#Chicxulub... TWO!

[arctic-hands]

People are always being macho about how they'll face death with their eyes open, but then there's me who likes to think I'm brave having dreams where I'm about to die and I always close my eyes at the end

[chirasul]

you finish the post

[akiragatr]

DISCLAIMER IF ANY OF THESE BANDS EXIST: In my defense, your honor, I did a Google search first.

(I actually did come up with several that were already taken, FYI. Among them was "Feral Housecats" and "The Gregs")

[bobnichollsart]

My 25 years of palaeoart chronology...

This is where a career in palaeo-reconstruction began. This acrylic painting is the first artwork I was ever paid for, a private commission by Paul Anker, in 1999. Named "Impending Doom," it depicts two T. rex approaching a "Super rex," an informal name given to some large remains (now considered T. rex, I believe). Behind them is the Chicxulub asteroid.

As you can see, I needed to teach myself how to paint and I had a long way to go – ya gotta start somewhere!

[dragonshoardofworks]

Chapters: 17/19 Fandom: Danny Phantom Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Danny Fenton & Dinosaurs Characters: Danny Fenton, Dinosaurs - Character, Jazz Fenton Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Not Phantom Planet Compliant (Danny Phantom), College Student Danny Fenton, Stranded In The Past, Chicxulub Asteroid, Prehistoric Survival, Stranded in the wilderness, Wraith, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, So much angst, Extinction, but there will be - Freeform, Fluff and Humor, Surprise Adoption, Eggs, Minor Character Death, No Beta we die like the dinosaurs, Mentioned Clockwork (Danny Phantom), Trigger Warning in the Start Notes of Each Chapter, Sick Character, Drown Scare, Acid Rain - Freeform, Earthquakes, Anxiety, Ectoberhaunt Order (Danny Phantom), Ectoberhaunt Chaos (Danny Phantom), Ectoberhaunt 2024 Past (Danny Phantom), Ectoberhaunt 2024 Future (Danny Phantom) Summary:

Alt. Titles: "Stranded Before Time" (thanks @redfoxtail26!) & "Danny's guide: How to escape from an Asteroid (not PP)" (thanks @mymadmedleyw) 🦕🦖/ᐠ｡ꞈ｡ᐟ\☄️☄️ College was meant to be his respite from the craziness of Amity Park, now that he had formed a stable truce with his Rogue Gallery. And it had been! (The first year.) It's the start of the second year that left him stranded in the past of 66 MYA with an... interesting unknown light approaching in the sky...

At long last! The 🦖Dinosaur Phic🦕 is complete! ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ

@ashoutinthedarkness @ectoberhaunt this is for you. Thank you for giving me the strength and the excuse to overcome the Writing Block and complete EH22 with EH24's prompt "Dinosaur". The unintentional peer pressure did wonders (and maybe that was the point...)! (^～^;)ゞ

Anyway! New tags have popped up, chapters have been rearranged in order to go in chronological order instead of following the Prompt List... And the chapter count WENT UP?? THAT IS NOT ALLOWED, HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME, BRAIN OF MINE!

*hem* Welp, hopefully there won't be another hiatus two-years long for the Extra Stories, but in the meanwhile, I hope y'all enjoy the technical end of Danny's Journey to the Past!

(๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

[hoodie-prince-kid]

"Average stone kills two birds a year" factoid actually just statistical error. Average stone kills zero birds a year. Asteroid Chicxulub, which crashed & killed approximately 20,000,000,000,000,000,000 dinosaurs at once, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

[pokemoncenter]

On Pokemon genetics

If I am being honest, I do not want to post this. The truth contained in this post is something I despise. Not due to any moral judgment, nor is it unbelievable. It is simply... deeply unsatisfying, to have chased this truth, and come to such a ridiculous answer.

Ditto is a very unique Pokemon. Through its signature ability, Transform, it can transform into anything, capable of rearranging its entire cellular structure to perfectly mimic anything it sees. Somehow, its visual scan is even able to identify the DNA of the other Pokemon, making it able to become a viable- that is, fertile- member of that species.

Mew is believed to have been the first Pokemon, three hundred million years ago. It was believed to have the same transformative properties as Ditto. Thus, it can be assumed Mew had the same properties. Mew was able to transform into anything, and thus, could breed with other beings. It was believed it became extinct in this way- By breeding by transforming into other beings, the resulting babies were not Mews, and thus, the species could not maintain its own population.

Even if it can rearrange its own cellular structure, its own DNA, its own natural structure must remain recorded, so it can change back.

In other words, when Mew bred with other beings... and passed on its own genetics to the children. This may be the origin of Pokemon as we know it. This is the meaning of the fact that all Pokemon are descended from Mew. All Pokemon share the genetics of Mew.

... I digress.

Through our studies here, we have determined that Pokemon have a far, far greater quantity of 'junk DNA' than any other creature. However, though it is non-coding, it appears to not be junk. It seems that ncDNA is... remnants of not only Mew, but every other Pokemon in that Pokemon's ancestry.

(This also seems to explain why Pokemon are able to interbreed among each other, despite not being the same species.)

I have mentioned before, the Great Mysteries of Pokemon. One of them is the extreme mutatability, the extreme changes that occur in Pokemon, but only when they need to for environmental factors, that then stabilize so quickly.

The ncDNA has so much information. While all the Pokemon have so much interbreeding between species, this means that generally, each Pokemon will have quite a variety of ancestry in them, with an endless variety of traits.

It is our current belief that when faced with environmental pressures, a mother Pokemon will be able to use... something of a degraded form of Transform. Not for itself, but for what genes it will pass down. It will make it easier to adapt its children to different environments, by bringing forward atavistic traits.

Atavism, for the record, is when recessive or seemingly-lost genetic traits are suddenly expressed again, many generations later.

For example, if there was a prehistoric mammalian Pokemon adapted to the cold- likely, one that would have existed during the Ice Age after the Chicxulub Impact- that was within this Vulpix's distant, distant ancestry, Team Winter's sudden freeze would have caused this Ninetales to attempt to adapt its children. Two of them were already too developed to receive the adaptation, but one of them was able to properly receive the atavistic transformation.

The idea of genetic code lasting that long is ridiculous. Everything about this is ridiculous. Ascribing this all to Mew genetics feels like we may as well be ascribing it to magic.

And yet, it is, as far as we are able to tell, the truth.

Regional formes, extreme mutations, inexplicable mysteries of Pokemon... So much of it is nothing more than ncDNA being called upon to create atavistic regressions to more suitable forms.

As a side note, the mother Ninetales was not released to our care, so we were unable to find the genetic mechanism by which the mother can trigger this effect, which is causing no end of frustration, yet we know it must be there.

[gothicprep]

earlier this month, scientific american published this astronomy op-ed about inaccurate and “violent” language in astronomy and it was… really something. I do not know what their editorial standards are over there. I sent it to my dept group chat and we spent almost 3 days roasting it. “black hole is problematic for obvious reasons. how about we instead call it a once in a lifetime opportunity to feel what it’d be like to have your body stretched into a near two-dimensional line of atoms” and “instead of the chicxulub impactor, we could call it an unexpected visit from a celestial guest who offered an opportunity for new forms of life to flourish in ways they never had before” were some highlights.

but anyway, it’s a deeply weird thing to argue because I don’t think the biggest obstacle to public understanding of astronomy is field-specific language, it’s science fiction. it’s unironically science fiction. I have no fucking idea why this isn’t obvious. and the lines here get blurred because there are a lot of astronomers and astrophysicists who write scifi as a hobby. or if not that, they’ll answer questions about the mechanisms of the universe to help aspiring scifi writers who are concerned with accuracy. alastair reynolds, I love you, but you’re not helping.

I bring it up now because I noticed that a lot of people were chattering about the “dark forest hypothesis”, which is sort of an answer to that fermi question about where all the aliens are, if they exist. but it’s from a chixin liu novel. I’m sure there’s one person who takes this idea seriously because astro… takes all kinds, because it only takes one eccentric billionaire to fund your project of digging space junk out of the ocean To Prove Aliens Are Out There For Real… but I don’t think this is anywhere near the consensus. At all. like. astronomy is not a symposium where you sit around asking stupid questions about “what if everyone was Space Hitler?” it’s significantly more boring than that. you ask different kinds of stupid questions, but maybe that one is only applicable to me personally.

[herebecritters]

Origins of a Curse pt 2

Sorry! It was such a long post I had to split it up into two! Here is the Lore Part Two!

Click here to read Part One if you haven’t yet

One fateful night, Geshtu heard a warning from Theia. An event was coming that would bring great devastation to them all. The three realized they would need to do something drastic to save their people. Geshtu sought out ancient forces deep within the earth and they began experimenting with this newfound dark magic. They discovered that sacrifice and blood could be used to extend life if done right.

They carved stone idols in their respective images and tied their souls to them. When placed in the middle of them, a corpse could be revived after blood was spilt and prepared by Geshtu. They had the oppurtunity to test this further when Demuzi found parts of her brothers mangled body in the aftermath of a tragic mishap he'd had while wandering the badlands- the ritual was a success, and it saved his life. Unfortunately, one sacrifice was only good for one life. To save them all from the great calamity to come, they would need a bigger sacrifice and much, much more blood.

Nergal suggested they summon something to destroy all of their enemies and give them all of the blood that they could ever need. Enough blood to last for centuries, ages even. They reached out deeper into the ether and the three were granted more power through their stone idols. The more suffering they caused, the more blood was spilt to feed the insatiable hunger of their idols. However, there was another price to pay that they did not realize. As they grew closer and closer to godhood, the more of their humanity they lost. Even so, the three had developed a system that worked, and their power only grew stronger. Eventually, Nergal found himself able to summon one of the greatest misfortunes to ever hit the earth- the Chicxulub impactor. They put their plan into action.

The three took their respective idols and hid them in burrows surrounding the area. They spread them out as far as they could to give them a large zone for regenerating their fellow mammals after the devastation. Within the burrows were chambers with a series of channels connecting the three to one another. The night before the impact, the three demigods abandoned their original cavern of operations and settled alongside their respective idols, readying themselves for the ritual to come.

As Chicxilub careened closer to earth, some of the mammalian villagers may have noticed a new star appearing in the night sky, growing ever larger, before one night when it disappeared into the Earth's shadow.

The next morning, there were two suns in the sky. All the mammals were asleep in their burrows...except for one. Unbeknownst to Dumuzi, her brother would be face-to-face with the doom they brought.

The impact did exactly what it was meant to do. Devastation swept over the planet, killing 75% of all life. You are probably familiar with the infamous kpg mass extinction, in which a Mr. Everest sized bolide hit the planet and wiped out the Non-avian Dinosaurs, as well as the pterosaurs and the giant marine reptiles. For the sake of time, here is a little summary of what Cro and his friends got to experience:

The irony is, the devastation that they were warned about initially ended up being the very devastation that they brought. A paradox of sorts.

Regardless, this plan worked. Blood flowed deep into the earth and filled the chambers, forming an underground lake. The land violently broke away and the Isles were formed. From the lake of blood, the three were able to bring back any of the mammals that perished during the impact. There was one they could not find though- Cro had gone missing during the mayhem. Had he perished within the circle Dumuzi would have been able to see him…but he was nowhere to be found. He either died outside of the circle or he was somewhere, still alive. He was lost to them, much to Dumuzis despair.

Little did they know he was frozen within the circle, in glaciers north of the Isles. The tsunamis had swept him up and as the sun was covered by soot and the temperatures dropped, he was frozen in place.

He’d be there for the next 66 million years until the ice around him thawed enough for his ice cube to break away and float onto the shore of Happy Tree Town.

Dumuzi searched everywhere for him, but could not find her brother- the one that she had wanted to protect the most. However, the three demigods had known the risks. It was all for the greater good; the ultimate sacrifice was needed in order to to reach godhood.

The surviving mammals of the impact gathered around their saviors. These were their gods now, and they would all spend the next million years living as immortals thanks to this gift they'd been given. As it would eventually prove, however, even the blood from a mass extinction does not last forever. As the years progressed, the lake of blood grew smaller. They could not sustain it without more sacrifice, and there were no more dinosaurs to kill.

It was decided that they would have to use their own peoples' blood to keep them alive. Now, they'd pay for their immortality with their own suffering. Unfortunately, people become less gracious when they are the sheep for their own sacrifices. This inevitably would not last.

~ To be continued ~

Shout out to my pal @teddy-terrible for listening to my insane rambles and cheering me on! Also for looking over and editing my writing on this. They are one hell of a wordsmith!

[hologramblue]

something i really really like in ffxiv, which obviously is drawn from FF in general -> ff7 but which to my limited understanding? is exponentially More in ffxiv, with how many times it's been iterated on in the scope of the game itself and within the lore of its universe,

is the Meteor motif. Meteor being the ultimate and definitive symbol of destruction and apocalyptic ends, over and over across xpac and in-universe epoch. i don't need to list all the examples, you know them. what i like about it so much is two things; one is the chill i get from the implication of primal fears echoing across time, the degree of repetition in the lore, that shit always makes me shiver. the other is how it's very grandiose and fantastical but also very modern, marrying a nice classic "skies raining fire" apocalypse concept (which is really volcanic, right?) to, like, a present-day awareness of The Impact Event as a very real thing that can happen, the Chicxulub asteroid as a thing that did happen, a sci-fi edge that embodied final fantasy's genre-blending shenanigans and embodied ff7's whole Vibe and is now woven into ffxiv's whole cosmogony. it's very spooky.

[squirrelwrangler]

Returning to OII and editing footnotes made me get a little more specific and a little more humorously snarky with said footnotes- and I finally clarified an all-important world-building note in the latest one:

[19] Acid rain caused by volcanic eruptions igniting coal beds. Yes, I am stealing from the Late Permian Extinction event, though the Breaking of the Two Lamps, and thus the end of the Springtime of Arda, is the equivalent to the break-up of Pangaea. But it's also the Chicxulub crater/K-Pg boundary. With a few exceptions like the Nazguls’ mounts, there are no non-avian dinosaurs in Middle-earth, even back during the events of the Cuivienarnya. Sorry, not sorry.

[skullshoal]

Ive decided to combine two worlds and have all the modern nanosaurus drawings I've done be a part of my story about aliens, replacing humans with dinosaurs.

Basically a world without the Chicxulub impact means dinosaurs evolved intelligence akin to modern day humans, but became a colony for a much larger alien civilization launched them into the space age.

this is an old line up so the designs are outdated and there is a human there but these are other alien designs and they run a cargo ship

[spacenutspod]

The massive South Pole-Aitken (SPA) basin is one of the Moon’s dominant features, though it’s not visible from Earth. It’s on the lunar far side, and only visible to spacecraft. It’s one of the largest impact features in the Solar System, and there are many outstanding questions about it. What type of impactor created it? Where did the ejected material end up? Is it feasible or worthwhile to explore it? But the biggest question could be: how old is it? The SPA basin is about 2500 km (1600 mi) in diameter and between 6.2 and 8.2 km (3.9–5.1 mi) deep. Research shows that it’s the Moon’s oldest impact basin and likely formed between 4.2 and 4.3 billion years ago. That places it in the most intense period of bombardment in the inner Solar System. But there’s debate about the accuracy of that date. A more precise measurement would help scientists understand the history of the Solar System and the periods of bombardment that helped shape it. Researchers at the University of Manchester and other institutions tackled the problem of the SPA’s age. Their results are in a paper in Nature Astronomy titled “Evidence of a 4.33 billion year age for the Moon’s South Pole–Aitken basin.” The lead author is Professor Katherine Joy from The University of Manchester. “The implications of our findings reach far beyond the Moon. We know that the Earth and the Moon likely experienced similar impacts during their early history, but rock records from the Earth have been lost.”Co-author Dr. Romain Tartese, University of Manchester Whatever struck the Moon, the impact was catastrophic. Some estimates suggest the impactor was 200 km in diameter, far more massive than the 10 km Chicxulub impactor that ended the dinosaurs. This massive, energetic impact represents a key event in the inner Solar System’s history. “Determining the timing of this catastrophic event is key to understanding the onset of the lunar basin-forming epoch, with implications for understanding the impact bombardment history of the inner Solar System,” the researchers write. “Despite this, the formation age of the SPA basin remains poorly constrained.” The inner Solar System bodies have been pummelled by comets and asteroids. On Earth, the evidence of these impacts is mostly wiped away by billions of years of plate tectonics and weathering. There’s only faint evidence of most impacts. The Vredevort impact crater in South Africa was created by a massive impactor about two billion years ago. It’s so eroded that scientists aren’t certain how large the original impact structure was. Since Earth’s impact features are incomplete, scientists study the lunar surface to understand both the Earth and the Moon’s bombardment history. Fortunately, some evidence from the lunar surface has made it to Earth in the form of samples collected by landers. Some serendipitous evidence also comes in the form of meteorites. Study co-author Dr. Romain Tartese, Senior Lecturer at The University of Manchester, said, “The implications of our findings reach far beyond the Moon. We know that the Earth and the Moon likely experienced similar impacts during their early history, but rock records from the Earth have been lost. We can use what we have learnt about the Moon to provide us with clues about the conditions on Earth during the same period of time.” When a large impactor travelling quickly strikes a rocky planet or moon, it releases a lot of energy. The impact can spread debris around the surface and even launch some into space. Scientists have studied multiple meteorites that came from lunar and Mars impacts, and they’ve learned a lot by studying them. In fact, there are so many of them that they’ve been able to categorize many meteorites according to their asteroidal parent bodies. At least one piece of debris from the impact reached Earth: a lunar meteorite named Northwest Africa 2995. Over the years, different researchers have examined NWA 2995. By comparing it to Apollo samples, they’ve found that it has the same oxygen isotope ratios, which points to a shared lunar origin. The meteorite’s minerals and texture are also very similar to crustal rocks from the lunar highlands. The researchers write that the meteorite is in “good agreement with lithologies exposed within the southern region of the SPA basin.” NWA 2995 was found in Algeria in 2005 and it hasn’t been on Earth for long. It’s only been here for a few thousand years, and by analyzing the concentration of certain cosmogenic nuclides, which are atoms produced by exposure to cosmic rays, scientists have determined that the rock has only been travelling in space for about 22 million years. So, though it was initially created in an ancient impact, it was only launched into space much later by a subsequent impact. MWA 2995 is relatively unchanged and can provide insights into the early Solar System. NWA 2995 is what scientists call regolith breccia. Regolith is the layer of unconsolidated rocky material that covers bedrock. Breccia is a rock formed from angular fragments of rocks and minerals that are cemented together by fine-grained material. According to the authors, NWA 2995 represents an “ancient fused lunar soil, made up of many different rock and mineral components. ” The researchers examined NWA 2995 to constrain the age of the SPA basin. They used radiometric dating on a range of mineral and rock components of the meteorite to find NWA 2995’s age. This image from the research shows a section of NWA 2995 in four different views. a is an optical scan, b is a back-scattered electron image from an electron microscope, c is a cathodoluminescence image that highlights certain minerals, and d is a composite false colour element map. The colours represent silica (blue), aluminum (white), magnesium (green), iron (red), titanium (pink), potassium (cyan) and calcium (yellow). Image Credit: Joy et al. 2024. The researchers also compared NWA 2995 with orbital data from NASA’s Lunar Prospector, which used a low polar orbit to map the Moon’s surface composition. They created a map showing the probabilities that the meteorite originated in different regions on the Moon. This figure from the research shows the probability that NWA 2995 came from different locations on the lunar surface. Image Credit: Joy et al. 2024. They found that the meteorite most likely came from one of two locations, both inside the SPA. The nearby Cabannes craters are all the right size to eject a rock like NWA 2995. c is from a unified geological map of the Moon, and d shows stratigraphic units by age. Image Credit: Joy et al. 2024. The researchers analyzed the ages of uranium and lead in NWA 2995. Overall, the results indicate that the SPA basin formed about 4.32–4.33 billion years ago. That means that it formed about 120 million years before the main cluster of other lunar basins like the Serenitatis, Nectaris, and Crisium basins. This image shows thorium concentrations on the Moon. Thorium is used in conjunction with uranium in radiometric dating to help determine the Moon’s chronology. Radiometric data suggests that NWA 2995 came from the South Pole-Aitken Basin. Image Credit: Joy et al. 2024. Dr Joshua Snape, Royal Society University Research Fellow at The University of Manchester, is one of the co-authors of the new research. “Over many years, scientists across the globe have been studying rocks collected during the Apollo, Luna, and Chang’e 5 missions, as well as lunar meteorites, and have built up a picture of when these impact events occurred,” Snape said. “For several decades there has been general agreement that the most intense period of impact bombardment was concentrated between 4.2-3.8 billion years ago – in the first half a billion years of the Moon’s history,” said Snape. “But now, constraining the age of the South-Pole Aitken basin to 120 million years earlier weakens the argument for this narrow period of impact bombardment on the Moon and instead indicates there was a more gradual process of impacts over a longer period.” These results will only grow stronger when future missions collect more samples from the area. “The proposed ancient 4.32 billion year old age of the South Pole-Aiken basin now needs to be tested by sample return missions collecting rocks from known localities within the crater itself,” said lead author Joy. “Our proposed formation age for SPA will require confirmation from future radiometric dating of samples collected from the south of the Apollo basin area by the Chang’e–6 mission or from future proposed missions such as the Endurance-A rover concept that aims to collect 100?kg of samples from across the SPA basin floor,” the authors write in their conclusion. The post Scientists Determine the Age of the Moon’s Oldest and Largest Impact Basin appeared first on Universe Today.

[hasellia]

Heya I'm bored so like, what's yoir current favorite animal? Mines the olm

Ahhhh I love them all it's hard to choose... Sooo I'll say my top 2

The spotted tiger Quoll

(Pictured: A spotted tiger quoll, Dasyurus maculatus, curled up sleeping in a glass exhibit.)

Bunjeen is the original Indigenous name (from the Bandjalung language group) for them in my area. Was called the marsupial cat by colonizers until naturalist told folk or was missleading. "Quoll" comes from anglicisation of "dhigul" (Note: Aboriginal spelling is different from English spelling) from the Guugu Yimithirr mob who contacted Captain Cook (our Christopher Columbus booooo).

Since it occupies the same ecological niche as them. A good native defence against feral rabbits, but is vulnrable due to competition with feral cats and poisoning from cane toads. These Polka dotted murder balls are the second largest extant carnivorus marsupial. Live only for 2-4 years. The size of a grain of rice when born. Live solitarily, but will use a communal latrine to see who's in the area. Reaches it's teens in year one, stops growing year two, doesn't live very long past year 3 (；ＴДＴ). I don't like exotics, and the reality is definetly different to my fantasy, but I kinda want one as a pet. Maybe I can volunteer at a sanctuary or something.

(Pictured; A Spotted-tailed Tiger Quoll on a mossy log at night, by JJ Henson.

Below that picture is an Eastern Quoll, Dasyurus viverrinus. Eating a very bloody piece of meat with their hands full. I had to include it for the absolute gremlin energy).

Hoatzin

Stem-bird/Dinosaur vibes. Babies have claws on their wings to climb trees if they fall out of the nest. It is also the only bird to be a folivore; a dedicated leaf eater (foli, like foliage, and vore, which I encourage everyone to look up themselves). It's very rotund for digestion and stinky, like a cow! A dinosaur cow bird is also apt, because we no idea what kind of bird it is! Is it a pheasant? Ratite? Songbird? To my understanding, the current idea is that it's a survivor of a unique lineage of birds that survived the Chicxulub mass extinction. Our oldest fossils of potential relatives only go to about 30 MYA. Not even genetics have gotten us too far, but give it time. Was my profile picture for a time on an obscure internet forum when I was a teen. It is also the same colours as my favourite and oldest Velociraptor plush toy. (Razor the wild republic UK Velociraptor plush)

(Pictured; Top Picture of a Hoatzin chick with visable wing claws. Below it Razor, my Willd Republic UK Velocirptor)

[realswolestrider]

Long expositional tirade.

Please.

[Text is bright orange and bolded, but has been Edited for accessibility.]

Sorry about that. Funny slash fucked up part of having progeny in any form - they take after you. Every day I think, surely at this point, Rose's gotta be outta ways to stealthily forcefeed me my own patented brand of nuclear orange medicine, and every day I am simultaneously pleasantly surprised and mildly horrified to be proven wrong.

Anyway. I got my fuckin' pantaloons back and we're done with the thinly veiled psychological warfare for the time being. So I got a couple minutes to give the people what they want.

Normally I'd have concerns about giving away all my plans, let alone in such dramatic detail. Oh, you're a mastermind supervillain and you're just gonna give the hero all the information in a neatly packaged two minute monologue? You're makin' some big brain moves the rest of us couldn't even hope to understand.

I'm sure you're thinking the same thing. "Yes, Dirk." You hiss through your teeth while jacking it furiously to your own literary competence. "Fall prey to your own ego for the umpteenth time this week and hand me the key to your downfall on a silver platter." And I'm like. Okay. With an enigmatic level of placidity.

I'm doing stuff. Things. Anticipating your dissatisfaction with such a memey non-answer, I continue on. To be blunt, as of recently I've been doing jack shit of fuck all, except waiting around. I am an irrelevant number of Earth C's revolutions along its axis into this trip across the Virgo Supercluster to find a needle in a haystack - the perfect planet for my plans.

It's a lot like picking one particular grain of sand outta the Sahara, but with way more grains, and billions of miles between each one. So as you can imagine, it ain't exactly a mentally stimulating process.

You see, on the relevant scales of spacetime, life is a fluke. An anomaly. Calling it a rare occurrence is being generous. It's not just the size of the planet, or the presence of water. The incubation period for successful generations of the most widely accepted philosophical definition of life is longer than my dick, and twice as dangerous. For a species to develop a level of cognitive awareness enough to question its place in the universe, a lot of shit has to happen. A Rube Goldberg Fractal of an infinite amount of Rube Goldberg Machines.

Sometimes, life gets pretty damn far. Take a trip to Chicxulub in the Yucatán. Find a gift shop there, and buy a velociraptor plushie to the impact crater of the K-pg extinction.

You'll look like a fucking moron, because velociraptors went extinct long before then.

If the variants of life on Earth C are crabs in a bucket, humans and trolls just happened to be the crabs at the very top who got their claws around the rim and got the fuck outta Crab Dodge before everything went pear-shaped.

The mere fact any amount of us survived the Sburb extinction event boggles the mind. Natural generation is clumsy and random. Many times human and troll alike were held back due to biological or sociological flaws.

Intelligent design ain't fuckin' real.

But what if it was?

[bestworstcase]

regular anon back again to ask another "do you think this" question, today's topic: salem's pyrophobia! do you think that salem is pyrophobic because it plays into her witch theme (witches are burned at the stake for "sinning," she was "a witch in the woods" when ozma first came back, etc etc) or for some other reason? (i would say "or do you think there isn't a reason" but it's you and it's crwby so there definitely is a reason and i'm sure you've already got one in your brain, i'm just sending this to ask if the one i have in mind is the same as yours but it usually isn't LOL)

on the one hand, of course you don’t name your witch character salem unless you mean to evoke the salem witch trials—but there were no witch burnings at salem, all nineteen executions were done by hanging. salem is connected to witch burnings in the popular imagination, however inaccurately, but i think the more salient piece of this association vis a vis rwby is that the salem witch trials even at the time became notorious for being a product of mass hysteria and theocratic injustice; i think the way salem reacts when she’s set on fire is the result of the writing team paying attention to what her backstory is, because, well…

this passage from ‘the two brothers’:

With that, the God of Darkness brought forth earthquakes and volcanoes that tore his brother’s continent apart into smaller lands, boiled the oceans, rained fire and ash, and wiped out all the living things.

describes 1. plate tectonics, and 2. the aftermath of a major impact in the vein of, say, chicxulub. i’ve mentioned before that i think the only logical way for details of this sort to find their way into a religious creation myth is if someone—salem—experienced them firsthand and recounted them to ozma in some form, and as it happens we know that salem witnessed a major bombardment: the moonfall.

so, there’s this textual basis for thinking that the moonfall is supposed to have been as destructive as it realistically would have been—which is to say, any moon debris large enough to actually hit would have vaporized on impact and the rest burned up in the atmosphere, heating the planet to such an extreme as to boil the oceans and set everything on fire everywhere. the aftershocks would have triggered massive waves, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions—cloaking the atmosphere in dust and ash, which would later cause acid rain once everything stopped being on fire everywhere and the impact winter began.

this would have killed almost everything—on the level of the k-pg extinction event (if not worse, because that was a single massive impact that wiped out three quarters of all living species, but the moonfall was a bombardment).

salem Lived Through That.

and then if that wasn’t traumatic enough on its own, ozma also incinerates her during their fight in the lost fable; she reconstitutes from a pile of ash.