A Bunch Of Fellas Designed From Randomly Generated Pixel Sprites Inspired By @mossworm! Which One Is

Here come the most Extra of turtles and tortoises

Indian Roof Turtle, about as close to a dragon turtle as we’re likely to get.

Burmese Roof Turtle, with a banana for a head

Diamondback Terrapin, the Rorschach of turtles

Red-Bellied Short-Necked Turtle, just look at those colors!

Burmese Starred Tortoise, geometrically chic

Radiated Tortoise, also geometrically chic but maybe more art deco

Painted Terrapin, no need to send in the clowns

Leopard Tortoise, breaking the mold with a little art noveau

Bell’s Hingeback Tortoise, “You think box turtles got it on lockdown? Hold my noms and watch this!”

Impressed Tortoise, what it says on the tin

Cane Turtle, otherwise known as “Winner Of Turtle Death Glare Competition Since Forever”

Sabyasachi Hertitage Bridal 2016

I get why fantasy authors would default to using, like, the same basic arrangement of seasons and weather and gravity that we have here in The Real World because they have to make up so much shit as it is and it IS probably good praxis to give your readers some familiar touchstones in your world so they can just focus on the plot, but. having said that. I think there should be more settings that have seventeen seasons, all of them different lengths, and constellations that don't have fixed patterns because sometimes they'll get pissy and just move to a different part of the sky, and sometimes the sun tells people things telepathically, and there's a type of weather where the air just gets really thick and difficult to walk through that's unpleasant but not any more uncommon than rain. it's called smärklf.

Pulp sci-fi illustration by Italian artist, Aldo Di Gennaro (b. 1938).

Feels like I should post these here as well - Chinese makeup elements iconic to Mulan’s era!

Meaning the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Sui dynasty, or the Tang dynasty (~400-900 CE). These few hundred years were when aesthetic styles in China were at their boldest.

My Instagram

My Chinese history tweet collections

For all my writers struggling with weaponry of the sword variety. 

So it occurred to me that ‘grawlix’ is sort of an obscure and specialized word, but what I didn’t know until I was googling around just now is that it was actually invented by cartoonist Mort Walker in his 1980 book The Lexicon of Comicana, in which he categorizes (and invents terminology for) all kinds of visual cues and shorthand commonly used in comics

In other news, this is now right up there with The Meaning of Liff as ‘books of made up words I desperately need to own”

Cultures/creeds for a gonzo transhuman fantasy setting constructed entirely from repurposed Dungeons & Dragons tropes:

A community of serial reincarnationists under a permanent enchantment that causes them to eventually reappear in a new young adult body with personality and memories intact any time they’re killed, whether through violence, disease or old age. The exact form the new body takes is random, and is as likely to be an animal as a humanoid; their cavalier attitude toward death is tempered by a strong cultural expectation to learn how to live with whatever body you end up with, so it’s not uncommon to encounter - for example - a respected member of the community who currently happens to be an owl. Socially they tend toward agrarianism, though they have no particular objection to urban living; in their ethos, a sprawling city differs from a bird’s nest or a beaver’s dam only in scale.

A mob of undead skeletons obsessed with the transitory nature of existence. Their culture is dominated by short-lived art forms, like sand paintings, improvisational music, and elaborate wooden sculptures which are burned on completion. They’re able to freely swap bones with each other, or replace them with suitably prepared substitutes taken from non-undead skeletons or carved from wood or other dead organic matter, and it’s not uncommon to encounter a skeleton with none of their original bones remaining; pondering the resulting ship-of-Theseus problem with respect to personal identity is regarded as a fun intellectual exercise, but it doesn’t actually bother them. Alone among the creeds, they never directly produce new members; every one of them is a former member of some other creed.

A society devoted to the pursuit of knowledge by transforming life forms through experimental wizardry. They regard experimenting on others - even animals - as horrifyingly unethical, and as a result, each of them uses their own body as a testing ground. Individual members range from mostly human with only a few odd physical quirks, to entities not readily recognisable as life, let alone people. While novel transmutations are always self-directed, they’re willing to perform the most thoroughly tested and proven procedures on others with informed consent, a service that comes in high demand. Likewise, interventions to rescue other members of the creed from experiments gone awry are permitted, though only after careful deliberation - after all, perhaps your neighbour meant to spend a year as a rock!

All you need in life is a color picker willing to expose you to the unbounded madness we call color vision.

me, absolutely clueless: "I want a color just like this one, but in red" color picker: Fuck you think you are, a Mantis Shrimp? Don't talk to me again until you can afford a wide gamut monitor.