#sometimes living its cool

[myewt]

Nobody get it NOBODY GETS IT BUT

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Lan Wangji might be an unstoppable force, but Xie Lian has 800+ years of practice of being an immovable object.

(poll results here for context)

[razzafrazzle]

strange old men!! theyre married for tax purposes (and gay purposes but thats less important)

[image description: a drawing of human designs for coach z and bubs from homestar runner. coach z is depicted as a lanky pale-skinned older man with a tooth gap, a five-o'clock shadow, and balding curly light brown hair with a grey streak through it. bubs is depicted as a bulky, dark-skinned older man with short greying afro hair and a short beard. end id]

[isbergillustration]

Hey. Can you hear me down there? I'm going to get you out, I swear, somehow. I'm going to get you out.

[serpentface]

What exactly are living gods in the blightseed universe?

Ok here's the (DANGEROUSLY vestigial at this point) Meta Deeplore:

There is a material form of energy that is utilized by biological bodies essentially as an animating force. This IS the vaguely defined, extremely ambiguous magic in the setting. It is what produces the actual experience of Consciousness and can be basically considered 1:1 with conscious experience. All life utilizes this energy (whether actually conscious life in the traditional sense or not).

It cannot be created or destroyed, and rather follows pathways of dispersal between one material plane and a parallel plane. This parallel plane is 'the ether' 'the dreamlands' etc, and has its own matter. Discrete entities from the dreamlands are essentially formed as a byproduct of consciousness and, when interacted with, are deeply susceptible to the influence of conscious Thought (they are essentially matter organized By consciousness and can be reorganized by consciousness)

These are the entities that can become living gods. Dreamlands fauna occasionally slips into prime material reality, at which point they are directly under the influence of consciousness and can be transformed. Dreamlands fauna in of itself is not directly perceivable but produces a sense of Presence, like the feeling of being watched when alone in the wilderness, a 'third man effect', a sense of inexplicable awe or fear, seeing shadows from the corner of your eye, etc. The combination of their tangible effects and their susceptibility to consciousness creates a self-reinforcing cycle that produces living gods.

IE: if one is on a forest and people experience the sensation of its presence, belief that there is some entity there may develop. This will follow the lines of the cultural worldview- say there are already beliefs in spectral hounds that encounter travelers at night, it might be interpreted as a location-specific hound, given a name and identity through stories. This in turn causes the dreamlands fauna to physically embody that form and the assumed qualities, and people will start having absolute materially real encounters with it, thus reinforcing the initial beliefs that created it and generating new elements of the mythology. This is what a living god is.

They need persistent, localized, and coherent beliefs to hold their forms. If a village creates a living god and is then wiped out in a disaster, the god will gradually lose its form and return to its initial state of a sense of Presence. This is also a limiting factor on the 'size' and power of a living god, if an entire religion formed around it and became a widespread phenomena, the living god itself cannot 'keep up'. It is sustained on direct and localized interactions, so belief becoming widely dispersed (especially if the localized belief is lost) will cause it to gradually become less discrete. The effect of this property is that living gods are almost always minor deities or spirits tied to a specific location by a specific nearby culture. A lot of deities in larger religions may have once had a living god component that is now indiscrete.

The living god of the Ur-tree is an unusual exception in that it was created over millennia, basically by the survival instincts of the Plants it interacts with, and has held its form over hundreds of millions of years due to this being ubiquitous and un-susceptible to cultural change. The only thing that could 'kill it' is if its forest was entirely destroyed.

So 99% of living gods can be described as thoughtforms created by the process of folkloric/religious development. They are created BY people and not the other way around, and nothing about their nature confirms or denies the existence of other deities or etc.

And yeah I'm going to be 100% real I am REALLY tempted to dump even this extremely ambiguous magical element like it is soooooooooooooooo fucking NOT important to the setting at this point. I've kind of allowed 'literal god entities created by mortal belief' to be just a tiny part of the world's fabric by their nature, like it works within the worldbuilding for such a hugely significant concept to ultimately be insignificant in the overall framework, so I COULD just Leave It but idk. If it were not for me wanting to still have my big fucking god tree and a talking dog as an actual character it would be out of here soooo fast..........

[ad-astra-per-aspera-1389]

oughgh this au is causing me pain. will gaines (frankie and jenny's dad) is the more empathetic one between himself and sig, and he's (as he so would) handling marcus learning to accept will as an adoptive parent after losing his first dad (bc not really a biological father and creator isnt something they can say in public, and it also sounds impersonal) and he's handling it SO WELL. will gaines my beloved fr...

[wildlyfreemoon]

just finished s5 of twd... can someone just tell me what happened?

like i enjoy the show bc its kinda easy to have in the bg... but also like i find (other than the prison x woodbury arc) there is rarely any like... plot...

[butchrindou]

i’m so pressured with improving myself as an artist and it’s making me lose it because i’m not even doing art for my career but i love it so much. Like i kinda feel useless doing it sometimes, especially since i see other artists and i know damn well i will never achieve that level and im not saying this for people to feel pity but idk i feel like my art style doesn’t fit tr.???3! or like idk. Sometimes i’ll literally cry because i feel like my art style doesn’t fit rindou and she’s literally my muse, she’s the reason why i get so excited to sit down and draw everyday yet i feel like im just stuck sitting somewhere where i can’t do anything special to show my love for her and it sounds silly.. bc that’s a fictional character but still, ive liked this character for so long and i see improvement just from drawing rindou non stop but i still feel like im just barely touching the surface of improvement. Also i feel like i care too much about what others may like vs what i want to try and draw.. i want to draw her raw and literally how i perceive her, her character, her body, every single aspect of her and why she’s so important to me. Yet i can’t do that because i get so scared of the outcome/how my artwork looks/ how others will perceive it. And im not saying im not happy with my art, i am but there’s just ways i want to do it i feel like wont stick out to others which scares me or it will seem ooc of rindou. literally because of this i always have the urge to delete my account and restart and continue doing that till i feel like i perfected her yet i dont think that’ll ever happen even with how much love i have for that character

[michaels-office-hours]

I’m so normal about my wife

[gifti3]

I like to to think mcs who wouldnt fall into the conventionally attractive category getting shooked when multiple demons find them attractive

[dullahandyke]

'if youre looking to be secure, MFA is best' shut up + dont speak to me again + rot in hell + fuck you + fuck you again + let me turn it off or i crush you and your family with my psychic powers.

[r0semultiverse]

Iroh in this adaptation is still as lovely as ever. Hot & cute old man.

[letsjam-art]

silly idea time

idk how this idea even started but the outfit i had in mind was way back from a doodle in 2021 or 2022, basically my 'what if' for temperance ending only instead of being wildly ooc and wearing a collared button up johnny becomes a cowboy. and because i was listening to vagrant song from wtwtlw (that whole ost really, and hardspace shipbreaker) i had the bright idea that johnny would finally become what his class in the ttrpg was an homage to and wander around collecting stories n telling them n kind of being a dead man walking/ghost story/witness/helper-bard r smthn but having been extremely tempered by the experience of v choosing to die for him, being shocked enough into actually thinking about his beleifs n what have you, humbled enough now to want to listen to others hed choose this path of wandering the continent of na, maybe for the first time in a long time actually taking in life around him yadda yadda. in my little scenario i also had it that even if/when the next corpo war broke out or the nusa annexed more free states, he wouldnt get involved like he used to, cause i think its interesting to muse on how a profound experience would greatly change someone so stuck in their ways like johnny. i think hed still be motivated by guilt and avoidance at first, but it would evolve into something more like a calling/altruism as he takes more seriously and uses more intentionally the time he was given as a dead man walking

also i realize how much of this 'outfit' is just putting v in a hat and calling them johnny like its some perry the platypus thing (also idk how to draw hats)

[hana-bobo-finch]

ii know I’ve said in the past that pumpkin daddy is Not in my minicomic he is Definitely not there he is Not but he is now. sorry guys

[locallysourcedshuggy]

brain not braining, write not writing, the horrors of being gay and having ethel cain as ur #1 on spotify, my dog walking away as im trying to pet her, my bb fanfic remaining untouched for several weeks

[bmpmp3]

thank god for indie devs making like tiny little maximum 10 megabyte freeware games on itchio keeping the art of filesize optimization alive. ASSET REUSE FOREVER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!