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fictionz · 3 months ago

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New Fiction 2024 - September

"The Cold Embrace" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1860)

To ghost, to suffer, to feel her hands.

"The Love Letter" by Jack Finney (1959)

We should be so lucky to have even a single letter to our name.

"Doggy-Dog World" by Hilary Leichter (2020)

We are what we want what we are what we want.

My Sister, the Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (2018)

Not the horror story I expected, but rather a darkly comedic look at Nigerian society, and really society at large and the expectations and privileges we are afforded. The narrator had a particular approach to life that will click with anyone who can't let that mote of dust rest in peace.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata & trans. Ginny Tapley Takemori (2016)

We should all be so lucky as to find our own convenience store.

Dinotopia: A Land Apart from Time by James Gurney (1992)

Dinosaurs and humans create a wondrous socialist utopia, accompanied by gorgeous art. Also some pleistocene mammals for good measure.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1872)

The Austrian countryside is a gothic teenage wasteland.

Dead Space by Kali Wallace (2021)

You solve A.I. crimes, what do you get? A prosthetic shoulder and deeper in debt.

Allegiance in Exile by David R. George III (2013)

Allegiance in Exile is a bit scattered in the plot but they have a really cool and subtle reveal near the end. It's also interesting to hang out with Kirk as the five-year mission comes to a close. Who are you, who am I, when the thing is done and the future awaits?

The Baby-sitter by R.L. Stine (1989)

Things move along predictably and then WHOA he really ratchets up the horror at the end, particularly for a book targeted at young teens. As the advertisement at the end of the book states, nobody scares 'em like R.L. Stine.

Be Afraid — Be Very Afraid! by R.L. Stine (1999)

Aw R.L., you had me going! It's a strange format at first, then it starts to get intriguing, but then the page count limit rears its head and the story wraps up way too blithely.

The Curse of the Creeping Coffin by R.L. Stine (1996)

Doesn't hit the same wacky highs as the previous entry, but the myriad ghost adventures won me over in the end.

"Under the Floorboards" by Emily Carroll (2012)

It's all fun and games until you and you can't work it out.

"Nightfall" by Bill DuBay & Bernie Wrightson (1977)

Who else would it be at this time of night?

"Monster War" by Joy Chin, Christopher Golden, Tom Sniegoski, Vitor Ishimura, Scott Kester, Trroy Peteri (2005)

Lots of cooks in this kitchen, ingredients in this stew. The monster mash is more interesting than the IP side of the dish.

"The wind carries your last cry away" by avi (2024)

And at long last only the hills will know.

A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll (2023)

It doesn't matter if you see what you think you saw. It's there, waiting for you.

Frankenstein: Junji Ito Story Collection by Junji Ito (2018)

Read it for Frankenstein, stay for the strange tales of Oshikiri and his poorly secured house.

Frankenstein 2000 dev. Peter Fothergill (1985)

Only vaguely related to Frankenstein but such a creative collection of levels that it doesn't matter, they're still great.

Castle Frankenstein dev. Epic Software (1984)

Oh, sweet forgiving parser and high contrast colors. With those basics out of the way, this is a text adventure game that can actually be enjoyed.

The Crow dir. Rupert Sanders (2024)

The look of a crow but the heart of a checklist.

1992 dir. Ariel Vromen (2024)

Couldn't decide between the backdrop or the foreground.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice dir. Tim Burton (2024)

Just hang in there for the finale.

The Front Room dir. Max Eggers & Sam Eggers (2024)

You're here for Kathryn Hunter.

Häxan dir. Benjamin Christensen (1922)

Now that's something. It presaged true crime television with live reenactments.

Friday the 13th: A New Beginning dir. Danny Steinmann (1985)

I guess you have to try and get away.

The Critic dir. Anand Tucker (2024)

Delightfully devilish, Sir Ian.

Paranormal Activity dir. Oren Peli (2007)

Whoa that's a slow simmer with a spicy kick.

Speak No Evil dir. James Watkins (2024)

I suppose, but the ending is lacking and we all know it.

The Killer's Game dir. J. J. Perry (2024)

I wish I could be there but I fell overboard early on.

Vampyr dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer (1932)

Not quite the classic vampirism I crave.

November dir. Rainer Sarnet (2017)

Listen, gardening tool servants possessed by demons.

Crimson Peak dir. Guillermo del Toro (2015)

Looks pretty!

Whiplash dir. Damien Chazelle (2014)

JK Simmons is too good at being the worst.

The Substance dir. Coralie Fargeat (2024)

I too made noises of discomfort for the duration.

Never Let Go dir. Alexandre Aja (2024)

On the edge of something, but never at the heart of it.

The Others dir. Alejandro Amenábar (2001)

A slow and perhaps predictable build to the sublime.

The Purge dir. James DeMonaco (2013)

We're not supposed to want more.

Wolfs dir. Jon Watts (2024)

The classic fun of assassination friends.

Bagman dir. Colm McCarthy (2024)

Just creepy enough to getcha.

Azrael dir. E.L. Katz (2024)

Needs a survival horror video game stat.

The Wild Robot dir. Chris Sanders (2024)

Gorgeous scenery and heartfelt robot moments my beloved.

Megalopolis dir. Francis Ford Coppola (2024)

Should I go and take a classics class again?

Rosemary's Baby dir. Roman Polanski (1968)

I waited for the twist and its arrival was so subtle that it made me stop and think about where I was.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers dir. Philip Kaufman (1978)

We lost something when we stopped employing the hushed and overlapping dialogue of the 70s. This remake is chock full of that and running scenes with with very audible footsteps. But it's also creepy as heck and surprisingly fleshy.

#new fiction #new fiction 2024 #september

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franzias-cave · 3 years ago

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the volturi daemon au

Continuing on from Vinelle’s post re: the inevitable daemon!au, here are my takes on what the Volturi’s daemons would be. This is a beast, so I’ve popped it under a cut. Citations and paintings included!

Aro: Haast’s Eagle

A very big, very extinct bird. The Haast’s eagle preyed mainly on the giant, flightless Moa (230 kg). They were driven extinct when early human settlers on New Zealand over hunted the moa, but the Māori still have legend of enormous birds known as Pouakai, Hokioi, or Hakawai that would eat people.

Aro is a conceptual, farsighted person with very lofty goals, so I think a bird would suit. He’s the HBIC of the vampire world, so a terrifying, deeply intimidating bird is my first choice.

(Image credit John Megahan)

Caius: Aurochs

Caius, the most belligerent member of the Volturi! Obviously we’re going with a predator, right?

No.

We’re sticking with something much scarier: a great big fuckoff cow.

Specifically, the aurochs - the terror of Pleistocene Europe. Not only would they happily gore just about anyone, but the bulls would also fight each other to the death. Violent, angry, aggressive, and a second away from murder at any given time. While juvenile aurochs could face predation by wolves, mature and healthy bulls were nigh on invulnerable.

(image credit: Gesner Woodcut, "Icones Animalium" 1560, reproduced from 1551.)

Marcus: Scarlet Macaw

Like Aro, Marcus has a unique perspective on humanity that would lend itself well to having a bird daemon. I can see Marcus as a type of parrot, specifically a scarlet macaw - profoundly intelligent, very social, and adventurous. Another thing - many birds are monogamous, but scarlet macaws mate for life.

There is plenty of apocryphal evidence to suggest that parrots grieve - they scream, pluck their feathers, and generally become inconsolable.

The tragicomic potential is immense. To paraphrase @therealvinelle: “You have Aro saying "talk, birdie. C'mon. Come on, let's say "Caius stupid" together! Let's go! And the parrot just never talks back

Aro insists the parrot can talk, used to be the chattiest parrot around. No one believes him.”

Didyme: Sonoran Desert Toad

I thought about choosing a cuddly, oxytocin-inducing animal, I really did, but the lure of the sonoran desert toad proved too strong.

These toads are frequently hunted down and licked by adventurous psychonauts because their parotid glands produce 5-MeO-DMT and 5-HO-DMT (aka bufotenin), powerful psychoactive chemicals that produces a profound sense of mystical euphoria. Also super poisonous, so that’s a fun vampire adjacent thing.

What else would do for Didyme?

(frogge)

Athenodora: Grass Snake

A common snake in Greece that mostly wants to chill out in nice warm patches, but will kill if necessary. We know very little about Athenodora from canon, but we do know that she chooses to get blazed off Corin constantly.

Sulpicia: Domesticated pigeon

Aro famously searched high and low for a woman suitable for the position of his wife. Per Vinelle and the Muffin, I think Sulpicia is most likely loyal, kind, unambitious, pleasant, and maybe a little stupid.

Since it’s Aro’s chosen life partner, I went with a bird. She’s happy being a companion, so I went with a commonly kept bird.

Parrots are too smart for captivity and will go insane (don’t keep parrots as pets!). Geese and ducks are friendly, but there are also capable of violence. Chickens are charming and stupid, but also evil.

Domesticated pigeons (Columbia livia domestica) are thee bird companion. They’re friendly, just the right amount of stupid, and cute. They like hanging out! You can pick them up like a little hamburger!

They also mate for life.

I think it would be a very beautiful pigeon. Sulpicia is upwards of 3000 years old, so I don’t think it would make sense for her to be a modern pigeon breed, but I’m including an image of the Damascene pigeon for reference.

Jane: Bullet Ant

I thought about going with something cute and English like a badger before realising that Jane needed something more insidiously terrifying.

The inventor of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index considers the bullet ant to have the most painful sting of any animal, bar the tarantula hawk wasp. He described the sting of the bullet ant as "pure, intense, brilliant pain...like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel."

The sting causes immediate, excruciating pain. The effects eventually wear off without leaving lasting (physical) damage, similar to Jane’s power.

I don’t like looking at ants so you’ll have to look an image up yourself.

Alec: Blue Ringed Octopus

Tetrodotoxin is a hell of a drug. It interferes with the transmission of signals from the nerves to the muscles. It causes loss of sensation and muscle paralysis, which is spot on for Alec. Just imagine this poor 11 year old swimming around in the Roman baths in the Volterra basement with a rubber duckie and his small, poisonous daemon.

(Image credit me - I painted this)

Demetri: Polar bear

Polar bears are magnificent trackers, and one of the only animals that actively (and enthusiastically) hunt humans. There are plenty of examples of polar bears stalking their unwitting victims for weeks at a time, going so far as to learn their potential victim’s schedule. You’re a scientist on Svalbard? Better change up when you have your cigarette break.

(she knows where you live)

Felix: dung beetle (specifically Onthophagus taurus)

These little dudes can pull up to 1141 times their own body weight. That’s like a 70kg person effortlessly lifting a small submarine. Also it would give him a complex and I think that’s funny.

(use your imagination to picture bug)

Corin: Bohemian Waxwing

Bohemian waxwings famously love to get fucked up on fermenting berries. They’re often seen flying around erratically after overindulging. I don’t know what Corin was like in life that her vampire power is getting other vampires metaphysically polluted, but she might have been a little like the bohemian waxwing.

(shots shots shots shots)

Chelsea: chimpanzee

Chimps have complex, intricate social lives with ever-evolving hierarchies. There is evidence of social manipulation and coercive social control in chimpanzee groups (super interesting paper linked). Chimpanzee groups will also go to war with each other, famously in the Gombe Chimpanzee War. Chelsea’s power is based on the manipulation of interpersonal attachment, so it makes sense to me that her daemon would have sophisticated social structures.

Heidi: Bolas spider

Heidi uses her powers to lure unsuspecting victims to their deaths. The bolas spider (Mastophora hutchinsoni), attracts moth males by mimicking the female moth sex pheromones. And then eats them. Pretty self-explanatory.

You’re gonna have to look this one up yourself, I hate looking at spiders.

#twilight #volturi #no bugs on my immaculate posts

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fatehbaz · 4 years ago

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hi maybe you’ve written about this before but i’m working for someone who is part of the ecological landscape alliance and we’ve been having big talks about the concept of “invasive” species vs “native” plants and how the concept is rooted in xenophobia, and also talking about how maybe invasive plants aren’t that bad?? this goes against everything i’ve ever heard anyone talk about invasive species but i really don’t know all that much about it. sounds silly maybe coming from a farmer but i really don’t have a super firm ecological understanding, most of my plant knowledge is agricultural based and im really curious to learn more and was hoping you could point me in the right direction?

Yes, I definitely run into this disk horse all the time. Especially the “maybe invasive plants aren’t that bad” discussion. It seems the native/alien stuff is most often mentioned in disk horse about the Anthropocene. Basically, you’ll sometimes see statements like: “Is anything really natural in the Anthropocene?” I have also seen, and spent a lot of time contemplating, how belief in the categories of “natural” and “alien/invasive” in discussion of ecology might be rooted in or at least inadvertently support racism/xenophobia.

But I am still wary of the “native vs alien” and “no creature or landscape is really natural, not any more” disk horse, at least as explored by some white/settler-colonial academics, for exactly the same reasons: because it might be rooted in or support racism/xenophobia. Because the proposal that “nothing is native, nothing is invasive” itself can actually engage in a sort of “settler absolution” that obscures how there really is a contrast between imperial and Indigenous peoples, and the “nothing is natural, nothing is invasive” proposal could excuse the colonial/imperial introduction and expansion of monoculture by accepting the spread of industry/agriculture/non-native species as an inevitability. And these concepts can actually work to generalize conditions of ecological degradation and apocalypse, as if to say that “all humans now live in such a damaged world, we’re all victims” (even though many non-white, especially Indigenous, people actually bear most of the violence and burden of living in “post-apocalyptic” ecologies.)

But actually, I don’t think I can be too helpful here.

I still have a lot of contemplating to do, about how categories of natural/invasive in ecology might support the violence of categorizing people as natural/invasive. Don’t really know where I stand yet, y’know? So I don’t want to be too quick to come to a conclusion. I don’t even really want to offer opinions here. That said, I am very sensitive to language, and the language that I use. So I do appreciate that there is an effort to interrogate the negative consequences of describing things with words like “alien”. Also, the categorizing of lifeforms is and always has been a mess.

I don’t have many reading recommendations. The “native vs alien” and “nothing is really native, actually” proposals are concepts that I brush up against but don’t read too deeply into, even though this disk horse has been popular-ish in dark ecology and academic ecology/environmental studies circles for at least 10 years or more by now.

I guess, for my thoughts on native vs alien, what counts as “natural”, invasive species, and how the disk horse can excuse settler-colonial/imperial racism, I would point to this post I made about Pablo Escobar’s feral hippopotamuses in Colombia.

One introduction to the concept, which I think is an enjoyable read (though I don’t necessarily agree with all of his implications), is this essay by Hugo Reinert about the category of “natural” and the “purity” of a species: “Requiem for a Junk-Bird: Violence, Purity and the Wild.” Cultural Studies Review. 2019.

Anna Boswell’s very famous article about stoats and non-native species in Aotearoa kind of dances around this same issue of naturalness: “Settler Sanctuaries and the Stoat-Free State.” Animal Studies Journal. 2017.

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Generally, I agree with the implication that there is no “remote” or untouched corner of the planet where ecology has escaped human influence.

On that aspect, here’s a post I made about “planetary urbanization”.

But the native/alien disk horse can be extended to problematique degrees, with proposals that sometimes remind me of sci-fi goofiness, like fans of dark ecology or weird fiction or Mieville/Van der Meer got a little too excited about “the boundary between human and other-than-human has become so blurred that there may as well no longer be distinctions between native species and invasive species”, like they got a little too drunk on theory and just decided that “everything is in flux!”. Criticisms, then, of the “nothing is native” disk horse include how this oversimiplifies ecology and might enable/excuse settler-colonial invasion.

A lot of the “invasive plants are good, actually!” disk horse I’ve seen shows up in Australian literature written by settler scholars, which might be pretty telling.

Basically, it seems some scholars will take Alfred Crosby’s “neo-Europe” and “ecological imperialism” concepts, and then say something like “look, the damage is done, so much of Earth’s soils/landscapes are altered by introduced plants that we may as well accept it as the new baseline/normal ecology, and work from there.” As if to point at how North America has been entirely overrun by non-native earthworms and then to say “well, the worms are going to inevitably destroy hardwoods forests, soils of the Great Lakes region, the boreal-temperate transition zone, and maple trees which supply place-based maple syrup foodsheds, so we may as well accept that we live in a damaged world.”

I don’t know if I’m entirely satisfied with this.

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Other related concepts brought up in the same discussion of “nothing is really native” might include “invasion biology” and “assisted migration.” I see these concepts brought up in academic writing from the University of California system, Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand, and “environmental humanities” generally. Basically, these writers/scholars will point to the past ten thousand-ish years of the Holocene, and how humans have had such profound influence on global ecology that “introduction of non-native species” and “mass-scale anthropogenic climate/ecological change” are not just recent developments since Industrial Revolution or Indus/Yellow/Mesopotamian statecraft, but even older. For example, I’ve talked a lot about how, in the Late Pleistocene or early Holocene, the Asiatic steppes and parts of the Great Plains could have apparently been more like intermittent woodlands before humans engaged in deliberate fire-setting to better target megafauna herds, meaning that the human role in creation of vast “naturally-occurring” grassland regions may be underestimated. This dove-tails with the better-established fact that the forests of Central America and eastern North America in the early Holocene were/are actually more like cultivated food forests managed by Indigenous people.

The argument, then, may also point to yams, sweet potato, and coconut as examples of creatures with what now appear to be “old” and “established” widespread transoceanic distribution ranges which actually may have been introduced via assisted migration by humans.

The argument, basically, says: Well, let’s say hypothetically that humans didn’t play a role in spreading sweet potato or coconut. By chance, if ocean currents “naturally” introduced these species, if these plants “naturally” colonized whatever lands they were swept off towards, doesn’t this mean they could essentially be “natural” to anywhere they might arrive and successfully establish themselves? Therefore, does it really matter if humans helped them get there?

This seems to be related to the “no plants are actually invasive” proposal. As if to say: “If English pasture grasses have successfully reproduced themselves in Patagonia, Aotearoa, South Africa, the Canadian prairies, etc., what does it mean that their migration was assisted by humans?”

But this is where I have reservations: It wasn’t just any humans that “assisted the migration” of monoculture grasses from Europe to the prairies of Turtle Island. It was specific humans, with deliberate intent, upholding specific institutions, protecting their own well-being at the expense of other humans and lifeforms, enacting specific violence against specific victims.

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Another aspect of this which I see mentioned often is how early human/Polynesian settlement in Oceania and the South Pacific is an example of how mass anthropogenic ecological change doesn’t always involve statecraft, mass mono/agriculture, and imperialism. Aside from the famous decline of creatures like the moa, Polynesian islands were also home to relict species of large land turtles and ancient terrestrial/semi-arboreal crocodiles until human arrival in recent millennia. Writers will also point to human settlement in the Caribbean, where human arrival coincided with extinction of remnant populations of endemic Pleistocene ground sloths. (This also happened on Mediterranean islands, which hosted endemic species of hippopotamus and goats until recent millennia.)

Again, though, this is where white/settler-colonial academics advocating “nothing is natural” can kind of obscure settler-colonial violence, by pointing to history of anthropogenic environmental change and saying “see, all humans provoke extinction.”

Thus, you’ll see these scholars invoke Anna Tsing or Donna Harraway, referencing the “arts of living on a damaged planet” or ��living in post-capitalist ruins.” Essentially, advocates of “nothing is native, any more” might say “we all live in a post-apocalyptic world now, so we should get used to it.”

This, coming from white/settler-colonial academics, sometimes rubs me the wrong way, as if it’s sort of like wish-fulfillment, or “an adventure” for comfortable white academics to engage in low-stakes thought experiments about extinction, naturalness, and apocalypse from which they’re actually largely insulated, at least compared to the poor, non-white, non-academic people who cope with the worst of environmental racism and ecological collapse.

This, again coming from white/settler-colonial academics, is also of course more than a little grating, since it kind of co-opts or culturally appropriates the “Indigenous/Native people actually live in a post-apocalyptic world” concept proposed by Indigenous scholars. It kind of takes from Indigenous/non-white people, and then generalizes the apocalypse as something that all humans now live with in seemingly equal measure, obscuring the fact that many people are actually forced to cope and/or live with more-serious-of-an-apocalypse than others.

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At the end of the day: Sure, kudzu or English pasture grasses or coconuts or European earthworms or domesticated cattle might be generalist species which can successfully inhabit landscapes across the planet. So whether humans introduce them via agriculture, or whether they "naturally" expand by some accident or by drifting across ocean currents, they might exist in this strange ontological space between "native" and "alien" which confounds human conceptions of what "belongs"? And this is worth considering! This is good to think about! But there are still, and always have been, those "small" landscapes, those isolated pockets, those relicts and remnants in shaded stream corridors, where small populations of endemic species teeter on the verge, with highly-specialized adaptations to highly-specific microhabitats. You're not going to "assist the migration" of or "accidentally introduce" a cave-obligate salamander from a limestone cavern or a temperate rainforest-dwelling land-slug to a desert biome.

But, again, I still think it is good to stop and ask ourselves whether categories of “natural” and “alien/invasive” in ecology make sense, are outdated, or if they reinforce racism/xenophobia. And, again, I haven’t read enough -- I haven’t grappled with these questions enough -- to have an opinion which I’m comfortable sharing, so I don’t want to discourage this disk horse too much.

Anyway, hope some of this is interesting. Sorry. Again, I don’t really have any good recommendations.

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saritawolff · 1 year ago

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More tags, adding on more length to this post (I hope this doesn’t become the new “do you love the color of the sky”)

You may be thinking of minks, which are another type of mustelid related to ferrets. Minks are bred in fur farms and fur farm minks are larger and softer than wild minks. Since they’re bred in human care, they do tend to be much tamer than a wild mink would be, however, they are not truly domesticated. They’re bred for size, color, softness, and ease of care in a fur farm setting, not for ease of care in a person’s house. Still, some people keep them as exotic pets. As they are semi-aquatic, they require access to water deep enough to submerge in at all times, a varied diet, and a rigorous enrichment program. These are things that can not be provided by a single household. I agree with your friend, if they were in fact talking about minks! If not though, ferrets are good alternative pets to keep but definitely require a specific type of person able to keep up with their enrichment needs and diet, as you’re probably not going to be using them to hunt rabbits.

No, it can take hundreds of generations for an animal population to have evolved enough to be considered domesticated. What you are thinking of is habituation. Habituation involves training an animal (whether intentionally or not) to lose its fear of humans. This is incredibly dangerous for the animal. Some habituated animals end up in zoos, but most end up needing to be euthanized for both the animals’ safety and human safety. It also leads to the spread of zoonotic diseases such as rabies and toxoplasmosis. I really hope you’re joking about luring foxes into your home.

Siberia is in Asia, and from what I read while researching for this, most can agree that dog domestication happened somewhere around there. I’m sure it would have been more Northern, as that’s where Pleistocene Wolves would have been ranging.

I don’t think we can truly ever get an exact area though. All the other animals on this list were domesticated during or after the advent of civilization. Dogs were domesticated when humans were still migratory hunter-gatherers, which is just wild to me.

There is actually a type of sheep called the European Mouflon, which were descended from feral sheep (similar to how wild hogs are descended from feral pigs). I worked with some at one point and they are insane. I can not imagine how the first round-up of truly wild Armenian Mouflon went.

Thank you for pointing this out it’s literally my favorite scientific name

I would be up for it as long as any educators contact me first, after which I can send them the high-res images. I don’t like my stuff being used without permission. I’d also want some time to correct issues I’m already noticing (I forgot to add blood sport for chickens and also the afformentioned misleading way I seemed to include spider ball pythons as a breed rather than an example of unethical breeding).

Phew. This one took, uh… a bit longer than expected due to other projects both irl and art-wise, but it’s finally here. The long-awaited domestic animal infographic! Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough space to cover every single domestic animal (I’m so sorry, reindeer and koi, my beloveds) but I tried to include as many of the “major ones” as possible.

I made this chart in response to a lot of the misunderstandings I hear concerning domestic animals, so I hope it’s helpful!

Further information I didn’t have any room to add or expand on:

🐈 “Breed” and “species” are not synonyms! Breeds are specific to domesticated animals. A Bengal Tiger is a species of tiger. A Siamese is a breed of domestic cat.

🐀 Different colors are also not what makes a breed. A breed is determined by having genetics that are unique to that breed. So a “bluenose pitbull” is not a different breed from a “rednose pitbull”, but an American Pitbull Terrier is a different breed from an American Bully! Animals that have been domesticated for longer tend to have more seperate breeds as these differing genetics have had time to develop.

🐕 It takes hundreds of generations for an animal to become domesticated. While the “domesticated fox experiment” had interesting results, there were not enough generations involved for the foxes to become truly domesticated and their differences from wild foxes were more due to epigenetics (heritable traits that do not change the DNA sequence but rather activate or deactivate parts of it; owed to the specific circumstances of its parents’ behavior and environment.)

🐎 Wild animals that are raised in human care are not domesticated, but they can be considered “tamed.” This means that they still have all their wild instincts, but are less inclined to attack or be frightened of humans. A wild animal that lives in the wild but near human settlements and is less afraid of humans is considered “habituated.” Tamed and habituated animals are not any less dangerous than wild animals, and should still be treated with the same respect. Foxes, otters, raccoons, servals, caracals, bush babies, opossums, owls, monkeys, alligators, and other wild animals can be tamed or habituated, but they have not undergone hundreds of generations of domestication, so they are not domesticated animals.

🐄 Also, as seen above, these animals have all been domesticated for a reason, be it food, transport, pest control, or otherwise, at a time when less practical options existed. There is no benefit to domesticating other species in the modern day, so if you’ve got a hankering for keeping a wild animal as a pet, instead try to find the domestic equivalent of that wild animal! There are several dog breeds that look and behave like wolves or foxes, pigeons and chickens can make great pet birds and have hundreds of colorful fancy breeds, rats can be just as intelligent and social as a small monkey (and less expensive and dangerous to boot,) and ferrets are pretty darn close to minks and otters! There’s no need to keep a wolf in a house when our ancestors have already spent 20,000+ years to make them house-compatible.

🐖 This was stated in the infographic, but I feel like I must again reiterate that domestic animals do not belong in the wild, and often become invasive when feral. Their genetics have been specifically altered in such a way that they depend on humans for optimal health. We are their habitat. This is why you only really see feral pigeons in cities, and feral cats around settlements. They are specifically adapted to live with humans, so they stay even when unwanted. However, this does not mean they should live in a way that doesn’t put their health and comfort as a top priority! If we are their world, it is our duty to make it as good as possible. Please research any pet you get before bringing them home!

#phew #hopefully that’s it for now unless I see more tags I feel really need addressed #if anyone has any questions though my ask box is open!#long post #SaritaZoo #Domestic animals #domestication

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sizeshiftingdeath · 3 years ago

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Ends and Starts (MCYT G/T Exchange!)

Hello there sizeshiftingdeath! I received your prompts for the gift exchange, and while I tried to start pretty close to your prompt, my ideas kind of spiraled out of control, I hope you don't mind ^^' I can make something else with another prompt if it doesn't fit what you were hoping for, though! There's also a little bit of extra information down the bottom with some stuff I thought of about the au I accidentally made.

Prompt given: ‘A human caught in the rain finds a giant in the forest’

The world is pockmarked with evidence of the tragedies of the past. Of warped land that paints the horrors that befell things that came before. The living reminders of them continue to live on in perpetuity, as immortal creatures that were wreathed in the horrors that life on Earth had endured in the past.

Bask in their horrible might.

There is the Death from Burning and Fire and Falling from the Sky and Cold Choking Death, the End of the Cretaceous. A massive beast, the bloody end of an era of enormous fauna. A destruction made all the more powerful by how quickly it was achieved. It stalks the land and sea and, where it steps, the plants die of lack of sunlight and the ground turns to tar.

There is the Death from Ever Hunting and Chasing and Too Warm Too Bright - Tech, the man-shaped leviathan, death in the shape of something familiar to mankind, the Killer of the Pleistocene. The death of great megafauna in an icy world from the encroaching warmth of a new era, the sharp point of a spear. It hunts the world with spears and arrows of fire and, in the depths of its nest, all water has turned to vapor and the earth itself has become a wasteland.

There is the Death of Falling Frozen Seas, of a primordial sea strangled to death under a glacier lock, Her Lady of the primaeval oceans, the Death of the Ordovician. The tail-end of an explosion of life, stretched too far by their own hubris. And yet, despite being a beast with a hundred trilobite and eurypterid faces, one that has a herald in the form of a human by Her side, for reasons that have yet to become known. Maybe, just like every other esoteric thing that such beasts may do, it shall remain a mystery forever.

Look and see. A new immortal is emerging from its eggshell of tragedy. The unstoppable bomb and burning oilfield. The death through hubris and a slow choking unraveling of your very being. The death of man from crackling radiation and tainted iridescent-film water and ash filled smoke. The destruction of the Anthropocene.

Except. This is a creature who was born prematurely. Because man is not dead nor feeling its own final throes. It was not born wreathed in the screams of the damned, only the fears held in the hearts of the still-living. It is naïve and curious and did not yet have the star of a hundred million species’ souls to power it yet. It was stunted.

And that is why the first human the newest apocalypse met was so important.

…

The forests are deep and dark. Quiet yet shivering with life. Constantly moving and yet trapped in some space between time. Most of all, they expected nothing more from you than for your own two legs to be able to travel. Ranboo liked that.

It certainly was nicer than what he had to deal with outside of the forest at least. Here he could continue walking and listening and breathing for as long as he still could move forward. This forest in particular was a favorite, with a constant twilight quality to it that played into its timelessness.

He stumbled over a log, slipping slightly on the slick moss, and focused as strongly as he could on his surroundings. It was hard when he could so quickly slip into his thoughts. He needed to enjoy his surroundings. He needed to stay in the present and not phase out like fog.

Ironically, it was his attempts to ground himself that prevented him from noticing what was slowly growing more wrong in the forest around him. The scent of ash in the air. The lack of birdsong or rustle of leaves. The trees, growing darker and more burnt-looking, and the dead logs that were bristling with fungi.

But when he stepped out into a clearing with an enormous rock embedded into the middle of it, Ranboo really couldn’t help but realize all of the discrepancies. The illusion of an eternal twilight had been broken with the red light that streamed down. The ground was distressingly clear of ground cover, instead dusted with ash.

Forest fire? He hadn’t heard of any in the area but… What else would it be?

Ranboo looked up at the sun, which had meandered towards the west since he had entered the forest. There were dark clouds gathering above him in worrying amounts, and the air was a little hard to see through with the particles suspended in it. He frowned at it.

Something was wrong here, he could sense it in a deeply animalistic kind of way. As if there was something screaming in his hindbrain to run.

He didn’t run. This was the forest that he has walked a hundred times before, when did this happen? Why had this happened? He needed to find out.

Overhead, thunder rumbled. A droplet of curiously dark water fell on his face.

Ranboo stepped towards the other side of the forest clearing that should not have been there.

And that's when a living embodiment of a mass extinction came shambling out of the ashen trees.

Ranboo didn’t know which detail he noticed first about this rogue apocalypse beast. Was it the limp brown hair that was almost black with iridescent oil slick? Was it the enormous horns that curled jutting from its face and looked more like scrap metal than keratin? Was it the uranium-glass green stripes that criss-crossed like cracks in ceramic along it’s skin?

Or was it the fact that this one was shaped like a man?

The apocalypse beasts always most resembled the myriad that had died in their creation. The death of the Ice Age looks vaguely like a man, if squinted at, mostly because so many cousins to humanity had died in its formation. It was more like an enormous boar-beast on two legs that had the arms of a man, if anything. This one did not look remotely like the death of the Ice Age.

Ranboo took a flying leap from horror and realization to hysteria. This is the death of humans. The death by nuclear bombs and smoke and oil. The fabled next apocalypse beast, the bringer of the end of the world, was already here.

For a moment of absolute blinding terror he wondered if this meant that all other humans on Earth were dead now. That today was the day the entirety of humanity died, leaving just him wandering the forest endlessly. That nuclear armageddon occurred and he was out there worried about keeping himself grounded enough to admire the birds.

The beast - and he was never in doubt that this was an apocalypse beast, even if he had never seen any of the others in person before something shook like a leaf in his soul simply from being near it - loomed over him. It watched him like a bug under a glass with nuclear hazard yellow-and-black eyes, and the spell of frozen muscles snapped in Ranboo. He bolted towards the boulder in the middle of the clearing and pushed his way into a space between it and a smaller boulder at its base, scrambling to find a smaller crack to squeeze himself into to just get himself out of reach of the beast, of the black water, of everything.

He could hear a rasping, clicking-crackling sound. (A Geiger Counter.) He could see glowing green-striped fingers reach under the edges of the rock he had wedged himself under. Could see, in the sickly chartreuse light they cast, fingernails larger than his head catch the rock. Felt the weight of the boulder lift from his back.

Ranboo was left crouching and shaking, so scared he couldn't breathe (or maybe it was the ash or the slimy water that couldn’t be rain), as the apocalypse beast crouched down further. It crackled and clicked with a mouth that seemed all too human to be able to make those noises, and then it. Crooned? With a voice that was more like a siren shriek turned down, weirdly echoey as if speaking from far away, it clicked and whined and Ranboo was so confused he didn’t even see the hand reach down and pick him up by the back of his shirt.

He screamed and flailed, imagination jumping into overdrive about what horrifying things the beast could do, and just as quickly, he was dropped with a whoomph to the ground and the death of Mankind jerked back. Ranboo gasped and sputtered as half of face got thoroughly soaked with ash-water mud, and hoisted himself up again to get away from the apocalypse beast.

Who was crouching over him, luminous trefoil eyes barely a foot away from his own, still crooning that awful siren tone. From this close Ranboo could faintly see radiation burns pockmarking its skin, and a horrible scar of curled and ridged skin along its face, as if it was victim to a close-range bomb explosion.

It tilted its head, leaning a tiny bit closer, and Ranboo threw his arms up to cover his face. God, it itched where the ash water had splashed on him. Why was it itching so much?

The death of Mankind stopped again, looking up into the sky and then down at Ranboo again. It seemed to come to a conclusion, because it then slowly - oh so slowly, why was it being careful? - cupped its hands out in front of it and held them out to him.

It… Wanted him to climb on. Into the grasp of a literal specter of death specifically designed with the destruction of his own species in mind.

Ranboo, in a moment of blind panic and stupidity, climbed on. It looked polite, he reasoned. He was already going to die just from being close to this thing.

It continued to… yes, it definitely was cooing now, in that horrifying voice, and for a moment Ranboo wondered if maybe he misinterpreted. Maybe this thing wasn’t meant to represent the nuclear apocalypse.

His eye had started to itch where the water touched it. He rocked himself in the grasp of this giant, feeling footholds in the craggy radiation-worn skin, and felt the side of his face.

The moment e touched it, a white-hot flash of horrible burning pain hit him like a truck, knocking him into a stupor of yelling. It was as if his face was burning, was twisting and gnarling just as much as the apocalypse beast’s horns did. Under his hand, stiff with pain and unable to move away, he could feel skin slough off, could feel the cells themselves die off in droves, in response to whatever radiation or toxin was in the ash-water.

He couldn’t even register the sensation of fingers larger than his torso curling around him and holding him steady, of him being pressed up against a vast chest that beat unsteadily like a stuck clock, of the vast thumps of footfalls against a diseased forest floor.

All he could feel is pain, burning coiling tunneling pain that tried to tear out his face, his hands, his neck, burning him bright and radiant like a star.

…

The creature was screaming in its hands. It hadn’t stopped screaming for a long time.

It was small and writhing and melting. Creatures usually didn’t like melting.

The death of Humanity wasn’t sure how to make it stop. It had dashed out of the black-rain (that seemed to make the melting worse, maybe it’ll stop once it’s out of the rain?) to its home cave, hoping that perhaps it could figure something out in the comfort of its own home.

The creature’s screams had died down, though whether it was from its pain being alleviated or their voice giving out, the death of Humanity couldn’t tell. All it could tell was that it wasn’t getting up, wasn’t looking at it with those wide curious scared-but-interested eyes.

Most animals ran from the death of Humanity. Land-creatures would yell in fear and flee, birds would rise up into the sky in huge swarms only to be struck down by the black-rain. Even insects would twitch and die when they got near, which led so many to flee this part of the forest entirely. It was a lonely existence. But this human hadn’t run like the other animals had. It had hid, yes, but it had viewed the death of Humanity in all of its glory and it almost, almost, was ok with it being picked up.

And then something had happened and now the human was dying just like all of the other animals and the Nuclear Apocalypse didn’t know what to do.

Be well. Be alright. Be just like you were before, it thought, delicately laying the twitching human on the ground out of reach of the dripping black-water puddles, in a nest of dried grasses and leaves that had swept into the cave over the years. It prodded the human with a finger, whining softly when all it did was spasm like a dying insect. It wasn’t dying, right? It was just hurt? It couldn’t be hurt, the death of Humanity wouldn’t allow it. Not when it was so curious and didn’t flee like the others. Not when the death of Humanity had a chance to learn from it. Even now, writhing in its palm, it could feel the frantic beating of life and warmth, things it had so rarely seen before.

You will be well. You must be well. I will make you well.

...

When he came to, it was to complete darkness.

Well, no. Not totally. There was a faint glimmer of far away light somewhere to his left. A shuffling shadow, a faint sickly green glow.

His right was totally dark though, and he couldn’t quite open his eye. He almost brought his hand up to touch it before violently flinching as he remembered what had landed him here in the first place. Would it start burning and melting horribly like it did before? That he was even awake to wonder that is a miracle in of itself... Or the start of the second round of his torture.

Horrible curiosity pushed him to touch, as lightly as possible, the skin on his right cheek. It… He couldn’t feel it. Or rather, he could feel the sandpaper surface of extremely rough skin, but he couldn't feel the pressure, the burning bright pain. The entire area was dead to the touch.

Ranboo threw himself as upright as he could make himself, which ended up only being a half kneel before falling back over into a sit. His breath hitched and he felt his face more firmly, the rough scratchy surface of skin that splattered like paint over the right side of his face, over his eye, down his neck and onto his arm. The muted tingling where it met smoother skin along his shoulder and the bridge of his nose. In an act of desperation he even poked at his eyelid, trying to pry it open to see if he could ever see from that eye again.

His hand passed in front of his working eye in that moment, and at this point his focus had sharpened enough to make out vague colors in the dim light. His hand… It was a black far darker than any human could naturally produce, with a grey-green cast that made him look sickly.

I feel sickly, he reasoned to himself. What is going on? He waved his hand a little frantically, as if the new midnight shade was something that was just stuck to his skin. Desperately he held up his other (totally numb to the touch) hand, hoping it hadn’t changed too.

Well, good news - it wasn’t midnight black.

Bad news - it was a shade so pale that it looked totally devoid of blood. And the raspy surface he could feel didn’t look any prettier to the eye. It didn’t have that same grey-green tint to it though, which was nice, because it would’ve shown up really well on this pure white canvas.

Why was he even thinking about looks right now? He was in the den of an Apocalypse Beast Ranboo get your head together! This was absolutely not the right time to space out - he needed to stay in the moment!

His hands were shaking uncontrollably as he tried to get himself upright. He had only just gotten himself steady when he felt the rattle of large footsteps shake through the ground. Before Ranboo could even think to run though, the shadows out of the corner of his eyes resolved into the beast, which made its way all too quickly towards him.

He couldn’t run if he wanted to. And besides, the damage done to him would probably kill him. He was on borrowed time as is. What did he have left to do but to see what the beast did?

It slowed as it came closer, reaching out a vast clawed hand towards him. Despite his resignation towards his fate, Ranboo flinched back as it came way too close way too fast. A movement that the beast obviously didn't notice or interpret or care about, because he was scooped up into its palm without a moment's hesitation.

“No!” He yelled, wriggling and pushing away from the cage of fingers around him. The beast paused in bringing him up to its face, and if Ranboo was being generous he could call the look on its face a frown.

In less than a blink the face of the beast was so close way too close and he almost punched it (for all the help that would do) out of reflex. It blinked at him with those lucent yellow-black eyes, laser sharp in their focus upon him. He felt for all the world like an ant being peered at through a magnifying glass. Maybe he’ll be fried like one too.

“What do you want with me?” He asked, voice cracking in fear. “What is it you want?”

It didn’t answer in that siren tone again, but instead shifted its weight to the side and turned its palms so that Ranboo was standing squarely in one of them. The other was drawn up and one sharp-clawed finger was pointed at Ranboo. Or, well. The side of Ranboo’s face that he couldn’t see from just yet.

He trembled with the anticipation of the jagged nail at the end of the beast’s outstretched finger spearing forward. But all it did was touch, very gently, under the damaged eye. The beast frowned even more.

Then it jabbed at him, hard enough to bruise but not much else, directly into Ranboo’s damaged eye. He yelped and jumped away, tumbling off his feet in the cup of the beast’s fingers and slapped a numb hand over numb face. Even if he couldn’t feel the area, it still surprised him enough to believe for a moment he could sense it again. Except… was that still his imagination? The eye under his pale skin was starting to itch and water, the first sensation he felt from it since he had woken up, and with a gasp he was able to open his eye.

Fuzz. That’s all he could see from that eye. The beast leaned forward and poked at his face again, softer this time, and when he opened his eye again the world had snapped into focus, tinged with red around the edges. He blinked a few times, and felt a trail of something wet leak from that eye onto his cheek.

What had happened? “You… You healed me?” He asked up at it. It was still frowning even as he had two working eyes again, and muttered softly in a voice that sounded like something crumbling into splinters. Then it poked him for a third time, this time on the shoulder, and Ranboo held back a yell of pain as the area lit up in a blaze of sensation that felt like liquid fire. As he watched, the black skin around the edges of the wound cracked and veins of bright green glowed beneath.

Just… Like… The beast…

Oh no.

The pain of his nerves coming back to life was nothing when compared to the cold horror that had bubbled into his stomach. There was a single case of a human managing to gain immortality as a result of an apocalypse beast. One of the first beasts, Her Lady of the Primordial Sea, the beast of the Ordivician extinction, had taken pity upon an ancient human who was trapped in the glacial ices that herald her path across the Earth, and had gifted it with immortality and a pair of wings that made him as beastly as the Lady he served.

Nobody knew exactly why the Angel of the Deaths had been spared, and why not a single human had ever had that happen before or since. All that was really known about him was his violence, and that he had an uncanny ability to be where an apocalypse beast would be travelling to next. He was just as inhuman and alien as the beasts themselves, if in a smaller form.

It had only ever happened once. Until now, obviously.

Ranboo stared at his white hand, prickling with waking nerves under the surface and twisting with green strands that trailed under his skin like angry snakes, and knew that he was a monster now. Somehow, it was freeing. Like he finally got an answer to a question he had asked over and over. Why him, why now, why is he still alive, why is he not afraid enough…

He stared back up at the apocalypse beast and it blinked down at him. It was no longer frowning, only looking thoughtfully now. “You’re not going to hurt me.” It wasn’t a question.

It reached a hand back up, maybe to poke him again, but this time rubbed his hair very lightly. He did not flinch this time, steeling up his willpower to allow this touch (It won’t hurt him. He needs to keep repeating it until it is true. It won’t hurt him. He was its now it wouldn’t hurt him).

It made that soft crooning noise again, like it had before lifting the rock he had been hiding under, and despite it being underlaid with sounds specifically designed to inspire fear in humans, he could find himself getting used to it. (Would have to. He’s an abomination now after all. The second angel.)

“You’re not so bad, are you…” He slowly pushed himself to his feet, flexing his newly sensated hand carefully. “I still don’t know what you are or why you are here now but…”

The beast tipped its head curiously and warbled exactly the same words back at Ranboo. He froze, because it was so much like his own voice except under deep layers of static, before shaking his head. Best get introductions out of the way - this creature was obviously smart. It was the death of Humanity after all.

He pointed to his chest. “Ranboo.” He gave it a few pokes for emphasis, and the beast poked him too before mimicking his name. He wasn’t entirely sure it actually got what that meant but, well. Baby steps.

Then he pointed at it. It blinked a few times (and Ranboo really couldn’t help but anthropomorphize its reactions - this thing was just too uncannily human to not) and chirped out another ‘Ranboo.’ He gestured more firmly, pointing at the beast.

It continued to look with (probably) bafflement for a few moments, before letting loose a cacophony of sounds that sent Ranboo’s hands slapping over his ears. It was all of the sounds of falling trees, of squawking birds, of the blazing sun and frigid cold and most of all the explosive fire and cold falling ash-water and death from sickness. It was everything and more that wrapped up the death of Humanity in a nutshell.

Ranboo blinked. That might take a while to learn how to pronounce.

He decided to call it Tubbo for short.

<End> There we have it! I hope that you enjoyed this - I hope it didn't betray too much how much stuff like this interests me and that this was potentially also 3000 words of me nerding out about mass extinctions.

Anyways, here's some details I had added but had no way of explaining naturally within the story that i was a little proud of ^^'

The Anthropocene apocalypse beast is also called the unstoppable bomb and burning oilfield. Shortened to TUBBO. Ha.

There’s 7, now 8 apocalypse beasts (Great Oxidation Event, Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous, Pleistocene, and now Anthropocene). I originally intended there to just be 5 (for the big five mass extinctions) and then a 6th Anthropocene apocalypse beast, but then I thought I really should add in the great oxidation event that almost caused extinction of all non-oxygen breathing creatures on a very early earth, and the death of most megafauna in the Pleistocene era.

Society is way different with these living eldritch abominations just shambling across the globe, causing a trail of destruction behind them. A lot less large cities, for one.

The Ordovician apocalypse beast is Kristin, yes. She’s uplifted Phil into something similar to what Ranboo is now. I kinda want to think more about her and her story with Phil.

The Pleistocene apocalypse beast is Techno. Idk why I chose to do that but it seemed to fit. Especially since the leading theory on Pleistocene megafauna death is humans hunting them, which I think fits Techno pretty well

The rain is black rain - rain full of radioactive fallout. Bad Stuff, definitely not what you should seek out if you want to keep your body in working order.

I kept referring to sirens in Tubbo’s speech. Just imagine every emergency warning broadcast sound except even more terrifying

So Ranboo’s skin is majorly fucked up. For one, he’s suffered major radiation damage to the side that is now white (healed over brand new skin). The black half is much more interesting though. Did you know there are types of fungi that can feed off of nuclear radiation? They protect themselves from the effects by secreting a LOAD of melanin, making them extremely dark. Anything that wasn’t newly healed on Ranboo had now become akin to those fungi now. Feeding rather than harmed by the nuclear radiation Tubbo naturally puts off. Perfect for a newborn Angel of the deaths.

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Thank you so much for this story submission!! I really love this idea and how well you wrote it! this is so amazing! ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

#submission #mcyt g/t exchange event #mcyt #g/t

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babaleshy · 3 years ago

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Why I'm Learning Russian

It's been a while since I was last here on this site, and since I seem to be back-back for good(?), I figured I'd update everyone following me on what's going on right now.

And I figured I'd make a separate post talking specifically on why I've chosen to learn Russian (instead of Serbian).

First off, I still wish I could learn Serbian due to family reasons, but there's a severe lack of sources for me to use. Duolingo ain't got shit regarding the language. I wouldn't have cared if it was listed simply as Croatian! I just wanna learn the language!

Thanks to the whole anti-communist propaganda in the states, many Americans (whether by ignorance alone, by design, or some combination thereof) would hear a Slavic language and get pissy. At least this is what I think is likely the reason behind why it can be so hard in some areas to find just books on a Slavic language. If you're lucky to find any, it's always Russian. The area I live in has plenty of Polish, Russian, and Serbian populations (albeit descendants of immigrants, but you get the idea). You're think they'd have a decent amount of books at the local library. The best I could find was a book meant to teach how to translate written Russian (apparently you have to have a ridiculous aptitude for high-difficulty languages or have to already be familiar a bit with it?) and a Polish For Dummies book. That's it.

There aren't any community colleges nearby that I can find that event teach foreign languages at all (this is a right-wing-heavy area, so surprise-surprise).

But in this country as a whole, the only Slavic language I can find that you will commonly find in colleges and universities if any Slavic language at all is supported is Russian.

So that's reason number one: accessibility.

Another reason is that there's quite a bit of stuff happening in the country that due to Americans not expecting to take on foreign languages on a regular basis, let alone a complex one, the ruling class could easily claim what Russians are saying whether it's a soundbyte, a video with audio, or signs and posters and such. They're relying on the American people to be completely ignorant of the language so they could spin whatever they wanna say however they need it to say. (This would largely be fux news' area of expertise, as they've been doing so recently with the protests in Cuba by not only showing protests that occurred in Florida and passing them off as Cuban protests in Cuba, but they straight-up blurred out posters because someone might know how to speak Spanish.)

On top of this, there's something boiling in Russia, so if the Russian people need help and ask Americans for advice, it would be nice if some Americans spoke their language, instead of relying on Russians (and anyone not American in general) to know English to some extent.

So there's reason number two: avoiding misinformation and misunderstandings.

I don't have to tell you twice that climate change is happening right now and that we may not see the climates of many regions go back to normal within our own lifetimes even if we did everything right.

However, worst case scenario, what if we were too late? Where in the would could remain habitable for humans? There's Greenland, Canada, Antarctica (which would be warred over for territory because of course it would), and then there's Russia. Russia is semi-landlocked thanks to the arctic ice on the northern coasts, but once that melts, they would easily be able to trade by sea. They also have a lot of currently uninhabited land that, in this worst case scenario, would be thawed out and quite fertile and suitable for agriculture, especially for the potential billions (remember, we're passed the 7 billion population point) that would emigrate just to be able to survive. This means that if you wanted to move to Russia, it's probably best to learn the language.

That's reason number three: it will be the largest habitable landmass on the planet if we cannot bring about a chance of reversal to climate change.

The last reason is due to the possibility that if I went back to school for what I ultimately want to be (paleoecologist), my interests (pleistocene ecology) may lead me to digging up frozen carcasses out of the Russian permafrost. There's also an attempt in a Pleistocene Park in the making right now (all that's missing is the mammoth which we will never successfully clone) to bring back fauna we still have that once existed there to help with the land's ecosystem in the Russian steppe. And so far, it's succeeding in its goals. And as a paleoecologist, this would be right up my alley. But knowing the language would be incredibly helpful, too!

Russian isn't actually hard for the reasons many "top x videos" claim it to be. The alphabet isn't that hard, to be honest. It's the cases, which is where I'm stuck at right now.

Duolingo is not a good way to learn a language, as they do not teach grammar or cultural context. The app has become a game that makes you rely on memory and hopes you'll catch on.

No other apps that I have found will teach the grammar in a beginner-friendly way for free, either. I'm poor, and can't afford this shit, so I'm hoping to borrow that library book I mentioned earlier (now that I've learned the alphabet quite nicely) might be able to give me a better idea in a way that I can best understand it.

For now, I'm focusing on keeping up my practice as well as building a nice vocabulary bank. That's going to make learning the cases much easier. The good news is my husband is also interested in learning the language and even he learned the alphabet without much of an issue. So I have someone to practice with.

Hilariously, like with Spanish, I have a problem with a foreign language... I can read it fine, I can hear it okay, but writing it? Eh.. And speaking it from memory? Holy shit I struggle. But my husband hasn't had much of a chance to really practice thanks to his job, so maybe it's the lack of practice?

Regardless, learning independently is going to be a nice primer for when (maybe if, who knows) we can finally go back to college once we've moved with my parents (long story) because the university in the area they want to move to does offer Russian. If things go well, I plan to take more than 2 levels (the university requires all students to take at least 2 levels of a foreign language).

So yeah. That's why I'm learning Russian. It's actually really fun, and I do watch vlogs from Russians on YouTube so I get a better understanding of their culture, too. I'm jealous they don't have this fucked up concept of a "lawn" like America does. All it is with the houses and dachas is native plants and fruits and veggies they decide to grow. Lucky...

#russian #learning russian #that's it that's all the tags

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mspaleoart · 6 years ago

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Woolly Rhinoceros – Late Pliocene-Late Pleistocene (3.6-0.01 Ma)

We’re getting iconic again, and talking about yet another ice age megafauna. This is the woolly rhinoceros, the best rhino ever. It might seem like a pretty basic animal, just a fluffy rhino. But, like most of the big ice age mammals, we have a comprehensive knowledge of this animal, from its appearance to its lifestyle to even its genetics.

Like with the mastodon, ‘woolly rhinoceros’ is a common name. Its scientific name is Coelodonta antiquitatis, which means ‘old hollow tooth.’ If that sounds kind of bland, that’s because it was named in 1807, and was one of the first extinct animals described, although it had been known as the woolly rhinoceros for a while before being formally named. Woolly rhinos evolved on the Tibetan plateau at the end of the Pliocene. When the Pleistocene began and the earth grew colder, woolly rhinos spread, migrating all across Eurasia. They were the most widespread and successful species of rhinoceros to ever live, and their remains are pretty common. Along with a lot of skeletal remains, a few frozen specimens have been found in Siberia, with flesh and even fur intact. Because of that, we’ve been able to study their DNA and learn that their closest living relative is the Sumatran rhino.

Like the rhinos we know, love, and desperately try to protect today, these boys had horns. Two of them. One really big one on the tip of the snout, and a smaller one between the eyes. When these horns were first discovered, they were thought to be the talons of a giant bird, but now we know they belonged to a rhino adapted to life in the cold. The horns were used the same way any rhino uses its horn, for defense and as a mating display, but also used them to clear snow from the ground as they looked for something to eat. They were mostly solitary animals, although they sometimes traveled in groups of a few individuals.

Although they sported thick, shaggy pelts and other adaptations for the cold, woolly rhinos were perfectly capable of living in warmer climates, and didn’t die off because the earth got warmer, like we previously thought. They were generalist herbivores, and while their populations were certainly affected by the end of the ice age, many of them carried on business as usual. While it’s hard to say what exactly drove a prehistoric animal to extinction, generally, we think human hunters are to blame. They valued woolly rhinos for their meat and thick pelts, and since early humans had no idea about abstract ecological concepts like extinction, they probably hunted them until they stopped finding them.

It kind of sucks that here we are, thousands of years later, still killing all the rhinos. Except now we just kind of do it for fun, and we really should know better.

I mentioned woolly rhino DNA, and there’s more to say about that. Just before woolly rhinos went extinct, there’s evidence for a genetic bottleneck. A genetic bottleneck (also called a population bottleneck) happens when a population is heavily reduced, leaving only a few members. This cuts down the genetic diversity down accordingly. Genetic diversity is the key to survival of a species, and in a bottleneck situation, this diversity is limited. This makes it more difficult for the population to adapt, making them more vulnerable to extinction. Small population size often leads to inbreeding in severe bottleneck scenarios, which causes negative mutations. These mutations can’t be selected against, because there are no genetic alternatives, and eventually can pile up until the population spirals to extinction.

That being said, bottlenecks aren’t necessarily a death sentence for a population. Several other animals have been able to bounce back from them in the past. That includes our own Australopithecine ancestors about 2 million years ago, and it’s been suggested Homo erectus experienced one or two as well. There are still repercussions to such an event, though. Diversity builds up very slowly, and it can take a long, long time to recover even a fraction of that former diversity. Case in point, humans are still experiencing aftershocks of our ancestral bottleneck. As a species, we have infamously low genetic diversity, to the point that there are several other subspecies with more diversity than all of the human genome put together.

Only tangentially related, but this is why eugenics is an inherently unevolutionary idea. The ideal of the "master race" calls for the elimination of every single other characteristic, thus shrinking our already minuscule gene pool. All this would do is make Homo sapiens significantly weaker, especially in the long-run.

Back to our friend the woolly rhino, there’s evidence for a bottleneck in their history. Many specimens from just before the woolly rhino went extinct share an unusual feature. Their last neck vertebra has a pair of holes where ribs would fit. The genes responsible for cervical ribs are also linked with juvenile leukemia and a host of birth defects. A combination of overhunting and the recession of ice age glaciers likely shrank their populations, and if our ancestors didn’t finish them off, the rampant diseas and birth defects likely did. We’ve seen a similar pattern in mammoths, too.

I swear, I’m going to say everything there is to say about mammoths before I even get around to drawing one.

On a more charming note, Woolly rhinos were a popular subject of cave paintings. These works of art have been found all along their range, most famously in the Chauvet cave in France. In a lot of these paintings, the rhinos are shown with a band of dark fur on their midsection. I decided to take some advice from my forebears and add that to my own drawing. Thousands of years later, and we’re still here, painting woolly rhinos. Except I’m doing it on a computer and there’s a lot more guesswork involved.

Woolly rhinos are one of the most iconic prehistoric mammals, and have appeared in all sorts of media. If you’re a paleontology enthusiast, I probably don’t even need to tell you where you’ve seen one. For me, the first thing that comes to mind is the sixth episode of Walking with Beasts, “Mammoth Journey.” Beasts really was the passion project of the Walking with team, and it really shows in the finale. It’s a beautiful snapshot of Pleistocene life, with our own ancestors playing second fiddle to a herd of mammoths. Like with the rest of the Walking with series, the CGI and some of the science hasn’t aged perfectly, but a documentary has yet to match it in aesthetic presentation, if you ask me. It simultaneously feels like the falling of the last curtain on prehistory, and the prologue to our own story. Even though the woolly rhino is only a minor player in the episode, it left a lasting impression on me as a kid, and I spent a lot of time drawing them when I was supposed to be paying attention in school.

While I could probably gush about Walking with Beasts for another few hundred words, it’s late, and I’m going to close off the post before it gets too off-topic.

P.S. I can’t promise that every drawing will have a background now, I drew this guy a little on the small side and wanted to spice the drawing up a little bit. The backgrounds are definitely fun to draw, though...

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Buy me a Coffee, if you’d like!

#woolly rhinoceros #woolly rhino #coelodonta #rhinos #perissodactyls #ice age #pliocene #pleistocene #neogene #quaternary #cenozoic #mammals #paleoart #palaeoart #paleoblr #palaeoblr #paleontology #palaeontology #prehistoric

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a-dinosaur-a-day · 2 years ago

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Can you recommend any dinosaur themed video games? Or maybe games that just have evolution somehow play a part?

for one, you can always play Evolution! evolution is a video game based on a card game that is actually a pretty great game-ification of the process of evolution (I have a couple of big critiques - predators don't hunt their prey into extinction as a general rule, but that's a key game component) and fun to play

if you're cool with going retro, the game Spore is essentially an evolution simulation game, even if its a bit oversimplified

The game Ecosystem mimics evolution too, you essentially are creating an underwater ecosystem from scratch, but my immersion is broken by the modern-type plants juxtaposed with cambrian-era fish

ironically, games with prehistoric life and games about evolution? not the same two things. none of those games really feature actual prehistoric life.

But, there are games that do!

I actually really like Saurian. It's still in alpha, and has a lot of development to do, but it's essentially a complete recreation of Hell Creek, and you can grow up as a raptor or as a triceratops!

Then there's Prehistoric Kingdom, which is a park builder sim with prehistoric life. The online community for it sucks (major transphobia incident), but the game itself is a fun time, and the dinosaurs are gorgeous.

I also enjoy Jurassic World Evolution 2. Sure, JW is inaccurate af, and every time I see manual unguals on digits 4 and 5 on the hands/front feet I scream internally, but a) there are lots of accuracy mods and b) the graphics are gorgeous

Let's Build a Zoo has prehistoric life, too! And things you wouldn't expect! It's kind of a basic game, but it's fun. And has more birds than fucking planet zoo does.

Zoo Tycoon 2 is still probably the best zoo game around, somehow, and there are tons of mods to add virtually as many prehistoric animals as you want. Hell, my friends and I made a Kulindadromeus mod for it! Literally! Any dinos you want.

Roots of Pacha is a game similar to Stardew that takes place in the Pleistocene! It's all about the power of human cooperation and community building, complete with Mammoths and Smilodon and Glyptodonts. Its a fun game, and I love it a lot. Can't wait for it to update more!

Dawn of Man is a pretty good caveman sim, as well, but it's very realism-focused, and killing mammoths is part of the game, so it's a bummer. But it's fun to go through the history of stone age human technology.

Dinosaur Fossil Hunter is... meh. the protagonist is a muscular white guy. the adventure side of paleontology is overemphasized. the controls are kind of crappy. I can't recommend it.

Tyto Ecology is a fun, if basic, ecology simulator, but it is no longer being developed or supported. Still, I enjoyed it.

aaaand... those are my recommendations. The pickings are kind of slim. Hence my desperate desire to make more prehistoric life and evolution themed games!

that said, keep an eye out - Paleopines and Super Zoo Story are both coming out soon, and they both have dinosaurs!

#video games #game recs #paleontology #prehistoric life #palaeoblr

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random-thought-depository · 2 years ago

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"That said, I do agree with you about the muddled definition of consciousness. The story seems to equivocate between defining it as introspection, defining it as a meaningless extra layer of mental time-wasting, and defining it as the sum total of all non-optimal thoughts.

There’s a hidden assumption, I think, that discarding consciousness would also mean developing a ruthless focus on maximizing your own fitness. And there’s really no reason to believe that.

In Blindsight, vampires don’t go to Heaven. They’re not interested in an empty simulated paradise. They see through VR and have no interest in satisfying their instinctive desires without achieving the deeper goals that those instincts were created to serve.

But... isn’t that silly? If you’re non-sapient, those instinctive desires are your highest principles. The human subconscious has absolutely no coherent concept of reproductive fitness and I don’t see why shutting off the conscious mind would give it one. If anything it should produce an all-consuming obsession with basic animal desires.

In the real world, the conscious mind is way longer-term than the subconscious. And the evolutionary reasons why that should be the case seem pretty obvious."

Yeah, I've had similar thoughts myself. Why wouldn't vampires enjoy a simulated Valhalla of endless successful hunts or something like that? If they don't have introspection, morality, desire for "higher purpose," etc. they would probably be more susceptible to wireheading: a human might reject a simulated paradise because of philosophical quibbles about how "none of it is real" and they want to have "real" accomplishments and "real" experiences or something, but a selfish pure efficient instinct-satisfaction engine would just instantly start smacking that instinct-satisfaction superstimulus button and never stop.

My rationalization is:

It's true on a more literal level: vampires have way better (but more resource-intensive) sensory processing than humans so it's much harder to construct a VR environment that seems passably authentic to them.

Vampires are much less social and much less trusting than humans, they really don't like the idea of being vulnerable, and being in Heaven is a state of extreme physical vulnerability.

But that's pretty different from consciousness being an inherent liability.

Also, that "useless" stuff like art is basically a form of play, which is part of how intelligent beings learn; there's a reason humans are most playful in our most learning-intensive period of life, and I suspect that link is part of the reason we got more neotenous as we got smarter. I suspect a species that didn't have such behavior would likely be rather mentally rigid.

And also, like... This is the stuff used as illustrative examples for "the Scramblers would have assumed this was an infowar attack because it would have been nonsensical to them":

I had a great time. I really enjoyed him. Even if he cost twice as much as any other hooker in the dome—

To fully appreciate Kesey's Quartet—

They hate us for our freedom—

Pay attention, now—

Understand.

Let's see: I see something about sex/mating, something about politics (which can be reductively described as negotiations over distribution of resources and shape of society's incentive system), a request for allocating sensory processing to the input, a word for "absorb an accurate model of the concept"... I think a Pleistocene vampire would have instantly understood why these might be important to somebody, even if the details might have been pretty weird to them! I guess Scramblers might have more trouble with it, cause they've got that eusocial-adjacent "unclear if Rorschach is a ship and the Scramblers are the crew or Rorschach is an organism and the Scramblers are organs" thing going, but, like... have the Scramblers ever met other aliens? Cause I think things like mating, resource distribution, and sensory and intellectual attention would probably be pretty important in the societies of lots of intelligent species, even intelligent but non-conscious species! The music thing is the only thing in that series of sentence fragments that's really incomprehensible if you think of it in evolution fairy aliens terms, and I think even that could be conceptually folded, spindled, and mutilated into something they'd understand by explaining it as a kind of fitness signaling by conspicuous consumption of cognitive resources.

Like, Susan James isn't actually obviously wrong here. The Scramblers may not be conscious beings but they're reasoning beings, so it should be possible to talk to them and negotiate with them! You've been talking to Rorschach, maybe explain to it that because of the way humans evolved we've got lots of weird elaborate social rituals that don't really serve any obvious fitness purpose, give it the authorial lecture about what consciousness really is and how it sucks and how its products are so pointless the Scramblers are misinterpreting them as a malicious attempt to make them waste cognitive resources trying to understand them! If the Scramblers are so super-smart I think they'd understand that evolved organisms often have weird suboptimal features, especially since they can't stand still without dying! Rorschach got blown up in canon so it'd be in their interests to avoid a pointless conflict! Maybe it wouldn't work, maybe it'd be a bad idea, but it'd have been nice to see this raised as a possibility!

finally read Blindsight; some thoughts with major spoilers below the cut

Keep reading

#Blindsight #cw: spoiler

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rosehoare · 7 years ago

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The future of love

Published in Sunday magazine, 2014

Ready for Valentine’s Day? It’s the day we celebrate the romantic notion that you can love the same person your whole life!

I mean romantic, as opposed to realistic. Because, let me tell you, my friend: by committing ourselves to monogamous relationships with one person (just one! That’s half what’s considered reasonable to help yourself to from a biscuit sampler), we are behaving like sexual anorexics, starving our basic, hardwired hunger.

From a computer scientist’s point of view, forging a face to face connection belongs in the too hard basket. And from a philosopher’s point of view, we are living in an age of such overweening narcissism that we might not be capable of real, scary, grown-up love anyway.

Nevertheless, since our weak minds cling to the delusion of love and our culture obsesses over “cute couples”, and since being single can get to feeling like a slow withering of the soul, the question persists: how can we stay in love and be happy?

Last September, ethicist Brian D. Earp and some colleagues at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Neuroethics co-authored a paper proposing a chemical intervention to a crummy problem we have inherited.

That old ��men just aren’t built for monogamy” cop-out turns out to be backed by data observable across species, and championed by evolutionary psychologists.

“The engine of natural selection is that you want to maximise reproduction,” Earp says. “We’re not puppets of our genes, but from an evolutionary standpoint, it makes no sense to have one sexual partner your whole life.”

Things were simpler for our Pleistocene-era ancestors. They lived half as long as we do, roaming around in groups of about 150 relatives, raising their kids communally. And after three or four years, the parenting was done, whereas we live in a more information-rich world, where raising a child to the point where it can fend for itself like the feral kid in Mad Max doesn’t really cut it anymore.

(Procrastination being what it is, I could tell you a lot more about this colourful Pleistocene era, with its woolly mammoths, sabre-toothed tigers and other such “megafauna” which we may, in our lifetimes, see “rewilded” in a Jurassic Park-like situation. Google it if you don’t believe me.)

The point is, Pleistocene parents used to be able to get back amongst it very quickly, while today’s parents are committed to parenting until the child is 16. And even after that, couples are expected to spend decades more as monogamous romantic partners.

Clearly, Earp says, “there’s a gap to make up between what our human dispositions are like and what we expect of ourselves. The question is how do we make up that difference?”

Currently, we respond to the problem with infidelity (10-54% of wives and 20-72% of husbands) and divorce (around 42% in New Zealand). We go to relationship counselling but plenty of couples don’t benefit from it. So Earp suggests we try huffing oxytocin.

Oxytocin is the hormone we naturally produce in situations related to attachment. It floods our system when we orgasm, when we go into labour, when we breastfeed, when we hug. When you come home and see your dog, you get a burst of oxytocin, and your dog does too.

On the face of it, oxytocin seems like a miracle drug for couples counselling. It reduces anxiety and stress (even when couples are discussing a ‘chronic source of conflict'). It boosts trust, eye contact, empathy and attentiveness. Under the influence of oxytocin, couples remember their good times more readily.

It even improves monogamous impulses: last year, neuroscientists found that after inhaling oxytocin, men in relationships displayed less interest in a pretty female than single men.

But it has a few wacky side effects. Oxytocin can turn the volume up on us-and-them feelings like envy, schadenfreude and ethnocentrism -- it makes people less friendly to strangers than they would otherwise be. For people with aggressive tendencies, oxytocin seems to actually enhance aggressive behaviour. It also brings up more bad memories for those with anxious attachment to their mother.

“Oxytocin isn’t just this universal enhancer that makes everything more positive, happy and trustworthy,” Earp says. “It interacts with the person, who they are and what their attachment styles are.”

All the same, for the right people and in the right environment, Earp thinks oxytocin shows promise. “I don’t want to have to be constantly spraying something up my nose in order simply to function in my relationship, but if I used it in a counselling session while I’m learning more productive communication behaviours or something like that, and then I weaned myself off of it but I retained what I’d learned, that could be very useful.”

But enough of bringing our Pleistocene impulses into the 21st century with experimental chemicals! Hasn’t technology already brought us further than that? Set the flux capacitor to 2045, Marty. Where we’re going, we don’t need roads!

Dr James Hughes is a sociologist and executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies in Connecticut. I wanted to ask him about the possibility of love with an artificial intelligence (AI).

Some futurists predict that, by 2045 or thereabouts, we will experience something called the Singularity, a point when artificial intelligence will overtake human intelligence, and keep improving at an exponential rate, leaving us all in its dust.

Some people find the prospect of AI menacing. Dr Hughes is not one of those people (although he is concerned about the effect it might have on the labour market). He doesn’t find the idea of a relationship with a disembodied AI all that outlandish.

For one thing, he says, we already interact with AI a lot. Software that uses algorithms and big data to predict what we want -- Netflix, Google, dating agencies -- are a form of AI. And Hughes says we already know that humans “anthropomorphize and seem to take a great deal of emotional comfort from relationships with technology”. In the 1960s, an MIT scientist created a rudimentary chat bot and programmed it with a script for psychotherapy. He was disturbed by how readily people opened up to it.

“The Roomba is another example: the little circular robot vacuum cleaners that wander around your house and suck up your dirt? People were naming them. They would feel heartbroken if one got broken and they’d send them back, and if asked ‘do you want a replacement’, they’d say ‘No, I want my one back’.”

Hughes says the attractions of electronic forms of love and romance are manifold: an electronic partner is constantly available, there’s less risk of sexually transmitted disease or unwanted pregnancy, and you don’t ever have to bicker with your robot lover, unless that’s what you’re into.

And yes, let’s get to the part you have probably been wondering about: sex with a robot or a remote human, via teledildonics and whatnot, promises to be fulfilling and, according to robot sex expert David Levy, commonplace by 2050.

When it comes to the burden of emotional and sexual engagement in a relationship, technology is already helping pick up the slack: a new sex app developed for Google Glass allows partners to stream each other’s points of view, can flash up sex advice in flagrante delicto and can even dim the lights. (Can you imagine anything sexier than watching your partner issue a pre-coital voice-activation command to their wifi-enabled home lighting system?)

Researchers are currently programming facial recognition software to help people with autism read emotional cues, so, Hughes says, “We’re looking at a future where ‘Your wife seems to be happy right now, but she’s really mad at you’ suddenly flashes up on your Google Glass.”

Regardless of whether it’s with a human you only connect with in World of Warcraft or a robot, Hughes believes technology will enable unimaginably richer connections. We’ll use haptic technology that responds to touch; facial recognition software that helps read moods, and nano-neural interfacing that enables us to share thoughts and memories.

“There may be AI in the future who, because of the depth of their programmed understanding of the human mind and emotions, knows you ten times better than anybody else could,” Hughes says.

Ah, but would I feel known? However nice it might be to have a robot lover who can suggest a movie I’ll love, wouldn’t I somehow still compartmentalize my feelings for an AI as being of a different, lesser order to what my feelings could be for a human?

Not if you can’t tell them apart, Hughes says. A classic test designed by math genius Alan Turing pits an AI against a human intelligence, and asks us to guess which we’re communicating with. “Every year, we see AI getting higher and higher thresholds of people guessing they’re human,” Hughes says. “The interesting thing about the Turing test is lots of humans fail it. There are humans whose interaction and style of communication is such that they can’t communicate as fully realised human beings.”

Given how important and universal the experience of love is, philosophers haven’t made a very impressive job of explaining its mysteries. In fact, some of the most influential philosophers had abysmal love lives. Nietzsche sprang a proposal on a girl he barely knew, was rejected and died alone. Kierkegaard had a nice girlfriend, but got emo and broke off their engagement. Sartre and De Beauvoir came close with a markedly bohemian relationship - lots of intellectual chats, no fidelity, no marriage, no kids.

So far, so romantic. Then along comes Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love.

In an interview format, the elderly French philosopher describes love as a sharing of perspectives that creates a new reality, an event as irrevocably life-altering as when Keanu takes the red pill in The Matrix.

Dr Tim Rayner, a philosopher at Sydney-based consultancy Philosophy for Change, has been pondering love ever since he gave a disastrous speech about its essential unknowability at his brother’s wedding years ago, and he thinks Badiou has come closest to nailing love, on behalf of philosophy.

“Badiou thinks when you fall in love with someone, you see your life again -- not just as it could be, but as it should be.”

“It’s a real world that we’re drawn into,” Rayner says. “It’s not like a window that we can look through and go ‘that was interesting’ and move on. We feel compelled to actualize it, because it’s part of who we are.”

That’s Badiou’s philosophical ideal of love, but it’s not how he sees things enacted. Rayner says Badiou is especially cranky about people looking for “risk-free” love based on mutual compatibility -- the kind of casual, exploratory relationships orchestrated by dating services, where, if things get tough, it’s easy to walk away. Anyone hoping to make love more convenient, to gain the ecstatic feelings without hazarding any disruption to their life, is missing the point. Love, the only way Badiou would have it, is necessarily fraught.

“It’s a very frightening place to be,” Rayner says. “You’re violating the sanctity of the ego and putting yourself in a position of vulnerability. But you need to go there to create the common space of love. And since we do live in a fairly egoistic society, for some people, that’s too much of a leap to make. But if you are going to commit yourself to the love experience, you have to say ‘my life is no longer just about me, it’s about us, and everything I do from now on is about strengthening that bond’.” Then you have to figure out how you’re going to change the world together.

Maybe the new reality you create together is being Hollywood’s hottest power couple. Maybe it’s doing a really sensational home renovation. For a lot of couples, it’s having kids -- a transformative experience that can have meaning for couples beyond fulfilling an ancestral drive.

That’s a traditional perspective, but Rayner says you can experience Badiou’s kind of love outside of a romantic relationship, too. For Badiou, a militant Maoist who agitated in the ‘68 uprisings, comrades can have a kind of comradely love forged by being engaged in a common struggle. And Rayner thinks colleagues -- workers or artists -- collaborating on a project can feel powerfully bonded by the experience of co-creation.

And if you’re single this Valentine’s Day, take heart: you, too, can experience Badiou’s world-reconfiguring, romantic love, all by yourself.

“When you meet another person who just sweeps you off your feet and gives you a sense of how your whole life could be different, often those kinds of relationships are unrequited”, Rayner says. “I mean, the best romances are, right?”

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garudabluffs · 4 years ago

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On Being with Krista Tippett

Michael McCarthy on Nature, Joy, and Human Becoming

With a perspective equally infused by science, reportage, and poetry, he reminds us that the natural world is where we evolved, where we found our metaphors, and it is the resting place for our psyches.

Michael McCarthy was longtime environment editor of the U.K. newspaper, The Independent. He was a driving force behind that paper’s campaign to explain the disappearance of the urban house sparrow in London. He also orchestrated the Great British Butterfly Hunt.

“It used to be that people had to stop their cars at night to clean the windscreen of squashed 'bugs'. Likewise moths used to gather around lights at night or beat their wings on the windows of lit rooms. Now that is rarely seen by most children in a country like the UK. It still happens in the movies.

'The Moth Snowstorm' refers to the way that at night on a dark road, you sometimes saw so many moths caught in car headlights that it resembled driving into a snowstorm. No longer.” -->>https://theecologist.org/2015/jun/30/moth-snowstorm-nature-joy-and-great-thinning

Michael McCarthy: “There is a legacy deep within us, a legacy of instinct, a legacy of inherited feelings, which may lie very deep in the tissues — it may lie underneath all the parts of civilization which we are so familiar with on a daily basis, but it has not gone; that we might have left the natural world, most of us, but the natural world has not left us.”

“...taking a very long view of time; that there are 5,000 generations of us.”

McCarthy: Just to be precise, I say 500 generations of farming, and 50,000 generations of —

Tippett: OK, sorry, right, I —500 generations of what we call civilization and the 50,000 generations when we were part of nature, and your argument is that that is “where we evolved; where we became what we are, where we learned to feel and react,” “where the human imagination formed,” “where we found our metaphors and similes.” And that’s — it’s not an idea that I had ever heard expressed that way, but as you lay it out, it — in the way you’re talking about it, it makes sense in my body, what you’re describing. That that is still defining us.

McCarthy: The idea is not mine, and it’s not new. It’s about 40 years old.

McCarthy: The idea is not mine, and it’s not new. It’s about 40 years old. It’s a perception that comes from evolutionary biology — that’s the Neo-Darwinism of the late 20th century, and a particular branch of that, which is evolutionary psychology, which has been going, really, since about the ’80s. And the core perception of evolutionary psychology is that the 50,000 generations that preceded us in the Pleistocene, which is the age of the Ice Ages, when we became what we are as part of the natural world — when we were wildlife, if you like; [laughs] we don’t think of ourselves as wildlife anymore, but we were wildlife then — that those generations are more important for our psyches, even now, than the 500 generations of civilization which have followed the invention of farming about 12,000 years ago. So that there is a legacy deep within us, a legacy of instinct, a legacy of inherited feelings, which may lie very deep in the tissues — it may lie underneath all the parts of civilization which we are so familiar with on a daily basis, but it has not gone; that we might have left the natural world, most of us, but the natural world has not left us.

K.T. “... people talk about population growth. But somehow, for me, the way you put this into context — that the “dimensions,” “the runaway scale of the human enterprise” — and that, as you say, in the same period of this baby boomer generation, between your teenage years and your middle years, between 1960, the year I was born, and 2000, the world’s population doubled, and the world economy grew more than six times bigger. And that the scale of the human enterprise is this defining thing that is also overwhelming this natural world, which is our life support system and home.”

M.M. : “... and the essence of it is the fact that the natural world is a part of us, and that if we lose it, we cannot be fully who we are. And if we were to realize that, which is hard, and if we were to realize it on a large scale, which is even harder, that might offer a defense of nature at the time when we are trashing it remorselessly.” + “ And I do say in the book, you’re very lucky if you can have a special place in your early life; it’s almost as lucky as coming from a happy family.”

McCarthy: Well, what in America, for want of another term, is generally referred to as the windshield phenomenon, more and more — the fact that 30 or 40 years ago if you went on a long journey, especially at night in the summer, your car windshield could be covered in bugs, and so could your headlights, and you might have to stop, and you might actually have to clean the windscreen, as we would say, to carry on. My own term for that, which I came up with myself, is the “moth snowstorm,” because — 30 or 40 years ago in the U.K., maybe 50 years ago, certainly, if you drove down a country lane on a muggy summer’s night, there would be so many moths in the air that as you drove faster and faster, in the car headlight beams they would start to seem like snowflakes, and in some occasions they would almost seem like a blizzard; there would seem to be — there was a snowstorm of moths. And this was only made visible by the invention of the automobile. We’ve only known about it for 100 years, because even if you went out —

Tippett: [laughs] We had to smash them with something.

McCarthy: Well, even if you went out at night on a summer’s evening, you wouldn’t really see that. But in automobile headlights, we could see that. And the whole point about the phenomenon of what you guys might refer to as the windshield phenomenon, what I’m referring to in England as the “moth snowstorm” — the whole point about it is that it has gone. It has vanished. It does not exist as a phenomenon anymore. You cannot now drive down a country lane in the countryside in England on a muggy summer’s night and see what you could see, in terms of the abundance of flying insects 50 years ago. That phenomenon has disappeared.

And I use that as a symbol of — well, you said, the word I use for British wildlife is the great “thinning” that is taking place.

this amazing study from Germany, last October, which has gone around the world, by this little society, which showed that in 63 nature reserves, the abundance of flying insects since the fall of the Berlin Wall had gone down by 76 percent.

I think your argument is that if we should lose nature, that we become less than whole; that we be less than we evolved to be. You even say that we would find true peace impossible.

McCarthy: That’s what I personally think.+ But I, personally, think that the natural world is where we evolved. It’s where our minds evolved. It’s where we became who we truly are, and it’s where, really, we are most at home.”

“_ liberal secular humanism_ a creed which had a single and honorable aim, which was everywhere to advance human welfare — it wants everyone to be free from hunger and fear and disease and live happy and fulfilled lives as far as possible — but that there was a gap at its core, which is, it does not recognize that humans are not necessarily good.And are there any limits on what we can do or what we should do? No, none at all. But yet, there are. And so we are not able, in this belief system, properly to face up to what we are actually doing to the world by development and everything else, which is that we are destroying our own home and the philosophical system by which we, at the moment, live, which does not recognize that, as human beings, we have a tendency to do very bad things. And because of that, we are not able to confront that tendency.”

K.T. : If I ask you to start — this vast question, what does it mean to be human, as you’ve lived your life and the things you’ve cared about, the observations you’ve made, how would you begin to speak about how your understanding of that has evolved, what it means to be human?

McCarthy: Well, the single greatest thing in our lives is the love for another person, that’s what I think, whoever we are and whoever the other person is. But human love is transcendent. I think it’s the single greatest experience we can have, and I rejoice when anyone has it and finds it, and if I could wave a wand, the thing I would do is let every individual find the love of another individual. I think that’s what I would do.

But in terms of the context in which we’ve been talking, clearly, we humans come from somewhere. And where we came from, where we emerged from is the natural world. And for 50,000 generations, we were wildlife. Well, we don’t think we are, anymore, and probably, we’re not. But we were just another species. I think — for myself, I cannot see our identity as humans as separate from the natural world from which we emerged. And what I think is that in the end, our spirits have an urge; they have a longing, still, to be part of it. And I think this longing can surprise you; it could suddenly leap out in certain circumstances; you could suddenly realize you’re surprised by the strength of your feelings. But I do feel that to be fully human is to recognize that the natural world is where we came from, and it remains part of us. And without it, being fully human is something we cannot do.

LISTEN Audio 96:21 READ MORE Transcript https://onbeing.org/programs/michael-mccarthy-nature-joy-and-human-becoming/#transcript

willow warbler recording https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/willow-warbler/

#book review author interview The Moth Snowstorm Michael McCarty On Being

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amazingreligion · 6 years ago

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Human Evolution and Islam

N.B That’s not a new topics ! It’s a part of an archived thread originally posted on sunniforum. This is a thread for this topic and how Islamically we can explain it. It is only for Muslims whilst Muslim biologists are specially invited to participate. It is incumbent upon the Muslim biologists and those in the field to refute those who use biological ideas against Islam. Otherwise don't blame those Muslims who are not biologists yet who take on this task. Here's a start that i wrote elsewhere: Ok after having read a lot since that time, particularly from pro-evolutionists-i'm not convinced by human evolution whilst the topic of other species, it is highly probable that macro-evolution(in case some are wondering, actually some evolutionists accept the distinction) to some extent took place although current evolutionary theory is seriously deficient in its explanations and must be improved-, i've come up several observations: 1) Evolutionists at times have used outright deception to propagate their views(such as Haeckal's embryos) 2) Evolutionists have been very gullible at accepting "evidences" that have turned out to be wrong(the "Piltdown man," the "peppered moths", the Miller-Urey experiments etc) 3) Evolutionists have a lot of evangelicals(atheists and agnostics) who are trying to promote their views against theists and thus have no sense of accountability for what they say-provided their not shown to be wrong- and this has been shown by their blatant lies at times. 4) Christians opposing evolution have also used lies and shown ignorance of the topic 5) Thus neither sides have been trustworthy(especially the atheists) 6) Considering the methodology of Islam in accepting information,-more important in this case as the issue affects Islam- i propose that Muslim scientists don't accept information on the topic where the opinion is against Islam(especially when there's a strong bias by the kuffar) but should set stringent criteria for verifying the information and must verify it themselves. 7) The conclusion is that the information that the kuffar provide on the topic of evolution(where is contradicts Islam i.e. human evolution) is not accepted at the current moment until it is verified by trustworthy Muslim scientists. 8) Also Muslim scientists should aim to refute those kuffar who oppose Islamic beliefs through science. Harun Yahya(although not a scientist and i disagree with his works) however must be commended(contrary to the useless Muslim scientists who have done nothing but complain about him) as he has set the groundwork and now the real Muslim scientists should take over and modify and strengthen his arguments. Note that i've talked with a science teacher(who is a biologist and has a masters degree) and he basically said that there's a number of serious problems with the theory but its a developing theory so there's no guarantee on some of the things it says. And he rejected human evolution.

Last edited by loveProphet; 25-06-2012 at 09:26 PM. A thought on human evolution, one thing that we expect if we're created differently to the rest of creation is that we should have unique things. Of course it is obvious in our intelligence(it is the highest) and other behavioural aspects but lets look at the physical aspects. Also why did humans supposedly ditch the trees and the tail? Before it was suggested that being bipedal involved less energy but now its shown to not be the case. Anyways some stuff i picked up from page 7 and onwards: http://www.arn.org/docs/luskin/cl_fa...gentdesign.pdf Sure i'm not fond of ID but they've got neat references that can be checked up. Another study wrote, “We, like many others, interpret the anatomical evidence to show that early H[omo] sapiens was significantly and dramatically different from earlier and penecontemporary australopithecines in virtually every element of its skeleton and every remnant of its behavior.” J. Hawks, K. Hunley, L. Sang-Hee, and M. Wolpoff, “Population Bottlenecks and Pleistocene Evolution,” Journal of Molecular Biology and Evolution, Vol. 17(1): 2-22 (2000). One commentator proposed this evidence implies a "big bang theory" of human evolution. New study suggests big bang theory of human evolution The famed late evolutionary paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould noted that "most hominid fossils, even though they serve as a basis for endless speculation and elaborate storytelling, are fragments of jaws and s****s of skull" A Harvard evolutionary paleoanthropologist recently stated in the New York Times that newly discovered hominid fossils "show 'just how interesting and complex the human genus was and how poorly we understand the transition from being something much more apelike to something more humanlike.'" Fossils in Kenya Challenge Linear Evolution [ "Other paleontologists and experts in human evolution said the discovery strongly suggested that the early transition from more apelike to more humanlike ancestors was still poorly understood. " And see: Fossil find pushes human-ape split back millions of years "we know nothing about how the human line actually emerged from apes.” Ok so i went through sciencedaily.com some time ago to see what features are unique to humans apart from the soul. I've found out about the brain and humans walking but now i saw this: What Is The Cognitive Rift Between Humans And Other Animals? No Easy Answers In Evolution Of Human Language Complexity Constrains Evolution Of Human Brain Genes Now fit this in with the Islamic idea of man being created differently. On the other hand more on the ERVs: Ancient Retroviruses Spurred Evolution Of Gene Regulatory Networks In Humans And Other Primates Using the tools of computational genomics, the UCSC team gathered compelling evidence that retroviruses helped out. It can be used as an argument that Allah put them there for our benefit. More like a common plan is why you see them at the same loci on the same chromosomes in the different species. Also see for HERVs: Retroviruses Shows That Human-Specific Variety Developed When Humans, Chimps Diverged More: Do orthologous gene phylogenies really support tree-thinking? Results Heat map analyses were used to investigate the congruence of orthologues in four datasets (archaeal, bacterial, eukaryotic and alpha-proteobacterial). We conclude that we simply cannot determine if a large portion of the genes have a common history. In addition, none of these datasets can be considered free of lateral gene transfer. Conclusion Our phylogenetic analyses do not support tree-thinking. These results have important conceptual and practical implications. We argue that representations other than a tree should be investigated in this case because a non-critical concatenation of markers could be highly misleading Originally Posted by ahsanirfan as salam `alaykum I shall respond, but not now. jazak Allahi khayrun for alerting me to it. Insha allah, keep adding whatever you know and I will be sure to read up on it. I took out three books today from the library: Behe, Michael - Darwin's Black Box - I've read this before, but I plan to read it again. Behe, Michael - The Edge of Evolution Gould, Stephen Jay - Punctuated Equilibrium - This is about how there are gaps in the fossil record Let me know if you have more resources that I can look up, insha Allah. I will Insha'Allah write up more when i have time. But Jay Gould's book is definitely great, he started the movement against gradualism(its weak in palaeontology) although he was an atheist. Jeffrey Schwartz has taken the lead, nevertheless they still believe in evolution(and i have no problem with it except with human evolution). As for Michael Behe and a lot of the IDists, they support human evolution so this stuff is of no use to us on this issue. So don't waste your time reading those two although i have the new book by him(got it today from the library called biochemical challenge). What we have to do is really create an Islamic perspective of this. For this the first thing we need is the different Islamic material(Qur'an, Hadith etc) on the creation of Adam(AS) and then we can make logical predictions from them so that we can atleast know what to look for. Though i might read this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Fly-Hors...3647641&sr=8-1 Since however you're not going to be studying biology, you might also want to read this(its simple for laymen to understand): http://www.amazon.co.uk/Evolution-Du...3647683&sr=1-1 There is a discussion over punctuated equilibrium and gradualism in this peer-reviewed article: http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/Cambrian.pdf This is only because you mentioned Gould's book. I don't the evolution of non-humans to be a discussion here. Remember we're not after evolution of non-humans so don't get too distracted! Last edited by loveProphet; 16-06-2008 at 08:28 PM. Discussions with Christians and Debate Human evolution is not supported by the fossil evidence. Much of the alleged evidence that filled text books over the last 50 years has now been reclassified or rejected altogether. The missing links are still missing. Human Evolution: The Legacy of the Fossil Evidence Human evolution has many issues, including the realities of genetics, biochemistry, design theory, irreducible complexity, DNA structure, and information systems. However, the reality of the human fossil record alone is enough to reject the theory of human evolution all together. Here are just a few of the major problems with the alleged fossil record of the past century: Ramapithecus was widely recognized as a direct ancestor of humans. It is now established that he was merely an extinct type of orangutan. Piltdown man was hyped as the missing link in publications for over 40 years. He was a fraud based on a human skull cap and an orangutan's jaw. Nebraska man was a fraud based on a single tooth of a rare type of pig. Java man was based on sketchy evidence of a femur, skull cap and three teeth found within a wide area over a one year period. It turns out the bones were found in an area of human remains, and now the femur is considered human and the skull cap from a large ape. Neandertal man was traditionally depicted as a stooped ape-man. It is now accepted that the alleged posture was due to disease and that Neandertal is just a variation of the human kind. Human Evolution: Human evolution has its currently fashionable specimens that lead from small ape-like creatures to Homo sapiens. These are examples of the most recent alleged links: Australopithecus afarensis, or "Lucy," has been considered a missing link for years. However, studies of the inner ear, skulls and bones have shown that she was merely a pygmy chimpanzee that walked a bit more upright than some other apes. She was not on her way to becoming human. Homo erectus has been found throughout the world. He is smaller than the average human of today, with a proportionately smaller head and brain cavity. However, the brain size is within the range of people today and studies of the middle ear have shown that he was just like current Homo sapiens. Remains are found throughout the world in the same proximity to remains of ordinary humans, suggesting coexistence. Australopithecus africanus and Peking man were presented as ape-men missing links for years, but are now both considered Homo erectus. Homo habilis is now generally considered to be comprised of pieces of various other types of creatures, such as Australopithecus and Homo erectus, and is not generally viewed as a valid classification. Human Evolution: The Most Recent Find In July 2002, anthropologists announced the discovery of a skull in Chad with "an unusual mixture of primitive and humanlike features." The find was dubbed "Toumai" (the name give to children in Chad born close to the dry season) and was immediately hailed as "the earliest member of the human family found so far." By October 2002, a number of scientists went on record to criticize the premature claim -- declaring that the discovery is merely the fossil of an ape. Human Evolution: The Theory Has No Support in the Fossil Record Human evolution is a theory in denial. With all of this fossil evidence (or lack thereof) it becomes increasingly clear to an earnest seeker that human evolution did not happen at all. • Lack of Transitional Fossils. Charles Darwin wrote, "Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking closely together all the species of the same group, must assuredly have existed. But, as by this theory, innumerable transitional forms must have existed, why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth?" (Origin of Species, 1859). Since Darwin put forth his theory, scientists have sought fossil evidence indicating past organic transitions. Nearly 150 years later, there has been no evidence of transition found thus far in the fossil record. • Lack of a Natural Mechanism. Charles Darwin, in his Origin of Species, proposed Natural Selection to be the mechanism by which an original simple-celled organism could have evolved gradually into all species observed today, both plant and animal. Darwin defines evolution as "descent with modification." However, Natural Selection is known to be a conservative process, not a means of developing complexity from simplicity. Later, with our increased understanding of genetics, it was thought perhaps Natural Selection in conjunction with genetic mutation allowed for the development of all species from a common ancestor. However, this is theoretical and controversial, since "beneficial" mutations have yet to be observed. In fact, scientists have only observed harmful, "downward" mutations thus far. N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden, continues: My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled. 4 Even the popular press is catching on. This is from an article in Newsweek magazine: The missing link between man and apes, whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures … The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated. Is it enough to prove that the human evolution is not possible? As I have already mentioned that in Quraan it is cleared stated that: All human are created from the single pair (ie. Adam and Hawwa) And still today the science is not advance to prove this. So Quraan is superior to the science. Realistically, if Darwin's theory can't begin to explain the 'evolution' of a system as simple as a ten part mouse trap, what hope has it got in explaining the development of the complex biochemistry associated with a single cell organism, let alone higher life forms? The Test Commandment: Sabbath matter Now examine the account in Exodus 16:1-30. The people of Israel were "murmuring" against God because they wanted more food. So God said, "I will... TEST them, whether they will walk in My LAW or not" (v. 4) Remember that this was a TEST—to see whether they would follow God's law or not. So what did the people do? As human beings so often do, they did NOT take God seriously! Some Israelites went out and tried to find manna even on the Sabbath. And the only link between the human and the monkey was explained in the Holy Quraan is: And indeed you knew those amongst you who transgressed in the matter of the Sabbath (i.e. Saturday). We said to them: "Be you monkeys, despised and rejected."___(Surah Al baqarah-Verse # 65) So When Allah rejected them and curse them to be monkeys, then is it not possible that those unbelievers turned into the monkeys or ape. And even if in the future the missing link between the human and monkey is found, it has to be of one of the unbeliver. Ok i found another interesting quote: Considering the very close genetic relationship that has been established by comparison of biochemical properties of blood proteins, protein structure and DNA and immunological responses, the differences between a man and a chimpanzee are more astonishing than the resemblances... Something must have happened to the ancestors of Homo sapiens which did not happen to the ancestors of gorillas and chimpanzees Elain Morgan, The Aquatic Ape: A Theory of Human evolution

#Religion #islam #evolution

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invincigirl · 8 years ago

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Brainfood from a Paleo-Nerd.

“HEEEEEEEEY BROTHERS!! Devon here, sit down, I’m gonna teach you shit that you probably don’t want. Do you want it? No? I don’ care, get yer’ notepads and pencils, and let’s be learned stuff!” Okay, so this is a rant on a very well-known and popular hominid (that isn’t an Australopithecus named “Lucy”, of all surprises to mention). It’s about “Homo Neanderthalensis, or “The Neanderthal Man”. A quick rundown, they were originally discovered as fragmentary remains in the Neander Valley in Europe, where they got their name. There are spots in Eastern Asia that hold fossils of this very hominid species, too. They were intelligent hunters, they crafted tools to aide them in their hunt for mammoth, woolly rhino, and to fend off saber-toothed cats... and I’m not talking about Smilodon, those kitties were in North and South America. Neanderthals donned arguably the first jewelry, as well! They have, by now, mastered fire, used paint from iron-rich dirt, and they hunt in groups. No, we can conclude that they did not invent the wheel, leave that for Homo Sapiens to discover in 3,500 BC after Neanderthals were long gone.

Now, my rant begins with this: THEY ARE VERY MISREPRESENTED IN ARCHAEOLOGY!

Why do I say this? Well, there are many theories suggesting what they could have looked like... but we ended up giving them human-like traits. Yeah, I get that they’re hominids, but they weren’t human.

They are represented as having thin hair on their bodies, huge nose, receded chin, prominent eyebrow ridges, and short foreheads with hair on it. Yeah, do I need to say more...? They are even shown with tribal tattoos and clothing, to rub salt in the wound... big red flag! Here’s a few reasons why it’s wrong:

1) This is not based on sound Archaeological evidence to support it, only loose theories. We get that hominids were losing their body hair as they evolved to become humans, but... are we forgetting something HUGELY important? Humans and Neanderthals evolved in completely different areas, just so you know... and let’s not forget another fact: It was the Quaternary Period in Earth’s history, so from the Pliocene to the Late Pleistocene. Fun Fact: The Pleistocene Epoch had the Last Glacial Ice Age. Europe was hit by the harsh, cold wasteland then! Africa was just dandy, it had many fruits, veggies, and animals to hunt and eat! What did Europe have? 5 edible plants, with had such little to no dietary value, that they were not worth harvesting... oh, and they had Mammoths, Woolly Rhinos, and other high risk animals to stab and beat to death... they even ate their own brethren if the situation was dire!

2) Anthropomorphism: Giving human-like traits to other species of animal. We as Homo Sapiens, understand our anatomy, but would we really give that to a Gibbon, Gorilla, Golden Lion Tamarin, or Chimpanzee? NO. I brought up primates because, whether you chose to accept it or not, Homo Sapiens are identified, by science, as primates. We are highly specialized apes capable of unique feats... but in the long run, we’re more closely related to a chimpanzee than a porpoise. So, let’s erase this anthropomorphized hominid for a minute and evaluate what the skeletons show!

To dissect the structure of this unique specimen, we’ll start with the head, which to a human, it’s like comparing day and night... The jaw is thicker and more robust than the latter, the eyes are bigger, the brain case is ovular, the nasal is bigger, and the skull is, all around, heavier and solid looking. Wait... Big eyes... that’s something our anthropomorphic representation is SEVERELY lacking! If Ben Affleck had to play an accurate model of a Neanderthal, his eyes would be higher up, and lots bigger! Oh, yeah, and the nose, forgot about that... let’s be Franc, and say that Cartilage doesn’t fossilize well, and we have other primate analogues to look at... chimps and Gorillas have similarly shaped skulls, so let’s go with them as an example. The protruding face can be explained by what they had to eat.

How bout Dat Bod, eh? Very thick and robust, looks like it was made to carry serious weight in muscle! Just look at how thicc dem thighs are! Let’s also note that their rib cages are wider, their spines shorter, and they have larger fingers and toe bones. They are a bit shorter than us, but they are more stocky, and sturdier built.

So, let’s see where we can fit biology in all of this from the top to down: Large, forward facing eyes, in a predatory situation, could mean a few things, great night vision, or (if the brain proves it), great visual acuity. The body is very muscular, with large fingers and toes to help keep themselves warm. Now, how about those INVISIBLE details, like the ears! The Woolly Mammoth had small ears to keep their body temperature, so a Neanderthal’s ears wouldn’t be so big, either, nor would they protrude if that were the case. The Nose is iffy, since there was no cartilage preserved, but it was large to warm the air they breathed in. The hair, because of the cold Glacial Ice Age that was happening then, would be long and thick all over the place, of course not on their palms and soles.

So now, we’re on the home stretch! We’ll now discuss one big, controversial thing: EVOLUTION. Charles Darwin looked at birds from different parts of an island, and figured out their niche. He also theorized that an animal’s environment affects their appearance. Would you see a buck naked human in the middle of Antarctica? NO... so don’t make it like that. Humans evolved in the warmer African region, where their faces are shorter because of the omnivorous diet of fruit and meat, and almost hairless body to cool themselves down... Neanderthals were in this sub-arctic wasteland that was Ice Age Europe with a whole body of fur, large eyes for seeing in the dark, and stockier bodies to keep their body temperature level.

So we’ve concluded that they should look more like this:

Much more primate/ape-like, but still showing their hominid nature best suited for the cold! They still did everything that science and Archaeology discovered them to have done, even the possibility of speech, there is no changing that. However, the caveman look is outdated and unrealistic and should be saved for Jurassic World 4.

((I’ll give credit where it is due. The images are not mine, and I did not conduct the research. Info was supplied here, and I found images on Google for this educational purpose.))

#ic #archaeology #neanderthal

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hermanwatts · 5 years ago

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OTHERSCIENCE STORIES: The Pleistocene Murders, Part 5

[Part 1] …[an] insidious gang of possible accomplices… we’ll need to investigate a little further before passing judgment.

The Winter of Life

At the worst of the Ice Age, the Arctic of now was the Europe of then- ice to the North, then permafrost all the way south to the Alps, then tundra and steppe to the Mediterranean. The sea level was more than one hundred meters lower than today. The Solutreans were able to walk across, or skip along the edge of, the sea ice from Iberia to America more than 20,000 years ago, there to become the Clovis people. The North America they discovered was not much different from Europe; a massive sheet of ice covered half the continent.

Yet, at the same time, Siberia had no icecap, nor did most of Alaska. These places were temperate at the time, even though they are further north, a major mystery stashed under the rug somewhere- don’t bother asking Dr. PhD how that’s supposed to work. On this particular point, a pole shift, or a giant electric blanket, are just as good of stories as any. We know these regions were temperate because of, among many other things, the undigested flowers, leaves, and grasses found in the mouths of the frozen Mammoths.

A group of awesome human hunters demonstrate the proper Sapien-guy form. Dr. Mammoth’s colleagues are just out of picture, to the left and to the right. Artist: Paul Jamin, 1885

The comet story is some part of the picture. The broken-up comet/asteroid (these are two names for the same thing, a Rock-That-Moves-Through-Plasma-Space) might have come in hyperbolic, at a low angle from the Southeast, ploughing into and vaporizing parts of the Canadian icecap, scouring the Canadian Shield. Part of the ensuing insta-muck was launched onto suborbital trajectories over the Arctic Ocean, to land on northern Alaska and Siberia. In this unauthorized version of the story, the Carolina Bays would be the precursors, with the similar features in Northern Siberia as chunkier pieces that overshot the space-muck. The atmospheric blast wave, then blast wind, attended the monster tsunami coming in from across the Arctic Ocean. These fluids carried the forces that uprooted, tore asunder, and finally entombed the millions of shredded trees and animals in the frozen muck. The volcanoes that lit up as a result could have plunged the northern world into darkness for some time, while the liquefied ice cap flooded all the coasts. A great deal of the lofted water would have ended up in the upper atmosphere, enough to provide heavy rain for, say, forty days and nights. Whatever did cause the mass destruction also instantly changed Siberia from a temperate climate to the subarctic climate of today, like turning out the lights.

Though the comet/asteroid story makes the grazing fly-by, it doesn’t quite land with the punch we are looking for. To be sure, something Terrible visited the North around the time of the major extinctions- maybe to wipe out much of the Clovis people in the process- but, in addition to the undesirable litany of iffys, maybes, and perhaps seeminglys, the Terrible didn’t visit South America, which suffered the worst losses. It also happened too quickly to account for the spread in the putative dates of the various extinctions, unless there were multiple hits coming in on similar hyperbolic trajectories over the centuries. That’s middling-plausible, since the Taurids always radiate from Taurus, but all the pairings of the orbital elements have to line up just so. The Terrible also destroyed all kinds of plants and animals that did not end up going extinct- the comet crept in through the window but the dog didn’t bark for them.

We want something even more terrible than an asteroid strike, that is worldwide, and that takes place over a period of centuries, hence the desire to blame climate or humans. We also don’t want to have to drag our tropey Space Brothers in to get ‘er done as part of their off-world mining operations- that’s so last ice age.

Dear Human Hunter: Mama Giant Ground Sloth would like a word with you.

The human-hunting idea has what amounts to a military problem. Our ancient parents were as bands of Hobbits surrounded by armies of giant Orcs numbering in the hundreds of millions between their different kinds. A field marshal, reviewing his rag tag tribe of midgets armed with sticks and arrows, would have to weigh those facts against his enemy’s tooth and claw, tusk, armor, size, and troop strength. He would have to retire from the field, discretion being the better part of valor.

We saw this dynamic play out in North America in historical times. The Great Plains Indians could not subdue the immense herds of Bison that ranged across the prairie lands. Save the occasional Hobbit-Indian, these were prey almost without predators, the layovers of a devastated ecosystem. These wilding Pleistocene survivors could not be fenced, or tamed, or stopped. Bison Army Field Marshal Old Logan, Pennsylvania Division, was quite insistent on this point. Most instructive. On this point:

“… When they were gone the barn was still standing, but the fences, springhouse, and haystack were gone, as if swept away by a flood. Six cows, four calves, and thirty-five sheep lay crushed and dead among the ruins.”

The Indians couldn’t build cities because cities need farms, and farms would be plundered by the Million Bison Army. They had to move their teepees around, always being careful not to pick a place that was too lush, too open, too attractive. Even with the gifts of the carbon-based horse and the iron gun there were still too many Buffalo and not enough Indians. The mighty new iron-based horse had to charge, to build the requisite mountains of skulls, to clear the table for the next course on evolution.

As with all the higher animals, there is an innocence and a sweetness about the remaining Bison despite their formidable appearance. The men on horseback could ride right into a herd and fire at will. The Bison have no concept of this kind of predation. Poor Old Logan was doing what he could to protect his tribe in the only way he knew. The landed farmers were as enigmatic as UFOs to them. In the end, all they really wanted to do was to eat the grass. It is no stretch to imagine that all of the other Pleistocene animals, both predator and prey- even the Orcs- were of similar disposition- as long as you are not on the menu, and don’t mess with their kiddies or their doggie bowl.

A few thousand years ago there were several North American bison models to choose from, from the deluxe Texas-sized edition on down. The little guy on the right is the only kind left, the only one we know. This striking pattern is echoed across many types of Ice Age animals: the big ones went under, their little cousins pulled through. Artist: Roman Uchytel

The idea that the biggest animals were sought after is a complete inversion of the basic rules of predation.

I’zzz jjjusss lovesses meezz sssome humanzesz hunter, tse-tse-tse. ////ssss//// Megalania Prisca

A predator cannot afford grave injury. He who fight and run away live to fight another day. The injured wolf cannot run with the pack anymore; it has to be left behind to die. The predator always looks for the easiest kill, not the most difficult. The predator, the bureaucrat, the businessman- the cleaning lady- all seek to make the necessary gains while spending the minimum amount of time, effort, and risk. Tracking prey over long distances would be quite perilous where packs of more capable predators are roaming the same territory. The hunter becomes the hunted. This is also a numbers game: one million or less Hobbits vs. 100 million or more Orcs per continent, with each Orc requiring several Hobbits for the dicey take-down. Additionally, each such operation has to be done while all the other Orcs are looking the other way, times 100,000,000.

Many of these Pleistocene animals had enormous ranges, spanning continents and even over several. A fanciful, blitzkreig annihilation would have to be coordinated between all the little tribes of warring Hobbits both in time and in geography, otherwise some of the animals would always be left to re-populate. The minor inconvenience caused by starting prairie fires over here isn’t going to stop the animals from simply moving over there for a bit, there to anticipate the lush new vegetation coming in after the burn. All those little stone arrowheads are clearly designed for small game, not the big stuff.

Some stories are better than other stories. The “Horrible Human Hunters are Awful” narrative has too many insurmountable problems to stand up to scrutiny, unless the absence of evidence can be entered to prove. It reads like badly-written fantasy: play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

Ugh: “Nice pix, yo. How’s bout we roll on these lion and hippo packs and stuff?” Og: “Cool idea, brah. But I gotta hang here and finish up another 10,000 years of art class.” Artist: Og the Chauvet Caveman

The debate about the causes behind the Quaternary Extinction Event has gone on for a long time without resolution. The pattern of extinctions doesn’t make sense. Things don’t add up. Into this vacuum other theories- stories- about exotic diseases, comets, and black swan events, have been put forth. I made up a new story awhile ago too, about Earth’s gravity increasing just a tiny bit, just enough to make today’s elephant and giraffe the biggest and the tallest possible animals, and the condor or albatross the biggest possible birds.

Any of these things may well be a part of the truest story, but none of them can stand on their own. There are too many specific cases that don’t fit.

The Pleistocene Murders were so very selective. Very discriminating.

The bit about a lower carbon dioxide level can’t explain either why only certain animals went extinct and others did not; it’s much too capricious and indiscriminate. Climate change- the Ice Age, the cold, the drier air, less rainfall- can point to a great part of it, but it also runs into the specificity problem. That should have affected many more plants and animals, not just certain ones. But there is another diabolical piece to this puzzle, one the Prosecution had failed to fit to its proper place before.

The players and their furniture have been entered and examined. There will be war…

OTHERSCIENCE STORIES: The Pleistocene Murders, Part 5 published first on https://sixchexus.weebly.com/

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undignifiend · 5 years ago

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Trollhunters Fanfic AU idea: Heartstone Sun

A stupidly long ramble about themes I’m obsessed with. Warnings: mentions of people getting eaten, other horror elements, redemption speculation, and pontificating about hatred, dehumanizing propaganda, and the cycle of abuse (and an idea of how to break those three things). I’d love to write this if I can figure out how to do it justice, but that may take a while. Criticism is welcome; I can’t hone an idea to proper sharpness if I don’t see its dull spots.

What if the sun is actually a Heartstone - like The Great Gramma of all Heartstones (in this solar system, at least)? And was placed under an enchantment/curse by a prehistoric human coven that Had Enough because trolls outclassed humans in pretty much every arena, and people were getting eaten with impunity by extremely durable apex predators that laughed at their sticks and slings and fire? It's not like trolls really needed to eat humans - these mofos were powered by the sun (and could probably do crazy magic with all that excess power, to boot) - they just like how we taste.

Though perhaps humans also have a knack for passively absorbing Hearstone energies, and that's what they used to essentially poison the Heartstone against Trollkind? And that same passive absorption is why humans make good supplements for trolls who don't have a Heartstone to rely on, as shown in the comics? Since trolls couldn't gain Heartstone energy directly from the sun during the night, if they were injured and/or had a hankering, they'd have to eat creatures that still could. So maybe trolls tended to mostly eat people at night back then when they needed a quick boost because they couldn't get sunlight? And perhaps this contributed toward a more intense, visceral fear of the dark in humanity's evolution - like our common fear of the dark, but on steroids?

Gunmar's comment about "They try to make the night brighter. They fear the darkness," not only speaks to real human fears of the dark, but a mentality that was essentially beaten into Pleistocene-Era humans by impossibly strong and scary opponents (though I love the idea of some troll groups teaming up with humans and having various mutually-beneficial symbiotic shenanigans).

You could see all manner of behavioral, instinctive differences in these humans based on that. From a death-like, numbing paralysis intended to spare them the agony of their last moments, to an overwhelming itch to hide when it grows dark, to a need to sleep in groups for protection, etc... I imagine most beds in most cultures would be in hidden places within a house. Some cultures might even develop "false bedrooms" as traditional parts of their home to trick trolls or evil spirits that are more inclined to hunt with stealth.

This is partly inspired from a weird experience I had one night where I got this sudden, intense fear, and I've never experienced it since, and I still can't figure out what caused it. But some part of me felt a hostile presence in the woods by the house, and I knew it was far too powerful to fight, and I had the overwhelming urge to shut off all the lights, quiet everything that was making noise, and huddle in a closet until whatever it was passed. "Don't let it know you're here," kept playing in my head. I imagine being a human in this AU, especially in the Bad Old Days, would feel a lot like that.

After the Sun Curse (but before humanity regards trolls as myth), I imagine a common survival rule would be: Travel by day (when trolls can't, or at least have a harder time of it), and hide by night (so you don't run into them; if they find you, make them work for it, don't give yourself away).

Humans in this AU love to fancy themselves apex predators not simply as a power trip, but a denial of their true position in the food chain as prey. They can lie to themselves all they like, but their instincts remember and know better.

So to give humanity a fighting chance, this prehistoric coven developed a powerful spell to make the sun toxic to trolls, which would allow humans safety under the sun, which until then, had been a main source of power and sustenance for trollkind.

As an unforeseen catastrophe of apocalyptic proportions, much of trollkind's lore at the time was lost as they scrambled to deal with this development. Their cultures had to adapt, and new lore and methods of dealing with this catastrophe overtook lost histories (mostly verbal at the time). There was very little evidence left of how the sun was cursed, or that humans were behind it - the coven responsible did their utmost to destroy any sign or record of what they did, knowing that such information would rally trollkind against humankind. And even if trolls were weakened without their most sacred life source, they were still a dangerous enough threat that, if they could cooperate with each other, they'd surely wipe humanity out.

They almost succeeded in destroying all knowledge of it, but a certain tribe connected to a certain Heartstone found out, and their resulting fury at this act of desecration gave rise to Gunmar the Black.

This curse would be a deep source of anger and resentment at humanity for having stolen not only trollkind's ability to roam freely on their own world (which they were the dominant species on), but for poisoning a vital and sacred life-source. This is what Gunmar would be talking about when he talks about 'taking back the surface lands'. It's not just propaganda to him, it's his peoples' birthright, and it was stolen from them, and he emerged to set it right. This coven may have acted out of self-defense, but what they did was an unforgivable act of desecration. Gunmar and his Gumm-Gumms would still see it that way, but over time, as humanity loses their knowledge of trolls and turns their attentions toward each other, the rest of trollkind moves on and adapts and forgets their hatred, or their history of having once owned the world. The Gumm-Gumms are still angry about an ancient injustice, and the rest of trollkind, now believing themselves to have always lived underground, sees this 'take back the surface lands' talk as warmongering propaganda against a group that is seen as relatively ridiculous and tasty, but now off-limits depending on who follows the Pact.

While on that note, I imagine Gunmar would find the Pact outrageous and absurd. Humanity has no end to hold up in return, it's basically a heavy restriction on trolls who have already had so much taken from them. It's adding insult to injury, and that any troll would agree to it galls him to no end.

Before the curse, trolls ate fleshlings because we taste good and are satisfying sources of indirect Heartstone energy. Now, Gumm-Gumms also eat humans as an act of rebellion and punishment for what their ancestors did.

CHARACTER PROFILES:

JIM

I love Jim. But I think I'm going to handle him a bit differently in this AU than how he is in canon because I see an opportunity to say something important and relevant to a possible theme of this AU, and I'm not sure canon Jim would really be up for that.

I love the warm, nurturing, gentle side of Jim, and how he likes taking care of his friends. I love how he loves cooking for them, which is the quintessential nurturing act. I love how protective he is of his friends and his mom, and how even though he has made mistakes, he makes those mistakes with protective intentions. His heart's in the right place. This is the side of Jim who looks at Rule #2: Always Finish the Fight, and says "No," and spares Draal's life, and takes care of Chompsky instead of 'taking care of him', and risks precious time to go back for Nomura. This is the Jim I love, and the side of him I want to focus on in this AU.

And that side of him (it seems to me) clashes rather loudly with the other side of him that refuses to apply Rule #1 to Strickler in favor of rebellious mouthing-off, and treats the deaths of his enemies with sassy quips.

With regards to my attitude about that last part, I blame Faramir from Lord of the Rings. His brief monologue about 'the enemy' was formative for me. He fought to protect his people, and in doing so, he had to kill other people. And he didn’t hide from that fact. He had the strength and honesty to both do what he had to do, and to acknowledge that tragedy. He didn't try to diminish their deaths, and I cannot stress enough how important that is to me to see in a protagonist. So in this idea, Jim can be sassy in some cases, and he will kill if he believes he has to, but #2 is a last resort, and when it comes to that, he won't lie to himself or diminish what has happened.

Seeing someone as an obstacle or problem is a crucial step in making it easy to hurt or kill them, and it's one of the goals of particularly dangerous forms of propaganda: dehumanize the enemy. It's a perspective shift that makes fighting easier, but I believe it's one of the very worst lies we can ever tell ourselves or each other.

Acknowledging someone as a person, and not an obstacle or a problem, is (potentially) a powerful way to break the perception that you yourself are an obstacle or problem. If you want a chance to see someone’s relatability/"humanity", you first have to show yours. And they won’t always see it, and even if they do, they won’t always care – you might be hurt or killed anyway. But I think this re-framing is a crucial step in non-violent conflict resolution (in particularly intense cases). It’s risky as hell, so it’s not very popular, but when successful, it broadens perspectives and opens new paths in their minds. And I think that's a powerful and worthy theme; one that Jim could champion. A better way to Finish The Fight.

GUNMAR

In this AU, Gunmar has plans that stretch far beyond the Eternal Night (which, in this AU, would instead be a cure for the curse). From his perspective, he's trying to piece the world back together after several Apocalyptic-Grade Disasters. He's bitter and stressed, but he has stayed tenacious and ambitious despite millennia of warfare, failure, and being forgotten by the vast majority of the world while trapped in the Darklands. He's trying to lead his people out of a bad situation and restore their birthright, and he's annoyed and angry with the significant number of trolls who accept the current status quo when they could have so much more.

Because Gunmar emerged from a corrupted Heartstone and doesn't seem to have parents (perhaps no tribe/clan/colony? I love the extra-spooky supernatural vibe it grants him) I like the idea of him wanting his own tribe. He had a son whom he seemed to care for, and their regard for each other was the one and only thing in canon (in my mind) that elevated Gunmar. I'd like to capitalize on that in this AU. Gunmar was born tribeless, as a symbol of trollkind's general animosity toward humanity, but he obviously doesn't want to stay tribeless. He wants to establish his own line; he wants to create a future for his descendants to thrive in. His ultimate goal isn't so much about putting humans in their place as it is about giving his own people the prosperous future he thinks they deserve. To those who follow him, he's not their tyrant; he's their hero. His aggression is largely directed at humanity, but his goals are NOT human-centric after all.

Gunmar’s backstory (in canon) fascinates me. He was born from a Heartstone that had been transformed by the trollish population’s animosity toward humankind. I think this was supposed to reflect the classic Evil Corruption you see in a lot of fantasy, and leans on a kind of Victorian notion of "bad breeding" and the idea that because he emerged from evil conditions, he is evil by nature. But I think it’s more interesting to look at it as a wound, because that gives his anger a sharper sense of purpose that I think it otherwise lacks. Gunmar manifested from a rift between two populations, and has used the hatred that formed that wound to try and heal it – by taking the surface world and devouring the impudent humans who stole it. The method of devouring them didn’t simply develop because we taste good – it’s also a punishment, born of that same hatred, that says: “You thought you were better, but you are lesser. You wanted a vaunted place for yourself at great cost to us, but your true place is as nothing more than our food. This is what you deserve for trying to shut me and my kind out of our own world, and poisoning something sacred against us.” (referencing the curse on the Heartstone Sun, not the Killahead Banishment, which would come much later).

That may seem to him like a perfectly reasonable way to fix what he sees himself as (both literally and symbolically) born to fix. But even if all his dreams were to come true, that hatred would persist throughout the myriad abuses he would inflict upon humanity (if he’d bother to keep us around as livestock and/or slaves), and long outlast the last of the human population. It would linger, it would continue to fester, and it would be poised to be unleashed upon whatever other sufficiently threatening group crosses trollkind next. After all, that method ‘worked’ on humanity.

But you don’t quench hatred or fix abuse by indulging it. You fix it by learning (and accepting) the truth: no one is a mere obstacle, object, problem, or hated symbol. You did not deserve the abuses you suffered, but re-creating them and re-living them will not put you in control of them or absolve you in any way. (Though the temporary illusion of control may become addictive, it will remain fleeting and false). Abuse, if you let it define you, begets abuse. If Gunmar had achieved all his goals, sooner or later, he’d see his own reflection in a human born of the horrors he inflicted, and of the hatred humanity would have for him and his kind. This human would not see trollkind as anything other than a problem that they were born to solve, just as Gunmar sees humankind. But this would not surprise him at all, because that’s how Gunmar already thinks humans see trollkind. It’s easy to hate someone if you think they hate you. And it would not matter who would win that conflict, because the hatred and abuse would survive to be re-created and re-lived and inflicted on whoever the winner meets next. Nothing would be learned, and no one would heal.

I don’t know what would show Gunmar the truth, much less in a way that would matter to him. But in keeping with Jim's best tendencies in avoiding Rule #2, I think it's necessary for Jim to make the attempt in this AU. Whether or not this would result in Gunmar getting a redemption arc doesn't exactly matter - this is really about Jim's efforts to be the best guardian he can be for two interlinked worlds with a lot of bad blood between them, and I want to do those efforts justice. I don't currently know how, but I have some idea of where to start.

I think two key parts of non-violent conflict resolution are convincing the other party that 1) you care about the same thing they do, and 2) you either can make it easier to achieve, you see a better path to achieving it, or you may be able to improve the final outcome beyond what they originally thought or hoped was possible.

In this case, the goal for both sides is to heal that ancient wound between trollkind and humankind. It’s the plan that everybody disagrees about. Protagonists and antagonists (often, but not always) both ultimately want the same thing – they just disagree about what that’s supposed to look like, or how to achieve it.

Currently, I think that to truly heal, trolls and humans have to come to terms with each other. This is no small undertaking - it would change the world irrevocably - and might never be fully achieved, even after centuries of dedicated work on both sides. A healthy relationship (regardless of it’s nature) isn’t something you achieve and consider Done; it’s dynamic, it’s lived, it requires constant attention and respect, and the acknowledgment that it may change irrevocably as life throws its weird curve-balls. Most of all, it requires a dedicated effort to understand the other person. The surest way to kill a positive relationship is to allow oneself, during times of hardship, to slip into the mindset of seeing that person as an obstacle, problem, or symbol, rather than continue the effort of trying to understand them or why they’re acting difficult. And that’s just taking failing positive relationships into account. Consider all the hardship that comes from starting from a mindset of seeing people as obstacles or problems, and you could see hate-crimes between the populations. Now consider how many trolls and humans may interact with each other as they try to move forward together, and you can get some idea of how easily everything can fall apart, back into the same attitudes that led to the same wound that Gunmar manifested from.

And that’s not even touching on how trolls would have to watch their strength and their tempers around delicate little humans (even the ornery ones), and how humans would have to put a certain amount of trust, patience, and good faith in a group that was, in the past, known for eating them (and that still thinks they taste delicious). It will be easier for some than for others, but for those others, it may feel impossible.

I’m not saying it can’t be done. I believe it’s necessary and worthwhile. But I also believe it’s important to not downplay how difficult it would be. It would be stressful, it would come with times of crisis and doubt, and some might give up entirely, and it would be up to the rest to persevere despite the inevitable tragic incidents; to be brave, and not take such incidents as proof that peace is impossible. “Fear (if you don’t let it rule you) is but the precursor to valor.”

There would be hate-crimes (committed by both sides) between the groups. And there would be heroes (from both sides) rushing in to stop them. And there would also be vigils, gatherings of both humans and trolls, in honor of the victims who couldn’t be saved in time, and in solidarity, in honor of the peace they’re working for together. And I think, in that act of mourning and solidarity, therein lies their victory.

Love and grief are some of the most powerful, relatable (rather than ‘humanizing’ which is an embarrassingly ironic and limited word, especially in this context) emotions out there. And I think it’s that relatability that has the power to reveal people as more than obstacles or problems.

I doubt witnessing it would cause every Gumm-Gumm to reconsider their stance on humanity, much less Gunmar himself, but it could be a little step toward a better path; a seed of doubt – a check to keep them honest when they try to tell themselves tales of what humans and troll ‘traitors’ want, or deserve.

Another thing I imagine might challenge Gunmar’s perceptions has to do with the Decimaar blade. At first, I wasn’t sure what it’s supposed to symbolize in the show other than as an explanation for why anyone would follow someone so careless with their lives. It would also explain why no one assassinated him while he was weakened and starving in the Darklands. (Curiously, no one else seemed to be starving, and I’m not sure what to make of that. I think I missed something important.)

At first, I thought the Decimaar blade symbolized the ultimate hatred/abuse: it enslaves, it wipes out its victims' identities; it turns people into objects to be used by their master, and obstacles to be rid of by their enemies. There’s no loyalty involved, no sacrifice – nothing of meaning that is gained from willing service is preserved. It is simply the use of others – abuse made manifest. In that, I saw the Decimaar blade as an extension of Gunmar himself; a symptom of the conditions of his birth. The cruel irony here was that he had the power to turn his own people into the exact, flat, threatening (obstacles/problems) monsters humanity expected them to be. So from this, Gunmar wasn’t just born from trollkind’s hatred, but humanity’s, too. And just like with abuse un-dealt with, un-treated, he perpetuates it.

And then I learned that the Decimaar blade was won from Orlagk, so there goes that idea. Or at least the part of it being a part of Gunmar. But somehow now, I feel that helps it fit even better; I don’t currently think the Cycle of Abuse starts with Nature (in the whole Nurture vs Nature argument). I currently think abuse (in all it’s myriad forms, intentional or not) is inherited. Gunmar may have emerged from hateful conditions, and he may have inherited a direct metaphor for coercive abuse, and he may pass it on, but it’s not truly a part of him. Therein lies a little glimmer of hope that he might eventually see it for what it is - what it's doing to him and his people (who he was born to protect and provide for as a leader) - and reject Decimaar not only as a weapon, but as a way of thinking.

I'm a sucker for redemption arcs. I'm not sure I can give Gunmar one, or if I should even try. But I think in this, Jim has to make the effort to try to understand Gunmar and what he wants, and to convince him that there is a better way. Whether this version of Gunmar (eventually - I imagine it wouldn't come easy if it happens at all) takes him up on it or not, I don't know.

IF I go for it, though, I want to do it justice. Redemption is not about forgiveness or acquittal. Redemption is about climbing, no matter how far you’ve fallen, and even if you can never reach the top, you can still try to give others a boost along the way. Redemption (just like a relationship) isn’t achieved; it’s lived. And it doesn't necessarily mean joining the Good Guys. You won't see Gunmar Reformed agonizing about all the blood (human and trollish) he has spilled, or asking "Haven't I redeemed myself?" Gunmar Reformed (at least the way I'd hope to write him) may still have a great deal of contempt for humans in general, but he has learned enough about them that he can no longer see them in simplistic terms. He may privately think on What Could Have Been had he changed his perspective sooner, but he doesn't have the time or patience to dwell on regrets - the world is still hecked up, and he still has work to do (although the nature of that work has changed dramatically). I imagine if Gunmar changes his plans, he'll chase his new objectives his own way. The Trollhunters might have occasional, tenuous, scary, and unpredictable alliances with him when their goals align, but it might be a stretch to call them allies - a lot has happened, both sides are still angry with each other, but they've come to an understanding and have a degree of mutual respect, and can demonstrate enough good faith in one another to surprise each other. Gunmar will still have all his old ferocity, he'll just be channeling it in a new direction.

#Trollhunters fanfic AU idea #Heartstone Sun #theme talk

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