These posts contain 374 horses (43.0% of the post)
Ants have the most badass lives of anything in the animal kingdom, life as an ant is like warhammer
Wake up in enormous underground cyberpunk metropolis
Venture outside with your ant buddies to forage scraps from an incomprehensible civilization of alien gods (each one several times larger than the city you've spent most of your life inside) for the glory of your GodMomEmpress
Get attacked by a platoon of soldiers from a rival megacity, they're an offshoot of your species except like twice as big (basically orks) and like 10% of them are genetically modified supersoldiers with wings
Luckily, you've been engineered from birth to spit acid so you and your antfriends successfully defeat the rival ants and their winged miniboss
Die from getting stuck on a jolly rancher
Ants are a fun way to look at cosmic horror, because they make complex decisions plus the whole eusocial thing, but most ants weight 1-5 milligrams, is the thing, and the human brain at a couple pounds or so is like without exaggeration a million times heavier than a whole ant. Imagine just... a brain, a whole brain that's a Boeing 747. But if you step back further, human lungs and circulatory system are so alien to most small arthropods. Pushing blood around in tubes would sound demented. Communicating by sound predominantly without pheremones, it would be cacaphonously loud to an ant, our scents would seem like babbling madness. The whole relatively isolated condition of human life must seem like the void is staring back, a being completely unable to see or comprehend the sights and language of insects that holds the power to destroy them all effortlessly. The vastness and total blankness of humanity to the insect is a cosmic horror to me.
I think you would enjoy reading Ursula K. LeGuin's short story, The Author of the Acacia Seeds. And Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics.
the first part of the story reads,
The messages were found written in touch-gland exudation on degerminated acacia seeds laid in rows at the end of a narrow, erratic tunnel leading off from one of the deeper levels of the
colony. It was the orderly arrangement of the seeds that first drew the investigator's attention.
The messages are fragmentary, and the translation approximate and highly interpretative; but the text seems worthy of interest if only for its striking lack of resemblance to any other Ant
texts known to us.
Seeds 1-13
[I will] not touch feelers. [I will] not stroke. [I will] spend on dry seeds [my] soul's sweetness.
It may be found when [I am] dead. Touch this dry wood! [I] call! [I am] here!
Alternatively, this passage may be read:
[Do] not touch feelers. [Do] not stroke. Spend on dry seeds [your] soul's sweetness. [Others]
may find it when [you are] dead. Touch this dry wood! Call: [I am] here!
No known dialect of Ant employs any verbal person except the third person singular and plural and the first person plural. In this text, only the root forms of the verbs are used; so there is no way to decide whether the passage was intended to be an autobiography or a manifesto.
Seeds 14-22
Long are the tunnels. Longer is the untunneled. No tunnel reaches the end of the untunneled.
The untunneled goes on farther than we can go in ten days [i.e., forever]. Praise!
The mark translated "Praise!" is half of the customary salutation "Praise the Queen!" or "Long live the Queen!" or "Huzza for the Queen!"—but the word/mark signifying "Queen" has been
omitted.
Seeds 23-29
As the ant among foreign-enemy ants is killed, so the ant without ants dies, but being without ants is as sweet as honeydew.
An ant intruding in a colony not its own is usually killed. Isolated from other ants, it invariably dies within a day or so. The difficulty in this passage is the word/mark "without ants," which we take to mean "alone"—a concept for which no word/mark exists in Ant.
Seeds 30-31
Eat the eggs! Up with the Queen!
There has already been considerable dispute over the interpretation of the phrase on Seed 31. It is an important question, since all the preceding seeds can be fully understood only in the light cast by this ultimate exhortation. Dr. Rosbone ingeniously argues that the author, a wingless neuter-female worker, yearns hopelessly to be a winged male, and to found a new colony, flying upward in the nuptial flight with a new Queen. Though the text certainly permits such a reading, our conviction is that nothing in the text supports it—least of all the text of the immediately preceding seed, No. 30: "Eat the eggs!" This reading, though shocking, is beyond disputation.
We venture to suggest that the confusion over Seed 31 may result from an ethnocentric interpretation of the word "up." To us, "up" is a "good" direction. Not so, or not necessarily so, to an ant. "Up" is where the food comes from, to be sure; but "down" is where security, peace, and home are to be found. "Up" is the scorching sun; the freezing night; no shelter in the beloved tunnels; exile; death. Therefore we suggest that this strange author, in the solitude
of her lonely tunnel, sought with what means she had to express the ultimate blasphemy conceivable to an ant, and that the correct reading of Seeds 30-31, in human terms, is:
Eat the eggs! Down with the Queen!
The desiccated body of a small worker was found beside Seed 31 when the manuscript was discovered. The head had been severed from the thorax, probably by the jaws of a soldier of the colony. The seeds, carefully arranged in a pattern resembling a musical stave, had not been disturbed. (Ants of the soldier caste are illiterate; thus the soldier was presumably not interested in the collection of useless seeds from which the edible germs had been removed.)
No living ants were left in the colony, which was destroyed in a war with a neighbouring anthill at some time subsequent of the death of the Author of the Acacia Seeds.
—G. D'Arbay, T.R. Bardol
and do you also cry that Michelangelo is a better sculptor than you
So... Is that all of that? Because that sounds fascinating, I'd love to see more.
Posts are selected by humans, processed automatically and queued to post. Click the link for more information about each horse. You can send a link or text to be counted to my ask box.
gummygunk
pixelskylines
2087
dailybridgerton
ellievsbear
