Today I learned that the university of Coimbra in Portugal has
a great 18th-century library, the Biblioteca Joanina, that maintains a colony of bats to effectively control the population of paper-eating insects called
papirรณfagos.
These bats are less than an inch long. They roost during the day behind the bookcases and come out at night. There doesnโt seem to be any English word for
papirรณfago, a cursory search turns up no details about what sort of insect they are, and ngl I am slightly concerned about them as a phenomenon. But I think my overarching point here is clear:ย
This library keeps tiny bats that look after the books.
Ok, so here is the croissant that started all this mess:
When asked about what kind of animal might it be, the woman said: "It's this, oh, what is it called... A lagun!"
The devil works fast, but The Krakow Animal Welfare Society works faster:
They already made a merchandise with an illustration of the lagun - they posted information about it on Facebook on Tuesday evening and by the Wednesday morning everything was already sold out.
My university professors are so delighted about this story that they are writing tons and tons of limericks, moskaliks and lepiejs (those two last genres are very popular, ridiculous and humorous types of short poems, in last decades popularized by Wisลawa Szymborska) and posting them on official Facebook pages of our university departments, and I am dying of laughter.
Important update on the story: owners of cafés and bakeries in Kraków realized that this wonderful idiocy that took over the country could bring them profit and help animals, and started selling croissants labeled as laguns: i.e. Massolit Café & Bakery is sending 10% of income from selling laguns to the Krakow Animal Welfare Society. Thankfully laguns are selling like hotcakes and bakeries don't plan to stop making them, so the story that started and could quickly die as just another seasonal nonsense transformed into a tool for helping small, helpless, vulnerable creatures, far less dangerous than vicious lagun.
It’s also *exactly* the kind of story behind the invention of new pastries. If there’s some little change on the ingredient level that can make a “lagun” distinct from an ordinary croissant, then a new pastry will have been born, complete with fanciful cookbook-ready lore.
The fact that the villain in Princess Redive anime absorbs ?souls? through her cleavage is almost certainly someone’s kink doesn’t make it any less horrifying in execution.
I think its the fact the shades of people defeated by her monsters appear in her throne room rather than her going out looking for it that gives it the most terror and harder to joke about? [personal opinion]
…you know that honestly feels like some folktale legend or something? I mean there are monstrous elderly ghosts out there that smother children with their breasts in Malaysian folklore.
Heh, I guess some people find breasts terrifying like how
Yoshimitsu Banno made Hedora’s eyes resemble vaginas because he thought they looked scary
[photo X-PLUS Hedorah toy, by X-PLUS, showing off Hedorah’s eyelids].
Alternatively, perhaps it was meant to be flowing into her heart but well…hard to illustrate that with ample bossom, and having it flow into her left breast would look even worse.
I feel like I’ve said this before, but I don’t think I have on Tumblr.
Anyway, if Hedorah’s eyes are meant to resemble vaginas, then based on some anatomy charts, Hedorah firing its eye-beams from the top of its vagineyes means that it’s a clitoris laser.
I wonder what this means when you consider it in light of the reveal that Final Wars Hedorah’s weird red finger marks him as a male, implicitly implying that Showa Hedorah was female. Probably nothing, but still…
“Eli Jacob Crowley, the famed pioneer figure who spearheaded America’s westward expansion by blazing the Crowley Trail in 1838, was an awe-inspiring figure of a man, as stout as a four-century-old oak, as intellectually complex as the fronds of a Florida palm, as singularly focused as the trunk of a Giant Sequoia, though in all other respects, not like a tree at all.” (John Hardi)
“Talila Norpiros, heir to the elven throne and commander of her people’s armed forces, chose a slightly more risqué outfit that morning than she would normally wear to battle, theorizing that if she were presented as a sex symbol as well as a dynamic protagonist, the series might attract a few more male readers and finally make the New York Times bestseller list.” (Bridget Parmenter)
“It wasn’t fair to call Michael a scum-sucking monster from the deep, the miserable, fetid descendant of some unnamed demon who, after centuries at the very depths of the ocean, had somehow surfaced and found his way to Wall Street—it was accurate, of course, but he preferred Michael.” (Allison Bryski)
and my personal favourite:
“Once upon a time, there was a place where things happened; allow me to be more specific.” (John Wallace)
just fucking remembered contest again so nobody asked but here are some 2019 winner highlights
“It
was a dark and stormy night, and since this was Miami in July and
everyone had left their convertible tops down, the rain fell in
Cadillacs.” (Andrew Lundberg)
“When
the tall dark, handsome, buff, and wealthy cowboy moseyed into my
“Blazin’ Six-guns” novelty shop, I felt a wave of heat flood through me,
as if I had accidentally swallowed my sub-lingual nicotinic acid
lozenge, causing the niacin to be released instantaneously, rather than
in a more controlled, extended, low-potency dose, for which means the
prescription had been written.” (Randall Card)
“Zajaxian
Planetary Law required that war, if it must be fought, be fought not
with bombs, bullets and blood, as on our own primitive Earth, but with
serried banks of immensely powerful mainframe computers, even though
they were bulky to carry and unwieldy to throw.“ (Jeremy Das)
“The
High Gondonderil gazed on with horror as the Elgaborian legions marched
at a single, pitiless pace into the once peaceful streets of
Sar-Andrada, the capital city of the kingdom of Xanthil, located in a
fantasy universe which might seem extremely confusing at present but
which will doubtless make perfect sense to you, dear reader, once you
realize that, like most fantasy universes, it’s basically just Tolkien’s
Middle-earth with different names for things.” (Harrison Glaze)
would you look at that its time to talk about my favourite bad fiction contest!! here are some 2020 winner highlights
“The
first thing I noticed about the detective’s office was how much it
reminded me of the baggage claim at a nearby airport: the carpet was
half a century out of date, it reeked of cigarettes and cheap booze, and
I was moderately certain that my case had been lost.”
(Paul Kollas)
“’You
may know my true name,’ gloated Archmage-Emperor !Gfńatt’ Bdúnśṽiobfhńr
to the foolish traitor who had dared try to end his glorious
mage-empire’s reign, ‘but can you pronounce it?’”
(Gideon Gordon)
“The
sound of his raspy voice and the feel of his chilly hand on her
shoulder made her shudder, like the wooden things on the sides of
windows, but a verb rather than a noun, and with two d’s rather than two
t’s.” (Kagte Minyard)
“Jarrod,
lying in the bed next to Selina, on his side with his head in his hand,
asked, ‘What would your husband do if he saw me right now?’ and Selina,
who was watching her husband sneak up on Jarrod holding a tire iron
with two hands raised above his head, replied, ‘Probably sneak up on you
with a tire iron raised above his head, preparing to use it for
something other than its intended purpose.’” (Randy Blanton)
it’s 2021 winner time and i want to be clear this time that “bad fiction” is not a judgment on my part, it’s the whole goal of the contest. the about page says, “…the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels.” i’m not insulting them. anyway here are my faves <3
“It was a dark and stormy … morning, Gotcha! – this is just the
first of innumerable twists and turns that you, dear Reader, will
struggle to keep abreast of as I unfold my tale of adventure as second
plumber aboard the hapless SS Hotdog during that fateful summer of 1974.”
(Louise Taylor)
“Our story begins in the cozy cottage of Bynnoldh-Dyr, son of
Asgwitch-Torgwyr, in the idyllic elven village of Myrthffolwrd, but our
book actually begins some two hundred pages earlier, in which you are
pummeled by irrelevant history and unpronounceable names, because my
publisher is paying me by the word.” (Neil B Harrison)
“As the dawn begin to break, Debby and Robert, their arms tightly wrapped
around each other, watched in awe as the sky turned a brilliant pinkish
red as the sun’s rays inched their way down the slopes of the craggy
peaks of the Rocky Mountains, but this was Canada so the rays were
centimetering their way down the slopes.” (Daniel Leyde)
“She had a deep, throaty laugh, like the sound a dog makes right before it throws up.” (Janie Doohan)
A lot of the really funny moments in Lord of the Rings come from Tolkien playing with language like this, where we have relatively formal, archaic, “high” language responded to with informal, modern, “low” language.
That’s, like, what the hobbits are for. Tolkien uses them to punctuate and deflate his own saga-riffic language and ground things back to a modern audience.
I was already on board with his sweet wholesome open-to-love-and-nurturing heart but I was fully unprepared for getting to that last tweet and seeing how off the hook HOT dude is
[It’s the most spooktacular time of the year, so I’m going to be celebrating the end of October with more monsters based on SF, fantasy and horror movies. First up is a tribute to all of the films that couldn’t afford stop motion, so they glued some crap to a lizard and called it a dinosaur. The Greek root atelo, by the way, means “inadequate, defective”]
Atelosaurus CR 9 N Animal This creature appears to be a
lizard the size of an elephant. Horns grow from its brow, and its body is
decorated with frills and spines.
Atelosauruses
are strange giant lizards native to remote jungles and caves. In these lost
worlds, dinosaurs are often still present, and the atelosaurus is mistaken for
a true dinosaur by inexperienced observers. Despite the fact that it is
“merely” a lizard, however, atelosaurs make for fearsome opponents, and they
are more than a match for many dinosaurs in combat.
An
atelosaurus is an opportunistic omnivore, consuming plant and animal matter
with equal relish. They are capable of surviving for extended periods on
relatively little food, making them capable of surviving even in small,
isolated habitats like caves and plateaus. After a long fast, atelosauruses
prefer meat to increase their metabolisms, making them most dangerous at these
times to smaller creatures.
Although
an atelosaurus spends most of its life in a solitary state, they gather to mate
in the fall. These mating grounds, called scrums, are full of the battling
creatures, as the males thrash each other about for the chance at the
healthiest females. Such fights can prove fatal for smaller or unlucky males,
but mostly end before lethal violence is done.
An
atelosaurus grows to thirty feet long and weighs three or four tons. Much
variation is possible in the species—different individuals may have different
numbers or sizes of horns, frills on the neck or back, or spines growing along
the back and tail.
Atelosaurus as Animal Companions
Starting Statistics: Size Medium; Speed 30 ft, climb 20 ft.;
AC +3 natural armor; Attack bite (1d6), gore (1d6), tail (1d4); Ability
Scores Str 13, Dex 19, Con 10, Int 2, Wis 14, Cha 3; Special Qualities darkvision 60 ft.,low light vision, scent
7th-Level Advancement: Size Large, AC +3 natural armor;Attack bite (1d8), gore (1d8), tail (1d6); Ability Scores Str +8, Dex –2, Con
+4; Special Qualities powerful charge, toss, reach +5 ft. (tail only)
Based on feedback and what’s relatively easy to do, I’m going to go with themed sets for the reruns. First up is one that I’ve covered a lot of ground with: The Past That Wasn’t. So this is going to include retrosaurs, fakeosaurs, trogcestors and other pseudo-paleofauna, as well as a few monsters that I’ve drawn on paleo-themes for inspiration.
Nope! The term “trogcestor” was coined by @dinosaurana and appears first on their tumblr here. It was developed in conjunction with @tyrantisterror, who similarly coined “retrosaur” in its modern monster design usage.
Video description: a child in pajamas is laying on top of several low shelves, which are covered in a mat and blanket. It is situated in front of a window front, and the sun shines through. There are seven cats in various positions on top of the child, one of them resting between their arms. Extremely loud purring is audible. End video description
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