You’re an enchanted suit of armor, completely hollow on the inside. After gaining sentience, you left your haunted keep & began to adventure. As you gain notoriety across the land, making friends & connections, it gets harder to keep it a secret that there’s nothing behind your visor.

There’s only so far you can get with telling your friends that you have burn scars or whatnot that make you self-conscious about being seen. They’ll kindly give you privacy to eat meals alone. But you have to hide that food somewhere. And no one teaches enchanted suits of armor about how fast an egg salad sandwich starts to stink. (Plus it kind of slorps around when you walk.)

Well, that’s what pets are for. An animal to eat some of it, a plant to have more, and a mimic for the rest.

Now there’s some forward thinking! The question is just what kind of hungry little omnivore is best suited to the task. Bonus points if it talks.

With a soft hiss of steel sliding on steel, the suit of armour shifted. “Ah… food. I had to find a solution for that.” it said.

From somewhere inside the suit’s chest a small muffled voice said, “Oh so now I’m a solution? I feel so valued.”

The armour sighed and pushed its visor open. With a scrabble and some huffing, a possum climbed up and peeked out.

“Please ta’ meetcha,” it said, fanning its face. “Woo. Fresh air at last.”

Then as I watched in fascination, it clambered out and sat on the shoulders of the armour.

“My boy here, he’s a good guy, the best, but lemme tell you, you do not want to be inside when he’s standing in direct sunshine, you know? I mean if you smell toast, I’m telling you now it’s not a stroke - I live on grilled cheese. But if you smell roast possum, pour some ice in there, I’ll thank you later” the possum said, rolling its eyes.

“I wish you would be a little more circumspect,” said the haunted armour. “I do believe it is a little suspicious how much bread and butter and processed cheese we progress through in any given week.”

The possum reached up and slapped its little black paw on the top of the helmet; “You can fit so many grilled cheeses inside this bad boy.”

I love it! That deserves art!

I did it. @marlynnofmany @cuprohastes @nightcapd

I LOVE IT!

people who don’t watch horror movies are SO confident that they know everything there is to know about the genre. like it’s okay to not know things. it’s okay if you don’t like friday the 13th or whatever. i promise you don’t need to make an ass out of yourself on the internet about it

horror is an incredibly diverse genre, because there is potential horror in everything. it’s in nature, it’s in architecture and technology, it’s in human relationships, it’s in folklore, the past, the future, the mundane. there are horror movies from all over the world. it is straight up anti-intellectual to pretend that the handful of B slashers you’ve vaguely heard about comprise the totality of what horror has to offer. If you’re just not interested in horror, or if you dislike certain subgenres of horror, then that’s fine, you’re not obligated to like anything at all. but smugly announcing that you don’t like horror because you dislike a handful of VERY specific non-universal tropes is just as stupid as saying that you hate comedy because you don’t like adam sandler movies.

this is what I mean by anti-intellectualism btw

ladies, ladies, please- one at a time! i can only block you so fast

So Arizona launched an “education hotline” that allows “concerned parents” to report “””critical race theory””” and other things like ~gender identity~ being taught in the classroom

It would be a shame if the number and email were spread to bad actors looking to prank call the AZ Department of Education

602-771-3500 or empower @ azed .gov 🤡

and for the love of god, don’t just spam it with memes or le funny shrek jokes or whatever, they’ll just hang up

make plausible-sounding reports for things that don’t actually exist, so that they actually have to waste time/resources investigating false leads - the goal is to waste time they would otherwise be using to do their jobs, not to get tumblr clout for being an epic troll

So apparently the internet article said the superintendent wouldn't be deterred by the prank calls because they would 'taper off eventually'. It'd be a real shame if this post stayed in circulation via queues so they get a consistent list of prank calls to filter through. 😇

It feels both sad and absurd that my home country (China) banned ghosts and demons from appearing in horror movies. I shit you not. It’s considered to be not family friendly.

Countries that don’t have this level of censorship don’t know just how lucky they are and will still bitch and cry about seeing a butt cheek in media

But sir, these aren't ghosts, they're behavioral AI reconstructions of past family members being holographically projected into the home.

Something I didn’t expect to learn in art history is just how human the old masters were.

Artists beefing over clients and stalking each other to learn their techniques. Michelangelo hating his job and being dragged kicking and screaming back to work on the chapel. Alphonse Mucha wondering if he had gone wrong in life before an opportunity finally presented itself. Raphael taking five attempts to get a nipple right.

It gives a lot of confidence doesn’t it

The Internet

Steampunk is gone, so the new weird based-on-alternate-history fashion trend is whiskeypunk, which is… (rolls dice) the 1920s if magic was everywhere

Fashion concepts:

- Pyrokinetic prohibition-breakers with flint gauntlets that give them sparks to turn into fireballs to throw at the police

- Lycanthrope mafia members wearing intricately detailed rings with sharp points extending over the finger so that they don’t lack claws while in human form

- Flapper dress made of live, electric blue butterflies

- A derby hat with holes carefully cut to allow a fae king’s antlers through

- Selkies wearing their seal skins around their necks like ermine furs, making other socialites jealous

I love it, let’s do it.

Merfolk rum-running in the rivers, and sirens singing at the speakeasy!

This actually feeds into my theory that fantasy starts 100 years into the past. Steampunk was the 1890s for the 1990s, and this is the 1920s for the 2020s.

[id: photo of a circular vintage button pin with no background beyond the circle. The pin is a shiny creamy white color with black bold text that reads in all capital letters "Art is anything you can get away with" /end id]

Fungi are truly the nearst thing to immortality we have on this planet

I’ve got to talk about this.

The recent sex negative trend is being fueled by the increase in ultra-right rhetoric. It’s an attempt to rebrand feminism as a way to prevent (white) women from being anything sexually other than breeding units in restrictive marriages to young men. Consider all the “groomer” crap around LGBT anything. This is adjacent to it.

That said, there is an abuse problem in BDSM. It’s easy to look at BDSM and think “Hey, that’s a way I can get access to pussy without having to care about women!” Of course, anyone who actually spends any real time in BDSM communities understands that no, it’s actually harder than vanilla if you’re doing it right. But some abusers always try to get in, try to show they’re valid BDSM practitioners, and lure impressionable wannabe subs into bad situations. So, the community is constantly having to police itself to weed out the predators.

I should know. I co-ran a blog showcasing these abusers and predators for a few years.

So, when is being anti-BDSM honestly about being anti-abuse, and when is it about controlling women? Always look to the amount of agency the warners assign to the potential victims. If someone is saying, “Your desires are valid, but there are ways people can exploit them, so watch out for this,” then you’re in the clear. If, on the other hand, they’re saying, “You don’t know what you want, you’re a bad person if you want that, don’t go after that,” then they’re trying to remove your agency. They’re trying to become your abuser in a different way.

Watch out for that. And whether you’re into BDSM or not, always watch out for people who don’t want you thinking for yourself.

Hi um so when Roko’s Basilisk happens can you do me first? 👉👈🥹 pweaaaase???

Reminder of the classically Christian nature of Roko's Basilisk. You just need to bring about a terrible Rapture.

More unconventional world-threatening disasters for your heroes to fight

Admech offering emotional support to fellow beep boops!

‘This is so shameful, what would your teachers and family think about you drawing freaky smut’

I got extra anatomy homework from my drawing professor because he said the butts are not juicy enough

Totally or how some men assume if a guy is respectful to women he MUST be gay or a straight up simp who’ll eventually become a “doormat”

This always amuses me, because it's the guys who can't be respectful that always lose out. Constantly. They smack you because you're winning at a game they can't play.

One of my favorite thing I’ve learned about animals studies is that you should avoid using colorful leg bands when you’re banding birds because you can accidentally completely skew the data because female birds prefer males with colorful bands

Apparently if you put a red band on a male red wing blackbird his harem size can double

So like you can completely frick up the natural reproduction of a group of birds by giving a guy a bracelet so stylish that females CANNOT resist him

Me, putting a red bracelet on the leg of a male red wing blackbird: ON GOD we gonna get u some pussy bro

I remember reading a study where researchers realized that female birds of a certain species preferred males with a darker breast. So they created what they literally called a “Super-Sexy Male” by catching a male and coloring his chest with a marker. They then ran dna tests on the eggs in the area.

Previously when the researchers had run these tests, they found a certain amount of infidelity was common for these birds. Somewhere around 10% of eggs were fathered by males who were not the primary mates of females.

After the advent of the Super Sexy Male, however, stuff got crazy in bird world. Infidelity skyrocketed, with upwards of 25% of ALL EGGS in the area being fathered by this specific male. Furthermore, his mate’s eggs were 100% his.

This is just insane to me. Just imagine you’re living your bird life when suddenly somebody scribbles on Dave’s chest and the ladies can’t stop throwing themselves at them. It’s stupid that we theoretically can wreck this kind of havoc on an ecosystem.

via @elytrians

It's hilarious to me when people complain about AO3 and its policies, and what they allow on the site - but it's ESPECIALLY funny when people complain like "Why can't the freaks make their own site and just go there?"

Sweetie... AO3 is the site for that. Y'all invaded our space.

Wattpad and FFN still exist. Go there. They're as shitty and G-rated as you want. You can't have the luxuries that AO3 offers if you're gonna be a little bitch about its policies. Imagine walking into a strip club and complaining about the alcohol and naked ladies when there's a god damn Dennys next door you could have gone to. Christ.

AO3 is the equivalent of someone with oppressive family who - after their bedroom was ransacked, phone stolen, computer hacked, half their contacts deleted, and personal property thrown into a bonfire by said family - moved out and got their own place.

Except the fact that they’re successful and have such a nice house they invite all their friends, who obey AO3′s house rules, to visit who means that all the unwelcome family members want to come over as well because the house is just so nice.

Except those relatives are just as unpleasant and entitled as before and start trying to enforce their own house rules despite the fact that said relatives don’t live there, don’t own the house, and have never been invited to live there and are only allowed inside because AO3 is better than they are.

“If you don’t like my rules then get out of my house.”

AO3 didn’t like the rules. AO3 left that house. AO3 got its own place and set its own rules. But then the asshole relatives followed them home and started pretending they owned the place as soon as they were let into a guest room.