celilinia-deactivated20180221 asked:
ask-will-and-nico answered:
Since it’s black cat appreciation day, have some shape shifting Nico
The ebony cat curled up in Will’s lap, the sound of purring quickly following. Will absently scratched behind his ears before going back to the book sitting in front of him. Will was lost in the silent void, the sound of the fan running in the corner and the soft purring of the cat in his lap acting as white noise that had him drifting away, fully focused on the textbooks that littered his desk.
The peace came crashing down when a certain Jason Grace came crashing into Will’s office. “Will! Have you seen-?” His eyes landed on the black cat that had scrambled up onto Will’s shoulder, his little heart threatening to pound out of his chest. Jason got a mischievous smile that made the little cat meow in protest. “There he is. I knew he’d be in here with you. C’mere, Nico.” Jason held his arms out nonthreateningly and walked towards him, but the cat meowed loudly and jumped from Will’s shoulder, darting across the room. Jason lunged for him, but came up empty handed.
Will tried to keep track of what was happening, but it was hard to when your boyfriend was dodging the arms of his best friend, shifting his form every three seconds. First there was a black cat, then a bird, Will thought he even saw him shift into a mouse at one point.
When Jason finally got him though, a perfectly normal Nico was wiggling in his arms. “Let me go, Jason!”
“Hm, I don’t think so.” Nico’s eyes landed on Will and when Will noticed the slit feline eyes, he heaved a sigh.
“Jason, come on, you made him half-shift again.” Jason blushed and let Nico go, Nico’s black tail twitching in aggravation, his ears flattened against his head.
“We just wanted to see if he could lay eggs.” Nico hissed at him and Will shot him a look.
“Down, kitty.” Will stood in front of Nico, letting Jason take the hint that he wasn’t necessarily wanted in the situation. Jason sighed dejectedly and walked out.
“I was having a perfectly good nap. Before he came barging in here and making a mess, waking me up and chasing me around.” Will scratched Nico’s ear, returning to his desk to pick up the papers that got scattered everywhere. Nico watched him closely, occasionally snatching a piece of paper out of Will’s hands and ripping it to shreds. He was careful not to grab an important paper.
“He brings up an interesting point, though.” Will mused aloud after everything was cleaned up and Nico was curled up under his desk.
“What’s that?” Nico didn’t open his eyes, but his ears twitched forward to the sound of Will’s voice. Will smiled and dropped a piece of paper, watching Nico snatch it out of the air and rip it.
“Can you lay eggs?” Nico’s eyes shot opened and he fixed Will with a cat death glare. The one they gave you right before they clawed your eyes out.
Will was willing to let it drop when Nico mumbled. “Yes.”
We have a black cat at school named Angus
Speaking as an owner of a lovely black cat
other girls: respectable hut at the edge of the village, uncursing wells, turning into a black cat to steal into a tyrant’s bedchambers and assassinate him in his sleep
me: no familiar, crushing my herbs with a rock i picked up outside, trying to make casual conversation with crows but they keep predicting my death instead
gOD i can’t wait to get an apartment with a cute girl and do the whole ikea thing and get lots of plants and maybe a cat or something but mostly the cute girl part
I’m super not-okay with that Mike Dawson “Why Did They Come” comic. If you’re a graphic artist in the U.S.? You know damn well what Maus is. Goyische graphic artists do not get to use the mouse-cat analogy for people fleeing their countries due to oppression, especially if those people aren’t Jewish, and certainly not if the text of the panel that does involve Jews absurdly downplays what was actually happening.
Like, you can make the exact same point without appropriating a seminal document of the Shoah’s aftermath.
Oh, it’s even worse than I thought. It says “Apologies to Art Spiegelman and Don Bluth.” Nope. Nope nope nope, you don’t get to rip this off. Make the same point and just change the fucking mice/cat thing – it’s not that hard.
Goyim don’t get to use incredibly important allegories of Jewish oppression at will. This shit needs to stop.
“Apologies, but plagiarism and also a barely veiled appropriation of the Shoah”
This makes me really uncomfortable. I mean… the whole Jews-as-rats imagery used in Maus was explicit reclamation of an intensely antisemitic trope and… It’s just not an okay thing for goyim to imitate.
Ever.
Plus when I saw the comic one of the panels was instantly recognizable as a pogrom and… it wasn’t okay.
^^^^
The comic on Dawson’s tumblr has like 44,000 notes, and this post has like a thousand.
Please boost Jewish voices.
The actual smell of rain comes from plants. When plants are in drought they produce oils in replacement for waters. When the time comes and it finally starts raining the plants get their needed water and they release these oils in the air and the smell of that oil is what we call smell of rain
the scent is called petrichor
This is my absolute favorite smell
The actual smell of rain comes from plants. When plants are in drought they produce oils in replacement for waters. When the time comes and it finally starts raining the plants get their needed water and they release these oils in the air and the smell of that oil is what we call smell of rain
the scent is called petrichor
This is my absolute favorite smell
This is my absolute favourite smell in the world. It’s so sensual and earthy. Makes me feel fresh and clean. It has a taste to it and sound to it. It’s one of the few things in this world that requires all five senses and it calms me.
• Cacti are some of the only plants to photosynthesize from their stems. Their needles are really just modified leaves.
• Avocados are only around because people pollinate and disperse them by hand. The large seed is indigestible to small mammals now. It was originally eaten by giant sloths who would poop them out far away from the parent tree so they can grow. This is called an evolutionary anachronism.
• Banana candy does not taste like bananas because it was designed to taste like the Gros Michel banana which was eaten in the pre-1950s. It was wiped out by a fungus called panama disease. Since bananas are asexual all of them are genetically identical making it easy to wipe them all out at once. However fungus is sexual so it evolves more quickly. This means eventually we may lose the modern banana, the Cavendish, to it as well.
• There are actually three different types of photosynthesis: C3, C4, and CAM. Which type is used depends on the aridness of the environment, and are increasingly more efficient as listed.
• Moss is amazing. The fuzzy part of the moss is called the gametophyte stage and it is haploid meaning it has one set of chromosomes like a sperm or an egg cell in humans. If you look closely, sometimes you will what look like little tiny seeds on stems coming out of the main body. This is the sporophyte stage and it’s diploid, or has two sets of chromosomes, like our body cells. Moss is the oldest type of plant.
• You can usually tell what animal pollinates a plant by the color and shape of its flowers. Red flowers are hardly ever pollinated by bees because bees cannot see red well. Butterfly flowers have long deep centers. Bird pollinated plants can bear weight and are wide and open. Bat pollinated plants usually smell strongly and are darkly colored.
• Almost all American native elms and chestnut trees are extinct because of fungi. Asian chestnut and elm have replaced them, because they are resistant to the strains.
• There is a type of fern that has over 1200 chromosomes. For reference, humans have 46.
• If you shine consistent low level red light on a plant it will grow extremely tall, because red light tells the plant it is being shaded by and competing with other plants. If you shine consistent green light on a plant it will not sprout or die (if already sprouted) because plants absorb red and blue light to use. This is also why plants are green, because the unused green light is reflected back out.
TLDR; Plants are frickin cool and should get as much love as our animal friends.
Into The Spiderverse took 100% of its critically acclaimed visuals from comic books and street art and while there are obvious in-universe reasons for this it can’t be ignored that BOTH of these are traditionally seen as “lowbrow” populist art forms, here celebrated for their inherent beauty, complexity and sociopolitical importance. In this essay I will-
Where’s the essay OP
Not a full essay but lemmie tell you. Spoilers below.
Why does Miles stop at a time-sensitive moment to paint one of Peter’s suits when he’d probably want to get going as quickly as possible? Three reasons.
One, on a character level Miles is about to go into the scariest endgame fight he’s been in the entire movie. Taking the time to make the costume his own, to take this little part of the old Spiderman’s legacy and probably get some encouraging words from Aunt May is important to pysch himself up enough to do this.
Two, suiting up for the first time is an important rite of passage in superhero comics. It represents the character deliberately taking on the role. Miles has been wearing a kid’s costume because he feels like a kid trying to take on the role of a hero. By putting on a real costume, his own costume that he designed, he is becoming his own hero.
Three, his costume is an extension of his art. He uses spray paint to alter it, and we see little drips and splatters in the costume’s design. Miles is a street artist and his spider-suit is a street artists’s creation.
Miles’s street art and his coming into his own as Spiderman are directly linked in the narrative in a way that’s too perfect to be accidental. His costume is made with spray paint. He’s bitten while painting a mural. He uses his spider-powers to put a sticker where his dad can’t find it. Jefferson doesn’t like Spiderman’s methods or Miles’s art. But in the end, he’s willing to work with both. And street art is the shared history Aaron, Jefferson and Miles all have even if they ended up on three drastically different paths.
Miles paints murals, throws stickers up on street signs, etc, both as self-expression and an expression of love for his city. It’s that same love for his home that makes him Spiderman, the city’s protector. His vigilante heroism and his illegal art are expressions of exact same thing.
And comics! This movie loves the language of comics!
It loves the humor in seeing the words float in the air around the characters! It loves stylized human figures and kirby dots and dynamic transitions! It loves the way comics tell stories (note that every time a characters is narrating their backstory in Into The Spiderverse it switches to comic format, doing highly comic-specific things like having three characters telling their stories side by side.)
Miles reads Spiderman comics in-universe and they’re what helps him understand what’s happening. How many people who worked on this movie do you think read a comic at a formative age and saw themselves in it, in some way?
Of course, if I’m going to talk about the “language” of comics or the “language” of street art I can’t ignore the fact that these two art forms have influenced each other immensely over the years, joyfully borrowing from each other at every opportunity.
-Some people don’t have brains
-I have to clean the litterbox?
-My couch is more important to me than my cat’s life
-My boyfriend’s a Prick
-I scare the hell out of my cat but WHY WON’T HE LOVE ME?!
-My cat can go outside?!
-Jackson Galaxy knocks common sense into morons
-Yes, you have to play with your cat
-Throwing two strange cats together sometimes ends badly
