#almost real

Something ✨🌿speculative 🌿✨ is coming this summer …

Almost Real's POP CULTURE issue is live on Kickstarter! Time to introduce the cute yet vaguely horrible cover critter, a living gachapon toy bioengineered by scud aliens!

The wild gachapede is a segmented worm-like arthropoid that lives parasitically inside a bivalve-like "giant diatom" in shallow, sandy-bottomed seas of the scud homeplanet. The giant diatom's shell is made of two interlocking lid-like frustules of transparent silica, allowing light to pass through to its veins of symbiotic unicellular algae. Much like the microscopic diatoms of earth, giant diatoms reproduce in two different ways, asexually and sexually. Asexual reproduction is carried out by the two frustules separating and each generating a new frustule, a phase during which they may be parasitized by the gachapede. But because the new frustule is always smaller than the old one, like the lid and body of a box, eventually one lineage of giant diatoms is too small to safely carry out asexual reproduction. These tiny ones will finally give up and reproduce sexually by releasing sperm and eggs that will join to create new larvae and maximum-size giant diatoms. The parasitic gachapede has a relatively low impact on a large healthy giant diatom, as it lays dormant until the frustules split, surviving off the "bloodstream" of unicellular algae.

Scuds have used the unique properties of these two organisms in combination with their civilization's advanced biotech to create a collectable toy; twisting the basic bodyplan of the gachapede into thousands of variations of "funny little guys." The wild diatom has been modified into a "gachapod," which is far more spacious and transparent than its wild counterpart. To obtain the toy, you crack open the two frustles and recycle the gachapod (which will now grow into two new pods). However, once removed from its food source, the gachapede typically only lives a couple days at most. At the end of its life, its cuticle calcifies and makes them into a rigid figurine. Scuds who are really into the gachapede scene will pose their gachapede into a desirable pose like a insect collector pinning a bug.

A sneak preview of my entry for the upcoming Volume 6 of Almost Real, a speculative biology zine! This edition of the zine will be based on pop culture! I’m incredibly proud to be a part of this project and cannot wait to show this off.

Follow the Kickstarter page to be notified on the campaign’s launch in June!

My two spreads for Almost Real Volume 5: MYTHOLOGY! You KNOW I had to do an entry for sphinxes!

This is a combination of the work I've done for Skin Deep sphinxes as well as its own thing set in a world where mythical creatures are known but still largely a mystery to science. I leaned hard into the Zoobooks aesthetic for this, one of my favorite parts of those magazines were the anatomy drawings so I wanted to do one just like it!

I’m incredibly excited to be a contributor to the sixth volume of @almostrealzine ! I look forward to sharing my platform-hopping bipedal reptiles and the relationship between them and their ambulatory vegetable(?) prey! I put a little bit of all of my favorite creature design things into my entry and I seriously can’t wait for you guys to see it.

You’re what I see in front of my eyes,

but you’re not real—

out of reach,

not always there.

You make me feel,

but I can’t touch you.

You make me choke

without using your hands.

A tease

running through my head.

Meaningful words on paper

write stories in my brain.

Art that bleeds

and leaves a stain.

You’re on repeat

like a heartbeat.

[ Read on AO3 ]

Fandom: Hades II Rating: Explicit Relationships: Icarus/Melinoe (waxwitch) Key Tags: Hand Jobs, Ghost Sex

Without the ectoplasmic draught, Melinoë and Icarus thought they couldn’t feel each other. But it turns out there’s an exception.

---