This defines conservatism. Ingroup loyalty is the only force in their moral universe.

It’s all they think you’re doing. It’s all they think there is.

• Tweezers (1x)

• Shard (173,294x)

Sucked air through teeth.

It technically is.

Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin’?

I despise every new term for Nazis.

They’re just fuckin’ Nazis. Don’t spread their newsletters.

Web rings are eternal!

Evidently.

This is what Yahoo was, in the 90s. Search didn’t really exist yet. They made an honest effort to link, describe, and categorize every site on the internet, and for a while it seemed like they were on top of it.

Accidentally reinventing Yahoo Directory.

Man, you can just scratch metal. Engraving only takes a steady hand.

The real eldritch magick is getting a god dang search engine to work these days.

You fool! Mankind was not meant to yeah okay good work.

I did not write this. Just something another redditor wrote that I saved because I loved it. Unfortunately the account is now deleted so I cannot give proper credit.

Fittingly, it is unknowable.

Well that’s fucking boring.

Good job on the color grading in what are technically the midtones, but come on, I wanted this to somehow be real light hitting this badass bitch.

“Big ugly squid.” I wish I was still that innocent, still unaware of what…they really are. Once you know, once you really understand - or if you are among those damned to witness it yourself - once you know, you will never forget. It keeps me up at night, and if not for my physician’s pity I would never sleep at all.

Squids. It’s charming, frankly - the Old Gods, with bloated and frowning faces writhing with tentacles like the beard of Neptune. Like a God of Egypt, with a man’s body and an animal’s head. A curiosity, and little more.

The truth…well, I cannot tell you the truth, not properly, as a man of science should. These things are beyond our science. Still, I understand things about them that explain some of the reports, and perhaps you can carry on my research now that I can no longer pursue it.

It comes down to dimensions. We possess three - height, width, and depth. Grip a billiard ball, feel your fingers wrap around it, and you will understand. Now imagine a creature that existed in only two of those three dimensions, in a universe that described a simple plane through our own. To that creature, the billiard ball would appear to be a simple circle, growing and shrinking as it passes through the plane of the creature’s universe. Imagine how our hand would look - strange fleshy circles filled with pulsing fluids, shards of bone, glistening meat. The creature could never understand what it was really seeing, as it could no more conceive of a hand than it could imagine a creature like us, moving freely in three dimensions and gripping billiard balls on a whim.

The Abominations, as you aptly described them, are to us as we are to that benighted creature. They exist in dimensions beyond our own, whose nature we can hardly guess. When they appear to us, we see only fragments of their bodies - long stretches of writhing flesh, glistening with juices that should not exist outside of a body, which whip through the air and vanish back where they came from in a way that our minds simply refuse to accept. Witnesses have tried to describe these as great tentacles, words failing them in the presence of such incomprehensibility. Those who heard the stories seized on this, and explained them as resembling cephalopods. This is a comforting lie, as there is nothing in the most stygian depths of the darkest sea that is not our beloved brother compared to the horrors of the Abominations.

This is a creature who is incomprehensibly alien, and our only glimpse is a sickening flash of writhing, elongated flesh that slips into our world and back out. Worse than the appearance of the creature, though, is its disappearance - your mind knows, on some level, that this creature - this hateful, hungry god of a creature - is not moving it’s body between “here” and “away”, but between being a glimpse of a writhing horror, and a horror that watches unseen.

Imagine our two-dimensional creature again, and imagine yourself to be a cruel child. If you chose to torment the creature, it would be powerless to resist. It cannot perceive you unless you chose to intersect its plane - you can watch its every move, and it cannot hope to escape your gaze. It would be the simplest thing in the world to push a pin through it, like a butterfly on a card. Take a glass of water and push it into the creature’s plane and it will find itself trapped, drowning, in an inescapable sea. The creature is entirely at your mercy, and always will be.

Same as you. Same as me.

How much of that is in-camera?

Early photographic treatments had terrible response for longer wavelengths, which is why wrinkles looked fucking awful. It lost all the subsurface scattering that makes skin soft. Basically you got the blue channel from any modern color photograph. I suspect that effect could work in color, in 1981, with some goofy color balance and incorrect lighting… but I’m not certain. I know color photos made black subjects look dark as hell until wooden furniture catalogs forced Kodak to develop a better formulation. I don’t think the typical effect was quite so… onyx.

The effect could also be thrown by the color of the jacket and the wall. They look black and beige, respectively, but the jacket could be burgundy and get lost in a blue gel filter. Maybe only the red of her lips is touched-up.

Alas, they’re the universal spooky bird. They show up in fucking Avengers Endgame.

One of those things that sticks in your brain but is reeeal weird to search for.

See similar review of ant emoji.

“Firefox: that is a termite.”

He’s makin’ em at night!