#curious sootball

[officialgleamstar]

Hi! For the ask game - I'd love to see you break down Garnet and Lug ^_^ have a nice day!

ask game

hi sootball! :D yippee, another day of being weird about oxventure characters XD <3

Garnet

How I feel about this character

ough i absolutely ADORE garnet. my thoughts on her are pretty simple. i just like her. but they are all positive ehehehe shes so COOL, i love when a female character dresses in traditionally masculine clothes, especially in historical settings. and she's a lesbian. to me <3

All the people I ship romantically with this character

as with every other deadlands character XD just edie! deadlands, in my head, is truly a polycule with edie in the center

My non-romantic OTP for this character

SILAS <33333 qpr of all time

My unpopular opinion about this character

i dont know that i really have one? tbh i think garnet, as a whole, is very hard to characterize. i dont tend to love other people's depiction of her in fan works, but i also do not like my depiction of her lmaooo ill go back through her episodes and take some notes on characterization mayhaps

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

i would love for garnet to, in character, confirm that she was raised by a single dad! no real preference on what happened with her mom, just. single dad. girldad. i just think that would be neat :] (has this happened, actually. am i just forgetting something. head in hands. i need to rewatch deadlands before the new season comes out)

Lug

How I feel about this character

lug has a special place in my heart... for being the only mike PC who does not have a special place in my heart XD that being said, i think he's fantastic, even if he doesnt grab me the way that eggy and silas and barney do. i love mike playing a more serious character while still having that goofy edge, i LOVE the concept of a passive aggressive barbarian, and he's fun to draw <333

All the people I ship romantically with this character

i really like him with happen, and i really like him with willowfine :] i could be swayed with other ships as well im sure

My non-romantic OTP for this character

once again. willowfine LOL i think they could be besties

My unpopular opinion about this character

i dont think i particularly have one! i generally agree with what other people say about him. so instead, i will give a headcanon that i brainstormed with my dear spouses dora and hop - i think lug is pretty short for a firbolg, so he doesn't see himself as big as he is. cressida or happen make some joke or complaint about being short and he tries to join in and cressida gets so mad XD

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

speaking of lug being small for a firbolg - i wanna see other firbolgs!! i wanna see lug interact with another firbolg!!!!!!!! i think its so interesting that hes so isolated, and i want to know if thats common for firbolgs or if thats a lug specific deal

[dimorphodon-x]

Happy birthday :D

Thanks!

[sanctus-ingenium]

i answer your asks vol... 6?

This one made me actually consider how they balance the humours beyond just a simply "they scour it out". Because sometimes a holy beast gets 'sick' and it's not necessarily related to any sort of tissue growth, it's more often a mechanical fault and because the beast is considered to be alive, he is then therefore 'sick'. So how do we deal with this? An enginesmith will make the necessary repairs, but sometimes the sickness is related to environmental conditions. The four humours are arranged on a scale like this:

A mechanical fault associated with being too hot and dry could be something like a lack of lubrication on moving machine parts. So this would be considered the reason for a production of yellow bile (excess of yellow bile, btw, was what Pantera was diagnosed with on his last outing). Whether or not the bile is literal or more symbolic depends on the case. Anyway this was the reason Pantera is associated with fire (originally, when I was designing them all) and Leun, diametrically opposite, is associated with phlegm, water, acid, etc.

But anyway, the way to fix these imbalances in hot/cold/wet/dry is to simply reduce whichever one is excessive. In practice, keeping holy beasts maintained even when they're not out on a crusade is a full time job for an army of workers, where the atmospheric conditions need to be as neutral as possible. Too wet and you've got rust, too dry and the metal fatigues, to hot and it might warp and break, too cold and the joints won't fit properly, etc etc. Although the enginesmiths view this through a lens of The Four Humours, it's also just good practice to try to keep things balanced.

Btw while they do cure an excess of blood by bleeding the holy beast, they don't make leeches big enough :'(

-

There are illustrated representations of dragons that are pretty traditionally dragony (typically a winged serpent with many tails representing the stinging tendrils). These are added to drawings and art as a catch-all symbol for a conscious and targeted Evil. The laity, which is very devout, is unlikely to associate dragons with resistance - dragons cause a lot of damage too, and those stinging barbs will kill you just from the trauma of the impalement before the venom even has a chance to (unless you just get grazed, in which case.. the venom will paralyse you. then kill you)

So active rebellions/civil wars/wars of succession have occurred many times. The subjugated Midaean nation/territory (depending on who you ask) rallies around their beloved Saint Lycaon, a wolf. Flags and signs depicting a wolf devouring a crocodile/a lion/whatever holy beast currently tops the hierarchy of the church would be more likely. Rebellion itself is rarely black and white and as neat as picking a symbol the church hates. It is more likely people would pick a symbol that they love. Outside of Midea, the Mezian empire might not be at its peak but it also has not given its own citizens and laity a reason to take up arms against it.

at the start of the story, at least

-

awesome questions thank you @curious-sootball !

So the nerve cords inside the vertebrae are artificial, but they still perform the same physiological function as a real spinal column. They interface with a knight's dialogue. This produces an incredible amount of heat - this is why the spines are often exposed, even though that might be a point of vulnerability. The spinous processes in particular are very effective heat sinks.

But the tail? In most cases we don't need the tail, really. The spinal column ends at the base of the pelvis. The tail is cropped for most beasts on purpose - we don't need this thing dangling around and becoming entangled, and it has no machinery around it to act as replacement muscles so it couldn't move even if they wanted it to. Krokodilos's tail is the exception and it's just extremely heavy for not much pay off. That's a lot of additional engines we gotta maintain.

So the tail tends to be abandoned. The bones are kept of course but not mounted on the chassis where they're not needed. With no nerve cord running through them they don't run hot either so they won't disperse heat all that well.

Now for replacing bones... they don't. The bones that exist in the chassis are the bare minimum needed to perform the required functions - basic movement. They don't have ribs, they often don't have phalanges. A skull is there to complete the nerve cord - but all you need of that skull is the occipital bone. Nothing more.

If they break a leg, it might be repaired using screw and plate fixation. The bone may deign to knit together (enginesmiths swear that they don't allow tissue growth ever.. but sometimes you need some periosteum. Don't tell the bishops). But if it gets crushed? That's the holy beast done, scrap heap time. The majority of all holy beasts that have ever existed have already broken down and been decommissioned at the start of this story - we only have seven left (eight if you count krokodilos). Krokodilos is an unusual case because he is not dead, so they can't just hold a state funeral and add his heart engine block to the big hall of old hearts in the cathedral. He's sleeping.

But he's the exception. Take Saint Guinefort - dead as a doornail. He had a full funeral, his heart was put in the hall and his body was [redacted] like they do with all dead holy beasts. And then he was [redacted] and now our pal "Sir Victory" with the metal arm uses him as Nosewyse. Circle of life.

I think sidecar motorcycle is a pretty apt way of looking at him lmao. You don't wanna know how many people he's cooked.

-

Hey there! So I know I've mentioned they are similar to pterosaurs but they are not related to them at all. In fact they are cetaceans :) Later art I did of them plays up the mammal traits a bit more. Check out these nipples

However it is a fact that they are not closely related to modern cetaceans - as in, they did not evolve from modern whales and dolphins, but belong to a side branch that diverged relatively early, around the same time dragons were leaving the water for the skies. That art is quite old too, from before I kind of nailed it all down, so if I drew them now I would remove the more derived traits (i.e the single blowhole, the tail flukes, etc) and tidy it up a little. They diverged from the lineage that would become modern whales before the pelvic limbs were lost. I originally depict them having the crowbar-like claws on their feet to lever skin parasites off the dragon, but i think they are more likely to not use their feet much at all, and are more likely to use their single huge beak-like tooth to do the job instead. They cannot walk on flat surfaces.

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Only insects and, specifically, winged insects :) I know it would be really cool to have various other giant arthropods but milennia ago, when they crossed into Thera for the first time, insects were the only fliers. And there is no other way to get over the mountain range quickly enough for it not to kill you. The mountain range in which the endless city sits is completely and 100% devoid of life. A journey on foot for a tiny bug would be next to impossible - they are more likely to starve or simply turn around and go back to where the food is.

The winged insects, otoh, can cross the range in a day or less, if the breeze is flowing right. And they would find plants already there in Thera - also solely wind-dispersed species from the previous time the mountains arrived and linked the world with Earth. The insects didn't really come by choice, sometimes the wind just blows the wrong way, but they definitely got lucky.

There are wingless insects in Thera today but only because they lost that trait over time (like ants or larviform female beetles). They have managed to colonise every reasonable habitat, including the sea (though the sea is not very salty) and have developed into a lot of very strange forms which might be unrecognisable to us. But a lot of them just got bigger and smarter.

This time round, in the period of time the story is set (early 1900s on earth), the mountains appeared and new animals crossed over who were not insects. Birds have become invasive in Thera, happily taking advantage of the smaller insect species who are completely unprepared for this new threat. There are also some wind-dispersed spiders hanging out now.

EDIT: oh i forgor the parasites on the flying insects that first colonised thera... yes they would have mites and horsehair worms and things of that nature

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

req'd by @curious-sootball

actually you know what fair

text: The one food you're not supposed to eat is FISH! I said *nothing* about ASS!

[carpe-aurore]

Making little signatures based off of the vibe your blog theme gives me

@curious-sootball

[to-hagsmire-and-back]

wholeheartedly obsessed with this human Siv design from @curious-sootball , i got very inspired so... fanart

[jazzyishere]

I posted 10,518 times in 2022

That's 10,367 more posts than 2021!

163 posts created (2%)

10,355 posts reblogged (98%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@theminecraftbee

@curious-sootball

@prismatic-bell

@holsten-from-hasa

@thebleedingeffect

I tagged 1,280 of my posts in 2022

#sky: children of the light - 75 posts

#sky: cotl - 73 posts

#useful information - 55 posts

#lol - 39 posts

#hermitcraft - 38 posts

#i am ascending - 20 posts

#goncharov - 20 posts

#important - 18 posts

#unreality - 17 posts

#grian - 15 posts

Longest Tag: 140 characters

#then it’s 9pm and dark out and you don’t know what day it is and you think you missed classes and deadlines and feel anxiety for a solid min

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

The rift ate Mumbo’s Jumbo

171 notes - Posted May 1, 2022

#4

225 notes - Posted June 13, 2022

#3

TGC’s expectations: players will make friends in our game ☺️

Reality?

242 notes - Posted June 4, 2022

#2

And the hemitcraft charity livestream is off to a great start by smashing the goal before the event even starts

288 notes - Posted October 23, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

This appeared in my feed today and…

It feels like a message? That he’s finally at peace after fighting cancer.

Rest In Peace Alex.

390 notes - Posted July 3, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[tex-now]

Thank you @curious-sootball and everyone who got me to 5000 reblogs!

Yayyy 5k reblogs. What now

Horny asexuals you have my sympathy and respect

Asexuals who look at horny posting and think "real" I love you guys

Non-horny asexuals you have my sympathy and respect

Asexuals who look at anything sex related and gag I love you guys

All asexuals you have my sympathy and respect

Asexuals who just exist I love you guys

[cirilee]

uh, hey, i hate to pull you into this in case it turns out to be Drama but I think curious sootball just blocked me? idk if they found something hideously offensive in the mulan post they had just reblogged from me minutes earlier, or what, but I’m very confused... if it’s not too much trouble would you mind asking them if that was accidental because from my perspective they just vanished from existence and that’s. upsetting

i’m trying to check my own blocklist to see if I blocked THEM by accident but uh, either Tumblr screwed up again or I’m stupid or both bc I can’t find it, I don‘t use it often enough to know for sure if I’m just looking in the wrong place 😂

Ahhh, so @sztefa001 and me both checked, and even outside of our account it seems as if @curious-sootball's account has been deleted?

;_; !!!! COME BACK CURIOUS

if anyone knows what happened to them, or knows where else to find them, we would really appreciate it ;_; ! (unless they dont wanna be found and deleted their blog on purpose of course)

if their blogs' just been wrongfully deleted or something i hope they can get it back .....

[the-warrior-dreams]

Oof, Markoth...that sounds like an image problem /concerned noises/

Also, Elder Hu, how do you feel now? (I felt like Elder Hu is kind of... forgotten)

Markoth: *he actually picks up Shelby to hug her better*

Shelby: You’re like the dad that wasn’t ashamed of me. This feels so nice.

Hu: I’m quite fine, thank you for your concern.

[carpe-aurore]

@curious-sootball

[maniculum]

BESTIARYPOSTING. THIS IS ABOUT THAT. IF YOU'RE WONDERING WHY YOU ARE TAGGED, THAT'S WHY.

When the original poll was going around, a number of people expressed interest in drawing critters by saying something in the notes but didn't follow this blog -- including a couple "sign me up" comments or similar. I want to make sure everyone who indicated an interest in making art with this thing sees this post so they have the option to follow the tag and/or at least be caught up on this.

I posted a few days ago asking for suggestions for how to alert these folks without upsetting Tumblr's spam detection, and the advice I got was to just reblog this post with a paragraph of tags, so here goes (sorry if this is in fact a violation of Tumblr etiquette):

@ainawgsd, @alicenotalice, @beatriceportinari, @bitchfitch, @bonetasty, @captainadwen, @captocie, @catherdrashepard, @curious-sootball, @elodieunderglass, @embervoices, @essektheylyss, @ghosty-schnibibit, @gimbledim, @gossip-wolf, @hannahmcgill, @itsseriouslyridiculous, @jamiethekeener, @kathara, @maxmorkson, @mayhaps-magical, @pangolen, @pokestine, @pomrania, @thatqueerweirdo, @threecandleslit, @thydungeonguy, @timeandspacelord, @treesurface, @tricky-pockets, @voidilite-singularis, @wobblydev

This is probably incomplete -- I just manually compared the notes on the post to my follower list and put in anyone who seemed to imply an interest in participating but wasn't following me. I probably missed a few people; I skipped over a number of notes that just said something like "YES" because i feel like that's ambiguous as they might just be excited about seeing the art; and there were a couple blogs Tumblr just wouldn't let me tag for some reason (maybe there's a privacy setting they have turned on?)

Also, of course, if you just voted in the poll but didn't comment, I don't have your username, so you're not on the list. And if you reblogged under one username but follow me under another, you're on the list but don't need to be, sorry about that.

My apologies if this is annoying to anyone; this is probably the only time I'll do it. Going forward, I'm planning to just assume everyone is caught up, has seen the instruction post, and knows what they're about.

Also, just a quick note for everyone, I managed to get everything queued up sooner than I thought, so the first critter will in fact be appearing one week from tonight. I've got them set for Mondays at 6pm Eastern.

Bestiaryposting Plan

So the poll is still running, but I think I'm safe in saying there's sufficient interest, so I'm going ahead and typing up a "how we're going to do this" thing, which I will schedule to post after the poll ends properly. As of the time I'm writing this, over 500 people have voted for the "yes I want to draw things" option, and I had been expecting to get maybe a dozen, so we definitely have enough participants. Let's get started then:

Our Source

I had originally planned to translate an Old or Middle English bestiary, but haven't been able to find a good one -- the best option I was able to dig up only has thirteen critters, which I feel like isn't enough to really have fun with. I was debating the idea of translating a Latin one -- this would have been far more time-consuming since my Latin is terrible, but also I do need to practice it, so I figured it evens out -- when I found a solution that doesn't involve me spending hours and hours on translating.

It seems that when Aberdeen University created their digitized version of the famous Aberdeen Bestiary, they released it under a Creative Commons license. (Assuming I'm reading their copyright policy correctly; I'm not a lawyer.) It does not seem to specify whether the transcriptions and translations they attach to the scanned images are also covered by Creative Commons, but since all of those are already freely available online through their website, I can't imagine they would have a problem with me posting them here as long as I provide attribution (which I am hereby doing right here on this post) and am not using it for commercial purposes (which I am not).

The Aberdeen Bestiary is missing a few pages, but there exists a very similar manuscript, the Ashmole Bestiary (they're sometimes called "sister" manuscripts), which is not missing those pages. And I happen to have a translation of the Ashmole Bestiary in hardcopy on my bookshelf, so I can just use it to fill in the gaps. (I think that should qualify as "fair use", since I'm only taking excerpts and not using them commercially.)

The upside of using the Aberdeen Bestiary is that it means when I round up all the art of each critter, I can include their very nice illustrations alongside the reveal of what animal was being described.

The downside of using the Aberdeen Bestiary is that since it already is free online, people might be tempted to "cheat" by looking up the entries and finding out what animal they describe. For that, please see the next section...

Guessing the Animal

Guessing what animal is being described is not the point of the exercise. (Feel free to have theories and whatnot, but please keep them to yourself so as not to influence the artists.) If you see an entry and think, e.g., "oh that's describing a raccoon"*, and then you create a picture of a raccoon... well, you could have done a perfectly good raccoon at any point and didn't need this framework to do it. So just don't worry about what animal is meant, and do your best to draw (or paint or stitch or whatever else) based on the description! You're not getting ranked on accuracy and there are no prizes forthcoming, so... just have fun with it.

*Example chosen as something that will, for obvious reasons, definitely not be in a 13th-century European bestiary.

Edit after starting to type these things up: some of these are going to be super easy to guess, though, to the point where I don't know how possible it'll be to block out prior knowledge. Sorry about that.

General Procedure

I'm going to schedule a post every Monday (I'm thinking of queuing them for 6pm Eastern Time) with a new entry. It will be the translation of an entry from the Aberdeen Bestiary with all references to the animal's name replaced by a randomly-generated nonsense word. (Henceforth to be referred to as "nonce-names". I'm Googling* each one before using them so I don't accidentally generate one that actually means something.) These posts will all be tagged maniculum bestiaryposting, so you can follow that tag if you want to make sure you see them.'with a new entry. It will be the translation of an entry from the Aberdeen Bestiary with all references to the animal's name replaced by a randomly-generated nonsense word. (Henceforth to be referred to as "nonce-names". I'm Googling* each one before using them so I don't accidentally generate one that actually means something.) These posts will all be tagged maniculum bestiaryposting, so you can follow that tag if you want to make sure you see them.

*Later Note: Did you know that if you search dozens of nonsense words within a short span of time, Google makes you prove you're not a robot? Repeatedly?

Anyone who wants to draw the critter being described should do so. (You are encouraged to describe your thought process re: why you've depicted it the way you have.) You can put it in its own post, or reblog the description with an image, or however you want to do it. Then tag your art with the nonce-name I've given to the animal.This will let me and others find it. (You should probably employ copy/paste there to make sure the spelling is the same, since nonsense words are hard to spellcheck.)

A week after posting the bestiary entry, I'll go through that tag and round up all of the art contributed. Then I'll put the images in a big post (or series thereof, considering how many people might participate), along with an @ and a link to your original post.

If you want...

to not have your work included in the round-up post

to have only a link to your post included and not an image

to have me include a link to your website / other social media / etsy shop in addition to or instead of your tumblr

to have other information included alongside your work

anything else along those lines

... then just say so in your post and I will follow your instructions to the best of my ability.

I will also include, at the end of the round-up post, an image of the creature as depicted in the Aberdeen Bestiary and what it is actually called.

All posts I make on this will be collected at https://maniculum.tumblr.com/bestiaryposting so that people can look at previous ones without scrolling through the tag.

Various Notes

I'm going to trim out any religious digressions in the original entries -- bestiary authors had a habit of adding stuff like "and the raccoon is symbolic of god in such-and-such fashion, which teaches us...", and I just don't think that's relevant here.

The entries will also be presented in a random order. This is because they're sorted into categories in the original text, so if I don't change the order we're going to get stuck with, e.g., a few months of All Birds All The Time.

You should all be aware that the animals described are not guaranteed to be, you know, real. There are several entries describing animals that straight up do not exist -- some of which are mythical creatures familiar to most people, others of which are extremely obscure.

Explanations of the animal's name within the entries will be redacted.

If other animals are mentioned within the entries, they will not get replaced with nonce-names. Originally, I was going to make the switch globally, so that if, e.g., the entry for "raccoon" read "a raccoon is about the size of a possum", and the random generator had decided that a raccoon was a balzikhear and a possum was a flunggrish, the "raccoon" entry would now read "a balzikhear is about the size of a flunggrish". However, I decided that it will cause more problems than it solves to obscure any comparisons to other animals -- so the name-switch is now localized only to the specific entry. A possum is a flunggrish only in its own entry, and remains a possum everywhere else.

I was originally going to do one post for every single entry, but there are a lot of them and they vary wildly in length & quality. So I've cut it down to exactly 52 posts, meaning that if I queue them up for once a week, this will run for roughly a full year.

Most of that cutting-down mentioned above was done by combining a bunch of the really short entries into categories -- the last half-dozen posts in this series will be group entries. You can choose to make art of any of them that strike your fancy, or do a group portrait, or just ignore them --I dunno, I'm not a cop, do what you want.

I did also directly cut some, mostly domesticated animals because there's a somewhat different approach to them based on author and audience familiarity.

So yeah, that should cover everything.

[hollowknightheadcanons]

This probably has been done before, but imagine Monomon doing this and Isma/Quirrel/whoever sees that freaking out a little before Monomon reassures them she's actually ok.

Those water things float around in Fog Canyon so this frequently happens.

[darkest-of-night]

(Oof, I hadn't rp-ed in years) Sometimes, when Darkstalker is resting or taking a break from doing something important, Zoey climbs his horns (like monkey bars). She is a really good climber and it is pretty hard to stop her

“Despite her size she can, uh

Be a bit of a handful...”

((If he did try to stop her it might result in her getting squished. So he just tries to be cautious not to move around too much, that way she at least won’t fall lol ))

[odddrawingsandwhatnot]

Based on [X]

@cirilee @curious-sootball @sztefa001

Full page:

[hopeaterart]

(Tags from @curious-sootball)

Hi! Thank you for your tags ^^

I was thinking that, specifically for the plot point where they stop Rauru from passing on so he ends up following Link around too, Urbosa does it by audibly worrying about Zelda, Revali does it by being, well, Revali, Daruk does it by audibly worrying about the state he saw Death Mountain in while coming to this point, and Mipha by staring at him blankly yet intensely. (She didn't mean to force his hand, but she's very stressed and it must've come across by her expression) Point is, they successfully prevent him from passing on by worrying and guilt-tripping him.

As for whether or not Zelda can see them too, probably! Although I feel only Revali would give them shit for going alone underneath the castle. I feel like a few other characters (ex: Sidon) should be able to see them too, but not all of them. (Ex: can only see Mipha).

Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom AU/fanfic idea where the ghosts of the Champions are unable to pass on at the end of BotW because the actual source of Calamity Ganon never actually went away, so they just... kept hanging around Link and keep him company throughout the entire game.