#feet compare

[size11heaven]

[panthermouthh]

“You doubtless recollect these papers. Here they are. Everything is related in them which bears reference to my accursed origin… the minutest description of my odious and loathesome person is given, in language which painted your own horrors and rendered mine indelible. I sickened as I read.”

[solargeist]

i like bird grian designs, but i dont draw them bc my version isn't a bird, however, xelqua would have bird features bc hes a watcher, best of both worlds

[starheavenly]

hey just curious are meggs n op just REALLY big or are the seekers really that smoll?

[greenerteacups]

What do you think of jkr as a writer? I for one has always felt like she didn’t treat her female characters well. It felt strange, being critical of her when she was god queen of the earth, and also being 10

I think most of the problems in her books can be chalked up to genre hopping. Books 1-3 are perfectly good and serviceable children's books — great children's books, even! They have compelling, relatable characters and juicy mystery plots. They have problems, sure, but for the first three books someone's ever written — especially someone with little or no background in creative writing — they're really fucking good. So: there's her flowers.

The last four books pivot sharply into much more emotionally complicated and sociopolitically loaded territory, because they're describing a war. And it's hard to write children's books about war. I would venture you can't really do it, at least without dramatically misrepresenting what war is! And so Rowling makes the executive decision somewhere during the writing of Book 4 that she's not going to flinch away from that, she's going to go for dramatic realism, and she kills Cedric Diggory to let us know. People had died in Harry Potter before, of course — Quirrell gets sent to the fucking shadow realm, for example. But children haven't. (It also gives parents who are reading these books with their children a warning shot: shit is about to get significantly more real, think twice before you buy the next one of these for your 10-year-old.) After that, Rowling starts leaning much more into dramatic realism, and the fast-paced mystery-novel plotting of the first few books is replaced by a slow, simmering political conflict that unfurls over the course of about a million words.

The problem — besides the fact that she's picking one of the hardest things to write about, like, in all of literature, war is really insanely complicated and emotionally intense and hard to portray well — is that she's now trying to use characters, plot points, and technologies she developed for a children's series to enact a sprawling war drama among teenagers and adults. So Hermione, who was a reasonably precocious snobby eleven-year-old, becomes this sort of encyclopedic all-knowing savant of the wizarding world, who somehow remains functional and mostly even-headed despite her identity being the chief target of a prolifically murderous terrorist group. Draco Malfoy, a schoolyard bully whose primary tools included 1. namecalling and 2. telling teacher, JOINS said terrorist group (and admittedly does react reasonably, i.e., has a total crashout and takes to sobbing in a girls' bathroom whenever he gets a free minute). Dumbledore, who starts out as "whimsical friendly winky-wink trustworthy grandfather type", ends up being Magical Winston Churchill in a violent game of spycraft and espionage, eventually revealing he's only been keeping Harry at all these seven years because he wants to KILL him! And like, maybe really good technical writing could smooth out these transitions and make the first-order dramatic choices seem more natural, but Rowling is like, a Fine Writer, technically speaking. meaning she's reasonably consistent in characterization, her plotting is well-paced and believable, she has a clear authorial voice, and her prose is readable. personally, that's not enough to get me to buy into some of the changes that happen in the later books, and because she stuffs these things so full with new elements every installment, a lot of stuff ends up getting glossed over.

And like, I still love the books. I think they're wonderful, and they taught me how to read. but i can say that and also say that Rowling probably did herself a disservice by trying to write four giant war novels as sequels to her first three mystery children's books.

[giggly-argent]

yknow... idek if it would work as punishment for him like-

[fisheito]

callback to my tags from months ago:

now SWITCH

[sciderman]

You mentioned Hugh and Nicole and sex scene in movie and I am shameless so I RAN to look it up and about coughed up a lung

LET'S TAKE A REAL LONG LOOK AND GUESS WHICH ONE IT LIKELY IS EVERYONE

they fuck canonically in all these movies.

[front-facing-pokemon]

[size11heaven]

[joshoconnaissance]

Whoever figures out the bank robber's name first wins lunch for a week.

THE MENTALIST EPISODE OF THE WEEK ↳ Not One Red Cent (5.03)

[clownsuu]

A bunch! Of worms!! (Well, caterpillars, to be more accurate)

I absolutely adore your designs for the mob AU characters! (And your Mob!Barnaby is absolutely the best!!! He’s adorable!)

AUUUGGHHH THE HIGHEST HONORRRRRRR

[eyedruple]

none of you get veestro like I do

[maddymoreau]

Grant Turner and I commission by @bebbyb00

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Monday Musings: From Fins to Feet

About 131 million years after the first fishes appeared, the first tetrapod climbed on to dry land. Tetrapods are animals with four weight-bearing limbs (among other things but we're here to discuss limbs). Amphibians, reptiles,

birds, and mammals are all tetrapods. Yes, you are a tetrapod.

So where did all the tetrapods come from? Fish of course! You are a very, very derived fish.

And those poor fish had a lot of hurdles to jump before they could exploit the resources on dry land. The biggest one was how the heck they were going to move around up there. Fish cannot support their own weight, there's no need when the water does it for you.

In fact, marine animals in general use the water for support and will suffocate under their own body weight if beached. Water is one of the reasons whales can get so big while land animals are limited.

Skeletons had to make some major changes before they could be useful out of the water. The vertebral column of fish are adapted for the stresses of lateral stretching during swimming.

For a tetrapod, the main force acting on it is gravity. This means the backbone needs to be modified to keep the body from sagging between the limbs like a pair of overlarge pants not held up properly by a belt. (I mean, our ancestors went through a lot of effort to lengthen the limbs to make walking easier and some people go and sag their pants like the wish to be fish all over again.)

Not only must the spine be altered but so must the fins. They simply can't support weight let alone move that weight anywhere. That's not what they were evolved for.

Sarcopterygian fishes, also known as lobe-finned fishes, developed early arm bones in their fins, bones other fishes lack. This allowed them to pull themselves across land (whether that was underwater or not) much like an army crawl.

Eusthenopteron foordi is one such fish. Part of the family Tristichopteridae, it possessed very early forms of the modern tetrapod arm and leg. Its front fin was attached to the back of the skull and the limb bones were very short. These two characters combined to make movement of the front fin very limited.

Another lobe-finned fish of note is Panderichthys rhombolepis.

Its humerus was nearly twice the length of Eusthenopteron's and its radius was longer and wider, while its carpals shrunk.

Its humerus was also held more horizontally than vertically, closer to the tetrapod state. However, its pelvic girdle was less derived than Eusthenopteron.

The final sarcopterygian that nailed some of the transition from fully aquatic to partially aquatic was Tiktaalik roseae.

It has very robust bones in the pectoral fins, good for eventual bearing weight. However, it still retained the fish-like metapterygial axis, a line of bones which the fin radiates around.

It didn't quite have a wrist yet, but its fin was flexible like a wrist which may have helped anchor it in fast currents. Although not entirely preserved, the hind limbs were nearly as long as the front limbs, a tetrapod trait.

Then came the stem-tetrapod, Acanthostega gunnari. It possessed four limbs but the front limbs could not bend forward at the elbow and therefore could not be put in the weight-bearing position. Another remarkable thing about its feet was that it had eight toes! EIGHT! Seems a bit excessive if you ask me.

It's pelvic girdle was fused with the sacral ribs of the vertebral column which was novel for the time. (The pelvic girdle is unattached even from itself in fish.)

Finally, we have Ichthyostega stensioei. It had four robust limbs that could actually support its body on land for a short time.

And that is how vertebrates transitioned from water to land...at least as we know it right now. Tune in tomorrow for some trivia! Fossilize you later!