souda you have a better chance with the microwave

These are my preferences, but your mileage may vary, depending on your personal dance style!

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I need you all to see how newborn giant pacific octopuses look when they swim

The way their little stubby tentacles flop uselessly...they're so silly <3

Hi. This explains a lot about me.

This only became worse and worse as the years passed by. 😔

Never let them know your next move!

Please, you gotta watch Eddie Williams' audition on Australia's Got Talent 2019 until the end!

The way she stood up and said "What!?" I felt that. We all felt that.

With Mother & Father’s day coming up, please remember you are not required to be grateful to abusive parents. Please remember,

one of my favorite types of comments I get on my art is when someone says a character I drew looks like them. especially if they don’t get to see themselves in art much. that was on purpose!!! you are seen and I want to do my best to continue doing that!!

NO EXACTLY EXACTLY EXACTLY

having my art compared to another character, even if well-intentioned, tends to just make me feel unoriginal or uncreative.

but to me, nothing is more original and unique as the way people look in real life. I could study character design my whole life and attempt to be as unbiased as I can, but there was always be an inevitable filter through aesthetics and my own personal tastes.

so when people DO say a character looks like themself, or their mom or their cousin or their best friend, it’s extra special!

happy mother’s day are you proud of me /jokey

Today was bath day for the Ruckus. Gonna start being him twice a month to get him better used to ask the grooming nonsense he is going to need as an adult

I have now learned that a wet Ruckus is just a chiweenie.

marie howe, in an interview with krista tippett of on being

from marie howe’s 2017 collection of poetry, magdalene

Doom II belt buckle a friend made.

MOST BASS ARE JUST FISH BUT LEROY BROWN WAS SOMETHING SPECIAL

Leroy Brown has been haunting me, so I looked into his backstory and it's wilder than you could possibly imagine.

Leroy Brown was about one pound when he was caught in 1973 in Lake Eufala, Alabama, by Tom Mann, who is absolutely legendary in the world of bass fishing. Instead of releasing or taking him home to eat, Mann decided he recognized a spark of something special in the fish, so he took him home and popped him in his backyard pond. Later, he moved the fish to a giant aquarium in his workshop. He was an aggressive fish, so he got named after the song. And Mann loved this fish. He trained him to jump through a hoop, he hand-fed him, he would talk about him to anybody. The fish became internationally known, with publicity in Russia, South Africa, Australia, and other countries.

Then, in 1980, the fish dies- probably of old age. So what to do? Have a funeral. Various sources say between 500 and 1,200 people came (there was a very large bass fishing tournament that weekend), and the local marching band was there to play "Bad, Bad Leroy Brown" as the fish's tiny casket was lowered into his grave.

But then things got really wild. On the day of the funeral, it was eventually decided that the ground was too wet and muddy, so Mann put the fish and his casket (actually a satin-lined tackle box full of one dead fish and the lure he was caught with) in the freezer.

That night, somebody stole the dead fish and his tiny casket.

Seriously. This was not a taxidermy fish, this was just. Y'know. A dead fish, with all of the smells that entails.

Three weeks later, the tackle box turns up at the Tulsa, Oklahoma airport. A baggage handler found it, and it was decided that the box full of three-week-old decaying Leroy was too nasty to ship back to Alabama. The statue remained at Fish World, which is where the public could visit Leroy during his life, until 2005, when Tom Mann died and the facility was closed. (Fish World was like... a weird museum/facility to learn about bass fishing. Mann wasn't just an expert angler, he also designed some of the most popular lures that are still used in bass fishing, as well as the Humminbird depth finder- still the most popular depth finder brand on the market. So he had this workshop/lure lab there and people could come see his stuff but also learn about how to go bass fishing and how to do bass fishing as a sport.) The statue went to another bass fisherman, until the city of Eufala asked for it back in 2016. Now it sits prominently on Main Street, reminding everyone that most bass are just fish, but Leroy Brown was something special.

LEROY BROWN UPDATE

I found a picture from his funeral!

From left to right: Tom Mann, Leroy Brown (deceased), Ray Scott

Ray Scott was the president of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society, and was the person who had the Leroy statue from 2005-2016.

I am still trying to track down images of Leroy when he was alive. There should be some, as the fish had editorials in Southern Living and a couple of other magazines, but those may take longer to find. For now, enjoy this image of Leroy laid to rest, covered by the only artificial lure he ever struck: Mann's coveted strawberry worms.

Tom Mann's memoir, Think Like A Fish, is up on the Internet Archive. While it doesn't have any photos (or at least, the edition that's online doesn't), Chapter 11, which is about Leroy, implies that there may be video evidence of this fish!

I really hope I can find some old commercials. Leroy was the only small fish in the entire tank, so if these commercials still exist, and if there's a small largemouth bass in them, we'll have moving images of this fish!

FOUND HIM

I couldn't find any of the old TV spots, but I did find this ad for Mann's Jelly Worm, featuring the legend himself!

There he is! In the four pictures to the left, that's Leroy Brown! Look at him, being extremely suspicious of that bait! Mann notes in his memoir that while Leroy Brown would hit plastic bait, he'd never take it- in other words, he'd bite, but if it had a hook, he wouldn't swallow. Instead, he'd swim with it:

I am officially declaring this investigation into the life and times of Leroy Brown complete. We've seen his memorial, we've learned about his life, we've marveled at his post-mortem kidnapping, and now we've seen pictures of him both dead and alive. The only thing I have left to show is this: the merch.

Oh yeah, there was merch. Specifically, the Leroy Brown crankbait and the Leroy Brown belt buckle:

If you want to see more about the lure, including watching a guy fish with it, there's a youtube video from a fella who does a lot of fishing with vintage/retro lures.

I feel enriched for having learned so much about bad, bad Leroy Brown.

The giant was in an iron cage that had once held an elephant in the menagerie.

Here in the dungeons, it was still too small for it to sit up in. It was lying on its side, knees drawn up to its chest, facing the opposite wall.

Gretta had been forbidden to see it. Well, no, that wasn’t right – nobody had even told Gretta that it was here. Her sisters and the staff of the castle had apparently been expressly forbidden to tell her, but Margit had a soft heart and told her the night before that they had finally caught the giant.

It stung that even her little sister had been told and that she hadn’t.

She didn’t sleep after that, and she spent the long morning looking for an opportunity to slip away. Now in the gloom of the dungeon, she stood in the entranceway and watched the slow rise and fall of the giant’s breathing.

She could feel the heart in her chest beating, a quick thud-dump, thud-dump, thud-dump that shook her whole body. Once upon a time the giant was a menace that had pillaged and ransacked the whole western coast of the kingdom. It was a story her mother had told her and her sisters and had made Margit burst into tears in the middle of the night–

“I know that heartbeat.”

Gretta froze. The words had been slow, and low, and had made pebbles on the stone floor shiver.

Chains started to jingle together. “That is a heart I’ve not heard beat in three long years,” the giant said as it started to turn in its cage. “I’d know it anywhere.”

The giant settled on its other side. In the low glow of the dungeon’s torches, its grin gleamed like rubies.

“Hello again,” the giant rumbled. “Do you remember me?”

Gretta swallowed. She remembered–

She remembered being lulled to sleep as the carriage rocked on the highland road. She remembered the door being pulled off its hinges with a shower of splinters. She remembered the grey hand as wide as a wagon wheel reaching out to her–

She remembered waking up with a long, delicate stitch along her sternum.

Her hand reached unthinking to feel the long scar under her shirt.

“Yes,” she said. “You’re the giant who put its heart in my chest.”

“I missed the sound of it. It’s beating fast, so very fast.” The ruby grin flashed again. “Are you frightened of me?”

Gretta stared. Then she set her shoulders and turned her chin up to a haughty angle. “I’m not frightened of an animal in a cage,” she said.

The grin vanished. “Fine,” it said. The chains rattled again as it turned to stare up at the ceiling.

this feels like such a genuine. what are you doing .