Somehow I Got 95/20 On An Assignment

waking up everyday is just like. good morning sun. good morning sky. good morning evergrowing festering pit of primordial rage inside of me. good morning birds

This is a free coupon/excuse for you to infodump on the current topic you’re obsessed with. Take some time away from internet discourse and share with us something you find interesting.

Today I read about Precambrian animals!

The above one is Thectardis, which is an animal so weird we have almost no inclination of how to categorize it. We know it was alive and it was cone shaped. That’s it.

The thing about fossil life from 500+ million years ago is that there often aren’t really any living analogs for it? Many of the animals from that time were sessile, many filter feeders, without much in common with what comes to mind when we think “Animal”—something that moves around and has a brain and thinks. The strata that preserve these animals are very rarely accessible, and these glimpses we have are hard to interpret.

Many of these creatures are known from a single fossil. Many are too weird to interpret or classify even tentatively.

Here’s another organism from that time, Eoandromeda:

Look at this thing. I can’t explain why, but Eoandromeda makes me feel some kind of deep dread. Like...we don’t know what this thing was. We don’t even know if it was an animal. I look at that shape and I want someone to tell me what that thing is. But we don’t know. We don’t have the words for What That Thing Is.

Imagine something so alien, so divergent from the paths life took to the present day, that we can’t look at it and say “That’s a worm” or “That’s a sponge” or “that’s a jellyfish” or...anything. The words for it literally don’t exist, because nothing like it now exists, and we know nothing about it. We’re not looking at different versions of the same categories of creature we have now. We’re looking at something that is too obscure to have a category. We can guess what it might have looked like. But it is so utterly unlike anything that exists now that we know nothing—except that undeniably, it existed.

Namacalathus. Be honest, doesn’t this make you scream inside? Or is it just me? This was a real animal that existed. It doesn’t know or give a fuck what a “snail” or “bird” is.

Learning about dinosaurs is DIFFERENT. We know what bones are. We have them! When we say that sauropod dinosaurs ate plants, we can imagine those plants. We can describe dinosaurs as having a “neck” and “claws” and “legs.” And I think that’s comforting because whatever I feel when I look at Namacalathus is not that.

This one invented muscles! Muscles are okay! I have muscles! That should make me feel better, right!

...Not really! Put it back!

For millions of years these things existed, living their unknowable lives. There was an entire world of these organisms. This was EARTH, our world.

People mostly haven’t heard of these. I think people care less about these strange early creatures because they seem less charismatic, not having brains or doing anything, but I think there is a lot of charisma to the Unknowable Cone Animal, the Dread Spiral, and all the other unsettling animals of the Precambrian.

"that lil animation loop is the most annoying fucking thing" suck on a lemon? Why would you say this. If you can't say anything nice jump out of a window.

Sam: this is why no one likes you you're so insensitive.

Wes:

Danny: REESES PUFFS REESES PUFFS

hello please take your share of appreciation for the fantastic ethubs montage 💚💙💚💙💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💙💚💙💚💙💚💚💙💚💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💚💚💙💙💚💙💙💚💙💙💚💙💚💚💙💚💙💙💚💙

If you liked last life el muchacho monday, try following my mcyt art blog, @dsymphone! I post plenty of ethubs, and I've even got fun variations on the og montage. 💚🧡💚🧡💚🧡💛🧡💚

glenn close

If you like Danganronpa, Zero Escape, or other stuff in that death game/discussion genre, then I would highly recommend Your Turn to Die: Death Game by Majority!  It’s a free RPGMaker game about a group of people that get stuck in a mysterious place where they’re forced to play various deadly games, including the recurring Main Game, where they have to discuss and vote for one of their members to die.   

It’s mostly a visual novel/point-and-click kind of game, although it does have some minigames, and the main gimmick is that there are discussion segments where you can argue against people, present evidence, etc. to either solve problems or decide on issues:

The characters are all multi-dimensional, the writing is good, and overall it’s just shockingly well-made for something that’s produced by a single person.  Like, I’ve read a shocking amount of death game media by this point, and I genuinely thing that this game has one of, if not THE best emotional handlings of the concept out of everything I’ve read.

Other highlights of the game:

most of the cast are adults, with only a few children/teenagers (the main character is a teenage girl)

almost no unnecessary sexual content (as i remember, there’s one non-explicit bath scene but that’s about it)

none of the characters are underutilized, and all their deaths are sad but never cheap/narratively unfair

starting in chapter two, the game has branching paths depending on who you chose to live/die! 

one of the characters is an elementary schooler named Gin and he wears a cat-eared cape and carries around a giant stuffed cat and he barks and meows when he talks:

It’s not finished yet, but the final chapter is being released, and you can play the parts that ARE out for free on vgperson’s website!!!  You can also find a list of content warnings there, since being as this is a game about death, there IS a lot of heavy stuff in there.

The first piece I made with little endy :O

i would like to thank phil for uploading this to his discord, it's my new favourite video on the internet

ive seen some posts lately about drawing diversity with actually diverse features, aka instead of just having a black character, drawing the character with nigerian features or instead of just drawing a vaguely indigenous character draw them with features from a specific tribe/area and in any case i figured you might want to check out this site because its a world map where you can click anywhere and it’ll show you different human phenotypes based on region and really goes into showing many types of people. like im making a chilean character so clicked on chile and it showed me this

which pops up this and this 

its just a pretty neat website to really become better at diversifying and strengthening your character designs

*"stress dream" = dreams you get when under large amounts of stress or anxiety irl, that may or may not relate to your current situation irl.