#*because man that was wild

[teapot-of-tyrahn]

"right, one more attempt, and then i think we're gonna have to call it the end of the session."

mumbo died on his last attempt. right before grian would have ended the session. right before grian could have saved him.

"but i just don't want to kill jimmy..."

he could have taken the shot then and there. he could have lived.

but the miner didn't want to kill the canary. he wanted the canary to live. and he died for it. because miners aren't meant to go into the coal mines alone.

[causticflower]

can someone check on this man

[grinchwrapsupreme]

shawn's deep trust of lassiter keeps catching me so off-guard like when he's held captive and lassie and henry both turn up he tries to yell "carlton" not "dad" and when he sees a guy with a gun come into the restaurant he goes straight for lassie and keeps trying to get his attention instead of literally any of the other dozens of cops in the room with them and when he's telling someone to call the police he tells them to ask for lassiter, not jules, not vick, lassiter. like he spends all his time provoking lassie but the second there's danger there's literally no one else he trusts more

[slashmagpie]

It’s quiet when the wild cards stop.

Pearl comes to a stop for the first time in hours, her body shaking, heart still pounding. She can feel the heavy thrum of blood in her veins. She stares out over spawn island and the server beyond, her breath misting in the cool evening air.

It hits her then, all at once. Impulse is gone. Her friend, her ally, the man she’d wanted to win. She’d given him everything, her resources, her totem, her time, her devotion…

And he’s gone.

The next breath in hurts, catching against something tight and sharp in her chest. It comes out shaking. She swallows hard against the lump in her throat.

Gem’s gone, too. If she’d lived just another thirty seconds she’d have survived the explosion of wild cards enough to see this quiet aftermath. Pearl could have been her friend, then, maybe, best friends again on red just like Gem had promised. If she hadn’t changed her mind again. Because Gem’s been confusing, all hot-and-cold, and Pearl’s been confused, so confused, and now she’ll never have clarity.

…They’ll never have that 1v1 either. 

The breath in burns. Her eyes burn too. The breath out catches at her vocal cords, not quite a whine, not quite a sob.

Impulse gone. Gem gone. BigB’s gone, has been gone for a while, taken by his snail, their friendly, (un)reliable, formerly nosy neighbour. Pearl remembers losing him before, gone too soon, time run out, and she’d wanted him to win, she’d wanted—

Scott’s dead. And isn’t that—isn’t that just—they’d made it to the end as a team. Just like Scott wanted. Because everybody had said they couldn’t, that they’d turn on each other like before, and he’d wanted to prove them wrong. And she still doesn’t know, really, how she feels about him. If this season has healed those wounds. If there's a part of her that will always feel bitter and sick and angry when she thinks about him. Even now, it’s still not gone. But they’d laughed, and they’d stuck by each other, and that had to mean something. It had meant something, however small.

She wraps her arms around herself, curls in around the burning ore in her chest. Her cheeks are wet. The in breath is just as ragged and broken as the out breath.

God, she feels pathetic. Completely and utterly pathetic. Alone and aching and everyone she’s fought with, fought for, is gone. Just like last time. Just like the time before. It hurts, and not in a good way, and she longs for the familiar and soothing sting of powdered snow. 

(A pain that is completely inaccessible to her in this world.) 

“Pearl!” 

She turns. Cleo’s standing on the bank, and she looks just as exhausted as Pearl feels. Pearl hurriedly straightens up, wipes at her eyes, sucks in a shaking, aching breath.

“Cleo!” 

Cleo doesn’t say anything as Pearl crosses the water towards her. She regards Pearl with sad eyes, soft eyes, and god, it doesn’t help with how pathetic Pearl feels. She draws in another painful breath, sharp in her throat, and Cleo opens her arms.

Pearl takes the invitation gladly, practically throwing herself at Cleo. Cleo is large and tall and broad and her arms are strong and warm around Pearl, or as warm as a zombie can get, at least. Pearl buries her face into the sweat-and-blood-soaked fabric of Cleo’s leotard and hiccups a sob around the glass shards of grief in her chest.

“Cleo, I’m so lost, I don’t know what to do anymore.”

Cleo hums, fingers running through Pearl’s tangled hair, and her voice catches in her throat, awkward and unsure before hardening. “I—If nothing else, we kill Joel.”

Killing Joel won’t make anything better. It’s barely a goal, nothing like help Impulse win, nothing ever so noble. (Nothing like get Scott back, nothing like protect BigB, nothing like get Bdubs—Joel—Scar to the end, it’s not—)

But it’s something. Something to latch onto, when it feels like the stillness of the world is somehow even more unstable than the chaos that had preceded it.

She swallows, pushes herself back from Cleo’s chest, looks up into Cleo’s dim green eyes. They’re rimmed with red and cushioned by deep purple bags, steely and uncertain and the last thing Pearl has to rely on.

“I agree with that. I like that, I like that thought. Okay. Y’know what, that’s fine.”

“That’s—that’s the law.”

“Alright. Fine. Let’s do that.”

And the words come out harsh, bitter, stinging her tongue like lemon juice and bile. Really, there’s nothing else to fight for, nothing else to win, not for Pearl. She’s not dead, but she’s already out of the game, all of her pieces stolen. There’s just Cleo, her old friend, her old enemy, her last remaining teammate. There’s just Cleo, and Pearl, and a half-dozen losses shattered between them.

So Pearl will sideline her grief, and take those shards, and she will do her best to kill with them. Just like everyone’s been goading her to do all season. Red in her clothes, in her eyes, in her blood, between her teeth. A stray dog that’s been ordered to attack. She doesn’t fight it anymore. There’s no point in pretending to be a person now.

After all, there’s nothing left to lose, and nothing left to win.

[dredgesnails]

everyone keeps going wow i can't believe mumbo is so suspicious of the two most loyal life series members but you also have to remember his life series experience so far has been grian threatening and then succeeding to kill him while the southlanders fall apart and then dying to lava while butlering for grian and falling off a cliff because he was upset about a tower building contest that grian had a hand in and then dying to the warden that grian and etho brought to the surface. so like. he's not had the best track record

[paintedcrows-caws]

Front row seat to Alex Hirsch's InMotion London Talk!! Aaaa!! (The high quality close up photos were taken by the wonderful @stupidlittlespirit! Who was sitting with me and had a far better camera, haha)

You can watch the full thing here, recorded by the brilliant Topaz Animation!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn_O7CMM67A&t=137s

[tea-cat-arts]

Shen Yuan getting transported into pidw isn't "the system punishing him for being a lazy internet hater," but instead representative of "step 1 of the creative process: getting so mad at something you decide to go write your own fucking book" in this essay I will

[kristoffs-lullaby]

Jealousy, Jealousy

[violetren]

The great thing about the White Collar OT3 is that at no point does the introduction of Neal into El and Peter's everyday lives never feels like a threat to Peter and El's marriage.

Like from the moment Neal shows up at their house in episode one he and El hit it off.

Within the first 5 episodes Neal and El have figured out they have similar knowledge and interest in the finer things, they're sharing looks over how Peter talks about and will react to things, El is telling Peter to trust in Neal a little, Neal is helping make sure they have a lovely anniversary, and El is calling Neal in to mediate/help prove her point in mini arguments to make Peter do stuff.

They also work really well because while Peter, El, and Neal might all be slightly different flavours and intensities of hyper competent adrenaline junkie weirdos, all three of them are intensely loyal to "their people" so the second El and Neal recognised that they both trust Peter as someone who will always try to do the right thing and respect them they were like "oh green flag."

[canisalbus]

uh hi hello!! first i wanted to say i am deeply in love with your art (god those shapes, these lines, texture, anatomy, expression, EVERYTHING) and your latest drawing just moved something in me i cant quite grasp it, been thinking about it for a couple days. sooo i felt inspired and made myself a smol little machete out of uh wild clay so i could kiss him on the forehead before going to sleep, i hope you're ok with that? (also sorry he's kinda wonky, me and acrylics hate each other haha)

.

[botanyshitposts]

ok INCREDIBLY old content originally meant for this blog but in 2018 when i was just a wee lad with a little spinner propeller hat and big rainbow lollipop i went to a carnivorous plant convention in california and met a bunch of people who breed/collect/study these guys. one person was this collector who was slowly working on leaving the hobby or at least no longer growing plants, and he had a bunch of carnivorous plant related files he was charging like 50 cents for or something, and so i came into possession of these, which are examples of the kind of paperwork you have to have done to legally ship/trade endangered species of both plants and animals. functionally very boring paperwork, but something i found like, incredibly fascinating. i blacked out the personal id of the person and then immediately forgot to ever upload them, lmao.

these plants were bred and raised in a greenhouse and sold abroad, not taken from the wild, but because the species are endangered and often protected in their native countries (most of these are nepenthes, asian pitcher plants, a huge family spread throughout oceania and southeast asia), there's a lot more documentation that needs to be done regardless of their origin, both on the end of the seller and on the end of the buyer.

the rabbit hole on carnivorous plant trade is deep and kind of wild. there's plenty of common, non-threatened, greenhouse-grown pitcher plants on the market that people buy all the time, even non-collectors, but there's a whole debate to be had on if it's morally okay to be collecting the more endangered/rare of these plants in the first place. the big argument for breeding is that breeding them in captivity means there's more supply that's not poached from the wild, meaning poachers have less of an incentive to take the risk of taking adult plants from their habitats; from what i've heard, sometimes countries will issue permits for breeders to collect some wild seeds just to create a non-wild breeding pool to drive down the price. predictably, however, you also get people who are very much willing to pay a lot of money to get as rare of a plant as possible.

anyone familiar with the allure valuable plants have had over people throughout history can imagine the rest, but here's an article about a guy who started buying poached plants to enrich his private nepenthes collection, who then got busted by a fish and wildlife service agent embedded in his carvirorous plant circle. the plants this guy was buying were being sold to him without any CITES paperwork or declarations like the ones above; it was literally just a guy in indonesia taking rare plants from the woods around where he lived, selling them over facebook marketplace and ebay, and mailing them overseas as an undeclared 'gift' to get around customs. frighteningly small steps to take on all sides, to be honest.

(also, fun fact: another example of carnivorous plants that get poached are wild venus fly traps, which are only native to north and south carolina in the US. from what i understand it's a mix of people who genuinely did not know it's a native species and people who really are just going out into the woods and digging up plants to sell online. sometimes poaching is closer to home than you'd think!)

anyway. wild and interesting times in the land of plants recovered from a hard drive lmao

[bre4yd]

BAM!

[goatpaste]

I think Charming Man should be put into a Highlights Hidden Image page for his enrichment

[Commission Prices][Etsy][Buy me a Kofi]

[blue-mood-blue]

I have been thinking about the blackening (as one does)…

…and it’s so interesting to me, the penalty Shen Qingqiu is faced with should he not decide to yeet his disciple into hell.

Account termination. Instant death. Sent directly home to his already-long-dead body, and that’s it for the villain of the piece who outright refuses his villainy. The protagonist needs a blackening for the story to continue, and Shen Qingqiu is going to provide it or get written out of the narrative. Either way, Luo Binghe is going to lose him. Either way, this is a turning point.

I wouldn’t claim that this is the intent of the penalty, but it fascinates me that the System has, potentially, backed the plotline into a corner - because Binghe still stands to be blackened even if Shen Qingqiu took the other choice.

Think about what that would look like, to him. He’s at the Immortal Alliance Conference, and everything is going wrong. He’s been outed as a demon, and not just a demon - the top tier of demon, as bad as it gets from the perspective of a righteous cultivator. His beloved teacher, the person who has been kindest to him and opened his home and heart to him, is standing there with his sword in hand, deciding what he’s going to do about what must look, to him, like a horrific betrayal. Binghe is apologizing. Binghe is begging for his life.

Shen Qingqiu hears him. Maybe it shows on his face, or in his voice, that he already knew; maybe there’s no hint at all, but Shen Qingqiu is suddenly talking quickly with an abrupt sense of urgency that Luo Binghe is having a hard time keeping up with. Telling him he’ll be wonderful - telling him he’s the best. Telling him the world will be his, with emotions cracking through that aloof mask that Binghe has never seen on Shizun’s face before, and it’s terrifying for reasons that Binghe cannot identify.

(He will, later. When he has time to think, he’ll realize it sounded like a goodbye.)

And then Shen Qingqiu is bleeding. And then Shen Qingqiu is on the ground. And then Shen Qingqiu is dead. There’s no countdown for Binghe - there’s no System, there’s no warning, there’s no answers.

Luo Binghe is a heavenly demon in the middle of a conference sabotaged by demons. Luo Binghe is alone. His fellow competing disciples are scattered, some dead or injured. The Peak Lord of Qing Jing Peak, the second in command of Cang Qiong Mountain Sect, maybe the only person he loved and who loved him back, is dead at his feet. No one will believe him if he says it isn’t his fault.

(He can’t believe it isn’t his fault.)

What choice does he have but to run? The last heavenly demon the cultivation world went up against has been sealed under a mountain for years, and one of the people responsible for that is probably looking for Shen Qingqiu already. They’ll be looking for him, too. There isn’t anywhere to hide; there isn’t any time to mourn.

There isn’t even enough time to ask why. Why again.

There is no closure waiting for him, because there is nothing to explain what happened. It just is.

It would be a different kind of blackening, certainly - less intense, probably, less of a warping, desperate thing. But how many times can one person have all the love and safety in their world torn out from under them before it starts to show? Before they just don’t allow things like love and safety to touch them, because that’s the better option?

Interesting to consider that, simply by offering the choices it did, the System rigged the story to guarantee that Luo Binghe would end up in hell (deliberate or not).

Interesting to consider that, even if Shen Qingqiu made what might have seemed like a kinder choice, there was every chance it wouldn’t have been.

[ender1821]

im a child of divorce

[nekrosmos]

"Nikolai had shattered Yegerov's friend's skull with the wrench propped up against the wall nearby. The blood had spattered up his bare torso, matting his chest hair, stained the side of his face. Shirtless, with a buzzcut he hadn't worn since his time in the Russian Air Force, he looked every part the madman he had become."

From this fic by @on-a-lucky-tide

As you can see, the image staid with me.

Alternate versions ( No blood, Nik with hair, lineart) under "keep reading" ⬇️​⬇️​⬇️​