yeah!!! i love symbolism and motifs so so much. obviously fog and mists everywhere - a large portion of the setting is called The Mists - but also apples, amber, bodies of water, crowns, and the colors red, black, gray, gold, and blue.
16: Imagine the entire story takes place but in the meantime the characters all also have tumblr. What kind of (terrible) tumblr posts would happen?
oh god. nik and ez run a meme page together probably with shitposts that rack up thousands of notes, and nog is definitely part of "science side of tumblr." rudolph doesn't know what the internet is. pascha does reasonably well posting blurry photos of his familiar (a small griffin, adorable) but also incomprehensible ramblings that no one's sure if they're god-tier shitposts or someone having a genuine mental breakdown (it's. it's the second one). and then it all blows up when he posts the most toxic call-out post of everyone else and deletes immediately afterwards
19. Describe the sillies you think about but that don't go in the story
there's plenty of sillies to be had between pascha's and nik's sibling rivalry. memory loss be damned, the cain instinct is eternal. i feel that ez and rudolph have the capability to be really funny together too, given their whole dynamic is "grumpy old man" and "stubborn ray of sunshine." also while it's played more for drama, nog as a psychic who doesn't believe in psychics/ghost-whisperer who doesn't believe in ghosts is pretty funny in my opinion
genuine curiosity -- you seem like someone who might at least know where to point me to find this out -- what are the environmental benefits of insects like mosquitos? all i really know is they can spread disease and itch when they bite, what ecological niche do they fill?
Off the top of my head (and this is with mild fact-checking/remembering some things from college courses but I’m not exactly citing academic papers, so take it with the usual grain of salt one would), they’re a pretty crucial food source for lots of other animals, some of which, like bats and amphibians, are facing their own crises in the current ecological environment.
Pretty much anything that exists towards the bottom of the food chain is usually going to be important by virtue of being a food source with something else, seeing as ecology is often an interconnected web of who’s food for who. Aquatic insects/larvae in general are often a pretty important one, too, considering how many animals live in and around bodies of water. And since mosquitoes in particular make up a huge biomass (which is a good thing and a bad thing, since that’s also why they spread so much disease -- there’s a lot of them!) I imagine they probably make up a pretty significant portion of the diet of some animals.
Perhaps more surprisingly, some species of mosquito are actually pollinators! Like any group of insects I think this is only true for certain species (it’s easy to forget that “mosquitos” are not a single monolith, but a collection of species, like many organisms), since pollinator relationships can get super specialized, but a lot of things pollinate, so it also makes sense that they’d get in on that sweet, sweet symbiosis like many other insects. The ecological web situation is probably still their bigger contribution, as it applies to all species of mosquito everywhere, though. But both are true!
sol1loqu1st replied to your post “The Jounouchi post is officially cancelled, quick everyone tell me...”
you KNOW i love gem-knight lady brilliant diamond!! she's my mom, and despite her high summoning cost, she's super useful bc she has the ability to tribute another gem-knight monster and special summon a gem-knight from my extra deck, which allows me to pull off some Sick Combos(tm)
GEM KNIGHT MOM IS SO FUCKING GOOD!!!! She may not have hulk hands but she is still VERY good and VERY scary to fight. I love her
dnd ask -- roll a d20 and answer the number that comes up :3
i used the sweet sweet dice i got from you for this, and rolled a 9!
9. do you keep any dnd superstitions?
yes. i generally dont like to use dice second hand (like if i had the choice to borrow dice or use an online roller i’ll use an online roller), and i like to rub my dice on my cat before a game starts so i can have their blessing/luck. i also have a VERY particular d6 i always use when rolling for stats cus it has good rolls. i also have a running joke where i can fix cursed/bless dice by putting them in my mouth. it hasnt like, Not Worked Yet so ???
idk if i sent u the eyes emoji meme but in case i didnt, 👀???
ok so this is a longer extract? because most of my stuff this year was Longer and harder to get short bits from that make sense out of context but uuuuuh yeah. transgender telepathic aliens anyone? Once again please don’t judge quality because this is all unedited, and don/t reb/og
(send me 👀 for part of a wip of mine from this year)
It takes Kanden and I until midday to get maybe halfway tothe ships. We left just before dawn, so while this is annoying, it still feelslike an improvement on our last visit to Drew and her gang, which was roughlythe same distance as halfway to the ship, just in a slightly differentdirection. And that took much longer than this is taking now.
Kanden has been sort of grumpy, which I don’t say as ajudgement on him but as a concern. I don’t think he slept very well last night,but he could be worrying about something as well. At the moment he’s walkingslightly behind me, ripping a leaf into little pieces and yawning. Or rather,his bottom lip droops a bit and then he does these sort of half yawns, butthat’s just how it looks on him. The flecks on his skin aren’t a dark blue,like the night before, but definitely darker than the default.
For reference, I’d say that when he or another Yakamonian isfully calm, their darker spots aren’t very easily distinguishable from the restof their skin. They can be mistaken for gradual variation in skintone. Now,however, his face is so pale blue as to almost be white, and his darker spotsare a sky blue. At least from pictures we have. I’m not actually sure what thesky looked like on earth anymore. The sky on Yakamon varies from white, to paleyellow, to mid green. Sky blue is just a point of reference I suppose.
Kanden walks up to me, and gently touches my bare shoulder.I feel sort of embarrassed that he’s seeing my very scientific observation typethoughts on his species, and then I feel a strange mix of sadness, nerves, andrelief, some of it crossing over from him.
What I see in Kanden’s thoughts, briefly for the moment hetouches me but very clear and immediate while that moment is happening, issomething I’ve seen many times before. It’s a worry, sometimes a nightmare,though I haven’t yet seen into his dreams apart from the times when weaccidentally brush against each other when we’re both asleep. The scene goeslike this: Kanden stands in a group of Komak, Yakamonians with the red antlertips. They jeer. Kanden stands in the middle of them and he is very small, andstartlingly purple in colour.
It’s what he thinks will happen, or fears will happen, athis coming of age ceremony. It’s a gendered event, and it happens at aparticular age – 10 years, which translated to Earth years is I think just over16. Kanden has only been living as a Komak for just under two years. He’stransgender, or whatever the alien equivalent of that is when your species hasfour traditionally recognised genders. He’s also about my age. The firstceremony he was old enough for happened before he was out. The second one, lastyear, he was too scared to attend. And now the fact he’s older just adds to howscared he is.
The thing is, it’s like anything. When I look at Kanden, hisantler tips are I guess a purplish red, but red nonetheless and nothing to beworried about. In his head, he’s almost blue. He takes some kind of medicinemade from that tree that helps him be the right colour, and probably does morebesides that, and it works. Compared to other Yakamonians I see on the street,he doesn’t look that differently to how I think he wants to. And even if hedid, he seems to be mostly accepted by them.
But that doesn’t matter. If he worries he’ll be ostracizedor laughed at, he’ll be worried about it right up until it doesn’t happen, andprobably afterwards too. And while to me he doesn’t seem in danger ofharassment or worse, I can’t just tell him to suck it up. That’s not howworrying works. And it’s not how real life works too, in a smaller than you’dthink but still too high amount of cases.
I do want him to go. Pretty desperately, because I think ifhe misses it another year he might never go at all. But I can’t force him. Iwant to tell him this, but I don’t know how to make it stand out to him as aclear message among all the thinking about it I’m doing in my head. Telepathymakes things easier, but it also makes things harder.
Instead I just sign ‘I’m sorry’, and he seems in some waycomforted by that.
okay uhhh. i started making a moodboard for the darkest part of the forest (holly black) but… lost the credit for all the pictures, and also never quite figured out composition or symbolism or relevance or whatever, and never actually edited any of it, so what we now see before us is… basically a jumble of images with a foresty, faeryish feel:
also, this is p bad quality, because it’s a screenshot of a draft and i had to zoom out to get the whole thing in
