MEAT MOUNTAIN CONCENTRATE

little WIP

all systems red doodles featuring mb in armor

artificial condition doodles (mostly about ART and how i stylize it)

and finally some of the preservation gang

"Murderbots I See in the City"

This fanart was inspired by one of my favorite ever art projects, @imgdist0000 's incredible "Drawing People I See in the City" series. And of course also by listening to a scene where Murderbot has to take a crowded train while I was on the train home from work. Picturing it in such a mundane situation just possessed me and this was my best thought on how to express it. Also, Naja's mobility aid thing is a space segway in my heart :)

Does there have to be one?

Like. I do think there is something inside me that goes “hhhgghhhhhhhh no” when I think about trying to Do Romance. Is that Lack Of Romantic Attraction? Well, I assume yes, because I do not feel a draw to do romance. So I guess definitionally there is nothing inside me that makes romance feel like an attractive prospect. So saying “there is something fairly fundamental to my personality that makes me not want to pursue a romantic relationship, and makes me uncomfortable when I consider trying, that makes me much happier when pursuing non-romantic relationships” is I would say an accurate descriptor of the part of myself that I identify as “aromantic.”

The fact that I identify it as “aromantic” is the stance I’m talking about. I’m identifying this as an important aspect of my personality and way I move through the world. Could I call myself avoidant instead? I mean, sure I could. Would that benefit me or anybody? I don’t think it would. However it is accurate that I avoid romantic relationships. So does that make me avoidant? Maybe. Is that a bad thing? I don’t think it is. “Avoiding romantic relationships because you don’t want them” is a neutral thing worthy of acceptance whether you identify that proclivity in yourself as “aromanticism” or not.

This is why I don’t like models of a-spec identities that reduce the whole thing to being about Attraction Only. Stressing over whether I was really aromantic or just Afraid Of Commitment, whether I was really asexual or Just Repressed, was making me stressed and unhappy. Reframing it around what I wanted—“What kind of relationships do I want? What life-path will make me happy?”—it felt like a weight lifted off my chest. It didn’t have to be about sussing out my True Attractions. It could be about determining what I wanted in my life and living it.

Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.

Dibaeis absoluta

OK, so why does this lichen look like it is growing mushrooms, even though these are decidedly not mushrooms? My first answer is "just to fuck with you," but D. absoluta evolved long before humankind, nonetheless you specifically. So my second answer is because the mushroom shape just makes functional sense when you want to produce a fruiting body by maximizing the physical area that produces spores, and raising them above the substrate by a thin stalk so they can get caught in and distributed by wind. Ok, so they are the spore producing structure of fungi, shaped like that, how are they not mushrooms? Mushrooms are we typically think of them are the reproductive structures of basidiomycete fungi, the spores are typically released from the lower surface of the fruiting bodies like this:

And in an ascocarp, the reproductive structure of an ascomycete fungi like that of D. absoluta, the spores are released from the upper surface of the fruiting bodies. So like this:

OK this is waaayyy simplified. There are also a bunch of internal physiological differences but you, dear reader, can look those up yourself if you are curious about the nuances of fungal development. But very generally speaking, basidiospores come out the bottom, ascospores come out the top.

So not tiny mushrooms, but very very cute just as they are!

The TikTok Team is back again with a Tag Wrangler Hear Me Out Cake.

but even so, we can take comfort in knowing we have creature of wet slop. grins.

It eats algae and lives in intertidal and sub-tidal zones on the coast of Mexico and California. You can find it in tide pools there!