#squid's replies

SO! In the books, the Lin-Manuel Miranda character and the bear are adventuring buddies who get together again because a twelve-year-old girl strong-arms them into coming on her expedition to the arctic. (Half the events of the first book happen because Lyra forces an adult to do what she wants against their better judgment, through emotional manipulation, social leverage or trickery. She is the best.) A very small subset of the fandom was like, “Hmm. What if they boned.” I am part of that subset because I am a shameless degenerate. Let’s be clear, the polar bear talks and is as intelligent as a human, but he is very much a polar bear. He is not a shapeshifter or anything of that nature. This isn’t even the weirdest combination of characters I’ve thought should fuck, frankly.

The show comes along and, okay, look. I haven’t seen Miranda on stage, only in a couple of TV things, but I am aware that his whole thing is to seem completely swept away by his feelings for whoever he’s acting opposite at any given time. I know that’s just his style.

Well, it works on bears. Show Iorek is CG, of course, but on set he’s played by a puppet that is puppeteered by his voice actor, and it really shows in the performances. In their first scene, the Lin-Manuel Miranda character (Lee Scoresby) and the bear (Iorek Byrnison) have been … … … … well, broken up for a while, and Lee, trying to get Iorek to talk to and perhaps come on an adventure with him, outputs such frustrated longing I swear I would’ve felt it if I’d touched my monitor just then.

I think Lin-Manuel Miranda wants to fuck the bear, Z. I really do.

what was the largest land predator?

Andrewsarchus! They were hoofed mammals related to pigs, entelodonts ("hell pigs") and hippos, and they're known from one enormous skull. Reconstructions of them are pretty inconsistent -- some artists seem to really want them to look like wolves or at least thylacines, but this is just not ... a particularly furry clade. Also, how jacked up were their shoulders? More pig, or more hippo? We just don’t know.

By Mick Ellison.

By Roman Uchytel.

And the most ridiculous one, apparently by Belgian taxidermy company Masai Gallery:

SINCE WHEN DO YOU ART??? (This is very pretty, though!)

@z-bot replied to your post  “Title: I Pulled a Thorn From His Tiny Paw...”

I second that! I didn't know you drew! So cool!

This got a couple of notes recently, so I was looking at it, and discovered I never replied to the comments. GREETINGS FROM SIX MONTHS IN THE FUTURE, PAST SAM AND Z. 

The reason nobody knew I draw is that I hadn’t done it in over twenty years. I had some lessons when I was thirteenish but hadn’t touched the stuff since, until @dustyjournal enabled me back on the horse earlier this year. Claiming a fic in the SBB was probably a little ambitious, but I wanted to play around with the Young Justice art style -- which turned out to be incredibly hard. What I was taught to do is observational realism; I am basically a photocopier that eats people food, and don’t have any intuitive understanding of stylization or how line art works, especially around faces (eyes are the worst part).

(Gonna do this in public so I can bring my message of hope to the masses.)

I use Vivaldi! This was created by the guy who used to run Opera, who apparently left Opera around the same time that browser became Slightly Reskinned Chrome. Vivaldi uses the Chromium engine, so you can use Chrome extensions on it, and wraps it in a ridiculously feature-rich interface (which resolves my problems with Chrome -- its interface is crap and it lacks many features I consider absolutely basic and essential, none of which I remember offhand because I haven’t used it since Vivaldi got out of beta and lost its beta hinkiness). I don’t use half of Vivaldi’s features, but its zero-bullshit marquee screencap tool alone is worth the price of admission. Almost everything’s a setting and it’s extremely stable.

@maybemalapert replied to your post: I just want to point out that I always misread...

*highfives callowyn* I kept parsing ungulates as a sort of verb and my mind decided it meant something like ‘moving your tentacles in a flowing, wave-y kind of way’ or like a pit of snakes all moving about