probably time for this story i guess but when i was a kid there was a summer that my brother was really into making smoothies and milkshakes. part of this was that we didn't have AC and couldn't afford to run fans all day so it was kind of important to get good at making Cool Down Concoctions.
we also had a patch of mint, and he had two impressionable little sisters who had the attitude of "fuck it, might as well."
at one point, for fun, this 16 year old boy with a dream in his eye and scientific fervor in heart just wanted to see how far one could push the idea of "vanilla mint smoothie". how much vanilla extract and how much mint can go into a blender before it truly is inedible.
the answer is 3 cups of vanilla extract, 1/2 cup milk alternative, and about 50 sprigs (not leaves, whole spring) of mint. add ice and the courage of a child. idk, it was summer and we were bored.
the word i would use to describe the feeling of drinking it would maybe be "violent" or perhaps, like. "triangular." my nose felt pristine. inhaling following the first sip was like trying to sculpt a new face. i was ensconced in a mesh of horror. it was something beyond taste. for years after, i assumed those commercials that said "this is how it feels to chew five gum" were referencing the exact experience of this singular viscous smoothie.
what's worse is that we knew our mother would hate that we wasted so much vanilla extract. so we had to make it worth it. we had to actually finish the drink. it wasn't "wasting" it if we actually drank it, right? we huddled around outside in the blistering sun, gagging and passing around a single green potion, shivering with disgust. each sip was transcendent, but in a sort of non-euclidean way. i think this is where i lost my binary gender. it eroded certain parts of me in an acidic gut ecology collapse.
here's the thing about love and trust: the next day my brother made a different shake, and i drank it without complaint. it's been like 15 years. he's now a genuinely skilled cook. sometimes one of the three of us will fuck up in the kitchen or find something horrible or make a terrible smoothie mistake and then we pass it to each other, single potion bottle, and we say try it it's delicious. it always smells disgusting. and then, cerimonious, we drink it together. because that's what family does.
dead metaphors are really interesting honestly and specifically i’m interested in when they become malapropisms
like, the concept being, people are familiar with the phrase and what people use it to mean metaphorically, but it’s not common knowledge anymore what the metaphor was in literal reference to. people still say “toe the line” but don’t necessarily conjure up the image of people standing at the starting line of a race, forbidden from crossing over it. people still say “the cat is out of the bag” without necessarily knowing it’s a sailors’ expression referring to a whip being brought out for punishment. some metaphors are so dead we don’t even know where they come from; like, there are ideas about what “by hook or by crook” references, but no one is entirely sure. nobody knows what the whole nine yards are.
and then you throw in a malaprop or a mondegreen or two, where because people don’t know what the actual words of the expression refer to, they’re liable to replace them with similar sounding words (see “lack toast and tolerant”). so we can literally go from a phrase referencing a common, everyday part of life to a set of unfixed, contextless sounds with a completely different meaning. that’s fascinating. what an interesting piece of the way language and culture are living, changing, coevolving things.
maybe part of the reason we can’t figure out where some phrases come from is that over time the words themselves have changed! one of the theories about “the whole nine yards” is that it’s a variant of “the whole ball of wax,” which some people further theorize was originally “the whole bailiwick,” meaning just “the whole area”! the addition of “nine yards” might be related to “dressed to the nines,” which might reference the fucking Greek muses! language is so weird and cool! (and I only know any idioms in two languages!)
the point is. I just came across the words “nip it in the butt” in a piece of published, professional fiction, and now I can’t stop giggling.
it's hilarious how if you do any amount of research into life or death melee combat the prevailing themes that emerge are that
you're gonna get tired very quickly
tired leads to injured, injured leads to tired, tired leads to—
you're not gonna be as composed as you expect
humans are more fragile than you think and also more durable than you think. both are true and neither stop them from dying of an infection later (DO NOT GET BITTEN)
DO NOT GET STABBED (generally good life advice)
DO GET A SPEAR
knights are faster than you think
This took longer than I thought. I doubted uploading it, mainly because of the broken dialogue and how weird was the reading. Writting is my weakness. Believe me, I considered doing the comic completely silent, but I wanted to get out of my comfort zone.
I don't know if the outcome turned out decent, I'm not sure. I've been staring at this comic for 2 months that my perception is heavely warped. Therefore, I'm not in good conditions to judge my work sjdhsdh
Anyway, hope you like it josuyasu nation.
The Chosen Four
Earthbound has had a quite big impact on my art journey. When I was a young teen, I would visit Starmen.net regularly to check amazing fan art EB fans would make and learn from them. It was nostalgic to draw some EB fan art again.
The way this piece had a chokehold on me. but it's DONE and it'll be a print :))
close up under cut:
This meme is dead but I couldn’t get it out of my head
Anyway, Fresh is amazing and I love him
Fresh by loverofpiggies (not sure if they have a tumblr lol)
The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
Why is the Undertale Fandom so obscenely bad at crediting people when they use their characters? I'm not saying you have to tag the creator everytime a sketch of their character makes it into their post, but general Fandom etiqette says: 'if you want to draw my character, at least credit back to me', and this Fandom just decided nope, never going to happen. I've seen AUs based on other people's AUs that do not once, anywhere on the blog, credit the original AU. I've seen alternate characters of AU characters not breathe a single word of the original creator.
'It's because theyre popular' so? I talk with people constantly who don't know the original creators of aus. Who don't know their blog names. Who have never laid eyes on the original material. And the fact 90% of art I see of these characters is completely uncredited, not only contributes to that, but is just such a basic disregard for other creators in a Fandom space that it's upsetting to think you couldn't take the 2 extra seconds to put 'character by ___ 'at the end of a post
I've never been in a fandom that thinks using other people's stuff should be done without credit. It's just common place. It's common knowledge. Here's an indie creator online, in the same fan base as me, when I use their chatacter, I credit back to them, because I as another indie creator in this fandom would want the same. But nope.
I did a little test, a little experiment, I scrolled through the undertale au tag and counted how many people credited while using a character that didnt belong to them
3/20 had credit.
Absolutely abysmal.
Now again, Im not saying to @ the creators every time a character is used, but simple acknolwedgement of their blog or other social media is all you need, so that if anyone wants to find that character off of your post, they can do so, without having to spend 20 minutes trying to find the 1 post that took the 2 seconds to credit another fandom creator with their own character.
This isn't even mentioning the countless times AUs have been purposefully targeted to be stripped of ownership by people that think they should either own the au, or that the au should not belong to the original creators. Ie x au belongs to the community (when it doesn't). A thing that was/is actively defended by a lot of people. Also abysmal.
There are some creators exempt from this criticism, but for the most part, I think just about everyone still actively posting content does it. And its a terrible habit the au fandom got itself into, and one of by biggest pet peeves about the content made for it.
If you want to use someone else's character, in the fandom, it's the most basic courtesy to say who made that character no matter how popular you think they are, because I know for a fact you'd want them to do the same for you.
So maybe we could start doing that again?
we all know there should have been a real hug in the finale (thanks @cryran88 for the inspo!)