the kicker is he was being asked if his work was coming from the approach of man vs. nature aka “THE ENVIRONMENT STRIKES BACK” but no. his literal words were along the lines of “sharks are not very scary if you are never in the water so i had to make them scarier, and now they have legs.”
Junji Ito has the best fucking take on horror, which is ‘wouldn’t that be weird’ and then he draws it into the most terrifying thing possible.
One of his strangest stories is about a cursed type of honey that, when ingested, is guaranteed to be the best thing you’ve ever tasted. But, if you consume it, you have a 25% of being flattened like a pancake by a giant tree demon. Characters eat it, get addicted, and that addiction forces them to risk it over and over again until they eventually get turned into a gory puddle by this ghost tree thing.
It’s a weird story, but the funny part is that Ito wrote it because he thought it would suck to be a mosquito.
So, this isn’t good, and it’s not normal, but this is something that can happen in even healthy snakes, with a few big qualifiers. This only really happens on ophiophagus (snake-eating) snakes, like this kingsnake, and it happens because they think they smell food and wind up biting themselves. This snake happened to bite at just the right angle to swallow their tail, and as they kept going, any pain they felt was dismissed as being from their “prey” biting them.
This snake is probably okay. As you can see in the video, they let go as soon as some hand sanitizer got in their mouth - snakes hate the smell and taste of the stuff.
Situations like this are very rare. This snake’s keeper did the right thing - it looks like they brought them to to the vet based on the table, and some hand sanitizer got them to let go with no issues.
Humanity has finally reached the stars and found out why no one had contacted us. The universe is in a sad state. As such, Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, and many othe charities go intergalactic.
The thing the recruiters don’t tell you about space battles is that you die slowly.
Ships don’t blow up cleanly in flashes and sparks. Oh, if you’re in the engine room, you’ll probably die instantly, but away from that? In the computer core, or the communications hub? You just lose power. And have to sit, air going stale and room slowly cooling, while you wait to find out if the battle is won or lost.
If it’s lost, nobody comes for you.
It had been about half a day (that’s a Raithar day, probably a bit shorter than yours) and Kvala and I were pretty sure we had lost. Kvala was injured, Traav and I were dehydrated and exhausted, and Louv was dead, hit by shrapnel when the conduits blew.
Most fleets give you something, of course. For Raithari, it’s essence of windgrass. I looked at the vial.
“It’s too soon,” Traav said.
Kvala gestured negation, shakily. She had been burned when conduits blew, and her feathers were charred, and her leftmost eye was bubbly and blind now. Even if we were rescued, she probably wouldn’t survive. “You know we’re losing the war.”
They couldn’t deny that. “It doesn’t mean we lost the battle.”
“Doesn’t it? The Chreee have better technology. Better resources. And they have their warrior code. They don’t care if they die.”
“We can’t give up!” Traav protested. They were young, a young and reckless thar who had listened to a recruiting officer and still believed scraps of what they had been told. “Any heartbeat now—”
There was a clunk. Something had docked with our fragment of the ship.
“You see?!” Traav crowed triumphantly.
Kvala exchanged glances with me. The Chreee never bothered to hunt down survivors. What was the point, after all?
The Aushkune did.
There weren’t supposed to be Aushkune here. They were supposed to hide in nebulas.
But if there were—
If there were, we were too late. The windgrass couldn’t possibly destroy our nervous systems in time to stop the corpse-reviving implants, and once you were implanted, it was over—or it would never be over, depending on how you looked at it and whether Aushkune drones were aware of anything—
Footsteps.
Bipedal. The Aushkune were supposed to be bipedal.
And then the blast door opened, and a figure stood in it. My first thought was, robot? That’s almost worse than Aushkune … But no, it was a being in some sort of suit.
Who wore suits?
“Friendly contact,” the suit’s sound system blared, as the being moved over to Kvala. “Urgent treatment. Evacuation.”
“Who are you?” Kvala struggled upright.
Despite the primitive suit, the blocky being was using up-to-date medical scanners. “Low frequency right angle shape,” it explained—or maybe didn’t explain. Two more figures came into the room and put Kvala firmly onto a stretcher.
“You’re with the Chreee, aren’t you?” Kvala was not at all happy to be on a stretcher.
“Not Chreee,” the sound system said. “You Man. Soil Starship Nichols.” The being hesitated. “Rescue Chreee as well. On ship. Will separate.”
“You what?” I said faintly. Who would do that?
“Oath,” the being explained.
“What kind of oath? To what deity?”
The shoulders of the being moved up and down. “Several different. Also none. For me, none. Just—oath.”
I exchanged glances with Traav, who looked as unsettled as I was. I had never, ever heard of groups cooperating when they couldn’t even swear to or by the same power.
The being scanned me. “Have water,” it said. “Recommend.”
Raithari have fast metabolisms. I could—would—die of thirst quickly, and painfully.
“Where will you take us,” Traav asked, “after you give us water?”
“Raithari to Raithar. Chreee to Chreeeholm.”
“Chreeeholm would kill them for failing,” Traav remarked.
The being hesitated, and then said, “War news sometimes bad. Sometimes lie.”
We had learned long ago not to believe the recruiting officers, but what did that have to do with anything?
“And you—what?” I asked. “Just fly around looking for battles and rescuing victims?”
The being seemed to consider this. “Best invention of soil,” it said finally.
Most of what it was saying didn’t make any sense. Did it worship soil? But it had said that it had sworn to no deity …
Madness.
On the other hand—war was a deliberate, rational act by deliberate, rational people, and I wanted no more of it. So why not embrace madness and see what happened?
“Soil Starship—Rrikkol?” I asked, stumbling over the word.
“Yes. Soil Starship Nichols.”
I followed the being in the suit.
Took me well over a minute to realize “low frequency right angle shape” was Red Cross.
This whole thing is brilliant with translation stuff.
If you went to a bar and the bartender was a mousegirl you could ask for a drink and she would balance it on her head and say “for you, it’s on the mouse”
She makes a mean whisker sour
Does she have anything non alcoholic?
Just putting all these pics together in one post
And, because this series wasn’t cheesy enough:
Okay, but would y'all hire rats? Or do they not get along with mice?
Two networked machines, one infected with a virus, slowly infects the other through the interface of classic romantic poetry.
A breakdown in the relationship was inevitable once the virus had seeped into the memory of one machine and then into the other through a singular network cable affecting the poetic text files. Communication between the two deteriorated, leading to irrational & at times odd behaviour. Each machine reacted with equal confusion and conflict. The interface text became an illegible poetic mutation of itself.
[ID: Two computers facing each other, connected to one another, on rectangular platforms. The room is backlit in red. End ID.]
stop listening to music and start listening to the sounds of nature. the “eagles?”The “rolling stones?” The “beetles?” Come into the beautiful forest with me and you will find all of those things friend…. I promise….If you just believe<3
In the beautiful forest you will also encounter the “mountain goats” and “corn” and “monkeys” and the “killers” and the-what do you mean what was that last one? Nothing haha don’t worry about it…………… <3
ALT
