waste site RLYH

Late last night, I woke from uneasy dreams of apocalypses with an idea sitting heavy in my head:

R’lyeh is an ancient waste storage site, and C’thul’hu is the waste itself.

The weird “architecture” of the place is just a bunch of nasty spiky stuff the Elder Race put on top of the buried waste, to mark it as a place to leave barren, ala the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site. The seven-pointed Elder Sign? Their symbol for “radiation hazard”. Or for whatever kind of hazard can be found at Waste Storage Site RLYH, one of many such sites spread out across the galaxy wherever the Elder Race stopped.

Perhaps Cthulhu is just an abbreviation for something like the giant mass of corium known as “The Elephant’s Foot” that’s deep in the heart of the ruins of the Chernobyl reactor. Somewhere in the long chain of translations from the Elder Race’s writing to modern English, there was a language that required everything to have a gender, and thus a giant psycho-radiactive pile of KL5-LO got called “he” and had people trying to pronounce its chemical label as a word.

It is dead – it was always dead – but it still lays there, still has power, still can kill you with its invisible tentacles of radiation. Stay away; do not approach. “But in strange aeons even death may die” – its half-life is measured in billions of years, and eventually this remnant will be safe. Good luck, whatever creatures come after us.

I doubt I am the first one to have this idea.

Mirrored from Egypt Urnash.

Needlemousevember 1-14

2018: Well look what I found in my drafts when I wanted to link to the big post I did about Needlemousevember last year. Apparently I never posted this. It’s been sitting in my WordPress drafts since September 21st. So I’ve added Needlemice 15-20, which covers all of the work I did for Needlemousevember. Everyone is talking about Inktober again and maybe I will do Needlemousevember again, because it sure is fun to start most days by making a really stupid picture of Sonic.

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So back in 2009, a dude decided he was gonna brush up his inking skills by doing a drawing in ink every day for the entire month of October. He gave this the name “Inktober”. Since then it has grown into a Major Thing for a lot of internet artists.

This year, though, it started to get a little out of hand IMHO. I saw one friend debating which set of prompts they were going to build a buffer of Inktober drawings back in the middle of August. I started seeing this ongoing argument over whether you could do Inktober properly if you were working digitally. People will do these crazy, elaborate drawings for it; it’s become a big Thing.

One day, I found myself doodling a crappy Sonic, using none of my usual working methods in Illustrator. It made me laugh. It made me laugh even more when I posted it with the hashtag “#needlemousevember”. Especially because it was still August.

I did another one the next day. And another. And pretty soon I’d started drawing these things most days. There have been some missed days, but I don’t care.

Here’s the first fourteen. More to come, I’m sure.

The rules of #needlemousevember, if you care to participate, are:

1. Draw a Sonic.
2. Don’t spend more than 5-10 minutes drawing your Sonic. GOTTAGOFAST.
3. Trying new tools, new workflows, and new methods is encouraged, but by no means mandatory. Making your drawings gleefully off-model is also encouraged.
4. Personally I try to avoid using ‘undo’. If I make a mistake who cares? It’s just a stupid goofy drawing of Sonic.
5. Stop drawing Sonics when it stops being funny. If it’s before the end of whatever month you have declared to be #needlemousevember then that is perfectly fine.

Mirrored from Egypt Urnash.