All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another.
I really want a science fiction story where aliens come to invade earth and effortlessly wipe out humanity, only to be fought off by the wildlife.
They were expecting military resistance. They weren’t counting on bears.
Imagine coming to a hostile alien world and being attacked by a horde of creatures that can weigh up to 3 tons, run at 30 km/h (19 mph), and bite with a force of 8,100 newtons (1,800 lbf).
By the time you realise that they can traverse water, it’s too late. The surviving members of your unit manage to make it back by shedding their excess gear and running for their lives; the slower ones were crushed to death within minutes.
You later describe the creature to one of the humans you captured, wanting to know the name of the monstrosity that will haunt your nightmares for cycles to come.
The human smiles as it speaks a single word, slowly and distinctly, in its barbaric tongue.
“Hippopotamus.”
This is giving me the biggest, creepiest grin I might have ever grinned
Imagine being the next crew to go down to earth and thinking “it’s fine, we got this. We have the weapons and equipment necessary to deal with bears and *shudders* hippopotamuses. We’ll be fine.”
And at first you are, you’ve learned how to dodge. You’ve learned where their territories are. You know how to defend yourself.
But then one night you are sleeping in your shelter. You’re in a tree covered temperate part of earth. It seems benign. There are been no sightings of the dreaded “hippos” around. Not even any bears. But there is a slight rustle of the undergrowth. You try and ignore it telling yourself it is just the wind.
Then you hear the rustle again. closer this time.
You peer out into the darkness but see nothing amongst the trees.
The rustle again and now you realise you can smell something. It’s musky and slightly foul. It’s the smell of an omen, a warning. But what of? Where is this smell coming from.
You sit up, but it’s too late. The foul smelling creature is on you. You are hit with 17kg of coarse fur and vicious bites. Long dark claws tear in to you and you are pinned down white the striped creature tries to bite your throat.
It takes some doing but you manage to wrestle free. Blood drips from your wounds and already they itch with the sign of infection. The creature has a bloodied snout, rust rad, mingling with the black and white hairs. It lets out a terrifying growl from the back of its throat and looks to attack again. It’s between you and your knife, so your only choice is to back away.
Eventually the creature gives up and snuffles off in to the undergrowth, down a hole near your shelter you hadn’t noticed before.
When you make it back to your base you once again consult the captive human.
“Badger.” they say, with a solemn nod.
One word: Moose
“Our vehicles are far superior to the local human models, in range, speed, armament, and any other metric you care to name! Nothing could possibly-”
BAMrumblerumblethumpcrash!!!
“That’s called a moose.”
“We should be free of the threat of the ‘moose’ here on our new floating accommodation”
*humans start sniggering*
“… they can swim, can’t they”
*humans start laughing louder*
….
*mid-winter*
‘I DON’T KNOW WHAT HAPPENED! K’T'SURKIK WENT OUTSIDE AND A MOUND OF SNOW ROSE UP AND ATE HIM’
“What is this ‘wolverine’ you speak of?”
Tell me the story of the unpleasantly surprised alien invaders and their captive human remnant, getting more smug the more the aliens fail at basic scouting…
I know we’re all talking the big smash-‘em-up type animals, but what about the little ones? Are aliens prepared for spiders? Mosquitoes? Fleas? Ticks? Even humans get sick or die from some of those, who knows what the fuck they’d do to an unprepared alien.
Nobody expects the mosquitoes
Radio: “We seem to have located a colony-based life form. Primary scans seem to indicate that their dwelling consists mainly of wax and a calorically high substance suitable for our consumption. Since food reserves are minimal due the nature of this mission, we’ve elected to attempt harvest. Requesting that alpha base interrogate the captives as to the nature of this find.”
there’s a lot of people pushing back against “write what you know” as advice for aspiring authors and i would like to speak up in its defence for a moment because i just finished reading a mystery book where the murder weapon was a vicious fighting dog, and in the scene where it was finally revealed we found out that a) the person who had stolen it and was using it to kill people it had been keeping it secret from the police by locking it in his car boot, b) it was an irish wolfhound, c) once freed, it attacked the hardboiled detective across the yard instead of the gormless idiot who had been repeatedly stuffing it in a car boot, and d) its way of attacking the detective in this very dramatic finale was via mighty swipes of its sharp claws, which slashed through his skin like knives
i don’t think this author has seen a dog in his life. i think he might have confused them with lions? write what you know: if you’re writing an animal, be fairly confident that you could point to one in a small child’s pop-up book
this single post is more useful to me then four years of art school
We did it in color study class on my college and it’s incredible the difference between using red/blue/yellow than cyan/magenta/yellow.
The purple was colored like shit, so as the greens. Than we tried the actuall primary colors and it FELT SO GOOD!
I JUST TESTED IT IN MY ART PROGRAM AND HOLY SHIT
IT WORKED REALLY WELL
On the left we have dissapoinment; on the right, love.
Then why do they teach us that RBY are primary colours in Pre-KG????
To mess with our heads….
Or because they think that cyan and magenta are too difficult for kids to learn? Lame either way
Reshare to save lives
Okay, no. No no no no no no no no NO.
Listen up you fucks because I’m not wasting thousands of dollars on an art degree to watch y’all fuck up basic color theory.
Red, yellow, and blue are the primary colors
If you’re using p i g m e n t.
Do you hear me? When you’re using traditional media, fucking actual goddamn paint, Bob Ross style, your primary colors are!
When you use paint, your primary colors are red yellow and blue and don’t forget it.
NOW THAT CHANGES COMPLETELY WHEN YOU GO FUCKING DIGITAL.
THE DIGITAL PRIMARY COLORS ARE RED BLUE AND GREEN IF AND ONLY IF YOUR WORK IS GOING TO STAY DIGITAL, ON THE SCREEN, AND NEVER LEAVE THE SCREEN, AND OF COURSE IF YOUR WORK IS GOING TO BE PRINTED. ON A PRINTER. WITH INK. THEN. AND O N L Y T H E N.
ARE YOUR PRIMARY COLORS.
CYAN.
MAGENTA.
AND YELLOW.
So say it with me folks!
Red yellow and blue, are the primary colors for traditional pigment that’s mostly used in paints and shit. You use red yellow and blue when you’re painting traditionally, Bob Ross style.
Red blue and green is light, which is what you’re painting with when you pick up your tablet and go digital.
CMYK is ink, and ink only. You could use cyan, magenta, and yellow as your primary colors in paint if you wanted to be a complete dick, but they’re not your primary colors unless your work is going to be printed using. i n k. The only time they could be considered the primary colors in a traditional medium is if you’re using ink.
Good day.
Also thatswhiskytoyou’s color mixing is bullshit because THIS:
Is my icon. I painted this using RED. GREEN. AND BLUE. AS MY PRIMARY COLORS and they turned out fine. Of course, I used the finger smudge tool first and then the color mixing tool and then the blur tool, but hey what do I know.
Clearly using the blur tool only doesn’t cut it.
“Oh but Leo!” You say. “You used cyan and magenta in that color wheel!”
Well bitch guess what.
this is the digital color wheel. I’d say I mimicked that pretty well, don’t you think?
Oh and one other thing, notice how Blue and Yellow are directly opposite each other on this color wheel? That’s because we’re dealing with light, and with light, yellow and blue are complimentary colors.
Which is why when you mix them, it looks like this:
Which is a pretty neutral gray tone: They cancel each other out on the rgb color wheel when you mix them together.
BUT WITH PIGMENT THE PLACEMENT IS DIFFERENT
If you’ll notice, yellow and violet are now opposite each other, meaning they’re complimentary colors and if you mix them, they’ll make a neutral gray.
But if you mix yellow and blue, same colors as before, YOU GET THIS:
Now keep in mind that the person in the video uses a darker blue, so they get a darker green, but the point is that it doesn’t make that neutral gray.
Now what happens when we mix yellow and violet paint?
Ah yes, you get a bunch of muted colors the more evenly you mix them.
What happens when you mix yellow light and purple light?
I see, I see.
OH AND ONE MORE THING.
They didn’t teach you about red blue green and cmyk in pre-k because when most of us were in pre-k digital art was still in its early stages and what fucking seven year old knows how to use a printer.
GUESS WHO’S NOT FUCKING DONE YET:
The reason the primary colors for light are so dramatically different from the primary colors for paint and ink is because your eye only receives combinations of red light, blue light, and green light. Our eyes do not have a sensor (cone cell) for yellow light. So when we paint with light, red green and blue are our primary colors. Because of our eyes.
Furthermore, paint primary colors are colors that cannot be created by mixing other colors together. For paint, they are red yellow and blue, because you cannot mix orange and green to get yellow. Mixing orange and purple paint does not make red. And mixing green and purple paint does not make blue.
Mixing blue and green paints will make cyan. Mixing red and blue paints will make magenta.
That’s why cyan and magenta aren’t primary paint colors.
However, you can’t mix yellow and blue ink and get cyan. You can’t mix red and blue ink to get magenta.
And that’s why cyan and magenta are the primary ink colors.
Brighter and stronger paints are created through tints and shades, through a thorough understanding of color theory and a few quality paint recipes. Not by bullshit posts on tumblr designed to mislead you.
I’m just dying while thinking about a hotel employee calmly Googling “How to fold a towel in the shape of an elephant,” and then going out to buy eye stickers.
I think these would guarantee return bookings. Loving the elephant.
I worked in a hotel for a year. Hotel staff LOVE silly requests because otherwise our job is just mundane. It gives the front desk a chance to do something creative.
my favourite day was when a customer requested a drawing of a dinosaur on his table. i had so much fun
singelisilverslippers asked: hey so i think tumblr maybe ate my ask or it went to you when you were in the middle of moving/conferencing, but i find myself kept awake at night by a pressing question: What (whom) did Jaylah eat all those years she was living in the wrecked spaceship by herself?
Her house tries its best to feed her, but the foodbox is missing a piece.
Sometimes after eating, with the ugly ache still in her belly, Jaylah will thumb through the foodbox settings, just to see what she could have eaten, on some other world, in some other time. The options light up in dull orange: taquitos. Caesar salad. Pizza of pepperoni.
“What is taquitos,” she asks her house, carefully, in its tongue. Her house tells her it is meat in rolled dough, fried in oil. It has been a long time since Jaylah has eaten dough. No nuts grow here, to grind to flour. No axeroot powder to leaven it, should she find some.
“Give me taquitos,” Jaylah says wistfully, and listens to the gears of her house whir and grind, trying to obey an order it is too damaged to fulfill.
“What is the meat,” she asks her house, when she tires of the sound of it trying and failing her.
The house tells her it comes from a cow.
“What is a cow,” Jaylah asks.
The house tells her it is an alien animal which lives on a world far away, bred for milk and slaughter. On her world, no beast lives for slaughter alone. The custom strikes her as barbaric.
The fist in Jaylah’s belly tightens, and for weeks she dreams of cows, their big eyes, their funny spots, their slow, fat bodies, designed for violence.
*
For a year, she survives on these things:
Whistling leaves, boiled down to soft coils in pale green water.
Salt sucked straight from mountain rocks.
She finds a strange artifact in the house, a box full of many thin leaves, covered in markings. The house says it is a book, but Jaylah knows books, and they are not these things to be held in the hand, to smell of dust and distantly of plants. She eats the pages of the book, one yellowed leaf at a time, and has the house tell her of its provenance: Around The World In Eighty Days, by Jules Verne. A story of an incredible voyage, to a primitive species.
There are fish in the river, when she dares go to the river. It is hard to make herself do it, though, and she is too rigid with fear to stay for long, so often her catches are small and scant, hardly worth the risk.
The yellow beetles, ground into paste. They are more palatable if she can wait and let them dry into powder, but often she is too hungry, and licks the yellow slick right off the pestle.
Thin-winged lizards, dumb enough to fly into her traps. They are mere mouthfuls the size of her first, full of bones, and stink of sulfur, but meat is meat. Jaylah plugs her nose to cook them, and tries not to breathe while eating. She spits the sucked-clean bones into a pile, and boils them the next day for broth.
A bee who falls from the sky, body and ship too badly damaged to fly home to Krall. She drags the bee two terrifying miles to her house, flinching at shadows, but no one comes to collect it. Under the shelter of her house’s cloak, she separates the meat from the metal, and tries to tell herself that the waste should go in the ground. But her belly hurts, and the meat is not soured, and there are only the beetles to eat that night.
*
There are other flesh-eaters Jaylah knows of, besides the men of Krall, who do not eat the meat of others but devour them whole, body and spirit both. She has had to avoid ending up in the cookpots of fellow survivors more than once. Jaylah is not like these people. Jaylah is smarter, stronger, better protected. She has not forgotten her father, her planet, herself. Yes, she is eating the meat of a dead man, wrapped in the leaf of a dead book to mimic the dough she does not have, but Jaylah did not kill this man to eat. It’s a distinction she feels is important.
She brings the rest of her meal to the captain’s seat, and puts her legs up on the arm of the chair. The meat is delicious, lean and good.
“Tell me again about cows, house,” she orders, rejuvenated despite herself, the animal pleasure of being fed making her dumb body glad. “Tell me what food can be had of cows.”
The house obediently recites the byproducts which should be available in its foodbox: butter, hamburger, steak, stew, half-and-half, cream, milkshake.
“I don’t know what is a milkshake,” Jaylah says, although she does–the house has explained before, that it is ice cream made soft, to be drunk through a straw. That ice cream is milk made cold, made sweet, and milk flows from a mother cow to her calf, a willing gift.
The house tells her about milkshakes again, and tells her to program 987 into the replicator should she wish one.
“You can’t give it to me,” Jaylah says, and takes a savage bite of her meat. “So no. I don’t wish one.”
The house sighs itself into perfect silence, until the only sound is Jaylah herself, chewing, swallowing.
“Play me some music, house,” she says hoarsely, and the house gives her beats and shouting.
*
Ten days after eating Krall’s man, Jaylah cannibalizes the fallen bee’s secondary systems–nothing that could help her fly, or reinforce the shields. Just the air temperature and the sound in the pod. She finds a little metal construct that lights up a connection in the back of her mind, although she has never seen it before.
The part slots perfectly into her house’s foodbox.
Her hands shake too badly to install the part that day. She ends up leaving the work undone for a full week, until the next time she finds a lizard in her trap. It isn’t yet dead, when she comes for it, only one wing broken, the wound reeking of sulfur. It mewls in pain when she reaches for it, and Jaylah finds herself crying wildly over the poor stupid lizard, crying harder than she did for her own father.
She can’t let it go–it would only end up food for someone else, unable to fly.
She splints the lizard’s wing–a reckless, foolish indulgence. She fixes the foodbox, and feeds the ill-tempered hissing thing little crumbs of taquitos, little saucers of milk.
*
When the lizard is healed, Jaylah grabs it up in her hands, and carries it to the roof of her house. It bites the pad of her thumb, drawing blood.
“Fuck you too, lizard,” Jaylah tells it, and throws the small thing into the sky. The lizard wavers briefly in the air, testing its wounded wing, and then lets out a joyful trill and soars over the cliff, leaving the protection of Jaylah’s house for the uncertain freedom of the dark.
Jaylah stands there looking over the cliff for a long time, sick with envy over the little lizard’s escape.
“I am leaving this place,” she swears to herself, and although she has eaten well for weeks, she feels a familiar twist her gut, the hollow ache of hunger.
While sailing in the Mediterranean sea, in 1962, the American aircraft carrier USS Independence (CV-62) flashed the Italian Amerigo Vespucci with light signal asking «Who are you?», the full rigged ship answered «Training ship Amerigo Vespucci, Italian Navy». The US ship replied «You are the most beautiful ship in the world».
Great, now I ship actual ships.
You are the most beautiful ship in the world.
Dear god, I’m in love with two ships in love. (Everything is wonderful and nothing hurts.)
I just want this to be true. I haven’t checked sources. Just too wonderful of an idea. @editorincreeps you can appreciate this love story.
The story is fantastic, I do not need it to be true.
piggybunny12 asked: Re: Erik--Thank you :) That was very helpful as someone not super familiar with the canon. It's so interesting how relevant the Charles vs. Erik poles can be. They should be the new angel and devil on my shoulders :P
Hey, I’m glad you liked it! I’ve basically been waiting to have an appropriate forum to ramble about the X-Men since always, it was a lot of fun to write. And of course Erik is just such a train wreck of a person, I love poking around in the moral and psychological implications of his situation. …I’m weird, just go with it.
if you ever try to befriend me and you expect to be in frequent contact with me i am so sorry. i do that with maybe two people and even then i often go days or weeks without saying anything before talking daily for a while.
the point is if we dont talk that doesnt mean i dont like u and think about u a lot im just terrible at maintaining close relationships
i came out of Beyond wanting to draw Ballerina Enterprise dancing the dying swan and i FINALLY got around to it i hope the next movie is a little gentler with my silver lady
;_____;
