Dragons are the superior lifeform

memento mori (remembrance of death) coins, featuring recently lost species in their infant state surrounded by extinct flowers

Golden toad + Nymphaea thermarum (extinct in the wild)

Dodo + Cry Violet

Quagga + African Daisy

Thylacine + Maiden’s bush-pea

Western Black Rhino + Worcester Brightfig

This week’s episode of PBS Eons talks about one of my favorite animal groups, the hyenas! Here are the three beasts I made for the occasion: Protictitherium, Chasmaporthetes and Pachycrocuta.

I AM NOW OPEN FOR COMMISSIONS!

(Please reblog, as it really helps out!)

I’ll open with 5 slots to start with–check my pinned post to see how many slots I have open! Please DM me on Discord if you’re interested (or if you don’t have discord, contacting me via Tumblr’s message system is fine).

Transcription under the cut:

Rito  (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧

Please reblog, don’t repost.

Please help boost this comic, since Tumblr isn’t letting it show up in the tags.

If you know me IRL, do not show this comic to anyone else IRL.

…Well, here it is.

This is a story I did not tell anyone for many, many years. If you’re a friend and this is your first time hearing about this… I’m sorry. I only worked up the guts to tell anyone last year, and it was hard telling it once, let alone multiple times. Eventually though I told my therapist about it, and I talked to her about making a comic about my experience, which she said would be a good idea if I thought I was ready for it.

And… I do. I feel ready now.

I wanted to post this during Ace Awareness Week, even though it’s not a particularly happy thing to be aware of. I know a lot of people like to focus on the positive stuff during this week, but I think making others aware of the things we suffer through is just as important.

“No-one cares that you’re asexual” is such a lie, and it’s like a punch in the gut every time I hear it. It’s like being told “you are a liar–what happened to you wasn’t real, or didn’t matter, and you are a bad person for even thinking about it.”

I struggled with thinking what happened to me wasn’t real, or that it was my fault, for nearly a decade. And… I don’t want anyone else to go through what I did.

If you are someone on the a-spectrum who has had a terrible experience like mine, I just want to tell you: Your experience is real, it was not your fault, and you should not suffer alone.

If you are an allo person who is reading this, I want to tell you: Please do not think that our orientation is meaningless, that it is something no one would want to know, that it is not something anyone would attack us over. Please support us and defend us against those who would hurt us.

That’s… all I have to say here, I guess.

Since it’s Ace Week again, I feel this is worth reblogging.

Posting this last year was very, very difficult for me. Writing up the script, drawing the comic–I had points where I had to stop because my hands were shaking and my brain was going into panic mode. (The panels where my character’s hands are trembling actually came from that.) While I finished this comic in less time than it took me to finish other comics (some shorter than this, even), this was one of the hardest comics for me to script and draw.

But it also helped me. I’d been living with what happened to me for nearly a decade at that point, and I couldn’t stay silent, but reliving the trauma by retelling what happened to me over and over again to those I trusted to hear about it would have been too much. By putting it into a comic form, I was able to tell it, once, and get it over with. I was also able to tell it to others who may need to hear my story–either to understand what aces can go through, or to know they’re not alone in their experiences.

I’m in a better place now than I was when I drew this comic. The trauma is not gone (I don’t know if it ever will be), but I am learning to deal with it.

I hope that one day we reach a point where stories like mine are rare, or better yet, never happen at all. 

Been thinking about that "thing you most often pretended to be as a kid" post and the cat alien people that I wrote stories about in elementary school.