#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

[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

[pantestudines]

"Stem group" this and "Crown group" that. Stop letting neontologists control you. Who cares if the group is related to Extant creatures or not. We can name groups based on whatever the hell we think is best. Paleontologists rise up. We have nothing to lose but our chains