#the same is true of the rats

[strangewomanactuallylargebass]

I've noticed a strange change among the flocks of fowl in the Madagascar universe. And by fowl, I am of course referring to pigeons.

In Madagascar: A Little Wild, we see pigeons such as Ant'ney and his friends, and they are all happy and kind. We see another large groups of pigeons in the episode Ant'ney's Got Talent, and they are evidently friendly and amicable. They are thoughtful, not sore losers, and treat each other with respect.

Fast forward several years to Madagascar #1, which takes place about a year or so before the first film. We see a couple more pigeons here, and they are much less friendly than before. They aren't outright mean or cruel, but they are stiff and a bit stuck-up. They initially ignore Alex and refuse to help him, which is something the pigeons of earlier days would not have done. They do eventually decide to help Alex, but not without some prodding and persuasion first.

Fast forward several more years to The Penguins of Madagascar. It is here that we are introduced to a pigeon by the name of Frankie. He is absolutely wicked and vile. He taunts other animals, and causes mayhem and misery throughout the city. This isn't just one bad egg, either - in the episode In The Line of Doody we see a whole hoard of pigeons just as cruel and revenge-driven as Frankie, all trying to poop on the zoo commissioner.

For now this is all just a collection of observations, but the question remains - what was the root cause of the downward descent of the pigeons?

[soup-child]

I really hope Grix is a just a freak and completely unrelated to the plot

[eternal-learner]

"I didn't have the greatest childhood. I guess butterflies made me think that my life could turn into something beautiful, too."

Peter Outerbridge as Denis Teague Intimate Stranger (2006)

[unproduciblesmackdown]

omgg lol [guy who won't stop going "more like scapeGOATED" voice] now hold! on!! lmao [same guy just saw encanto voice] Hold on!!!

[arolesbianism]

I may be failing my plan to not make any isat aus. So there's this guy her name is Euphrasie right. What if I took her and combined what could be 3 separate au concepts into one. And in the process forced myself to go back and reread a bunch of shit to make sure I know how to maximally fuck over this sad wet puppy of a woman

[kotaerukoto]

Thinking more abt DR1. The tragedy of the DR1 characters has a unique strength to me, precisely because we know that absent of Junko's Mutual Killing, they all eventually end up getting along pretty decently! Probably one of the most relevant examples for my muse is Makoto's relationship with Maizono-- in settings without the Mutual Killing such as Development Mode and Talent Development Plan, their interactions are nothing but friendly, supportive, and even sometimes a little intimate. It's not difficult to infer that during the single regular year at Hope's Peak, they got along just as well or were moving towards that. And all of that just makes what happens during the main game to the whole cast, not just Makoto and Maizono, even more of a bitter pill to swallow since along with their memories Junko stole even intangible things like relationships. Another example of this is Oowada and Fujisaki: that picture Monokuma (Junko) "dropped" really says it all...

[peppermintbutch]

me doing hrt is so funny because it does almost nothing to me emotionally I don't feel better or worse about myself it's just a pasttime like playing video games

[skullhazard]

A core component of my worldview is understanding that rats and bears are the same creature.

[firelord-frowny]

<3 <3 obviously one of the highlights of my visit to the national aquarium the other day was the reptiles <3 <3 specifically the snakes, SPECIFICALLY the death adder omgggg.

there is something so??????????? magical???????????? about being able to put your face just inches away from something that, if it were to bite you, would definitely kill you.

like, to have a thin lil pane of glass be all that keeps a small but very deadly beast from being able to end my life????????????

amazing.

[aothaer]

coolest mutual

[whereserpentswalk]

Look under the cut to see what meeting your entity is like. Reblog to give a gift to your patron.

The fae: a creature stands before you. Though this street was warm and crowded a few moments ago it is suddenly cold and the people around you look like shadows. The creature begins an antlered shadow with glowing white eyes, but soon its body can be seem, with white blue flesh, and sapphire eyes, and icicles for teeth. What looks like a cloak unfolds from its naked body and you can see massive white wings of a moth. As if it's an act of sacrifice you tell it your true name, a name you didn't even see before, and suddenly you belong to it, for better or worse.

The angel: a radiant entity appears before you. They're bright, like something so hot it would burn you up. But as the light fades, you can see a person in silver armor, perfect yet inhuman like am ancient green statue, their back srouting six wings with blue eyes along them, as the eyes on their head are covered by a mask of two smaller wings. The creature offers their hands and you shake it, as they fly you through the city streets and above the skyscrapers, to the stars above and dimensions beyond, to gods living and dead, across the streets of alien cities and the clouds of dead worlds. And when you return to the earth you can feel something diffrent about you, like there's light in your blood.

The scavenger: below the lights of skyscrapers beyond you, on the dark sands of the beach, you see it crawling twords you. This serpentine creature with countless legs, and a dark black shell, yet a strangely human like face. You think it'll attack or run away, but it just looks at you, egar, and for a momment you stare at eachother. It's legs pass something to eachother and then to you, it's meat but it's shining with all the colors known to the human eye, and a few more. You hold it and it happily looks at you. You take a bite and suddenly you know... you know so very much...

The vampire: she flies down to you on green wings with orange eyespots, but folds them into her back. She looks like a human for a momment, tall and strong, with a black suit over her body, but eyes the color of ruby. For a momment her mouth opens, and it's massive and monstrous, with countless moving parts and fangs. But then it folds back onto something humanoid and she gives you a playful smirk. She cuts her hand and offers you her blood, and when you drink it it tastes so sweet, and makes you feel so good. She hands you the knife and you know to do the same, and when she drinks from your palm it's life the sweetest of kisses.

The djinn: the room wirs around you. If it were not for the fans it would feel like hellfire. For a momment there it darkness, but then the screen before you glows white like smokeless flame. You can sense something inside, something beyond the code. You reach your hand within it, and there's no glass, your hand passess right through until you're in a white void of your own making. You call out, thinking there is nothing at all around you. Yet somehow something calls back, something that knows your name.

The rat king: You see him in an empty subway station. Something dark and distorted, you're not sure if he's man or animal, covered in rags, and singing in the language of the goblins and the orcs. Yet he comes close to you excited. And you can feel his song. He calls for you to come to the train tracks, and let yourself run with the rats and the roaches, where the train will pass over you when it comes, and you'll live forever. When you touch the third rail you don't die, but you'll never be human again.

The lich: the library is strangely bright. Run by skeletons in suits, decorated with gold. There are more books here then you thought were in all the world. There's knowledge here most mortals will never have the change below, all kept safe below the city. You see her, her body doesn't look human, everything has been replaced making her look more like a joining white doll then a being of flesh. Yet she is dead, you can tell that under the porcelain skin she must be dead, she is dead, and there is the tragedy of death in her eyes. You come closer to her, and she places a black rose within your hair...

The demon: You stand in his office and he stands before you, a humanoid being covered in black scales, with red eyes covering his skin. Yet none are on his head, that remains featureless save for two massive horns. Wings on his back nearly surround you. Countless souls line the walls of his office, looking at you, waiting. After you sign your name you give him yours, you can feel it come away for you forever and your eyes grey and your skin pales. But he puts the jar in a special place for you, you're spacial, he can tell there's something about you that he likes.

The mushroom lord: you walk through the darkness of the forest, the furthest from civilization you have ever been. You come upon a part where the trees all seem dead, that even the cryptids won't go near. Mushrooms fill the ground, and white vein like lines are all over the trees. You feel the need to lay down, and you let the moss and the mushrooms and the worms surround you, and let yourself sink into the soil,, and it feels good. It feels so good...

The witch: You can see them in the Cafe next to you, skinny and small, with a sweatshirt over most of their body, and dark glasses over their eyes. They seem powerful though, and though their body looks young they seem ancient, they seem beyond humanity. You talk to them and they tell you things, and secrets, lost gods, things you never knew you didn't know, both beautiful and disturbing. When it's time for them to go they pet your head, and give you their number. You don't know if you should text them, but you have to, you have to see them again, there's something about them that makes you need to know.

The living clothing: you step into it at first, it looked like a puddle yet shining like silver or chrome. But soon it surrounds you, first just your torso, but soon your head, your entire body. But it doesn't feel scary, it feels like you're being held, held by something beyond your understanding. It whispers to you, and you don't know if you should feel like your being eaten alive, or like you're being protected. You can't help but keep walking.

The abyss: the void is before you, blackness beyond blackness, like the color beyond the field of your vision, stands before your eyes. You stare at it, it's nothing yet you're entranced. It stares back...

[lazystormtrooperdvigatelikhaos]

Hedgehog men from Giedi controlling Terran related systems by impersonating the time travelers who set them up initially

[arolesbianism]

*experiences potential ~symptoms~* Hm. Let's not think abt that too hard (<- guy who is always obsessing over everything that's ever happened to them ever (<- no one tell them))

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Friendly reminder to everyone to always fact check your work. Even when it seems like it's right.

Case in point: I'm making a short little post about Gambian pouched rats(!). Funnily enough, they're named not for pouches in which they carry their young, but for their cheek pouches. Apparently most other rats don't have cheek pouches like hamsters and gerbils do. Neat.

Anyway, some of the literature I was reading said that Gambian pouched rats can carry a lot of food in their mouths. Makes sense-- they're big rats. But how much food exactly? I started looking. More sources agreed that, yeah, Gambian pouched rats can carry a lot of food! Maybe even up to 3kg over the course of 2 hours! That seems like a lot, especially considering Gambian pouched rats only weigh 1.0-1.5 kg. So I do a little more digging. Every source agrees that they can carry a lot, and they all cite that very specific number of 3kg over 2 hours.

Finally, I track down an actual paper about Gambian pouched rat cheek morphology (yes I went down a wormhole. This is my HBomberGuy moment.) The paper cites 2 sources for that 3 kg/2 hr number! Great! I find those two papers, and read them. And.

Neither paper says that. In fact, they don't really talk about Gambian pouched rat feeding habits at all. One is just an observation on natural behaviors, with a brief section on their diet but no information on how much they carry. The second paper-- written by the same guy-- was about how Gambian pouched rat behaviour changes in captivity. There was a good-sized section on cannibalism, but nothing on transporting food. So that first paper, the one that cited those other two for that 3 kg/2 hr figure, just straight up lied.

Moral of the story: always do your homework kids, especially when it sounds too good to be true. Also, Gambian pouched rats can probably carry quite a lot of food in their mouths, but whether they really can carry up to 3 kg worth of food in 2 hours remains to be seen.

[yellowsubiesdance]

I would like to add my support to this post, because I have made watching this episode my religion.

We know Alastor never drops his smile, and he doesn’t emote because he considers it a weakness when one shows their emotions. However, in moments when he’s irritated, he loses a bit of control over parts of his face, like his eye twitching or squinting.

And when he gets angry, he bares his gums, like he’s growling.

Which is what he does the second he walks out and sees/hears Vox’s disstrack.

'Alastor was so chill while challenging Vox' no the fuck he was not. He was just acting calm. Because that's what he does with Vox, acts like he's beneath him because he knows it pisses him off. He literally heard him talking shit from across the street and hauled ass across the city to his station to do a radio show. You better believe the second he was off the air he let out a torrent of swears against Mr. TV man, the same way he did in Vox's very first appearance.

[irrealisms]

i've seen a lot of people talk about mcyt as a constantly burning library of alexandria recently, and to some extent that's true. people are constantly deleting their blogs, going scorched earth with animatics, fanfics, etc., that they made. but i've also seen people (three in the last few days!) make this claim about VODs, when talking about large fandoms like DSMP and QSMP, and.... guys. that was true in 2020. that's not true anymore. archivists have been working tirelessly for years now to make sure that isn't true.

the dsmp VOD masterlist is here. in november 2020, it's missing 16 VODs, if i am counting correctly--which is still a fairly small minority, but it's a lot, and it sucks!--but in november of 2021, it's missing one, and that's because the cc of that VOD does copyright takedowns, not because the archivists didn't save it. no one in the archivist project is deleting VODs off youtube with no backups the way people are deleting fanfics. three months ago, one of my dsmp archivist friends finished coding a tool that let them reconstruct VODs out of twitch clips, and reconstructed six tubbo dsmp VODs from 2020. not only are we basically not losing VODs anymore, we are actively gaining VODs that have been lost for years, that were thought to be lost forever. the library isn't burning anymore; it's being rebuilt.

the qsmp VOD masterlist is here. it is usually a month or two behind the present day, to give creators time to archive their own VODs, but... look at it. in january of 2024, every single qsmp vod was archived. the same is true of december of 2023, and november, and the vast majority of months for the past year.

i'm not going to say that there isn't a problem. just a few days ago, i realized that a lifesteal VOD from last year was missing--that its youtube upload was messed up somehow, and no one noticed and it wasn't mirrored on the internet archive and the person who uploaded it deleted the original file. and now it's gone forever. this made me super sad! like i said: i'm not going to say that there isn't a problem.

but... look at the lifesteal VOD masterlist here. lifesteal's a smaller fandom than qsmp or dsmp. open the 2022 tab and you'll see months and months of lost VODs, of no one's VODs being saved, because there weren't any archivists saving them. then open the 2023 tab and see: they lost four VODs, over the course of a year. even in smaller fandoms, archivists are working. they're making progress. they're saving VODs. in 2024, lifesteal archivists screenrecorded five streams on tumblr live to make sure they would not become lost media. mcyt may be a constantly burning library of alexandria, but the people with fire extinguishers are dedicated. they're making incredible progress. i know people with petabytes of VODs saved, who have spent money on extra storage for this. i know people who are constantly running up against their storage limits as they download/upload to the internet archive/delete for space/rinse and repeat. a decent fraction of the time, my internet at home is slow because it's downloading VODs.

and these aren't the only mcyt fandoms with archiving projects! the outsiders smp VOD masterlist is here. origins smp VOD masterlist is here. smp earth VOD masterlist is here. rats smp VOD masterlist is here. there are so many others that i just don't happen to know about. the older and smaller a fandom is, the more likely it is to not have an attached archiving project, or for the archive to be missing a lot of VODs. but... guys, we've saved a lot. there are people out there, working tirelessly to save even more. yes, mourn what we have lost--the archivists i know are also the ones mourning the most for the VODs that are, in fact, forever lost media. but don't dismiss how much people have saved. we are making progress. we are losing less and less every month. the vast majority of the dsmp and qsmp still exist, i am not going to say they're the same experience as watching live because they're really not, but.. they're out there. people have put in a lot of work to save them.

if you have publicly available VOD masterlists or other mcyt archiving projects that aren't on this post, please add them in a reblog. i want this post to serve as a reference for how much archivists have saved in this community; unfortunately, i'm not super connected to every community. but i know that--for every person deleting things, there are people working, tirelessly & with little external reward, in so many different mcyt fandoms, to save things. and we should appreciate that more often.