a certain way, and drew more sketches for guiding me with this part than any other. They genuinely helped.
Remember how Toby's original storyboard has the note "covered in slime and shrinks"? That meant I had to learn how to make 3D slime. You can see my tech advancing here.
I'm really happy with how the final Tenna animation at the end of the intro movie turned out! It wouldn't look as good if it wasn't for some 2D animation to reference from SmallBuStudio, so thank you to them for the help! Tenna is cute… Huh, I already said that…?
Phew!! That's a lot of Tenna. I hope it was fun to look through my posts! Oh, one more thing - the Fangamer Mr. Tenna Figurine just straight up uses the 3D model I made, which I think is really funny and cool and nice. Check it out if you want! Thanks for reading!
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