Reading a lotta pluribus posts Seems like every "the hive is evil" post is built on the assumption that this is an alien virus that is puppeting around the bodies of 8 billion people and doing Hannibal lector mind games to carol, while the (rarer nowadays) "hive is good" posts assume a kind of perfectly distilled utilitarianism but neither of these are really the whole truth. Let's look at the material facts: The hive is the result of an engineered RNA strand that functions as "psychic glue" that joins sentient species together, similar to a virus but not quite (describing exactly what it is is probably impossible using Earth's examples of life). It carries with it a biological imperative to spread more copies of itself, as expected of any kind of life. To achieve this end, the hive is working to construct a radio emitter large enough to beam the RNA instructions back into the space and hopefully into the ears of another civilization. It is also working tirelessly to find a way to integrate the literal dozen or so humans that were not genetically compatible with the RNA. This is where the line of thought tends to stop with the "hive is evil" posts, but it feels like there's some odd prioritization going on here. If the hive really only cared about spreading as many copies of the RNA sequence to as many planets as possible, then it would be much better off just ignoring the straggler humans, or even kill them and focus entirely on constructing the radio dish. When you consider the amount of manpower and resources the hive is using on each of the uninfected, either to indulge in their whims like koumba and carol or to simply simulate normalcy like laxmi and kusimayu, it's not exactly a profitable tradeoff to infect such a small amount of people and to keep them happy in the meantime is completely meaningless in terms of the continuation of the RNA.
OKAY WELL i was going to wait to post the latest art telephone game on here until everything was finalized but one of the last artists got delayed by life stuff but everyone's already posting their individual piece online so it's silly to keep this secret now. i'll hold off on posting all the art natively on tumblr until i get the last piece in but in the meantime you can check out the hydraphone 2025 tag on here to see a bunch of it
this was the most ambitious game of art telephone i've run to date and had so many artists that i split them into 7 teams but with each working off of the same starting image. seeing how the characters and world evolved and changed across the different teams was so insanely cool and i'm so proud of all the kickass artists who contributed to this.
CHECK IT OUT:
hey remember that 7-month, 36-artist game of art telephone i hosted last year? well hold onto your assholes and prepare for:
there's also no reasonable way of fitting all of the submissions into a single tumblr post without crushing all the detail out of everything to satisfy the 30-image limit per post so i'm gonna have to make a whole chain to feature all the kickass art:
16-18: @snejkha @librivore42 @edenartfactory
19-21: @lymphwyrm @palossssssand @gachimushi
22-24: umberfossil justagoldfish @pinkbat5
25-27: @solidagold @nutspider elixer
DON'T REBLOG YET WE'RE NOT EVEN HALFWAY THROUGH!!!
31-33: sludge (no website) @snippit-crickit thenauticalwarlock
34-36: luzie @eisly @salavarte
40-42: @ibenkrutt @skelebee @crtastrophe
43-45: @mathpope @avpol @iguanodont
NOT DONE YET! ONE MORE POST TO GO!!
61-63: @craboon exuvialremains @espimyte
64-66: @turbofanatic @slitherbop @chalkrub
67-69 (nice): @artvalentinapaz @satourni @vhsdruid
70-72: @psalidodont @boxheadpaint @bowelfly
and that's all folks! big round of applause for all of these insanely talented artists. what a ridiculous and fun project. 14 fucking months...
also here's that link again to the whole thing again so you don't have to scroll all the way up
carpenter ant mimicking spider just wants to help ^_^
(ant...? comm for @pitofsquids )