Bro Was About To Shit Bricks While His Skeleton Was Getting Crumched Down By The Full Weight Of Santa

Bro was about to shit bricks while his skeleton was getting crumched down by the full weight of Santa what do you want from him

Zim emotionally dumping on others who didn’t remotely ask compilation

Second IZ Halloween Special idea - Zim’s gotten over the hysteria about the candy zombie assumption. A year was enough time to learn that the kids don’t literally become worse or more hideous monsters than they already are. It’s just a strange cultural dress up thing, yeah? Ergo, extremely conniving evil plan for the hell of it.

1. Give the disguise a day off for the whole holiday.

2. Attend Skool as normal.

3. Watch Dib start foaming at the mouth and get crazy carded again, because he’s full-exposed and everyone else believes it’s just a costume picked specifically to mess with him.

3. Relax and enjoy the slight convenience of not having to wear any of that crap for a day, the peaceful lunch break, and the amusing blissful ignorance of these idiot primates that can’t even see the enemy in plain sight.

4. Spend the evening watching GIR defending the lawn (absolutely obliterating those trick or treaters)

5. Bask in the fact that from now on, not even visual recorded evidence is going to raise suspicion among those students. Dib could literally show them a photo taken of him from inside the base and these tools are primed to reply “that’s just a picture of Zim in that tacky alien suit from Halloween”

Also a very fun thing to imagine. There’s definitely room in my head remaining for mechanical stridulation. Most of all cause the ability for a disembodied PAK being able to chitter and chirrup all on its own is just the cherry on top for my beloved/terrifying “desperate PAK running someone down like a headcrab on sterioids” mental image.

Oh, I think I got a spacebug science ask . . . if Irkens make various bug noises (chirps, clicks, hissing, whathaveyou), how do they do it?

Thank you for throwing me a real curve ball on this one. I’ve actually been pretty stumped. At first, I wanted to hand wave this off with the simple ‘oh pretty much like any Earth vertebrate’ considering that they do in fact breathe air, can choke, visibly speak from the mouth, etc. but then I started running back into the rabbit hole question of how Irken breathing/airflow even works, since no one knows if they have lungs or an insectoid setup or something of the like to begin with. I have always theorized that the PAK is heavily integrated with their body’s circulation and gas exchange but there’s not much I have to go on with to guess at the exact machinations. It’s not that I have NO ideas, it’s that when you start taking inspiration from nature absent of canon pointers, you kind of literally can’t run out of equally plausible ideas.

Original point being that laughing, clicking, hissing... I mean, this is all stuff we can do just fine with tongues, teeth, and a larynx. Occam’s razor says ditto for them.

Except for this one thing that screams so distinctly arthropod to me.

See there was this one little moment in Dark Harvest that I’ve been majorly obsessed with. There’s this… sound that is part of the ost right before the big chase. When the lights are flipped off. It could be a strange choice of ambience but I swear it feels like the implication was that it was actually coming from Zim. And the reason I can’t stop thinking about it is because it sounds damn near identical to, of all things, hermit crab chirping. Take a listen to what I mean

Congrats btw if this is how you learn hermit crabs can even do such a thing. In the wild this is actually a way they communicate stress and aggression to other crabs, as in during fights over shells or when trying to warn an attacker to back off.

Their method for it is something called stridulation, which is essentially big word talk for rubbing together certain body parts like an acoustic instrument. Lots of other invertebrates produce sounds in the same manner. In the crab case, it’s a leg on leg or legs on shell kind of action. In crickets, think leg to wing or wing to wing. By no means universal either, though. Cicadas are a surprising example of insect that sounds off primarily through other means. Their mating calls are produced with tymbal structures located on either side of their abdomen.

As nutshell fashion as I can describe the tymbals, they’re a combo of complex membrane and stiff ribs that produce sound by flexing and clicking together really, really fast. I focus in on these at all because they are personally my favorite pet theory behind a secondary, possibly vestigial way for mature Irkens to produce sound :) and I needed some alternate idea because the one other moment in the show that got me on this thought spiral- if you remember that screaming back and forth Zim got into with Dib in Backseat Drivers. You know, the “ISN’T IT” bit? I’ve pointed out before, but if you listen closely enough Zim is so angry in that exchange that the way he vibrates angrily is actually audible. Like there’s this odd noise accompanying the rage shakes I can only describe as “skittery”

The agony of being unable to explain to anyone I know IRL why Not Stanley is one of the funniest pieces of media I keep coming back to because my sense of humor was so long ago rendered beyond unsalvagable

Anyway here’s a compilation of some of the parts I mentally reference or quote to myself unhealthily often

I am so glad someone asked! See, I got into a little bit of experimenting in the sparse reef with releasing tame wildlife, and here’s a few things I’ve noted about some common ideas for outdoor “base pets/guards” I’ve tried out.

Now I know for one that most captive raised predators are supposed to be at least neutral to the player upon release. Ideally you would want that dolphin sized carnivore outside your hatch to be focused on cleaning up the hostiles around your home instead of grabbing you every time you exited a hatch. In my experience, and this could be the result of bugs that have since been patched, crabsnakes and crabsquids have always been a little unpredictable when it comes to clearing this bar.

I’ve had both instantly attack me upon leaving my inventory, and crabsquids in particular are so tech/light hostile that they make pretty awful additions to the area no matter what, unless you love the occasional base-wide power blackout every time it decides to let off a pulse close enough to the hull. They didn’t even deserve to be in this consideration list. I have a small suspicion as well that crabsnake AI is a little finicky outside of their home range, because they don’t have designated cave shroom patrol routes like the wild ones. Amp eels are in a similar vein to gasopods, technically neutral, but not harmless due to natural defenses. In the eel’s case, an electrical shock, and in the gasopod’s, their acid pod droppings.

And speaking further about the latter, gasopods are broadly pretty useless, at least to me, outside of being nice to listen to. I don’t really invest at all into torpedos, but if you do, I guess free acid pods could be my trash and your treasure.

Sand sharks and bone sharks are on par with each other, being fairly territorial toward other lifeforms but also reliably chill around the player once released. The same, however, absolutely cannot be said for your vehicles. Bone sharks are still attracted to light sources and both still readily take a nibble on your unattended moth/prawn.

Stalkers now, stalkers actually have quite a bit going for them. Just like wild ones, they still love to play around with metal savage and will occasionally drop teeth. Anyone who has played far enough into the game can see why a safe and near-instant source of enameled glass is absolutely fantastic; big however, I actually cannot stand stalkers near my base. They are almost as annoying as crabsquids in their own respect, because they are even more hostile to your technology than anything else on the list. They are a nightmare around scanner rooms because they WILL steal your cameras as toys and run off with them. Not only are they just as aggressive towards smaller vehicles, but they like to test their teeth on your cyclops as well. Sure, they can’t actually put a dent in the hull, but they really like to endanger themselves while you’re piloting it. My tooth farm always stays a healthy distance away from where I park all my things for good reason.

Finally, there was one more con to all of these I didn’t even consider until I accidentally discovered this pro about the Mesmer-

It can take down much larger creatures than itself without enduring a single scratch, and it’s incredibly fun to watch in action.

Like all of the other predators, captive Mesmers are pretty happy to wander around where you release them and occasionally chase after small fish to eat. What I did not consider was that the player is not the only creature they are willing to use that fun gimmick of theirs on. I learned this one time when I released a mes near a base I had set up in the grassy plateau biome. Within a few in-game days, I noticed the former presence of *sand sharks* around my setup had gone practically silent. Curiously, I released a fresh one out of containment to see if it would try to attack the Mesmer still lingering around.

And to my amazement, rather than directly attack it the way Mesmers will small fish, it turned around and used its hypnotic ability on the sand shark… and it freaking worked. You could literally see the larger predator very slowly closing in on the creature until the Mesmer took a hefty bite and sent it fleeing. A couple loops of this cycle and the thing was dead in good time. I still have to test this out with some other fauna but I can say for sure that local sand sharks can be pretty much wiped out by a single individual. Incredibly effective invasive species lmao. Most of all I’m extremely curious to know if this works on Warpers, so in the future I might be testing out releasing some Kharra infected ones near a precursor base.

And in the name of sprinkling in a bit of personal bias, I just find Mesmers pretty neat to watch once they stop trying to kill you. My favorite one occasionally clips through the base and doesn’t seem to eventually wander off somewhere else the way bonesharks and stalkers tend to. But best of freaking all they leave your freaking stuff alone. Absolutely harmless toward your gear and your submersibles, which is more than even tiger plants (stupid base-flooding weeds) have going for them.

But yeah just my two and half cents on the matter!

Y’all are sleeping on the best base guard dogs in existence on this great big blue marble

Do y’all think Zim actually ate that sandwhich Red pulled out and gave him in the first ep?

Also how have none of us have stopped and asked yet what kind of maniac literally pockets a whole sandwhich for later in the first place