#also taxonomy

[kuteon]

bugs are so nice but i am soscared

if i give you facts about bugs would that help

[atthecenterofeverything]

"even if you don't personally identify with the label x, it's important to have a word to describe our common experiences. it's crucial we have a word we can all rally under. if it objectively describes you, it's useful as a way to organize and find community"

why is this label, specifically, and not another, considered the gold standard? what rhetorical weight does the idea of an "objective description" pull? when did this specific label arise and under what material conditions? what do the majority of the people who identify with this term look like? where do they come from and where do they live? what language is this label in? who do you include in those "common experiences", and who do you exclude? what taxonomizing system does identifying with this label make you a part of - what other words are the counterparts to your label within this system, and how did they arise? how have these systems been imposed and maintained throughout history, and in parallel to which other violent phenomena? what does it imply about the permanence of the self or a certain coherence of experiences throughout one's life? where does the idea of identity-based organizing (of fighting back based on a word we all find ourselves in) come from? where does the idea of identifying come from? how would you handle someone enduring violence who refuses, flatly, to claim this term or any other that you understand as coherent and in good faith? how would you handle someone enduring violence who claims that their label is the one that should be the gold standard, and everyone else should adapt to it? do you assume that everyone refusing any engagement with your taxonomizing system is unserious, apolitical, privileged, stupid, short-sighted, idealist? since when, and why?

[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

[essektheylyss]

okay re: my tags on the smartypants post the thing about standardizing the grocery store is that on the most basic level, you will fall into the "there are now 15 sets of standards" problem. but on a more practical level, you can't do it to begin with because there are major regional and cultural differences in both volume of demand for different food products as well as different conceptualizations of those products and their categorical relationships to one another, which is a major part of the reason grocery stores are not standardized in the first place. you also if course run into further trouble if you're considering more culturally specific grocery stores, especially ones with specific dietary requirements, in which case you will REALLY run into the "there are now 15 sets of standards" problem.

but it does pain me, because it has resulted in my biggest day-to-day pet peeve, which is that in Seattle, where there are no Italians, THE ENTIRE ARRAY OF CANNED TOMATOES ARE NOT WITH CANNED VEGETABLES. THEY ARE IN THE ETHNIC AISLE.

[black-and-yellow]

Bug AU stuff for YOU

[sturnellamagna]

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

[unpretty]

My kink taxonomy hell adjacent gripe is that I *am* into mean stuff (humiliation, force fem, degradation, ect) but as soon as the story starts trying to convince me that actually, this is cosmically right I have to backpedal entirely. Like "ooooh well he was an asshole so he deserves to be forcefemmed" "oooh she was rude so she deserves to be humiliated" "actually this predicament bondage is a force for justice" NO! I want bad things happening to people who don't deserve it.

you're so right for this

[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)

[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)

[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.

[gl1tchxr]

animals all have human level intelligence in my world, so it wouldn't make sense for them to herd sheep and cows or have dogs and cats for pets. so what if insects filled those roles? that opens the door to so many cool concepts. huge fluffy moths kept for their silk, mantises as livestock guardians, cricket coops instead of chicken coops, beetle species being bred for the brightest colors and shiniest shells to compete in beetle shows, tarantulas as beasts of burden, dragonflies as aerial mounts. honestly just scale them up and bugs can do anything