PUMPKINNESS!

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…

I found this weird VHS - the visual style is really more loony toons but the humor is pure 2001 high-schooler, it had this label on it:

"High schoolers Rico (short for Ricochet, magenta) and Magnit (not short at all, in fact quite tall, red) are two average California "weird kids", they hang out at the supermarket and the beach, goof off in class, and like to pretend they're a lot darker and spookier than they really are. In this 36th episode; when their classmate's kleptomaniac pet monkey gets loose the two watch with mild bemusement until Rico's favorite pen and Magnit's pants go missing - then it's a chase through the school full of wacky hyjinks all the way!"

Here's the image not on a screen:

Palico pottery! @ankoku-jin wanted me to make some 3rd scale felyne ceramics while I was using my kiln and I'm so happy to oblige. I love sculpting like a lil guy with no thumbs. The doll is a Cocoriang Rupee, who's smaller than 3rd scale, so I suppose it's just a kitten playing around in the kitchen.

The designs are based on a few different Monster Hunter games, including the clay oven from MH Freedom (roughly - the in-game one is based more on a Shakalaka I think though), the Grandmeowster's big soup pot and various jars from MH World, the pot on the default Palico set from MH Wilds, and the acorn vessel that has appeared in multiple games.

There's also vigorwasp spray from MH World too - because it fit the theme. I made a bunch because they were really fun to build.

Well you see, everyone ALSO used to hate bees. Like. You guys are just too young to remember when everyone who wasn't an apiarist or a gardener or an ecologist was militantly aggressive towards bees Because They Sting You. People would burn their hives and kill them all when they were found, not call a bee guy to relocate them, they'd stomp bees in the clover if they saw them. They actively hunted down and destroyed hives.

The reason "everyone loves bees" isnt an arbitrary whimsical choice because they're cuter than wasps. It's because bee lovers made a HUGE effort to encourage people to see bees as valuable pollinators and friendly little guys that just want to defend their hive. They taught people to see bees as cute and fluffy! There were awareness campaigns about the value of bees, there were advertisements, there were little documentaries and articles teaching people how to readjust their views on bees so that the hatred of them didn't cause complete ecological and agricultural collapse.

Bee lovers used to be in the exact same position that everyone who loves other insects is - you say that you like this creature and everyone in a 10km radius comes crawling over to tell you all the ways they personally would kill them.

The fact that it's so common now for people to think bees are cute fun little guys doing an important job is a fucking monumental victory and it was hard won, and it's as recent as in the last 20 years. When I was a kid in the 90s, everyone hated bees except ecologists and bug guys.

Overly dramatic bugs club.