Bats Photographed By José gabriel Martinez

not to be native on main but like, it’s everyone’s responsibility to steward the land they’re on. like you’re required. if you’re in america the people who own the land aren’t around to steward it so pick up the slack. learn how people cultivated and cared for the land you’re on. if you’re an animist there’s really no excuse. man, i get disabilities and stuff (i’m disabled myself) but you gotta do something. get some native grasses and toss em into your yard. mow your grass a little higher. leave a little strip that’s completely untouched so native wildlife can take residence there. cultivate a relationship with the land you’re on, not only for magical reasons (and you WILL get magical benefits) but also because the earth is deserving of love and respect in itself. 

everyone meet Pickles

Realized I never actually posted Pickles on here once he got his button eyes. Pickles is 100% hand knit on circular needles from a nice mystery fingering-weight merino yarn that was gifted to me. The only sewing on Pickles is the yarn holding his eyes on, everything else was knit into his form. 18 inches long and about 9 tall, Pickles took about 230 hours to create.

He is soft and traps heat well when held. Stuffed with nice high loft filling, he gives a solid and comforting feedback when hugged.

Pickles has NO pattern, but instead was inspired by/adapted from African flower crochet plush patterns using knitting techniques. (if you aren't a thread artist, imagine you heard a song and so you decided to write out sheet music for a completely different instrument)

Today I learned about an incredible artist named John Conrad Berkey. He created cover art for many science fiction books, and also created artwork for NASA! But he’s most famous for his incredible Star Wars illustrations.

George Lucas actually bought several John Berkey science fiction illustrations and used them to help pitch Star Wars to studios. And many of Berkey’s pervious artwork was used as inspiration for Star Wars’s visuals.

Berkey was later commissioned by LucasFilm to create posters for Star Wars, shown below:

"Berkey's imagination and expressionistic style quickly set him apart from other sci-fi illustrators. From a distance, his paintings appear very exacting and perfectly rendered. But upon closer inspection, they reveal a beautifully loose and freely abstract style."

―Rusty Freeman, Vice-President, Collections & Public Programs, Plains Art Museum, Fargo, North Dakota

You can check out Berkey’s website here, and read his Wookieepedia page here

people will say "why cant the eldritch gods just be nice to humans :((" and then kill a bug for existing near them

It is complete…! :’D I wanted to get these done in December but life happened. Regardless, I’m glad I got to finish at a decent time. Enjoy some lovely Pines Winter bonding :D

I laughed way too hard at this

hobbies include: close reading the Redwall series to answer my most burning questions. such as:

- can I replicate any of these delicious-sounding foodstuffs and would they in fact be delicious if I was able to

- corollary to the above: are we just supposed to read “oat cream” and “nut cheese” every time we see the words “cream” and “cheese”? I think so. bc if not, what tha hell are their livestock animals

- what is Society like? I don’t think we ever see a Mouse City or even Mouse Town though we do see castles and obviously an abbey. are we supposed to believe that most creatures are either in wandering bands or these societies based around a single structure (castle/abbey?)

- they appear to have an idea of what currency is (the bad guys always want treasure — maybe just to have, not to sell? but less ambiguous is some dialogue I just read, “acorn for your thoughts?” “you can have them for free”) but again, we never see anyone using money or making goods for the market. is this after the fall of Mouse Capitalism? are the bad guys (the idea of rat pirates gives me a headache, vis a vis the political/economic systems needed to power piracy) raiding preindustrial mouse societies for treasure/meat?

- corollary to the above: the abbey creatures have oats and wheat but we don’t see anybody farming or trading for farm goods on a large enough scale. is the abbey “orchard” really a like an indigenous forest farm of mixed foodstuffs? is that possible if you live in the same place the whole year or only if you travel each season? I have to do some googling

- both the lack of mixed-species families and the idea of mixed-species families give me a headache. has a squirrel never fallen for a handsome otter? what is the culture shock like if you marry into a subterranean mole family?

- this is the least “important” question but this read through I’ve been desperately trying to figure out What Size Everything Else Is. i’ve come to the conclusion that everything other than animals are at mouse scale, given that they can make seaworthy vessels their own size (a mouse sized vessel with real-world-sized waves seems impossible) and pick and eat apples and plums. but so far it seems like they’ve avoided mentioning how tall trees are — like a person compared to a tree or a mouse compared to a tree?