Guess where this was found. Guess!



Correct: JAPAN.

The permanent display at the Shima Marineland Aquarium in the town of Shima includes a 96-tentacled Common Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) that weighed 3.3 kilograms (about 7 lbs) and measured 90 centimeters (3 ft) long when it was captured in nearby Matoya Bay in December 1998. Before dying 5 months later, the creature laid eggs, making it the first known extra-tentacled octopus to do so in captivity. All the baby octopi hatched with the normal number of tentacles, but unfortunately they only survived a month.

Must... do... semiserious painting for once...

wip: http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v73/yubishines/art/dinahlulz.jpg

edit: Yeah, I dunno if I can salvage this.



Time for a second go...

Trip Cyclone - Alone Inside

God, I love youtube. I didn't think anyone would have this uploaded anywhere.

OTTERSOTTERSOTTERS

If this doesn't make you laugh, you must be dead.

I don't watch enough anime to have a least favorite. Juri in Utena does have the most ridiculous design I've ever seen in anime, so perhaps she counts:

Eh. I don't think there's any inherent shame in living with your parents, so long as you're not just sitting around picking your butt.

Why do people screw with the people serving them food? Spitting in your drink is the least of what they can do to you.

Just finished reading The God Eaters by Jesse Hajicek online, and oh my god, you guys.

For an amateur novel featuring people born with super-speshul abilities and omgpersecuted for it and pretty-boy shounen-ai action, it's GOOD. The characters burn and leap off the page and grow.

The paperback's horribly pricey, but I really think I'll be ordering it.

EDIT: Speaking of ordering stuff online, DO WANT

Using a mac here, dunno if you do too, but the differences ought to be minimal.

Select the pen tool and change it to Paths. It defaults to "Shape layers" I think. Then draw your outline.

When you're done, right click, Make Selection, and Stroke it.

Just got news that my paternal grandfather is dead. He was cremated yesterday.

Um.

Not sad, exactly, not even shellshocked. Any sadness there is is for my aunts and uncles and grandmother who are over there dealing with it, while I'm thousands of miles away. The monk who performed the funeral service wanted it to be a joyful farewell to match the life he had, and I'm glad about that.

Not fishing for sympathy here or anything, but the news is just sort of sitting on my mind right now.

I dreamed I went to a The Protomen concert.

I'm not a geek.

About two years after everyone I knew was into it, I've been playing Flyff. Level thirtysomething magician on the Mia server, going for psykeeper. Apparently "psychic magician" translates into "satanist" in Flyff-world.

It's got some pretty neat class character outfits, if you ignore all the worryingly shiny butt cleavage. On both genders.

Here's the comedy one and here's the artist one.

WIND is pretty much spot-on.

I woke up decent. Then I came across two delightful articles (one titled Why Women Aren't Funny, the other There's Never Been A Great Woman Artist), and now I'm gnashing my teeth in a berserker rage.

whee!

Until you have your own computer, absolutely nothing?

If your parents are going to be monitoring your crap, they'll notice if you figure out how to disable the controls. Contrary to popular belief, parents have half a brain.

So... you're not actually doing anything dodgy online or offline?

So where's the problem?

There actually are programs other than Tegaki I can use to draw with? Say it isn't so!

You do realize you can delete your browsing history, right? Clear private data?

By parental control, do you mean actual software that's limiting what you can do?

Look, it has fanfiction already!

Awesome Alternate Ending by amaliedageek

Stheno and Euryale? Maybe. I haven't really thought far into this idea yet. Medusa and Echidna are both supposed to be dead, anyway.

Clockwise, starting from the left:

Echidna (A kind of Greek Lilith. A beautiful winged woman with a snake body who mothered several of the significant monsters in the mythology, like the chimera and the sphinx. She probably needs a modern name, but there aren't any good ones that start with the syllable "ek-". Considering Elaine.)

Xiaoqing "Ivy" (When I first came across her story, she was a carp demon, but Wiki says she's a green snake demon? She was Bai's maid and companion.)

Bai Suzhen "Ivory" (White snake demon, transformed into a human to marry her beloved. Then her husband betrayed her, and she was imprisoned by a monk for several years until her son freed her. Whole bunch of variations of her story actually.)

Nie Xiaoqian (Ghost girl forced by a demonic tree to kill travellers for their blood. A scholar defeats the tree, frees her from servitude, and marries her.)

Medusa (Interestingly, Echidna may be her mother.)

Coatlicue (Attacked by her hundreds of children when she was pregnant, she was beheaded by her daughter Coyolxauhqui, I think? The two snakes that sprout from her neck represent the gouting blood. Then her son Huitzilopochtli is born, fully-grown and armed, and avenges his mother. Except she didn't die. Or something. Aztec mythology is crazy.)

Meet the goddesses of Ivory's Restaurant.

...well, not all of them are deities, and this isn't all of them, but still.


tegaki - devart

There is no time! Your SWORD is enough!

I wasn't going to make another post here today, but uh...

Because I hate you all and never want you to sleep again, I would like to introduce you to the Demodex folliculorum, or the friendly eyelash mite.

You know that old story about little spiders that live on your eyelashes? It's not quite right. They're more like metroids with long wormy bodies.



They're 0.3 to 0.4 mm long and live in your pores. Everyone has some, although it's less common in children and you probably have more if you're a filthbag. Or if you use lots of makeup.

And when I say in your pores, I do mean in.



They burrow in head-first and nomnom on "secretions" and dead skin debris and, I'm told, mascara. The yellow trunk here is an eyelash.

Don't worry! They're mostly harmless. If you have too many of them, you'll be itchy and gross, but that just means you need to wash your face more often, you greasy filthbag.

I cannot imagine why so many people play it. It has no redeeming features whatsoever. All the graphics (from the item/skill icons to the 3D) are painfully outdated and ugly, the character customization is wretched, movement and combat are horrifyingly slow, and if I already absorbed all of that from the short time I played (maybe half an hour), god knows what the rest of the game is like.

There are microscopic worms burrowed in my face and eating my dead skin cells that are more fascinating than Runescape. No foolin'.

...I think I have a new Weird Nature post to make in the Interesting Images thread.

The Watchmen trailer is OMG SQUEE HAPPY. Still fearful it's going to be ruined, but slightly less so.

I read about that man, Timothy Treadwell. There's a documentary about his work and death called Grizzly Man. I've seen a bit of it, and the man was visibly off his rocker. I believe he had an alcohol or drug problem before the thing with bears started. It just feels like he traded one obsession for another.

Retard.

I believe it's an orphaned puppy. There's a documentary about the work he did raising a wolf pack, but I've never seen it.

Here, have more weird writing things. One day I might link them into actual stories. One day,

---
[spoiler]"You're being too harsh on her."

"I think," said Maris, "that she's a little brat shooting her mouth off about things she doesn't understand. I've no obligation to be nice, neither."

"But you're a loudmouthed brat yourself. Begging your pardon."

She grinned at that, bright shark's-tooth grin in a dark face wreathed with cigar smoke. "That's because I'm older. I earned the right to be a hypocrite. She hasn't."[/spoiler]
---
[spoiler]This is the magus at the age of five. The tribe's shaman is explaining to her parents she has the talent, not just for magic, but for medicine too. Healing hands that have to be trained now, and the shaman -- literally, their witch doctor -- needs an assistant.

Look at her carefully, standing at attention as the adults argue. No soft doll is cradled in her arms, or thumb in her mouth. Her hands just hang stiffly, and her wary eyes are always watching.

She will be striking when she grows up, but never beautiful. Her lips are too thin, her features too angular and defined.[/spoiler]
---
[spoiler]He finds delight in small things: The pattern of seeds on a grass-stalk, the fine weave of cloth, the pulsing lights that flicker in the redness behind his eyelids. Distantly, he knows that it's a crazy-person thing, to spend hours inspecting cracks in the floor or picking bark off a tree, but he can't help it. The repetition soothes him and settles his mind. In those hours, the trembling stops and the worry is forgotten. For a time.[/spoiler]

Have I linked this before? I'm not sure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rBRLcLxn74
Wolf researcher Shaun Ellis (who looks suspiciously like a werewolf) teaching a baby wolf to howl. All I can think is, "Deliver one of each to my doorstop, please."

Warning: Head may explode into candy from the cute.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j64-U0JLoFo

Usually I hate this sort of thing, but... OMG. SCAR.

Actually, I was making fun of overly-elaborate character descriptions. You know, "glowing ivory skin," "eyes like shimmering orbs of liquid emerald," that sort of thing. Also how many roleplay characters I run across with ivory skin never mention sunburns.

It's gotten so that I want to stop describing hair or eye colours when I write, because argh.

I have to concur that red hair + pale skin is gorgeous, though.

I'd really, really like to get into Dungeons and Dragons properly, but the simple fact is that all the stat juggling and rules and guidelines are freaking intimidating. I don't want to have to read a library to know whether I can do this or I can do that. I love freeform roleplaying, provided it's with smart people who know that freeform doesn't mean they can shoot purple eyebeams willy nilly.

This gladdens my soul.

Import Justice (5:17:20 PM): you've seen this right? http://www.somethingawful.com/flash/shmorky/babby.swf

Import Justice (5:20:14 PM): people at my school quoted this all the time for a while last semester
Import Justice (5:20:17 PM): we'd all be working in a lab
Import Justice (5:20:34 PM): and then someone would be like "OK, so I think I got this working now"
Import Justice (5:20:44 PM): and then someone would be like "No, you need to do way instain mother!"

misterskub (5:31:42 PM): I fail at making properly evil characters.  I just make them have some sort of exception to evil-will thing where they can't be evil until it's necessary or something I dunno what I am saying anymore babby.

Import Justice (5:41:24 PM): um, Profit? :3
Star Spiritgate (5:41:29 PM): babby profit
misterskub (5:41:31 PM): ?????
DrowCatFlan (5:41:39 PM): maximizing babby profit
Import Justice (5:41:45 PM): yeah
Import Justice (5:41:55 PM): you need to re-evaluate your Babby-Margins
Import Justice (5:42:00 PM): and Update your Finances
DrowCatFlan (5:42:02 PM): potential babby output

Star Spiritgate (5:56:52 PM): Tribute?!
Star Spiritgate (5:57:01 PM): You steal men's souls, and make them your
Star Spiritgate (5:57:03 PM): babbies

Oh man, and I bet the main character is one of those damn annoying girls who won't shut up.

The main character is Bella, short for Isabella Swan. She has ivory skin that doesn't tan in the sun. She's a newcomer in a town that strangely bears no resemblance to its real world counterpart (I know a person who's lived there). She's wildly intelligent, has read all the classics from Chaucer to Shakespeare, and becomes obsessed by vampires because they're all smokin' hot. The plot doesn't start proper until about four hundred pages in, because up until then it's all about her romance with Edward. (The book is five to six hundred pages in length.)

Why do I know this much? Because people I thought were my friends posted great long excerpts of it at me in AIM until I wanted to die.

*sputters with horror*

http://community.livejournal.com/ohnotheydidnt/25476518.html

I'm worried about doing vampire stories. The two boys in that story I really want to write about (at least one about their meeting, and another of them in a modern/semimodern setting) but I want to show vampirism as actually being a curse. Not something sexy or glamorous.* It doesn't help that I'm removing a central part of the curse, which is being harmed by daylight.



* See: The MarySuefest that is Twilight. A girl I liked told me today that she loves that book. A part of me died today.

Edit: On the Russian thing, I think the one before the one that is most certainly Fahrenheit 451, that could be Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas but that's just a pretty half-hazard guess. I have absolutely no idea what the first one, the Croc one, or the one with the guy using the computer are.

Although come to think of it, that computer one could be Johnny Mnemonic, since he seems to be putting a USB stick up his ass. But that's a more reckless guess than Fear and Loathing.

The USB one is the most confusing because he looks exactly like JohnnyDepp!Wonka, but for the computer. I'm not familiar with Johnny Mnemonic and I haven't seen Fear and Loathing yet, so I wouldn't know.

I think I heard that the crocodile is based on some actual folk tale than a movie? I don't know. For all I know it could be based on a movie that was based on a Russian folktale about a crocodile. Talk about recursion.

*headdesks at the whole sorry business*

What are you talking about? That's the only crack I've made in recent memory. Or are you counting the chromosome thing?

More like a sorority.

I need to step away from the Garfield Randomizer. Every time I load it up, there's another hour gone.

And now for something completely different.

I think I've wanted to be a writer more than an artist, but it's harder to motivate myself to actually write and finish stories. Ngh.

Here's three really short things I wrote last night. It's freaking hard to write things that are sad without going emo. (There's a difference. Sad can be played to actually be hurtful. Emo is just whining.) One's a vampire yarn, the others are just... things.



[spoiler]"What are you afraid of?" he said, and because it was too dark to see him, she could answer.

"Being found out," she said.

"As...?"

"As a fraud. People looked up to me, you know, and they've called me brave and daring and steadfast. I haven't earned any of it. But they need me, they need me to be that idea of a person. I think I'm just waiting for someone to find me and say, nice try, now go home before you embarrass yourself."

"But you have earned it. You've saved people -- put your life on the line for strangers -- I'd be dead if it wasn't for you."

"Is that virtuous? To do something when to do anything else would be monstrous? I haven't done anything to be a hero, Lycaon. Just human."

"You know that isn't true."

"Heroes don't freeze when they're afraid. Heroes aren't dogged by bad memories everywhere they go. Heroes don't cry or throw up or want to die when they fail..."

He reached out and took her hand, but she barely noticed.[/spoiler]


[spoiler]If they kept track, they would know this was their three hundred and fifth anniversary, but they lost count after the first sixty years. Neither would know how to celebrate it, anyway.

Survival is easier than either would have imagined. Food was never a necessity, though they discovered early on that they could stomach certain things: pure water, for instance, or rare meat. Excesses of temperature were never a bother, and their eyes have always seen best in the dark.

Still, it is good to fit in, and there is electricity for heat and light in the apartment they share. There are books on the tables, mugs in the cabinet, art on the walls. Not much is treasured. They don't have many personal possessions. In this age, being hounded down as witches or demons is unlikely, but habit is habit.

Their only difficulty is remembering to stock the fridge. Luckily, guests are few and far in between.

He, the younger one, is better with people, and so is often the one to find work. Currently he does a late-night show for a radio station. On weekends he helps at a crisis hotline, where his patience earns admiration from the other volunteers.

The older one doesn't leave the apartment much. Mostly he listens to music. His smiles are seldom and gone quickly, as though he's forgotten how.

Here is a secret: Daylight doesn't kill them. Still, the elder is profoundly unsettled by it; the younger less so. They both keep to the nights.

When they are alone, they rarely talk or touch or make love. The nearness is enough.[/spoiler]


[spoiler]There are things that are triggers for her. Not many, thank goodness, thank goodness, but none would have been better than some. A smell, the feel of cold marble, a lilt of voice, perhaps.

She doesn't respond to it consciously. Sometimes she catches herself in time. Usually she doesn't. She's clenched her hands so hard her knuckles complained, and pulled and pinched at her skin. It's worse if she's alone. She slammed her head into a wall once, hard enough that she almost blacked out.

Any physical pain is better than remembering.[/spoiler]

Modern movies as Russian folk art

Cleverly done and quite brilliant. I don't recognize some of them, though, and I can't read Cyrillic. Whoever the artist is, they've done Terminator, Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Spiderman, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Anaconda, and War of the Worlds.

Anyone want to try and figure out the ones I couldn't identify?

The A's and Bs thing is a question of style too, though. I've always been taught to figure out one way and stick with it. Switching in the middle of a paper (in the same sentence!) strikes me as sloppy.

Then again, that's not really what the quiz was asking...