#also taxonomy

[kuteon]

bugs are so nice but i am soscared

if i give you facts about bugs would that help

[njere]

Accipiter pecten oculi

[soath]

“essek wants the gods dead” “oooh, this is going to change essek’s mind about the gods” i’m sorry but that boy is a cultural luxonite. he has no strong opinions on the gods other than ‘well, they sure empirically exist’. he might have some issues with his home faith (understatement) but he was still raised in an ancient battlefield literally scarred by the horrors of the calamity where the prime deities are a bunch of affectionately tolerated minority cults. his entire society thinks they transcended the need for Gods with Shapes and my man is not immune to the luxon-centric chauvinism of his upbringing.

sure, given another few years under ludinus’ thumb he could have probably been swayed to team deicide, but that’s not where’s he’s at. where he’s at is hanging out in rexxentrum, getting made fun of by caleb for referring to the dawnfather as ‘an influential, if over anthropomorphized solar deity’. you can take the elf out of rosohna but you can’t take rosohna out of the elf. the gods? well, fjord and caduceus are very fond of theirs (tone of someone describing their friends’ baffling but periodically lifesaving hobby). he technically works for one now through the cobalt soul and he can respect her ethos. after that he runs out of things to say about them.

now the luxon, on the other hand… he’s watching this entire directors cut triple-feature like a hawk. trying to divine the secrets of the universe from a reality show and it might just work.

[filurig]

fibbla, tussilago's older sibling, also another part of the artist collective in sartrill!

fibbla can come across as a bit uncompromising and staunch in their views - especially in regards to art. if something is not to her taste, they will make it obvious - whether or not the recipient is a stranger or a friend is irrelevant to them. fibbla believes that the worst that can happen to art is stagnation, and therefore seeks to dabble in many different mediums, including painting, textiles, leatherworking and printing - although she is, admittedly, most charmed by different printing methods, perhaps partly because of the, in their view, near limitless possibilities and techniques. surprisingly, despite her sense of fashion, fibbla is actually rather interested in exploring the basic "essence" of a subject in their work - sometimes through simplification, other times through abstraction. 

despite her "uncompromising" attitude and often critical feedback to their peers, they don't actually seek to steer them away from what they seek to explore in their own work, rather, she believes that it's necessary for an artist to experience such criticism and pressure, even if harsh, in order to truly develop a strong identity - and this sort of extends to her general attitude about life. very "tough love" type mindset.

[markscherz]

Bird-reptiles is a butterfly-moth situation?

Precisely! These kinds of situations show us how wrong we have been for so long about the relationships among various animals. The pretty little boxes we like to make are often very, very wrong, phylogenetically, i.e., they are not compatible with the *actual* relationships among the organisms.

Here are a few other mind-fucks that have come to light as a result of modern methods being applied to traditional categories that turned out to be wrong:

• Snakes are lizards

• Termites are cockroaches

• Birds belong to lizard-hipped dinosaurs (Saurischia), not the bird-hipped ones (Ornithischia)

• All tetrapods are fish

• Insects are crustaceans

[black-and-yellow]

Bug AU stuff for YOU

[essektheylyss]

It's very interesting that both Allura in this episode and Essek in 2.124 frame the Luxon as a pre-Founding entity that has been in Exandria since before the Primordials or the pantheon, because it really does complicate the idea of gods as a single unified classification. Discussions around, say, the Raven Queen's ascension and Artagan's godhood are interesting of course, but lend themselves to a hierarchy of being and power—mortals and archfey must be elevated to a higher position to reach a place among the gods—but the Luxon throws a wrench into the hierarchy itself.

Fandom discussions around the Luxon referring to it as an entity tend to feed into this hierarchy as well, even when framing the Luxon in a positive light, by placing the classification of god or deity as a literal higher power in a contemporary and very sociopolitical conceptualization of "power," positioning anything in that role as inherently oppressive, and I think this also does the conversation a disservice. A better metaphor, in my opinion, is to compare deities to the fundamental forces of physics.

The way that dunamis has been said to intertwine with reality on a minute level and the Luxon's extension of divine power without direct communication suggests to me that its power in relation to other deities is somewhat akin to gravity itself—gravity is the weakest of the fundamental forces, but much farther reaching, and therefore it exerts a massive influence on the cosmos in spite of that lesser strength.* This echoes the complexities of trying to rely upon a hierarchy of being in this discussion, because such hierarchies are always constructed and imposed, not inherent. Sometimes they are constructed by those positioned at the top, and other times not, but from any angle, regardless of field, they tend to be used to justify some moral stance and standing.

This is utterly negated by the Luxon's existence. Whatever can be said about it as an entity, it seems to be an inherently amoral being—it does not seem to concern itself with moral questions, and very possibly has no capacity to do so. At the same time, dunamis seems to be enmeshed within the reality of the Material Plane and the Weave itself, perhaps even the Skein of Fate—as described, dunamis may well be the very particulate matter comprising the choices of everything in the cosmos and how those choices intertwine.

The Raven Queen, as an ascended mortal, can look upon the individual heroes of the story and acknowledge them, validate them, but the Luxon has no inherent position from which to look, and as such evades any positionality within the constructed hierarchy upon which the questions of this campaign hinge.

*Complicating this metaphor is the fact that gravity's weakness means it doesn't exert significant influence on a micro scale, but I do not ever purport to suggest that dunamancy is a one-to-one mirror of the realities of quantum mechanics, not least because Matt is definitely no more a physicist than I am.

[mllepomme]

the taxonomy section of the wikipedia article about things named after tolkien and his works is insane.

loving the crazy ass scientists who named an absurd amount of grass-miner moths after tolkien characters. there’s a STUPID amount of elves btw.

also,

there’s more. would you still love them if they were worms….

there’s way more including Shrimp Baggins Family, a bunch of attempts (some successful some not) to name wasps after elves, dwarves and hobbits and like one amoeba named after gimli but honestly just go look at it yourselves it’s SO funny

[eddieintheocean]

vampire squid taxonomy

vampire squids are cephalopods in the family vampyroteuthis

they are the only extant species in this family, but there are 3 extinct genera in this family. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1055790307001698)

despite the name, vampire squid are more closely related to octopi than squid, this is due to their 8 arms, placing them in the superorder Octopodiformes, instead of Decapodiformes (the squid and cuttlefish)

it was discovered in the late 1890s, and described later in 1903.

the feature that distinguishes the vampire squid from both octopi and squid, is two retractible filaments, which are separate from the arms, and this is why it is neither a true octopus, or a squid (Young, R. E. (1967). Homology of Retractile Filaments of Vampire Squid. Science, 156(3782), 1633–1634. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1721610)

[bitterrobin]

I've always felt Damians anger and desperation in his early times in Gotham was kinda justified. Like, you leave the life you've always known, you denounce your grandfather and more importantly your mother, you leave luxury and pride and honor and people who listen to you, respect you and the knowledge of having a place in the world, somewhere you belong - You leave it all behind. Sever from it.

And for what? For a father that's dead and didn't raise you? For strangers who hate you, strangers who claim allegiance to a family and a mission you can never join? A city unknown and treacherous? A home thats empty, an echo of its former self? The grief over never getting to know half of your heritage? The fresh judgement of every face you meet? The expectations and pedestals higher and harsher? To never belong anywhere so long as you exist in their world?

Which is why writing the ending of Graveyard and certain chapters of Chiroptera is so cathartic to me, because I'm trying to give Damian's anger an outlet to voice these frustrations, give him people to talk to that won't judge him with a prior Bat's lens. I've always wondered - why should he try so hard for them if they don't try for him? He's not a person to them, he's an obstacle, a thing to regard with caution, a danger to everyone. And frankly, Damian should be allowed to be that danger on his own, at least for a bit, before Dick and Alfred reign him in with the promise (the false hope) of a new purpose.

[oliveroctavius]

I got this ask on main but thought I'd pick it up here, my comics history/fashion ramble blog. I'd been wondering this exact same thing recently, and Google initially wasn't much help—Rocketeer replica jackets describe themselves only as "Rocketeer jackets" and the one Lobster Johnson cosplay thread just suggested ordering one of those.

The most curious part is the double seam and horizonal row of buttons that mark out the entire front as possibly being an unbuttonable "bib", like a plastron front. (Please don't ask how late in the game I worked out that "plastron" is the right word for that.)

The closest genuine Golden Age example of a plastron jacket I found was the military tunic style uniform of Blackhawk, created in 1941.

(Pics from the '52 movie serial (right) really show how awkward it is to combine open lapels + plastron. On a double breasted coat, that chest panel IS the bottom lapel, folded shut.)

Here's the thing: This outfit mirrors that of the Nazi ace pilot he fights in the origin issue, von Tepp (middle). And compare further to the far right: real life WWI flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, AKA the Red Baron, in imperial German Uhlan (lance cavalry) uniform.

"The Germans had designed such great costumes, we decided to use them ourselves," co-creator Cuidera is quoted as saying in Steranko's History of Comics, which (more dubiously, in my opinion) compares the look to the Gestapo or SS. Breeches or jodhpurs weren't strictly a Nazi thing at the time, but they do add to the overall effect.

Compare two other military tunic themed costumes from 1940, on Captain Marvel and Bucky Barnes. These are asymmetrically buttoned, and switch to a more classic circus strongman look below the waist.

But somewhere around 1975, with the Invaders book, Bucky gets a buttoned bib! There's something infectious about it—the symmetry, maybe. (Even re: the characters we started with; Mignola didn't draw Lobster Johnson with buttons down the right side, but every artist after does. And Spider-Noir wore a sweater under his coat until Shattered Dimensions introduced the double-breasted vest.)

If it didn't reach his belt, Barnes' button-on front + shirt collar combo would resemble a bib-front western shirt, like the one that became the Rawhide Kid's signature look in '56. (Or Texas Twister's in '76.)

This shirt entered the old-West-obsessed public imagination in the 1940s/50s largely because John Wayne wore it in several cowboy movies. In reality it was rare among cowboys, more common with firefighters and civil war era militia.

Military tunics, Western shirts, alright, but does anything match the style and material and era, or are these jackets a total anachronism? I tried looking into 1930s leather flight jackets and was surprised when the closest-looking results were marked as Luftwaffe.

It took me a bit to work out why: USAF and RAF issued standard flight jackets with a center closure. The Luftwaffe instead let their pilots buy non-standardized ones. The 'weird' double-breasted black German flight jackets were in fact fairly normal (but repurposed) motorcycle racing jackets.

Far left is an English biker's jacket that dates back to the 1920s. Even without the bib, this may be as close as you'll get to an authentic Rocketeer. The jodhpurs were pretty common to complete the look. (What was an early motorcycle anyways, if not a weird metal horse?) The first biker jacket with the now iconic off-center diagonal zip was designed in America in 1928 and yet as far as I can tell, not a single actual pre-war pulp hero wore one.

The greatest weakness of this post is that I haven't been able to find any of these artists' notes on how, exactly, they arrived at similar versions of this iconic Pulp Front Panel Jacket. I'm sure I've missed some things. But as far as I can tell, this jacket is an odd bit of convergent stylistic evolution from the above influences that's picked up enough momentum to now be self-perpetuating.

The problem with pulp heroes is that for the most part, they just wore clothes. The appeal of this jacket is actually very similar to what the 1940s thought the appeal of the bib-front shirt in westerns was: It's alien enough to feel "old". It looks like something invented before zippers or synthetic fabrics. It looks formal and militant but also renegade, rebellious. It also looks a little mad-sciencey*. It's a costume, but you can nearly fool yourself into thinking the past was weird enough that you could find something this cool on the rack.

If I wanted to end on some grand point, I could try to argue that there's a thematic throughline between fascist fashion, John Wayne movies, and throwback pulp. A manufactured aesthetic valorizing the violence of a fictional golden age... but I think the noir stylings of the post-Rocketeer comics in this lineup mean that, at least on some level, they know the "good guys" didn't dress like this.

*If I had another couple weeks of time to burn, I'd try to trace the visual history of the Howie coat in popular culture and investigate its possible connections to this. Alas, I do actually have a life.

[doyouknowhowtowaltz]

differentiating a few of my favorite Herods

[eurodyning]

thoughts on the taxonomy of fruits....

OKAY LISTEN I GET IT. I GET IT. I KNOW A BANANA IS BY BOTANICAL DEFINITION A BERRY. BUT GOD FUCKING DAMN IT. IT SHOULDN'T BE.

^ ME WHEN I GET WHOEVER MADE THAT CHOICE

(citrus fruits they could never make me hate you like this)

[knifeforkspooncup]

What you thought I was gonna see a fish with a name like Bony-Eared Assfish and not make it into a meme?

Also yes. Scientists talk in Times New Roman. Fish talk in Comic Sans. Everybody knows this.

[markscherz]

The eye of Uroplatus garamaso, the new gecko species my colleagues and I described yesterday. Check out that weird pupil! Four little diamonds in a chain.