#mellification

[crowthebadhunter]

when your friend dies to bees

[themightythornicus]

What if you locked me in a tomb and I ate nothing but honey until I died and then you mummified me in honey and 100 years later opened up my sarcophagus and ate my mellified body for medicinal purposes? 😳 haha just kidding😜…unless..?🤔

[gayle-blythe]

On the day you moved out, your father handed you a bottle of honey and a Manila folder. He told you that these two items have been passed down through the family for generations. Saying that the honey is thousands of years old and the folder holds documents to prove so, you took his word and his gift. You’re curiosity got to you a few weeks after and you decided to look in the folder. What you found you almost felt unworthy to be handling. Papers and parchments, some old, some new, and some REALLY old. Some preserved in sheets and others sealed in plastic. As you look at them you see family records among other “documents of authenticity” but what really caught your eye was that some of the other documentation was written in a different language. You couldn’t identify it yourself, but then again you’re no linguist.

On your own you came into some money and with global tensions rising, war on the horizon, you decide to prepare, just in case. Among the canned food, bottled water, survival gear, and some extra valuables, you also decided to stash your fathers honey.

As it turns out, your investment paid off. Bombs flew and as many were stopped and shot down, just as many made it through. You didn’t have time to react, you saw a flash, a cloud, and then you heard an emergency alert. You’re lucky you didn’t freeze in the panic, your body moving on its own, rushing to the bunker.

That was a month or two ago.

While you still have food to survive off of for another few months, the selection has grown slim. Still plenty of medicine, all you had used was some cold medicine, and some antibiotics when a cut got infected a while back. But that’s not the issue. Lately you gotten sick, far sicker that you’ve been and in more pain then you think you’ve ever felt. You’re not sure what’s wrong, you’ve tried everything you can think of. So you’ve deduced it must be something beyond your control. Radiation poisoning? Some sort of chemical leaking in? You can’t be sure, but whatever it is, the growing lumps and peeling skin CANNOT be good. One thing you are sure of is that you’re as good as dead.

Once you had come to this conclusion, you found your eyes drifting to that bottle sitting next to the Manila folder again and again. When you had rediscovered it upon entering the bunker, you had decided to save it. Maybe, once you could leave, it would hold value to someone, you could sell it and maybe live a little more comfortably in the post apocalypse. Or maybe just hold on to it. Make it out alive and keep it as some sort of trophy to your survival. Maybe even pass it down to your own child if you ever have one. But now it looks like those options aren’t so obtainable anymore.

You hold the cloudy glass to the light. The fluid so thick and dark only allowing little light through, but what does break through glows a deep, rich amber. You glance around the room, searching for something to eat with the honey and eventually land on hardtack, the foundation of your diet here in this hole. While it doesn’t taste horrible, after some time it began to become more of a chore to eat it and the taste began to wear on you. Especially since you ran out of any sort of jam or preserves to spread on it, so a touch of sweetness will be a welcome change! Speaking of, it has been some time since you had ANYTHING sweet down here. Pushing that thought aside you grab a spoon and some of your hardtack and sit, ready for your impromptu meal. It takes some elbow grease but you crack open the lid and immediately a pungent sweetness permeates the air. It takes a moment to adjust but once you do, you find the smell, appetizing, almost intoxicating. Your stomach growls as you suddenly feel profoundly hungry. You take your spoon and scoop a little honey out. You let it drizzle back into the jar for a moment, Alamo t mesmerized by the way it flowed. Thicker than syrup but thinner than molasses. You move it to begin coating the hardtack as your mouth begins to water. You stop and set the spoon back in the jar just before the honey leaks over the side of the cracker. As you bring it to your lips the sweet smell is stronger the ever, just begging you to taste it. And so you do. It’s the best thing you’ve ever tasted. Sweeter than anything you’ve ever had, and more rich too. It’s a different kind of sweet, one that while overpowering, it doesn’t hurt or sicken you like some sweets you had tasted in your past. It’s overpowering nature, you welcome it, crave it. You lack the words to describe it and only one word comes to your mind.

Ambrosia

You thought you had only taken one bite, but the whole cracker is gone, all that remains is some drops of honey on your fingers. You lick it up greedily. You must have more. You break off another chunk of hardtack and hold it in your hand, this time skipping the spoon and pouring straight from the jar. You let it overflow into your hands but not enough to let it hit the floor. You set the jar down and you feast. Some how it tastes better the second time. You sloppily eat the cracker, hardly chewing, lapping, slobbering, and slurping the rest of the honey from your hands.

You MUST have more

You grab the jar, fully intending to drink it all. You put it to your lips and tip your head back. The sickening sweetness stronger than ever before. The liquid flows towards your gaping maw, yet it can’t seem to come nearly fast enough. Just as the honey begins to bear your lips, you come to your senses. No. You must savor it. You must make it last until your final days here. If you were to run out, you’re not sure you could take that loss.

You screw the lid back on. As you sit, you feel full. Fuller than you’ve felt in a long time. Almost stuffed. And you feel… warm? Regardless, you feel better than you’ve felt in a while and you decide it’s time to sleep.

The next few days pass without much note. You eat some honey with each meal, but you never lose yourself as you did the first time. Just drips and drizzles, but you find it just as sweet and filling as before. Some days when you eat it, you think if your father and the rest of your family. Thinking on where this honey came from, as well as where you were before all this. Reminiscing on warm memories. These last few days, you’ve felt far less hungry, and far less cold.

Weeks pass

You’re honestly surprised you’re still alive, but you don’t question it. Oddly, you’re more worried by the ever shrinking honey reserve. You’re left with about half of what you started with. As you go to get a spoonful for todays lunch, you feel the spoon hit something solid. As not much happens in the bunker, this is new, and curiosity takes you. You begin fishing it out, wondering what it could be. A piece of honeycomb? Maybe a bottle with a note inside! Or maybe it’s just a rock. Regardless, whatever it is, it’s likely been in here since the honey was bottled. It doesn’t take to long to fish it out, but in that short time, the anticipation is still unbearable. As the spoon breaks the surface, it takes you a moment to realize what’s on top of it. You don’t recognize it at first. In shock you drop the spoon. Surely, surely that is NOT what you think. You stoop down and upon closer inspection, your suspicions are confirmed.

A finger

You feel sick, it takes all the strength you have not to puke then and there. Once you regain your composure, you close in again to examine it further. You were right, it’s a finger. You poke it and I kinda of feels like… jerky? It’s dark and slightly shriveled up but it’s been sitting in that honey for god knows how long. Is it mummified? You remember seeing mummies in a museum as a kid and this kinda looks like that, but you can’t be too sure. You pick it up, touching it as little as possible, and drop it in a can, carrying it to a corner of the bunker where you leave it. You sit there for a moment, staring at the honey, the can, and the blank concrete walls. You ATE that. You are A LOT of that. Starting to feel sick again, you decide to stop thinking about it. You close the jar of honey and set it on a shelf, telling yourself that’s the last you’ll eat of it.

A day passes

And another

You haven’t eaten the honey as you said, but you’re starting to feel… wrong. You’re cold again. You’re feeling hungry again. You need it. Deciding that if it was going to affect you, it would have already, you reintroduce it to your diet.

You wonder if your father knew when he gave it to you. You wonder if his mother knew when she gave it to him. These question fill your mind each time you eat and most the time in between.

Days continue to pass

As you go to change bandages covering open wounds in your arms, you contemplate your mortality once again. It’s been quite some time now since you were certain you’d die. Why haven’t you died? As you question this, you realize all at once that you aren’t hurting any more. In fact, you haven’t been hurting for a while now. When did that happen? You quickly unwrap the bandages and see clear as day, where open wounds and sloughing skin once was, new skin was growing. Still sensitive, but you were healing. How? You check your other wounds, the bumps and rashes and sure enough they’ve all shrunk if not completely healed. How is this possible?

Then it hits you

The jar, the honey, the finger. That’s what changed. But how, how could that possibly work. You think of what happened to you when you first tried it. Not matter how much you try to convince yourself, you can’t accept it. Yet the proof is clear as day. Did they know? If so, why didn’t your dad tell you? Regardless, you know now. You try to think of what this means, the implications and repercussions but your head is just swimming with questions. Once you calm down, an idea comes to you.

You look at the door

Surely not, right? It’s not possible. You’ll die out there. But, maybe there’s a chance. You have this… this miracle! You already know it saved you from the brink of death. What else can it do?

You stand

If there’s even the slightest chance, you have to take it right? For your father, who gave you this second chance, for your family. Maybe they’re still out there. As your hand touches the cold steel of the bunker door, you feel something you haven’t felt in a long time.

Hope

Your dad had this vintage bottle of honey, dated thousands of years. He always told you to save it for a special occasion. Trapped in a bunker about to die, you think it’s the right time.

[yffresbeard]

if i could change anything about bosmer lore id reverse who's bodies are eaten and who's are left to rot, as per the meat mandate.

endocannibalism for fallen village members and loved ones, as an act of mourning and perhaps ritually passing down their wisdom and strength or other attributes. im imagining like, a Mourning Stew sort of situation? enemies are left to rot so their memories and attributes can never be passed down.

[sordidmorbid]

" all the nerves in my brain and the blood in my veins made of CANDY "

(candy - nelward)

[sawtraptommy]

nick is so bitchy and unsubtle it's hilarious. i'm obsessed with him.

[indoraptorgirlwind]

Wesen Moodboards

Mellifer (Latin: Honey To Bear)

Mellifers are a communal race who live in small groups ruled by the Mellischwuler with the others acting as her "worker bees." In the Wesen society, they fulfill the role of clarions, sending warning calls within the creature world. Like real bees, Mellifers operate with a "hive mentality" and live in man-made, human sized "hives." They tend to build those "hives" in the attics of houses, where they harvest their own apitoxin (bee venom).

Under normal circumstance, Mellifers aren't aggressive unless they feel threatened. However, when they do sometimes go after someone with the intent to kill, they use coordinated strategies to disguise their attack. Hexenbiests are their sworn enemies, and Mellifers often kill them on sight. Mellifers also have a tendency to wear yellow or yellow and black patterned clothing, sometimes personalizing some of their belongings as well, such as cell phones, with that coloration.

Notables: Melissa Wincroft, Doug Shellow, Elliot Spinella, John Coleman

[identifying-ladybugs-in-posts]

#5 - Squash beetle

Epilachna borealis

Stylized

One of very few ladybug species that eat plants rather than hunting smaller insects! and one of only two species that are considered vegetable pests, the other being its close relative the Mexican bean beetle. More info here

beetledrop (additional beetles here)

tumblebug x 80s tracksuit | earth-boring dung beetle x talavera ponderous borer beetle x jazz | six-spotted tiger beetle x holo paper squash beetle x zellige | marsh beetle x celtic knot potato bug x nebra sky disc | comb-clawed beetle x morris & co. wallpaper

[mentally321]

heritas Sakshi,

[snowshinobi]

sipping strawberry-sage kombucha thinkin this ... is what blond cranberries would taste like

[sleepnoises]

stickers that the postal system willing i will have at this year's San Francisco Zine Fest, Sunday September 1 at City View at the Metreon (tabling with the astonishing @mellific!)

i will also have tiny little ceramic guys, a few block printed bandanas, and a delicate smattering of Zines

[mmmmalo]

You talk about mummies quite a bit and I don’t feel as though I’ve read enough of your east-mapping stuff to get whatever points are being made here so I bring you these:

 On page 695, Tavvy leaves a bag of trail mix for Vrissy and Harry and tells them not to pick the raisins out because they’re healthy. I’m pretty sure this is supposed to be a mummy joke; since raisins are the preserved dehydrated remains of grapes, and his claim that they’re healthy seems like a reference to Europeans eating mummies for “health benefits”. The next page has Harry chewing, so he’s (presumably) eating the mummy. My first thought was that this was about Alt Callie eating LE's corpse but I don't know if LE counts as a mummy or not

And I've no clue if you've considered this already but I think ‘hook up’ / ‘off the hook’ is sometimes used as a mummy joke via reference to the brain being hooked out from the nose. On 4488 Roxy says “its not like im lobbyin for you to hook me up with a whole mess of fuckin babbies”, like she’s lobbyin for him to make her a mummy. It gets brought up alongside sweet stuff too sometimes e.g. “your gooberish ways are gonna land you in a jam and i know im going to have to get you off the hook” on 1662 and Vrissy’s “I TOLD you my moms were going to Hook Me The Fuck Up with a sweet milit8ry commission!” in Candy 34

I'm not really persuaded by the hook reading -- focusing on the word hook and teasing out subtleties of its usage seems potentially worthwhile, but would want a more direct reference to brain removal before I accepted the mummification angle... but the raisin thing kind of makes sense to me, even if I can't tell what it would say about Tavvy. It resonates with the mummy stuff I've picked up on:

1. Lord English is definitely a mummy -- the sarcophagus ("flesh eater") that he travels in is called the Cairo Overcoat, and Jake's wall has two posters for the Mummy films next to the Incredible Hulk poster to get the images nice and mingled. I also suspect the cherub diet of meat and candy is itself a reference to mellification, the process of embalming corpses with honey: Jake calls himself a "mellifluous old chap" in the Epilogues and says his gyrations awaken people's hunger like "pouring butter on bacon", invoking candied meat to outline his desirability.

2. Lord English's first words "GIRL. YOU THERE, GIRL." are an echo of WV's first words "BOY. YOU THERE BOY." They have several parallel but the pertinent one here is that WV is the story's first mummy, visually speaking. The exiles wander the desert in bandage-like shrouds: mummy imagery. By my reckoning, mummies are here acting as an Orientalist symbol of the Middle East, giving us an early hint that the apocalypse is politicized along racial lines, much like WV's chess game where Black mates White (causing Brown to erupt from a Pink can). The American suburb is bombed and replaced by Arabian dunes.

3. Back to mellified flesh: ectoslime seems to basically be the same thing. Rose travels through the mummified Jaspers' crypt to reach Mom's lab, whereupon a. she is able to boil her beloved cat down to a candy green essence and b. a mutant cat arisen from that essence emerged from a teapot (the same teapot that Death used in Problem Sleuth). This abstracted suggestion of liquid cat being poured out a teapot points us back to the mummy WV, who straight up ate the ectoslime. "Vodka Mutini" was implicated as a drink before he was named, and Roxy bottling cat slime much later just returns us to an established image of consuming the candied flesh of the dead.

The suggestion that Mom might've been imbibing cat slime could lead to several conclusions. Maybe Nepeta (who gets a planet of teapots and sugarcubes) pursuing the Fountain of Cute with her cat was a tipoff, and Mom is drinking dead kittens in a bid to preserve her youth? This would resonate with the "health benefits" of raisin/mummy consumption and further connect Mom to her life-extending doppelganger HIC. Metaphorically, it might be taken as a extreme example of Mom being Tipsy on Gnostalgia, drunk on an artifact of a lost past, mourning what is gone and trying desperately to unite with it again. Maybe since Ghostbusters is called manbro bukkake theater all this ominous hoohaw around slime consumption amounts to elaborate cocksucking jokes. The possibilities dazzle

[dannybobany]

hello, can you tell us more about cannibalism please? (This is in reference to the shark fin post and your additions about what happens eating human flesh)

Okay sure!

So cannibalism psychologically occurs in one of three scenarios

Survivalist cannibalism

Narcissistic cannibalism

Psychosis triggered cannibalism

The first two are the most common, Survivalist cannibalism is merely a result of situational desperation although interestingly it’s been found that people who engaged in it showed far less apprehension to do it again and less disgust then the average person, which in my opinion implies the aversion humans have towards Cannibalism is social rather then innate, the most famous example of this was the Donner party, a group of American settlers who became stranded in the snow on their way west and were forced to eat their dead until rescue

Narcissistic cannibal’s are something we’re all familiar with but probably don’t realize it, the vast majority of cannibalistic murderers are this type, the most famous example of this is of course Jeffery Dahmer, what most people don’t understand about this case and the cases of most other cannibal serial killers is that the main focus of their crimes usually isn’t the cannibalism itself but rather other acts towards their victims and the killing itself, that’s why these crimes are often done in tandem to sexual ones as the killer in question’s reasoning is centered around power dynamics; their motivation rests within the idea that eating something is the ultimate way to be above it, a sort of food-chain complex

Last but not least there’s Cannibalistic ideation as a symptom of psychosis or other schizoaffective disorders, psychosis is what most people refer to when they talk about “going insane”, it’s a state any particular disturbed person can fall into which causes hallucinations and delusions, the desire to eat human flesh as a symptom while uncommon is not unheard of- in fact there’s several sub-disorders that have been named to define more specific and repeated circumstances

“Windigo psychosis” is one of these specific disorders which has only been observed within Native American communities, it’s thought that cultural context can affect how a persons psychosis manifests, and for Natives of North America within Algonquin speaking regions this particular form of it can occur which includes some amount of cannibalistic ideation as its symptom

(although I’d like to note that in cases of psychosis regardless of circumstances its rather uncommon for the person in question to act upon the thought, it’s a pervasive idea that schizophrenic or psychotic individuals are dangerous due to the frequent violent thoughts which can occur for these individuals, but it must be said that violent crimes are not committed by these people as often as some think, and self harm is far more common in these situations then the harm of others)

With that disclaimer out of the way! Let’s talk about pseudo-cannibalism! That’s not a real term that’s just what I call it, but it’s when a person only consumes a small, specific part of another human or prepares them in a very specific way, these category also includes ritualistic cannibalism and cannibalism as a death rite

Some interesting examples of this include Egyptian mummy candy! The creation of this substance entails the regular mummification process in which a dead body has its organs removed before being sewn back up, but rather then being wrapped in cloth the sarcophagus is filled with honey and left for a long time, in addition the person in question also consumed honey before death to really just be full of honey, this process is referred to as mellification and it’s thought that the substance produced was used as medicine once hardened, although I must stress that mellification is a theory and has not been confirmed to have actually happened in ancient Egypt by archaeologists, still it’s extremely interesting and I wanted to talk about it even if it hasn’t been confirmed as real

Although you know what kind of mummy eating actually did happen? Mummy parties! In Victorian England and America mummies we’re all the rage, people would buy them to keep in their house or host mummy parties which on occasion entailed crushing up bits of the mummy into powder and eating or SNORTING it! Sometimes the powder was even used as paint by combining it with sunflower oil- these practices are unfortunately why we don’t have many mummies anymore

As for cannibalism as a death rite, the practice has been observed in places like Brazil and Peru, and while the practice is essentially retired in the modern day there’s plenty of places that did so in the past

Okay that’s about all I’ve got off the top of my head, I encourage looking into into it yourself though! There’s many interesting things to be learned, additionally I’m not sure how accurate all of my information is, cannibalism is an obscure topic so sometimes stuff gets spread that isn’t true, like mellification and how we aren’t sure if it ever actually happened or not! Hope you enjoyed my ramble though!

[gallopavo]

Revenge for my friend, mellifering!

[quietplaceinthestars]

MELLIFICATION MELLIEFERA BABYGIRL IM SO SORRY I FORGOT ABOUT YOU TAR BABY BOY IM SO SORRY I FRHOT FUCKKKKKKKKKKK INHAD I had a beautiful cross over fic planned with pallor, whos hopefully getting his own fic. Fuckkkkkkkkk and commander kite who was a legends chara but i stole him. Fuckkkkkkkk and I haven’t even touched on marks. And god claud. Claud baby I’m going to write some sort of follow up bc Cordelia commented and I know I could come up with something even more devestatjng. Fuck it maybe I characterize daisy a lil.

[regicidal-optimism]

a girl may transpire against them || shi wudu, and arrogance to pierce the heavens; shi qingxuan, and not needing it.

johnny autery | asoftersea -16 | pedestrians - lia liao | jdebbiel | andatsea | utility monster - artbyblastweave | wind over water - pauline burbidge | night fireworks - jinta hirayama | daylight savings - mellific | codependence poll - cannivalisms | cleveland museum of art | mojangles font | andatsea | amonimy | angelica alzona for the root | morning tea - serge n. kozintsev | claude removes the squid - alexander wales | valtsv | shitty horoscopes book xi: illuminate - amrit brar | pondwater - choo | the sound of waves - lâm tùng nguyen | dirge without music - edna st vincent millay | shitty horoscopes book viii: medicine - amrit brar | starry night over the rhone - vincent van gogh | splinter - corpsentry | andatsea | miracle fish - ada limón | andatsea | cyanometer - horace-bénédict de saussure | with you - hajin bae | michael haddad for wired magazine | a girl in an impossible situation - intactics