#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]

[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..........

[c1trvswurld]

I tried so hard to selfship that it made me realize that I was aegosexual, and that's somethin man

[so-i-macedup-abit]

i love you pokken aegislash

[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...

[telesodalite]

Sort of a ramble, sort of me just writing my thoughts out while I'm stuck with writer's block, but I keep thinking about how Fulcrum was in stasis for roughly 3 million years??

Like, that's a long time, even for Cybertronians. Not a really long time, not an entire lifespan. But still, it's a large chunk of a normal lifespan just gone. Poof.

One second you're crawling across the pockmarked terrain of an alien planet, surrounded by the sound of gunfire, and the shouting and screaming before and after each earth shuddering impact of another k-con hitting the ground. And then it's quiet. You're not there anymore. You're drifting somewhere between not alive and just asleep. Preserved somewhere in the background of a doomed body, ignored by time and space, still here, but also not.

And then there's sound. Not gunfire. Not shouting or screaming. Not the sounds that'll haunt you till your dying days, your own death sentence pounding in your head. No. Just voices, talking, standing out against a silent, dead world. Wondering. Joking. Bickering. Familiar. Just, not familiar to you. And you're awake. Pulled back from the nothingness you've been frozen in, consciousness tugged forwards with the yank of a fuel pump and the nearness of life.

These two moments are roughly 3 million years apart, but only minutes, maybe even seconds, to him. From a hectic harrowing battlefield, to an old silent graveyard in one blink.

How long did it take to really sink in? I mean, he seems to just roll with it. He doesn't seem particularly bothered. But like, what happened outside of what we see? How did he really feel?

Also, his body aged without him. While his mind preserved itself, freezing him as he was right then, his body was left to weather Clemency for all those years. No wonder it crumbled to dust when he jumped off the world sweeper. It's probably a miracle of some kind that it didn't just fall apart each time someone leaned on him.

And even after they rebuild him, give him a better, newer body. His spark, it's casing, all the irreplaceable core bits that make up their inner bodies, it aged in the time without him. Does he feel it? Does it make his body even more foreign to him?

Then he's also a technician with information that's 3 million years out of date. Lucky him that the scavengers probably weren't working with top of the line material. But still it's gotta be weird when faced with anything brand new, because a lot can change and progress in 3 million years, and now some of the knowledge he once prided himself in is obsolete.

Besides those things, his view of the galaxy, of the war, of their kind, of other kinds, is one of the few things actually pointed out when it comes to him being stuck in the past. So, how often were his old views challenged? Facts of life he held close proved to no longer true? There's 3 million years worth of new science, new beliefs, new words, new terms, new views.

And sure, some of it can be familiar, because they're an ever evolving kind, and they have patterns, core beliefs, repeating behaviors, but a lot of it's gonna be unfamiliar at the same time, because it's 3 million years worth of catch up, it's not like missing last week's trend.

In a way, it makes him a living relic of a bygone era for Decepticons. It would've been really interesting to have had that explored a little more.

[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

[way2gosuperrstarr]

ok sometimes i like to think of the blorbos/dca seeing me at work when i think i do something cool

[r0semultiverse]

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

[evercelle]

How do you find motivation ??

Like, if I'm drawing, I lose interest quite quickly and then just never continue it.

Bad habit, how do you prevent that from happening ??

it's usually either bc (A) there's something missing in the fanwork out there and i have to fill the gap, e.g. i wanna depict a character a certain way or draw a niche self-indulgent AU, or (B) i got a LOT of feelings and need to exorcise the demons from my body somehow!!

i think motivation has to come from why you wanna draw... for me, it's because i want to share what i like/appreciate/feel about media! it's hard for me to just. bring it up in conversation, even with close friends... so i draw it instead, bc it's the way i'm most comfortable expressing my enthusiasm. there's lots of different reasons for wanting to draw (original/fan story only you can tell! wanted to find other people who feel the way you do! need to earn income! just wanted to make a cool picture! also needed to exorcise demons from your body!!), and it's OK if it's not "deep" or anything, but it's definitely something you have to find for yourself

[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)

[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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!