#Apex Evolution

[r4spb3rry-t4rt]

When your bf who regularly falls into a coma tries to wake up on your day off

[w3llf4ll]

Trying to figure out how I want this show to look since my main style looks like hell’s inferno to frame by frame animate. But this also does.

[p1tf4ll]

APEX EVOLUTION ART

[polybiiex]

APEX PREDATOR EVOLUTION (from 2020)

a brain high on chaos and rage

[ambreignsfan4life]

Who is better out of each faction

[n3onwraith]

Made an entire alien species to have lore behind my "space angel" alien motherfucker because now he just needs his story and I'm set

I want to figure out organ systems and dietary components and base elements (non-carbon based life forms) and other life on their home planet and much much more, but I'll do that later

[ruthlesslistener]

"Able to consume anything"

He is just a goat, then

Wyrms are goats if goats were prepackaged with carnivore characteristics instead of a preference for herbivory. Its fucking terrifying.

[creativemaniacshenanigans]

Shiny Mega Gilgobleye

A Fusion of: Mega Bull Shark (Maneater), Gilgoblin (Warcraft), Gobfin (PalWorld), and Shiny Mega Sableye (Pokemon)

Gender: 50% Male and 50% Female

Element: Neutral, Normal, Dark, Ghost, Fighting, Rock, Psychic, Ground, Flying, Steel, Ice, Fire, Water, Electric, Fairy, Poison, Bug, and Grass

Capabilities: Magic Bounce, Mega Effects, Sonar, Double Jump, Breach Lunge, Air Lunge, Lung Capacity, Angry Shark, Vanguard, Logging Foreman, Motivational Leader, Mine Foreman, Stronghold Strategiest, Lv. 2 Watering, Lv. 1 Handiwork, and Lv. 1 Transporting

Resident to: Poison and Fire

Immune to: Normal, Fighting, and Psychic

Natural Diet: They're Carnivores, and also like to eat gemstones

Natural Habitat: In Underwater, Swamps, Valleys, Golden Cities, Rocky Caves, Towers, Mountains, Volcanic Areas, Steel-related Caves and Mountains, Rallys, Abandoned Amusement Parks, Abandoned Mansions, Caverns full of Mirrors, in Islands, Canyons, Deserts, Cliffsides, Nearing Ponds (Along with Lakes and Seas), Rocky Areas, Ruins, Gemstone Caverns, Flower Plains, Mines, Sand Temples, Light Temples, Abandoned Factories, Abandoned Warehouses, Ghost Japanese Festivals, Abandoned Museums, Gemstone Clusters Outside of Caves, and Haunted Villages

[koraichalcum]

@spikemuthtoothfairy asked:

So does Clifford the big red murder machine hate humans just because he got kidnapped from his own life and time or is there more there? :3

CLIFFORD THE BIG RED...I mean yeah, yeah, true. I actually had a headcanon planned for this 🤔

It's one part hate for being pulled here against his will by two overzealous humans and another part ego. Catch him and his "Im the Apex Predator, top of the foodchain, judge and god of the earth as ya know it. I dictate what is law and right or fall by my might and claw" sort of deal. He's been largely unchallenged as you can imagine in Pokemon mesozoic era and ya know, things dont ~quite~ work like that anymore. Not to mention humans weren't at all around during his time. Like?? How dare they?? Exist?? And think they're the apex predator now?? With their scaleless skin and stupidity?? And want to baby him?? He wants to hunt and murder and offering him anything is just a slap in the face like how dare you, what are you implying--??

But thats like telling a grandpa that times have changed...cept grandpa can crush continents with his fists and snap metal and boulders with a single bite of his teeth.

[dxrknessembr8ced]

BIOHAZARD

X

EVOLUTION

{ 進化は力だ }

[oh-youknow]

i am the ideal autistic son. stopped being able to speak about an hour ago bc i was so stressed and now im sitting on the sofa absolutely blasting legally blonde and doing crosswords.

[homunculus-argument]

A planet that's so similar to Earth that a species that looks and moves uncannily like humans has emerged due to covergent evolution. But these humanlike creatures are not the spacefaring species of the planet - the alien species capable of space travel is different, more clever, gained advantage earlier, one could say that the humanlike species never evolved the same path as humans did specifically because this other type of creature beat them at the race to become the planet's top apex predator, and could no longer be dethroned.

Instead, the two learned to coexist, and the species that would one day sail to the stars domesticated the humanoids, becoming allies and partners instead of rivals in some needless competition for space and prey. The creatures that never were quite human to begin with settled comfortably to a new position, as the top apex predator's allies, guards and friends. Fed and cared for, they became instinctively trusting of these aliens who would one day journey across the stars, and would encounter humans. And in return, their carers did the same, regarding their companions as beloved friends as well as servants and tools.

And now that they've met with humans, who are so eerily similar to that familiar species at home, they struggle to resist the urge to go "doggy!" and casually pet the starship captain's head.

[p1tf4ll]

APEX EVOLUTION WRITING

[mcmansionhell]

this house may or may not be real

on grayness in real estate

Allegedly, somewhere in Wake Forest, North Carolina, a 4 bed, 5.5 bathroom house totaling more than 6,600 square feet is for sale at a price of 2.37 million dollars. The house, allegedly, was built in 2021. Allegedly, it looks like this:

A McMansion is, in effect, the same house over and over again - it's merely dressed up in different costumes. In the 90s, the costume was Colonial; in the 2000s, it was vague forms of European (Tuscan, Mediterranean), and in the 2010s it was Tudor, dovetailed by "the farmhouse" -- a kind of Yeti Cooler simulacra of rural America peddled to the populace by Toll Brothers and HGTV.

Now, we're fully in the era of whatever this is. Whitewashed, quasi-modern, vaguely farmhouse-esque, definitely McMansion. We have reached, in a way, peak color and formal neutrality to the point where even the concept of style has no teeth. At a certain moment in its life cycle, styles in vernacular architecture reach their apex, after which they seem excessively oversaturated and ubiquitous. Soon, it's time to move on. After all, no one builds houses that look like this anymore:

(This is almost a shame because at least this house is mildly interesting.)

If we return to the basic form of both houses, they are essentially the same: a central foyer, a disguised oversized garage, and an overly complex assemblage of masses, windows, and rooflines. No one can rightfully claim that we no longer live in the age of the McMansion. The McMansion has instead simply become more charmless and dull.

When HGTV and the Gaineses premiered Fixer Upper in 2013, it seemed almost harmless. Attractive couple flips houses. Classic show form. However, Fixer Upper has since (in)famously ballooned into its own media network, a product line I'm confronted with every time I go to Target, and a general 2010s cultural hallmark not unlike the 1976 American Bicentennial - both events after which every house and its furnishings were somehow created in its image. (The patriotism, aesthetic and cultural conservatism of both are not lost on me.)

But there's one catch: Fixer Upper is over, and after the Gaineses, HGTV hasn't quite figured out where to go stylistically. With all those advertisers, partners, and eyeballs, the pressure to keep one foot stuck in the rural tweeness that sold extremely well was great. At the same time, the network (and the rest of the vernacular design media) couldn't risk wearing out its welcome. The answer came in a mix of rehashed, overly neutral modernism -- with a few pops of color, yet this part often seems omitted from its imitators -- with the prevailing "farmhouse modern" of Magnolia™ stock. The unfortunate result: mega-ultra-greige.

Aside from war-mongering, rarely does the media manufacture consent like it does in terms of interior design. People often ask me: Why is everything so gray? How did we get here? The answer is because it is profitable. Why is it profitable? I'd like to hypothesize several reasons. The first is as I mentioned: today's total neutrality is an organic outgrowth of a previous but slightly different style, "farmhouse modern," that mixed the starkness of the vernacular farmhouse with the soft-pastel Pinterest-era rural signifiers that have for the last ten years become ubiquitous.

Second, neutrals have always been common and popular. It's the default choice if you don't have a vision for what you want to do in a space. In the 2000s, the neutrals du jour were "earth tones" - beige, sage green, brown. Before that, it was white walls with oak trim in the 80s and 90s. In the 70s, neutrals were textural: brick and wood paneling. We have remarkably short memories when it comes to stylistic evolution because in real time it feels incremental. Such is the case with neutrals.

Finally, the all-gray palette is the end logic of HGTV et al's gamified methodology of designing houses with commodification in mind: if you blow out this wall, use this color, this flooring, this cabinetry, the asking price of your house goes up. You never want to personalize too much because it's off-putting to potential buyers. After twenty years of such rhetoric, doesn't it make all the sense in the world that we've ended up with houses that are empty, soulless, and gray?

A common realtor adage is to stage the house so that potential buyers can picture their own lives in it. In other words, create a tabula rasa one can project a fantasy of consumption onto. Implied in that logic is that the buyer will then impose their will on the house. But when the staged-realtor-vision and general-mass-market aesthetic of the time merge into a single dull slurry, we get a form of ultra-neutral that seems unwelcoming if not inescapable.

To impose one's style on the perfect starkness is almost intimidating, as though one is fouling up something untouchable and superior. If neutrality makes a house sell, then personality - at all - can only be seen as a detriment. Where does such an anti-social practice lead us? Back to the house that may or may not exist.

In my travels as McMansion Hell, I've increasingly been confronted with houses full of furniture that isn't real. This is known as virtual staging and it is to house staging as ChatGPT is to press release writing or DALL-E is to illustration. As this technology improves, fake sofa tables are becoming more and more difficult to discern from the real thing. I'm still not entirely sure which of the things in these photos are genuine or rendered. To walk through this house is to question reality.

Staging ultimately pretends (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) that someone is living in this house, that you, too could live in it. Once discovered, virtual staging erases all pretensions: the house is inhabited by no one. It is generally acknowledged (though I'm not sure on the actual statistics) that a house with furniture - that is, with the pretense of living -- sells easier than a house with nothing in it, especially if that house (like this one) has almost no internal walls. Hence the goal is to make the virtual staging undiscoverable.

If you want to talk about the realtor's tabula rasa, this is its final form. Houses without people, without human involvement whatsoever.

But what makes this particular house so uncanny is that all of these things I've mentioned before: real estate listing photography, completely dull interiors and bland colors all make it easy for the virtual furniture to work so well. This is because the softness of overlit white and gray walls enables the fuzzy edges of the renderings to look natural when mixed with an overstylized reality. Even if you notice something's off in the reflections, that's enough to cause one to wonder if anything in the house is real: the floors, the fixtures, the moulding, the windows and doors.

This is where things are heading: artifice on top of artifice on top of artifice. It's cheap, it's easy. But something about it feels like a violation. When one endeavors to buy a house, one assumes what one is viewing is real. It's one thing if a realtor photoshops a goofy sunset, it's another to wonder if anything in a room can be touched with human hands. I won't know what, if any, part of this estate costing over 2 million dollars actually exists until I visit it myself. Perhaps that's the whole point - to entice potential buyers out to see for themselves. When they enter, they'll find the truth: a vast, empty space with nothing in it.

The better this rendering technology gets, the more it will rely on these totally neutral spaces because everything matches and nothing is difficult. You are picking from a catalog of greige furniture to decorate greige rooms. If you look at virtual staging in a non-neutral house it looks immediately plastic and out of place, which is why many realtors opt to either still stage using furniture or leave the place empty.

Due to the aforementioned photography reasons, I would even argue that the greigepocalypse or whatever you want to call it and virtual staging have evolved simultaneously and mutualistically. The more virtual staging becomes an industry standard, the more conditions for making it seamless and successful will become standardized as well.

After all, real staging is expensive and depends on paid labor - selecting furniture, getting workers to deliver and stage it, only to pack it back up again once the property is sold. This is a classic example of technology being used to erase entire industries. Is this a bad thing? For freelance and contract workers, yeah. For realtors? no. For real estate listings, it remains to be seen. For this blog? Absolutely. (Thankfully there is an endless supply of previously existing McMansions.)

The thing is, real estate listings no longer reflect reality. (Did they ever to begin with?) The reason we're all exasperated with greige is because none of us actually live that way and don't want to. I've never been to anyone's house that looks like the house that may or may not exist. Even my parents who have followed the trends after becoming empty nesters have plenty of color in their house. Humans like color. Most of us have lots of warmth and creativity in our houses. Compare media intended for renters and younger consumers such as Apartment Therapy with HGTV and you will find a stark difference in palate and tone.

But when it comes to actually existing houses - look at Zillow and it's greige greige greige. So who's doing this? The answer is real estate itself aided by their allies in mass media who in turn are aided by the home renovation industry. In other words, it's the people who sell home as a commodity. That desire to sell has for some time overpowered all other elements that make up a home or an apartment's interiority to the point where we've ended up in a colorless slurry of real and unreal.

Fortunately, after ten years or so, things begin to become dated. We're hitting the ten year mark of farmhouse modernism and its derivatives now. If you're getting sick of it, it's normal. The whole style is hopefully on its last leg. But unlike styles of the past, there's a real, trenchant material reason why this one is sticking around longer than usual.

Hence, maybe if we want the end of greige, we're going to have to take color back by force.

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[pinkiexneomorph277]

Evolution : Pitcherdra.

Evolves from the Tropical Carnivine Variant once it hits level 45 + Miracle Seeds or over .

Rare to see as they are known to hide deep in Tropical Rainforests , they are apex predators amongst pokemon, they draw bug and rodent pokemon in with alluring sweet scents to their desired hunting ground and den where they are known to root themselves into the ground and blend in with the foliage and plant life, mouths open ready to snap shut. Their throats resemble pitcher plants , when pokemon are swallowed they are softened and soaked inside the throat till ready for transfer down to the stomach.

My Tropical Variant for Carnivine, they just become a bit more vibrant and like to hang in clusters wrapped around each other or hang from branches

(results of roleplay)

[knuppitalism-with-ue]

Please welcome Franconiasaurus brevispinus!

A new plesiosaur from the early Jurassic of Germany and a important missing link in plesiosaur evolution! Congratulations to the three authors, here the paper for those who haven't seen it

I have a rather personal connection to this specimen because me and Sven were on a road trip to the EAVP meeting in Munich when we came across this fossil in Bayreuth. It was quite the surprise walking into the collection and finding this, already largely out of the matrix.

It was quite funny to see Sven dive right in and after roughly 15 min of looking at it proclaiming, "pretty sure that's a new genus", I think we had a name for it already on the drive back

Franconiasaurus wasn't an apex predator, that time hadn't come yet for plesiosaurs, but it fills an important evolutionary gap between basal and more derived plesiosaur clades of the Jurassic. Here a little overview of animals that lived with it. This formation, the Jurensismergel, isn't as productive as the underlying Posidonia shale, but it's also a thinner, and less studied formation. Quite a few fossils still await a proper description or a name. These Temnodontosaurus for example.

A little background for my illustration. The Jurensismergel appears to preserve largely a deep water environment but I wanted to show the animal not in a blue void or with some dark sludge near the bottom so I gave it a patch reef to rest on, sourced from some locally available Muschelkalk. The whole presentation is very much inspired by the collection of the Museum in Bayreuth. down to the Temnodontosaurus rostrum jutting out of the ground here. Saurichthys is known from the Jurensismergel but the Dapedium and other fish were burrowed from Posidonia.

when you zoom in you can see crustaceans climbing over and cleaning the Franconiasaurs.