#bog of the week

[landscapeexposurenetwork]

This week’s featured blog is @branchflowerphoto!

“Nature photographer from Australia”

Tumblr // Tumblr Art // Tumblr Reblogs

Photo Credit

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[abilai]

Hit wife???? NO

[roxiusagi]

Sangcheng week Day 2 - Joy & Celebration

Celebrating the joy of life. A normal day where both of them are simply alive, well and happy together 🪷

[b1asho]

Holy moly people liked the dragon posts here huh.

So heres some more of them, this time featuring the spectacular @bogcreacher 's dragons!!! Bog is one of my fav wof artists around, and though it was late this was going to be an artfight thing.

(Just a disclaimer that l do Not normally draw fandom stuff, this post and the other wof i just made are reposts from old deviantart ones i did and mostly for funsies. The httyd one is new art but also i just made it spontaneously because i watched and disliked the live action teaser) (I have dragon brainrot but a considerably more powerful and all consuming brainrot for my own project, so anything I post unrelated to it is by sheer chance)

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

atp phil’s like “ffs i wish i could hit you with a car then i wouldn’t have to be stuck with your annoying dramatic ass 🙄”

[arschbiene]

That night, Feliks learned Gilbert's violence towards his own men was growing habitual and his dreams were fraught with visions of the boy taking knife to his own throat. The next day, he bid Gilbert to take his knights and leave his kingdom and was stunned to be refused.

i like to think some humans can be really driven mad around the presence of a slow growing immortal child, so for teuton i think a few of his knights developed a sort of religion fueled schizophrenic paranoia about him, like just from exposure to him and his increasingly belligerent and wild behavior.

I think he grew harder to control as he grew older within the knights and the entire atmosphere was oppressive, abusive, and violent. I like to think teuton gets to the point where he can't handle the bullshit anymore and starts culling men left and right it's like a mutual descent to madness where he thinks he's the sane and righteous one, but he's just as sick as the men who are seeing him as a demonic entity (who we can probably argue are they really sick or are they just seeing things as they are lol).

I like the wedge being driven between him and feliks' bond as the Feliks sees the deterioration of Gilbert's mental health and morality, thinking you know someone when you absolutely do not. Betrayal, hatred, horror and deep pity entwined deeply in this situation.

[minty364]

DPXDC Prompt #94

Danny falls through a portal to the DC world from a natural portal that opened up while he was in mid fight with Skulker a fight that began at Vlads where the creep put a collar on Danny that kept him in ghost form, Vlad thought he’d force Danny to reveal his secret to his parents by taking away his human form. Looking around he’s in a dark city with dark smog colored skies. Unfortunately he’s stuck here as the portal closed leaving him trapped. He tried to find help but no one can see him in his ghost form. He starts tailing the vigilantes of this world and eventually follows one onto this space station through this tube (possessing inanimate objects sure comes in handy). He wasn’t expecting for the random British guy in a trench coat to see him.

[thatsbelievable]

[takataapui]

'the farmer and the bog body' by Riwhi Kenny (takataapui)

this is a two player game about a tender conversation between the titular characters. players trade 7 questions back and forth, with each question asked leading down a different branching conversational path.

played with nothing more than this pdf, and a willingness to dive into each other's answers, the two players of this game will create an evocative and rich story, drawing together the past, present, and future of each character.

download 'the farmer and the bog body' now here, for only $3USD.

(all proceeds from any of my games go towards my top surgery fund)

this game is published as part of KiwiRPG week, find out more about Kēmu Whakatau O Aotearoa | KiwiRPG here.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

Father- Father please feed us more laughingstock-

a lil Nibble for ya!

[novelmonger]

First Contact

Written for @inklings-challenge 2024. It feels very first draft-y to me, and didn't quite end up how I initially envisioned it, but here it is.

When the first lights were seen in the sky, some said it was the end of the world. Passages from Revelation and other religious texts were thrown around, talking of stars falling from the sky or the Four Horsemen coming to bring judgment.

Others said, with slightly less drama, that it must be some sort of cosmological phenomenon—perhaps dozens of meteors falling to Earth to usher in the next Ice Age.

Still others, with an air of smugness, said these lights proved they'd been right all along. The extraterrestrials were real after all, and now they'd come in their UFOs to subjugate all of Earth at last. They'd been called crazy when they talked of inexplicable lights and experiences of being beamed into flying saucers and probed, but now the little green men were back, and everyone who'd called them liars would see the truth. Oh yes, they would see.

And then of course there were those who pointed fingers at one country after another, blaming them for sending missiles and unauthorized aircraft across the borders of peaceful nations. Some ran for their bunkers, but those who continued to pay attention to the news quickly learned that the same thing was happening all around the world. None of the world's superpowers were capable of such a feat.

Dr. Shannon Campbell wasn't sure what to think. Ever since reading War of the Worlds in high school, the thought of first contact had fascinated her. If aliens really were out there, what would they be like? Would they be hostile like so many books and movies claimed? Or might there be a way to communicate with them?

And suddenly, it wasn't just an idle imagining or the raving of lunatics. The possibility that they were not alone in the universe started to look more and more likely. And then she got a call, and then a visit from some bigwig at NASA and a General Somebody-or-Other decked out in camouflage, and the next thing she knew, she'd packed a bag and was heading to an undisclosed location in the Midwest.

It turned out everyone was a little bit wrong, and a little bit right at the same time. In the middle of a cornfield, an extraterrestrial spaceship had landed. But it was more of a shiny silver sphere than a flying saucer, and it didn't quite seem to be the end of the world just yet. Not to mention that the beings that emerged were neither little green men, nor were they Tripods or bug people or anything else Dr. Campbell had ever imagined aliens to look like.

The aliens...stepped? Floated? Well, they emerged somehow from the side of their spaceship, which shimmered to let them through but immediately looked the same as it had before. Not like a door or a hatch opening. And the aliens themselves were pale creatures that somewhat resembled octopi, or maybe jellyfish. Their bodies hovered in the air, with long, thin tentacles dangling down to the earth.

But even as the NASA scientists and soldiers surrounding the spaceship looked on, the aliens' forms began to shift. They hunkered down closer to the ground, their many tentacles sticking together and morphing into thicker, smaller limbs. Soon, instead of dozens of tentacles, they only had four, and their bodies compressed into something more like a torso and a head.

They were mimicking the humans, Dr. Campbell suddenly realized. In mere minutes, they had assumed roughly humanoid shapes, with arms and legs and...well, it looked more like two clusters of tiny eyestalks rather than eyes, but they were basically in the right place on their faces. They had no ears or noses that she could see, and their hands looked like they were wearing mittens rather than being divided into ten fingers. And where their mouths should have been was a thin membrane that glowed slightly as it vibrated with the low humming sounds the aliens had been emitting the entire time.

One of the aliens began to glide forward, holding its too-long arms out to the sides. The humming intensified, all of the aliens joining in at different pitches and frequencies, like some kind of interstellar choir. Several soldiers raised their weapons, but Dr. Campbell hastily said, “Please, don't shoot! We should at least try to communicate with them first!”

The general glanced nervously between the slowly advancing alien and Dr. Campbell, then gave her a sort of shrug as if to say, “Suit yourself.” He motioned for his soldiers to lower their weapons, and everyone took a step back.

Dr. Campbell swallowed. Now that she stood facing the alien leader, presumably, she felt like she had during her first undergrad presentation: two inches tall, and faintly sick.

But then...was that just her imagination, or were those words, garbled in mouths without tongues? Words in English?

“Gogojohnnygo. Heusedtocarryhis. Guitarinagunnysack?”

“Wait...is that...'Johnny B. Goode'?”

High-pitched trills exploded from every alien, their mouth-membranes vibrating loudly as their long tentacle arms waved excitedly in the air. At least...she thought it was excitement. For all she knew, maybe they were about to attack.

Some of the surrounding soldiers seemed to think this, as they tensed and looked ready either to bolt or to start firing.

Maybe the alien leader realized this, because his trills descended sharply in pitch and volume, like he was shushing them. The others quieted down as well, until the humming started up again. This time it was a complicated rhythm, interweaving several melodies at once, with an interesting breathy quality to their voices that almost made them sound like musical instruments on an ancient phonograph.

And yet...the longer she listened to them, the more she realized it sounded familiar too. “That's, like...Bach or something, isn't it? They're humming Bach.”

But how on earth would they know Bach? Or 'Johnny B. Goode,' for that matter. The only reason Dr. Campbell knew it was because of Back to the Future. She pressed a couple fingers against her aching temples. Multiple PhDs in linguistics and anthropology hadn't prepared her for this.

While she was pondering, the aliens moved on from their Bach concerto and suddenly started barking like a dog. Then made the clop-clop-clopping sounds of a horse trotting along. Then something that almost sounded like the pattering of rain on a roof. Then, as one, they all emitted the exact same laugh.

A sudden suspicion. Dr. Campbell whipped out her phone and frantically looked something up on Wikipedia. Sure enough, it all clicked into place. With a gasp, Dr. Campbell straightened up and looked at the aliens looming over them. “It's Voyager! They're mimicking the recordings sent with Voyager!”

“What does that mean?” the general snapped, irritation masking his nervousness at not having a handle on what was going on.

Slowly, a smile spread across Dr. Campbell's face. “It means we have a basis for communication.”

~*~*~*~*~*~

By the end of six months, Dr. Campbell had managed it at last. She'd managed to hold an entire conversation with the aliens, and was reasonably certain both sides understood what was being said. It was the greatest achievement of her life...and she was just getting started.

Once it became clear that the aliens weren't going to immediately start shooting laser guns or levitating people into their spaceship and start probing them, the army seemed to relax a little. A temporary camp of trailers and tents had been set up in the cornfield with all the equipment Dr. Campbell needed to do her work, as well as a base of operations for the soldiers who created a perimeter around the cornfield to keep curious civilians from wandering through before they could fully ascertain the aliens' intentions.

It seemed the aliens were also in favor of caution. After that first day, when Dr. Campbell had pulled up a recording of the record that had been placed in Voyager and played it for the aliens, attempting to convey that they were trying to communicate, all the other spaceships that hovered in the air around the world had returned to orbit around Earth. They linked together in a chain, like Earth were wearing a pearl necklace, and just stayed there.

Presumably, communications were carried out between those ships and the one in the cornfield, that attempts were being made to speak with the humans. Maybe now that they were finally able to speak to each other and they could ascertain their intentions, the other ships would land again.

So far, they hadn't discussed anything of particular importance. Just things like names (the leader that Dr. Campbell talked to most often was called something like Brrringgnggniiiiib, but she called him Johnny), whether the aliens could breathe the air (it seemed they could, though they preferred the pressurized atmosphere of their spaceship), and what various objects in view were called. Both parties were curious about the other, but cautious of giving too much away. Just in case.

The aliens' language was highly tonal, like Mandarin but with a whole symphony of timbres and tones, some of which were far too high or low for human vocal cords. The real breakthrough had been when the team of technicians from around the world had cobbled together a soundboard with programmable pitches. Over the months, by working with the world's most skilled computer engineers, they'd been able to create an alien translator, where a human could type in what they wanted to say on a standard computer keyboard, and it would translate to a series of music-like tones that would play on a speaker for the alien. Then when the alien spoke in its language into a microphone, the machine would translate it into English on a little screen.

It was a slow, arduous process, but it worked. It only translated to English for now, but it would be a simple matter to add more human languages to the database, a project the technicians were already hard at work to complete. And though the translator was currently the size of a pipe organ and required a mass of extension cords and portable generators and solar panels just to run for a few minutes a day, Dr. Campbell had no doubt that eventually this machine would be reduced to a pocket-sized translator everyone carried with them. That is, if the aliens were going to stay.

And that was what today was all about.

Dr. Campbell stepped out of her trailer, breathing in the crisp air of the October morning and wrapping cold fingers around her mug of coffee. As always, the shiny dome of the alien ship rose against the sky, the constant backdrop of what her life had become. It looked somewhat foggy towards the bottom—frost, perhaps?

She took another sip of coffee, swirling the bitter liquid around her mouth as she wondered what Johnny would think of the taste. They hadn't yet discussed what the aliens ate—if they ate. They didn't exactly have mouths, after all. Though Birdcall, what she called the shortest of the alien crew, had once picked up a blade of grass and seemed to absorb it through the palm of the hand, before Hellohello had whistled shrilly, apparently admonishing Birdcall, who had immediately 'spit out' the grass, leaving it a little crumpled in the dirt. Like a mother scolding her child for putting something into her mouth that she'd picked up off the ground.

Draining the last of her coffee, Dr. Campbell stretched and set off across the cornfield to the tent where the translator resided. “Time to make history, I guess.”

Just like every day, Dr. Campbell met Johnny in the middle of the cornfield with a trill she personally thought sounded like a ringing telephone. It was a greeting, one of the alien words she was actually able to say herself. She held her arms out to the sides and wiggled them a little—it was like a hand wave. She'd finally stopped feeling stupid when she did it.

Johnny also held out his arms and wiggled them, though his looked much better because his 'arms' were really just tentacles stuck together in an approximation of human arms. “HeeLLLlllooooOOOoo, DoooktoooooRRRR,” he said in his sing-song voice. Johnny was much better at speaking English than she was at speaking his language.

Dr. Campbell thought of Johnny as 'he,' mostly because she'd started calling him Johnny, but she still wasn't sure if the aliens even had genders. The conversation they'd tried to have about that had left everyone more confused than when they'd started.

“Shall we begin?” she asked, gesturing towards the tent with the translator.

Johnny 'nodded,' which for him meant bobbing in a sort of full-body bow that made him look like one of those floppy dancing inflatable things outside of a car dealership. The aliens didn't nod as a way of indicating assent, but Johnny was always trying to mimic Dr. Campbell's mannerisms. It was kind of cute, in a way. If a tall, spindly alien with eyestalks and no mouth could be called cute.

Once she'd situated herself at the console of the translator, Dr. Campbell looked across at Johnny. He knelt or sat (it was hard to tell which when the limbs he folded beneath him had no joints and just sort of glommed into a squishy mass supporting his torso) on the ground a comfortable distance away. She'd offered him a chair several times before, but even once he finally understood what to do with it, he'd assured her that he was just as comfortable without one.

Taking a deep breath, Dr. Campbell put her fingers on the keyboard and looked across at Johnny, meeting his eyes—well, at least a few of his eyestalks, anyway. He liked to keep a 360-degree visual range at all times. Then she typed in the first, and perhaps most important, question:

Why did you come to Earth?

The almost musical sound of computerized tones echoed through the still morning air. Dr. Campbell was suddenly aware of many eyes on the two of them—the general, the two guards who were always stationed at this tent to keep anyone from tampering with the translator, the technicians and scientists standing by. They couldn't understand the aliens' language just from listening to it, but everyone knew this was an important day in history. The day they would finally get some answers.

Johnny's trills and chirps were very familiar to Dr. Campbell by now, and she could almost catch a few words here and there, but he spoke much too fast when they were at the translator. She had to wait for the words to trail across the screen.

“We hear voicings we know people being in the darkness. We must bring light.”

Light? Do you mean knowledge? Dr. Campbell's heart leapt. Maybe they would share the secret to faster-than-light travel.

Johnny bobbed in a half-bow. “Knowings. We asking you a questioning now Doctor.”

Dr. Campbell looked up at Johnny and nodded. A question for a question. Only fair.

Johnny leaned forward a little. It was almost impossible to make out expressions on his mushy alien face, but he seemed eager. “Are you knowing of your origin?”

“Origin?” Dr. Campbell muttered aloud as she read the words on the screen. She frowned up at Johnny for a moment, trying to understand what he was asking. Do you mean my parents? The people who gave birth to me? She didn't even know how the aliens reproduced, or whether Johnny would understand what she was talking about.

Johnny swayed his whole body from side to side, his version of shaking his head, while humming a single note that sounded kind of like a dial tone. Every single one of Johnny's many eyestalks zeroed in on her, catching her in an unblinking alien stare. Johnny's next words came like a song, so mesmerizing it was all she could do to glance down at the screen to see what he was saying.

“Origin is life beginning. Origin is light sun star root. Origin is making planets moons we Doctor Earth. Origin is making good peace life. We are of Origin and when Earth metal rock falling to our planet we are saying we must see. We must know. Does Earth is knowing Origin? Or is only darkness?”

Dr. Campbell's mind whirled. Suddenly, after months of extreme caution and dancing around revealing too much, now she wasn't sure what to do with this influx of information. She had a dozen new questions, and it took her a moment to decide what to ask first.

Is Origin your planet?

Johnny swayed a no again. “Origin is making our planet. Origin is making Earth. Origin is making us. Origin is making you. Origin is making cooOOOoorrnnnnffffIIIiiieeeeEEEEllLLLd,” he added, switching to English for that word, since the aliens apparently didn't have corn on their planet.

Slowly, a suspicion dawned on her. This 'Origin' was something that had made everything in the universe. It almost sounded like...a creation myth. Are you talking about a god?

Johnny's long limbs flipped into the air, and he let out an excited trill as he bobbed up and down. “We are not knowing you are knowing this word Doctor. Please saying this word in your voicings so we may be learning it.”

Dr. Campbell looked up at Johnny's eyes going haywire, at his 'arms' beginning to fray into many tentacles in his excitement. Slowly and clearly, she said, “God.”

Such a short word, but when Johnny repeated it several times in his musical voice, it sounded so beautiful. Like somehow, the little song made from the membrane of his 'mouth' vibrating was part of the very fabric of the universe. The music of the spheres.

After a few minutes of repeating the word God,interspersed with the trills and chitterings of his own language that Dr. Campbell couldn't fully understand because he wasn't speaking into the mic anymore, Johnny made an effort to calm himself down. “TTTtthhhhHHHaaaAAAAaaannnngnggnkk yoooOOOOOoooooouuuuUUUU, DoooktoooooRRRR,” he said carefully in English, before pulling the mic closer so he could speak more fluently in his own tongue. “We are very exciting Doctor because we are seeing now that God is showing to you in Earth also. God is holding universe in hands and we are family with Earth. We are thinking we must fly to Earth to show God leading the way but you are already following.”

“Whoa, whoa, hold up a second,” Dr. Campbell muttered. “I haven't even been to Sunday School since I was five.” But how to explain that to...an extraterrestrial missionary, apparently? Biting her lip, she eventually went with I'm not even sure I believe in God. There are lots of people on Earth who don't. Some people believe in different gods, or none at all.

Johnny hummed for a little after the translator's tones subsided. Not humming in words, just a faint sound of discomfort. Or thoughtfulness. Dr. Campbell wasn't sure. But he grew still, with none of the excited energy of a moment ago.

Finally, Johnny leaned towards the mic again and said, “We are saddening to be hearing this Doctor. But we are also gladdening because this means we are staying in Earth for longer. We are hoping you are letting us stay. We want to be learning more of Earth. We want to be talking more about God with you and other Doctor people.”

Funny. If it had been a Jehovah's Witness or somebody like that on her doorstep, asking if she had time to talk about their Lord and Savior, she would have shut the door in their faces. But this was a literal alien saying that he wanted to have conversations with her about God and who knew what else. So she found herself smiling and typing in response:

I would like that.

[landscapeexposurenetwork]

This week’s featured blog is @seagirl49!

“Nature photographer”

Tumblr // Instagram

Photo Credit

Apply to be featured Submit your Original Photos

[dwellsinthebog]

wip wednesday!

[secondbeatsongs]

had a dream that I was video chatting with some friends, but when I turned on my camera I looked like I'd just crawled out of a horror movie, and the only thing I could think to say was "sorry I look like a bog witch today, guys - it's the testosterone."

[theultimatekamehamehavoc]

Day 1: Non-Despair

Inspired by this!

Felt it'd be very cute to reference instead of just drawing the boys in their school uniforms!

[danandfuckingjonlmao]

me n who 🤪😈🔪🩸🥺😘🥰👹