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I'm working on clearing out some old tabs, and ran across this piece from last fall. The short version is that your gut microbiome and other microbes that accompany you in a series of symbiotic relationships throughout your lifetime persist even after you die. While you might assume that these bacteria and other little beings would perish along with you once you're no longer warm and living, it turns out that they shift gears upon your death, being part of the massive effort to return your remains en masse to the nutrient cycle.

There's honestly something rather poetic about that. Here you've spent a lifetime being the center of a holobiont--a sort of miniature, migratory ecosystem. And these many millions of life forms that you have given safe harbor to for thousands upon thousands of their generations are among the funerary vanguard caring for your remains after you're gone. They pour forth from their ancestral lands--the gut, the skin, and other discrete places--and spread out through even the most protected regions of your form.

And then, just as you constructed your body, molecule by molecule, from a lifetime of nutrients you consumed, so do these microbes go through the process of returning everything you borrowed back to the wider cycles of food and growth and life and death. The ancient halls where their ancestors lived in relative stability are now taken apart in the open air, and their descendants will disperse their inheritance into the soil and the water through the perpetual process of decomposition.

If life happens only once, I'll trade everything for a chance

SVSSS x Witch Hat Atelier (pt 3)

Meet Master Shen's loyal and trustworthy Watchful Eye!!! Reliable as always, Liu-shidi 🙏

I had sm fun figuring out a design for Witch!LQG and went with something sort of prince/knight inspired, since he's always given me that vibe in canon. Also an excuse for me to indulge in liushen crumbs!!!

Him and his sister are from a very established witch family and lived in the Great Hall for some time, until he got sick of it and left to go adventuring. He signed up to be SQQ's watchful eye after learning that he suddenly wants to move his atelier outside of the great hall, thinking he's up to no good (LQG still believes SQQ is SJ at this point). Little does he know that the SQQ he now lives with acts so different from the one in his childhood and unexpectedly becomes fond of him (as all watchful eyes do with the masters they protect, anyways)

Here's the full version of the photocard that I made for the Leon stamp rally I was in at AX!

Phoebus  ☀️🌿🏹

Here’s Apollo of this year! I’m working on and off for this painting since Jan and decided to just let it go now, below cut are just my little process/commentaries

What a beautiful family reunion in the pits 🥰