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i am not sure if my words can match my thoughts, but a few days ago, i was walking on a rather big mountain with my girlfriend, cause we were on a trip. and nature, especially the presence of pine trees makes me shifty enough in the first case, but we also climbed up on a lookout point with a pretty building.

and my girlfriend is afraid of heights, so i reached the highest point by myself, and by just standing there and watching the mountains and feeling the strong winds and having the unfiltered sunshine fall over everything i am and what i have was. absolutely maddening, to say at least.

as grateful i was to be there at the moment, the amount of grief i felt suddenly. I was happy there, on the highest peak of the mountains, but i couldn't fly away.

i couldn't fly and i felt trapped and sad and amazed and happy and mesmerized and very lonely. for a brief moment, i was considering simply jumping off the fence and falling down a few hundred meters, but honestly, even that wouldn't have helped. so i finally joined my girlfriend downstairs to hold onto them while this storm of emotions passed, but then we spotted a big bird of prey flying not far from us. it was using the wind to glind through the sky and looked like it was observing stuff, making just the tiniest movements, and god i felt SO envious. that moment, i kinda had everything i could wish for, and also almost nothing.

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The Bird (falcon) mask mentioned in my last post :>

it was made from scratch with cardboard and hot glue, furred with faux fur felt, and some craft feathers !! for the dyed part, i used acrylic paint (beak, eyes) and pernament markers (to color the fur for more realistic effect.) also can't forget some accesories for pretty original effect (also TRINKETS-)

I got everything from my local craft store :)

I mostly use cheap stuff, so this post is also a reminder you don't need high quality materials to make a decent looking mask! it's all about having fun.

Should I make a tutorial? (for the cardboard base and how to start)

I have some experience in mask making, so I don't use pre-made cat bases anymore for example, i made the pattern by myself :3

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Long awaited Hera's mask tutorial (no cat base, low budget)

example of the masks I've made, here:

Author note: I have a 3 year experience, and I got used to making gear like this, so if you are trying masks for the first time, you might find some difficulties.

also, the whole thing Is REALLY "trust the process"... Anyway here we go!

You need: Cardboard, paper(optional), hot glue gun, felt/something to fur it/any material is okay if it works, foam (optional), basic tools like scizzors

1. Cardboard forming

You need a piece of cardboard that's kinda a little bigger shape than your face, and measure where the eyes should be, so you can see well.

you can make the mask symmetrical by bending it in half, but it's optional

the first picture down there shows the back of the mask, don't be scared to pull it in and out, I'd say, you need to form the mask shape with your fingers VERY GOOD.

it really depends on what species you wanna make, I'm making a snow leopard rn!

you can even cut it almost in half, and shape it to your liking

2. Texture

for this part, when you have your BaseOfTheBase ready, you need to make it more 3d, so it doesn't seem flat. small pieces are a key.

u can use various materials to recreate the real look, for example - foam that is easy to work with, and maybe more cardboard pieces layered on eachother. also you can use the pieces to glue the whole thing down together so it's sturdy.

I smooth it out with paper too, so the fleece/felt/fur sticks better to the mask and doesn't leave unnecessary bumps..

you use the bends like that to create a 3d effect, and expand the mask a little.

That's what I came up with! I added alot of paper pieces to smooth it down ^^

3. furring/felting, and the final touches

this part may be kinda tricky, so i reccomend you to watch various of felting tutorials on cat masks, cause this works basically the same!

I didint take any more photos rly, but here's the final product, and only felted one. (the nose is made out of hot glue)

I don't really want to elaborate on how to do the patterns, since you're the one who's customising the mask, but I like to use alcohol-based markers to make them! acrylic paint is also okay ^^

I hope I helped in some way !

If you have any questions, feel free to ask <3

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Y'all are gonna love what I got this week.

Load that sucker up with pancake batter and boom. Plate full of delicious treats.

So far, I've made plain, cinnamon, blueberry, and peanut butter treats just by adding ingredients to cheap box pancake batter, and they've all been delicious. Since they're so small, thin, and heated from all sides, they taste kinda like the thin, crispy edge of a waffle.

I'm not very dog-esque, so it doesn't actually do a lot for me from a non-human perspective, but it's gimmicky and fun, and I figured you domestic dogs and more dog-adjacent canines might get a kick out of it!

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🌫️⚾️dreamcore canines☁️🦴

being happy doesn't have to make sense to people🫧

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Being a dragon roughly the size of a great Dane laying in a warm home while someone lovingly strokes the scales above and beneath my wings would fix me.

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SilkWing Study!

Featuring the color palette of OC General Viceroy, Queen Monarch's brother in my Pantalan AU.

Details, explanation, and one more art below. Otherwise, next week are the HiveWings. See you then!!

Sorry for dropping off the face of the earth; school tried to kill me. I live!

Last time, I had called this series the 'dynamic bases', but looking back on some of them I would like to fix the anatomy and... generally everything, haha. The SilkWings I actually like all of the poses but I want to keep it as a study just for now.

It was a lot of fun to play with Joy's style and try to put the dragons in tribe-specific poses. Not all dragons in the tribes behave the same way, but it's a fun approximation. For example, for the SilkWings, I wanted the wings open as much as possible and from multiple angles. The pose at the top is a fun way to showcase both the wings and the silk - if the dragon is a flamesilk it could be shown there. I really like to make SilkWings interact with their silk like a cat's cradle game, it seems like a fun way they'd play and practice weaving.

Also, many people have their own interpretations of wingbuds, and this is mine. I'll do a whole anatomy study later but it's my headcanon that the dragonets hatch with the wings partially formed, just encased in scales to protect them as they finish growing. They would do this so they could hatch earlier (say half a hear-ish compared to other dragonets, who take the time to develop their wings in their eggs). Metamorphosis would then be the shedding phase where they drop the casing and release their fully-developed wings.

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I really think that the therian community needs more essays on former trends and general forms of conduct, because I've said it before and will continue to say it, but the way the community was structured in the mid to late 2010s when I was first awakened was fun and exciting and helped me really find the good in my identity, but also was extremely toxic, judgy, and detrimental to my overall journey.

In my first few years in the community, I was embraced into a corner of the internet that was all about animals and the ethical treatment of them and appreciating and worshipping nature as we all considered ourselves more a part of it than "others". I was also dragged by my tail into a corner of the internet that forced me to give up every single personal, little detail about my personal identity and how I felt about it and the step-by-step of how I got there just to be allowed to speak.

That community both sang the praises of wolf therians, put them on a pedestal, to the point that it felt like they were above all other 'types, while also simultaneously tearing down anyone who questioned wolves, especially certain coat colors, to the point that you had to defend a master's thesis in front of a panel of graymuzzles for anyone to allow you the label "wolf therian". From day one, you were conditioned to believe there was no fun and intimate community, no pack meets, no content for you, unless you were a gray wolf, but you had to be educated on par with the top experts in the world on both identity and the species to not be considered "another kid that likes wolves". If you were anything else, you were an outcast in a world of outcasts. You were just "trying to be unique". You never got edits, outfits, etc. without asking creator accounts for them yourself. The community's terminology was structured around wolves. Howls, packs, etc. You either had to accept that you were going to be outnumbered in any close-knit small group you joined, if you were even allowed and it wasn't "wolves only", or, you could make a group designed around 'types similar to yours, which would never be found by others like you, and would quickly only become a failed idea.

That community is what led to my complicated and painful feelings towards wolves. For the rest of my life, no matter what happens, I will always have doubt in my identity because of it all. I will either be a wolf who believes I'm one because of the community's influence, or I won't and will believe I'm not because I want to escape the stereotypes that come with being a wolf.

That community also was riddled with rigid, unspoken rules about what was and wasn't an acceptable therian identity. I never heard of systems during that time, never saw anyone identify solely psychologically, and no one identified only because they felt like that creature. Back then, you were a standard therian with a single 'type, maybe a second if you'd been researching and journaling every single day without fail for more than a year with statistics to back it up. You had a reason for your identity, but it couldn't just be that you imprinted on your pets as a child (that's not enough), or that it developed from trauma or autism (therianthropy isn't a mental illness), or that you simply feel that way (you're just a wolfaboo). You had to be a misplaced soul, someone with past lives, on rare occasions, you could be a permanent walk-in spirit (but definitely not in a plural way). Don't even get me started on the idea of polymorphs, conceptkin, etc.

I personally feel like a standard therian, but to this day, I still question the origin of my identity. So much of my identity as a red wolf hinged on it being endangered and from my area, because then I could be a misplaced soul due to there not being enough bodies for red wolves to be born into. When I first awakened, I thought my identity came from a past life, even though I personally don't believe I can ever find out what those were, if I even have any. Later on, when I realized being raised with dogs and always seeing and being compared to canines likely had something to do with it, and I considered it to have come from imprinting, I still felt as if I was required to find some spiritual side to it as well. I still struggle with this, to the point that I barely know what I believe in afterlife-wise anymore, and I certainly don't understand what led to my identity, if something even led to it at all.

Those kinds of things needs to be discussed more, because to an extent, I feel like it's still present, both in the same and different ways. The newly-awakened alterhumans of today, yesterday, and tomorrow, all deserve to have a truly accepting space to figure themselves out without pressure to conform to an unspoken standard of how one should identify. Tumblr is better about it than most sites, but ones like TikTok might set things back, if they haven't already, despite the attempts of well-meaning individuals who are trying to break through the algorithm and educate others. I just think more discussions need to be had and more perspectives and experiences need to be shared for the sake of awareness and making sure damaging practices don't continue forever.

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Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

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I think it's important to remember, as a rule of thumb, if you take advantage of a social service, it actually makes it easier for other people who need that service to access it. Most of the time, when these services get cut, it's because politicians will look at usage and say "see, no one is really using this thing, we can afford to trim the budget for food stamps by at least half". Whereas if you decide to step up and use these programs, even if you feel like you "don't really need it", at bare minimum it's another data point advocates can use to say "hey, look, people are using this thing, this is an important service we are providing, do not cut our funding".

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Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit

“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.

In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings �� even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.

…

When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.

Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.

The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)

All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.

Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.

But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”

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you arrived before mariah carey, that's terrifying

november 6th, its time for

christmas profile picture

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*pulling these sillies off and silently sticking them on you*

someone sticking a fun sticker to my shirt would probably fix me right now but alas i'm going to a literal college for a field trip today no fun sticker :(

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A friendly fox in Pripyat, Chernobyl exclusion zone