i have a little switch in my head. its two settings are “do everything immediately” and “do nothing at all”. i do not control what the switch is set to, and there is no third setting
please behold the 24 Hours of Lemons race, in which you can only spend $500 total on a car to cross country race for 24 hours
named after the legendary 24 hour Le Mans race, Lemons rallies barely legal cars in an endurance race across America. had the privilege of sharing the freeway with this race and seeing the absolute art od this event
We’ve got an itinerant cheese-selling woman who comes into town every Friday morning to sell the cheeses she purchases from local farms, and I like this old-fashioned way of buying cheese (other people, like the mayor, find it mortifying that our village is too small to support its own cheese shop). She stations herself in the plaza and likes to share news about the farms and villages she’s visited this week (at the moment we get a lot of baby animal news, like new calf announcements.) She has the unfortunate habit of denigrating her own cheeses without meaning to because she is a cheese perfectionist. You ask for a bleu, she grimaces hesitantly and says “Ah, poor choice, it doesn’t look quite right to me today”; or you tell her “I really liked the brie I picked last time, so creamy!” and she shakes her head and goes “Ah, you got lucky, often that farmer gives me such shitty brie with a chaulky texture—” then she suddenly looks frustrated with herself, you can tell she’s thinking “why am I giving this information to a client?? I’m the worst cheese saleswoman ever.” It’s very endearing.
She also sells eggs, and always writes the name of the farmer she got it from on each carton so you can make sure to buy your friends’ eggs and avoid your enemies’ eggs. You’ve got to be like “Six Gilbert eggs please” and publicly announce where your loyalty lies, it’s a whole Thing. If one day you decide to go rogue and ask for Agnès eggs instead you can be sure people will notice, and they will talk. Getting my own chickens is the only way I have found to avoid pledging egg allegiance.
i hate when people draws mermaid’s tail like it was some sort of goddamn suit on normal human legs like this:
it just doesnt work
yeah we wouldnt want to make our mermaids too unrealistic
this asks more questions than it answers. they don’t really have vestigial legs, like those aren’t even motile fins, so why do they still have fully formed hips, why hasn’t the pelvic bone changed significantly? and where did the tail come from?
whales as we know them evolved from land animals that went back out to sea, and it’s all spine all the way down to the tail fin. the pelvis is vestigial to the point of being tiny and unrecognizable, and the rear leg structure is //gone//. and by the time they evolved all that, their forelegs had turned into proper fins and they didn’t have hourglass figures, because they built up walls of insulating fat and blubber where it was needed most - around the vital organs.
which brings us to the walrus. as you can see the skeletal structure and the external appearance are fairly ursiform - the rear legs are basically still in there forming the tail, and the pelvis is intact, and above that it may as well still be a land animal. if mermaids did exist, as hominids who went back out to sea, and if they hadn’t evolved into basically dolphins, then a walrus skeletal system, complete with vestigial thigh bones inside a kind of muscle skirt, and with significant fat and blubber deposits //on the main body// would be most likely. which is to say, mermaids with human torsos and seagoing lower bodies would waddle around on their tails, have clearly defined thigh structures, and would be a hell of a lot rounder above and about the waist than they’re usually depicted.
which begs the question, then, if you see a mermaid and it’s a skinny little thing with a slinky waist and an eel-like tail and a perfect bosom and a coy smile, //why does it look like that//? because whatever that is? it is not a land animal that readapted to the sea. it is not your distant kin. it is a sea creature that adapted //to get your attention//.
maybe it’s all an illusion, a frilly mane, an hourglass shape, and narrow antennae that mimic the shape of human arms, waving lonely sailors into the water, only to realize too late the bioluminescent patterns of lipstick and pert breasts are to distract from what lies behind them - viselike jaws and row after row of stiletto teeth.
or maybe it’s all soft tissue, the gelatinous bell of a jellyfish folded into a pleasing shape, luring the unwary down to be caught up in a tail that is nothing more than thousands of barbed lines of stinging neurotoxin cells.
or it could be that the tail goes deep into a shadowy well, and the beautiful woman is a mask for a single enormous jaw, the internal skeleton just the endless spine and ribs of a vast and hungry sea snake.
or, perhaps most terrifyingly, the face is real but not the face of the eyes looking out of it - a human mask for an intelligence both cold and calculating, wearing an inviting smile to bring you within reach of the dagger behind it’s back. waiting to slice the skin off of you because it needs a new disguise, because it is shaped like you but does not look like you, because it must pass as you so it can go among you, so that by starlight it may go on land and into town, where your kin are sleeping, unsuspecting.
remember when people on here back in 2k12 would regularly hit post limit and have a special side blog they switched over to when their main one got throttled for the day? did they remove post limit or did we all just grow up and stop talking so fucking much?
