quark-nova

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they have the silliness level of small pterosaurs i love them

tweaking the design of these guys a bit. They're a tiny, solitary, sapient alien that evolved to survive in an endless windstorm. I initially imagined them as sea dwelling, but I think they might work well with a setting I've been tossing around, a little planet dominated by oceans of wheat

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"if it kinda looks like a dire wolf/red wolf, it is a dire wolf/red wolf"

Colossal about to create a wolf with stripes and call it a thylacine

People getting so mad in the notes of that GMO dire wolf post holy fuck.

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wait, I missed an episode, wtf happened with the red wolves?

Kinda regret live blogging my reactions to the colossal dire wolf story in one long thread, bc people keep reblogging earlier versions of the post and thinking that I still think the red wolves thing has merit. That said though, I feel it absolutely accurately represents how unhinged I was finding that stuff out.

We literally just did jurassic park but shittier.

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so long as we're back to social justice 101 on this stupid website, u need to be aware of the feedback loop that emerges from disproportionate scrutiny: any social group that is placed under extra scrutiny, regardless of the actual prevalence of any particular behaviour, will appear to engage in that behaviour more often.

you see this most blatantly with racialised groups (more cops in black neighbourhoods = more arrests in black neighbourhoods = "omg look at all the crime in these neighbourhoods!" = more cops in black neighbourhoods etc). even if the rate of crime is the same (putting to one side the criminalisation of poverty which is also an important related factor), one group gets away with it way more often and a new generation of racists is indoctrinated with the crime statistics which "prove" that some groups are simply more criminal in nature. we see a similar phenomenon online with particular groups (trans women being a huge example) being subjected to mass stalking, their every move documented by weirdos and broadcast as representative of the group as a whole.

tl;dr - overscrutinising groups based on existing bigotries creates a recurring feedback loop, reproducing those bigotries across generations and nominally justifying them. this is bad, and you need to remember that you are not immune to it.

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Mortis Obitus; Death Itself and a major God featured in Deicide. His design is based off the therizinosaurus, and this is his base form. Most mortals will 'go to the stars' upon their death, but for Wretched ones and those who live particularly callously, there is no afterlife– only true death.

The broken-off tip of his claw is impaled through the protagonist's heart in the beginning of the story.

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Thankfully, some stegosaurians lived until the mid-Cretaceous!

Hopefully one of them had the opportunity to try berries... 🥺

Incredibly fucked up that flowering plants weren’t really a thing until the Cretaceous.

Think about it. We had all of these huge, big-brained vertebrates well before we had grass

Stegosaurus never ate fruit because fruit didn’t exist yet

I know in my heart he would have fucking loved berries

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telling the truth to the killer means that you would have lied to your friend about hiding him

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Winter has arrived on Poob.

Start your 7 day free trial of Poob today, and watch smash hit Martin Scorcese's Goncharov.

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They just made a genetically modified grey wolf. We already had these, they're called dogs.

To anyone who follows me, I don't care about nor trust Colossal Biosciences anymore (The people behind the "Wooly Mice"). They have proven themselves to be headline-chasing grifters after this latest stunt. They are claiming to have de-extincted *Aenocyon dirus*, aka the Dire Wolf, by editing just 20 genes from the the DNA of a Grey Wolf (*Canis lupus*) to make this thing:

If it wasn't clear from their scientific names, Grey Wolves and Dire Wolves aren't remotely related to one another aside from being Canids, despite what pop culture like Game of Thrones would have you believe. If they did look like each other, it would have had to be via convergent evolution, as they only shared a common ancestor over 5 million years ago.

This distinction, however, isn't found in the publicized articles about this so-called resurrected Dire Wolf and makes their claim that they brought the Dire Wolf back by simply editing *20* genes from the genome of a Grey Wolf laughable. A Dire Wolf would have shared more in common genetically with a Maned Wolf (*Chrysocyon brachyurus*) or Bush Dog (*Speothos venaticus*) than it would with a Grey Wolf.

Bottom line, don't fall for whatever this company is trying to tell you. If the Dire Wolf were to be brought back, it wouldn't be via something like this, and certainly wouldn't *look* like this. If you want an idea as to how a real Dire Wolf would look like in life, here is some fantastic paleoart by artist Mauricio Antón:

Addendum: I seem to have partially miscalculated Dire Wolf genetics. They were not closer to Maned Wolves or Bush Dogs, but they were still not closely related to Grey Wolves. They were basal members of Canini, related to canids like Jackals (genus Lupulella) but distinct from them. I am sorry for this misinformation in my attempt to correct other misinformation. My main point, however, is still correct.

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Honestly not being a killjoy, but do we have photos on what the protests were like in Republican territory? That seems more significant than the numbers in liberal zones like DC/NYC/Boston/Portland/Philly/etc.

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Ok, I want to preface this by asking you to please not immediately react with denial, anger, or accuse me of neglecting other groups, or just being uneducated.

Look up

'trans people india'

'trans people pakistan'

'trans people bangladesh'

'trans people malaysia'

'trans people turkey'

'trans people afghanistan'

'trans people tajkistan'

Look at interviewers, new reporters, trans life accounts, descriptions of trans communities, trans activists, autobiographies, protests, everything.

And ask yourself.

Where are the trans men?

And do not balk, or accuse me of saying trans men are the most oppressed group in the world,

When I tell you they are enslaved. Or married. Or dead.

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this is a critter

Todays shark is...

The Saddle Carpetshark!

Fun Fact: Also known as the Saddled Carpetshark, this rare, poorly-known shark species is native to temperate waters of the northwest Pacific!

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#with all due respect to people in the notes this is not the same as wikipedia using fanart of itself to illustrate a concept#this is 'we know this issue exists on our own site and we're choosing not to fix it'

To clarify, the people writing articles and using these screenshots (who are volunteers who clicked the "Edit" button) are not the same as the people in charge of the website's technical stuff (who are actual WMF employees)

I'm sure the people who wrote this were internally screaming at the WMF to fix the website

Fucking amazing example image to choose for the Scunthorpe problem. Just like "here is an example of the problem on the very website you are looking at"

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A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals. “A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”

9 October 2024

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A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals. “A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”

9 October 2024

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Is Golbo happy?

does golbo respond to external stimuli

like when it had its arm cut did it cry or if you poke it does it respond in any way

Golbo does not respond to any external stimuli. It does nothing except exist. This will be the same answer for any asks about what Golbo does, how it reacts, what it likes or dislikes, or anything pertaining to it theoretically performing an action.

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#comics#I've been informed that the names of Every Robin Ever are not common knowledge and I'm over here worrying about my jaybin characterization

I missed that first tag and thought y'all were still talking about birds

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better