Latest Posts by the-crabmaster - Page 3

Fury of Magnus in a nutshell

captain general kitten and magnus my beloveds

If you were a sci-fi writer, how would you solve the Fermi paradox? That being the discrepancy between evidence for alien life, versus the likelihood of their existence? (basically. If alien so likely, why we not see?) The Dead Space series has an amazing cosmic horror solution, but i'm curious what you're brain could come up with!

There's a lot of possibilities, some more interesting than others.

The speed of light and the distance between inhabited stars makes it prohibitively slow to detect, make contact with, or reach any star with alien life. It doesn't matter if we're not alone, our corner of Space Reachable Within A Human Lifetime is so comparatively small that we may as well be. We're all blindly wandering through an infinite desert, calling into the void. Space exploration is a long game, and on that timescale, even whole civilizations blink out very quickly. If we manage to catch a signal and follow it, we might find nothing on the other end but ruins - or an asteroid field where a planet's orbit used to be.

The universe is too young for us to find anyone else out there. We're the first. How will we shape the galaxy to make life better for those who come after us?

The life that formed on Earth is terrifyingly invasive. The atmosphere and ocean is choked with monocellular life, and its surface is coated with a mass of multicellular organisms finding new ways to devour one another. Even extinction events don't keep down the biomass for long. If life on other planets looks anything like us, the problem isn't going to be detecting it. It'll have gotten everywhere. The problem is going to be not immediately getting colonized and eaten alive by it. And if life on other planets DOESN'T look like us, our whole planet is probably a class 1 biohazard and contamination risk. Multicellular earth organisms contain microcosmic ecosystems that proliferate explosively when they die. If anything inside them can find ANYTHING to eat, it's over.

Life evolves frequently, but always in oceans. It is extremely rare for any alien life to leave that ocean and adapt to life on land. Without this step, the jump to space exploration - even space contemplation - becomes infinitely more unlikely.

Monocellular life is seeded on planets from an outside source and allowed to self-cultivate and grow until the biomass reaches a certain volume. Then the farmers return to harvest it.

There is not a single other species on our entire planet that humans can actually reliably communicate with. It takes tremendous amounts of training to make an animal capable of recognizing even a handful of words, and very few of them can use them. Humans can't even communicate with other humans with 100% clarity, even if they're using the same language. When we find alien life, if we even recognize it as anything resembling life as we know it, we have absolutely no way of communicating.

Space colonialism has been disallowed by the space geneva conventions due to massive past tragedies, parasitic exploitation of worlds and senseless loss of life. Human expeditionary efforts are being watched warily through targeting sights.

We've known about radio communication for less than 200 years. We haven't yet figured out the medium through which all advanced civilizations communicate.

Alien life exists in abundance, but the vast majority of it is extremely tiny. We wouldn't spot an anthill on a satellite photo, and none of their ships are large enough to survive passage through our atmosphere.

Earth's oxygen atmosphere is an anomaly, and our first and most enduring extinction event. The explosive proloferation of cyanobacteria and their oxygen photosynthesis irreparably altered the planet's prebiotic atmosphere and wiped out everything that couldn't handle the sudden massive increase in a highly reactive and flammable gas. Earth is considered highly toxic and unstable, though recently detected increases in methane and CO2 might signal that nature is finally beginning to heal.

the transition from people needing each other to wanting each other is literally one of my greatest weaknesses that shit makes me want to walk into the sea and sit on the ocean floor for a thousand years

@tatouchantilly @charnel-doll @sensarna @copitix I tried answering all your prompts! Prepare for a baby avalanche.

My new favourite archery image!

This painting is located in the Church of the Nativity in Prague, and is dated to 1663. It is also the basis of at least 3 D&D character concepts that are stuck in my head now.

If you want more info, art references, and tutorials, check my Patreon!

Credit to @cursed-40k-thoughts for the idea, illustrated from this post.

It's a very quick doodle I did, hopefully it looks well. Thank you for the idea!

Idk how to animate but I had this idea lol

My favorite blonde swordsman with identity issues

please read Aurora by @comicaurora it’s so good and I’ve been reading it for 3 years

Was discussing Guilliman's Farm Thing and there's something I need to break down for y'all here.

Guilliman is not a farmer. Guilliman knows jack fucking shit about what life is actually like for a farmer, or any other working-class, or middle class, or non-aristocratic class person. Like I am 100% certain he has read tons of statistics and books and whatnot but that is very different from actually living the life.

Guilliman is a chronic overachieving workaholic who was forced one (1) time to take a vacation when he was briefly stranded on an agrarian planet during an especially stressful time in his life, and he enjoyed that break so much that he has spent the rest of his life fantasizing about it. Has he ever taken a vacation since? No. Has he even realized that what he really wants is the peace and quiet of a vacation rather than the """"""""simple""""""" (FARMING ISN'T SIMPLE YOU COLOSSAL FUCKWIT) life of a farmer? Also no.

Guilliman is a very, very smart person who is, on occasion, a giant fucking dumbass. Thank you and good night.

do you ever think about how chemos got blown up. fulgrim's home planet got blown up. the planet he grew up on, that he loved, that he brought back from the brink of collapse, that he had such high hopes for. his adoptive parents, who probably died before he ever saw the fruits of his labour, were buried there. every spouse and friend he'd ever had was buried there. the oceans couldn't support life. he wanted to fix that.

it doesn't exist anymore. it got blown up.

Top reasons for there to be a kneeling knight emoji

- Defending women online

- Offering women support when they are in distress

- Commenting on a woman's selfie

- Offering to kill people bothering your online friend

- Sexual reasons

The way VR-LA becomes a Cleric is so hilarious when zoomed out at the right angle. Mans literally said 'consider it a prayer' and ACTED SURPRISED when Mystra gave him a littol pat on the head and began treating him like her special littol pet cleric boy. Like VR-LA you HAVE to know Mystra's modern worship primarily consists of 'Dear Mystra: I would appreciate if you did not let my spell fuck up, please and thank you.' and 'Dear Mystra: I am in need of some divine inspiration for this spell, if that is okay.' Then you turned around and just HANDED HER THE COMPASS ON THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN YOUR GODDAMN LIFE and said 'You. I want You to help me. Consider this a uniquely religious act of outreach. Also I Do Not Trust You.'

Interplanar goddess sees some robot peering through The Weave, a thing no one else to her memory has done because How And Why The Fuck Would You Do That??? Decides to appear before him to get a good look at this guy and says One Word to him, then a week later he cosmically pages her personal phone number saying 'Okay don't freak out but I found your number because I need your help with something Incredibly Personal To Me. If you'd please. Also I've functionally already contractually obligated you to do this.'

Girl raises an eyebrow, thinks 'Oh, this little dude's exactly the right flavor of fucked up', and proceeds to hold his littol hand through the big scary mission he asked her to hold his hand for and trusting him to be a good boy who makes good decisions. He would say he asked for her help and guidance, a completely different thing from holding hands. He has not let go. He has actively gotten More Invested in this relationship to divinity.

And then AS-TR spells out the big important lesson he learned that led him to lean into the Cleric thing and he just goes '... Oh. Yes.'

So this is the Ultramarine rental agency, we will find the right Ultramarine for you.

Have you heard that the Ultramarines are a bit flavourless and boring? Or have you tried one and was left unsatisfied, do not worry. Ultramarines comes in all shapes, colours and sizes. There is something for everyone here.

Do you like them a bit stupid but with a good heart? We got that. Or perhaps dashing and a bit reckless? We got that, too. Or do you like ‘em pretty as they come but a bit of a stickler for the rules, we got it.

Tell me what you like in a character and I will find you the perfect Ultramarine to suit your needs.

The new page be going crazy ngl

Erin better get a hug AND SOON.

you will never beat the biphobia allegations until you radically accept bisexuals who are stereotypical. you must accept the sluts, the polyamorous, the girls with straight boyfriends, the questioning, the confused, the ones who want to be another couple's unicorn, the ones who are in a phase and will eventually identify differently, and even the ones you suspect aren't truly bisexual but just want attention. take people at their word when they tell you who they are. let them live and express their identity as they see fit. happy bi visibility day

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

ARE YOU A BONE OR BLOOD PERSON.

ARE YOU A VOID OR ABYSS PERSON.

ARE YOU A ROT OR DUST PERSON.

How do you manage to motivate yourself when you're feeling tired or depressed?

Usually I try to give myself time to rest until those feelings lessen, since they're generally symptomatic of having pushed too hard, but on occasions where tiredness seems to be getting a little too cozy with depression, there's a few things I do.

I've observed in myself a habit of sort of… waiting in a holding pattern for something to push me into action. "Something" isn't defined clearly, but it becomes a real problem on depressed or low-executive-function days. This might just BE what low executive function feels like, tbh; like there's some invisible trigger and I can't Do The Thing until something trips it. When I notice I'm stuck in a holding pattern, I have a few tricks to snap myself out of it:

Flip a coin. Heads I get up and Do The Thing, tails I don't. The simple act of challenging myself is enough to motivate me sometimes, regardless of the outcome, but sometimes this makes me realize that I am legitimately tired, so I stay put and recharge a little until I want to flip for it again.

Set a five- or ten-minute timer and do whatever I need to do until the timer runs out. An artificial deadline can bypass the holding pattern. Sometimes this gives me momentum, and when the timer runs out I keep going. Sometimes this does NOT build momentum, and I crash after the timer runs out - but I crash with five more minutes of progress done. Any progress is better than no progress.

Assume Direct Control. This one only works sometimes, but sometimes it's as simple as breaking down a list of individual units of tangible progress - Get Off Of Bed, Put On Pants, Plug In Tablet, Etc Etc - and just grab the manual controls in my brain and make myself do each thing in turn. Sometimes I'll assume direct control to make myself take a Stupid Mental Health Walk, which has thus far worked every time to improve my mood and energy even though when I am in a Low Mood the last thing I want to do is subject myself to the mortifying ordeal of wearing pants and dealing with people.

I also find that sometimes it's helpful to pull the thread of what you're waiting for. Sometimes I'll realize I've locked myself into a weird paralysis because I've accidentally made something a prerequisite for other tasks. For example, I might realize I'm feeling weirdly frozen and uncomfortable because I haven't taken out the trash, and I've told myself I can't do X Y and Z until the trash is taken out, but I don't want to take out the trash, so I've locked X Y and Z behind Unpleasant Task in a subconscious attempt to motivate myself to Do The Task but instead I've just dramatically reduced the number of things I feel I can do. Often just noticing this pattern is enough to break out of it.

I also find that sometimes the invisible trigger I'm waiting for is just waiting to want to do something. That is unfortunately a trap. There are many things you can enjoy or benefit from without wanting to do them beforehand, because the thought of it is unpleasant or scary or anxiety-inducing or otherwise loaded down with what-ifs and caveats. I will never WANT to have a doctor's appointment, but I feel very good AFTER arranging and going to one. I very rarely WANT to exercise, but after the fact I feel very rewarded and more confident in my abilities. I've only WANTED to go on like a third of the walks I've taken this year, but every single one of them has been pleasant and beneficial to my mental health. Sometimes you just gotta say "I don't WANT to do it, but I'll be glad I did it" and manually pilot yourself into Doing It.

Hey, sorry if you’ve been asked this before, but I have ADHD and I’ve been following your comic for years and just now have started to write my own comic (partially because you really inspired me). But I’m really struggling with staying on the project even when it’s boring and getting myself to work on it in the first place. Do you have any tips on how to keep your brain invested or just to make yourself do the work at all?

I have excellent news, I literally just figured out something really important about this.

So when you're an ADHD kiddo or otherwise have difficulty staying on task in a structured environment where Task is the Priority, the main way people try to MAKE you stay on task is by removing your access to anything that is not The Task. No phone, no TV, no doodling, no going outside, etc. In practice, this just makes us miserable because it takes the boredom that's always simmering around a 2 or 3 and cranks it all the way up to 11. In the same way that you would have difficulty staying on task if you were in physical pain, this crushing existential monotony makes it very difficult to work. The work might get done simply because you have no other options, but it will not be done quickly or well, and it will take a while to recover from how much it hurt.

What I realized earlier this week is I caught myself doing this to myself. I had 42 pages of background colors to do, and I thought to myself "this sounds really tedious, but I suppose I have nothing better I can do." And I realized what I'd just thought, and got very alarmed.

Because back when I was an ADHD kiddo imprisoned by school scheduling and a million little factors that keep children immobile and restrained, I couldn't stop thinking about how big and exciting the world was, and how much I wanted to be anywhere but here. When I was feeling really crushed in I'd pick a random spot on the maps on my wall and just imagine being there instead of my bedroom. This was the impetus behind almost all of my creative energy. I've said it before - anything is a prison if you can't leave, and being in a prison makes it easy to imagine how amazing things could be outside of it. Aurora's initial worldbuilding was forged in the crucible of fifth grade misery. My enthusiasm for art and my creative drive are inextricable from my sense of wonder and yearning for excitement in the real world. Not escapism, but appreciation. Wonders unimaginable are out there, and I gain just as much joy seeking them out as I do conjuring them up in my head and sharing them with all of you.

So now that I'm a grown-up with actual freedom in every way I've been able to get, the idea that I was staying on task by making myself believe the world was small and not worth seeing was extremely alarming. It could keep me on task for an afternoon, but at the cost of slowly extinguishing the thing that made me want to make art in the first place - the hunger to experience and draw inspiration from all the myriad complexities in the world.

So what I've been doing is I've been purposefully and intentionally taking excursions whenever I catch myself thinking "I could take a break but it wouldn't be worth it, it's the same outdoors as always, I'll be uncomfy and unproductive and tired." Because that is never true. Every time I've put down the stylus and gone out, I've been renewed in one way or another, and when I come back to comfort fully recharged I get a lot of shit done. Because it is easier to work on anything if you remember why you wanted to make it in the first place, and it is self-defeating misery to just lock yourself in with it and tell yourself you're a bad person if you can't get it done.

I honestly don't know how widely applicable this is. I have worse wanderlust than anyone I know, so for me this has always been modeled as imprisonment vs freedom. I've also been extremely lucky to find myself in a profession that lets me set my own pace on literally everything I do. But I genuinely believe that when it comes to making art with ADHD, you need to give yourself freedom to move laterally, not just in the direction of obvious forward progress. We don't think linearly in any other part of our lives - art is no different.

really helpful technique ^ once you know how to divide by halves and thirds it makes drawing evenly spaced things in perspective waaay easier:

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL

“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”

I do not want to be here.

Random linguistic worldbuilding: A language with six sets of pronouns, which are set by one's current state of existence. There's a separate pronoun for people who are alive, people who are dead, and potential future people who are yet to be born, and the ambiguous ones of "may or may not be alive or aleady dead", "may or may not have even been born yet", and the ultimate general/ambiguous all-covering one that covers all ambiguous states.

The culture has a specific defined term for that tragic span of time when a widow keeps accidentally referring to their spouse with living pronouns. New parents-to-be dropping the happy surprise news of a pregnancy by referring to their future child with the "is yet to be born" pronoun instead of a more ambiguous one and waiting for the "wait what did you just say?" reactions.

Someone jokingly referring to themselves with the dead person pronouns just to highlight how horrible their current hangover is. A notorious aspiring ladies' man who keeps trying to pursue women in their 20s despite of approaching middle age fails to notice the insult when someone asks him when he's planning to get married, and uses the pronoun that implies that his ideal future bride may not even be born yet.

A mother whose young adult child just moved away from home for the first time, who continues to dramatically refer to their child with "may or may not be already dead" until the aforementioned child replies to her on facebook like "ma stop telling people I'm dead" and having her respond with "well how could I possibly know that when you don't even write to us? >:,C"

Not my white ass locked in the duke’s dungeon again because I fucked his favorite jester 😩

I didn’t know he was so territorial over the silly little guy 🙄

So, you guys remember good old Ea-Nasir?  The copper merchant from ancient Mesopotamia who kept stiffing his customers out of their money and copper, and then kept their complaint letters stored in a room in his house, to be found by archaeologists thousands of years later?

Well, I recently learned something that makes that story even better.  Most clay tablets from that time period were made of unfired clay, which means that they degraded over time, getting washed away by weather and such.  Some of the fired tablets were fired on purpose, but others were fired accidentally when the building they were stored in were burnt down.  

That means that in this case there are three options.  (1) The tablets in Ea-Nasir’s house were unfired and just really randomly lucky to survive.  (2) Ea-Nasir’s house was burnt down, likely by someone he owed money to.  (3) Ea-Nasir not only kept a bunch of complaint letters in his house, but fired them to preserve them.

redrew some Erin's to the best of my ability because the man won't leave my brain