Bridges

No, not Beau Bridges you idiot, regular bridges!


Here's the thing about Civilization... From what I understand you reproduce a whole bunch and have your children grow up and become grown humans. You all work together, plant seeds, breed livestock and basically obliterate your parcel of land for all the resources it has. Then you build roads so you can sell your apples and pigs to neighbouring villages and then those roads need to cross a river because there's better grain on the other side maybe, so you need to build passageways everywhere all around the world so that civilization can function, or something.

Right, so basically you need to build bridges spanning these physical obstacles. And then cities emerged and these incredible bridges got built.





Bridges.

Mandrake

Ok, so in real life, the Mandrake is a plant (belonging to the 'Nightshades' classification strand. Pow.) whose roots have long been used in the practice of magic rituals. It is a wholly unimpressive thing, except for the fact that the roots often closely resemble figures of humans, or even children.

The impressive stuff is how far practitioners of the dark arts have taken the backstory with these things. According to the legend, when the root is dug up it screams and kills all who hear it.

Some of the Magic folklore and writings surrounding the Mandrake, are incredible (and disturbing). Here's what one "History and Practice of Magic" book, by Paul Christian instructs us to do:

Would you like to make a Mandragora? Then find a root of the plant called bryony. Take it out of the ground on a Monday (the day of the moon), a little time after the vernal equinox. Cut off the ends of the root and bury it at night in some country churchyard in a dead man's grave. For thirty days water it with cow's milk in which three bats have been drowned. When the thirty-first day arrives, take out the root in the middle of the night and dry it in an oven heated with branches of verbena; then wrap it up in a piece of a dead man's winding-sheet and carry it with you everywhere.

...Anyone want to make one with me?

Living Forests

How about this? This rules, hey! Imagine what these trees would "have to say for themselves". They'd probably speak super-slowly and know everything about everything thats ever "gone past them".

The ones in this picture are from Mortal Kombat II - which is just because it was the clearest picture of what I wanted to write about. There were some awesome ones in an old Adelaide theme park called "Dazzleland" - remember Dazzleland? It was cool, it had those Trees with faces, and a Rollercoaster and stuff.

PS: I just noticed, there's a living tree in the background, on the right - that has a really angry, demonic face. Whoa.

Ghost Orchids

Look at this fucking flower, man:


So majestic. Jesus, look at this thing. Its terrifying and beautiful at the same time.

I'd love to get into "the cultivation of rare plants" in my spare time, something about doing that would just be really peaceful and awesome. I realize this is the symbol from that (underrated) movie Adaptation, but still, fuck that - Best. Flower. Ever.

Look at it, man - I could imagine being "obsessed" with these.