The
submersible reached the bottom of the trench. The trio cheered as the
depth reading displayed 26,850 feet.
“We
made it,” cried Raquel. “So few people have reached this
depth.”
The cheering stopped when a voice came from the gloom outside, “you’re back?”
Shout out to the missus today for lending me a jelly painting for this story. I was faffing around with dark background jellies and Posca pens and it just wasn’t working. I went for a grumble to her about it and spotted her jelly painting on the wall. To quote those seagulls from Finding Nemo, MINE!
You can check her art out and say hello to her on Twatter at @DonnaMStrachan and you can nobble her art prints from Society6.
As the fungi continued their tirade of abuse, Poofball did declare, “screw this crap, I ain’t taking yo’ shit any longer.” Forsooth, she did sprout a pair of legs, and she did feck off to a nicer place, with most pleasant mushrooms.
I’m with ya, Poofball. Fo real!
I’m grateful I never have to deal with haters. Arguments online always look so pointless. On the rare occasions that they involve me (three in over 20 years of internet usage), I treat them with utter indifference.
Of my three encounters with drama llamas, one abused me for days before disappearing altogether when he realised I wasn’t the person he thought I was (lol). Another one I saw abusing other people, so I blocked and ignored him. Three months later he realised I blocked him, he kicked off and got himself blocked and ignored by people he was fuming too, about me.
The third one was back when I released Grey Moon. A minor drama where someone assumed the 100% female cast was a parody or satire of lefties. I told him it wasn’t and couldn’t understand how he’d drawn that conclusion. He wrote some negative reviews announcing I’d become too SJW. And that was that. Arguing was not going to change anything, so I ignored him. His blog has since vanished from WordPress.
Side note on that, Grey Moons cast was all female because I wanted to write a story about three characters in a pub. Fuen, Yuffie and Reala felt like perfect characters for that story. The rest of the cast were female by mistake. I just kept writing ‘she’ when referring to the penguins and llama that visited the bar.
The Lost Leeds series was all female thanks to the main characters being based on my two dogs, Lily and Sally. The supporting cast was female thanks to pun names such as Molly Cule the chemist and Robyn Banks the thief.
Brass’ cast was all female because, well, I don’t know. Nor do I care. At no point did I make a casting choice based on the gender of a character. Take any post in all of those stories 300’ish tales, and tell me what difference it would make replacing any character with a male counterpart. I can save you some time there, and say ‘none’.
The point of all that tangent being, even the reason the guy cried “Peter is an SJW,” was misplaced. Not only would me responding to the guy be pointless, but his entire argument with me was irrelevant in the first place.
Internet abuse man, it such a waste of pixels.
With all that said, I do understand some folks cannot ignore the online abuse they take. People, young and old, often don’t know how to deal with digital bullying and women get it at least ten times harder than men.
So if you’re taking abuse online and you don’t know how to deal with it, check out the Cybersmile Foundations website. Their help centre has information on everything from doxing to mental health and even legal perspectives. https://www.cybersmile.org
For parents and children, the NSPCC has some information on cyberbullying and they have people you can talk too. https://www.nspcc.org.uk/
Also, a quick shout out to Julie Reeser. A long time Fears’er who’s hosting a panel later this month on Social Media Gone Wrong. You can see her schedule HERE, her Patreon HERE and her Twitter HERE.
Not sure how to end this post, so a dog-Latin quote from the British Army during World War II.
Different stages of their growth cycling into synchronicity.
Scrape, scrape, scrape. Like nails on a chalkboard.
Durthi remembered the science charts from her primary
school days.
Roots. Stem. Petal. Pollen. Pistil.
All done up in pastel colours.
Cheery hues that hid their fear. Their sadness. Their pain.
And their rage. Encapsulated in tiny golden grains of pollen.
She felt that, too.
No. She tried to scrape back.
Safe, they answered, unanimously.
Warmth flowed through the root system that encased her.
She saw what they saw.
A million billion human faces bent over them.
The pistils fired.
This week’s spooky-ooky-dooky collaboration is with Willow Croft of willowcroft.blog. Another longtime Fears’erer, blogger, author and pun-lover. Cheers for the spooky-ooky-dooky’s Willow!
Hah! Get it! A mousemaid for #mermay! Or should that be mermouse…
I’ve been playing with a Zig Art & Graphic Twin pen today. I’ve had it for ages, but I have little to no brush control. it’s a swish, swoosh and hope for the best.
Still managed a few Fears critters though. I shall be piddling about with brushes for the rest of the day as it’s ma birfday.
Yep, May the 4th, I am exactly <age redacted> years old. Let me tell you, May the 4th be with you has been a gag since the seventies! In all of my <age redacted> years, I’ve heard that saying every darned birthday! I’m a little older, wiser and my moustache is a little greyer. That’s going to happen after <age redacted> years on this earth though, aye.
“Yeah,”
grumbled Claws. “A hundred pigeons led a violent uprising.”
“Oh
dear,” said Yuffie. “Did they take legal ownership of your farm
as well?”
“All seventy-six acres,” cried Claws. “I tell ya, it was a planned coo.”
For anyone in need of a laugh this morning, there’s a bird I follow on Twatter. Jon Pigeon. A biscuit obsessed London pigeon who can work social media. twitter.com/pigeonjon
I can say, with absolute certainty, MerMay is a challenge I will not complete. I’m not even going to try. I have too much going on right now. But, on the days where I have an extra bit of time, I could draw some more fishy fears.
The first day’s theme is extravagant. So that’ll be a seahorse for me. Maybe on her way to meet Pisces or Aquarius. Or on her way to commit an evil deed to appease the zodiac fears.
If you’re interested in #MerMay, check out the homepage: mermay.com
If you want to nobble the pens I used, Faber Castell Pitt artists pens, you can grab them on Amazon: amzn.to/2VBMS9c
“No
horse,” sighed Sprite. “Your spellings as bad as the
illustrators.”
“Well,
the English language is stupid,” grumbled Horse. “I before e my
fuzzy mane.”
“It’s
a given rule mate,” replied Sprite. “Except for when my foreign
neighbour Keith, a weightlifting financier from Leith, was in a
feisty heist with eight reindeer.”
Little Fears 