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floatingcatacombs · 21 days ago

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UFO 50 Abducted Me For 159.2 Hours

12 Days of Aniblogging 2024, Day 4

I love video games...

UFO 50 may love video games more than me, though. It’s a preposterously ambitious compilation of fifty small-to-medium-scale games, developed and published by Mossmouth, which here refers to Spelunky creator Derek Yu and like five of his buddies.

These are retro-styled games, with three or four asterisks apiece on ‘retro’ and ‘styled’. The overall aesthetic approximates the eight-bit period, with a limited color palette and sequenced music, but things get tricky after that. There’s deliberate anachronisms everywhere, with a heavy focus on genres and mechanics popularized far after the NES era. There’s games in this collection that take elements from real-time strategy, 4X, deckbuilders, tower defense, platform fighters, and even immersive sims. The evolutionary lineage of games influencing other games is practically flipped on its head here! The Steam page for UFO 50 describes this as “a familiar 8-bit aesthetic with new ideas and modern game design”, which I think is a frankly bad way to describe the means by which these games constantly astound and surprise by playing with our expectations. It's the kind of collection where you boot up some shit titled "Waldorf's Journey" expecting a dinky little mascot platformer, and after twenty minutes of calibrating walrus trajectories you're forced to contend with the fact that Waldorf's Journey has imprinted itself into your very soul.

Only a few of the games in this collection are straightforward pastiches of popular NES genres – there’s a beat ‘em up, a space shooter, some arcadey sports titles, and a Bubble Bobble, but that’s about it. Everything else is either a novel idea or working within far more advanced genre mishmashes. The panicked unit reorganizing of Attactics, the death-based puzzle platforming of Mortol, the glorious Fire Emblem and Pogs mashup that is Lords of Diskonia - even when liberally borrowing from other games, it’s really creative stuff! I loved all the times when my initial assumptions of how the game would play ended up completely wrong. You may think Rock On! Island is a tower defense game, but there’s a secondary aspect of creating chicken-immolating factories to get more resources that practically supersedes the tower defense aspect in later levels.

Of course, these are the Spelunky guys, so procedural generation and roguelike elements feature heavily in more than a few of these games. That’s the biggest jump in plausibility – more than half of the games in this collection could hypothetically run on the NES with enough tweaks, but anything with enough randomness fundamentally could not. If you hate procgen with a burning passion then a fifth of the collection will probably be out of reach for you, but there’s plenty of bespoke design to go around as well.

UFO 50, as a collection of a defunct fictional company's game catalogue, conjures up the feeling of playing old games without the manual or a copy of Nintendo Power to help you out. For younger players it might invoke the times you tried to emulate NES games to see what all the older gamers were always going on about, devoid of the original context. There’s a real willingness on the part of UFO 50 to just drop you in and have you figure out the controls and strategy yourself. Because of this approach, the first ten minutes of any given game are often the roughest! That’s a wild trust fall on the developer's part, asking someone to stick through the period of confusion and frustration so that they can watch those emotions bloom into understanding, then competency, then joy. These “dude trust me” design moments are everywhere.

It doesn’t always work. Caramel Caramel has a straight-up backwards difficulty curve, Star Waspir has way too much going on on top of demanding shmup literacy in advance, and Porgy plus Divers are both extremely divisive for their slow and punishing starts, which definitely made me lose interest. But sometimes the difficulty and hostility actively draw you in, in a way that easier or more tutorialized games would not have. Rakshasa is a short but extremely difficult platformer inspired by Ghosts N’ Goblins that I just kept chipping away at in between trying out games. Rail Heist seems simple at first but is chock-full of emergent systems that let you truly rip the levels open if you think outside the box, something which is actively encouraged by the optional clear conditions. Onion Delivery is Crazy Taxi with tank controls and random events to make driving even more stressful. It's hell on earth and I love it for that. Mortol 2 also has very open-ended design, with each new run of 99 lives and one-hit deaths forcing you to rethink and optimize your approach until you find a way through its winding map.

The fifty games here are organized in chronological release date, with the “earlier” games being far simpler and often less polished than the later ones, even if their quality usually still shines through with gameplay. This is a bold move on Yu’s part. The first game in the collection, Barbuta, is a cryptic La Mulana-like with cheesy traps, clunky movement, and a truly painful learning curve. It is what the true game design freaks out there refer to as “kino”. I’m not on their level yet, but there is plenty in this collection for me to enjoy. Generally, I’ve found Eirik Suhrke’s contributions to be the most personally compelling to me on a gameplay level. Mooncat is an absolutely sublime platformer that forces you to relearn movement from first principles with controls that cannot possibly be described in text format. Campanella is a delightful little obstacle course of a game, and I had a fun time hunting for secrets in it. Warptank is a solid puzzle platformer, Pingolf is easily my favorite multiplayer game in the collection, and I’ve already praised Onion Delivery and Rakshasa. Surhke has a knack for fiendish little games where the difficulty comes across as more of a punchline than anything else. They’re bursting with character through the gameplay alone. I felt the drive to rise up to almost every one of his contributions, which is similar to how I feel about my favorite indie game developer, sylvie. I hereby award Eirik Surhke the UFO 50 Game Design Pervert Award. Who would’ve known that the Spelunky composer was as good of a designer as the Spelunky guy himself, if not more?

play mooncat. I am not fucking around

UFO 50 also has quite the elaborate metapuzzle, which is only really worth investigating once you’ve become familiar with the whole game library. It’s a good’n, though. The puzzle hunt unlocks a secret 51st game snuck into the collection by a disgruntled employee, chronicling the late days of the company with an atmosphere that feels hollow and downright wrong. The vibe is RPG Maker horror more than anything else, which is a cool and unexpected pull for this kind of compilation. Through Miasma Tower, the small team process that created UFO 50 is mythologized and problematized, with the fictional company UFO Soft undergoing serious financial and cultural problems, as well as implied fraud, cults, and even a missing person investigation. It was an incredible privilege for Derek Yu and company to be able to pour all of their time and skill into creating a game collection of this caliber without the pressure of money or deadlines due to the success of Spelunky, and Miasma Tower is something of a reckoning about that. Very happy it’s here.

UFO 50 isn’t for everyone. You have to be a fan of either retro games or indie games, ideally both. You have to have an open mind for getting your shit kicked in by both mechanical difficulty and initial game obtuseness. You need to be able to look past the deliberate anachronisms and learn to roll with the mechanical surprises that each game has to offer. But if you’re a weirdo like me, then maybe you’ll also sink a hell of a lot of time into superclearing more than two-thirds of the collection. If nothing else, it’s an amazing value proposition!

#12 days of anime #UFO 50

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alithographica · 4 years ago

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I encourage you to look upon your next avocado with a touch of wonder. You follow in the footsteps of giants.

Thanks to herofan135 on dA for introducing me to this concept!

Transcript below the cut.

Who Spreads the Avocado?

One major distribution route for seeds is to be eaten and carried long distances by animals. However, no modern native animal eats an avocado’s seed—it’s simply too big, and is poisonous to many species. It’s believed that it used to attract recently extinct megafauna like giant ground sloths, who were large enough to swallow the fruit whole. The avocado is an example of evolutionary anachronism. Evolutionary anachronism is a concept that refers to modern species (usually plants) that coevolved alongside now-extinct species, leaving them with abnormal traits in a modern context (like having large, toxic seeds that no modern animal will eat). There are many proposed examples of this phenomenon: • Honey locust pods are too large and tough for modern native animals, yet the seed coat must be damaged in order for the seed to sprout • Papaya seeds are poisonous or distasteful • Small animals can eat the flesh but not the seeds of osage oranges, and the thorns on the tree are spaced too far apart to deter deer, pointing to defense against a larger animal • American figs produce far too many fruits for the density of small animals in the area, possibly implying that they used to be eaten in greater numbers by larger animals

#scientific illustration #avocado #food #evolutionary anachronism #evolutionary biology #biology #my art #artists on tumblr #original art #science fact friday

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mykaeba · 1 year ago

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oo hi ty for the tag!! bit late, sorry!

last song: apocalypse 894 by stupeflip! some weird french rappers my brother likes and made me listen to, and i actually quite enjoy it :]

favorite colour: it has to be blue,, probably some greyish sadish blue from early morning times?

last movie/tv show: just rewatched the entirety of lotr with my roommate, was a blast!

currently watching: the owl house? i saw one too many fanart of hunter and had to know what that was about (still not there yet tho lmao).. i also started jjk recently!

sweet spicy savory: i have the sweetest tooth. spicy comes right after but i’m unable to handle anything too spicy despite liking it…..

relationship status: uuuuh- uh. um. celibacy (add meme here)

current obsession: it’s missing chommy hours…

last thing i googled: “evolutionary anachronism” it’s that very cool thing where a plant outlasts the species that were supposed to pollinate it/ distribute its fruits, i am very obsessed with that atm

no pressure tags: @areus-in-a-little-cave @two-wizards-in-a-trench-coat @becauseplot @blissfali @eekonis @thinkingaboutctommy @youreyeslookliketheocean @amagnifique (bcuz ik you won’t see this till forever and i find it funny) and whoever has never done one of these (i’d love to hear abt you!)

9 people I would like to know better

Thank you for tagging me @drewstarkeysbae!!

last song? Heartbeat, Childish Gambino

favorite color? Red

last movie/tv show? The 100

currently watching? Invasion

sweet/spicy/savoury? Spicy

relationship status? Talking

current obsessions? Jack championnnn

last thing you googled? Jessica Lord (bc Matt Rife is dating her lmfaoo)

No pressure tags: @reychvmpion @runningfrom2am @rvfecamerons @serial444killer @corpsebasil @heavensghost @heavenhillgirl @11133 @polishlolita

#tu for the tag lyra! always open to chat :]]

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foodreceipe · 4 years ago

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Why the Avocado Should Have Gone the Way of the Dodo

Its large pit and fleshy deliciousness are all a result of its status as an evolutionary anachronism.

Smithsonian Magazine K. Annabelle Smith

The avocado is a fruit of a different time. The plant hit its evolutionary prime during the beginning of the Cenozoic era when megafauna, including mammoths, horses, gomphotheres and giant ground sloths (some of them weighing more than a UPS truck) roamed across North America, from Oregon to the panhandle of Florida. The fruit attracted these very large animals (megafauna by definition weigh at least 100 pounds) that would then eat it whole, travel far distances and defecate, leaving the seed to grow in a new place. That’s the goal of all botanical fruits, really. Survival and growth via seed dispersal.

But the great mammals disappeared forever about 13,000 years ago in the Western Hemisphere. Around that time, North America lost 68 percent of its diverse Pleistocene megafauna, and South America lost 80 percent, Connie Barlow, author of The Ghosts of Evolution: Nonsensical Fruit, Missing Partners, And Other Ecological Anachronisms says. But even after this major shift in the land mammal population, the wild avocado still requires the same method of seed dispersal, which makes it somewhat of an evolutionary anachronism.

“After 13,000 years, the avocado is clueless that the great mammals are gone,” Barlow explains. “Without larger mammals like the ground sloth to carry the seed far distances, the avocado seeds would rot where they’ve fallen and must compete with the parent tree for light and growth.”

A fruit with smaller seeds, like a berry, for example, can be consumed whole and dispersed by small mammals, making the chances of fruiting in a new place higher.

After the giant mammals had died out, if an avocado tree was lucky, a jaguar might’ve found the fruit attractive—the cat’s stomach is designed for digesting large hunks of meat, leaving potential for swallowing the avocado whole, though there is no evidence to support this idea. Rodents like squirrels and mice may have also contributed, as they traveled and buried seeds in the ground, rather than letting it rot on the surface. Wild avocados were appealing to larger animals because it had enough tasty flesh to lure them in and could be eaten in one bite. The fruit had a larger pit and less flesh than today’s avocados, but it really served as a quick snack for big mammals like the mammoth. Barlow writes in “Haunting the Wild Avocado,” originally published in Biodversity:

The identities of the dispersers shifted every few million years, but from an avocado’s perspective, a big mouth is a big mouth and a friendly gut is a friendly gut. The passage of a trifling 13,000 years (since the Pleistocene extinction) is too soon to exhaust the patience of genus Persea. The genes that shape fruits ideal for megafauna retain a powerful memory of an extraordinary mutualistic relationship.

How the avocado still exists in the wild after surviving its evolutionary failures remains a puzzle. But once Homo sapiens evolved to the point where it could cultivate the species, the fruit had the chance to thrive anew. Back when the giant beasts roamed the earth, the avocado would’ve been a large seed with a small fleshy area—less attractive to smaller mammals such as ourselves. Through cultivation, humans have bulked up avocados so there is more flesh for us to eat.

The avocado has been a staple food in Mexico, as well as Central and South America, since 500 B.C. Spanish conquistadors discovered the fruit from the Aztecs in the 16th century, but the ahuacate, the Aztec word for “avocado,” wasn’t grown commercially in the United States until the turn of the 20th century. By 1914, the exotic fruit made an appearance on California soil. Roughly 90 percent of today’s avocados are grown in California according to NPR. But Barlow is quick to point out the difference between a cultivated avocado and those found naturally.

“The wild varieties of avocados that are still somewhat available have a thin fleshy area around the seed—it wouldn’t necessarily be something that we would recognize as edible,” says Barlow. “When we go to the store and we see an avocado on sale, it’s always a question of will this be one with a tiny seed, or will it be a batch where the seed takes up five-sixths of the space of the fruit?”

Ecologist Dan Janzen conducted groundbreaking research on these and other “anachronistic fruits” and found that the avocado isn’t alone in this regard. His research in the late ’70s in the neotropics— an ecozone that includes both Americas and the entire South American temperate zone—sparked a shift in ecological thinking regarding these evolutionary-stunted fruits. Other examples include: papaya, cherimoya, sapote and countless other fleshy fruits of the neotropics. Another surprising “ghost” you may see everyday: Honey locust pods scattered about your driveway. All of these fruits are not considered edible by most native mammalian standards today. Barlow continues:

“In 1977, however, was beginning to suspect that he—along with every other ecologist working with large tropical fruits of the New World—had been wrong in one very big way. They all had failed to see that some fruits are adapted primarily for animals that have been extinct for 13,000 years.”

“We don’t have the liver or the enzyme systems to detoxify our bodies from something like the avocado seed,” Barlow says. “But at the same time, the rhino which has been around for ages, can eat all kinds of things that are toxic to everyone else.”

A South American folk recipe for rat poison mixes avocado pits with cheese or lard to kill off unwanted rodents. Whether or not humans are supposed to eat avocados from an evolutionary standpoint, America produced 226,450 tons of the fruit and consumed 4.5 pounds per capita in 2011. The avocado, a true “ghost of evolution,” lives on.

More avocado facts to drop at your next party:

The Aztec word for avocado, ahuacatl means “testicle”. This is most likely because the avocado, growing in pairs, resembled the body part. After the arrival of Spanish conquistadors, Spanish speakers substituted the form avocado for the Aztec (Nahuatl) word because ahuacatl sounded like the early Spanish word avocado (now abogado), meaning “lawyer.”

The Spanish-Mexican word “guacamole” was derived from ahuacamolli, meaning “avocado soup or sauce,” made from mashed avocados, chiles, onions and tomatoes.

For reasons related to the word’s origin, the avocado is also considered an aphrodisiac. According to the book The Aphrodisiac Encyclopaedia, by the time the fruit traveled to Europe, the Sun King (Louis XIV) nicknamed avocados la bonne poire (the good pear) because he believed it restored his lagging libido.

The Hass variety of avocado was named after a postal employee, Rudolph Hass, who purchased the seedling in 1926 from a California farmer.

K. Annabelle Smith is a writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico who covers a wide variety of topics for Smithsonian.com. Her work also appears in OutsideOnline.com and Esquire.com.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/why-the-avocado-should-have-gone-the-way-of-the-dodo?utm_source=pocket-newtab

#Avocado #fruits and vegetables

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getoffthesoapbox · 7 years ago

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(VK Science anon) Haha of course, it’s no problem at all! I will admit that this discussion is certainly keeping me on my toes. Now I know that I need to reread Kaname’s past and that I don’t understand how a catastrophe could cause people to find each other unless it caused people to migrate to a certain area. However, neither one affect my theory! :) 1/?

(VK Science anon) The environment from 10,000 years ago would be different from the present and we can this in how temperature, sea level, precipitation, and even land changes. Now I’m noticing that some of the issues with understanding this theory are some misconceptions about mutations, so sorry, I am going to spam you this time, but I just want to clear some things up :) Again, mutations are random, spontaneous, so it’s hard to pinpoint a particular reason why one would even occur. 2/?

Just like everything else, DNA replication and repair is not 100% perfect. Sometimes there can be an issue during DNA replication like a nucleotide base is deleted, inserted, or paired incorrectly, which would affect the codon and the gene. As ironic as it sounds, there can even be an error during DNA repair. This would affect development and the genes that are expressed. There also isn’t an age range for genetic alteration. 3/?

Going back to my theory, the environment would only be a factor. It could affect anything from climate to people’s diet. In terms of people’s diets, we know that a pregnant woman’s choices can affect the development of a baby. In terms of mutations when someone is already born/alive, radiation and chemicals can act as mutagens, so location and even job can affect this. Earlier you mentioned a virus, which could also affect someone when they’re already alive. 4/?

In terms of cancer, it could affect gene regulation by keeping a gene “on” and increasing cell proliferation, which is bad. However, because mutations are random, none of these things have to be a factor, but because Hino only had humans birth Purebloods at one time in history, it led me to suspect that the environment somehow played a role during development (Not mutations after being born). So to clear some other things up, a mutation can either be positive or negative. 5/?

A mutation can be beneficial and it is actually mutations that can increase an organism’s fitness, which will lead to natural selection and evolution (yay!). An issue with gene(s) or even the chromosomes can still be referred to as a “genetic disorder” aka a disease (negative). Examples would be Sickle cell and Down syndrome. The question is whether or not you would want to look at naturally-born vampires as having a genetic disorder… 6/? (I think? This is a lot OTL)

Wow, I sent so much that tumblr briefly blocked me (=__=) Obviously, you don’t have to answer all of this at once. But back to my point: If you were to look at naturally-born vampires as having a genetic disorder, I think that would affect if you would classify them as a subspecies of humans (They would still be the same species regardless). However, I think you would have to weigh the pros and cons of their abilities to determine whether or not they can live healthy lives. 7/?

That would include considering the fact that they can’t get ill, they heal quickly, etc.; but then they are nocturnal, need blood, and live long lives, which based on VK and other stories I’ve read, is a bad thing. And then you would have to look at if the definition of a “healthy life” can be different from the norm of a human life. As far as evolution, I’ll leave that to the ecologists :P 8/?

I love that you broke tumblr’s ask quota. =P~~~~ But no, keep ‘em coming, I’m loving this conversation, and don’t worry about spamming my inbox–you’re my only anon for the most part these days, so it would be quite a tumbleweed-infested area without your contributions! ;D

Thanks for clearing up the whole mutations business for me–that’s really helpful, especially since the last time I took a science class was so long ago we’ve probably had a million revolutions since then. ;D I fully admit my ignorance on the subject!

Okay, so first, the origin of the mutation itself: If I’m understanding you right (and correct me if I’m getting any of this wrong), it ultimately doesn’t matter what “caused” the mutation–whether that be before or after the climate catastrophe mentioned during the Ancestor memory section–because a mutation could be caused by any variety of environmental factors that existed before the catastrophe or after it. And you think the progenitors could have been any age when the mutation hit them? That does make it seem more like a disease like cancer, where it just happens randomly and the body replicates it. And I think you’re right about the progenitors just migrating–that’s the way it appears to be in the origin chapters; the Hooded Woman is wandering around “gathering” all of those of her kind. It does make me wonder if a significant portion of regular humanity was wiped out during that climate catastrophe though, and perhaps that’s why it was easier for the purebloods to find each other during that time.

Anyway, so the progenitor purebloods still seem to be fairly rare in 10K years ago history; is it normal for spontaneous mutations to only affect a small fraction of people in the same way over large populations? Though that is true of cancer, so perhaps that’s true of the pureblood mutation as well, if it’s “built into” the DNA and just needs the right sequence triggered. But wouldn’t we see some variation in the mutations too? Purebloods all seem to be fairly consistent–they all have immortality, they all are invincible, they all can “turn” humans vampire, they all can create these familiar things from their own blood, they all can (I assume?) regress their cells to any point in their evolutionary development, they all can control their servants. It’s a pretty consistent mutation without much variation, other than perhaps the individual “magikal powahs” each pureblood gets. Thoughts?

Your musings on beneficial mutations made me think of something else too which I wanted to run by you: so okay let’s assume from an evolutionary perspective, the purebloods are a “response” to something in the environment, a protective response to preserve the species. The good things they get: immortality, attractiveness, power, impervious to disease. The only drawback is that they can “change” other humans into vampires and then control them. But evolution isn’t moral and doesn’t care about free will, so from a species preservation perspective this makes perfect sense–purebloods are an evolutionary answer to some kind of human devastation. They can “save” a human by turning them into a vampire. This human will then have vampire babies, who will also be impervious to whatever devastating factors were causing the necessity for the rise of the purebloods. So in that sense, the purebloods would be arguably beneficial from an evolutionary perspective, as they could protect and ensure the survival of the species by just changing all the remaining humans into vampires.

The problem, of course, is that clearly the environmental conditions reverted or altered to a state where purebloods were no longer necessary in order to keep the species moving forward. So now basically they’re almost an anachronism that can’t be destroyed because, well, their very evolution rendered them immortal and impervious to any damage (they’re too well-built, but not sustaining because of the harmful mental effects of immortality). So I would argue in the current day, their evolutionary advantages are working against them now, but only in a psychological sense, which leads to them killing themselves and/or not procreating (their birthrates are really low according to Kaname in the early Kuran Manor arc chapters, and we know they’re down to a mere 33 purebloods before the story even started, which is even lower with all the murdering Kaname did–33 purebloods isn’t remotely enough to ensure replacement rates, plus with all their darned inbreeding they’re not exactly going to be genetically diverse enough to ensure continued species existence). We know purebloods go bonkers the longer they live and have trouble coping with what to do with themselves for all eternity, but that may not have been the case had all of humanity been turned into vampires. There’s a term for that…the Gini Coefficient I think? Basically, the vampires are “comparing” themselves to their shorter-lived counterparts–humans–and are becoming unhappy precisely because of the comparison. If everyone was a vampire, likely most people would be happier, and the evolutionary advantage would be more apparent I think, especially since vampires can feed off each other and don’t actually “need” human blood? (The other potential problem is that purebloods clearly still have a regular human brain, which may not be properly equipped to deal with their uniquely immortal circumstances.)

Okay, sorry, went on a tangent there. Not sure where I’m going with all that rambling, but I would say what we have on our hands is a subspecies of human created to protect the survival of the species during a period of instability that no longer exists. But because this strain of human is so impervious to disease and death, it’s still around despite no longer being “necessary,” and thus it’s a nuisance to the original human strain, which doesn’t want to “evolve” into the new species (thanks mind control and blood sucking–both gross things!). Basically we’ve got free will clashing with evolutionary necessity I think. I still have a tough time grappling with the evolutionary necessity for “servant vampires,” but maybe that has to do with ensuring those members survive, because the will of the master vampire will protect them or something. (Which of course, master vampires misuse and abuse because, hey, that’s what humans do!)

I’ll answer your last ask separately, since it’s kind of moving us into a new topic. ;D

#vampire knight #vk science anon

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geopolicraticus · 6 years ago

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This most recent post of mine of appear on Centauri Dreams consists of material from four previous blog posts, edited together, revised, and expanded. The four earlier posts were Origin Myths of Spacefaring Civilization, The Archetypal Age and the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, Cognitive Descent with Modification, and Mythologies to Come among Spacefaring Civilizations.

I was pleased with the way this material came together into this longer essay, though I have easily left as much unsaid as I have explicitly discussed. For example, although I have discussed some of the relationships between societies and their mythologies, I have not here delved into the relationship between mythology and institutionalized religion, or the relationship between mythology and the central projects of civilizations, or the relationship between mythology and ideology, or the relationship between mythology and mystical experience.

I am especially interested in the relationship between mythology and mystical experience, because it is in mystical experience that human beings directly come into contact with the achetypal material that is the basis of mythological narratives. But just as we often misunderstand mythology and often fail to recognize it when we see it (especially when particular myths are woven into the structure of our own lives), so too we often misunderstand mysticism and mystical experience and fail to recognize it when we encounter it.

For most of us, mythology and mysticism seem to belong to a distant past, or perhaps even ought to belong to a distant past, making mythic and mystical survivals into the modern world a kind of anachronism. This is a mistake. displacing mythology (or mysticism) exclusively into the past implies myths no longer shape our lives or our societies, and this is not true. Mythology is pervasive in human experience, from the personal heroic narrative to the myths that explain and sustain entire societies over hundreds, and sometimes over thousands, of years.

And if civilization manages to survive into the far future, that far future will look back to us as a mythologized antiquity, constructed from mythic archetypes as much as remembered or reconstructed from historical records. This idea of our own mythic role in relation to a future society is the motivation of this essay, and it gives us a novel way to consciously orientate ourselves in regard to mythology. Rather than exclusively looking for how archetypes shaped the familiar myths by which we live, we can also consider how archetypal material shapes our lives and societies today, which will provide myths for tomorrow.

#mythology #archetype #spacefaring civilization #mysticism

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homedevises · 6 years ago

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The Five Reasons Tourists Love Garden Of Eden Found In Africa | garden of eden found in africa

The charcoal of bristles aboriginal Homo sapiens accept been unearthed at a armpit in northwest Africa. At about 300,000 years old, the fossils are a whopping 100,000 years earlier than the antecedent record, blame aback the agent of our breed by a cogent margin. And because the fossils were baldheaded in Morocco—far from the declared agent point of our species—the analysis is additionally resetting our notions of breadth and how avant-garde bodies evolved.

The Garden of Eden – Black History In The Bible – garden of eden found in africa | garden of eden found in africa

The agent of our breed is buried in abstruseness attributable to the poor deposit almanac and a complete absence of abiogenetic evidence. The hasty analysis of the anachronistic charcoal of bristles aboriginal bodies at a armpit in Jebel Irhoud, Morocco—along with affirmation of bean tools, beastly bones, and use of fire—is abacus an important allotment to this frustratingly abridged archaeological puzzle. As this analysis shows, our species, accepted in the accurate classification as Homo sapiens, has been about for a lot best than we realized—a hundred thousand years longer, to be precise. We can now say, with reasonable confidence, that the breed to which you and I accord to emerged in Africa about 300,000 years ago. It’s conceivable, of course, that archaeologists may acquisition earlier specimens in the future, but this now the high apprenticed for the alpha date of H. sapiens.

What’s more, our breed didn’t arise from a bedfast breadth of Africa, but rather, above the absolute continent. As abstraction co-author Jean-Jacques Hublin of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology explained at a columnist appointment yesterday, “There is no Garden of Eden in Africa, because the Garden of Eden is Africa.” Aboriginal beastly hominids from which we’re descended may accept emerged from the African interior, but the evolutionary drivers that created H. sapiens were in abode above the absolute continent, and in northwest Africa in particular. These abstracts now arise in two abstracted studies, both appear today in the science account Nature. In the aboriginal paper, the scientists call the fossils begin at the site; in the second, they assay and date the bean tools.

Before this new discovery, the oldest accepted samples of H. sapiens were baldheaded in Ethiopia, and anachronous to amid 150,000 to 200,000 years old. Strangely, however, Neanderthals and “archaic” Homo sapiens (i.e. bodies that anon pre-date H. sapiens, and who lived amid 300,000 and 150,000 years ago) diverged from a accepted antecedent about 500,000 to 600,000 years ago. The abridgement of deposit affirmation above-mentioned to 200,000 years ago led some scientists to conjecture that H. sapiens charge accept emerged rather suddenly, acceptable from a antecedent breed accepted as Homo heidelbergensis. (As an aside, any beastly with the chat “Homo” in advanced of it is advised a human).

This new discovery, which shows that an aboriginal adaptation of H. sapiens was blind out in northwest Africa some 300,000 years ago, now challenges this “rapid emergence” theory. After deviating from a accepted ancestor, a accumulation of age-old H. sapiens advance above Africa, gradually accepting the ancestry that would eventually appear to characterize our species.

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To ability this conclusion, the authors of the new abstraction accumulated new and old deposit evidence. Aback in the 1960s, beastly fossils were begin at the aforementioned armpit in Jebel Irhoud alongside some beastly bones. The fossils were originally anachronous at about 40,000 years old, and the charcoal were anticipation to be some anatomy of African Neanderthal. Unsatisfied with this interpretation, advisers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the National Institute for Archaeology and Heritage in Morocco absitively to renew the investigation, which circuitous new excavations at the Moroccan site. This led to the analysis of the fractional ashen charcoal of bristles individuals—three adults, one adolescent, and one child—along with bean tools, beastly bones, and signs of blaze use. The archaeologists had stumbled aloft an age-old cavern acclimated by aboriginal bodies to action and absorb beastly meat, primarily gazelles and zebras. And yes, the aboriginal archaeologists absent these bristles specimens—but in all fairness, the address were in-and-around a mine, which is now a behemothic quarry.

Using a address accepted as thermoluminescence, the advisers anachronous the altar baldheaded at the armpit to amid 300,000 and 350,000 years old, and used the bean accoutrement to date the fossils begin in and amid these artifacts. It’s now advised the oldest affirmation anytime begin of the age-old associates of the H. sapiens lineage.

Importantly, this analysis accouterment the bounded agent of our breed abroad from the autogenous genitalia of Africa. Hundreds of bags of years ago, the Sahara was abounding with forests and all-inclusive plains, authoritative it accessible for aboriginal hominids to bisect northwards appear what is now Morocco. In the case of these aboriginal H. sapiens, they were acceptable afterward herds of gazelles as they migrated above Africa, evolving new cerebral abilities forth the way—cognitive abilities that enabled them to actualize added developed accoutrement and accept circuitous amusing behaviors. By overextension above best of Africa, these hominids acquired the actual ancestry accept appear to ascertain our species.

Curtis W. Marean, an able on beastly origins at Arizona State University who wasn’t circuitous with the study, says the new analysis is important, and not absolutely surprising.

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“The antecedent age appraisal on the Jebel Irhoud hominin never fabricated sense, for two reasons,” he told Gizmodo. “First, the analysis was too ancient for the about adolescent age, and second…evidence…suggested that the Maghreb was alone during a time aback it was about absolutely actual arid. So this earlier age makes a lot of sense. I am blessed to see this aggregation break this problem.”

Marean says the fossils buck a arresting affinity to a audibly human-like skull, alleged the Florisbad skull, apparent in South Africa aback in 1932. “The affinity to [this] case suggests that at this time there was a pan-African citizenry that conceivably was the aforementioned species,” he said. “This is important to know, but conceivably not unexpected.”

It’s important to point out that the appellation “Homo sapiens” is not akin to the appellation “modern humans.” The age-old bodies begin in Morocco were hardly altered than bodies who are animate today, but these aberration weren’t cogent abundant for the advisers to aperture them into a abstracted species, or to cast them as yet addition bandage of age-old H. sapiens. By authoritative micro computed tomographic scans of the fossils, the advisers detected some ancient features, such as a longer, lower braincase, able countenance ridges, and a ample face. But they additionally had aerial cheekbones, a audibly modern-looking face, and teeth and jawbones that were about identical to H. sapiens. As Jean-Jacques Hublin acicular out at the columnist conference, “these bodies wouldn’t angle out if we were to accommodated them in the street.”

Archaeologist Chris Stringer from the Natural History Museum of London, who wasn’t circuitous in the study, says archaeologists and anthropologists should accept a ample analogue of Homo sapiens—but he didn’t consistently feel that way.

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“I acclimated to altercate that ‘anatomically avant-garde humans’—including fossils that about attending like us today—are the alone accumulation that should be alleged Homo sapiens,” he explained to Gizmodo in an email. “Now, I anticipate that anatomically avant-garde bodies are alone a sub-group aural the breed Homo sapiens, and that we should recognise the assortment of forms aural aboriginal Homo sapiens, some of which apparently went extinct.”

Indeed, abounding altered groups of bodies existed about this time, but it was Homo sapiens who eventually prevailed, overextension out of Africa some time amid 60,000 to 70,000 years ago, and again overextension added still into Asia, Australia, and North and South America. Our breed is all that’s larboard of the assorted beastly evolutionary “experiments” that transpired for hundreds of bags of years above abundant of Africa, and to a assertive admeasurement in Europe.

But as these new studies show, the defining aspects of our breed emerged as the aftereffect of our charge to move above our borders and constraints. How absolutely human.

[Nature: 1, 2]

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robertvasquez763 · 7 years ago

Text

The Once and Future Off-Roader: Land Rover’s Heritage Experience Hypes Its Next Defender

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Land Rover operates four off-road driving schools in North America—in Asheville, North Carolina; Carmel, California; Manchester, Vermont; and Montebello, Quebec. Each affords opportunities to drive unpaved terrain ranging from moderately difficult to creepy-crawly. The schools are a profitable enterprise that also serves a bigger purpose: selling new vehicles. Participants can use their personal vehicles or pilot a new Land Rover or Range Rover from the school fleets, but this year the parent company put a little spin on the programs, adding vintage Land Rover Defenders to the school inventories.

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The idea came from Kim McCullough, Jaguar Land Rover vice president of marketing for North America, a serious enthusiast whose résumé includes participation in Italy’s Mille Miglia revival in a personal Jaguar XK120. She saw this Defender Experience program as a way to help promote Land Rover’s impending 70th anniversary in 2018.

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“Since it is the 70th anniversary, we want to help keep it alive,” said McCullough. “We thought, let’s put it out there and build some awareness.” And, of course, with a new Defender anticipated in the not-too-distant future, there’s more to the awareness aspect than touting Land Rover’s history.

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Active Heritage

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These Defenders are definitely not new vehicles. The Defender 90s and 110s are parceled out, one per school, for what is called the Land Rover Heritage Program. The numerical designations relate to their 90- and 110-inch wheelbases. The program is run separately from the standard Land Rover Experience, for which the entire Land Rover brand portfolio—Discovery, Discovery Sport, Evoque, Range Rover, and Range Rover Sport, and Velar—is represented.

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Let us put a finer point on “not new.” Tracing its roots back to the company’s 1948 origins, the Defender (née Series I) went through a half-dozen evolutionary updates before Land Rover punched its ticket on January 29, 2016. By that time, the Defender 90 had been absent from U.S. showrooms for almost 20 years. And the funky four-door 110, with its external roll bars, was in North America for a single model year, 1993, as a limited edition; 509 were sold in the U.S. and 23 in Canada.

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Like any out-of-production vehicle, especially one as well loved as this, Defenders have become serious collectibles, commanding escalating prices at auction. “We’ve already seen some going for six figures,” said McCullough. Also commanding six figures: a Series 1 restored by the factory.

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Rare as they may be here, some two million Defenders found their way into customers’ hands worldwide over the vehicle’s 67-year run, and about 75 percent of them are still in use, according to Land Rover. In the end, although sales were still reasonably strong, profitability kept losing altitude because of high labor costs. As a survivor from another era in manufacturing, the Defender’s assembly entailed too much handwork.

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The Quail

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We signed up with the Land Rover school headquartered at the Quail Lodge in California’s Carmel Valley. Our Defender was a hardtop 90, model year 1996, and it was a testament to the assembly standards of its time. The body panels, for example, are secured by rivets, and panel gaps seem to have been conceived for auxiliary ventilation. External door hinges enhance the Defender’s rugged persona and also allow for easy removal of the doors. Another anachronism is that the Defender requires multiple keys: one for the ignition, one for the side door locks, and a third for the gas cap. The interior is spartan by today’s standards—no touchscreen, no navi, no Wi-Fi, minimalist audio—and our example showed signs of its two decades in service.

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While this is clearly a blast from the past, we are not talking Fred Flintstone here. There’s a 3.9-liter pushrod V-8 under the hood making 182 horsepower and 232 lb-ft of torque, mated to a five-speed manual transmission. The four-wheel-drive system employs a manually locking center differential and open differentials at both ends. The Defender rides a coil-spring suspension with control arms and anti-roll bars front and rear. Minimum ground clearance is 9.0 inches, maximum fording depth 20.0 inches, maximum forward approach angle is 51 degrees, and maximum departure is 36 degrees—figures that would be impressive on any current Land Rover or Range Rover product you can buy new today. There are disc brakes at all four corners, squeezed by four-piston calipers front and two-pistons rear.

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While these specs aren’t particularly impressive today, particularly in contrast to a Jeep Wrangler Rubicon, in the context of their times the Defenders were as rough and ready as any. And if the ’96 Defender seems a little dated, consider its distant ancestor. The design for the original Series I Land Rover was derived from that of a World War II Jeep, and it was primordial by today’s standards. The 1.6-liter pushrod four was rated for 50 horsepower, the suspension employed elliptical leaf springs, and concessions to comfort were few.

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On the other hand, the Series I box section frame was as solid as a bridge, the electrical system was 12 volts—a rarity at the time—and the four-wheel-drive system was similar to that of our ’96 Defender: open diffs, with a manual two-speed transfer case, a manually locking center differential, and a four-speed manual transmission.

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The Carmel Labyrinth

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Land Rover’s Carmel Valley school involves a labyrinth of trails in the heavily wooded heights above the valley. During the dry summer months, the trails aren’t particularly difficult; occasional patches of deep dust pose the most significant traction challenges, and those are brief.

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It becomes more interesting in the winter, when rain makes the trails slurpy, but wet weather had not yet arrived when we made our visit in the late fall. Nevertheless, we emerged with a solid respect for this iconic Land Rover. It had a no-nonsense persona, but its off-road fun-to-drive factor was high.

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“When you’re driving the Defender,” McCullough observed, “you’re involved. When you’re in a manual Defender, you’re more involved.”

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Accompanied by Justin Demayo, a Monterey-area native who runs Land Rover’s Carmel Valley school and knows every twist and turn of its trails, we buckled up and rolled out of the parking lot and onto dirt.

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Two decades equate to old age for most vehicles, but our veteran Defender exhibited no geriatric symptoms as we motored up and down the dusty heights above Quail Lodge. The D90 trudged up even the steepest hills with only occasional brief episodes of wheelspin, motored down equally steep downhills at a comfortable crawl, and generally inspired confidence.

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Suspension compliance was surprisingly benign, on par with a new Discovery we tried for contrast, at least in the dirt (we didn’t exercise the Defender on pavement). And nothing scraped underneath in the deep ruts we encountered from time to time.

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Demerits? Very minor. The worm-and-roller hydraulic power steering, though surprisingly tactile, was slow by contemporary standards—3.8 turns lock-to-lock. And for a vehicle with a 92.9-inch wheelbase, the 38.4-foot turning circle seemed more appropriate for a World War II landing craft. More than once we had to execute three-point maneuvers to make it around tight turns without scraping timber, turns we made in one pass with the Disco. But that in no way diminished the day.

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The Price of Play

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Viewed simply as an automotive novelty, the Defender Experience is an entertaining retro trip, albeit an expensive one—$1200 for half a day or $1500 to play all day.

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But as already suggested, there’s more to this program than lending an historic element to the 70th anniversary season. Land Rover CEO Ralf Speth has already acknowledged that an all-new Defender is on the near horizon. The question is what will it be and when. Speth has been quoted as saying that the new Defender will utilize elements from the current Land Rover hardware inventory and that he has driven the prototype, pronouncing it “even more capable” than its predecessor.

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Land Rover has also let it be known that the resurrection will entail a trio of Defender models, including a high-performance SVR edition heated up by the Jaguar Land Rover Special Vehicle Operations hot-rod shop. Beyond that, it’s all speculation.

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Defenders of the Faith: We Drive Every Generation of Land Rover Defender

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Cars Worth Waiting For: 2018 Land Rover Defender

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1997 Archived Comparison Test: Land Rover Defender 90

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However, it does seem clear that the revivalist Defender will bear little, if any, resemblance to the DC100 concept vehicle that Land Rover displayed at the 2011 Frankfurt auto show. The Defender faithful dismissed that one as wimpy. As McCullough observed, “That’s why we put things out there, to get consumer feedback.”

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And the Land Rover Heritage Program? “It’s a fun thing to do—keeps the conversation going. And even though it has been 20 years since there’s been a Defender in the U.S., there’s still a core of enthusiast interest.”

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eddiejpoplar · 7 years ago

Text

The Once and Future Off-Roader: Land Rover’s Heritage Experience Hypes Its Next Defender

Active Heritage

The Quail

While this is clearly a blast from the past, we are not talking Fred Flintstone here. There’s a 3.9-liter pushrod V-8 under the hood making 182 horsepower and 232 lb-ft of torque, mated to a five-speed manual transmission. The four-wheel-drive system employs a manually locking center differential and open differentials at both ends. The Defender rides a coil-spring suspension with control arms and anti-roll bars front and rear. Minimum ground clearance is 9.0 inches, maximum fording depth 20.0 inches, maximum forward approach angle is 51 degrees, and maximum departure is 36 degrees—figures that better those of any current Land Rover or Range Rover product you can buy new today. There are disc brakes at all four corners, squeezed by four-piston calipers front and two-pistons rear.

The Carmel Labyrinth

“When you’re driving the Defender,” McCullough observed, “you’re involved. When you’re in a manual Defender, you’re more involved.”

The Price of Play

Viewed simply as an automotive novelty, the Defender Experience is an entertaining retro trip, albeit an expensive one—$1200 for half a day or $1500 to play all day.

Defenders of the Faith: We Drive Every Generation of Land Rover Defender

Cars Worth Waiting For: 2018 Land Rover Defender

1997 Archived Comparison Test: Land Rover Defender 90

- from Performance Junk Blogger 6 http://ift.tt/2CPkDqz via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Performance Junk Blogger 6

0 notes

jesusvasser · 7 years ago

Text

The Once and Future Off-Roader: Land Rover’s Heritage Experience Hypes Its Next Defender

Active Heritage

The Quail

While this is clearly a blast from the past, we are not talking Fred Flintstone here. There’s a 3.9-liter pushrod V-8 under the hood making 182 horsepower and 232 lb-ft of torque, mated to a five-speed manual transmission. The four-wheel-drive system employs a manually locking center differential and open differentials at both ends. The Defender rides a coil-spring suspension with control arms and anti-roll bars front and rear. Minimum ground clearance is 9.0 inches, maximum fording depth 20.0 inches, maximum forward approach angle is 51 degrees, and maximum departure is 36 degrees—figures that better those of any current Land Rover or Range Rover product you can buy new today. There are disc brakes at all four corners, squeezed by four-piston calipers front and two-pistons rear.

The Carmel Labyrinth

“When you’re driving the Defender,” McCullough observed, “you’re involved. When you’re in a manual Defender, you’re more involved.”

The Price of Play

Viewed simply as an automotive novelty, the Defender Experience is an entertaining retro trip, albeit an expensive one—$1200 for half a day or $1500 to play all day.

Defenders of the Faith: We Drive Every Generation of Land Rover Defender

Cars Worth Waiting For: 2018 Land Rover Defender

1997 Archived Comparison Test: Land Rover Defender 90

- from Performance Junk WP Feed 4 http://ift.tt/2CPkDqz via IFTTT

#IFTTT #Performance Junk WP Feed 4

0 notes