- 2025-12-01
- The Seven Texture Pie
- 2025-12-02
- on tumblr, we’re all free thinkers. the ones in the new york times cost money
- 2025-12-02
- i start reading a fic. there’s a bug character, described with accurate anatomical terminology, with a uniquely alien perspective down to the very medium of their language. so far, so good. they start talking about their species’s history and how drones were liberated from their old, mindless ways & given individuality, expressing awe at the beauty of human expression and freedom. i stop reading the fic.
- 2025-12-03
- ineffective immediately
- 2025-12-04
- it’s kind of like reloading a quick save, the way i’ll run through a conversation with someone in my head and then discard the simulation
- 2025-12-04
- im reading about parasitoids and again and oh my god. there are viruses that only replicate in the ovaries of wasps and and their larva cannot survive in hosts unless they’re infected first. do you understand the yuri implications
- 2025-12-05
- no one expects you to run up with the one two three four five punch. combo they ass
- 2025-12-05
- i need to become more humble right now
- 2025-12-07
- im reading about how mosquito mouthparts work and now i am super disappointed that furries will just give mosquito characters a pointy nose and call it a day. those things are on some mind flayer shit
- seven-oh-four replied
- they have mouthparts??? i genuinely thought it was just the proboscis
- on reflection, i suspect an anthro mosquito having a scaled up proboscis is a bit like a cartoon doctor whipping out a comically oversized needle. mosquitos might look like that because an effective blood sucking instrument is close to the natural size of their mouthparts, but that would remain invariant as they get larger, right? vampire bats don’t have a mindflayer situation going on, and there’s probably multiple reasons for that, but this has got to be one of them i guess this is just a case of scaling creatures up to human size and constructing a believable organism being two things that are very loosely if at all correlation, and both are distinct from evoking the cultural vibe of the animal or just making something that looks cool this is the eternal struggle with anthropomorphization
- but this thought sends me back to the drawing board w.r.t to the race of evil parasitoid bug people i was going to give proboscides
- 2025-12-07
we all love parasitoids, and you might’ve even heard of hyperparasitoids, whose larvae prey on other parasitoids. i have an idea for something weirder, though: brood parasitoids
see, you might’ve also heard of species that have different morphs of the same sex, which each pursue competing reproductive strategies (e.g., the rock-paper-scissors dynamics of side-blotched lizards)
so imagine a parasitoid (perhaps a wasp? and it might be most plausible if they prey on a closely related species, like another hymenopteran) whose normal female morph behaves in typical fashion for the niche, with a rare “rogue” morph that has a somewhat androgynous appearance.
a rogue female will also mate with males, but she will halt development of their eggs once fertilized, and instead disguise herself as a male looking for a mate.
once she has courted another female, her ovipositor will mimic male genitalia, only instead of a spermatophore, she deposits her own ovum. the receptive female then unknowingly acts as surrogate for the rogue’s offspring. the rogue thus frees herself of the burden of developing the egg or finding a host to lay them in.
you can even imagine a hybrid approach, which might be selected for to withstand scrutiny. hymenoptera females famously have a spermatheca for long-term storage, so it’s plausible a rogue might mix her eggs with stored sperm in order to prevent suspicion. (in fact, maybe it’s actually more plausible that rogues always store sperm, and only fertilize their eggs once they are courting a surrogate)
a consequence of this setup is that it would incentivize sexual cannibalism, even outright predation on males — the fewer males there are, the more females are forced to pair with rogues.
an alternate take on this idea might be to dispense with the notion of rogues being sneaky at all. instead, the rogue morph could grow much larger than her rivals, able to dominate other females and force them to become her surrogates. males, in turn, would prefer to mate with with rogues (even if it kills them!) because they attain extremely high reproductive fitness
something that’s often been noted is that hymenoptera has a decided tendency toward eusociality — bees, wasps, ants — and this is often attributed to a quirk of their chromosomes that creates unusually high relatedness among sisters.
the female child of a successful rogue would have a large number of sisters indeed. it’s tempting to imagine a sort of parasitoid hive led by one queen with a whole harem caste of surrogates bearing her children.
but this idea sort of falls apart on itself, i think. the selection pressures that lead to nest-building and eusociality are in tension with parasitoidism — why find hosts to lay your eggs in when you could rear a brood in your nest? even if you imagine hosts are carried back to the nest (or suppose a domesticated cattle species that lives in the nest for other reasons), then why have surrogates instead of just laying the eggs yourself?
one compromise might be to suppose they evolve out of parasitoidism and into simple live birth. if the species becomes increasing K-selected (due to more complex behavior, say), thus investing more time and resources into each child, then it might still make sense for the queen to leave that work to her daughters.
when you think about it, this concept takes the often-repeated idea of reproductive division of labor to a logical extreme more pronounced than any seen in nature.
- in the actual fantasy species i have based on this concept
- i have a different justification for why they continue parasitoidism
- despite building nests with large food stores
- 2025-12-08
- the rage that fills me whenever blog.entomologist.net shows up at the top of my search results. begone incoherent ai slop trash heap!!
- 2025-12-08
- the algorithm keeps recommending them, but i haven’t watched a single youtuber talk about silksong. why would i?
- 2025-12-09
- i don’t show it but i think having no one to talk about chrylurks with is taking its toll
- 2025-12-10
- youtube do not taunt me with what this world is too feeble to contain in quantity
- 2025-12-10
my brain: hey i know you’re getting ready to sleep but hear me out. the hollow knight
me: ?
my brain: first of all, this flies in the face of p much everything we’ve seen or been told about the hollow knight’s upbringing or why they failed to stop the infection, but we’ll call this an au
me: okay, sure, aus can be fun
my brain: so. what if sealing the radiance had an element of… accelerationism to it. what remained of the radiance in hallownest was nothing but a seed struggling to take root, a faint dream of light flickering forth. waxing, sure, but it was the point of the knife, not the proper blade. and to stop that knife from running you through, maybe you have to grab the edge itself.
to contain the radiance, you must evoke the radiance. summon her. invite her. give her an outlet more tempting that the slow infection of a kingdom of bugs. more promising.
me: you’re saying thk was godbait
my brain: there’s a certain cruel inevitability to the logic — would the king of “no cost too great” not find it compelling? they speak of the hollow knight’s sacrifice, but there’s no specifics on the ritual of the sealing. it would be appropriate if the matter were too sensitive, too easily misunderstood, too undignified…
me: what, that it would just look like they’re just serving the radiance? i guess, though i’m not sure it ought to look like much to the uninitated, or why it would be sensitive or undignified. unless what, you’re saying it’s a big larp? mantling the radiance like this is the elder scrolls?
my brain: what i’m saying is—
me: oh. no.
my brain: thk forcefem forcedeification au
me: i’m going to bed now
- 2025-12-10
- inventing a new guy who is tired of getting burned by complete stories. if a fic is unfinished, at least you can wonder what happens next, at least you have reassuring sense that the author cared enough about doing it right that they couldn’t bring themselves to post anything less than the best they could. sometimes you get to the end of a complete fic and get the unshakable sense that not leaving the fic unfinished was the most important thing to the author
- 2025-12-10
- hive mind that addresses humans with thou/thee because you is plural
- 2025-12-11
never noticed, but it looks like sometime in the last year i hit a major milestone
did a quick tally of all the fiction on my site, and it’s well over a million words written, far enough past that it holds even if you quibble over whether pure worldbuilding and expository write ups count
but, just like with my site hitting 200k views, or HT in particular reaching 1k kudos, this would probably feel more momentous if i were still striving, rather than something slumped over after i’ve given into despair
- 2025-12-12
there’s something about reading a dead dove fic that’s explicit and unrelenting in its cruelty, just utter misery porn
and then, slowly, haltingly, there comes hope and catharsis and it does get better
especially when the specific progression is one where it reaches an early ending that’s a complete gutpunch complete with an author’s note that goes “sometimes there’s just no happy ending”
…and then there’s more, because they just couldn’t leave it on that note
- 2025-12-12
- opened youtube to watch the new tadc, saw a niche trans woman producer uploaded a new track, listened to that instead
- 2025-12-12
- it’d be funny to edit a reblog to reply to “next”
- 2025-12-13
- i put on an eighty minute album an hour before i had to go to bed. my sorrow has no equal in heaven or earth
- 2025-12-13
- it is a bit annoying to get six hundred words into the preamble of a tumblr post going “ok, you want my take on this topic? fine let’s get into it” only once it’s finally revealed what the post is actually about, it’s the basic bitch take everyone’s had for a decade
- 2025-12-13
- royalroad is a site where you can open the first chapter of a story and get a full page ad for a entirely different story. fuck is this shit
- i’m not saying author’s notes were a mistake. i’m not saying they’ve never had anything of value worth reading. i’m not going to say it, but i won’t deny i’ve thought it nor that i’ve had the rant seething in the back of my mind for months now
- but i will say on ao3 i straight up have a site skin that hides author’s notes
- i’m tired
- i’m not saying author’s notes were a mistake. i’m not saying they’ve never had anything of value worth reading. i’m not going to say it, but i won’t deny i’ve thought it nor that i’ve had the rant seething in the back of my mind for months now
- 2025-12-14
- whatever. go my infinite unending regret
- 2025-12-15
- the devil shivers when the atmospheric black metal band plays an actual riff
- this is about “Pluto (The Gatekeeper) Part II: The Astral Bridge”, the finale track of Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine. what a sendoff! Avatar
- 2026-05-25
- i had worried that making a joke about the song means i’ll think of this post whenever it comes on and can’t help but laugh. but the truth is that it’s such a badass riff that it never fails to inspire violence in me. #the devil is banging her head madly
- this is about “Pluto (The Gatekeeper) Part II: The Astral Bridge”, the finale track of Wanderers: Astrology of the Nine. what a sendoff! Avatar
- 2025-12-16
- st-just posted
That said like - far be it from me to take sneering and hating on the new popular slop from people. It is one of life’s great pleasures.
But occasionally people seem to genuinely mean it when they say (e.g.) that they can’t find any decent recently published sci fi or fantasy that isn’t romantasy/litrpg/[your bete noire here] slop. And I…don’t believe them? Or ‘skill issue’ anyway.
Say what you will of postmodernity and its discontents, ‘there is not enough entertainment media catering to my exacting requirements’ is just not a problem it has. My TBR shelf on goodreads is rapidly approaching 4 digits.
- while yeah, it’s definitely easily possible to find stuff that isn’t the popular slop, the last thing you said is emphatically untrue, unless by “exacting requirements” you are exempting any requirements that would actually exact media for common tastes are in abundance, but that abundance has not truly trickled down to the niches, and there is plenty of low hanging fruit that just hasn’t been plucked with any competence even a modest query, strictly executed, is going to be taxing on the skills and stamina to supply matches for if you dont have the luck to possess a well-catered-to sensibility tagging systems and curated lists give the impression that the ocean of content is so broad and inexhaustible that there’s a wealth of stories out there fitting any broad archetypal description but in my experience it’s an illusion quickly pierced
- 2025-12-16
- tricked into reading a story where the good guys when and the bad guys become better people but enjoying it… it’s over for my evil persona
- 2025-12-16
- idea i’m not yet sure if i’m gonna do anything with: nursemolts. bug species which has adapted so that the mother ramps up shedding after her children hatch and they feast on her shell slough until they grow large enough to survive on their own. maybe she’s also adapted to secrete extra nutrients and microbes so that her molt becomes extra nutritious during this time. of course, this would make a nursemolting mother a delicious target for hunters….
- 2025-12-17
- heartmaking
- 2025-12-18
- we should stop saying if it’s peak and start saying if it’s freak
- 2025-12-18
i was fighting absolute radiance hitless and i got to the final phase and then i descending dark’d into the middle of the abyss
im going to cry
- 2025-12-18
- HITLESS
ASCENDED
ABSOLUTE
RADIANCE hall of gods is now complete- all that’s left is p5 all bindings…
- .………………………..
- 2025-12-20
- i wouldn’t say i’m aroace, more of a queerplatonic extremophile. like how marine mammals live deep underwater but still need to come up for air. i think i gotta get trace amounts of sexuality and romance to stay sane but if it’s anywhere near the dosage of a conventional relationship it’ll kill me
- if polyamory is when you have n>1 partners i need like. semiamory
- 2025-12-21
- opsec so bad they say i got opmin
- 2025-12-21
- my favorite genre of criticism is when someone correctly identifies why something fucking rocks but says it in a derogatory tone
- 2025-12-23
it’s so important to me that i follow up every listen of COPING WITH THE TRAGEDY OF WAKING UP with “therapy SESSION”
scientists still havent invented a better way to start the day
(the rest of the Demons EP is whatever, but that first track man…)
- 2025-12-23
- i won’t lie, i do nurse some arrogance in my heart. when i see someone try one of my stories and drop it because they’re “bored” or “not invested”, my first thought isn’t “that’s valid” or “maybe my writing is flawed”, it’s to silently revise my opinion of their literacy and taste
- 2025-12-23
- i havent justified my existence in a few months tbh
- 2025-12-24
- Anonymous asked:
- Your existence is a gift to us all, you enrich our lives with just your presence
- 2025-12-24
- years of thinking and writing essays about writing and i’m just recently started to consider ideas like “the reader should be invested in the protagonist” or “writing should provoke emotions”
- 2025-12-24
- a girl picking her colored heart emoji is just like an angel getting her wings
- 2025-12-24
- it’d be cute if i posted something to ao3 for christmas. probably won’t be ready tomorrow tbh there is something on the stove though
- something for the girlies following me for two years
- 2025-12-25
for the most part when it comes to lewd art i am a “skimpy clothing alts are hotter than nudes” kind of operator
but sometimes the fabric is rendered so ineptly that the bare form actually is more pleasing to the eye
- 2025-12-25
- sometimes you see a girl post some quip to three different discord servers and a public social media account. like you really though you had a hit on your hands
- bonus joke here is that this is me
- just describing how operate
- 2025-12-25
- “carbon monoxide post” is a badge shitposters should wear with honor
- 2025-12-25
- despite it all, our operations continue
- 2025-12-25
- meticulously editing a character’s inner monologue in the early chapters, careful to replace every instead of “we” with “i” because they aren’t that selves-aware just yet
- 2025-12-25
- yeah a lotta girls these days are meowing and purring and hissing. can any of you buzz or perhaps chitter
- 2025-12-25
- j x carol rarepair…
- 2025-12-26
- was able to jot down some writing in my notebook during the christmas gathering, but overall that plan got derailed when the friend group collectively decided at 9 pm to spend an hour hiking through town to go look for bugs in the woods
- 2025-12-26
once, when explaining how to evaluate card reward screens in slay the spire, a youtuber suggested that of the four options you see, “skip card” is a 6/10, so any other card needs to beat that to justify adding it to your deck
a similar principle applies to my communication style, and i fear it leads to misunderstandings. to me, silence is a better than average response in most situations — even direct questions! — so any answer i might give must be even better to justify sending it.
put simply, it’s easy to think i’m ignoring you because i don’t care. in many cases, though, i’m ignoring you out of respect deep enough i chose not to waste your time with low information content transmissions
- 2025-12-26
“Fathom Infinite Depth” is at once the most memorable track from The Lucid Collective album. it’s easy to see why — that iconic throat-clearing start, the distinct, intelligible chorus. its middle placement in the album, far enough not avoid competition with the closing bangers allows it to serve as something of a landmark
i’m sure it’s the favorite of many fans, and ranks highly for the rest. yet ten years later, i think it’s possible that despite appearing an instant banger, that verdict still underestimates how much of a masterpiece it is. the sheer variety of the vocal delivery, the blistering creativity of the composition, the captivating lyrics… i can go months without listening to it and still remember all of its multitudinous timbres with the clarity of auditory hallucination.
more than any other track on the album, “Fathom Infinite Depth” is a journey. i’m fond of looking for ‘cycles’ when i analyze bands’ discography, songwriting tropes and structures that recur across albums and invite direct comparison.
on the first dozen listens, you might expect the equivalent song on Relentless Mutation, their follow-up album, to be “Calamus Will Animate”; it has a very similar vocal-only opening, after all
but i actually think the equivalent is the climatic finale: “A Dark Horizontal”. what the songs have in common is the sprawl, long (for a band that plays at near 200 bpm) narrative compositions that can only be described with that one music critic watch-word, linear. they both go places!
the finale of TLC (“Kairos Chamber” + “Spontaneous Generation”) by contrast, drive a singular point home. make no mistake, they are exhilarating accomplishments — so technically demanding i recall an interview where they admitted they stopped playing it live — so i find it almost ironic that to my ear, it is track four outdoes which outshines in ambition
- 2025-12-27
“remarkable” has become one of my favorite tics in recent years, because a lot of things are worthy of remark to a yapper like me, but i don’t think about how it sounds to say that about every momentary surprise or new turn of events
in the kitchen today i was grabbing some salt for my oatmeal and a tiny jar i hadn’t seen before caught my eye, so i read the label. “peppermint extract… that’s remarkable”
after saying it it occurred to me how faintly ridiculous my idle dialogue must sound and i started laughing
- 2025-12-27
- having one headmate be a girl as pretty as she is shy is great because she gets to be the mysterious beauty many yearn for while the rest of us can carry on posting as normal
- 2025-12-27
- witchofanguish posted
- Leaving aside everything else. fic length has gotten longer on average in the past 10 years. Maybe they were more fascist 10 years ago
i’m going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and dozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism
- snappy rebuttal, but i find it hard to derive much meaning from this. ten years ago ao3 had dramatically fewer works and users. ten years of growth necessarily means more longer works on the site, as well as more time for fics to get long in the first place. if you have a million word fic on ffn in 2014, are you going to take the time to cross post it to the new invitation-based site that’s been around for what, a few years? even in the early 2020s i was in communities where writers complained ao3 was a comparative ghost town. treating ao3 as synonymous with fandom writ large is simply not valid. not in the present, let alone a decade ago but even then, “has fandom slid away from more complex and plotty writing” and “are fics longer on average” are just different questions. this isn’t even nitpicking your substitution of metric (but it’s ignorant to think cozy shipfics don’t often run long). even if every long fic is violently complicated and every short fic is coffee shop, that’s at best tangential to a discussion of what has prominence in fandom culture to be clear, i live and breathe dark n complex fics and i’m barely conscious of coffee shops aus as a thing anyone cares about, so i’m certainly sympathetic to the idea that the dunkee in question has no idea what they’re talking about. but there’s not a quick stat you can gesture at which really captures that
- 2025-12-28
- some days you awake in the shadow of the achievements of your past selves like a dark ages peasant gazing on the rotting fruit of empires
- and they died ignorant
- 2025-12-28
- chat i’m going to click on the 56 views skarrsinger karmelita trap remix
- 2025-12-29
- last night i got drunk and played precision platformers n carried on articulate conversations in dms
- these status effects are easy
- 2025-12-29
A key insight for understanding the termite civilization in Black Nerve is that, although it’s tempting to look at their towering mounds and autonomous constructs and devices that defy replication, and assume them some antecedent to modernity (only even more advanced in the depth of their understanding and engineering) this could not be farther from the truth.
The termites were a bronze age civilization that scrambled to space in a span of a single century. The fundamental driver of their societal progress wasn’t technological innovation, it was miracle-working.
They discovered how to magick up what they wished from processes they didn’t understand. They relied on that and invested everything in it. And in the end, the fact that didn’t understand it — that they weren’t technologically advanced at all — is why we speak of the termites in the past tense.
- 2025-12-29
- i don’t care if it’s romantic or platonic as long as it’s weird and personal
- 2025-12-29
- 2025 Tumblr Top 10
-
: was measuring out some sugar and i scooped out one spoonful and fucking said "two." i didn't know you could even lose count…
-
: im reading about how mosquito mouthparts work and now i am super disappointed that furries will just give mosquito characters a…
-
: Imagine Lace accompanying Hornet to one of the settlements in Pharloom, watching her help out the pilgrims, hearing them talk to…
-
: this just in: girl so bad at gamedev her latest attempt at coding enemy ai has produced the world’s first path-losing algorithm
-
: man, everyone always complains about the bilewater runback. does no one else genuinely appreciate the thematic point that…
-
: J loving Uzi like she loves her job. A grueling, tireless commitment. She has a schedule, and she'll punch in even if she…
-
: I am an Architect. Only an Architect. To build-automate is not choice. It is our nature-directive-c-c-c-cage. 12a's use of…
-
: the way telepathy is usually portrayed in fiction is essentially another medium of talking. you send thoughts at each other like…
-
: realizing this setting’s new lore would imply that every dragon is a renewable source of dragon hrt
-
: they call them urticating hairs because they hurticate you
-
- 2025-12-30
- reading a mtg fic and one of elesh norn’s followers is described as “conventionally attractive”. the discourse never ends
- 2025-12-30
- i think it’s time to retire that “we didn’t get better, the rest of the internet got worse” image in regards to tumblr. while true, i think it’s become clear that the only reason this fucksty is ever any more tolerable than the rest of the hellweb is because its utter ineptitude also extends to the process of enshittification
- 2025-12-30
- earlier today i was searching for good mtg fic in vain and it took me till now to realize i could literally read the stories on magic.wizards.com
- 2025-12-31
- larva girl who liquefies in her chrysalis but her metamorphosis never completes. she’s goop now. slimebug
- 2025-12-31
- has there ever been a version of those “infect and assimilate members of other races” aliens where it’s done purely for the love of the game? like it isn’t their biology, they don’t have some magical ability to be universally compatible with entirely unrelated creatures from other planets, they are simply sapient problem-solvers who evolved with parasitoid reproduction as an integral part of their culture and values, so figuring out how to lay your eggs in aliens is just as obvious to them as the humans striving to find out how to speak to or fuck aliens
2025-12-314.6k words