lieutenant burpy boy

Create your farm, romance the villagers, dive to save coral reefs, catch bugs and fish to put in the museum, attend mini games and festivals, and MEET MERMAIDS.

Let's talk about Coral Island!

This Kickstarter has come a long way since it's launch, and as of Feb. 15 it's still got 15 days to reach it's higher goals.

Or, DO YOU WANT TO DATE A MERMAID?

There are three mythical figures in this game, one of them being mermaids. We've finally unlocked the village, but if we unlock the kingdom there are two romance mermaid options.

But if mermaids don't do it for you, the human options are just as sexy! (And yes, OF COURSE YOU CAN PICK ANY GENDER 🏳️‍🌈)

(and the normal townies aren't bad looking either 👀)

Coral island can be a solo or multiplayer experience, and is planned to launch on switch and other consoles not long after early access in Q4!

By backing you get the game key for only $20, which is low for the amount of gameplay Coral Island has to offer!

Yes, that's right! For the low amount of $20, you too can eventually date a mermaid! Consider pledging today!

I am going to preface this by saying the people involved in these stories did not intend for The Little Mermaid to be a 1:1 replica of their lives but it’s clear how significant their experiences shaped the telling of it.

Hans Christian Andersen’s sexuality isn’t easy to define especially since the society and culture he lived in wouldn’t have the language or the framework to discuss sexuality, and it would do a disservice to say he was gay when he didn’t have a known romantic life. But his love life has been defined by his numerous unrequited loves that ranged from women to men, but also his steadfast refusal to have sex.

Another aspect of Andersen is how heavily religious he was and how that showed through his work. Some of his other stories like “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “Thumbelina”, and “Princess and the Pea”, all have themes around being alienated but that there isn’t a true villain in any of them and their happy endings be something close to divinity and good morality. Though not overtly religious in his stories it’s clear how much faith he had in God doing the right thing in the end.

The Little Mermaid however, is probably one of the most overt in how his religion and his sexuality intersected.

A brief overview of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is that in his story, Mermaids are creatures born without souls, however they live significantly longer than humans.

But it’s precisely because of this, the titular Mermaid longs to become human in hopes she too will gain a soul. She chooses to trade her tongue to get a pair of legs to woo a human she rescued, and on these legs all she feels is pain and suffering, and she must do so in silence. If she cannot gain the love of her prince, she will die without a soul, and never get to heaven. All the while, the prince loves her only as a brother would in the time they spend together and eventually chooses to marry another girl.

The mermaid is then given a chance to return to her life as a mermaid if she kills the prince before she dies but in doing so she will never have a soul. She loves him too much to do so and chooses death over living as a creature with no soul.

But when she dies, she finds herself amongst the daughters of the air, and is told because of her love and her suffering she has the chance to gain a soul unlike any other mermaid. She can work for 200 years making sure children are happy and be granted a soul thereafter.

So, looking at this, you can draw clear parallels with this story and Andersen’s personal life.

Like the mermaid, Andersen saw himself as a creature without a soul. He too was in love with a man who only saw himself as a brother to Andersen. Andersen saw himself doomed to be silent, doomed to constantly feel like he was walking on knives and doomed to be alone.

But his idea of a joyous ending is that his suffering wasn’t all for naught, that his stories that he wrote for children and the joy they brought WOULD eventually grant his greatest desire to be granted a soul and accepted into heaven.

Of course there isn’t a villain, Andersen accepted that his culture that cruelly casted him out was correct in doing so, and that he had to work within the system to exist.

The Little Mermaid’s themes of suffering and love were tied to Andersen’s life and his sexuality intersecting with his religion.

The 1989 Disney version has consistently gone on record that despite have Musker and Clements being directors, Howard Ashman, a gay man with AIDS in the 80s, was the creative force in character writing, music and the creative direction the movie eventually went in.

In the movie, all of the religious aspects have been stripped away, and the motivations have been changed.

Ariel no longer wants to gain a soul, her desire to become human instead is tied with feeling alienated with her home life and wanting acceptance elsewhere. Her hobby of collecting human stuff HEAVILY echoes the experiences of many LGBT+ people who had interests outside of their gender roles, and being unable to to see eye to eye with bigoted parents. People often mistake her attempts at asserting her own identity as “being in love” when the narrative is about her wanting agency and respect for who she is.

Ursula being a villain in this version is tied to how LGBT+ people of the 1980s understanding at least part of their oppression was due to predatory and unscrupulous people, as well as being systematic. This contrasts with Andersen’s work because Andersen, despite suffering, always put faith in the systems surrounding him and only striving to work within them, while Ashman understood that to work with society you don’t do business with morally neutral people.

While Andersen sees the only option for people, or to him, creatures, like him to gain any morally good ending, they need to remain passive and work within the system to get what they want.

But the 1989’s response to that is, no, to get a happy ending, you NEED to question the system, you need to fight against it because it is a system that only uses you to get what it needs and it needs to be destroyed to get a happy ending. Like, you CAN NOT separate how this change in the story occurred with Howard Ashman being a gay man with AIDS during 1980s America.

In the end, Ariel reconciling with her bigoted father to be able to live her life as a human with another man thematically ties in to how Andersen saw his own happy ending.

The Little Mermaid is a story that can not be separated from two men who dealt with complex relationships with their own identities, and it’s disingenuous to say the 1989 film is a bad adaptation for not religiously following the plot points of the original.

The Little Mermaid is at its best when it explores how a person’s sexuality and identity is alienated from the culture around them, and how they navigate the system that oppresses them.

Andersen saw the system to be just and his idea of a happy ending clashes with Howard Ashman’s own experiences of a system that needed to be defied to have earned a happy ending.

“If you are trapped inside by the smoke and watching your air quality steadily decline- here is somethung you can do right now to make things slightly better.

Get every spare pot/pan/container/bucket you have and fill them halfway with water, place these everywhere in your house you have the space to safely do so. The idea is to create as much watery surface area as possible- the water will gradually absorb smoke particles and clean the air. It’s small, but if you have enough surface area it can make a *very* meaningful difference over 2-3 hours.

Another thing you can do is run a hot shower until your bathtub is 1/2 filled up- leave the batroom door open. The rush of humidity into your living space will knock many of the smoke particles down onto the floor. (Do this every few hours as needed as needed).

I know how it looks but this set up has kept the air quality in my bedroom basically normal for the past 3 days. It’s an improvised solution- but it’s one that works surprisingly well and doesn’t require much in the way of materials.”

another seasons guide, but this time for New Horizons!

unlike past games, the tree and grass colours don’t change on specific dates. instead, they gradually change a little bit every day. that’s why I’ve only included pictures of things that change on definitive dates (weeds, bushes, cherry blossoms and snow), and included a picture for the first and last day of each time period so you can get an idea of the range of colours that happen during that time

things to note:

the weeds in these images are organized by row. the small weeds will grow into the the medium weed that is directly above them

if you time travel forwards to a new bush season, the flowers will be buds, even if you jumped to somewhere in the middle of the season. if you want to have certain bushes blooming, jump to the day before you want to land on, then move one day forward

if you time travel backwards to a new bush season, the bushes will not have flowers or buds. go back to two days before you want flowers, then travel forwards two days

I’ve heard that cedar trees are supposed to get lights from Dec 15th - Jan 5th in both the northern and southern hemispheres, but for some reason none of mine got lights while testing. maybe it’s because I only have three cedar trees in this town idk

How to Grow Lots of Big Weeds

the short and simple answer is:

if you have 149 weeds or less, they will grow

if you have 150 weeds or more, they will not grow no mater what

everything else in this post is just extra information that you may find interesting or useful

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I got fed up trying to figure out how weeds worked, so I made a throwaway town on my old switch and ran some experiments. the percentages I list is information I got from the guidebook. based on my tests, they seem to be correct. here’s what I learned:

water makes your weeds grow faster. rain, snow and your watering can all count

baby weeds have a 20% chance of growing without water, and a 50% chance of growing with water

medium weeds have a 5% chance of growing without water, and a 10% chance of growing with water

if you have 149 weeds or less, new weeds will spawn. once you reach 150, weeds will stop spawning and your weeds will stop growing

because weeds stop growing at 150, you can only have a total of 149 medium and large weeds combined

you can make all 149 of your weeds into full grown weeds if you want

if you want lots of bushy, wild-looking weeds all over your town, the most effective way to maximize your weeds is to plant exactly 149 weeds in places where you want the biggest weeds to grow. once a day a new weed will spawn, tipping you over to 150, so you’ll need to pluck one baby weed a day until all your weeds are the size that you want. at that point, you can go fill in the spaces with baby weeds

below are the notes I took while doing this process if you’re interested

These are photos taken by Robert Landsburg of the eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980. He realized he would never get to safety in time, so he kept taking pictures of the ash cloud for as long as possible. Then he put the camera securely in his bag and lay down on top of it to protect it before being engulfed in the pyroclastic flow. When they found his body, the recovered the pictures were invaluable to geologists because no one had ever been able to document an eruption that close up before.

I was here. I explored. I saw this. Remember me.