some newish stuff:

• Äxe - Autogeddon
• Hours of Worship - Resignation
• Bone Weapon - Chaos Marked By Death Of Sun

and some old familiars:

• All Your Sisters - Uncomfortable Skin
• Corbeau Hangs - Optograms
• Bolt Thrower - Those Once Loyal

these are beautiful, especially in the textures! mushrooms are one of my favourite things to draw and it's always cool to see how other people draw them too!

yesss dust off those skellys!!

ok :) the bats may be figurative. for vibes.

sounds very interesting! i am moving to a new city next month so i would love finding some localised stuff more easily :D

manul 😌

thanks for sharing! i had a craving for something like this today

thank you, now i know the source of this 😌

i'm a non-technical user and it is a pretty awkward position to be in tbh. i have been floating around various fediverse platforms for quite some years now and it is just very isolating. i can do all the right things in terms of curation and maybe find a tiny handful of cool people but i am still missing out on things like information about local community events, because a huge proportion of those pretty much only get posted on instagram.

so for me it is not even about friends being on there or needing to yap at brands but like..when is the popup art market on, oh there is a call for volunteers for beach cleanup, there is a blood drive on, the tattoo shop i like has a flash day coming up. and before someone yells at me: i dont currently have an instagram account and havent for a while now. but like..i do miss having access to that sort of information because it would get me out of the apartment and involved in local community events. and now i never know what is going on in my city and don't go out as much. :/

so yay for not using evil meta bullshit that is increasingly janky and many kinds of fucked up. but like. if i had friends over on insta as well, it would make switching to a fedi platform a very hard sell: "come to this place where your friends are not, and probably no local information is available, and people will be continually pissy at you for not caring enough about technical things, and almost nobody wants to hear about the things you are interested in, and people dont want you there anyway because the low userbase is considered a feature not a bug". ya know? it is just a non-starter.

there are good things about fedi platforms too, but some of those good things are things normal people will simply not understand or care about no matter how frustrated it makes technical users. i wouldnt tell a friend to come here, i would simply tell them to use what they are using less often. and i am sure there will be people in this very thread thinking "good, we dont want idiots like you here", and that is indeed another part of why it is isolating for me to be here. :)

maybe take a gander through the list Blaze made of active communities which are not politics, news, memes or tech, there's definitely more than that around but it is a good starting point

also New Zealand :)

unfortunately yes

https://quokk.au/c/[email protected]/p/986172/fyi-blahaj-zone-is-down-for-the-next-few-hours

Blahaj.zone experienced a security breach and is handling it to properly reduce the risk of harm to their users. the current eta for their reture is in about 7 hours.

very recently got an e-reader so that i can get back into reading, i am excited to be able to post something! hopefully i will find some contemporary fiction to read soonish, it's a bit overwhelming right now so i am just reading stuff that has been sitting in my Calibre library. frankly it has been so long that i am not even sure what i like to read anymore.

anyway, last week i read Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard and now i am chewing through the Standard Ebooks collection of Clark Ashton Smith short fiction. i haven't particularly loved either but that's okay!

i know not of sports things but i have seen many a creative pub quiz team name in my time!

these are all great! the ginkgo leaves are especially lovely, really nice colour choices & that little bit of detailing, just super pretty!

prob down to personal preference as to which is better. i will say i dislike how often i cry but i know there are people who wish they could cry more. so really we just need to figure out some sort of mutualistic distribution system so everyone can get a balance suited for them at any given time.

thank you! it's still a good while away from done and i am perpetually haphazard in my process but here is where i am at with it currently:

i am still going on House of the Wolfings! still enjoying it! i am about halfway through now.

i took a little break from it to read Soft Targets by Carson Winter, a novella i picked up on a whim because Tenebrous Press was having an ebook sale. i liked it and it is the first contemporary thing i have tried to read since coming back to reading. it was fucked up but in a satisfying way, if that makes sense. i picked up another novella and some short story collections from that sale too so i really do have plenty to get on with!