As a fun challenge, I made a creature with the help of prompts on da and fa. These prompts were then randomly selected and used as a base to create this guy.
Special feature: Octopus’ color/texture change – Jaycred (fa)
I ended up combining the spines and the octopus like texture change. It has spongy bobly bits on its skin that harden into spikes when tense. And the sharp feathers got changed into quills cause I want this to be more of a mammal. But hopefully it has the same effect!
I see it as slightly aquatic but its more built for speed on land. So it uses its colour changing skin to hide in murky pools and lunges at its prey. If it cant catch them in the first bite, it bounds after them.
Here’s a website where you can do something similar from your browser! https://radio.garden/
[Video Description: a small globe on top of a small monitor with a simple display. Across the globe is a band with a sensor. As the globe is moved, the focuses in on locations beneath it and the monitor shows the radio stations being tuned in as a variety of music around the world with each movement of the globe. End ID]
I’m glad that Indiana finally has its first national park and that it’s the one mostly known for having sand dunes that eat children.
how, pray tell, does a dune eat A Child
Imagine that you’re a big pile of sand by the shore of Lake Michigan, between Gary and Michigan City. Your name is Mount Baldy, and you’re a popular tourist destination at what is now Indiana Dunes National Park.
For a huge pile of tiny rocks, you live a surprisingly nomadic lifestyle. More than a hundred years of tourism and foot traffic has destroyed much of the native grass that kept you stationary. You are now what they call a “wandering dune”, as wind off the lake slowly but steadily pushes your tremendous bulk a little further inland every year.
As you move, you gradually engulf everything in your path—trees, buildings, rocks, hills, your own parking lot—everything. You are an unstoppable force, like some kind of gigantic gelatinous cube, but you’re still very popular with visitors.
In 2013, you suddenly eat a child. It’s a surprising move on your part—dry quicksand isn’t supposed to be a real natural phenomenon. I mean, what is this, a 1960’s action movie?
One moment, a family from Illinois is cheerfully climbing your slopes. The next, the 6 year old boy suddenly vanishes without warning, leaving no trace. Would-be rescuers dig in the sand where he disappeared until their hands are bleeding. Geologists insist that he must have wandered off, because enormous piles sand physically cannot form hollows or pockets within themselves—but three hours later, he is found, unconscious but alive, buried almost twelve feet deep in the sand.
The current leading geological theory as to how this happened is that the organic material you engulf, like trees, slowly decompose beneath your slopes, leaving behind unstable voids held together only by the fragile remains of the decayed material. When these voids are walked over, they collapse, forming sudden sinkholes that can swallow visitors whole. The rules that typically govern stationary dunes, or wandering dunes in areas that are not forested, no longer apply to you. You are unpredictable and dangerous and have remained closed to visitors except on guided hikes ever since.
world heritage post
So this sand dune just… what, defies the laws of physics for sand?
Nope–here is an illustration I just made that might explain it better:
being a self-taught artist with no formal training is having done art seriously since you were a young teenager
and only finding out that you’re supposed to do warm up sketches every time you’re about to work on serious art when you’re fuckin twenty-five
someone: oh yeah, do this exercise during your warm ups! it’ll help
me: my what
What’s up I have an actual college degree in art and I was never ONCE taught to do warm ups.
when i was in undergrad, it was kind of mentioned in and offhand way that we should do warmups, but we were never shown what that meant. And, y’know, we were young so it didn’t matter so much.
Being older now and having an art job it’s…kind of essential.
So: a quick primer for those of you who are like ‘ok but how do i actually go about doing this warmup thing.’
1) you may be tempted to do ‘a warmup drawing’ which is just a drawing that will take longer than it needed to and probably be frustrating and kind of bad because you didn’t warm up first. It’s tempting but always a trick your brain is playing on you! Do not trust!
2) warmups will vary based on what feels good to you/what task you’re about to do/what motor skills you want to practice. That being said, some good standbys:
a) circles. Just a whole page of circles on whatever drawing surface you’re going to be using, whether that’s your tablet or your sketchbook or a drawing pad on an easel. For these circles you should make sure that you’re drawing from your shoulder and not your wrist. In fact, you want to be drawing from your shoulder rather than your wrist most of the time! forever! your wrist is delicate please preserve it!
In order to ensure that you’re drawing from your shoulder, when you’re holding your pencil or whatever drawing tool you’re using, the only part of your hand that should be touching the drawing surface is part of the last two fingers–some people prefer the finger tips, but I tend to favor the first knuckles. Either way, the fingers should really be ghosting over the surface, providing guidance rather than support.
I usually start with big circles and then go to smaller circles and lines of ellipses, and then try to fit circles and ellipses inside other shapes i’ve already drawn as a precision exercise, but i don’t do that unless i’m feeling loose
b) spirals! i don’t always do spirals, but if i’m stiff and the circles just aren’t cutting it, spirals are a good fall back. I start from the center and work outward, going both clockwise and counterclockwise until i feel comfortable with the whole range of motion. Some people really care about getting perfect spirals but for me it’s all about making sure i’m comfortable with how i’m moving so who really even cares about how the spirals look. Not me!
c) lines! straight lines! in parallel! i do a mix of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal. These are often more from the elbow than the shoulder, especially if I’m working on a smaller surface. For this exercise, I recommend holding the drawing tool perpendicular with the surface
d) connect the dots. This is a precision and accuracy exercise and takes two forms. The first is to draw two dots and then draw a straight line between them. The second is to draw three dots and draw the curve that connects them. This sounds a lot simpler than it is in practice. Take time to ghost over the line you plan to draw before actually committing to your line. (I don’t always remember where I picked up my warm up exercises, but I’m pretty sure I got this one from Scott Robertson. His how to draw and how to render books are very technical but also accessible and worth checking out)
e) cubes, spheres, cones, and cylinders. These help get your brain into a more volumetric space. I draw multiples of each, rotating the forms around, and I’ll often take the time to do some rough shading on at least a few of them
f) spidermans! This one is really good if you’re going to be storyboarding or working on dynamic poses. Just fill a page full of spidermans doing all sorts of acrobatics.
g) beans. I don’t do beans too much anymore, but I know a lot of people like it so I’m mentioning it here. Fill an area with different size bean shapes without lifting your pencil off the paper.
h) short medium and long line repetition. draw a short, medium, and long line on your page, and then draw directly on top of them 8 to 12 times, doing your best to exactly trace what you’ve already drawing. Repeat with a wavy line. I’m bad at this one, which means I probably need to do it more.
And there are lots more options too! Hit up youtube to see what other people recommend, put together your own go-to list, mix it up when you’re getting bored, etc.
This is a long list, I know, but I usually don’t take more than 10 to 15 minutes to warm up, and I can warm up one handed while I’m drinking coffee, so, multitasking hurrah.
Sometimes I’ll advance to a precision warmup and find that I haven’t loosened up enough yet; it’s totally ok to go back to an earlier exercise! Also, all of this has the added benefit of kind of ritualistically getting you into the drawing mode so even if I’m not feeling it before I start, by the time I’ve gotten to the end I’m usually Ready For Drawin’. Brain hacks.
so, yeah! that’s a lot of words, but! Warmups are important! Save your joints, take less advil, do better drawings!
Why are Peopke saying Huey Needs School? His uncle is As smart as can ve with booksmarts,and His Mother Is More Tuned for Wits and Street smarts. He needs no school.
Answer:
mega intelligent pokemon and also literally a pokemon XD
I have cochlear implants and I can only buy parts to fix them or upgrade then from 1 corporation bc of tech exclusivity. upgrades to get new processors for both ears cost $23k & insurance only covers 90% (and it’s “good” insurance)
cyberpunk dystopia is already here for the disabled. fight for universal healthcare, fight against capitalism NOW.
One of my favourite linguistic things is looking at the ways different cultures classify colour.
In my research, I have found four words which convey “light” or “white” in Irish, depending on context - “bán” is the colour of fair skin and frost, “liath” is more of a light grey hair (but grey animal fur is “glas”), “fionn” is the warm brightness of sunlight and light blonde hair, and “geal” is more of a clean whiteness of teeth and snow.
A lot of the other colours have similar nuance - “glas” and “gorm” both convey blues, greens and grey, with varying intensity rather than hue. Then there’s “uaine” which people tend to define as being more vivid or artificial greens
Similarly, “dearg” and “rua” both mean red - but the former is for brighter reds like blood androses, and the latter is the earthy red of hair and rust
An extra note on skin and hair: generally in Celtic languages, when we call someone a colour, we mean hair not skin. “Tá sí donn” (literally “she is brown”) means that she has brown hair, not brown skin. This is presumably because, for a long time, most people speaking these languages would’ve been white, and therefore distinguishing people by hair colour would’ve made more sense. If you want to specifically refer to black skin, the word used is “gorm” which generally means blue.
So I wanted to know what kind of crystal could go in a wizard staff, right? so I googled “big crystal,” as one does, and got an Etsy ad for This
And as you all know I Am currently taking a geology class, so I am probably more emotionally invested in minerals than usual. But that is…very obviously not a natural crystal.
So I did some looking around on Etsy.
Now, these shops all seem to advertise to the “witchy”/“spiritual healing” type of person. And there are a lot of them. Crystals are a Big Thing on Etsy. And ALMOST ALL of them are obviously artificially cut into the same sort of prism with a triangular pyramid top, regardless of the actual sort of crystal it is supposed to be.
Even like, fucking, obsidian. Obsidian is volcanic glass, it doesn’t form crystals at all, it is not a crystal
I’m not throwing any shade at people who are into crystals for like witchy reasons, but it really seems like if crystals are spiritually important to you, you should know what a crystal is…right…?
So there I am. Caught in the helpless anger and distaste of looking at geologically inaccurate Etsy crystals.
And as I scroll, I start to see items in…interesting shapes:
“Oh,” I think to myself. “Oh no.”
But it is too late. I have heard the siren’s song, singing to me of knowledge that will destroy me, but that I cannot help but seek.
These…elongated objects are almost always ambiguously described as “massage wands,” “crystal healing wands,” and other such innocuous things. The egg-shaped objects are, um, “yoni eggs.”
…Right. Okay.
Maintain the youthfulness of my sacred organ.
IT’S A SEX TOY. SAY IT. BITCH, IT’S A SEX TOY, IT’S OKAY, SERIOUSLY, THERE’S NO SHAME IN IT, SAY IT WITH PRIDE, SAY IT WITH YOUR CHEST,
OKAY.
Okay. I’m good. I’m fine.
Actually, you know what, never mind. There is shame in this and I want it to be never acknowledged again.
Additionally, I am not fine.
Why the fuck are there so many of these—
At this point I stop and start googling.
Now, Selenite is the crystalline form of gypsum. It is also known as satin spar. Selenite is brittle and breaks easily, and has a Mohs hardness scale of 2.
For those unfamiliar with the Mohs hardness scale, a mineral with a hardness of 2 is soft enough that it can be easily scratched with a fingernail. It also is dissolved by moisture.
NO. DON’T PUT THAT IN YOUR BODY???? DON’T PUT THE GYPSUM, WHICH HAS A MOHS HARDNESS SCALE OF 2, IS BRITTLE AND BREAKS EASILY, AND IS WATER SOLUBLE, INSIDE YOUR LITERAL ACTUAL VAGINA??????????
I try to reassure myself with the fact that these things are probably not actually selenite, because making a dildo out of such a soft mineral in the first place would be very difficult. Having seen fluorite before, I feel pretty certain that the fluorite yoni eggs are probably actually just glass.
I google fluorite.
Okay.
Further exploring online shows me that fluorite is soluble in various strong acids.
Some guys on a forum in 2004 have strong contradictory opinions on this.
(I google the pH of the vagina.)
I don’t understand how pH works. I give up on the solubility question and google the toxicity of fluorite:
I now know at least one orifice fluorite does not go inside.
Science.
No, dear followers, my journey did not end here.
I have opened Pandora’s box, except Pandora’s box is filled with minerals God did not intend to be anywhere near the vagina carved into the shape of dildos. Etsy is advertising me sex toys I wish I could forget.
And vaginal steam herbs.
It seems that there is potentially a correlation between wanting to steam your vagina and wanting to put rocks in it. I know, groundbreaking discovery.
Okay, so we’re talking therapy substitute therapy substitute.
(I begin to think about how desperately we need universal health care. Maybe I just need someone, something, to blame.)
At this point, I realize that I haven’t done any googling on whether dildos made of rocks are a good idea at all. So, very tentatively, as if typing it more slowly will make it any less observed by the FBI, I google whether quartz should be used…internally.
First result that pops up:
That’s, uh. That’s reassuring.
I decide I’m incapable of unpacking this particular suitcase.
There are, of course, a small handful of articles debating the safety of rose quartz sex toys. But I’m getting the feeling that this is not a normal question to have in the first place. I close the tab with little relief.
Etsy is still enthusiastically recommending me things that hurt me psychologically.
…pleasure chalk?
How can I describe the fear that this image struck in me, reader?
Pleasure Chalk? What could that be?
Is knowing worse, or is not knowing? I scarcely have a choice:
I check in with my emotions.
Is this relief? Am I relieved that they are eating the dirt instead of fucking it? One review complains about the taste. I don’t know what they expected.
I try in vain to struggle against the tide, to return to the relatively normal side of Etsy. I begin to resent, no, hate, these deceptively aesthetically pleasing hippie shops eagerly spreading medical misinformation and things as yet unknown.
This, unlike the other “crystals” I have shown, appears to show naturally grown crystals. They are, of course, quartz crystals, and $45 comes off as extremely overpriced. I have a quartz crystal I got for a dollar at an Eastern Kentucky rock festival, about the size and quality of the ones in the photo.
Quartz is the most common mineral in the Earth’s crust. But at least this is regular levels of annoying.
Then I see this:
Well, I see the photo and the price, and I think, that looks like a regular quartz crystal. There’s no way a regular quartz crystal is $1,347.
I read the description:
I am crying. I don’t want to google any of this. I am beyond googling. I no longer desire knowledge.
THATS A QUARTZ CRYSTAL. MOTHERFUCKER THAT’S QUARTZ. SIO2, MOST COMMON MINERAL IN THE EARTH’S CRUST. ITS FUCKING QUARTZ IM—
I click on a malachite.
The malachite promises to protect me from emails. And at this, darkest hour, I want to be protected.
I have been broken. I have been lured to my demise.
Big Brother: loved.
Geology lab I’m supposed to be doing: incomplete.
God: unmerciful.
in regards to the edible clay, iirc I think that'w actually a thing? saw a video about it at some point but it was long enough ago that I can’t remember very well. something about the mineral content or something being used in some places to act as a supplement, obviously etsy is kinda sus for sourcing it but the concept i’m pretty sure is like a thing that some cultures do
The basic concept makes sense, I guess. Dirt has minerals in it, and when you have a dangerous deficiency and can’t get supplements in little pills, you’ve gotta do something, and sometimes the “something” your body comes up with is “crave dirt.”
The big problem with buying “edible clay” on Etsy is that this stuff is totally unregulated. (Most ‘alternative medicine’ is.) At the very least, you may or may not adequately address the dangerous nutritional deficiency you could likely have by eating random clay from Etsy. In a world where we do have supplements in little pills, there is no reason to just eat clay and hope it works. There’s no way of verifying what mineral content the clay has.
There’s also the fact that you could poison yourself with contaminants, since, again, this stuff is unregulated. I googled byproducts of kaolinite mining and quickly found results suggesting that it can absorb hazardous metals during the mining process and also that kaolinite deposits in Nigeria are also rich in radioactive thorium. In general, though, mining stuff out of the ground results in a lot of hazardous waste material.
Of course, the kaolinite pictured in the screenshot may indeed not be industrially mined kaolinite and may in fact instead be dried-up clay purchased at Hobby Lobby.
My search history is really something right now.
crystal eggs are the tide pods of dildos
discuss
Oh gods, do we have to dig up the “do not use the malachite stalactite as a dildo” thread again? Does anyone have it within reach?
I have it; I pinboarded it the last time it went around.
Everyone always says they wish that they had wings but I’m sure they’d be exhausting to use. So many captive birds don’t fly if they don’t have to, but choose to walk and climb around rather than go to the effort of flapping their wings. I suspect that, if humans had wings, most of us would consider flying a chore-like exercise and let those muscles atrophy.
serious flying, sure, but if we were capable of hovering with them I think most people would use them all the time - think about how often something is just too high to reach.
Hovering with wings sounds like a lot more effort than flying! Soaring around on thermals doesn’t require much wing movement at all. What is an albatross but a meaty hang-glider?
My friend’s parrot just climbs with his feet and beak when something’s out of reach. I guess a couple flaps of your wings would be fun to leap into the air a little, but it would cause so much air disturbance that anything I was trying to reach would probably just be blown off the shelf anyway.
I do not want wings. Wings are bones, muscles, and nerves. I do not enjoy the bones, muscles, and nerves I already have thanks
If they were ethereal magic wings, that would be one thing. But imagine having to take care of enormous human-proportioned wings and plumage… treating your feathers with Permethrin to control mites and flatflies…
And if you had leathery wings instead? Imagine moisturizing. Imagine sunscreen. Instead of backne, would we get wingne?
Okay, I’m happy to have learned this because I use DoorDash a lot.
This is true of basically all third-party delivery services!!
I worked for OrderUp and then for GrubHub for a while and they all do this.
You’re guaranteed $10/hr. If you make that in tips, they don’t give you anything else. If you don’t make that, they give you whatever gets you to $10. If you make more than that, you keep everything you make.
The thing is, they have no way of knowing if you tip us in cash. It just looks like we got no tip.
You essentially pay us double when you tip us with physical money.
This isn’t just DoorDash. This is technically true of most servers. The whole 2.13 and hour thing gets bumped up to minimum wage if the server doesn’t declare enough tips; if they do, they get paid just the 2.13, if they don’t, the restaurant has to pony up. Now, most restaurants, if you dont declare enough to meet the min, they’ll get REAL sus and start monitoring you. But if you tip in cash rather than card, the server doesn’t have to declare it, and can at very least pay less tax on it as a result.
Hey, let’s help out some scientists this summer! They developed an ap called Cicada Safari to help track the Brood X cicadas and if you’re going to be out and about in nature this summer we might as well help out the bug people.
Romantic summer things to do with your partners: take a walk in the woods and catalogue things that are screaming. It’s like a scavenger hunt, but loud.
Some guy in an avengers Tshirt I just met at a coffee shop: so who’s your favorite superhero?
Me too exhausted to explain there’s more than one Robin: Batman
Guy: oh! Did you watch the Joker movie? It was surprisingly good for a DC film haha
Me: yeah it was something
Guy: you know they really fucked up on Justice League, but I’ve got to say Wonder Woman was better than Captain Marvel. Like, we get it, “yay girl power.” That’s great but it was so over the top. It totally ostracized half of it’s audience.
Me: wow really
Guy: yeah. You know, you seem pretty chill. Maybe we could hang out sometime and watch some decent superhero movies? You know, Marvel movies haha
Me: i never asked, who’s your favorite hero?
Guy: Iron Man. Like Batman but richer and cooler haha
Me: you know, Batman’s rule? No killing?
Guy: yeah?
Me: i have no such rule. Lindsey, I found another one. My usual, please
Lindsey, the barista: *hands me my sword*
Guy: wow that’s a poor replica of the God Killer blade, it should have more- *beheaded*
Me: thank god that’s over
Lindsey: yeah. Hey want to watch Birds of Prey with me sometime?
Me: oh? You mean like as… a date?
Her: well yeah… is that okay?
Me: of course it’s okay! all this time, all these years, i never knew you felt that way
Her: i don’t keep a replica of Wonder Woman’s sword under the counter for just anyone
Me: i never thought about it that way
Her: *writes her number on the forehead of dead guy* text me ;)
This is gaining notes faster than I thought so either we all know the same annoying guy or this is just what y'all think romance is
it’s honestly so wild how so many westerners think “doujinshi” means porn when it just means indie. like, a doujin game just means an “indie game”, but for some reason westerners only associate the word with porn and thus react accordingly
imagine if someone said “oh i’m an indie game dev” and people just automatically went “you make PORN??”
OP left out the third tweet talking about asexuality haha
Bi asexual 😍😍😍😍😍😍🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰
Lesbian asexual????
GUYS I LITERALLY HAVE A POSTER OF HER ON MY WALL BECAUSE SHE WAS SUCH A HUGE PART OF MY GAY AWAKENING I FEEL SO VALIDATED RIGHT NOW
WE FEEL VALIDATED IN THIS HISTORY TONIGHT
Just wanted to share this for my ace lesbian followers! Marilyn Monroe was most probably one of us asexuals, even if she didn’t know about/use the terms we use to describe ourselves today. Reading these excerpts is almost the textbook experiences of aces before we find out community.
-FemaleWarrior™
I really like “it was like hearing all the time that stove polish was the greatest invention on earth.” Because yes, that’s exactly the sentiment of the disconnect.
A quick, sketchy tribute to Wesley’s sweaters from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I started watching the show for the first time last year and am now in the middle of the fourth season. Gimme that space fashion!
Sokka and Katara are PEAK sibling representation for many reasons, but one of those reasons is the fact that you literally cannot separate them as “the reasonable one” and “the dramatic hot mess”. Like true siblings, they have to take turns with the braincell.
Sokka’s getting whacked out on cactus juice and poor life choices? time for Katara to put on the Mom Friend Hat. Katara is impulsively stealing from pirates or starting another revolution? guess Sokka’s gotta pull out the Dad Voice™. You never know which one of them is gonna do something completely wild next, but you can be sure the other one will be there on the sidelines, armed with exasperation and vicious mockery in spades.
Your friendly reminder to not spend money on gacha.
if your response to this post is “too late for me” i want you to sit down and think very, very hard about your life. Because maybe you said it jokingly, and it IS a joke, then good for you, but if you actually do spend significant amounts of money for a jpeg you’re not even sure you’re going to get, you might have a gambling addiction and that is a serious problem not a joke or a meme.
I agree, but I want to add that I think the “just a jpeg” thing on posts calling out the predatory nature of gachas is getting in the way of reaching the audiences that might spend money on gachas. Especially as modern gachas are more than just pictures and stats. Like, look at games like Genshin impact which I believe is the biggest gacha at the moment; it’s a game that is as complex as many other non-gacha games on the market and the characters themselves provide both variations to gameplay and power advantages. Calling it “just a jpeg” is allows for rationalisations like “it’s okay, I’m getting more than just a picture for my money”.
Gachas are predatory for tons of reasons. They’re basically gambling, and oftentimes the average cost of of getting the character you want can reach hundreds of dollars. The thing you’re gambling for is ingame power and while you *might* be able to do most things without paying, the sense that “if I only had this character it would be so much easier” will grow stronger the more you progress. They often include guild systems with guild missions that give you a sense of obligation to perform to your guild members and if you make connections within the game you’re less likely to leave. Pvp and leaderboards also give you something to constantly want to aquire more power.
So more convincing arguments might adress things like “does this game really give you something you couldn’t get in other games for way less money?” “would you accept buying power being a thing if it wasn’t abstracted behind characters and gambling?”
Highlight the predatory nature of the game compared to other games and ask questions to gain and show an understanding of the gacha player’s view. Because every gacha player has heard the “it’s just a jpeg” argument. Every tcg player has heard the “its just a piece of cardboard” argument. But it isn’t a convincing argument because it is honestly kind of false, the thing is a game piece of a game that is sold piecemeal and would cost thousands of dollars to get every piece.
in average
are photos
are videos
are texts
are gifs
are audio