Marcille had many sleepless nights while exploring various dungeons, usually due to fear or it being too cold, but thankfully she had developed a spell that could ease those feelings and induce sleep. This spell has worked just fine, as it instantly knocked her out and made sure she would stay out without waking up due to these factors, but this is the first time she had restlessness due to a stomach ache.

The party had vanguished a lobster type monster just in time for dinner, which led Senshi to decide on a lobster alfredo for their meal using some cockatrice eggs they had in reserve. Marcille was ecstatic at this. Sure, she still hated the idea of eating monsters, but this creature they had defeated looks almost exactly like a lobster! Y'know, besides it being the size of laios and the extra face feelers. And besides, she had grown up with pasta dishes and was ready to help out with the cooking! Marcille had never made pasta from scratch before, but before she knew it she was making plenty of dough from the basilisk eggs. Too much, in fact, as the size of the eggs plus the size of the lobster left them with Senshi's pot to be completely filled with the pasta, even after the party had taken their dent out of it.

After such a heavy meal, Laios had wrapped up all the left overs into seperate, meal sized portions using medicinal leaves he had found early. The party then said their goodnights before turning in, with the chosen person to take first shift of guard duty being... Marcille? She rarely ever offers to take any guard shift, much less the first of the night, and yet something was shifting inside of her alongside the alfredo. This had been one of the best meals she had ever had period. The rich lobster meat, the creamy sauce, the noodles that gave a bit of chew, it was all so perfect that when eating it she had to stop herself from practically inhaling it all down, and left her wanting for more.

She had to do this in the night. Marcille is a classy lady who never over indulges, is the appearance she would like to maintain. That, and if she showed how much this meal had a hold over her it would just make Laios and Senshi more embolded to try and feed her more awful monsters, which made her stomach churn just thinking about it. After making sure everyone was asleep, she had taken one of the wrapped meals and started to dig in again, this time caring a little less for appearance as she quite literally inhaled some of it down, not even caring to chew. Despite being left overs, each serving was still huge, with the wrapped meal that Marcille took being just a bit smaller than her head. None of this mattered of course, as the mage just enjoyed her second wind.

Marcille had slowed down a bit after her initial feasting, as her current meal was still having to contest with her dinner. Her taut stomach was rounding out from all the food, giving her a little pot belly that was fairly noticeable due to her robe being fairly fitting. The deep grumbles of her overworked stomach had become fairly audible, a hand on her gut letting you feel it all churn and get mulched down. The mage had stopped to let out a few burps here and there, not wanting to wake anybody up while she continues her feast. Once she had gotten to the point where the wrapped pasta was only slightly bigger than her fist, Marcille heard shifting coming from Chilchucks sleeping bag.

"Crap! I spent too much time eating!!" Marcille couldn't just be caught like this, the embarressment would kill her! So, without hesistation, or really any forethought, she had used both hands to stuff the remaining leaf wrapped pasta into her mouth and down her throat.

"Hey Marcille, it's my shift now. Get some rest."

Chilchuck saw Marcilles backside from where he was, only seeing her left hand in front of her as her right came up in a thumbs up, all while not looking at him. The reason Marcille didn't turn at all from her knealing position was due to the fact that she could hardly move. Her face was scrunched in pain as the fist sized rock slowly moved down her throat while her hand was preemptively calming her gut, until evenetually...

guluuuoarrn....

The package had been delivered, her stomach visibly increasing in size as the wrapped meal joins the sludge already being worked on. Her stomach groaning as an airy belch comes out of Marcilles mouth.

"Uh, yeah, good night then. And if you throw up, please do it away from the camp this tike okay?" Chilchuck, who had been non the wiser as to what just happened, turned his back and began carving wood into nothing while sitting at the fire. This left Marcille to be able to carefully move her sleeping bag farther away than it was originally, and get into bed as her stomach sloshed and moaned. This all leading into Marcilles restless night, drool coming out of her mouth as she rubbed her taut stomach, realizing that the edible wrapping Laios found was only digestable after being cooked. It's unfortunate that she knew very little gastronomy magic, as that was more of Falins deal. All Marcille could do now was try her best to sleep and digest it all before morning. As well as try and push down this strange feeling she felt in the pit of her gut, that seemed to crave more.

April Stickers! ✨

omg I need your thoughts on the terminally o line author culture bc ngl it makes my eye TWITCH, there are authors I deliberately avoid even tho I've heard their stuff is good bc they're like that 🙈

HHHHH oh good lord, okay, from how I see it, there are two angles on this, both aggravating and sad: the official decree one and the spontaneous ecosystem one.

The officious one is that the nature of publishing nowadays demands an author have an online presence. You need Twitter/X. You need to let every potential reader know your book is coming out. You need engagement through reviews and pre-orders incentives (if you buy now you’ll get a special keychain!!) and word of mouth assurances from your peers that yes your book is as cool as you say it is. You need a newsletter with links (more buying! more voting on lists that are simply popularity contests!) and promises you’re still working on the next thing, don’t forget about me in the morass of everyone else doing the same thing. You need an Instagram and TikTok now to post pretty pictures and videos because one or two authors made it big off this kind of promotion and now everyone thinks it’s the ticket to the bestseller list (sadly, it seems to be working). You need an OnlyFans (a joke but I do recall a twt spat that was a joke/not joke about how rupi kaur will always be more beautiful than her critics and people who took issue with the conflation of beauty with talent). At the end of all this, you’re basically an influencer, a content creator creating content for the content you should be focusing on creating, the finished novel. And the novel itself seems to be disappearing behind the masks used to promote it (fanfic-style tropes, moodboards, playlists, memes) until I now no longer trust the book that I’ll pick up to have any resemblance to the enticements that brought me here. I’ve seen an author or two complain about the stress all this self-promotion generates, but it’s become such an entrenched part of the industry, I think people just accept it. And thus spend too much time online hoping that if they tweet just a little more, produce just one more reel, maybe that’ll be the difference between a sale and no sale.

The other side of this, distinct but obviously connected, is the ecosystem created by this panic of being perpetually visible coupled with the fact that so many of the new authors came of age during the rise of internet fandom culture. That opinionated community mindset that blurs the line between anonymity and friendship is the lens they bring to their own work. I mean, it makes sense I suppose—if you love yelling about characters and words, why wouldn’t you do that once you start to produce your own? This really came home to me hearing about that reviewbombgate “scandal” and how people involved were in reylo circles and that was used to provide receipts. You’re interacting with your readers and peers about your intimate work but they are also all strangers. They will not always give you the benefit of the doubt, and now—as opposed to the past when maybe the worst that could happen was a handful of bad reviews in newspapers—you will either be tagged in hate reviews, sub-tweeted, explicitly called out, demanded to atone for your sins. It’s no longer the morality of consumption but the morality of production. Of course, the easy answer is just log-off, touch some grass. But that can work only when you and everyone else are separated by anonymous accounts or when you have no platform to maintain. As an author trying to make your livelihood from this, suddenly it’s do or die. We’re in a strange moment of authorship bringing the Internet’s echo-chamber and claustrophobic into the real world (this is a lie: publishing now is no longer the real world. But it looks like it) and thus you can kind of no longer escape things.

Will the average reader who isn’t aware of all these machinations care about reviewbombgate? Would a reader browsing at Target think about the controversies around Lightlark? Very likely not. But the impression I’m getting more and more is that the average reader isn’t the one buying all the books. Or shall we say—a bestseller’s status relies on bookstore stock. Bookstore stock is only huge when they know a book will be a good investment. They’ll only know a book is a good investment if it and its author has street cred based on booktokkers, bookstagram, bloggers and reviewers (have you noticed how many books out these last maybe 1-3 years have these kinds of accounts thanked in the acknowledgments? Yeah), and THESE are also chronically online people who will Know. And decide the cast of fate.

Honestly, @batrachised, I see why you avoid these kinds of writers, though I wonder how long it’ll be before the disease becomes epidemic.

Confession:

I’ll be perfectly honest, i killed Glutt during the myconid circle quests because I had The Most Raging GirlBoner for Sovereign Spaw. I wanna suck seven whole generations out of Spaw’s nuts in one go. To say I want him biblically is an understatement, I want him more than the waves want the shore.

The majority of the people complaining about not getting the CRM/villain story they wanted from The Ones Who Live would have been perfectly happy sacrificing Rick and Michonne's reunion or killing one of them off to have the crossover they wanted. For weeks they have predicted that Rick or Michonne were going to die, that they wanted a "twist", to the point where they looked to be eagerly anticipating their deaths. They didn't care about Rick and Michonne getting a happy ending, or that prolonging a villain arc is exactly why these two have only two surviving kids instead of three. They just wanted their crossover arc at all costs. Even now they are whining about Rick not going to France to rescue Daryl even though another core character is on her way there.

I am so, so glad these people didn't win. I think unless Andy and Danai had been directly involved, they would have won. I have no I'll will towards Gimple despite his horrible decisions, but he's greedy and he would have strung this out as long as he could. I'm glad they were there to steer him in the right direction, and that he was open-minded enough to listen. A lot of showrunners won't.

I am so happy my faves got the ending they deserved and I don't care about any of the other shit. This matters more.

Am I right that the social media manager does not take part in the development of the game? The developers are like “oh, we need help... you! Help us manage social networks, the level of horniness among these people is prohibitively high!” and here the manager is like in the manga in the poor image, with one single tear, but there is a second image where the manager laughs devilishly in the middle of the darkness...

Your friendly social media raccoon Violet is also a lead writer on Obscura! The horniness in our audience for our characters is both expected and appreciated 😊

I tied the string on my shorts suuuper loose like... 4 months ago? Anyway... My roommate made hotpot tonight and my gut is *straining* against the waistband rn and that poor string is so tight now 😵‍💫🐷

Idea: orchard harvester saddle. More of a standing platform with a scooter handlebar for the rider where the centaur can hand things up and down. (playing Farming Simulator is making me crave more peaceful/agricultural world building; there's already so much Warlike WB around, it needs some balance)

(also, eat like a horse vs eat like a bird, horse metab is high efficiency but a lot of it just due to net size, imagine that efficiency applied to refined grains and breads. Centaur diets would be less-per-weight than humans, although not necessarily by much due to the metabolic needs of sapient brain and foretorso)

Ohhhh I absolutely love this and absolutely think it should be a thing. I've been thinking more about the inherent benefits of centaurs in an agrarian society and more and more the borders of the Merchant city has been expanding outward towards the edge of Rider territory with enormous matriarchal farm towns that feed most of the surrounding societies so this would fit right in to that kind of lifestyle! And sounds so useful! One doing the moving and loadbearing, one doing the climbing and picking.

And I agree, war shapes societies undeniably but so many worldbuilders forget that trade, craft and industry shape cultures and societies just as much! It's definitely a topic i could GO OFF about haha, I have major exports and interrelated trade agreements drawn up between ALL my current societies 😁

(also absolutely, the use of refined grains and bread was a huge part of my initial thoughts about how centaurs could survive feeding that big horse body with comparatively small/limited human teeth. The efficiency of processed grain and grass fibers would be SO necessary to their digestion and overall survival!)

In January 2023 Marvel guru Kevin Keige pronounced that there was no such thing as Superhero Fatigue. Less than a year later Marvel Studios is going through its worst crisis in it short history.

In February 2023 “Ant-man Quantumania” opened well below expectations earning $125 million less than its break even point. And its 46% Rotten Tomatoes score is one of the MCU’s worst.

Sam Jackson’s “Secret Invasion” was poorly received by fans.

“The Marvels“ cost $250 million and its tracking to open with less than 1/2 box office than “Multiverse of Madness”

“The Marvels” requires four weeks of reshoots to “bring coherence to a tangled storyline”

Marvel VFX workers voted unanimously to unionize

Iger publicly acknowledging the Marvel TV glut

The clear skies and bright sun beamed down the makings of a particularly lazy day for Garreg Mach. Students and teachers alike spent the day resting and relaxing, with most of the energy being spent by the knights and those who are particularly dedicated. One such case of dedication was hidden away inside the empty library, pouring through every book she could find trying to figure out what's wrong with her current theorem.

Hunched on the ground with books piled around her, Lysithea kept staring at the same page, eyes passing over the same verse over and over again. The laser focus she seemed to be applying to her studies wasn't the full truth, however.

grrrrrrrrnnn...

The sorceress quickly looked away to verify the library was empty before closing her book and softly slamming it into her lap. "Gah!! These conditions are far too troublesome for research. I will have to pause my studies for now, but that leaves me with the new dilemma of what to get..."

(feel free to send in an ask!)

Woah, color palette swap?? ✨ Commission for the lovely Ember!🐐

Confession: When Sovereign Glut asked me to help him grow a mighty circle, my horny brain immediately imagined me being impregnated by Glut and being a good little incubator for Myconid spores.

König is a very poetically inclinded person.

However, since he is not a native English speaker and plenty of expressive attempts and phrases translate poorly, he is not as comfortable to speak English therefore leading to him being much less talkative and sounding rather wooden at times among his international peers.

That changes massively when switching into German. König becomes something between chatty and eloquent, not growing tired playing with words, rhymes and references.

The biggest sign of love to him will always be to learn German for him so he can express his adoration much more fluently than English ever could for him no matter his attempts.

BHOC: INVADERS #38

INVADERS was a series on a downward slope, and much closer to cancellation that I realized as a regular reader. I could tell that something was off about the book, but I was so invested in the Golden Age as a concept and in the formative versions of these characters, like the Justice Society of America over at DC, that I never allowed it to puncture my enthusiasm for the series. INVADERS was a…

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As social worker Sam Wilson, I’m trained to listen!

(Captain America #218)