Because Folks Liked My Latest Pigeon Comic So Much, Here's Another Pigeon Piece!

Reblog this picture of me holding a Family Size box of Honey Nut Cheerios? I’d really appreciate it.

hi! i was just wondering if you’re getting a piece of this pie. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/voidrealmminis/rise-of-the-eldertubbies?ref=profile_saved_projects_live

Oh my goodness! Haha thanks for showing me! And no, of course, this guy is still selling my dream while claiming it’s totally nothing to do with me. I hadn’t heard about it so thank you.

For those just joining us, here is the saga of the elder teletubbies:

1. in 2017 I posted a dream I had on Tumblr. In the dream I discovered that the childish teletubbies shown on BBC’s Teletubbies are merely the children of a species that grows up to be forest cryptids as adults. The post contained a detailed character description explaining how the children’s simple antennae become more complex antlers; their coats become thicker hair; their eldritch screens are unknowable; here, look:

The adult Teletubbies have more branching, complex antlers and shaggy coats. They are less brightly coloured. They are terrifyingly large. Their strangely human faces, emerging from the thick fur, are unquestionably adult; remote, serene, reproachful. Their television screens are glitchy, esoteric and unknowable. They are cryptids whose public exploitation has undermined their rarity and their strange, alien dignity.

That’s a pretty clear description.

2. The post quickly gained attention and many people drew art, made sculptures, designed in-depth character concepts, and even made DnD character sheets and entries with detailed notes. It was 2017. The post got over 90k notes. It had an extremely clear description of the cryptid in it. This wasn’t at all obscure.

3. The post and four pieces of the concept art, including the first piece by were screencapped and posted on r/tumblr. The post included this art by the now-deactivated @finoliatav which is, I think, the first piece of art. Most screencaps don’t show that it’s animated! Once you see it you can no longer pretend that any more work needs to be done in designing these characters, really - they’re all variations on a very clear theme.

4. A guy called Jars started drawing the BBC Teletubbies as adult Teletubbies. He noted on Reddit that his inspiration for the first one was the r/tumblr post but after that, he considered it entirely his own creative work. He drew each of the 4 BBC Teletubbies as adults using my character description and wrote a little story about how his character had stumbled upon them in the woods. He’s a good artist and his work went viral on Reddit and instagram. Those places being separate from Tumblr by the walls of the enclosure, they quickly believed the Jars was being highly original and praised him for it.

5. jars got carried away by his fame and started merchandising for all he’s worth. He’s selling elder teletubbies placemats. He got a collaborator to help him make and sell plushies.

6. Plushies of my character design applied to BBC characters. Jars sells them. To people. Who buy them. He sells these.

7. I think this is like… his job.

8. It has been years of this. I don’t think he has actually come up with anything else to sell by himself. But given that he now has millions upon millions of views on platforms I don’t use, let alone dominate (Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok) he seems to have fully subscribed to the idea that this is his THING.

9. After a while I wrote him a friendly email expressing that since my original dream was very much about discomfort with how the teletubbies were being exploited, I didn’t mind him selling his own art but that I wasn’t happy with him selling plushes based on my writing.

10. He wrote back along the lines of it all being his original intellectual property and absolutely nothing to do with me, etc, so jog on and don’t interfere.

11. I’m not entirely sure where the original intellectual property is when taking BBC characters and drawing them according to someone else’s detailed description of how to “evolve” them (branching antlers, shaggy coats, eldritch screens, serene adult human faces) especially having drawn them after seeing four separate detailed reference photos to base your own drawings on; especially when they’re the existing BBC characters from the show and not even your own. Like, Jars, you were given an entire detailed brief, several sets of references, an entire concept and a television show: the only artistic choices made here were to pick up your own personal pen and do the drawing. You have never deviated from my description, which you did not come up with yourself in any way. But okay Jars. You did some real intellectual heavy lifting here, this is Intellectual Property suddenly, and I guess this is your day job!

12. I myself actually have a day job, am capable of generating lots of other original material just for funsies, have never asked you guys for money, and I’m not generally huge jerk I don’t think. Also, I’m uncomfortable but have never been clear on how to stop him - I don’t think I can. So I don’t do much about this, apart from occasionally scream with hilarity with you guys about it.

13. Like this is the opposite of Goncharov. This is a guy making his wage on a 2017 tumblr collaborative shitpost insisting that this is the beautiful fruit of his only brain. And millions of people believe him.

14. There are now YouTube documentaries with millions of views and TikTok lore about Jars, and his lore, the Elder Teletubbies, which apparently he invented. People are making their wage talking about the history of Jars and his teletubbies lore. These documentaries are, if you can’t tell, not especially well-researched, as it is not difficult to find the original elder teletubbies art on the internet, which is all timestamped. Occasionally hilarious people from Tumblr point this out in the comments (thank you, you guys are hilarious) but the juggernaut is unstoppable!

15. Jars is now, apparently, doing a kickstarter to raise money for some kind of DnD sheets using the grown up BBC teletubbies.

16. I will point out that tumblr made and played with DnD teletubbies in 2017 for free and nobody had to pay $3000, but again. The juggernaut is unstoppable.

I have never, ever known what to do about this guy.

I have always been open to advice but genuinely never been able to articulate how it “damages” me, apart from ethical discomfort about how much I hate my writing being monetised by other people, especially when it was about my discomfort with exploitation. The juggernaut is unstoppable though. He fully intends to get thousands of dollars from this. He almost certainly will!

This is definitely not a google drive full of the sleep stuff from the Headspace app, including sleepcasts, music, and wind down meditation, that normally costs 17.99 a month, no siree and you definitely shouldnt share this with people

Favourite things to say before doing something incredibly stupid:

Hey everybody watch this

I'm God's favourite

I'm always right and I'm never gonna die

(Person nearby) gets my crap if I beef it

I'm way too sexy to fuck this up

It's okay I've done this a hundred times

This is gonna to be on purpose

Hello you're watching Jackass

Check out this cool magic trick

If I die I want you to tell people it looked really cool

Wanna see a trick I learned in prison

It's okay, I saw this on TikTok

This is only illegal in Massetchuschessetts

My dad used to do this all the time before the divorce

If you're a cop you have to tell me or it's entrapment*

I'm doing this as a prank

Could a mentally ill person do THIS

Out of two thousand possible futures this is the only way we live

I have to. (Stupid thing I'm doing) killed my mom

The government doesn't want you to know this is even an option

I'm about to become so powerful you have no idea

i need a ranma 1/2 remake where EVERYONE is bisexual for ranma

tfw you see some stupid post that paints medieval peasants eating just plain grey porridge and acting as if cheese, butter or meat was too exotic or expensive for them, and have to use all your inner strength to not just reblog it with an angry rant and throwing hands with people. so i will just post the angry rant here

no, medieval people did not only eat grey porridge with no herbs or spices, they had a great variety of vegetables we dont even have anymore, grains and dairy products, not to mention fruits and meats, all seasonal and changing with the time of the year. no, medieval food was not just tasteless, maybe this will surprise some of you but you can make tasty food without excessive spice use, and can use a variety of good tasting herbs. if you'd ever tried to cook some medieval recipes you would know that. medieval people needed a lot of energy for their work, if they would only eat fucking porridge all of the time they would get scurvy and die before they could even built a civilisation. they had something called 'pottage' which was called that because it was cooked in one pot. you could leave the pot on the fire and go about your day, doing stuff and come back to a cooked meal. they put in what was available that time of the year, together with grains, peas, herbs, meat etc etc. again, if you would try to make it, like i have with my reenactment friends, it can actually be really good and diverse.

dont confuse medieval peasants with poor people in victorian england. dont think that TV shows what it was really like. dont think that dirty grey dressed people covered in filth were how the people looked like.

they made use of everything. too poor to buy proper meat? buy a sheeps head and cook it. they ate nettle and other plants we consider weeds now. they foraged and made use of what they found. hell, there are medieval cook books!

most rural people had animals, they had chickens (eggs), goats (milk and dairy), cows (milk and dairy), sheep (milk and dairy) and pigs (meat machine), and after butchering they used ALL THE PARTS of the animal. you know how much meat you can get out of a pig, even the smaller medieval breeds? the answer is a lot

if you had the space you always had a vegetable garden. there are ways to make sure you have something growing there every time of the year. as i said they had a variety of vegetables we dont have anymore due to how farming evolved. you smoked pork in the chimney, stored apples in the dry places in your house, had a grain chest. people could go to the market to buy fish and meat, both fresh and dried/smoked. they had ale, beer and wine, that was not a luxury that was a staple part of their diet.

this post ended once again up being longer than i planned, but please for the love of the gods, just actually educate yourself on this stuff and dont just say stupid wrong shit, takk

Screaming crying because I hate every piracy guide I come across on here.

Phew. This one took, uh… a bit longer than expected due to other projects both irl and art-wise, but it’s finally here. The long-awaited domestic animal infographic! Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough space to cover every single domestic animal (I’m so sorry, reindeer and koi, my beloveds) but I tried to include as many of the “major ones” as possible.

I made this chart in response to a lot of the misunderstandings I hear concerning domestic animals, so I hope it’s helpful!

Further information I didn’t have any room to add or expand on:

🐈 “Breed” and “species” are not synonyms! Breeds are specific to domesticated animals. A Bengal Tiger is a species of tiger. A Siamese is a breed of domestic cat.

🐀 Different colors are also not what makes a breed. A breed is determined by having genetics that are unique to that breed. So a “bluenose pitbull” is not a different breed from a “rednose pitbull”, but an American Pitbull Terrier is a different breed from an American Bully! Animals that have been domesticated for longer tend to have more seperate breeds as these differing genetics have had time to develop.

🐕 It takes hundreds of generations for an animal to become domesticated. While the “domesticated fox experiment” had interesting results, there were not enough generations involved for the foxes to become truly domesticated and their differences from wild foxes were more due to epigenetics (heritable traits that do not change the DNA sequence but rather activate or deactivate parts of it; owed to the specific circumstances of its parents’ behavior and environment.)

🐎 Wild animals that are raised in human care are not domesticated, but they can be considered “tamed.” This means that they still have all their wild instincts, but are less inclined to attack or be frightened of humans. A wild animal that lives in the wild but near human settlements and is less afraid of humans is considered “habituated.” Tamed and habituated animals are not any less dangerous than wild animals, and should still be treated with the same respect. Foxes, otters, raccoons, servals, caracals, bush babies, opossums, owls, monkeys, alligators, and other wild animals can be tamed or habituated, but they have not undergone hundreds of generations of domestication, so they are not domesticated animals.

🐄 Also, as seen above, these animals have all been domesticated for a reason, be it food, transport, pest control, or otherwise, at a time when less practical options existed. There is no benefit to domesticating other species in the modern day, so if you’ve got a hankering for keeping a wild animal as a pet, instead try to find the domestic equivalent of that wild animal! There are several dog breeds that look and behave like wolves or foxes, pigeons and chickens can make great pet birds and have hundreds of colorful fancy breeds, rats can be just as intelligent and social as a small monkey (and less expensive and dangerous to boot,) and ferrets are pretty darn close to minks and otters! There’s no need to keep a wolf in a house when our ancestors have already spent 20,000+ years to make them house-compatible.

🐖 This was stated in the infographic, but I feel like I must again reiterate that domestic animals do not belong in the wild, and often become invasive when feral. Their genetics have been specifically altered in such a way that they depend on humans for optimal health. We are their habitat. This is why you only really see feral pigeons in cities, and feral cats around settlements. They are specifically adapted to live with humans, so they stay even when unwanted. However, this does not mean they should live in a way that doesn’t put their health and comfort as a top priority! If we are their world, it is our duty to make it as good as possible. Please research any pet you get before bringing them home!