#*worms

[i-give-worms]

(+🪱)

o/ <- person waving

o7 <- person saluting

ol <- person raising hand

o1 <- person scratching head

\o> <- person stretching

[i-give-worms]

Look at this worm

[inbabylontheywept]

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

she then told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and go to heaven, and be able to talk to the worms face to face. that i'd be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident, driven only by excessive Love, and that she was positive they would forgive me because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

[troop52]

We are so back baby. Look at my blinkies.

I have some artwork I need to finish for work, so that takes priority, but I do have some ideas on what my first art back on this blog will be! I'll make a poll a little bit later to see what people are interested in. :^)

But in the meantime, meat n such!

Meat and such themed blinkies...

Find the rest of my profile decor here! Free to use without credit

[stevejgarza]

Wizard worm just emerged from a wizarding hole! Lucky you!!!✨🪱🪄🍀

[saewokhrisz]

39

[sonotcoolmax]

watercolor beanie babies, spring 2024

[i-give-worms]

(+🪱)

eat it

[goblinfables]

pick your poison

[i-give-worms]

(+🪱)

If you go to the end of the rainbow you'll find me there actually. It's me

[389]

A Girl’s Best Friend by Margot Quan Knight, 2002

[plaguedocboi]

May we have a wormse? Please?

ouppy

[treasuregamble]

dirt cups

1, 2, 3

[cheapsweets]

Cool bugs and worms (or wyrms, in some cases)!

Living in the British Isles I always tend to think of termites as something that medieval authors wouldn't have encountered, but I keep forgetting that there are about 10 species endemic to mainland Europe!

Bestiaryposting Results: Miscellaneous "Worms"

Here is what I intended to be our final Bestiarypost: all the animals from the "worms" section of the Aberdeen Bestiary.

I checked, there's not a big missing portion this time. "Worms" only get two pages.

I put quotation marks around "Worms" here because what medieval writers would call "worms" and what we would call "worms" are not the same. The medieval sense is somewhat preserved in the modern word "vermin", but in other ways it's closer to "bugs". Really, it's broader than either of those terms are for us, because it more or less means "any animals that are very very small."

Anyway, if you don't know what I'm talking about, answers can be found at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting.

If you want to see the entry people are working from, it's here:

And if you want to see the entry for the next (and, unless something goes awry, final) week of Bestiaryposting, it's here:

Now, art below the cut:

@silverhart-makes-art (link to post here) decided to make these into wyrms, with a "y", and I think they came out well. The Lenggalgak and Shmigwanog are probably the coolest-looking, but I also like the Phlerotger. Silverhart calls it a "horrible little creature" but I think it's charming how... shameless it looks about that. More details on all of these in the linked post.

@wendievergreen (link to post here) has drawn two of them in this very nicely stylized artwork here. I like the detail added by including the Lenggalgak's web and some plants for the Kholruntae to eat. I really like the inclusion of evocative bits from the entry as captions. (Also, thank you for including alt text.)

@cheapsweets (link to post here) has done the whole set here. I like the depiction of the Khrezaroth swelling in a pitcher, and the kind of charmingly goofy Phlerotger. Also they pretty clearly have the Logkashgae's number -- which is to be expected, given where this whole project started.

@coolest-capybara decided to go with the theme of "what medieval illustrators might draw when they have no idea what the animal is and decide to get weird with it." I absolutely love all of these, but I think the Khrezaroth is running away with this one. All of them really would fit into the margins of a suitably fancy medieval manuscript. (And I think they might also have clocked the Logkashgae, judging by the face.)

Now, the Aberdeen Bestiary. None of these get illustrations -- they're just brief little blurbs crammed into two pages, so there didn't seem to be any motivation to add pictures.

The section does, however, start with this rather nice inhabited initial:

(This is of course the first letter of "Uermis".)

The entry starts with this helpful introduction:

Here begins the account of worms The worm is a creature which generally springs from flesh, or wood or some other earthly material, but not as the result of intercourse, although occasionally they are hatched from eggs, like the scorpion. There are worms that live in earth or in water, in air, in flesh, in leaves or in wood, or in clothes.

Again they are trying to define "worm", but the fact of the matter is that it's mostly vibes-based. The author suggests that worms are anything formed through spontaneous generation, but then notes that some of them, like scorpions, lay eggs. And, of course, in the Miscellaneous Mammals entry, we learned that mice form through spontaneous generation, but they're not listed with the worms.

Anyway, here are their identities:

Lenggalgak

This is of course the spider, which is apparently called aranea on account of it living on air. Maybe the author didn't know what the web was actually for, and figured its tendency to catch insects was an accident.

Khrezaroth

The worm with many feet that rolls in a ball is the millipede. I haven't seen any swell in pitchers, but I'm sure they could if they wanted.

Phlerotger

The bloodsucker is the leech, naturally. "So called" because the Latin term given by the author is sanguissuga.

Logkashgae

In a bit of a full-circle moment, this is the scorpion. I've written a lot about these already, so we'll just move on.

Burlebroth

The worm that makes silk is the silkworm, surprising nobody, I'm sure. I can't explain the name thing this time, because the Latin name given is bombocis.

Kholruntae

Interestingly, this is the caterpillar. Odd that it is specified not to fly, when in fact it's one of the only ones on this list that does. Just... not until after it metamorphoses.

Shmigwanog

The wood worm is the termite, which makes sense.

Feabladtae

Finally, the worm that sticks to dogs' ears is the tick.

Misc.

There are also several that I intentionally left out this time, because there was even less of them to make into these little entries. Here's the rest for your perusal, however:

The worm found in clothes is called tinea because it gnaws at fabrics, and burrows into them until they are eaten away. For this reason, it is called pertinacious, pertinax, because it works away all the time at the same thing. Worms of the body are the emigramus, the stomach-worm, the ascaride, the coste, the louse, the flea, the lendex, the tarmus, the tick, the usia, the bug. The emigramus is a worm of the head. The stomach-worm, lumbricus, creeps into or lives in the loins, lumbus. Lice, pediculi, are worms of the body which get their name from their feet, pedes; people on whose bodies lice swarm are called lousy, pediculosi. Fleas, pulices, however, are so called because they live mainly on dust, pulvis. The tarmus is a worm found in pork fat... The usia is a worm found in pigs, so called because it burns, urere. For when it bites, the place burns so much that blisters form. The bug, cimex, gets its name from its resemblance to a plant which has the same stench; properly speaking, this worm originates in putrid meat.

There is also this helpful little conclusion:

To repeat, you find the moth in clothes, the caterpillar in vegetables, the termite in wood and the tarmus in pork fat. The worm does not crawl like a snake with visible steps or by the pressure of its scales, because it lacks the firm spine which you find in snakes; but, moving in a straight line, by expanding the contracted parts and contracting the expanded parts of its little body, it unfolds in motion and, impelled in this way, creeps forwards.

So there you have it. Worms.