#;;WE HAVE HERE A BEAUTIFUL NAUTILUS - BEAUTIFUL COSMO ( me )

[moonatiic]

;;make CQ muses you cowards................

[yellowfoot-06]

Why you should read Cucumber Quest

      So it is currently 2 am in the morning and I decided to write an essay. I may put this in draft form and continue if I get too tired. This will probably be less me trying to convince you to read it and more me gushing about Cucumber Quest. This is also just me distracting myself from what is happening with it right now.  There will be no pictures but just me referencing pages of it because I am on the computer so it is hard for me to put in pictures compared to Mobile. More under the cut if you care for this and link if I was somehow able to convince you to read this underrated comic.

https://cucumber.gigidigi.com

Main Details

      This section is just a simple overview of the comic and I will elaborate more in the Character/Story section. The comic is about a little flat planet called Dreamside. The pancake planet is inhabited by bunny people and like, some pigs in one country/kingdom. An alien named Queen Cordelia has taken over the Donut kingdom and is trying to collect the Disaster stones to summon the Nightmare Knight, an ancient evil that used to destroy Dreamside 500,000 years ago (And the Dreamsiders somehow haven’t technologically advance in half a million years using the theming of two characters) Anyways, now it is up to Cucumber and his sister, Almond, along with two other characters to help defeat her and save dreamside! You should probably read Cucumber Quest and come back after reading the prologue and Chapter 0 (Also the beginning of chapter 1 for good measure) because there is some suspense there that is hard to not spoil when talking about the story and characters.

Art Work

        Anyways, here is an entire section about the artwork and designs alone because of how beautiful it is. The artwork is probably all you need to know before reading the comic. Page 804 is probably a good non-spoilery example of the artwork. You can also see the gradual improvement in the artwork if you compare the artwork from prologue to (currently the latest chapter) chapter 5. It makes sense to see the artwork progress because it is 9 years old (since I’m writing this) and it is still going on. In the printed version (which only goes to chapter 3 for now) You might notice that the artist/author, Gigi D.G., Redrew some of the pages. The printed version also has some exclusive stuff in it if you want.                                                                                                                         

        The character designs are another plus. Now they are very visually pleasing because of the colours used for them. They all have nice and soft colour schemes. Most of the characters also all are the same species say for the antagonists and some other characters. This kinda separates the villains from the protagonists (The antagonists also have different speech bubbles and some of them have this thing where the style slightly changes when they come on screen with the protagonists). The setting kinda makes everyone's designs unique yet fitting (There is literally a character that is just a giant black circle and she somehow fits). On the side note of unique character designs, even when the color schemes _and _outfits change on the characters change, you can still see that it is them based on the designs and personalities. Pages 346 and 349 are good examples of this yet slightly spoilery. Other good examples are basically the entirety of chapter 5.

Characters/ Story

       I mashed both the characters and story section into one because the characters are the ones moving the story along and it is kinda hard talking about one without talking about the other. Anyways, let’s talk about the protagonists, Almond, Cucumber, Sir Carrot, and Nautilus. You can also put the antagonists in the protagonists territory because of how well written they are.                           

       Cucumber is a great main protagonist because of his ideals. His character is slightly cliche, you know, the nerd preteen (At least I think he is that age range) has to now save the world and he doesn’t want to do it. Now there is no real “Oh, I don’t think he can do it” in there but he does have an idea of pacifying the antagonists and everyone thinks that is a silly Idea except for Nautilus. Now, Gigi puts a twist on the second part by making him slightly possessive of this idea. So much in fact that he kinda ignores the people around him. He tries to pacify the Nightmare Knight in chapter 3, it was working until Almond comes along and ruins it. Now, the Nightmare Knight scares them with a near-death experience. They talk about it now shook, and Cucumber now sees Almond crying and realizes that she was just trying to protect him. From the outside view, it seems like the antagonists are awful monsters, so it looks like Cucumber is needlessly endangering himself when the better answer would be to stab them all to death. I just love this twist and how he becomes more insensitive to others when trying to sympathetic to the antagonists. The end of chapter 5 is also a good part of Cucumber’s ark when he believes in an assumption and starting less to believe in his own cause.                                      

              Almond also has a great story ark in this comic. In the beginning, she is cocky and believes that saving the world is just gonna be a nice adventure like in the tv shows she watches. She is actually the main reason they are on the adventure, to begin with. Her stubbornness and cockiness starts to dilate the further she is on this adventure and when she sees the real danger that is happening. In chapter 4 this is brought up by Cucumber. She still has some of her beginning ark in her but now it seems like it is a mask that she puts on.        

           The other two protagonists are Princess Nautilus and Sir Carrot. Sir Carrot came into the story before Nautilus so I’ll talk about him first. Sir Carrot is just a simple knight that wanted to help two bakers out. He is not really interesting compared to the others. At the beginning of the story he was scared by everything but you can really see a reason begin to form in chapter 3 and onwards. He has a really interesting dynamic with the Nightmare Knight and with some other characters. The final protagonist in the group, and my personal favorite, is Princess Nautilus! She is probably the funniest and most comedic out of the three. Her comedic shenanigans make me laugh a whole lot. There are only two characters that make me happier when I see them. She hardly changes in the story, the only real changes that happen is that her comedy starts to dwindle as the story progressed. A big part of her ark is a little eel named Liquus. They have such a cute dynamic together that started to dwindle more after chapter 3.                                                                                               

       Now, time for the most interesting characters, the antagonists. The first villains we see are Queen Cordelia and Peridot (pronounced Peridoh). They have a nice and cute familial connection. Cordelia is stubborn and confident. She is a cat from an alien planet that came to conquer Dreamside with the help of the Nightmare Knight. When Cordelia summoned the Nightmare Knight, her confidence starts to break as she sees his power. She seems to be a powerful conqueror with confidence in her actions, so seeing her in fear is a slight surprise as summoning the Nightmare Knight in the first place was her idea. When she interacts with Peridot, she is calm and motherly, another thing that separates her from her average personality. The Nightmare Knight is also very intriguing because he is basically stuck in a place he can’t escape from as both sides are antagonizing him and he has this cycle but it can’t keep going on forever and with fears of what happened before and-                                             

         Great, now that we got all the other characters off the plate (except for the side characters) now we can talk about the best characters (in my opinion) the Disaster Masters! This is where the gushing really begins! They are the most interesting when you think about the logistics of each character and the cycle they have been. I can’t talk about every character since there are 8 and this section is already extremely lengthy. So I am speeding through each of these. Splashmaster: adorable but not really interesting. Ya Boi: great and the first example to show that everything is not completely what it seems. Mutemaster: probably the most forgettable and gets over shined by Ya Boi. Rosemaster: Oh ho ho! This is where the story starts to turn darker and she is a really good character, her chapter might be one of the best. Thebestmaster: Name says it all, he is the best and if you say otherwise I will personally stab you through the screen. Quakemaster: Same as Splashmaster, except replace adorable with menacing. Mistmaster: Terrifying and even more so if you think about what happened to him. Glitchmaster: You know about the circle I talked about earlier? Yeah, that's her. She is a lot more spooky with context.                            

         Woohoo! This is (hopefully) the last paragraph of the section! The side characters are where the comedy mainly lays on. These characters are very wide-ranged. You have characters such as psychopathic 10-year-old, realistic Rabbit, and a bunch of crabs. These characters are normally comedic and a great part of the story. Some characters are more important like Cosmo, the psychopathic 10-year-old. Other characters are just jerks jokes like Cucumber’s father. Even though some aren’t important, all of them are likable/enjoyable.

Final

     Finally! If you read the entirety of this, then uhh, you read it! Here is a link to  a Youtube video that is a lot shorter and more concise than this essay, and the link to the comic again: 

Video: https://youtu.be/4uiO9ZKj2HE

Comic: https://cucumber.gigidigi.com

[glamrockmonarch]

MiCO LTD - Brian May x Reader

A/N: I hope you enjoy this, I don't think it is too long. I didn't want to put too much info and confuse everyone... This is not exactly my first time writing more "imaginative" stuff, but it is certainly the first thing like this that I post over here. And I will be waiting for some feedback guys!

"Travelling through space and time has never been easier! Allow us to take you to the other side of the universe, the cosmos awaits! Visit our website www.mico.com to find out more about our payment programs."

The friendly high pitched voice of a woman on TV got everyone excited. The payment programs were too good to be true.

In fact, it was all a lie. We all forgot to read their name. MICO. It was so obvious and simple, it was right there on their business sheets, yet we were fooled.

You would have to be either too poor or too ignorant if you did not get yourself a seat on the Nautilus.

It was all fun and games. The world coming together to watch the ultimate show. To have the stars dance for us, in front of our eyes. Nobody could know, predict or tell how fucked we were.

Royally fucked. Some of the teens described it later, before they were pulled into the youth cells.

Their red overalls stained with dark patches over the knees, evidence of the long day they had at the fields. Like everyone, they wore white long sleeved shirts underneath, as a sign of rebellion some of them cut the sleeves to make them ¾ or even removed the sleeves entirely. These teens were often pulled aside and were seen again with brand new shirts and dilated pupils.

The young ones suffer the most, being 12 already counts as a teen for them. Some are only children still, forced to work all morning, attend school in the afternoons and go to the youth cells every night...but I digress.

Once you had your ticket you were told to pack nothing but your passport. If you had a ticket you were issued a new one. Mine was a metallic blue card with nothing but the words U.S.E on one side and a small golden chip shinning on the corner of the other side - women with university degrees got the same one.

Women without degrees were given golden ones. A platinum one meant that you were an elder. Pink and Violet ones were for the "sexually diverse" - as they call them in HIə. Men with or without university degrees got yellow ones. Children got green ones, all teenagers got red ones.

We failed to see the differences, too distracted by the novelty of a card with a chip as an official document. It contained everything that there was to know about us, beyond our addresses it contained information about our physical examinations prior to the trip, what we were beyond who we were... it was too late when we discovered it.

The ship, the large and beautiful Nautilus, was a piece of metal engineered to take all of us through the galaxy. All of my friends and their mother were going too. Half the world population took ships alike. The classes on the ship were oddly assigned, while women had the best rooms and seats in the viewing salon, men were put on different rooms at the bottom of the spaceship. The children had to stay in a special viewing salon where mechanic Nana's looked after them. Upon entering the ship we were given uniforms. Everyone's passport cards matched their pants and jumpers, we thought at first it meant something like the meal plan people were on, which was later debunked as we were separated from our friends and family.

That was the worst part. That moment when we realized this was a mistake, that we had no option but to do as we were told. When I look down at my hands I can almost see it still, my husband's llong fingers fiercely tangled with my own before the officers pulled us apart.

In many ways, I wish it had gone down a different way. Brian meant well when he got us into the whole thing. He wanted to take the chance, to see the very thing he spent so many years studying. I could see the childish wish spread on his face when we first talked about it. The great darkness of the universe unveiled at last. The large planets, the small moons, the dying stars, black holes and craters on alien earths. We fell for it. Worse, we dragged people along.

It was a nice trip all the way till the third month, regardless of us being apart for the evenings, we were still allowed to eat together and wander inside the ship in the company of whomever we wanted. It was then, when we were supposed to be heading back that we saw the real problem; we were never meant to come back to earth. The ship moved forward still. Had it not been for the airplane pilots in the crowd we would not have seen it happening. The ship was not bringing us back to earth. It took us here, or as they spell it on this planet: HIə.

HIə is a strange place. The city is made up of tubes and cabins. Some call it Earth 90214. We call it... Here. Because there is nowhere else to go.

We got separated from each other. All bluesies, goldens, and greenies went straight to the training camp. The rest were taken away. Apparently Pinks, Violettes and Reds got taken into the reduction chambers before joining us. Male Plats, elders, were put on psyche wards for evaluation while Female Plats were selected and discarded.

The new world awaited, we did not know it until it was too late to reject it. Rejection of the social order meant discarding, meaning you were put inside a tube and shot outside of the atmosphere. Here has breathable air, we could go outside from time to time, see the odd light of the sun on the rocks, but we were not allowed to talk among ourselves until the programme was over. There are plants and wild animals. We have seen them, but it doesn't feel like home when you are put in large rooms with 49 roommates all sleeping in bunk beds.

I don't know what has been of my friends, I fear to know. Are they dead? Have they been discarded? Will I be discarded?

This training...it is starting to look like brainwashing, we reply to the Great Question, we call it Master. Who does that?

We call this home. I know this place is not home. They have machines put chips in the nape of our necks. Will they read my thoughts? Program me like a cheap machine? Use me?

I don't know.

I wonder, as I roll the ring on my finger, and I look out the window in the large sleeping hall. Bunk beds around me, the jumper shining under the light of our night. It is winter in Here. Nights are longer, cold and wet. Sunlight shines the strangest shade of violet during the day, night is pitch black. The glass is starting to become foggy and I have to pull my sleeve over my palm to wipe it. Three moons stare back at me from their odd formation in the night sky.

"Are you thinking of him again?" A little voice to my left hisses.

Rolling on her side she sighs. The bags under her eyes tell the truth of our situation. She pulls her knees up to her chest under the fluffy covers of her bed.

"He must be thinking of you too," she assures me.

I shake my head. A frown forming on my face at the pain inside me.

"They will discard him," I voice my concern, "he is older. Stubborn. They cannot change him into their pet." I hiss.

Another capsule flies away up into the wide nothing and my stomach sinks. Every one of them could be him and I wouldn't know. I am so scared. What do we do? If he is gone, what am I holding on to?

Hope.

I hope he is alive. I hope he is well. I hope they haven't brainwashed him.

"He is famous on Earth. He is smart. They have no reason to throw him into space." She whispers, her voice soft and soothing.

I wipe my face of tears I didn't feel falling.

That is even worse: them using him.

My mouth feels dry, words are gone in my brain. The training has started to take its toll. I sit and stare at the reflection on the mirror and ignore her voice as I stand from the window sill and walk back to my bed, laying down with my eyes looking forward and my body going limp.

Hope is stupid, and resistance is futile.

[ntrending]

Octopuses are not aliens, but boy are they a bunch of beautiful weirdos

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/octopuses-are-not-aliens-but-boy-are-they-a-bunch-of-beautiful-weirdos/

Octopuses are not aliens, but boy are they a bunch of beautiful weirdos

We have to stop taking away Mother Nature’s achievements. Every time a creature is quirky or bizarre people say that it must be an alien, when the reality is that evolution is capable of creating some of the strangest, creepiest organisms you could ever fathom.

This includes octopuses, which for the record is the correct pluralization of octopus. (It can also be octopodes, since the word is Greek in origin, but never octopi.)

Octopuses seem to be particularly prone to alien theories. The most recent is thanks to a group of scientists—none of whom study zoology and many of whom don’t even study anything biological—wrote a paper in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology that claimed to show octopuses might come from space. In fact, they say that the entire Cambrian explosion (a period 541 million years ago when animal diversity rapidly expanded, producing early forms of many creatures alive today) originated with an influx of viruses from the cosmos. Thirty-three authors co-signed their names to this paper, including the man who originally proposed this highly controversial idea in the 1970s. They use an octopus as an example, noting that “The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus to the common Cuttlefish to Squid to the common Octopus are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form” and that therefore “it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant ‘future’ in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.”

E.J. Steele, a molecular immunologist at the C.Y. O’Connor ERADE Village Foundation, one of the co-authors, wrote that “From our perspective the evidence is now quite overwhelming” for their theory, and that they felt it merited a “complete rethink” of evolutionary processes. Steele thinks the claims presented in the paper have been “suppressed and ignored for many years” and adds that “I have great faith that other objective scientists confronted with the same array of data would behave like me and reach the same interpretation.”

The problem is that viruses and octopuses are both firmly terrestrial. A commentary, written by molecular geneticist Karin Moelling, printed alongside the article, notes that though the authors clearly believe their own theory, they’re “describing it as evidence-based, yet without any of the necessary evidence.” She concludes that “the main statement about viruses, microbes and even animals which came to us from space, cannot be taken seriously.”

William Gilly, a biologist specializing in cephalopods at the Hopkins Marine Station of Stanford University, told Popular Science that “To be truthful, this paper seems to be so badly written and full of misleading statements that I cannot believe that it passed peer-review in any respectable journal.” He also asked whether this was perhaps the April Fool’s issue of the journal, as that would be the easiest explanation. (We reached out to said journal and will update this article when they respond.) Another biologist, Ken Stedman, told Live Science that “Many of the claims in this paper are beyond speculative, and not even really looking at the literature.”

Caroline Albertin agrees. She’s a researcher at the Marine Biological Laboratory and says to find confirmation of octopuses’ earthly origins, one need “look no further than their DNA.” She explains that in fact, one of the papers cited in the new study “shows very clearly that octopuses share a lot of the same genes with other animals—molluscs like snails and clams, flies, and humans, indicating that they share common ancestors, and therefore are from the same planet as the rest of us.” The cephalopod fossil record may be limited, but Albertin notes that’s it’s hard to find fossils of soft-bodied creatures in general, which is why biologists look back at nautiluses and ammonites to trace evolutionary origins.

Back in 2016, yet another set of headlines proclaimed that octopus DNA came from space, which was wrong, but persisted because some researcher gave a reporter a juicy quote about octopuses being practically alien.

Here’s the thing: if octopuses are aliens, then so are milk-sweating echidnas, cartilaginous blobfish, and indestructible tardigrades. Which is to say, until the day we scoop up bacterial goop in the oceans of Europa, we can safely proclaim that 100 percent of the weirdest creatures we know about were created right here on Earth. “The fact that they are so cool and weird even though they have similar genes to other animals is what I am most fascinated by,” Albertin says. Her own work focuses on figuring out how genes crucial to other animals’ developments play a role in octopus bodies as well. “Obviously, that wouldn’t work if they had a celestial origin.”

So let’s celebrate how incredibly bizarre our planet has made octopuses instead of flinging the credit out into the larger cosmos.

Octopuses: not alien, but still pretty cool

For starters, octopuses have literal blue blood. There’s a common misunderstanding that human blood is blue inside your body when it’s deoxygenated, but that comes from the fact that your veins look blue through your skin. Deoxygenated blood is still very red because of the iron-based mechanism by which our bodies transport oxygen molecules. Octopuses said ‘no, thanks’ to iron blood, though, and swapped in a copper-based protein that binds oxygen instead. It’s more efficient than iron in the cold, low-oxygen environments that most octopuses live in. It sure does make them spookier, but they’re not alone. The ocellated icefish has clear blood and there are lizards that run green. Both are from Earth.

Octopuses’ brains are in their arms, which is admittedly pretty odd. Two-thirds of an octopus’ neurons reside in the long appendages that many mistakenly call “tentacles” (in modern zoology, a “tentacle” is relatively long and thin, with some kind of clubbed end). This decentralized way of thinking means that even severed arms can “think” for themselves, or at least respond to physical stimuli and try to escape whatever is trying to eat them, which is why people die from trying to swallow live octopus arms only to find that the arm is still fighting back (a reported six people die this way on average each year in South Korea, where the dish is popular).

But their peculiar approach to brains hasn’t stopped them from ranking among the most intelligent creatures that we know of. Octopuses regularly use tools, solve puzzles, and generally cause mayhem by sneaking in and out of their enclosures. They also sometimes accessorize by hopping inside old coconut shells and using them as little mobile homes, all while looking more stylish than most humans.

As they travel, they also taste everything that they walk on since their suckers are all sensory organs. You’d think that would motivate them to swim everywhere, but unfortunately one of their three hearts has to stop beating whenever they swim, which is quite tiring and means that many octopuses prefer to stroll. Their other two hearts provide blood to the gills, but that third heart circulates blood to the central organs. The main organs reside inside the octopus’ bulbous head (called a mantle), which contains no bones. The only truly hard part of an octopus is the beak, which is basically its mouth. This means that the critters can squeeze through almost any opening as long as it’s bigger than the schnoz. Everything else is negotiable.

But perhaps the weirdest thing about octopuses is that, unlike many of the other highly intelligent creatures populating our planet, they don’t live long. Some live just six months, others a few years, and most males die shortly after mating. The females last long enough to protect their clutch of eggs, during which time they slowly starve to death.

Sadly, the myth that octopuses are from space will probably outlive any octopuses alive today. But you can rise above the nonsense and appreciate them for what they truly are: some of the weirdest and most wonderful earthlings ever known.

Written By Sara Chodosh