This Guy Nails It Right On The Head.

no fucking way

You can only reblog this today.

Also going to finally make a pinned post for all my stuff:

BOGLEECH - my tumblr blog is named after this website I created around 2002 and still update. Thousands of pages worth of content focusing on creature design as well as real biology. My review of the original Legend of Zelda monsters might be the most straightforward example of my articles. Links to some of the most popular content:

POKEMON REVIEW ARCHIVE: - I rate and review each and every single Pokemon, in Pokedex order, on its merits as a creature design. I also do so as someone whose favorite animals are all parasites.

DIGIMON REVIEW ARCHIVE - same, but more chaotic.

CREEPYPASTA COOKOFF ARCHIVE - for several years I hosted a yearly writing contest before it grew too big for me to keep up with. There are over a thousand user submitted horror, fantasy, sci fi and surrealist stories here emphasizing unconventional, original ideas you seldom see from the "creepypasta" community!

The original "MORTASHEEN" Monster Archive - since the early 2000's I've created and illustrated more than 800 creatures and counting for my own monster-catching world, now set for release as a tabletop RPG setting.

AWFUL HOSPITAL: SERIOUSLY THE WORST EVER (page one): an interactive comedy-horror-sci-fi webcomic I started in 2014 about a medical facility that could maybe be better.

Some of my other internet stuff:

PATREON - constant work makes my patreon updates inconsistent, but the content backlog goes back years with a huge amount of exclusive art and writing. I try to put up new exclusive stuff whenever I can.

ETSY - I design all sorts of original enamel pins like these, plus I sell zero-maintenance terrarium plants (just leave them in a jar!), original books and other things!

COLOR THE ABYSS (available on the above etsy!) - a 30 page educational deep sea coloring book! Includes a few famous favorites like giant isopods and hagfish, but mostly focuses on less popular, often much weirder animals.

UNBELIEVABLE BUGS - also regularly restocked in the etsy store, 30 of the strangest and most surprising arthropods most people have likely never heard of, illustrated by myself and @revretch, written for even the youngest kids to understand (but will likely teach you something new at any age)

My Itch.io and Ko-fi - both sell digital versions of my books, including some creepypasta collections and my first novel, "Return of the Living," about a world of entirely ghosts suddenly dealing with the appearance of ghost-hunting monsters.

TWITCH CHANNEL - I now try to stream something at least monthly, sometimes weekly when possible, from horror games to books and art.

YOUTUBE CHANNEL - archives my twitch streams and other little things.

INSTAGRAM - look at pictures of my huge weird collection of toys and Halloween collectibles

BLUESKY - I'm going to put mainly just updates to my stuff on here. SEE ALSO:

HUMANS-B-GONE - a science fiction animated series by my partner @revretch, about a world of kaiju-size, technologically advanced insects and arachnids to whom vertebrates like us are just pesky little "gubs." Also has a tumblr account @humansbgone

I've been watching some videos about xenofiction for... reasons... *glances at my recent writing projects* AHEM yeah and this guy mentioned something that... vaguely got me to understand my friends more.

I'm (unfortunately) friends with lots of people who think a lot of the things I'm interested in are "too weird" for them. They can't watch The Last Unicorn because they find the unicorn as well as the art style creepy. They can't watch Watership Down because they can't wrap their head around talking rabbits who haven't advanced to Wind in the Willows levels of society yet. Or maybe they can't watch or read animal xenofiction or consume anthro art whatsoever because animals don't talk or do those things and they think that it could have been as good with human characters. It's like their brain does all of these gymnastics that I haven't in all my life considered. I just liked these pieces of media as a kid because I thought they were... cool... I've never found it hard to understand that the rabbits in this story talk, even though they don't in real life. That objective/subjective concept has never crossed my mind whatsoever.

This guy talked about verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief. Verisimilitude is pretty much just continuity and rules in a story. Firebenders in The Last Airbender cannot bend water. Rabbits in Watership down can talk to each other, vaguely understand other animals, and cannot understand humans. They're fabricated rules of reality that exist within a narrative.

Suspension of disbelief is basically your capacity to understand and believe those fabricated rules. This can swing wildly in two directions. You can either be just wholely unconvinced of anything that doesn't follow normal rules of life or be totally gullible to the point of disregarding plot holes and crappy deux ex machina. I feel like I lean more toward disregarding plot holes lmao.

Not sure where I was going with this post but it felt sorta nice to hear another fan of xenofiction describe this... weird thing when you read a book or watch a movie that changes your life and you recommend it to a friend and their first reaction is "uh... how is she able to understand the wolf?" and that stuff is too weird for them to even consider picking up a masterpiece of art. I guess it makes me feel less like my friends are intentionally withholding understanding to be mean to me and more that this is just... how some people are and some people just seem incapable of understanding certain stories and media.

don't forget y'all that sonic channel specifically asked to please credit them if you repost/upload their works 🙏

As someone who grew up with and loved and adored The Land Before Time (1988) and experienced quite a few of its sequels, too, it's amazing how similar the Ice Age series became to it as well - meaning sequels wise. Though in my opinion, Ice Age (2002) is leaps and bounds better than Land Before Time (1988) though I do deeply love BOTH of their original movies.

Both The Land Before Time and Ice Age (2002)'s original movies are gritty and dark, with a sense of "realism" grounding their events with migrations underpinning the journeys of the original narratives and with a greater xenofictional factor since in IA1, the Ice Age megafauna are treated like majestic creatures who growl and rumble (see Manny and Diego mostly) like they might've done so and with the threat of humans being a major conflict factor within IA1 itself with Manny's choice to return baby Roshan despite the knowledge that in doing so, the child has a chance to become a hunter one day.

However, just like its predecessor The Land Before Time, when it came for Ice Age to get continuations, the realistic underpinnings of IA1 were thrown out the window as its series went Lighter and Softer, just like Land Before Time before it.

And yes, in one of The Land Before Time's many direct-to-DVD/VHS sequels, aliens and an asteroid and end of the world themes (like Ice Age's much reviled IA5) become major plot points!

The Land Before Time sequel where Littlefoot reunites with his father involves Longnecks pushing back the sky to save everyone (because of a solar eclipse which was treated in-universe as an "end of the world" event) and the Stone of Cold Fire teased alien dinosaurs. .-. It was around those sequels that I put away keeping up with the TLBT sequels though when I was young I enjoyed them and it saddens me the Ice Age sequels followed the same route.

My hopes for the Ice Age sequels, even as a young (12/13 year old) child was that they'd buck the trend and remain dark and xenofictional and not devolve into silly Lighter and Softer-ness and Dense and Wackier plots like The Land Before Time did years before. In short, the Ice Age sequels deserved better - they deserved to not basically become a modern, theatrically-released "Land Before Time" sequels-redux!

Hmmm I've seen a lot of crow and raven people in fantasy settings but sci-fi 'uplift' premises tend to focus on dolphins and chimps and other reasonable targets.

Want a sci-fi story that's set long after some unwise scientist CRISPRed a be-much-smarter tweak into at least two species each of corvids and cephalopods.

so we've got established society of crows, who absolutely picked up human languages fast and use them routinely to interact with human beings, and maybe don't have citizenship in human countries where they reside because they have their own political units that aren't based on terrain, but they are recognized as people by law

(but like, i want to emphasize they are crows that are physically the same as crows have always been)

and the much more mysterious and retiring underwater society of the octopuses.

Nix Reviews: Legends of the Guardians: Owls of Ga’Hoole

Summary: A young barn owl and his brother fall from their nest and are kidnapped and enslaved by Nazi in all but name owls. The barn owl befriends a similarly enslaved young elf owl and the two escape and befriend a young great grey owl and burrowing owl and set off to find a nigh mythical group of owl nights to stop the owl nazis. 

Based on the first three books of the Guardians of Ga’Hoole series by Kathryn Lasky.

Rating: 6/10

Sexual Assult Drinking Game: N/A

(+) Holy fucking hell is this beautiful animated and designed. They deserved the award that they won.

-those fight scenes! Pure excellence

-the music fits very well

-Owl City has a song in it and frankly, I like puns

-I generally don’t like high fantasy but I loved this

- War is bad but under certain circumstances, the right thing to do is to fight

- White Tyto supremacists and slavery is bad

- Snakes are good guys

- the visual worldbuilding is just lovely

(-) dear gods the pacing. Way too fast.

- We do not get Twilight or Digger’s backstories and their characters are exaggerated

- Glyfie doesn’t get her time to shine since much of the St. Aggies stuff just isn’t in the movie

-Bats are bad guys

- The movie hits only the most important plot beats of the books outside of the fights and doesn’t linger long enough to let emotion settle in

-The film is set in Australia and not N. America

Overall: It’s a beautiful, absolutely lovely looking film. But you’d probably like it better if you didn’t read the books and don’t pay much attention to ecology stuff. The pacing really does the whole thing dirty and would have made a better mini-series than a film. I recommend it purely on the visuals.

Ya know what I hate? How in Science Fiction if there are aliens and humans, then the humans are ultra super special for whatever reason. Like they can’t just be there they have to ether be the main focus or the only species that matters! Apparently people can’t relate to aliens unless they are inherently superior.