#Random things are more fun.

[heatherly84]

One of my hobbies used to be browsing websites that sold exotic pets. One website I spent a shitton of time on had a name like animalsexotique.com and might be retrievable on the Wayback Machine, I dunno, I haven't tried in a while. But they had a selection of fucking LITERAL ZOO ANIMALS you could keep as pets. Like lemurs and kinkajous and wallabies. You could buy a wallaby joey for the relatively low price of $900.

See, this website was based on a gigantic ranch in Texas, and the laws in Texas- at least at that time, circa 2001- about what animals you could import and keep as pets were TERRIFYINGLY loose. (They haven't even been tightened up all that much; in Harris County, Texas, the rule for having a pet tiger is that you can't live within 1,000 feet of a daycare or school.)

So you know what? If you live in Texas and are a walrus believer, you're pretty fucking justified.

And if you're a fairy believer scoffing at walrus believers, you've clearly never fucking been to Texas.

[heatherly84]

Got a little bit stuck, and then a lot insecure, so not finished, but I am posting it here before I delete it in a pique of nervousness and am RUNNING AWAY NOW.

Even when it rained, they fought for the view of the sky in Durraska.

The eye of the temple was open wide to the heavens, which were gray more often than not, and sleeping beneath it was a good way to drown or freeze to death from the seemingly endless rain that poured in.

Of course, sleeping in the rocks and the darkness, away from the sky, was no great comfort either. Water dripped from the ceiling all around the eye. Veins of it trickled between the stones of the walls. The eye was the only way in or out for the people who lived there- and the colonies of tiny rodents who had made Durraska their home longer than anyone- but water could find a way in anywhere. Even if you fled to the deep dark chamber below the iris, it still leaked in in drips and drabs.

Valmiki, who had once lived on Asephone before the Ginai banished him here, was the only one who never complained about the wet. This made him wildly unpopular with the rest of the Banished, and though most of them had such poor nutrition and hygiene that a full set of teeth was only to be found among the newest residents, Valmiki had the fewest whole teeth of any Banishedman in the whole of the temple.

Worbla was not as sympathetic as perhaps she could be to this. Hearing they lived in what would be unthinkable wealth on another world had a sound to it she and most of the others misliked.

"As if we should be grateful, eh, little friend?" she asked, grinning her broken-toothed grin at the plant growing crooked from the cracks in the wall.

The light couldn't reach the plant, but it didn't seem to need it. Nor did the lack of food- or what it might be a plant calls food- or fresh air seem to be doing it any harm.

The plant had arrived some spans before- Worbla thought it might even be years now, but there were no calendars in Durraska, and she could no more count the days and keep the count in her head than she could grow wings and sail out of the eye. But she could remember that the seed fell down the shaft and skittered across the floor to somewhere near her feet. She had paid no mind to it at the time, because pebbles often washed down from the surface into Durraska, and she had long since given up hope that anything useful would ever wind its way down here.

But not long after, there had been a blood rain- when the Ginai demanded a sacrifice of the Freedmen, and they would be hung upside down in four rows of three with their throats cut. The remaining Freedmen would be anointed with some of their blood, while the relentless rain would take care of baptizing the Banishedmen below.

When the bloody water poured down on them in great rushes like a flood, the seed had been carried away on it until it crashed into this spot in the wall. Worbla had watched with some interest as this strange white thing had become pinned against the mortar and bathed in blood, and seemed- peculiarly- like a living thing struggling to make sense of drowning.

The stranger thing was that the water attacking it became clearer and clearer of blood as it went, as though the seed were cleaning it up. Filtering it out. (Worbla hesitated to think drinking even now, but in consideration of what had happened since, what other word could there be?)

Worbla didn't remember exactly what compelled her to save it. She had little use for a pebble that could clean blood from water- hell, blood from water was the best protein some of them got half the time- but the damnedest thing was that she felt <i>sorry</i> for the thing. No face to it, no noise, but to her, it had just seemed alive. She had plucked it out of the bloody flood and pushed it into a crack in the mortar just above the water line, where it seemed safe enough. She cut her finger when she did, and the little pebble cleaned that up, too.

The little pebble, which turned out to be a seed, which had grown into a plant, was now the most priceless and protected item in all of Durraska.

[heatherly84]

The toy Audra bought Runar is not intended to be a vehicle for a young child to drive themselves around. It actually is an accessory for a series of remote-controlled robot toys. You use the remote to make the little robot drive the vehicle.

Audra saw it in a toy catalog and judged the robot to be roughly Runar-sized and then spent a while on SpaceTube determining if the robot actually drove the vehicle or if it was controlled by the remote and the robot just did little gestures to look like it was driving.

And then another while going through patents to see how the design worked when she didn't find the SpaceTube videos as elucidating as she'd hoped.

She learned at the end of the research rabbithole that they were originally designed to be practical vehicles for small species like Anzellans, but no bigger vehicle manufacturer saw it as profitable enough to justify the expense of manufacturing them. So the designer sold the patent to the toy company et voila, a Runar-sized vehicle available in stores for ☉159.99.

Zane is also getting a note about looking into the designer, because that feels like a person with tapable talents who probably isn't living their best life in the Realm.

[magnusbae]

To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:

A post in 2023:

A post in 2014:

A zoom out of the same post:

This is what a community looks like.

See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.

It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.

Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.

If you want more of something, reblog it.

[heatherly84]

@starfightervicki

[meamiki]

silly comic based on a time i struggled to read live on stream :thumbsup:

context clip compilation below ASDASDFASA

(cw for brief mention of hospitals/strokes)

[kj-beastboy]

very original Christmas gift! I'm sure he totally didn't expect that, Flug!

[heatherly84]

I have done all of these but Lawful Good and Chaotic Neutral.

True neutral crew. 🔖

[doctorsiren]

thinking about ???%…but…but with adult mob :(

[heatherly84]

Randomly ended up imagining Runar and Makana after she blows up a timeline where he married someone else, with him going, as mockingly as possible, "You hardly need every instance of him."

[seungs]

stray kids - sherlock cover (orig. shinee)

[heatherly84]

Chuck Tingle SHOULD be a playable character in this game.

furious that i am not a playable character in this game

[raffi-cat]

tried something new with my process and quite like how it turned out!

[muri-ne]

rivulet could make the one block vertical jump for the beef

[cherry-bomb-ships]

Ha-ha! I laugh at your pain! I make a sound of pleasure at your shortcomings! I do this because I am bad! I am evil! I am… Mojo Jojo!!!

[heatherly84]

This is my eternal struggle. I know it's Mehico, but I sound dumber and whiter than if I'd just said Mexico. :(

the desire to pronounce words as they are said in their source language for the sake of accuracy vs the desire to not sound like a complete tool