Back in the summer of 2006, exciting things were on the horizon for Nintendo fans. Nintendo’s new console, the Wii, was just a few months away, and with it would come The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. On the more immediate horizon, however, was the Japanese release of Pokemon Diamond and Pearl.

Munchlax and Bonsly had appeared in the anime and the side game Pokemon XD: Gale of Darkness, and rumor had it that for the first time the starters would deviate from the Grass/Fire/Water formula. There were a few minor leaks, such as Lickitung and Magmar getting evolutions, which a few people drew their own interpretations of. These images being used in hoaxes such as fake leaks ultimately lead to what those who were there call The Summer of Fakemon.

It felt like new fake leaks were appearing every day. It was pretty easy to recognize most as being fake, but for some it was hard to be sure, while others were completely convincing. At that point, I’d been drawing and editing sprites for a Sailor Moon web comic for about two years, so I was mostly interested in the pixel art aspect of all the fakes. Granted, I wasn’t very GOOD with pixel art, but I still enjoyed it. When I threw my hat into the hoaxing ring, it was with something that I thought would fall into the “obviously fake” category.

It was picked up by several major Pokemon fan sites, particularly Spanish-language ones for some reason, and got around enough that Serebii added it to their Fake Pokemon page. I think the reason a lot of people believed it was real might have been because it was just too ugly. If someone were trying to pass off a fakemon as real, they would make it cute or cool, not ugly and weird, right?

My fondest memory of people reacting to it was one person, who seemed to believe that it was real, referring to it as “Cthulhu’s dog”.

I didn’t bother making it look convincing, since I didn’t think anyone would buy it and it was going to be in a small distorted image anyway. As you can see, it’s crudely cobbled together… but what exactly are we looking at here? As luck would have it, I never delete my working files.

The head is actually that of a Beautifly, with a single smoothed-out Articuno wing mirrored to serve as both ears (…or whatever those things are), which also seems to be where I got the blue color palette.

The body is an Espeon’s. You can actually see those lines, left over from the legs, in the final design.

The fins are the leg-wing-things of a Crobat, recolored but otherwise unedited.

Needless to say, when I started I just thought that Beautifly’s head would look interesting, and had no clear idea what direction I was going with the design.

Next up was a Gorebyss tail, and this is where things went a little… experimental. I knew that I didn’t want that purple fan on the end, but I really didn’t know what the end of the tail SHOULD look like.

I ultimately settled on the tail in the bottom-right, which is actually the feathers from the top of a Swablu’s head. I considered leaving it like that, but felt like it was still a little too simple. I decided to add part of a Magikarp tail, to make it more similar to the Kingdra design in the top-right.

From there, for whatever reason, I had the idea to shape the tail into a fishing net, hence the creature’s name, Tsurigu (Japanese for fishing tackle). I honestly have no idea if anyone but me ever saw the tail as a fishing net.

Finally, the adornments! I used the rear part of Lanturn’s antenna, editing it just enough so that the ball portion looked like it was in the foreground. I removed the bottom (earlobe?) parts of the modified Articuno wings, and drew on some gold rings just to add a few points of visual interest.

There you have it! Eleven years later, the full truth of Tsurigu’s creation. It’s hard to say how far it spread or how many people saw it, considering it’s been so long and most of the sites that posted it have disappeared. Over the years I’ve seen the design used in a few different ways, including things like reinterpretations and a creature made in Spore that I can no longer find.

My favorite is actually one from just last year, by DeviantArt user Urbinator17.

It was never that well-known, and at this point has been almost entirely forgotten, but the terrible amalgamation once called Cthulhu’s dog is a highlight of The Summer of Fakemon, and one of my favorite memories of 2006.

Pokemon Heritage Post

“Do it scared” “do it badly” it’s time to drop the guide for do it alone

Doing it scared and doing it badly is one thing, but no one seems to talk about doing it alone. When you feel so isolated from your friends and your family but you have shit to do and you have to get it done no matter what. When your support system really is only you. For any myriad of reasons. We do not talk enough about doing it alone.

Want guides? I do Guides.

Other things? Job, Food, Car, Home, Health, Money. Plus a request form.

Doing it alone the next 1,282 days

Does Jeff Fowler know this? Someone get him on the phone. I think it's a good offer.

I don't know if anyone reposted it here

From Twitter

I love this man he's so cool with the fans! And also lore from behind the scene!!!

website

StopNCII.org is operated by the Revenge Porn Helpline which is part of SWGfL, a charity that believes that everyone should benefit from technology, free from harm. Founded in 2000, SWGfL works with a number of partners and stakeholders around the world to protect everyone online

Sounds legit

Hey, look at me. Look at me. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: you need to condition yourself to being okay with being inconvenienced by things. The first time I spoke about this I meant it in a mental health way- it is good to go out to the store and see people versus just ordering alone at home- but there is another more pressing societal issue you should be more concerned about as well.

Any service you rely on for convenience can be weaponized against you the moment you begin to rely on it. Streaming used to be a cheap and convenient way to see movies at home. It is now exorbitantly expensive, you need multiple accounts just to get what you want, and any of those movies can be taken from you at any time. And unless you have gotten used to going through the “inconvenience” of owning physical media, you can do nothing about it. Same goes for buying things on Amazon. Same goes for any service like DoorDash etc. These companies WANT you to be reliant on them for convenience so they can do whatever they want to you because, well, what else are you gonna do?

Same thing goes for the uptick in AI. If you train yourself to become reliant on AI for doing basic things, you will be taken advantage of. It is only a matter of a couple years before there are no free AI services. Not only that, but in the usage of AI’s case, it is robbing you of valuable skills that you need to curate that you will be helpless without the moment the AI companies drive in the knife the way they have done with streaming. Delivery. Cable. Internet. Etc. It will happen to AI too. And if you are not practicing skills such as. Writing. You are not only going to be at the mercy of AI companies in the digital world, but you are going to be extremely easy to take advantage of in real life too.

I am begging you to let go of learned helplessness. I am begging you to stop letting these companies TEACH you helplessness. Do something like learn to pirate. It is way more inconvenient at the beginning, but once you know how, it is one less way companies can take advantage of you. Garden. Go to the thrift store (older clothes hold up better anyway). These things take more time and effort, yes, but using time and effort are muscles you need to stretch to keep yourself from being flattened under the weight of our capitalist hellscape.

Inconvenience yourself. Please. Start with only the ways you are able. Do a little bit at a time. But do something.

im a bit of a pointless hater about certain usages of the term “monsterfucker” bc i think it’s often one of those things people say but don’t believe with their whole chest. like if all the “monsters” you like are vampires and similar mopey human-looking folks it’s possible you are actually just into goths. Let’s not dilute the beautiful world of teratophilia for our bloodborne sex soldiers out there fucking and sucking in yharnam or whatever. Anyone on earth would fuck a vampire. that’s vanilla

Don't you DARE gatekeep monsterfucking OP, all fuckers of all monsters are valid. If one person mostly prefers the twink bodytype and another prefers the bear bodytype, they're both still attracted to men. Some people fuck monsters because of the taboo of finding something dangerous or other than "human" attractive and some people fuck monsters because they want to feel a tentacle force their butthole open like an anteater snout into a termite mound. All of us are nasty freaks and there's no need to create unneeded barriers between us.

if we’re considering essentially cannibalistic human people with bad teeth to be monsters we must include those who are attracted to British people under the banner of monsterfucking lest someone feel invalidated

So I have a theory about this:

The "attraction to vampires and other mostly-human monsters" end of the spectrum gets debated like this because it is both monsterfucking AND normie at the same time. It also has its equal and opposite twin in wanting to fuck a person so idealized they no longer resemble a human.

Hear me out. (Long post under the cut)

Actually I'd like to revise my opinion a bit because I'm hydrated now and my friend in chat pointed out that my "inhumanity of form" and "recognition of personhood" are just two of the MANY axes upon which the monsterfuckerness of anything can be judged, so I propose this:

Kink in general, but ESPECIALLY monsterfucking, is the exploration of what could be. Playing Imagination, if you will. Therefore, it's opposite is a total lack of imagination.

Since it's extremely weird for a human to be totally without creativity, what you get is a bimodal distribution on either side with a sharp dip in the middle, where the vast majority of people are into something A Little Weird, tapering out the Spiders Georgs out there who want to be actually jacked off by the invisible hand of the marketplace or suchlike esoteric and unachievable fantasies.

Hence, wanting to fuck a vampire is both monsterfucking and normie at the same time.

An Example Graph for people that didn't take stats back in high school: The distribution of attraction on the Hyperhuman-to-Inhuman Anatomical Axis of Monster Fuckery (one of MANY axes of monsterfuckery)

Figure 1: classic Nonhuman Antatomical Form Monsterfucker Spectrum

Figure 2: Proposed Inverse of the previous spectrum, AKA "Hyperhuman Anatomical Form" Monsterfucker Spectrum:

Figure 3: The full spectrum of Deviance From Human Anatomy Axis of Monsterfuckery:

My theory is that you can analyze "Monsterfuckery" on various axes (inhumanity of form, social monstrosity, etc.) and the population distribution will shake out the same way.

don’t let anyone on this website call you cringe they literally have a tumblr account

What I love about this site is the fact it's the closest I've gotten to pre-2000 internet in years. No one knows anyone's real name, photos are entirely optional, and we're pretty sure at least one of our mutuals is 100% lying about everything. There's a reason it's one of the only social media sites I keep coming back to. It somehow manages to be just as horrible, enjoyable, and chaotic as 1990s chat rooms used to be.

The internet is a gentrified neighbourhood and we’re a stubborn old lady refusing to sell her run-down home to the developers.

Oh they already sold us to the developers and the developers went bankrupt trying to dislodge us.

Get yourself a fabric store that will light your fabric on fire for you

No but legit I asked what the fiber content of something was and the guy didn’t know so he cut a chunk off and lit it on fire and felt the ashes and was like. Yeah this is mostly cotton with a lil bit of silk. And that was the moment I knew. This is it. This is the fabric store for me. Also that guy is marriage material. Not for me but damn some person is gonna be so happy with him.

Ok but this is actually one of the easiest ways to tell what something is made of! I did a textiles degree and one day as part of a class we all went outside with a pile of scrap fabric and set fire to the little pieces and recorded how they burned. We were given a chart that looked something like this to tell what each fabric was (it gets a little tricky is it’s a mix of fabrics though). Why did we do this? There is very little regulation in the textiles industry so a lot of materials are mislabelled as something they aren’t and sold for more than they should be, also sometimes people buy fabric second hand or discounted which doesn’t have any label at all. If you have a fabric you are having doubts about, cut a tiny piece off and do the burn test and you should know pretty fast what you are dealing with. Anyways your fabric store should be lighting things on fire because this means that they are actually checking what the fabrics are and aren’t trying to pass cheap stuff off as more expensive than it is.

Ooh! I knew it was a standard test but I hadn’t seen a chart as detailed as this thank you!

It’s wild to me to see transvestigator conspiracy theories online that could be so easily explained by natural human variation. That woman has a deep voice? Yeah, sometimes they do. A woman has broad shoulders?? Maybe she plays rugby or hits the gym a fuckton. There’s a “bulge” in her tight pants?? Maybe her vulva is just fat. All the “markers” of trans woman that transvestigators use to harass any woman aren’t even things unique to trans women.

Transphobes talk about women like they’re Barbies. Have you forgotten the existence of cameltoe? Tiny boobs? Narrow hips? Broad shoulders? Why do you think choirs have altos and not just sopranos? What do you think female athletes look like? Do you think a woman that lifts weights and plays contact sports will look like a 90s supermodel? At what point in history did we collectively forget that human bodies have natural variability???

official anti terf post

i do desperately need everyone on this website especially people who arent american but want to rag on america to familiarize themselves with the basic romanized spelling conventions of native american languages because every day i come on here and i see people making fun of massachusetts or connecticut or mississippi or passamaquoddy or mashpee or nipissing and its like PLEASE. PLEASE THEY ARENT ENGLISH WORDS. PLEAAAAASEEEEEUUUHHH. USE YOUR MINDS TO IDENTIFY WHEN A WORD LOOKS LIKE IT MAY NOT BE ENGLISH. I DONT CARE IF YOU MAKE FUN OF AMERICA JUST PLEASE STOP BEING RACIST WHILE YOU DO IT

Map I found showing which states got their names from where. Over half of the states come from Indigenous languages.

When I became freelance, one of my first marketing contracts was fixing my boss' blog posts and articles that he had 'written' with ChatGPT.

It was the single most soul-sucking task I have ever done in my life. I could have ghostwritten it for them faster than it took me to edit it.

ChatGPT would often hallucinate features of the product, and often required more fact-checking than the article was worth.

It is absolutely no surprise that 77% of employees report that AI has increased workloads and lowered productivity, while 96% of executives believe it has boosted it.

The reality is that it's only boosted the amount of work employees have to do which leads to increased burnout, stress and job dissatisfaction.

Source.

In the words of Cory Doctorow, AI can't do your job, but AI salesmen can convince your boss that AI can do your job.

For my Tumblr Flag/Fandom Games project

See the other fandoms here

Hi if you ever find yourself in a relationship saying anything along the lines of "well I can't leave cause I would never be able to find something better than this because I'm trans/fat/aging/antisocial/unlucky" I beg of you to run. Please. You can find and build better but in order to do that you have to take the first step out the door. You do not have to endure abuse, mistreatment, or just plain incompatibility for the sake of a fraction of happiness. You don't.

This post has ended multiple shitty relationships. Reblog it to end even more

reminder that 30 isn’t old, it’s very normal to not accomplish everything in your 20s, and that it is never too late to learn that thing you’ve always wanted to learn. you’re always growing. that’s a good thing. 

Who the hell accomplishes everything in their 20s? Who made that a thing?

I was 48 when I started my apprenticeship to become a tattoo artist. I was 50 when I married the love of my life.

You’ve got time.

I needed this right now. I’ve got time!!!

To anyone who needs to hear this, my aunt called my mom last year in tears and, as she talked about how things are going, she admitted that she didn’t know she could be so happy, and she didn’t know how good life could be.

She is 72. After a very rough go of things, she is now with someone who cherishes her (met him three years ago!), goes on bucket-list road trips multiple times a year, founded two nonprofits to help people who have been through similar struggles, and feels fulfilled.

30 isn’t too late. Neither is 40, nor 50, nor even 70.

@dimiclaudeblaigan asked for a tutorial on how to begin drawing. Good news! If you can draw a funky looking stick man, you have already started!

I think that stick people are a great starting point for artists because of the things you can learn from them that will be important later on.

If you are able to draw a circle and a couple of lines, you can easily put together a stick person.

Congratulations! You have started to draw. :)

A stick person is a very minimal artistic representation of a real life person. It is simple yet recognizable, and is widely used in art, media, and signage.

But what can a stick person teach us about drawing people that look more like… well, people? Lets have a look!

this is a really nice guide! I like it a lot! I feel like it also bears mentioning that each of these stages theoretically be the final step in your process.

what I mean by that is that when I was in Middle School I drew hundreds of comics with stick figures. for years and years that's all I drew... then for years following it I only drew les mis chibi comics. the things I wanted to do and represent with my art got more complicated, so my art had to evolve to become more complicated with it. like, if I wanted a dramatic close up in my comic if somebody's eyes, I needed to learn how to draw eyes.

the point at the end of the day is to have fun doing. it you don't have to draw a fully-fledged person to complete something. if you have a funny fanart idea - or even literally any kind of idea that can be represented artistically at all - you already have the tools to communicate it. there is value to be gained from doing hundreds of stupid stick figure comics. sure, practicing anatomy and shape language and doing targeted exercises all have very clear value - I'm not saying don't do them in the slightest - but don't feel pressured, or like you're not learning if you're not doing anatomical drills lol. you're still training the muscles in your hand, you're still developing a familiarity with the tools you're using.

I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.

Are there any other particularly egregious examples?

This book already exists, sort of! Or at least, it’s a biology textbook but I bought it for writing purposes:

It starts with a chapter about freezing to death, and it is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve read in years (and I read a lot of horror fiction).

This book can be downloaded for free on Researchgate, posted there by the author himself:

The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments

In third grade, I started writing a book called "HOW TO NOT DIE IN THE WOODS" mostly about not petting the wildlife, but apparently I should finish it.