#mayhaps i do have a type

[ecoustsaintmein]

Me looking at my blorbos:

Peter Bonnington, a short king who is a car nerd, and

Thorsten Lannert, another short king who is also a car nerd

[bucket-puns]

Ishmael death stranding au stuff I was cooking. Also a faust kromer and Before team Ishmael doodle.

[patrocles]

sara snow. daughter of a lord, sister of another. a bastard she-wolf. a keeper of the old faith.

[b4kuch1n]

found out this year’s snow miku contest is happening yesterday while on call with my friend and then I blacked out and woke up to this being posted on the piapro site (it’s here btw)

[thegreenhordes]

Field Guide to encounters with The Glow, Part One: Type 1 infected, AKA Growlers.

Growlers are intensely aggressive, so much so that they are just as violent towards other infected as anything else that moves. While blind, the Growlers are equipped with keen hearing and smell, and can locate a potential meal from far distances. Constantly on the hunt, these unfortunate beasts' diet of choice ultimately leaves them unsatisfied and starving. Stage 3 Type 1 infected usually die within weeks, but some have survived up to two months.

To Distract a Growler: Find some way to create noise in the opposite direction that you are located. Make sure it is loud, and lasts long enough for you to run. Flying is a viable method of escape if you possess wings, as stage 2 and 3 Growlers are incapable of flight. Stage 2 due to the weakening of their flight muscles- and stage 3 due to the loss of feathers.

How to avoid detection: Mask your scent. Try to remain as neutral-smelling as possible. This can be hard to do, but do your best and you will avoid being sniffed out by a late stage Growler. Avoiding detection by a stage 2 is simply a matter of staying out of sight and keeping noise to a whisper. Additionally, avoid making noise when near a stage 3 Growler. If you cannot be detected through smell, your best bet with a stage 3 is to hold completely still, breath slowly (quietly), and wait for them to leave line of sight- then you can make a run for it. Stage 3 Growlers are strong but slow-moving. Outrunning them in a large enough space is possible.

Special Notes: Growlers at stage 3 cannot be reasoned with and have the minds of starving, cornered predators. However, due to stage 2 Growlers being still rather cognizant, you can communicate with them- it is recommended to do so with some form of barrier however, due to their overwhelming instinct to bite and infect everything they see. When things were still relatively stable and infected were being appropriately contained, Princess Twilight Sparkle had frequent verbal contact with multiple stage 2 Growlers in her care. They were reluctantly polite, expressing a clear desire to attack the princess, but understood their situation well enough to be compliant at the time. All these stage 2s eventually progressed into stage 3, and were either put down, escaped, or kept for further study.

[genshinlesbian]

Y’all don’t even understand I love Neuvillette sooo so much

[1captainjordan4]

What if you (thats you!) send me drawing request that i try (big emphasis on try) to draw this weekend 😳😳

[aeriondripflame]

red hibiscus flowers symbolize ephermality and are symbols of opportunity. while often used for the representation of joy and romantic passion, the hibiscus flower is a symbolic stand in for living life in the moment. larys’ motives have always been a mystery, but i think the usage of flower symbolism (as well as larys’ personal sigil being a firefly) gives us some insight into what larys’ motivations actually are. the idea that larys doesn’t have some grand master plan but is just acting impulsively living his life by each moment.

[keeps-ache]

hello caffeine. hallo heart palpitations <33

[quasieli]

Yay I'm drawing something thats actually making me feel good. I think drawing Fitz has been really good for me cause their lines and curves just scratch that good itch in my brain. Also gender, they are incredibly gender and I'm living vicariously through them

[coollyinterferes]

//so...i'm just learning about some BL comic where one of the characters looks like this

and turns out that he's also apparently some gang boss (he's in his mid-30s, so like.. 10-ish years older than PB!Speebs), and he's also tall and buff too?????????? The lighting here doesn't really show it, but he appears to be blond in almost every other colored pic I've seen (his hair curly/wavy)

[sternbilder]

ok so today I had one of the most fascinating and enlightening discussions maybe of my life and I need to share bc it blew my MIND (warning: long)

here's the context. there is a friend I have. they are a pretty good friend of mine that I've known for many years now and I appreciate them as a person very much. lately I have noticed that they've been texting me fairly frequently. which, from my point of view, is once every couple of days. not because they had something specific to say, but just saying hello or asking how my day was.

I'm sure this was well-intentioned, but this was starting to get a tiny bit grating for me. we just met up in person literally two days ago! and you had texted me not long before that, too! nothing new has happened since then! my day has been quite boring, actually! I thought, in my mind, as I swiped away the notification—and immediately felt like an awful friend.

I knew from past experience that responding to the message would invite an immediate and not easily escapable conversation that, due to my poor multitasking skills, would distract me from work or require me to context switch away from whatever else it was I was doing at the moment—cooking, doing chores, watching TV—and worse, amount to little more than idle chit-chat about the same boring quotidian complaints as usual. I am not one of those people who thinks they're above small talk or don't see its social value, but I found myself thinking, am I the one who is being not normal here in not enjoying having this specific kind of interaction MULTIPLE times a week with the SAME person?

so recently, I've been finding myself routinely avoiding opening this particular friend's messages for fear of hurting their feelings if they saw that I had left them on read for a prolonged period of time. I had even gone so far as to avoid posting in a group chat in which we're both participants so that they don't realize that I have, in fact, been online, just not responding to them, specifically. my hope was that after enough slow responses, this friend would eventually get the hint and give up on trying to maintain a steady steam of conversation, but somehow this has not worked so far.

this was starting to weigh on my conscience. I realized that I will have to eventually fight my conflict-avoidant tendencies and just confront this friend directly, for the sake of both my sanity and our friendship. but how to do this gently? tactfully? without implying that I don't value their friendship or that I perceive them as needy or annoying? that was the tricky question. because I know that my friend isn't doing anything wrong! if anything it is probably me that is weird and antisocial and I probably just need to work on my social skills!

but not wanting to feel like a total asshole and hoping to go in with an informed and reasonable mindset (knowing full well that my understanding of social norms isn't always the keenest), I asked a different group chat for their opinion, hoping to gain some perspective on what boundaries they generally considered normal and acceptable to exercise. I phrased my question thusly:

how many friends* would you say you have where you text on a regular basis (say, multiple times a week) 1:1 just to say hi, about nothing in particular *explicitly a friend, not a family member or SO

y'all. the responses were eye-opening.

there were four people who participated in this discussion, all four of whom were in different camps and had wildly different experiences:

0, and assumed most others were the same

0, but assumed most others were not the same

multiple, and assumed most others were the same

multiple, but assumed most others were not the same

1 was me; in retrospect, I am realizing that because I had assumed that these kinds of interactions were not typical, I had interpreted my friend's gesture as something much more significant than it probably was in their mind, which is to say something that they just happen to do with everyone they know and like—which created a sort of pressure in my mind not to let them down and caused a sense of intense anxiety when I found myself struggling to reciprocate. I am absolutely floored at the revelation that it is apparently normal and common for people to have MULTIPLE friends (not even partners!!! or family!!!) that they are talking to on a constant ongoing basis at any given time, and at the possibility that I was treating my friend's feelings with kid gloves when it REALLY wasn't that hashtag deep for them.

2 clarified that they never initiate these kinds of chats, but when others initiate with them, they're fairly comfortable with simply letting these kinds of pings go unanswered, assuming the other person will just move on to someone else without taking it personally.

3 confessed to me that they once tried to do something similar with me, and eventually gave up, but had felt a bit hurt and rejected at my lack of enthusiasm, because they assumed that I was doing this with other people, just not them specifically. they sympathized very strongly with my friend.

4 also recalled that they had at one point tried something similar with me, but sort of got that I wasn't one of those people who would be receptive to this style of communication and wasn't particularly bothered by this, agreeing with 2 that the expectation is not that the recipient HAS to respond, and that my friend should probably pay closer attention to the face-saving social cues I was sending by not responding or responding slowly.

but yeah, the takeaway from this conversation is that people's preferences and experiences and expectations when it comes to digital communication are WILDLY varied, and because both communication technology and the social conventions surrounding them are changing CONSTANTLY (just a few examples: are read receipts good or bad? what about typing indicators? online status? are emoji reacts or gifs/stickers an acceptable substitute for an actual reply? group chats vs. 1:1 DMs? synchronicity and formality of various communication methods like email and chat and video? are phone calls are still socially acceptable?) there are either no agreed-on norms or different camps of people have vastly different understandings of what the norms are

among the other highlights/a-ha moments of this discussion:

Friend 4 asked another friend who is even MORE extraverted than they are what their # was and they reported somewhere in the ballpark of 20-40 people in any given week which is absolutely buckwild to me (importantly, all four of us in the original group happen to be software engineers, a class of people notorious for their lack of sociability, so I have no confidence that I have captured a representative sample size even within this particular group—the numbers both 3 and 4 gave were still both in the single digits, though they are definitely the warmest and friendliest of the bunch)

I realized that one difference between me and 3/4 was that we fulfill our social needs quite differently? specifically, I mostly connect with friends over group chats, of which I have a handful that are quite chatty and at least one or two that I'm actively posting in on any given day. I also typically have at least one, often multiple, real-life social plans every week! I am, in fact, very satisfied with my social life, to the point where it is almost maxing out my social quota (especially recently now that I've started dating someone)! but anyway—I find group chats to be my ideal form of day-to-day communication because there's less urgency and pressure for any individual person to contribute if they're not feeling up for it, and ALSO in the case of group chats where at least one member is a straight man (which is the majority of them for me, and I call out straight men only because they are the only demographic I have historically had this issue with) there is less room for platonic interactions to be undesirably misinterpreted as romantic

3/4 expressed that they prefer 1:1 conversations because they feel more personal and they can be more vulnerable about sensitive topics, which I would generally agree with—though in several of my group chats, I personally do feel comfortable enough with all the members to share things about myself with the entire group just by virtue of having known everyone for a long time and having built group camaraderie, but they seemed to not be comfortable with this without having previously established a consistent 1:1 pattern of day-to-day communication (or maybe they meant they were uncomfortable with the group forum itself, even if they were cool with sharing with everyone individually)?

they also expressed that for them, frequent unsolicited checkins and 1:1 attention from a friend would feel exciting/flattering/validating for them, whereas for me it would feel overwhelming, especially if we weren't THAT close

I do use 1:1 DMs also, but for a very different set of use cases: 1) if I haven't caught up with someone in a while (read: weeks or months), in which case we'll often just not text super long and make plans to call or meet in person instead, or 2) if I have something specific to say, like "here's this meme/song/piece of news I think you'd like to see" or "I need advice on X" or "guess what happened that made me think of you" or "I heard X happened, are you OK?"

I found that whereas I have a very clear distinction between communication preferences with a friend (someone I talk to on a regular basis but don't have a constant line of individual communication with) vs. a significant other (more or less willing to do this, unless they preferred not to), such a boundary between a platonic and romantic relationship does NOT exist for all people which boggled my mind

but yes anyway. I am learning so much about the way people view socializing in the digital age and I am so curious to know more and I kind of wish more people talked about this more openly (specifically among friends! because in my experience this is something that is fairly common to sort out explicitly in a romantic context) because I think this is probably the kind of thing that no one talks about because people are either afraid of potentially hurting feelings or everyone is just kind of assuming by default that their takes are universal without realizing that no actually, many people have strong opinions on this that are the polar opposite of theirs

but my gut feeling is that there is a lot of completely unnecessary friction that could just be resolved if only we could agree that it's cool to be more upfront about what our communication preferences are without worrying about that being taken extremely personally by the other party? bc idk, every single person I talked to about this today was like holy shit this was a whole fucking revelation actually, I can't believe I hadn't thought about this before thank you for bringing this up

[whelpimnauthuman]

🔮 🎊📜 pick whichever you want to answer (if you are still doing the ask game, sorry if not)

Ahhh!! Yes, I am still doing this! (Also, I'm answering all of them. Because I want to)

(From my Wolvden Ask game!)

📜 Is there a naming system?

More or less? I use nature names, but if one of the parents is from another Pack that had a naming system I try and integrate that in! (For example, one of my friends that I trade with often uses Romanian names, so wolves I get from them tend to also have Romanian names, and when those wolves have pups I like to give some of them Romanian names as well! Just as a family thing)

🎊 Any interesting customs, celebrations, or ceremonies?

I can think of three:

For reference, the Sheer Cliffs Pack lives in a very mountainous territory. There is some forest, yes, but the majority is large, maze-like mountains, with steep cliffs that can easily kill any wolf who isn't paying attention. The territory is harsh, and food can be scarce in the winter - the Pack has just recently survived a harsh famine. As such, pups are forbidden during winter; it's seen as selfish on the parents' end to do so when food is hard to come by as is. The pups themselves are never punished (it's not their fault their parents broke the rules), but their parents will be fed last, and it's not uncommon for the father to be almost constantly out of camp hunting. If this does affect the pups... Well, the parents knew the risk. (While the pups may be seen as a hardship, those that survive are known for their durability, able to survive the hardest of elements)

The Pack has three main ranks* that a young wolf can train as- Hunter, Scout, and Fighter - and while all ranks receive relatively the same training, each excels in something. Starting at a year old, a wolf is able to finish their training and become a full adult by finishing something called a Trial

Hunters, being the Pack's main food providers, must be able to complete a hunt successfully. This includes not only a solitary hunt, but also a hunt with their future hunting team - Team Hunts obviously take longer, as the Team needs time to get used to each other, and it's seen as a time of great celebration when a Team brings down their first kill together.

Fighters mostly defend the Pack, and their Trial is... Probably the most difficult. Wolves training to be fighters must successfully defend the Pack in a fight, normally from a battle of some sort. However, if times are peaceful... Well, fights aren't always guaranteed, so, if a Fighter-in-training has reached 2 years old, and has yet to have their trial, they will be approached by an older fighter and have to prove their strength against them. This was put into place to help prevent younger wolves from seeking fights to prove themselves - whether they could win them or not.

Scouts are kind of a combination of the other two roles; they hunt and fight, as well as patrol and expand borders. In an attempt to teach the young wolf the territory, the Scout-trainee is sent out into the territory, and must survive alone for the next 24 hours. During this time, they are expected to mark and defend the borders, find new land, or make their way through the maze-like Winding Canyons by themselves. An experienced Scout does follow to keep track of where the trainee goes and what they are doing, and the trainee can decide to do multiple at once, so long as at least one is done and they return to camp safely the next day, they pass.

There are also trials for outsider wolves (mostly consisting of surviving the territory and actually making it to the camp), as well as Healers and Pupsitters.

*These are the "main" ranks. There are more - Second-in-Command, Heir, Healer, etc - these are just the ones that mostly make up the Pack.

The final ritual is perhaps the most somber. When a wolf dies, the Pack must howl for them, as it is believed that, if they don't, Lunen, the Moon deity who leads wolves to the dead, will be unable to find them, and their spirit will wander the mountains forever.

🔮 Are there any higher powers/supernatural beings? Any kind of gods, religion, etc?

I have a lot of old life I need to re-write at some point. The basics are "The Pack mainly believes in two God-Wolves that control the Sun and Moon respectively, as well as their own respective seasons, causing the seasons to be associated with their respective God and vice-versa."

Also the gods change depending on beliefs; if one wolf believes the God of Death (for example) is a terrifying beast to drag you to the afterlife, that's how they'll appear to you, but if you see it as something gentle and welcoming, that's what you'll get. Gods are just. Vague and built on belief, basically. (Kinda "gods fade/die with time" but instead of dying they change? Or like. Zeus vs Thor, both exist, just different)

Uhh, there are more/other gods, those are just. The main two/only two I really feel like. Fully creating rn.

ANYWAYS if you want the long (and somewhat outdated) version, it's under the read more!

The Pack (mainly) believes in two God-Wolves, Solaris and Lunen, who rule the heavens together. Solaris is a large male wolf who takes the form of the sun, Lunen's gender changes and takes the form of the moon. Stories of the two are mostly vague, beyond the fact that they rule their Pack (therefore the World) together, causing night and day, as well as the seasons.

Solaris is known to be a constant: he rises daily, gives the world life, watches over his creations, and rests. Lunen, however, is a bit more adventurous. Depending on one’s beliefs, it could be that they’re curious of the creatures they don’t get to see (living, at least, since Lunen is the one who guides the dead to the afterlife), or it could be they’re just bored. It may also be they’re sneaking off to visit Solaris. Whatever the reason, Lunen is known to “sneak off” from time to time and adventure the world, only to return later.

There are stories of what Lunen looks like, however, they all vary as much as anything else when it comes to the gods: some say a white wolf with black or gray splotches, some say a dark black, almost blue, wolf with white. Stories even differ on them being male or female. However, all report similar splotches along the wolf’s face and tail, and the same similar pale white eyes…

As Lunen guide’s wolves’ spirits to the afterlife, they’re seen as very important to the Sheer Cliff’s Pack. The winds that howl through the cliffs are said to be spirits that Lunen forgot, or, perhaps, Lunen themself passing by, delivering a message… Because of this, it’s believed Lunen loves music, and that, if a wolf dies, the Pack must howl for them, so Lunen can find them, or the wolf’s Spirit will be lost.

The Seasons

Winter Death, Hardship, Strength (From Overcoming Trials)

Spring Rebirth, Energy, Life, The Possibility for New Beginnings

Summer Relaxation, Enjoyment of Time and What One Has, Memory to not “Go Soft” and take things for granted.

Fall: Change, Death for renewal, Sacrifice for the greater good

[timey-fandom-stuff]

I will not start another project. I will not start another project. I will not start another project. I will not start another project. I will not start another project. I will not start another project. I will n

[hop3wrlds]

need a nick wilde x husk edit on my desk by tomorrow morning at 9am

[asexualjedi]

Took my last exam today just need to finish my seminar papers everyone wish me luck this is so stressful