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Hi it's me Marshy I'm just a guy vibing here. I'm into Trigun mostly rn but who knows what I'll hyperfixate on later. My art is here. Say hi!
Reblogged ashphorical
they were playing & milly had been planning to lean in and catch her priest man off guard with some joke, but. well. now she's forgotten whatever-it-was she was gonna say
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como la flor
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el wowo wolfie commission for patre0n support art for @Dragon_Cat_Arts
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Black Lagoon manga redraw as vashwood
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A pair of chul.
Finally pulled the plug on my long-debated 'are there any suids in this setting or just the entelodonts' issue. There are no pigs, but some of the domesticated entelodonts play similar roles.
Nechoi are a broad clade of ungulates. Most are medium-sized generalist omnivores, though a minority are very large and predominantly herbivorous (an even smaller minority are bear-sized and occupy similar niches).
One species of nechoi has been domesticated and is widely utilized as livestock, which I'll be referring to as chul (this is the Burri language word for these animals, and is the common term in the part of the setting I do most writing in).
Chul have four toes per foot, but two of these are entirely vestigial nubs of bone only visible as a small bump. They lack the tusks of some of their wild cousins, though the upper cuspids of boars are still somewhat exaggerated in length as a display feature. Most morphs have floppy ears, and virtually all have full-body fur cover. As an ancestral trait, boars develop huge cheek flanges and a fatty back hump, which primarily serve to display fitness to prospective mates and intimidate rivals (the flanges may also provide a degree of protection to the face and neck during fights). Some domestic morphs have lost this trait, but it is very often preserved for its utility as a source of oil or calorie-dense meat.
As livestock, their main utility is for meat and hides. They do not provide many resources while alive (save for manure and perhaps blood), so they are rarely central to the subsistence of people who tend them. Sows well-accommodated to human handling may allow themselves to be milked, but their milk output is low and the flavor is notably gamey, and no domestic populations exhibit selection for milk production. What makes them most valuable as livestock is their generalist diets. They can eat almost anything, are not dependent on seasonal growth, and are low maintenance and do not have to be moved between different pastures. Chul can essentially be fed on garbage, and transform this into a large meaty carcass and good hides.
They primarily eat nuts + seeds + tubers + fruits + leaves + invertebrates, and will opportunistically predate on small vertebrates. They readily consume carrion, and their powerful jaws and large molars are capable of crushing bone. Their heads are not as adapted for digging as pigs, instead having flexible lips to select and crop food items. When pursuing edible roots/tubers, they usually dig scrapes with their hooves or rip whole plants out from the ground.
In captivity, Chul are usually provided refuse to eat (inedible parts of crops, byproducts of butchered animals, uneaten or rotten food, etc) and will roam a small home range to supplement this with forage. The flavor of their meat ultimately depends on their diet, which can cause notable individual/regional variations in taste. They are sometimes 'finished' on a higher quality diet of grain/nuts/starches/fruit to produce a mild-tasting carcass with sweet fat.
They pant and sweat to thermoregulate and are not dependent on wallowing, though will gladly do so when given the opportunity (they're also fairly strong swimmers). They have sweat glands across most of their bodies, and will sweat very heavily in heat and require large amounts of water to stay hydrated. They originated in the tropics and do not molt into winter coats, though some populations in temperate climes have adapted via thicker year-round coats (though usually must be actively fattened before winter. They require a lot more upkeep in temperate zones and aren't as common there).
They are notably vocal. When foraging together, they make soft barks to keep track of each other (kind of like this). Babies produce squeaky bleats as contact calls (kind of like this, but much shorter). Boars are known to produce loud, deep bellows when displaying (sounds somewhat like a red deer but a little higher). All will produce low moaning growls when threatened, sharp barks when behaving aggressively or in pain, and panting huffs when excited/happy/playing.
When left to their own devices, they generally form into herds of sows/young/juvenile males. They do not establish discrete territories, but will generally stick to overlapping home ranges as long as food resources remain reliable. They are very social animals, and these herds can become quite large when resources allow (though they are typically on the small side, with 2-6 adult sows per herd). Sow bands form social hierarchies based primarily around size and age. Dominant sows are usually the ones to chase off subadult boars, and may chase away subordinate sows if resources are scarce. Unfamiliar sows will be integrated into herds with little issue if food resources are stable (though the process entails a few hours of posturing and displaying to keep the hierarchy established).
Subadult males usually live in small bachelor groups (almost always with siblings from the same litter), which form dominance hierarchies largely based upon size. Boar bands with stable hierarchies may remain together for life, and have greater reproductive success overall than lone boars. However, boars can be extremely aggressive towards unfamiliar boars, particularly when in the presence of sows in estrus. There are some ritualized elements to confrontations between boars to prevent escalation into deadly fights. Most confrontations can be resolved with posturing, roaring and yawning to display teeth and jaw size, and will usually escalate no further than shoving matches before one backs down. Fights usually begin with face to face open mouth posturing, which will turn into slashing and biting with the cuspids. Outright fights can be deadly, and boars with a number advantage may not stop until the opponent is mortally wounded or dead. Even when confrontations do not end in fights, confident boars are known to target the scrotum of fleeing rivals in attempt to castrate them.
The best practice is to geld most of your male chul and keep only one boar per herd. It is generally safe to keep multiple intact boars together if they're from the same litter, but this can create other problems, as boars in bands will wander farther and are likelier to get into confrontations with those of your neighbors.
They are also more physically dangerous in general than domestic pigs, being similar in size but stronger with a significantly more powerful bite force. They are not particularly aggressive towards people, however. Most respond positively towards the company of handlers and enjoy close interaction, and are likelier to hurt you by accidentally knocking you over than in acts of aggression.
All in all they cause proportionately fewer deaths than cattle. The big difference is that a cow who kills you will ultimately leave your corpse alone, while a chul will readily eat it.
Reblogged odoanaga
Waiting for a change
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Random headcanon: the reason that Peach and Bowser don’t seem to get a lot of respect in some Super Mario games is because the Mushroom Kingdom is kind of a rural backwater and isn’t terribly important or influential politically, so people tend to regard Bowser as a C-list villain for being so hung up on such an insignificant conquest. Nobody really expects Bowser to be a serious threat – that would be like expecting a guy whose main claim to fame is repeatedly failing to conquer Wyoming to be a serious threat – so they get taken by surprise every single time.
So what you’re saying is that Bowser is more or less on the same level of villainy as Dr. Doofenshmirtz?
Oh, quite the opposite – point him at any target that isn’t the Mushroom Kindgom and he’s this massive outside context problem that rolls over entire armies and cracks planets in half. It’s just the Mushroom Kingdom in particular he can’t seem to figure out, and that bothers him terribly.
The obvious implication is that, like, Mario is an A-tier hero who happens to live in a C-tier nation.
Like, if Clark Kent hadn’t moved to the big city for a reporting job, he’d still be Superman. And there’s be some villain who tried to knock over a bank in Bumfuck Kansas and wound up having a very bad day.
(And eventually we have Lex Luthor spending a huge amount of time trying and failing to run some penny-ante scheme in rural Kansas and failing, and no one can take him seriously despite the fact that he’s just as competent as he would be in canon.)
In Oregon there lives a species of snake capable of surviving tetrodotoxin doses strong enough to kill animals thousands of times their size. This is because they evolved alongside a species of poisonous newt which they consume regularly, which produces ludicrous amounts of a poison thousands of times stronger than cyanide. They got to this point by fighting each other in the same bumfuck nowhere habitat for millions of years. The newts got more toxic to fight the snakes. The snakes got better immunity to keep eating newts. Now we’re left with snakes capable of eating some of the most poisonous creatures alive, and newts so deadly that they are inedible to anything other than these snakes.
What I’m trying to say is that Mario and Bowser are the result of two evenly-matched overpowered idiots fighting the same battle for decades. The consequences only become clear when you square them up to literally anything else.
These are the outlandish and logical takes I want on my dash