#magic in your fingers

[canisalbus]

Love your art so much. Will you show us cool nature pics from your country? I'm literally so stoned I forgot where you live sorry.

Sure anon, why not. I'm not a photographer so the quality of these is kind of slushy at best. I like nature and wander around a little bit, but I rarely hike properly, so I don't go to that many scenic places. These are mostly from regular walks. Long post warning.

Summers are short but very green, and since we're at the arctic circle we get sunlight around the clock. Some of these were taken at midnight or early morning small hours. Most of Finland is very sparsely populated and covered in boreal forests.

Finland is a very watery country, lots of lakes in particular.

Sometimes you get intense sunsets

And winters are very cold, snowy and last about six months. In summer we have midnight sun and in winter there's the polar night to counter it. Around late December sun only rises for about two hours per day where I live so it's very dark for many, many weeks on end (which is wonderful if you get seasonal depression like I do). But sometimes the weather and lighting are just right and you get this ethereal pastel effect that I love.

[ekat-fandom-blog]

Things We Ignore

Danny learned to ignore things quickly. From the migraines and muscle spasms he sometimes got after the portal to the icy discomfort during summer months. He ignored the ache in his arm from a poorly taken care of break. He ignored the jittery awfulness whenever he had to stay still.

Then he swapped bodies with Captain Marvel and found things he couldn't ignore.

Billy had a lot of things he ignored, too: The gods constantly yammering in his head, giving him unsolicited advice; The gnawing ache in his stomach; The sometimes numbness in his fingertips; The electric buzz under his skin; The constant loneliness that seeped coldness into his bones that had nothing to do with temperature.

[aliettali]

skilltober day 19: hand-eye coordination

(HOW ON EARTH DO YOU DESIGN THIS BASTARD.)

[phoenixcatch7]

In love with the idea of captain marvel being Billy's imaginary friend. Like, it'd be so easy. Early depictions had them as almost fully separate people sometimes, like one soul with two minds, rather than just two filters like we mostly see now.

But imagine a Billy down on his luck, hurt and hiding from police and criminals alike, daydreaming the hours away as children do, taking inspiration from all the superheroes rising to fame, making little stories to play out his dreams of saving the world with a generic action doll he found while dumpster diving once. Most of the paint's rubbed off.

Red's his favourite colour, his comfiest jumper is a bright ruby even after all the grime and washes. Gold, too, it's shiny and warmer than silver! A hero cape is a must, big and eye catching! And he can fly, of course, like superman, and in his daydreams, when he's sore and frustrated after a long day's grind, his superhero is smart enough and knows all the right words to get the bullies to stop without resorting to fighting.

His superhero fantasy is one he spends a lot of time on, the first one he goes for when struggling to sleep at night, and he can picture it so clearly. Captain marvel is big and bright and kind, strong enough to lift the boxes for the old lady up the road who's moving all by himself, fast enough to catch Jamie who fell out of the tree on Saturday and broke his leg and couldn't come to class for weeks. He appears at the entrance to alleys when Billy is cornered, he steps up behind to cover for him when he gets caught shoplifting, he sits at the bus stop with him when it's pouring rain and the right bus doesn't seem to be coming.

And then the wizard comes, or rather whisks him away, and like a magician from a fairytale breathes life into his imaginary friend until Billy feels thrice his size and a million times more invincible.

From then on, captain marvel is a real hero, just like Billy is a real boy, and as one they save the whole city, and then the whole world, and get cats down from trees and help Mrs Victoria move the last of her boxes and she gives them a pinch in the cheek and cookies for the road and sometimes it hurts but it's so much better than he imagined.

[mammomlette]

People don’t talk about MC needing to wear a magical ring to not accidentally yk cause NATURAL DISASTERS with their powers??? Not only accidentally but without realising???

Diavolo or smthn is asking too much of MC or being a bit too annoying and their other hand slowly drifts towards the ring and they hold onto it while maintaining dead eye contact. Like continue to piss me off hoe I’ll blink and blow a hole in your castle idk

Obv they never do it (or do they?) but the threat is there and it’s a risk dia (or whoever but I’m using dia) can’t take

[honeygrahambitch]

Aawww someone got mad at my take, I powmise you will be okay hun hugs and kisses

[cellarspider]

I went to go watch the eclipse yesterday.

There were some people there with very fancy equipment, but I just had my phone and a viewer I stuck over the lens. We could see progressively more and more detail on the slopes of the mountain in the distance, as the light dimmed.

And then the light on the horizon started to change, and the mountain fell fully into shadow.

It was beautiful. Like the sky had broken.

[ilovemesomevincentprice]

Vincent Price as Erasmus Craven

The Raven (1963) dir. Roger Corman

[crimeronan]

last time i got an irl writing critique there was one moment of pretty mild body horror and the universal reaction was "oh i'm nauseous. well done" so now i'm writing my next chapters like. gotta turn that up to one thousand :) sorry devin.

[aparticularbandit]

ALSO theory disproved - Agatha's natural purple magic is not dark magic.

One of the other witches said she GOT INTO dark magic, which means her natural absorption powers are not that.

(And her natural absorption powers seem to be separate from her magic, too, as Agatha instinctively tried to get the others to attack her so she could absorb theirs. Which means Wanda didn't take that. Which means that's something DIFFERENT.)

[dms-a-jem]

The Police - Music Videos/Promos

Part 2: 1981-1986

[hightidesandoldmen]

2Fords Au but the other interloping Ford (Fara) is also a teenager from a Magical Girl dimension is this anything

[whatudottu]

Me: Aw, my ideas for ectonurite reproduction are unrealistic, good thing I can use magic and the presence of Anodyne to justify them!

The humble turritopsis dohrnii: Let me introduce myself

So, after bumbling the idea of how the freak ghosts would produce more of themselves, I can now use an actual real world base to actually understand how the mechanisms would work.

Even though I've linked where I found out about the aptly named 'immortal jellyfish' I'm not going to expect anyone to read it, especially since it's pretty dry as more of a scientific debrief on the life-after-adulthood cycle of the t. dohrnii, but to summarise; outside of the standard reproductive cycle, a 'reverse development' would start in the medusa stage (essentially the adult stage but both mature and immature medusae can reverse develop), transition to a ball-like cyst stage where their features disappear, then metamorphizse back into a polyp where it would then reenter the standard reproductive cycle by developing from a bud to an adult polyp again to reproduce asexually, creating medusae once again. It's not quite as extreme as to say it reverses it's mitosis, simply that the transition to becoming a cyst allows for the cells to metamorphose and reattach themselves to the sea floor as a polyp, a 'hydroid colony' with reproductive zooids (something about 'fulmini = siphonophore' post).

Anyway! That's the general gist and I wanna go ahead and apply that to ectonurite AND expand on how it'd define their culture, not just being genetically immortal but also how the different life stages interact socially.

One thing I didn't mention in the summary but will use as an introduction to this section is that a precursor to the reverse development process is a 'weakened' state, which aside from the slow natural degradation of aging and a more controllable but also slow deterioration from the environment (faster if the environment is at least slightly harmful), also includes physical damage. I know I haven't made a whole post about this before but I think I might've implied in other topics that ectonurites need to die in order to reproduce, but I suppose 'dying' is now less literal as it's more the cells work overtime to heal from whatever physical issue put the individual into their state, doing so by morphing them into what amounts as scar tissue; a cyst. A lesion, a wound, a scab. Something that will in it's own right metamorphose yet repair in it's own right, become something new directly from the old.

An ectonurite medusa, the main body beneath the skin, would undergo the process of reverse development and become a cyst, the skin it's new cocoon yet also it's sail, leading the pulsing core of the cyst where whatever winds will take it. It will eventually make landfall, whether it was lead by the environment or nurtured by observing family - siblings and cousins and auncles but no parents, parents are impossible to have - and it would begin to metamorphose using the skin as nutrients and begin the steps again to become a polyp, a sprouting flower. Wherever they had landed they have become something new, and will continue to develop into being that something new until they create themselves once again, being born of their own body and creating more than they had ever been alone. From one into a myriad, the budding of the polyp creates more of themself and though in large quantity, the mortality rate is quite frighteningly significant. However when all is said and done, the asexual reproduction of the polyp spawns new descendants of the original medusa, in clutches of 5-20 on average; some more... some less.

Ectonurite spawn are still affected by their anti-mana life force, in reaction to the intersection between the planes allowing Anodyne and Lederdomain influences to spread amongst Anur Phaetos, so no matter where they end up budding they still take on the traits and attributes of the life around them like a sun-hungry plant. Technically fully mature medusa are also affected by this but it occurs less due to their final state, it is the cyst that initially begins to integrate the medusa's external influences into it's genetics, which in turn it uses in it's metamorphosis including the older genes present in the skin. Sisters Zs'Iza and Zs'Oise are an example of such with their visibly transylian faces in addition to their skin having the bandaged texture of thep khufan's many limbs. They are also an example of the 'less than average' clutch size a polyp can develop, a scorn say a power-hungry High Ecto-lord cannot bare to face, let alone acknowledge that it was amongst his genetics to barely remain biologically immortal.

AKA the reason why Zs'Skayr held interest in the Omnitrix, preservation of his genetics in a way that his species could even compare to even as close as they try. Something about desiring something more when it is just out of reach instead of being completely unattainable, immortality an easy concept to grasp when it is not hard to deride reincarnation from ones own natural biology. Especially since with the technology of the Omnitrix inherently blocking the influence of mana and thus rendering Zs'Skayr completely himself without the genetic differences of the life around him.

Speaking of the High Ecto-lord (a dumb name I'll give it the benefit of a mistranslation of a Phaetan or even a general Anurian term into English to cope with it), politically with their reproduction in mind I can see it in two ways; an absolute monarchy where the High Ecto-lord passes the role to their next life or something like a post-constitutional monarchy (emphasis on post-monarchy) where ectonurites have biological knowledge to know that appointing the one literal same guy over an over again with absolute power is bullshit but they recognise them as a figurehead with a political force of chosen reps behind them. Having a preference for the second, I'll say that Zs'Skayr is extra motivated to figure out actual immortality of the self in order to retain what little rule he does have, especially if with his clutch sibling only ending up producing two young with no other family of his in Zs'Castle Zs'Skayr to speak for, it seems he is at the end of his rope and wants to cling onto that for as long as infeasibly possible.

Moving on and hah, reverse developing this discussion to an earlier point, let's go back to ectonurite cysts and expand what I mean by 'observing family'.

Ectonurites, though biologically immortal, do host something equivalent to that of a funeral. However, unlike most funerals where the person who's the main event OF the funeral is very much dead and lacking any agency over the event, ectonurites old significant age or those with a significant amount of physical damage host their own funeral; in some cases, either immature medusae who's current combination of genes have given them rapid cell death and accelerated aging, or someone is significantly injured they cannot do much anything else, a funeral is hosted for them. It's an event that simultaneously mourns the old and celebrates the new, where during the middle of the funeral the host instigates their reverse development (or it's instigated for them) and the procedure from medusa to cyst to polyp takes place. These events often take place outside, but if the atmosphere is thick enough and there are no land-locked species in attendance then they might take place in the air itself, if not the full event where maybe the host wants a feast or activities before they reverse then in the reversal itself. This is done to make sure the cyst has ample time to drift to be coerced into drifting into a spot they and the family agreed upon away from the event space, more often than not directed to a family garden or a community garden, but sometimes in spots the host specifically wished to drift to or even through chance alone.

This can have a few Karen moments treated similarly to the way say human mother-in-laws demand full creative control over their children's wedding or guests that want all the attention come wearing white to the very same, but applied to what is essentially simultaneously funerary rights and also a baby-shower hah. The Tr'Riken moment perhaps for family name given name *pans over to me scrabbling to piece together a Phaetan equivalent name to Karen* maybe Pani'Kn or given name family name, who knows.

And with funerals being as casual conversation as humans consider weddings to be, sometimes some auncles siblings and cousins like to push the idea of their family member hosting a funeral someday, especially since unlike marriage it's a pretty guaranteed thing to happen. Sometimes though family would pester ectonurites with benign or otherwise non-terminal diseases illnesses or disabilities with arranging funerals because 'well, this combination of genes hasn't really worked out for you, but if you spend time with [xyz] and host one maybe you could get a different pattern and avoid all that'.

What I haven't mentioned yet is the family and community gardens. Gardens of polyps that either live on family property or exist in lots where housing and or hospitals are close by. When one says biologically immortal one might assume that the polyps that produce their youth asexually would be also immortal and thus outgrow any physical lot, but that is untrue. Instead, though the polyps last much longer than a corpse would in addition to being around longer with maintenance of the family or community gardeners, they are not immune to dying of old age. Since polyps are not the reverse developing medusae they cannot themselves persist in life beyond death and just like all polyps do eventually come to pass. Unlike a funeral perhaps where there is a person to actively mourn however, the passing of a polyp is seen as beautiful. The medusae produced by the polyp have legal rights on what to do with the remains of functionally their earlier self, whether to perserve it like a flower crushed within the pages of a book (though much more elegantly than that), to seal it in some resin as the equivalent of an urn (a display piece that does not decay), or to let it 'metamorphose' one last time an let it feed the grounds of the garden it lived in.

Zs'Castle Zs'Skayr's entrance was guarded by pumpkins yes? Like a form of garden right? I wonder what happened to all the Zs' family's polyps *blinks innocently*?

[bigassbowlingballhead]

i liked driving more when i smoked cigarettes.

[vigilskeep]

have a slightly stressful thing to do today so i am going to be exclusively thinking about whatever gender fhawke has going on to distract myself and oh boy is it working

[sugar-and-pearls]

Hi hedone! Thank you for ur words on my nik art :D I super appreciate it.

I wanted to ask if any of your f/os liked to dance? What kinda music do they dance to?

Have a nice day!

-Jeri🌻

Hiya Jerico!! Thanks for sending this in! Sorry for how long it took.

I really like to dance but I'm a little shy about doing it out in public as I'm not very good at it. I think most of my fos like to dance to some degree.

For my romantics I would pick William and Dabi as the two who are the most enthusiastic/ willing to dance with me. Maybe Jace too. the rest I would have to drag.

Both of my queerplatonic fos dance. This is seen in canon with Helaena, she loves to dance. She's the type to jump and twirl about and I love that. Klarion didn't know until I was like, "hey I want to dance" and he was like "She can't do that without me!!". He's still learning but thoroughly enjoying it.

Gomez and Mortica are well know for their love of dancing so enough said about that, the same too can be said of Jareth. The Storyteller is always up for a Irish jig.