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Nature of the Beast

Some sage advice that many people need to hear right now.

What happens when anxiety and depression takes over and you just can't write anything? I wanted to use lockdown to my advantage but I'm not well and I'm sad. Any advice?

Just know you aren't alone in this. I've written a fraction of what I should have written, over the last 4 months. The anxiety is real, there are many things to be anxious and depressed about.

So be kind to yourself. Set yourself small targets and goals. Be happy when you succeed, and forgive yourself when you fail.

I'm really into these.

The Mighty Nein Yasha & Beau & Caleb & Fjord & Caduceus & Molly & Nott & Jester (My other Critical Role Fanart)   (Find me on Twitter)

This one really tripped me up when I first saw it. Amazing use of perspective and foreshortening in this work though. He was a master at it, foreshor.

In Praise of Dialectics, 1937, Rene Magritte

Size: 54x65 cm Medium: oil, canvas

Beautifully illustrated and written story comic. I would love to see this in full graphic novel format or as a written novella. It's such a cool concept.

This is such a cool concept

Here’s how to charge your phone when it’s alive, full of guts, and you are a crab alien who lives in the sea. Scuds are amphibious, comfortable breathing on land as long as their gills stay damp, but they spend most of their time in saltwater intertidal zones. This makes human-style technology powered by heat and electricity improbable, so scuds never really developed that– instead, animal husbandry and artificial selection developed to the point that extremely sophisticated manufactured technology can be created through the surgical combination of extremely derived sedentary animals, alga, and bacteria.

So what powers a phone full of guts? The simplest form of food: sugar water with essential nutrients added. The charging cable also deals with the outgoing (mostly liquid) waste from digestion and the nitrogenous waste from the phone’s metabolic processes.

Ironically, while humans have trouble bringing our electrical technology underwater, scuds have trouble bringing their biotechnology onto land. Even with a lung attachment, biotech innards have a high risk of desiccation and temperature shock on land. For especially large or delicate pieces of technology, the lack of underwater buoyancy can cause internal distention and damage.

PATREON | STORE | Runaway to the Stars

Good words to live by; beautifully said.

A Virgo once told me I can be as sad as I want just make sure I’m still doing things and that has changed the way I view everything. I’m like it’s fine that I’m sad right now but let me go be sad at hot yoga and be sad while I’m taking my vitamins and be sad while I’m learning ceramics and while I’m completing my tasks. This might sound like depressing but for me it’s so elevating. Bc I know in like, December for example I will be able to look at how much I’ve expanded myself n it won’t matter that I was sad in August because sadness doesn’t stick. It’s what u do that shapes your life. And I kept doing things. And I shaped my life

This is amazing; we often personify various parts of our body. But little did we know, that it turns out our body personifies itself.

Your body is an incredibly bizarre machine.

“What you see is a myosin protein dragging an endorphin along a filament to the inner part of the brain’s parietal cortex which creates happiness. Happiness. You’re looking at happiness.”

We are ignorant of the meaning of the dragon in the same way we are ignorant of the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the dragon’s image that fits man’s imagination, and this accounts for the dragon’s appearance in different places and periods. 

Jorge Luis Borges

This was amazing; what a great storyteller.

I was raised agnostic and tend to remain ambiguous on theological matters.

-but my house has a porch on the second story that affords me a terrific view of my neighborhood and the Colorado Front Range and I was partaking of some peace before the 4th Of July Finger-Loss Festivities begin, and I have had a

~*Spiritual Experience*~

I just watched my neighbor try to unload an actual wooden pallet that had to have been forklifted into the back of his insecurity pickup worth of fireworks.

Except that he does not have a forklift in his garage.

He does have so much sports memorabilia and cardboard boxes of unsold MLM Merchandise and patriotically themed camping gear and posters of women in bikinis and flags of suspect political organizations in his garage that there is only BARELY enough space for the fireworks and certainly none for his truck.

So he had to unload the individual boxes of recreational explosives from the back of his truck and stack them in the minimal space he had cleared by hand. This is a tedious and time-consuming process as this neighbor has purchased a wide variety of recreational and locally illegal explosives instead of many of just a few types, so the individual boxes are rather small.

He begins, and this is crucial to what happens next, by cutting apart the industrial-grade saran wrap his explosives dealer had so carefully wrapped his merchandise in, and discarded it unsecured on his lawn.

Where Outdoor Conditions sometimes happen.

His process for unloading the fireworks is to 1. Climb up through the gate into the bed of his pickup truck (a feat made unusually difficult due to the slope of his driveway, and this man's fascinating decision to wear the world's Siffest and least Flexible Denim Overalls. 2. Once in the pickup bed, he selects ONE (1) box from the pile He is apparently from a niche religious institution that doesn't believe in stacking things. 3. Carries it awkwardly around the palette that barely fits in the truck bed 4. His wife yells "Be careful!" when he nearly falls out of the pickup. 5. He Yells "SHADDUP!" back at her. 6. The Large German Shepherd barks from inside the house. 7. He yells "SHADDUP!" back at her too. 8. He sets the (1) box down on the gate 9. Slowly and awkwardly climbs out of the pickup bed 10. picks the box back up, and carries it into the garage.

Question: Aren't you going to help this poor man? Answer: Absolutely Not.

There's four military veterans, MANY dogs, and several people with dementia in this neighborhood, all of whom are terrified by this chicanery every year and many neighbors have repeatedly asked him to maybe do the fireworks somewhere else. (This is the Eighth Year Running he's held a major demolition event in his driveway, and for those of you who can do math, you may be able to guess the precipitating incident to this little ritual) Additionally, I live in Colorado, a state marginally less prone to spontaneous and catastrophic conflagrations than a rotting grain silo, but only marginally. Our recreational explosives laws are written accordingly.

I am in fact calling the Non Emergency line to report Fireworks violations, and reading off the brand labels to someone named Dorothy, who is gleefully totaling up a SPECTACULAR fine for my oblivious neighbor.

However, while I'm on the phone with Dorothy, I notice the wind begin to pick up. and by "Notice" I mean "The Industrial Saran Wrap he left on his Lawn earlier is suddenly swept up about 100 feet into the air by an updraft intense enough to make my ears pop" And by "Pick Up" I mean "I look up to see the sky has turned a fun and exciting shade of glass green, and the bottoms of the clouds are bumpy and rounded, and the overall effect is not unlike looking up through the bottom of the cup at God's Matcha Boba Tea."

For those of you who do not live in places with Inclement Weather, these conditions mean "You have about 30 seconds before a Major Meteorological Event Occurs."

I move under the eaves. "Hang on Dorothy." I say, nose filling with Petrichor. "The show is about to be cancelled." "Oh, that doesn't matter!" Dorothy cheerfully informs me. "It's illegal for him just to possess those, no matter if he actually gets to set them off or not." "Terrific, because he's gotten maybe five boxes out of a hundred inside."

Sometimes, the weather gods are Merciful and give you a verbal warning, typically in the kind of thunderclap that makes your ears ring.

The Gods were not merciful today.

It's not often that I am in the time, place, correct angle or in a properly observational frame of mind to see this, But I got to see it today. Huh. I thought. I've never seen a cloud just DIVE for the ground before. Oh. I realized as it got closer. That's RAIN.

Sometimes, a thunderstorm will form in such a way that the rain that would normally be distributed over an area of say, five to tent square miles, is instead concentrated into an area of say, my neighborhood exactly.

So today, I was granted the rare privilege of being able to actually see the literal wall of water descend from On High and DIRECTLY onto my porch, my street, and my neighbor's truck, and his pile of unwrapped fireworks.

The sheer impact force of the downpour immediately scatters the teetering pile of fireworks boxes in the back of the truck, like the wrath of God striking down the tower of Babel. Boxes tumble, then are washed out of the bed of the truck by the deluge. Smaller Boxes are carried down the road in a little line by the stream forming in the gutter, like little impotent explosive ducklings.

My neighbor was definitely yelling something, but I could not hear what over the DEAFENING noise several million gallons of water makes upon high-speed contact with the earth's surface, but there was a lot of arm-waving and faces turning red as he went looking for the saran wrap that had probably blown to Nebraska by now, while his wife started disassembling the complex three-dimensional puzzle of interlocking material goods in search of a tarp. They do not have a tarp. They have one of those wretched Thin Blue Line flags though, and my neighbor jogs out in a futile effort to cover what's left in the truck.

Which is when the hail begins.

"HELLO?" Yelled Dorothy. "HI!" I shouted. "WE'RE HAVING SOME WEATHER!" "OH GOOD!" she shouts back. "WE NEED THE MOISTURE!"

I watch for a minute longer, but the loss was immediate and catastrophic- the hail is the size of marbles and dense and cares not for your pitiful cardboard and cellophane, ripping the boxes asunder and punching holes in the few things covered in plastic. The colors on the Thin Blue Line Flag are seeping all over the remains of that it was supposed to protect in a particularly apt visual metaphor. Not even the few boxes that made it into the garage are spared, as the German Shepherd escapes from indoors, and in an attempt to assist her humans, jumps directly into the small stack of not-yet-ruined boxes, scattering them into the driveway and deluge. She even picks one up so her humans will chase her around the yard, before dropping it in the gutter to be swept away.

So. I was raised Agnostic -but even I can recognize when God slaps someone upside the head and shouts "NO!" at them.

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