GOOD NEWS FOR CRAB FANS EVERYWHERE

Please click through and read the article. It just keeps getting better and better.

"Can you describe your prior work experience?"

"I'm a professional crab botherer."

i fucking love humanity and space. thinking abt.. thinking about the perseverence rover, lovingly nicknamed "percy" and the family portrait it has on it of the former rovers sent to mars 😭

how we sent an ounce of clyde tombaugh's ashes aboard the new horizons space probe so he could visit the "planet" he discovered.

the pioneer plaques

AND the golden record on the voyagers

us screaming out to space hoping desperately to not be alone, that we are HERE HERE WE ARE THIS IS WHAT WE LOOK LIKE.

astronauts turning into artists after their time in space,,, ooughghg

Years ago back when I worked in cubicle land, we were hiring junior software developers. They didn’t have to have a ton of experience, just a willingness to learn, and some demonstration of their software skills. Like: show me a program you wrote (any language) or a web site you designed. Anything.

And there was this one guy I talked with who seemed super sharp, but had virtually zero experience writing software. When it came time to do the show-n-tell part of the interview he whips out his laptop, brings up a website, and spins it around to show me what he made.

A website of tiny ceramic frogs.

Not for sale. Just… all these ceramic frogs, organized into categories. Frogs on bicycles, frogs with hats, frogs sitting on lily pads. It was a virtual museum of ceramic frogs in web form.

I scrolled through his online collection of frogs, slightly baffled.

“This is your website?” I asked finally.

“Yep!”

“You coded this yourself?” I popped into view-source mode and poked around some incredibly well-formatted, well-commented html. I nodded slowly. This guy was meticulous.

“Yep!”

“So… where’d all the frogs come from?”

“I made those too,” he says, beaming. 

And while I’m processing this he rummages in his bag and pulls out a little ceramic frog working at a computer terminal. He places it on the table before us, next to the laptop.

“And THIS one,” he says, “I made for you! As a thank you for the interview.”

It was adorable. I hired him on the spot. I mean, why not? Worst case he’d wash out in 90 days and we’d hire somebody else. He turned out to be one of the best developers on our team. 

And yes, his cubicle was loaded with ceramic frogs.

wizards thinking of clerics as hacks cause we spent years of study learning the secrets of the universe they cheated and got a god to do their magic for them

clerics thinking of wizards as hacks cause we spent years serving and cultivating a deeply personal relationship with a god they copied down some cheat codes to make stuff blow up

And sorcerers are like "no wait, hold on. This is basically a curse. I've been *experiencing* magic against my will since I was born and it's hurt a lot of people."

... and then everyone glares at the warlock in the corner. Their response: "Yeah, no. That's fair. I blew Cthulhu in the parking lot behind the McDonald's and now I can do magic. Best deal ever. You all can (and should) suck it."

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.

I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while.

Its parts were obscenely limited in their movement. Each hinge could open or close only a small amount before reaching its limit, yet by working in concert they demonstrated unexpected dexterity, moving and manipulating the objects before it with cunning equal to my own. It was more torso than limb, as though a seal had been stretched and warped, given long grasping tentacles filled with bones like bars of coral.  It’s head was most horrid of all, flat and ovoid, jutting out too small from the trunk as though it belonged to a beast half its size.

The thing rose upon its lowermost appendages, two long trunks that ended in flat, protruding flippers that branched into stubby, grasping mockeries of a sucker. It’s triple-hinged uppermost limbs were similar, but the ends branched into five smaller tentacles, each with three hinges of their own.

I froze, as the thing’s gaze fell upon me and it opened its hideous fish-jaw, filled with thick, many-shaped teeth like white shards of stone, and spoke in a shrill, discordant babble. I felt its horrid dry grip on my flesh, as those hinged appendages closed on me like the legs of a crab.

I felt the heat of its body, tasted its noxious, oily flesh through my touch, and prepared for the end, and all went black as a swoon overtook me.

I awoke, some time later, the cold and comforting water, banished back to the comfort of the sea and the dark. I should be grateful I am alive. I should cast aside the experience like a half-remembered dream.

I shall never again go swimming in search of lights above. The last thing I recall before the darkness took me was my right eye popping free of the thing’s grasp enough to see into the distance for one brief moment.

I saw thousands of lights.

ok so it turns out “horror but it’s about something mundane from the perspective of a non-human animal” fucks severely

Friends

hello.

Richard Chen

When I went to Sunderland, my grandad told me he’d teach me how to ride when I came back for Christmas and then he fuckin’ died and I haven’t been on a bike since. And now I’m saying that out loud I realize that never learning was actually a great disrespect to his memory and now I feel ashamed so can we stop talking about it and go back to me just taking out my negative emotions on you even if you deserve it or not.

Come on, Roy. For grandad.

To be completely honest, c2e73 is probably my absolute favourite episode of all time just because of the mechanical storytelling. Fjord is powerless. All he has is a whip and a dagger, and he’s proficient in those weapons but he doesn’t have modifiers to make them particularly effective. He’s built to be a hexblade warlock; he’s got max charisma and high constitution, but he doesn’t even get a plus one to his strength or dex.

But a giant fucking worm attacks his friends—snapping Jester up with its jaws, burrowing underground with an unconscious Beau between its teeth, swallowing Caduceus into its searing gullet—and Fjord charges directly at the danger, with nothing but sheer determination and a couple of weapons that he’s only kind of okay at using.

And it fucking works, Fjord deals max damage with the dagger as he flanks the worm to save Jester. Fjord climbs directly into the mouth of a worm to pull Caduceus free and is strong enough to grab hold of him. Fjord succeeds on multiple strength checks to keep the worm from getting away, which is pretty much the only reason that a Beau didn’t die in that battle. Fjord beats a contested strength check—a stat which has no modifiers in, again—against a giant fucking worm with a +7 to strength by rolling a natural fucking 19. It’s the definition of miraculous. It shouldn’t work at all.

But it works. Without magic, without tricks, without gimmicks. Fjord is powerless. He’s just a half-orc with second-hand weapons loaned to him by his friends; with a scar still fresh on his skin from where he plunged his own sword into his chest; with the same ever present fear that he’s useless without his powers, that he’s a liability, that he’s going to drag the party down and doom them all.

And so Fjord does what he’s always done. He digs his heels in, tightens his grip, and makes sure to keep his friends alive.

The Nightmare King

EREMAD PLUSH MY BELOVED👹

previous parts: [1] [percy edition]

OSYSA in The Trials of Vasselheim (2x02)

Update:

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Christmas time means cookie time!

Tons more at the source!