My blog keeps getting invaded by bots and checking if every blank blog is a human is waaay too time consuming, there are just too many so reminder that if you follow me and your blog looks like this:

I may block you!!! Bots can reblog and like posts, so please put a profile picture or a header, or add a description so that I know you're not a bot! I've seen people just write "I'm not a bot! Don't block me!" and just that was confirmation enough!

all cave art makes me emotional but there's something very special about neanderthal cave art

it's just so good. it's so evocative. it's fascinating and beautiful. i kind of want it tattooed on me

this is a message to all babytrans. you may come across a subreddit or maybe even a 4chan board that is made up entirely of the most miserable trans people you’ve ever met. they have their own lingo borrowed straight from incel communities. but instead of being an incel where cishet men tell each other that women will never want to fuck them because of 2 mm of browbone, it’s trans women telling each other that they will never be a woman because of 2 mm of browbone. it’s trans men calling other trans men pooners for having a round face instead of a chiseled gigachad jawline. but they swear it’s not a toxic community because they’re all hiding under several layers of irony, so you can never really tell if someone is being serious. and it’s very important that you never visit these forums, even out of morbid curiosity

since this post is making rounds i feel like resharing this for no reason in particular

Transportation: The surface of Ivalice is covered in mimic-germinites, which corrodes metal, so ground-based machinery has been left behind. Instead, transportation mainly relies on chocobo and airships.

Chocobo

Chocobos are large birds with excellent running ability, living mainly in the grassy regions of the Ozmone Plain and the Tchita Uplands. Although their wings have declined, their legs are highly developed, allowing them to run across land at considerable speeds.

Several varieties have been identified, most commonly yellow, but also black, red, and white. Yellow chocobos are generally gentle and obedient, so they are often kept for riding or transport. Only their strong distinctive odor is a drawback, but recently, efforts such as improving their feed have been made to help reduce the smell.

<- Yellow chocobos in particular are very easy to tame, making them the most widely used variety.

So this post mostly covers the adorable, apparently stinky birds featured prominently in every Final Fantasy game, but that little bit at the top about "mimic-germinites" opens up a bit of worldbuilding for Final Fantasy XII that is absolutely bonkers and I love it to pieces.

In FFXII, a lot is said about the ancient past, about the Dynast-King who united the lands and how that definitely didn't have any sort of geopolitical or religious consequences at all, don't worry about it, it's not portentous or anything. But there's other strange things you'll find every so often. Like, this is a world with airships and magical crystals that power everything.

So why are there vast fields of abandoned oil derricks and storage tanks?

This is never really expanded upon in the dialog. One of the great empires drilled for oil here, and were chased away by the indigenous people who live in the Sandsea. No, not in the region, in the sand. Which literally moves and flows like water. It's a literal sand sea. There's fucked up fish in it and everything. Absolutely wild.

The game doesn't really expand on that further, and because you're mostly boggling about the sand, you don't think much further about it. But tucked away in a corner of the extensive and delightful bestiary lore entries, there's this passage:

So. The plot never bothers to explain this either, but if you're paying attention to the bestiary as you travel through the Sandsea region, you can find a series of diary entries from a mage who was commissioned centuries ago to create an artificial, living, parthenogenic construct that could be snuck into a dragon's hoard, lay eggs, breed an army without being noticed, and then attack. This concept was a failure, but as a petty revenge against their annoying patron, the mage snuck a mother-mimic into the patron's cellars and left it there.

This seems like it would just be a funny little story, but the setting of FFXII features a very particular system of magic: it's basically radiation. It's mutagenic. While a certain amount of it is normal, or even healthy, too much can do precisely what you think it would, because this is fantasy fiction. It makes giant technicolor mutants.

And also, apparently, tiny mimic sky-plankton. That eat engine blocks and electrical cables.

This, quietly, and completely unexplored by the game, implies an absolute apocalyptic level of technological collapse. A civilization that mixed magic and easier, more powerful electrical technology, completely lost its long-range ground transport and untold amounts of societally critical electronic systems. People had magic to fall back on, but it wouldn't have been painless. They had to completely retool how people and supplies moved across the world, how countries held themselves together, how food and medicine were produced, how they kept their homes lit, how they cooked, just about every single aspect of life was affected. This world had cars, and then artificial bugs ate them.

That is WILD. And it entirely exists in backstory, never directly addressed. It's just there in case somebody says "why do some characters have smooth-bore pistols but there's Star Wars-y airship dogfights?! This tech makes no sense!" It's because if you brought one of those airship-mounted machine guns down to ground level, the bugs would eat them. Checkmate, nerds!

I love this game so much

So, there are horses! But they're really, really weird!

Horses were exclusively a cavalry critter, which were trialed by a now-fallen kingdom as a war mount. There's never any mention of them being used for any other purpose, probably for this reason here:

Those are sharp teeth. This is a horse with a prey drive, and might potentially be blind, or at least hooded by their armor. Armor that they still wear, because apparently these suckers are pretty much immortal.

Imagine you're a footsoldier and this xenomorph-looking fucker comes charging at you. I can see why it was effective! I can also see why nobody else found this practical to deal with. You have to feed this horse a lot of meat.

Bonus fact for those who've played the game, the ones with these big cleavers on their heads in particular are apparently wearing Nabradian barding. Apparently those guys were hardcore.

There's actually a whole ecosystem of feral animals that were previously used for transport or war, which have since been replaced with chocobos and modern airships. I can post more about those if anyone's interested, but I want to just give these murder-horses a moment in the spotlight, because holy hell.

Also, we're not done with the murder-horses, because these were apparently the ones that could be at least partially domesticated. Then there are the literal Nightmares.

The bestiary explicitly notes that they have forward-facing eyes and sharp teeth, but hilariously makes not one mention of the FANGED TENTACLES. One can eventually learn that these evolved because some ancestral horse started eating marlboros, which are approximately vegetal and entirely composed of bad vibes. They're apparently mutagenic bad vibes, or possibly the horses were kleptophages, like how some sea slugs steal stinging cells off of anemones and transfer them to their own skin.

This is, as Gallus would say, a Mustain't.

Final Fantasy XII is the game that just keeps on giving, I swear.

Interestingly, the Mesmenir has the chance of dropping a Destrier Mane as loot, which has its own bestiary entry on page 2:

The History of Things

At precisely what point the polished destrier mane came to be used as a device for the casting of magicks is unclear. The noble steeds from whence such mane-coverings came were named by a sorcerer, however, and perhaps this association has given them their magickal properties. As tools for the casting of magicks go, these are among the best.

To me, this implies that the covering is actually part of the beastie itself. I don't think I'd expect it to be so imbued with magick if it was just a piece of barding that they were wearing.

(also because it's me and because I know you'll appreciate this too: with this snippet in mind does looking at the shape of that mane covering not really heavily put you in mine of Ghis' war fan!!! Perhaps there's sth in the shape of it that aids with magick work)

Page 1: Observations for the Mesmenir:

Being a breed of sleipnir conditioned to be the perfect faithful war-horse. Uncannily skilled in warfare, able to sense the moment and flow of battle, and carry out maneuvers of some difficulty, such as the timely withdrawal from a fray to regroup and strike anew. The conditioning wrought on these creatures by the masters for whom they once fought was so steely that even after countless generations of breeding in the wild, it has faded not in the slightest. A tragedy indeed, for they consider all those not hailing from their long deserted homeland to be enemies, and attack on sight.

They've been breeding in the wild for generations, so they must be just part of them! Although that does then beg the question as to why the references to Nabradian barding in the Leynir bestiary entry?? Unless the barding refers to just the armoured sections on their backs and not the crests. But also, if the crests/helmet thingies are just part of them and bred in, they must be born soft. Then again, there are weirder beasties in xii, perhaps it's best not to question 😂

Also, not to Spider Enable or anything, but tell them about the Slavens >:3

SANS IS NONBINARY?!

HUH?!

monks debating whether vows of silence should still allow you to leave emoji reacts on the monastery groupchat

So a guy I went to middle school with now works in the vatican and according to Cam, the rules on:

-vary from one silent monastic order to another, but none of them have ever successfully banned "Long trail of increasingly hostile post-it messages on the fridge".

sorry i’m reblogging this again but this just makes me so fucking angry. this reminds me of those dudes running game of thrones who had virtually no experience and were allowed to just. treat a multimillion dollar franchise as their little fuck-around-and-learn-about-tv sandbox. why are white men with no credentials allowed to get away with this over and over again while the rest of us have to fight tooth and nail for literal crumbs. i fucking hate the entertainment industry

tfw you realize you put more thought into your self indulgent fanfic in middle school than someone in charge of a multimillion dollar franchise that employs thousands of people and is watched by millions.

@robinade YOU CANT JUST LEAVE THAT THERE hdhddhdydhdndhhfnff

so, funny story about my dad

many years ago, when my father was a young man, he was living in London, and he was not doing so in the strictly legal sense. plus he was squatting, and one of his roommates was a burglar. like, full on breaking into homes and stealing TVs kind of guy. not a group of people who wanted to attract the attention of police.

so one day, my dad dropped that roommate off at work (someone's house, I assume), and went to drive back to their squat on his roommate's motorcycle. let's assume the vehicle itself was of questionable legality, and my dad for sure didn't have a license to drive it. let alone anything that said that he was allowed to be in England in the first place. and my dad

gets caught

in a roundabout.

he cannot figure out how to get out. he hadn't been in the country too long, and was still figuring out how to navigate all of the weird things that for sure did not exist in Israel or Greece or anywhere else he had lived. and you know what? fair. I DID grow up in a country with those cursed circles, and I struggle with them sometimes myself.

now in this particular roundabout, there was a police car parked at the center, and those police officers watched him go around two times. and he figured that if he went around a third time, the police would pull him over and ask for documentation that he did not have.

now, another fact about my dad is that he has balls of steel. this man has made many choices that I would describe as....unwise. many of those choices involve brashly making illegal choices right in front of authority figures, and then talking himself out of them like a snake oil salesman.

so my dad. he drives that motorcycle right up to the cops at the center of that roundabout, and he says "excuse me. I'm a foreigner in your country, and I'm stuck in this roundabout. can you help me get out?"

and who would do that if they had anything to hide? that is a move made by someone who believes that police always act in his best interest. nothing suspicious going on here!

so he got escorted out of the roundabout by a police car, was bid good day by the helpful copper, and took himself back to his illegal dwelling on an illegal motorcycle which he was illegally driving in a country he was illegally living in, where he proceeded to do many more of the things that add up to his lore.

British Pub Sign The 3/4″ x 1/8″ Threaded Hex Bushing, Norwich

Y’all gotta come up with some new lines, or just absorb the information without comment.

Sneefin and Snorfin time at the Hertfordshire Zoo

WHAT IS THE CHARGE? EATING A PENGUIN? A SUCCULENT ADÉLIE PENGUIN?

The other perspective makes it funnier

primordial soup

The trailer of Adult Swim’s first fully Spanish series, a lesbian stop-motion animation titled “Women Wearing Shoulder Pads”, was just released recently. Unfortunately, it’s fallen under the radar, and most of the comments are people complaining about woke. Give it some love!