PillowHorder

Mothra is now called “A-Bish Eyelash Buuug”… because she has pretty eyelashes lol

Been a while since I made an animatic, just wanted to warm up before I start the big one

Link to the original here

Want your character to have a cool prosthetic in the modern day?

steampunk? check

#aesthetic? Floral?

avant garde?

cyberpunk?

Dark void creature + Cute lil bean eyes = Peak character design

The original tweet summarizes it pretty well. Fanfic tends to be popular among certain types of neurodivergent people (aka people most likely to read excessively as a child, and have burnout as an adult) for the same reasons that we tend to hyperfixate–neurochemical signaling (I hope I’m using that phrase correctly). What I mean is, for people who are really dependent on changes in dopamine/serotonin/neurotransmitter levels, who have low levels or wonky neural reward systems (perhaps the most common types of neurodivergence)…people like us rely on dependable external sources of those neurochemicals. In order to function, we spend a lot of our free time trying to level out our brain chemistry using things that can reliably bring us a steady stream of joyful moments (rewards) without costing too much of the mental effort that is already in short supply. 

significantly: the investment of reading has to be balanced with a steady “return on investment”–and this return has to start fairly quickly. because again, we don’t have a lot of attention/energy to invest on tiring things. we have perpetual “low batteries” in that regard.

that doesn’t mean these stories are “simple,” or that they lack complexity or value–only that the reward has to come in short regular intervals, and it has to have a low “upfront cost.” these stories are only “easy” to read in the sense that the effort we put into them is rewarded in a timely manner. which is why fanfic stories are so perfectly formulated for neurodivergent readers–they are often beautifully written, but skip a lot of the upfront costs (of introducing new characters, of world-building, of getting the audience emotionally connected to the story elements).

the nature of fanfiction is that the reader has a pre-existing relationship with this world and these characters. that–combined with the shorter average length of fics–means that fan fics very quickly start rewarding the reader in a way that traditional fiction struggles to. that’s not a bad thing! and maybe it’s something more traditionally published writers should be paying attention to.

it’s past midnight and im hysterically laughing and then thIS-

And meanwhile over in historical costuming, we are fucking eating, sleeping, swordfighting, riding horses, and feeling great like this:

(credit: Jenny La Flamme, The Tudor Tailor, Verdaera)

Like is there NO overlap between people who want to bind and people who care about accurate 16th century clothing reconstruction techniques?

(I, okay, maybe it is kind of a niche interest, but…. REALLY? Anyone who’s made a boned binder, PLS SPEAK TO ME)

This was only the second pair of stays I made, but it already made me practically flat and was quite comfortable. I didn’t even full bone it and it looked like this:

(don’t judge me for the awful way the boning sticks out at the top, I am by no means a corsetry expert)

People who are actually good at stays will be able to make things like these with no trouble, because if something made from old sheets and recycled boning can do this, imagine what you can do with proper materials.

Just for fun, here’s me in my gentleman’s outfit:

dummy thicc

dummy thicc

All this is to say that the fact that this octopus appears to be dreaming means one of two things. Either

a) dreaming is a very, very old thing indeed, going directly back to the Urbilaterian. This would mean that almost every animal, from insects to starfish to sea slugs to newts, is likely to have the ability to dream in some capacity or another (unless they have specifically lost it by evolutionary simplification).

or

b) dreaming evolved entirely independently in cephalopods when they developed greater intelligence. This would suggest, at least, that there’s something very fundamental about dreaming related to intelligence itself, which causes it to emerge independently when sufficient intelligence arises.