#if there are birds that implies dinosaurs once existed

[tanadrin]

the inability to use modern expressions like "jesus christ" and "oh my god" when writing people speaking in a modern, colloquial fantasy in fiction is actually really awkward sometimes. because almost anything you replace it with is going to sound naff as hell. tempted to just leave the culturally-contextual oaths in and trust people to understand that they're translation conventions. turn linguistic smeerps into rabbits, as it were.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

None of these things imply the thing transitioned from is lesser or bad, given many of them still exist - and none imply the thing transitioned to is better or good, given many examples of each often go extinct regularly :)

[inventors-fair]

Moral Support: Full Commentary

Welcome to the full card commentary! This card contest was mechanically fairly prescriptive in some major ways, so I was pretty pleased to see such a wide range of approaches. Thanks so much for all of your submissions! They were a blast to read, and I hope you’ll check out what everybody produced this week. - @teaxch

@abzanhero - The Core-Piercer

This card combines several things that Dwarf cards have cared about in the past in a fairly elegant way. On a creature, an ability that wants you to deal damage to creatures and trample have mild tension, but it’s less of an issue on an equipment, which can be used on both offense and defense. I’m not sure if I get the flavor of specifically getting treasure when a creature is damaged, but the “big drill” making treasure is sensible enough.

@alextfish - Uprising of the Downtrodden

I went back and forth on this card. Specifically, Revolt cards tend to have the trait that they make sense when played after combat damage has been dealt, as that’s the most common time that permanents leave play in many formats. A tribal Trumpet Blast isn’t generally useful played after combat damage. The card is pretty clever, however, in that it gives the power boost a function when played with Revolt. The design of the card is also clever in that the card may legitimately be worth running in a deck that lacks Rebel tribal in limited, as it’s still a Lightning Strike (at least for creatures and planeswalkers)  that leaves a token behind with Revolt, which is solid.

There’s no special synergy with the existing Rebel mechanic other than that Rebels are good at getting multiple creatures onto the board, but the Rebel mechanic has some play issues, so it’s reasonable that they’d probably go in another direction if they brought the type back.

@bread-into-toast - Spray of Strikes

I love this as a Hydra-themed card design. Hydra’s don’t have a long history of fighting multiple things, but it makes a lot of sense as a place for the creature type to go.

While it’s very slightly different, I suspect that this may be templated as “Target creature you control deals damage equal to its power to each of X target creatures your opponents control. Each of those creatures deals damage equal to its power to that creature,” or something along those lines. It’s a lot clunkier, but it avoids confusion about whether your creature can die before all of the fights happen. (It cannot; even if it takes damage greater than or equal to its toughness, state-based actions will not be checked until the card resolves completely.)

@chungus-supreme - Sea Shaper’s Cant

Permanent unmarked changes to land types aren’t unheard of, but they are uncommon; unless there’s a specific environment reason that this must be an instant, I feel like this could be implemented as an aura with Enchant Land, Flash, and an ETB ability that puts an Islandwalk counter on a Merfolk.

@corporalotherbear - Threefold Sun’s Zenith

This card has a very clever Modern Horizons-style concept, tying the Threefold Sun to the Sun’s Zenith cycle. You have to invest a ton into this card before it starts to approach a good deal, but that fits in reasonably with the general go-big strategy that dinosaur decks typically have. I think that the decision to avoid tying the effects directly to the three-card Sun’s Avatar cycle makes sense; there’s not really an obvious way to scale the white one’s effect.

@deg99 - Hurloon Hymn

The global enchantment that makes a single token on ETB isn’t a commonly used design tool - typically they just attach the enchantment effect to the creature directly (which also makes it easier to remove.) This is a reasonable application of the technology, in the vein of Liliana’s Mastery. I like the connections to both very old and more recent lore in the name and flavor text.

@demimonde-semigoddess - Crash the Workshop

I’m assuming that, based on the implied Kaladesh setting, that this card is from an artifact-heavy set, which I think is pretty important to its design. In an environment without many targets, this is a moderately swingy (and potentially frustrating) sideboard card at best, and also potentially misleading - you don’t want to maindeck this card in a typical limited environment no matter how many Gremlins you have. Fortunately, that’s likely not a concern.

@dimestoretajic - Auntie’s Blessing

I think this card is really interesting in that it uses a creature type restriction to focus less on something that the tribe is good at and more as a limitation based on what the tribe typically isn’t that great at. This aura is strongest when it’s on a large, evasive creature, and goblins are typically neither. That helps keep the snowball potential of this card in check. I do think that this card could be less color-intensive; triple red is a lot to ask when the card already has several hoops to jump through. (On the other hand, many Goblin decks historically have been mono-red; this is more of an issue if Goblins are also in another color, e.g., black, and for limited.)

@gayagendaofficial - Phoenix Frenzy

Phoenixes have a little bit of history with instants and sorceries, including multi-format star Arclight Phoenix, so while this card only touches indirectly on Phoenixes’ most prominent gimmick, it still makes a degree of sense. This card becomes very interesting and complex if you have the ability to trigger it multiple times in a turn (the ease of doing so varies widely with the number of Phoenixes in the environment), because it allows you to cast the same card from your graveyard multiple times in a turn, including itself, provided you can supply multiple Phoenix triggers. Cards that let you cast instant and sorcery cards from your graveyard in some fashion typically include some clause that keeps them from being used more than once. The fairly major Phoenix-related limitation may be sufficient to make this unnecessary, but given that this card is in a set that has Flashback already, it could give the spells Flashback 0 instead of letting you cast them from exile, if that’s something you wanted to avoid.

@ghoulcaclulator64 - Sylvan Funeral

This card is on the lower end of value if you’re not getting the tribal effect, although accepting a bit of card disadvantage to get your bomb back is something that could plausibly be worth it in limited. This card could probably be bumped up a whisker; Find/Finality is a rare, but Survivors’ Bond, which compares favorably to this card, is just a pretty good common. 

@gollumni - Bloodrage Strike

Commons are hard to pull off in the Fair in the best of times (well, except for weeks like the current week, where being common is required). They tend to not be as splashy or novel, and this week in particular lent itself to more complex designs. That said, I appreciated this common’s elegance enough that it only just missed the winner’s circle. An effect like this has never been done quite so simply or elegantly; there are a few cards that care about the type of the sacrificed creature, but in all cases it’s a component of a more complex card.

@grornt - Howling Snowstorm

Yetis don’t have a strong existing mechanical identity, so this is as good as any. The Yeti bonus here is pretty tame, as this will generally be a card played later in the game (if not as a finisher entirely), but the discount is still good tempo. That this is a Cantrip is interesting as it encourages the use of the card to push through some damage mid-game, rather than only using it to close games out, which is the most common use of cards that tap all of your opponents’ creatures.

Currently, all printed Snow instants and sorceries care about snow mana or cards in some way, but not all Snow creatures or lands do, so that doesn’t seem to be a hard rule in general. (It appears that Kaldheim used the rule that only cards that care about Snow or produce mana are Snow, but other sets haven’t hewn to this.)

@hiygamer - Mining Rig

The decision to tie the treasure production specifically to tapped Dwarves is really smart on this card. It not only makes a certain amount of flavor sense and keeps fresh dwarves from immediately adding to your treasure total (unless they have Haste or help), but it pushes the deck to generally be active, rather than just playing a bunch of dwarves and doing nothing with them and winning a few turns later off of a giant spell.

@hypexion - Carrion’s Call

Magic has done a bit of bird-graveyard interaction before, generally with the flavor of carrion birds, so even though Birds’ primary mechanical identity is just that they fly, this feels reasonably connected to the tribe, especially as it exists in black. This card is a nice “zero or more” tribal card, which isn’t something the contest naturally lends itself too, and the overall flavor package is very tight.

@i-am-the-one-who-wololoes - Plague Rite

While it’s common for triggered abilities to appear after static abilities, on this card that ends up burying the lede a bit; even in an environment very heavy on -1/-1 counters, the main selling point of this card is the third of the three abilities. That’s a fairly minor point, however. (The other abilities do combo with Everlasting Torment and things that grant persist, at least.)

Removing -1/-1 counters from your creatures (without moving them somewhere else) initially felt a little odd in black, but the overall package of the card sells the general idea of the counters being spread around. Additionally, black does have the little-used ability to remove arbitrary counters from permanents.

@ishmael-urquhart - Angelic Restoration

As near as I can tell, white’s never gotten a simple sorcery that just brings back a creature with low mana value, so this is a good find. In some ways, I wish that the two options for this card were more parallel, rather than one bringing the creature back to the battlefield and one putting it into your hand, although I’m not sure if the card could cost three mana if it could bring back any Angel to the battlefield. Currently, the second of the two options is a bit overcosted, but it’s still something you’re realistically choose late game some of the time.

@jsands84 - Bountiful Hive

This card very barely missed the Winners’ Circle cut. This is a new mechanical identity for insects, but it’s one that makes sense for insects in green and white, which is an especially appropriate color pair for social insects, like those printed on the card. (Also, Insects don’t have a terribly strong existing color identity.) This card could probably be a rare; the Lorwyn tribal reveal lands probably don’t have to be rares, but adding the extra ability might push it there.

Minor nitpick - I’m assuming that the last ability should read “tap an untapped insect...”

@lesbian-verdeloth - Stand Against Tyranny

Not many people submitted Tribal cards, but this one certainly merits the type. It’s largely doing the same trick as Bound in Silence, a card that I personally consider the single best and most interesting deployment of the Tribal card type, but on a card that more directly supports the Rebel game plan. If anything, this may support the Rebel game plan a little too well; the mere threat of this card makes it hard to profitably interact with a Rebel deck’s board as long as a card that can search for a Rebel 3-drop is on the board.

@loreholdlesbian - Lycanthropy//Form of the Alpha Wolf

This card has some good flavor, although it’s very complex. A “Form of the Dragon” card for being a Werewolf is really clever, and a DFC that uses the established werewolf mechanic is a great way to sell what’s going on. 

I think the card may be a bit on the weak side. The turn you play it, it basically just gives you a 1/1 and halves your life total, which isn’t great for three mana. It generally won’t transform until the beginning of your opponent’s upkeep three turns after it was played, if you forgo playing anything on your next turn. While this is how all cards with the Werewolf mechanic work, generally the front side of a Werewolf card is at least a mediocre creature for its cost.

The back half of the card is also somewhat complex in terms of nesting ability dependencies. If you control a 3-power human creature when the card transforms, there’s a three-deep nesting of abilities determining your new life total. That’s not something alien to Magic, but it’s rare that it’s all on the same card.

@maizenolo - Statue Garden

I’m legitimately not sure if the game rules can recognize “Destroyed by a Gorgon” - that seems to be new technology, and I’m not sure whether there are rules issues with it. Assuming it works, this is a cool and flavorful thing for Gorgons to be doing.

I’m not sure if the ability is the sort of thing that necessarily goes on a land; lands rarely have repeatable, board-affecting triggered abilities of this sort. A statue garden is a place, but I would generally expect to see this effect on an artifact or enchantment.

@misterstingyjack - Renais, Prince of Beasts

Because the contest for this week disallowed creature cards, there were a limited number of ways to make cards that could take advantage of their own tribal effects. Making tokens is the easiest, but this approach is also very cool. This design also allows for a very highly tribal planeswalker (none of the loyalty abilities do anything without beasts) that’s still functional on its own.

The first ability may need to read “number of loyalty counters on him,” but that’s just a minor templating issue.

@morbidlyqueerious - Mycelial Reinforcement

The tribal Winding Constrictor effect plays very well with both the spore counter mechanic historically associated with fungi and with the general Doubling Season strategy that the tribe tends to adopt in Commander. There’s potential for slight rules confusion with cards like Ghave (Ghave enters with only one extra counter), but decks that play cards of this sort already potentially deal with that interaction, so that may not be that big of a deal.

@naban-dean-of-irritation - Vantrian Tactics

Even with just a few available targets, this is a fairly decision-dense card; the number of possible permutations grows pretty quickly. That’s not unique among Magic cards, but this card asks the player to make the decision every turn, and the nature of the chosen keywords is such that differentiations will often be slight, and the total impact of the card is fairly moderate. Outside of a handful of specific interactions (Infect, etc.), First Strike is generally just a worse version of Indestructible, although I don’t know that that’s necessarily a strike against the card, and can help experienced players make decisions more quickly, as its exceedingly rare that it’s worth it to give something first strike until you’ve already allocated the Indestructible.

@nicolbolas96 - Ritual of the Nezumi

This card is another great example of using a tribe to limit the impact of an otherwise potentially very dangerous effect. There are certainly some good rats out there, but it’s a very narrow set as a whole, and limited in the sorts of things that appear on the cards. I also like that this card heavily encourages spreading the mana out over several rats or rat-abilities. There may not be much in the way of specific reasons for this card to work with rats rather than with some other tribe (although there are some decent rat token generation options), but rats do fall in the window of being plentiful enough and interesting enough that a tribal card that only works with them is interesting without being so omnipresent that a ritual that also functions as a spell copier is dangerous.

Black hasn’t gotten many mana-positive rituals recently - Culling Ritual is the last new one I know of, and may be the only one in Modern. It’s still nominally in Black’s pie as of the most recent Mechanical Color Pie article when some other cost is involved, however, so this card seems fine.

@nine-effing-hells - Nature’s Majesty

“Power four or greater” is a theme they’ve used a couple times in RG, and that’s also where similar themes often live. This card extends that to blue; I’m assuming that this appears in a wedge product where the theme lives in those colors and where the referenced creature types also are prominent there. In that context, it makes a lot of sense, and clearly spells out a path for a deck.

This card does something that a few multi-tribe submissions do, which is to require colors that one of the tribes isn’t likely to be playing in a dedicated tribal deck. There are technically a few blue plants, but a plant deck that wants to play this plant tribal card is probably mono-green or green-black. That said, the pool of plant cards that trigger the effect to begin with is pretty small, so barring new plants being released alongside this card, this is probably mostly for beast and elemental decks to begin with. 

@pocketvikings - Piper’s Swarm

Rats were a popular tribe option for this contest. Rats don’t have a terribly strong tribal identity - they’re kind of good at making tokens, some of them have discard effects, etc., but there’s not really a specific iconic thing that rats do. This card cleverly references a single existing and flavor-driven Rat card, Piper of the Swarm. This card can’t be anything but a rat tribal card - if you replace it with a different creature type, the reference is lost.

@rasputingold - Crypt Command

I’m assuming that this card, like other existing commands, is meant to be a rare; it’s pretty complex and overbearing for a common. The base rate on this card is pretty good - four mana to counter a spell and make a 2/2 is solid. There is a little friction between the first and third abilities, in that the first ability is more likely to be used on not your turn or during your end step, when the third ability is useless, but it’s not a total nonbo, and it’s fine if not all mode combinations are reliably good.

Normally, if one mode of a command targets something that has a good chance of becoming an illegal target while the command is on the stack, then all of the modes target, so that the spell doesn’t fail to resolve if one of its targets becomes illegal. Ojutai’s Command suggests that spells (or at least creature spells) are not considered likely enough to become illegal targets that that’s a concern, so this spell is probably in the clear. (There’s an argument to be made that spells that target are more likely to become illegal targets if what they target is removed.)

@reaperfromtheabyss - Dusk Beacon

I’m not 100% sure what this card represents, but it’s a good all-around support card that any tribe could make use of. The primary tribal identity of Scarecrows in Shadowmoor block is supporting and being supported by non-colorless creatures and aside from that they’re sort of generally just small artifact creatures, but this card does have specific synergy with Scarecrone and The Reaper King, who are probably the most popular scarecrows, and who are among the most worth actually building around. Menace is a nice choice of keyword, as it’s a fairly scarecrow-y keyword, but no printed Scarecrows have it.

@shakeszx - Negotiated Services

I’m assuming the decision to make this card symmetrical (rather than asymmetrical, like almost all modern tribal effects) was intentional, and I think it’s kind of interesting if that’s the case, because the drawback is large enough to serve as a meaningful hoser. The card only ever really goes in Rogue/Mercenary decks, but it makes more sense as a symmetrical card than most tribal effects do. I’m not sure if this interaction is quite worth breaking the modern default of this sort of design being asymmetrical, but it makes a decent argument for it.

@snugz - Fiendish Omens

Batching these three types together makes a lot of sense; Rakdos the Showstopper does it, and it feels like a well that’s natural to return to. Red and Black don’t get this sort of effect terribly often, but it’s reasonable for things that are in their colors, I suppose. This could arguably dig a little deeper; a set would have to be very heavily focused on these creature types before you could build a deck where this rarely whiffs, and I think you need this to rarely whiff for it to be worth including.

@starch255 - Crabcasting

This is presumably a crab so that it can use its granted ability itself. An enchantment granting itself a tap ability is a little odd; while this is an interaction that exists in the game across multiple cards (E.g., Joraga Treespeaker and Prowess of the Fair), putting it on a single card feels like it’s pushing into Future Sight design territory, and creeping on one of the few remaining distinctions between artifacts and enchantments. The card itself does a great job playing into the mill identity that crabs have sort of picked up against all odds.

@takemuse1 - Age of Trax

This card is a very cool lore cut - The Age of Trax is an era of Theros’s history when Archons ruled as tyrants before being overthown by Kynaios and Tiro, with the help of the gods. The card itself recalls the abilities of several notable archon creatures, which is cool. The card is a bit on the wordy side; that’s nothing new for Sagas, but this one may have more total text than any currently printed Saga. The first ability may be able to lose the part about playing Archons from your hand; the card still lightly encourages Archon tribal through the second ability. The last ability may also be a bit of a reach in white; white gets symmetrical card draw, but I’m not sure if the other abilities are something that appears much in white.

@wilsonosgoodmcman - Overshadow

The card name here is extremely clever, and helps sell an otherwise somewhat improbable combination of abilities. There’s some synergy between a Shade’s ability to pump itself and the mechanics of the card (and some non-synergy with most Shades’ very low non-pumped stats, which helps control the card’s power level), but the name pun really helps it cohere.

Behind everything else, this is a fairly powerful card, as a free removal spell, even if you’re not using the Shade part.

@wolkemesser - Sarpadian Diplomacy

This card has a clever, novel, powerful ability on it - powerful enough that I’m not at all confident how much this card should cost. It’s a very good combo with lots of things, but most of the things that’s a very good combo with are cards that are already a very good combo with lots of things. 

Finding a mechanical tie between two creature types that have a flavor tie helps the card feel cohesive, and I think it’s interesting that the two referenced types interact with sacrifice in different ways. (Many funguses with sacrifice abilities sacrifice other things, while thrulls sacrifice themselves.)

That said, there is one hitch with this card - it’s substantially more natural in a Fungus deck than in a Thrull deck. A Thrull deck that wants to play this Thrull tribal card has to include green, which it otherwise has no particular reason to do.

The card also supplies a recurring blocker for no mana investment. although its status as a rare means that that’s not as much of an issue.

@yourrightfulking - Clique’s Contingency

This card packs a lot of different decision points into a relatively tight package, especially if the player controls exactly one faerie. The nods to what faeries do as a tribe aren’t super loud, but the card fits with the general faerie game plan, and certainly feels trickster-y.

There are enough non-blue fairies that this card does represent counterspell access in non-blue decks. That could be considered a bug or a feature, but the ���safe” version of this card would probably cost U if you returned a fairy. That said, while Bitterblossom and certain Changelings do make it into non-fairy decks, realistically any deck that’s considering this card is likely playing blue.

[nanoland]

new chapter (supernatural fic)

(earlier parts are here; whole thing is here) 

Clean Hands, part 3 

Crowley/Castiel/Dean Winchester, warning for violence and spn demons being spn demons   

0   

Another day, another assassination attempt.

“Congratulations, sir,” said Paula, bustling in with his coffee and daily planner. “That brings it to eight, yes? I recall your making some remark about throwing a small office party if we hit ten before the end of the month.”

Lifting the corpse off the row of retractable spikes he’d installed in his desk, Crowley grunted, “It was a joke. On the other hand, maybe it would be good for morale. Make the blighters less determined to snuff me.”

“I’ll add it to the calendar. Sir, your ten ‘o clock is waiting in the lobby. Should I send him in?”

Technically, ‘ten ‘o clock’ didn’t exist in Hell. Time didn’t exist in Hell.

But by God, it did for Paula.

Infamous among Crowley’s minions, she ruled his appointment diary with an iron fist (well – iron talons, more accurately) and kept a horseman’s pick tucked neatly under her workstation for anyone who was more than five minutes late.

She’d been the most competent corporate PA in the business when Crowley had purchased her soul in exchange for a medical breakthrough that had beaten down her cancer and allowed her those ten precious years. It would, in fact, have allowed her a normal human lifespan, if not for Crowley’s hounds.

(Her wish was among his favourites and her contract had pride of place in his trophy cabinet. She could have just said ‘cure me’; she’d dreamed bigger. Ambition! Now that was what Crowley liked to see. Very few people who sold their souls managed to leave the world a better place than they’d found it.

Truthfully, arranging the breakthrough had taken an amount of power on his part that, ordinarily, he’d have objected to. Ever since the Zuckerberg Incident of 2004, Crowley had maintained a policy against granting wishes that fundamentally altered the pace and trajectory of human scientific development. But he’d wanted her. Reliable PAs were like gold dust and they almost always went to bloody Heaven. “And for what, I ask you?” he’d said to Dean once. “How much admin is really involved in keeping people locked in a lotus-eater machine?”)  

“The ten… oh, piss. It’s Alan, isn’t it? Yes, yes. Let’s get this over with. Send him in.”  

Another day, another fucking workplace harassment mess to sort out. How many more sodding seminars was he going to have to host before they all got it through their heads that biting off a co-worker’s arm was not a viable long-term conflict resolution strategy?

Sigh.

It was only after four meetings and sixteen calls that Crowley remembered he’d not yet disposed of the assassin.

“I suppose I should make an example of you,” he huffed, already imagining it.

The hassle.

The bother.

Getting an apron on.

Finding the hammer.

Lugging the stupid bastard up a ladder and nailing him to the office noticeboard by his scrote.

He could always ask Paula to do it. But, bless her heart, she’d only been a demon for six years and arranging a corpse for maximum intimidation was just as much a matter of practice as talent.

As Crowley was fetching the ladder, Gwen from Legal arrived whey-faced and dogged by two dozen assistants and interns.

“Sir, it’s a catastrophe,” she wailed.

Five minutes later, Crowley was back at his desk, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Avoidable. Utterly, pathetically avoidable. All you had to do was amend the contract to state that the phrase ‘ten years’ refers solely and specifically to Earth’s orbital period, not the orbital period of the contractee.”

Gwen hung her head. “I don’t know what to tell you, sir. Finding qualified staff to manage this sort of deal is tricky. When people with, you know, science degrees and stuff die and are damned, the assholes over at the Experimental Punishments Department always snatch ‘em up first. It’s a real problem.”

“I’ll have a word with them. Ugh – alright, alright, let’s try and sort this out. How long is a Martian year?”

“The internet says six hundred and eighty-seven days.”

“Damn. Almost twice as long,” Crowley grumbled, pouring himself a drink. “What did he even want from us? He’s a billionaire. The list of things they can’t get without our help grows shorter by the day.”

“He wanted to guarantee that he’d be the first man on Mars, sir; that none of his competitors would get there before he did.”

“Wait. Hold on. The thing he wished for and the mechanism by which he’s attempting to fuck us over are one and the same? Oh, no, no, no. I’m not going to take that cheeky bollocks lying down. Get the head of Research and Development in here, now. We’re going to find out how to crash a spaceship.”

Gwen’s gaze flickered to the assassin’s corpse. “Um.”

“Fuck,” Crowley muttered.

At which point Paula tapped on the door to ask if he wanted to reschedule his next five meetings, because unless he could deal with them all in a grand total of twelve minutes, he’d be late for his call with the NRA’s chairman.

When Castiel arrived – without an appointment, as per usual, but Paula had standing instructions to let him through – he found Crowley resting his head on his desk, fantasising about being a paperweight.

“I’ve come for more sex,” he explained.

Dragging himself from despair’s depths, Crowley slurred, “T’riffic.”

He instructed his meat suit to sit up and turn on the winning smile. Unlike more reliable vehicles, possessed bodies didn’t have dashboard lights to indicate an exhausted battery; instead, it announced its displeasure by growing three new tumours.

Castiel stepped back, confused. Displeased. “You’re usually more enthusiastic than this. Why is your desk covered in diagrams of rockets? Is this a ‘new hobby’?”

Exaggerated finger quotes. Damn him to the pit, he was precious.

“Kitten, rest assured I have only two hobbies and they both dress badly.”

He expected retaliation for that. Castiel hated being reminded that Crowley regularly dallied with his favourite human. It came as a surprise, then, when the angel simply reached out and firmly gripped his shoulder, declaring, “You need to rest.”

Wings flapped. Suddenly, Crowley was standing in front of a wide, glassy lake, surrounded by dense forest, and in the distance…

“Is that Mount Fuji?”

“Indeed,” said Castiel, smiling briefly. “She’s a childhood friend. I first visited when she was little more than an unusually picturesque bump in the ground.”  

There was no one around. There was nothing around. No boats on the lake, no fishermen, no families on holiday, not even the distant roar of traffic. Just them, the view, the water, and a – huh – a bright orange tent pitched nearby.

“This is where I come to relax,” Castiel informed him, opening up the zipper.

“Whose is it?”

“Mine.”

“Huh. I wasn’t aware that you…”

“That I what?”

“Owned things. Or even grasped the concept of owning things. Don’t give me that look; you’re the one who’s worn the same socks ever since you slipped into that God-bothering flesh puppet.”

Castiel sniffed. “Materialism is a disease. But I’m not a child, Crowley. For your information, in my time on Earth I have owned many things.”

Always fun to ruffle the pretty bird’s feathers. “Yeah? How many of them were hand-me-downs from the Hardy Boys?”

“Most of them,” he said, levelly. “With the exception of this tent and your ass, demon.”

A pin drop pause.

Castiel maintained unblinking eye contact for exactly twelve seconds, then turned and crawled into his neon den.

Practically vibrating with adoration, Crowley followed.

It was evident that Castiel, despite his laudable efforts to create a space for himself in a world that had no space for him, didn’t entirely grok camping.

There were no sleeping bags. Instead, the tent’s bottom was covered in duvets, dozens of them, soft and fresh as if they’d come directly from the shop – or, more accurately, Crowley suspected, someone’s washing line.

“I cured her dog’s foot infection,” Castiel said, somewhat defensively, settling into his cotton and fleece nest.

“Ah. And she was so grateful she said you could make off with all her laundry, hm?”

“She… did not say those words, precisely. But it was heavily implied.”

Thank sin this was only a meat suit. Thank sin, thank everything that Castiel couldn’t see the expression of hopeless, pitiable fondness that would have adorned Crowley’s true face at that moment.

It was a relief when Castiel, without further ado, started undressing. Crowley, copying him, took the opportunity to talk sense into himself.

Come on. Grow up. Get it together. You know what you are. More importantly, you know what he is. Ageless. Unfathomable. Demons, at the end of the day, are just distilled human nastiness, but him? He existed before humans. Before microbes. He’s nice to babies and bees and pot plants and Dean and that makes it easy to forget that… that…

Oh, yes. Remember when he came to Hell? The first time he saw Dean; the start of their epic, eternal, infuriating romance? And where were you? That’s right. You were with the others, standing there slack-jawed and helpless, like dinosaurs watching the comet hit. Like children gazing up at a mushroom cloud.

Twelve thousand. That’s how many demons he burned out of existence, without even trying. Twelve thousand.

Do you think he ever thinks about them? Do you think he even noticed?

Twelve thousand.

Do you think he knows how close you were to being one of them?

Do you think he cares?

He’s nice to babies. Bees. Pot plants. Dean. You, even, sometimes. He’s sweet. He’s got big, soft blue eyes and hair that aches to be tussled. He’s a top-tier, world-class fuck. And at any moment, for any reason, he could end you, easy as blowing away dust, and you can’t say for certain he would even remember your name in a month’s time.

“What? No,” Castiel protested when Crowley kissed him. “We’re here to rest, Crowley.”

Drawing back, Crowley leered. “That’s what you want to do, is it? Rest?”

Perpetually thirsty tart that he was, Castiel bit his lip and looked torn. “I… yes.”

Crowley pouted.

Firmer now, Castiel said, “We will rest for a while first. Then we will have sex. Is that satisfactory?”

No sooner had Crowley resignedly nodded than Castiel seized him and finished undressing him, tossing his undershirt and socks out the tent. When they were both naked, the cold air coming off the lake making Crowley shiver, Castiel burrowed into his pilfered pile and dragged the demon down with him.

“Rest first,” he ordered him. “Sex afterwards. No, no – stop that. Afterwards, I said.”

Crowley groaned and whined and fussed, but obeyed.  

And bugger him gently if it wasn’t actually pleasant, very pleasant, to lie there with Castiel’s strong arms locked around his torso, toasty warm under layers of wool while, outside, the lake lapped at its bank and wind rustled through the trees. No assassins. No paperwork. No blood. Everything nice and quiet. Everything calm and clean.

Then Castiel sighed, a hot puff against the back of Crowley’s neck, and said, “You know, the thing that vexes me most about Dean is the way he…”

[optimistic-dinosaur-nacho]

𝕎𝕖𝕝𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕖 𝕊𝕡𝕠𝕠𝕜𝕪 𝔽𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕤

It’s your monstrous dinosaur here. Unexpected right? Don’t worry. As you all know a certain month is coming its way to haunt us. You’re wondering why I’m giving you a long speech and you want to know why I’ve come here to give it to you so unexpected.

It’s Spooky Season, ladies & gentlemen. Grab your brooms, daggers, stakes, rope and a candle for the dark. I cannot talk for long, once this hour strucks 3am, I am no longer safe. And so are you. 

I have made a challenge. A Spooky Challenge.

Let’s hope you know your movies.

They’re about to come to life for your imagination.

Rules are simple. There is a list of Classic Spooky Films put back from the 1970s and 2000s. Films like Alien, Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, A Quiet Place, Halloweentown, Hocus Pocus, and more! Your chosen Actor/Character shall play any character you desire in your Spooky Story. Will this character survive or will this character take another life? That’s your choice.

And choose wisely. Like I said.

You’re no longer safe.

Rules Below

You can choose any classic Halloween film. 

But choose wisely. First come first serve and you might not be able to turn back.

Do you have to follow Dino to participate?

No. You do not have to, this is for everyone. But I’d appreciate it. 

Limit of two films per writer.

Limit of two stories per character 

Once 2-3 people choose the same film, that film is gone. So hurry!

No Smut! Implied is allowed just have very little and a warning

Dark themes are allowed! Make sure you have warnings.

These can be reader insert or OC stories.

Ethnic, Interracial, LGBTQ+ and polyamorous stories are welcome and encouraged.

Minimum 500 words. No max.

It must be an original work and not part of an existing series.

No sexual situations with minors, no bodily functions and no snuff.

Can be scary if chosen to be. The characters can watch the film of your choosing or put them in the movie to make it even spookier. Whatever you desire!

Doesn’t have to be based on the film! Can be put in a different way but gives the same scenes for that film.

If your story contains anything that every horror film has (Blood, gore, Ouija Boards, Etc.) that should be in your warnings for others. Thank you

Deadline?

October 31, 2020

How do you participate?

Choose a film below then send in an ask along with your chosen film and character. If you’re doing more than one character add them, too. (There is no limited character choosing, just films)

When you have your Scary Story written, tag me in that fic, and use the tag #DinoScaryStories2020

Spooky Classic Films

First come, first serve

Horror Thriller Films

Jaws (1975) @just-one-ordinary-fangirl​

Carrie (1976) @ssebstann​ @nekoannie-chan​

Halloween (1978)

Alien (1979)

The Amityville Horror (1979) @sweater-daddiesdumbdork​

Friday the 13th (1980)

The Shining (1980) @nekoannie-chan​

Poltergeist (1982)

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)/(2010)

Silver Bullet (1985)

Aliens (1986)

Little Shop of Horrors (1986) @hettie-drysdale​

Predator (1987)

Pet Sematary (1989)/(2019)

The Babysitter (1995)

Scream (1996) @queenofspades20​

America Psycho (2000)

The Ring (2002)

Saw (2004)

Paranormal Activity (2007)

Orphan (2008)

The Conjuring (2013)

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters (2013) @hettie-drysdale​

The Purge (2013)

World War Z (2013)

Annabelle (2014)

Ouija (2014)

Split (2016) @nbarnes​

Don’t Breath (2016)

It (2017) @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad​

Get Out (2017)

Happy Death Day (2017)

Truth or Dare? (2018)

Bird Box (2018)

The First Purge (2018) @writerwrites​

A Quiet Place (2018)

Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (2019)

Us (2019) @just-one-ordinary-fangirl​

Ready Or Not (2019) @waywardodysseys​

Family Friendly Films

1984 - 2015

Ghostbuster (1984) @nbarnes​

Gremlins (1984)

Beetlejuice (1988)

Little Monsters (1989)

Witches (1990)

The Adam’s Family (1991) @unnuevosoltransformalarealidad​

Hocus Pocus (1993) @hevans-angel​

Casper (1995)

Halloweentown (1998)

Corpse’s Bride (2005)

Coraline (2009)

Goosebumps (2015)

Be creative with your stories, no need to write the exact film. If I were to do Hansel and Gretel, maybe the reader falls into Steve’s trap and he holds her captive. Be creative! I’d love to see the 2018 films in your stories. 

I will also participate in these but I will not take places of the films, those are your places to take!

Official Taglist:

@jtargaryen18​​​ @joannaliceevans-fanficblog​​​ @donutloverxo​​​ @axen-gers​​​ @captainchrisbaby​​​ @patzammit​​​ @bucksgoat​​​ @la-cey​​​ @void-hoechlin​​​ @lovepeacefood​​​ @stargazingfangirl18​​​ @sweater-daddiesdumbdork​​​ @stop-obsessing-over-those-actors​​​ @star-spangled-beard-burn​​​ @nickysurfer28​​​ @nbarnes​​​ @mcntsee​​​ @adriannajackson​​​ @chuckbass-love​​​ @sebbystanlover-vk​​​ @onetwo3000​​​ @captainamerica-is-bae​​​ @cheeseburgersstuff​​​ @iguessweallcrazyithinktho​​​ @rororo06​​​ @elliee1497​​​ @navybrat817​​​ @waywardodysseys​​​ @just-one-ordinary-fangirl​​​ @chris-evans-indian-fanfic​​​ @this-is-a-chilis-drive-thru​​​ @what-is-your-plan-today​​​ @princess-evans-addict​

 @queen-kass-the-writer​ @marvelinsanity​ @ssebstann​ @writerwrites​

[inikavulpixelreviews]

Let’s Talk About Pokemon - The Rolycoly Family

837: Rolycoly

OHHHH!!!! OH OH!!!!! THE COAL MONSTER!!! THAT I PUT ON MY WISHLIST! OH How I instantly fell in love with this little guy when it was first revealed. This design is so neato in its lovable simplicity. At first glance it's little more than a chunky hunk of coal with a single eye. Oh, but they eye GLOWS as if it has coal burning on the inside! That on top of its general body shape makes it look like a living miner's helmet! Hah, how clever and original for a little coal critter!

It even has a unique ability that has it interacting with Fire and Water, boosting the Pokemon's speed if its hit with moves of those type! Cool! And how I LOVE that grumpy little visage it has. It's just a single eye but it still lends so much fun personality to the thing. But Rolycoly comes with a little something extra:

It's on a WHEEL! It has an entire wheel-shaped shard of coal on its underside that allows it to roll around like a unicycle! That is PRECIOUS! And boy howdy has the excitement for what this thing could possibly turn into get me pumped. So many neat Fakemon ideas floating around. That and I absolutely KNEW I was gonna be using a Rolycoly once I started playing the game myself. I just HAVE to see what this coal dude turns into!

Personal Score: 10/10

838: Carkol

Oh, well... hrmmmm. We're not off to a fantastic start, I guess. My instant turn-off on the other side of that evolution screen was that Rolycoly instantly lost its cool cycloptic eye in favor of a much more regular looking face. Why does it just look like Golem's face??? Like I can't stress this enough. If a Pokemon has a unique feature, especially one that is a rarity like a single eye, or a droopy face, or having shaggy hair cover the majority of its face, or even a complete LACK of face, it absolutely should NOT lose these features unless it has a compelling enough reason to, like fulfilling a design theme. There are so little Pokemon that are cycloptic that it's SO ANNOYING that it instantly fails at step 1.

I also don't really like that's already SORTA lost the wheels. They're there, and they function as wheels, but they're behaving a lot more like legs most of the time. It doesn't even keep its glowing eyes. They light up during certain animations but that's it. Nor do I like that a pile of coal is precariously going over its back. It makes it stop looking like a coal monster and just that it's a monster that carries coal. The shape of its back should evoke the look of a mine cart filled with coal and not BE a mine cart full of coal, if you get what I'm saying?

Even if it was just the face that was redone, I would've taken it. But if I could do a little tidying up and redoing of Carkol, it wouldn't take a TON to do it. The basic shape is fine to me, just good lord please give it its face and wheels back.

Personal Score: 5.5/10

...But not all hope is lost just yet! There's loads of Pokemon with a good beginning, and low middle, and a good end. Awkward teenage stage am I right? Even if its face isn't just a single eye anymore, at least it's keeping the wheeled theme! In fact, you could really build off of that! Like making it a train! A TRAIN POKEMON, LIKE ON MY WISHLIST AGAIN! That'd be knocking out two birds with one piece of coal! Surely they couldn't possibly think of ditching that aspect of this line, especially since it's been present in two stages so far! Surely the least possible thing that could happen would be if this almost literal mine cart Pokemon had suddenly lost all its wheels and miraculously turned into a generic bipedal dinosaur that walks like literally any other Pokemon out of nowhere. That’d be like, the worst case scenario. But that wouldn’t happen, right?

...

...Right?

839: Coalossal

Not to come off as blunt right off the gate here but this did it. I didn't think it was gonna be possible. Gallade is no longer my least favorite Pokemon of all time. Because in the end, as much as you could say Gallade sullies the Gardevoir line's unique take on a knight just by association, you can at least IGNORE Gallade. Just evolve your male Kirlia into a Gardevoir anyway because Gardevoir is just better than Gallade in every way anywho. Gallade? Literally WHO??? But Coalossal is impossible to ignore if you were a fan of what Rolycoly was putting down. And even Gallade had a FEW merits to it. Coalossal has almost systematically taken every little bit of what has cool and unique about Rolycoly and thrown it out the window in favor of being an all-around copy-paste job.

Okay, for a moment, let's pretend Rolycoly and Carkol never existed. Coalossal was just a single-stage Pokemon on its own in a cave somewhere or whatever. What about Coalossal is individually unique to it and it alone? Sincerely close to absolutely nothing. No single individual aspect of this design is unique in any way. Want to know the major reason why? Because Coalossal already existed. We've already had Coalossal for about ten years now. But back then, we called it Rhyperior.

I'm personally not a gigantic fan of Rhyperior either, but look at this. This is absolutely comedic. They're the fucking same. They are the SAME creature. Coalossal is nothing but an off-color Rhyperior. Like come ON. At least Rhyperior has the benefit of having is rough body serve a visual motif where it's wearing construction gear, with sound-canceling headphones, complete with wrecking ball tail. A solid rock monster design, even if I personally prefer Rhydon. I can confidently look at Rhyperior and see that it’s gone through revisions, redraws, and polishes to make it unique even in its own evolutionary line.

Can I say the same for Coalossal? I honestly can't say I do. With Rhyperior fresh in mind, what's Coalossal's visual motif? It's made of coal, I guess? Its face SORT OF looks like a cowcatcher on a train. But here's a question, why doesn't it look MORE like a train if train was clearly a motif they wanted to go with? If it's a train monster, why is it bipedal in the first place?

The only bit of its design that's even a little eye-catching is the pile of coal clumsily piled onto its shoulders, but I already said why I don't like that. It makes it look like Coalossal itself isn't a coal monster, it just carries coal around. Besides, most well-done designs aught to still have at least some value to them even if you took away one aspect of said design. Rhyperior with a plain tail with no wrecking ball is still a funny construction site rhino man. Even Carkol with no coal on its back would've still been a weirdo mine cart monster. Coalossal without the pile of coal is just naked Rhyperior.

Things only get worse when you add Carkol and especially Rolycoly back into the equation. Rolycoly's unique features were that it was a coal monster with one eye, riding on a wheel and it's shaped like an object. Carkol at least continues most of this, mostly ridding of the single eye thing. Coalossal gets rid of all that's left. No more wheels, no more object shapes, no more fun, it's just a coal thing now. Literally the first thing that comes to your mind when you think “I want to make a coal monster.” A rough draft in monster design form, printed and published for the full release.

I have to wonder, how many questions of whether this looked good or not the decisions to make in a train monster but also a bipedal dinosaur-thing was a well enough thought-through idea? Is being a dinosaur with a cowcatcher on its head visually interesting? More visually interesting than its previous stages, where it had far more visual motifs going on? Was it a conscious decision to say yes or was there a time crunch where they had to settle on a “close enough” design to pad out the Pokedex?

And you know what's more than likely the thing that murdered this line? Time.

I feel bad for possibly implying it was going to be nothing but smooth sailing this Gen when I made my little Sword and Shield pre-review. Because the more I've dug into Gen 8 the more I've realized how many designs in here are heavily flawed. And I can only blame the very evident drop in quality on the clear lack of time Gamefreak has these days. Generations are getting shorter and shorter and it's starting to show. Had SwSh not happened for another couple years, I guarantee I wouldn't be making this rant right now. This kind of blunder is simply so uncharacteristic of Gamefreak's art department. Like say what you will about the games themselves but Pokemon's been running strong from Gens 5 to 7. It's hard to believe the same company that made creatures like Mimikyu, Buzzwole, Sigilyph, or Pumpkaboo churned out Coalossal here.

Here, I'll embarrass myself and share a bit of concept art of a personal project of mine. These designs aren't too terribly spectacular, are they? That's because they're just the rough drafts. The very first instance of me drawing a creature in order to have their design idea on paper, because I can flesh them out later. They’re very wonky looking, weirdly generic at best because later on, “Ash Wolf” there would later become...

“Billowolf”. And heck, it’s plenty possible that it’ll go through one more redesign or so before I’m fully satisfied with it. Coalossal feels like the former. A sketchbook doodle of a “coal dinosaur” base idea that was meant to be more fleshed out later but wasn’t given the opportunity.

And I'm noticing more and more that this is gonna be a repeat complaint going into Gen 8. Lots of ideas with decent or even excellent potential not being lived up to because the designs haven't been through enough revisions. We're well aware of an internal approval process that happens within Gamefreak for these Pokemon to get accepted, and I can only wonder if they just settled with “good enough” designs simply because they were running out of time. Like for PETE'S sake this annual release schedule needs to stop. I hope this new trend of DLC will alleviate the Pokemon Rush. Hell, I'd encourage it so long as they're fairly priced and maybe even bring in a handful of new Pokemon designs each. It's not quite a year off the constant Poketrain but DLC is a lot easier to make than an entirely new game or even a “deluxe edition”. I don't care if we go back to a release schedule of one generation per major Nintendo system. Just let these guys have the time and leeway to do their dang jobs without the stress of ridiculously tight deadlines. There's still so much talent within Gamefreak and it's maybe easy to forget that they're the ones that made the more beloved entries in the series back before they forced a game out almost every year.

And to be clear I DO NOT mean to say all this to shame whoever designed Coalossal, even if they themselves are proud of it. Nor am I shaming anyone that does like Coalossal (just given I’ve gotten comments before acting like I’m being the opinion police with this review series.) Alarmingly enough, my taste isn’t law! And that’s fine. I’m just wondering if the higher-ups on the art team have given Coalossal a pass under less time-constrained circumstances? Or would they have sent it back in to go a few more rounds in a feedback loop? The basic point of this rant is just

Obviously, I'd want this line to follow through on the train motif and have Coalossal actually be a goddang train. And of course keep the single eye.

I do hear one of the defenses of Coalossal being dinosaur-shaped being that “it's a fossil fuel coming back to life.” If that was the intention, that should've been the theme from the very start instead of the rolling wheel idea. (Even under this light, I still wouldn't call Coalossal a very good design. It's far too generic to be doing even that cool idea justice. If that WAS the idea, I’d say it’d be way cooler to do a monster that’s moreso crudely trying to imitate the look of a dinosaur.)

...Awkward thing is, Coalossal wound up sticking in my team for the whole game. Mostly because I wasn't sure if any more new Fire types would be coming afterward (there weren't) so. My Sword team has my least favorite Pokemon on it. I still love ya though, Obsidius. It's not your fault your design wasn't finished. ):

Personal Score: 1/10

I'm sorry if it feels like I'm just dunking on Pokemon after Pokemon here. I PROMISE there's some Pokemon I'm excited to talk about coming up later. In fact, oooh, Applin's next! Applin will be a good palette cleanser, yes.

G-Max Coalossal:

Oh yeah, Coalossal has a G-Max form too. It's better, I'll give it that, and it SORTA brought the wheel thing back but only in having tire-shaped thighs. Pbbbth. The scale is imposing and at least its eyes look a little bit cooler again. I can't bring myself to like it much better just by association with Coalossal. It's fine, I guess. I'm not even gonna rate it. I just don’t like it. It’s fine. Eh.

[Archive]

[plasticozoic]

I Hate Frog DNA

Sometimes I see people online excusing the inaccuracies in Jurassic Park/World by explaining them as being related to the frog DNA used to fix the gaps in the dinosaur genomes. Jurassic World canonised this, with Dr Wu further mentioning that the dinosaurs were always genetically engineered to not be like the real thing, and supplementary materials such as websites implying that genetic engineering was behind everything from the venomous Dilophosaurus to the abnormally vicious Spinosaurus in JPIII.

I hate this explanation, for several reasons.

First, the frog DNA exists in the plot to set up the twist that the dinosaurs can breed. It also exists as part of the overall theme of InGen taking shortcuts in creating Jurassic Park, and said shortcuts coming back to bite them; in the book, it’s stated that Wu felt free to use any DNA to patch the sequence gaps as all DNA is roughly the same, leading to the inclusion of frog genes. Outside of this, everything unexpected about the dinosaurs is implied to be from a lack of information in the fossil record. InGen didn’t know about the Dilophosaurus venom until they saw the dinosaurs using it, for example.

Second, that frog DNA can result in such a bewildering variety of mutations, from frills and venom to suspicious similarities to old palaeoart, is stretching the suspension of disbelief way too far for my own liking.

But mostly what irks me about the frog DNA retcon is that it insults the efforts of the people who worked to make the original Jurassic Park a representation of the then-current knowledge of dinosaurs. Popular culture moves at a glacial pace, and despite the dinosaur renaissance of the 70s and 80s the dinosaurs in media were still cold-blooded tail-dragging monsters for the most part. While, yes, Jurassic Park did upscale its Velociraptors and ruin Dilophosaurus’ public image forever, their depictions were still informed by palaeontology. In one of his books, Jack Horner recounts how he corrected Steven Spielberg on how Tyrannosaurus walked, resulting in the iconic image of the T. rex piledriving its foot into the mud while looming over Muldoon and Sattler. Furthermore, Horner convinced Spielberg to remove the snake tongues from the Velociraptors, arguing that it undermined the movie’s point that dinosaurs were more like birds. You can see this in the below test footage. In the final movie, this was replaced by the Velociraptor’s breath fogging up the window, a clear sign that this warm-blooded, intelligent animal was a far cry from the monsters of yesteryear.

And yes, they are inaccurate nowadays, but that’s my point: they were intended to be accurate for the time, and that they’re not accurate now is the fate of literally every artistic depiction of an extinct animal because there will almost always be new discoveries that change what we know. Feathered dinosaurs were speculative at best until 1996 when feathered fossils started flooding out of China. Suddenly every piece of dinosaur art produced before this date was made inaccurate, but that doesn’t mean that the artists didn’t make an effort to reconstruct these animals with the data they had available to them, and the same is true for Jurassic Park. Suddenly coming out and saying ‘oh, they were always fucked-up frog monsters and not real dinosaurs’ feels to me like a giant middle finger to the original talent behind Jurassic Park.

I also feel like this retcon has changed the spirit of the franchise. It’s not about dinosaurs anymore, it’s about weird genetic mashups that vaguely resemble dinosaurs. It’s a monster movie franchise claiming that its monsters are real animals that once existed in our world. The designs and behaviour of the dinosaurs have become completely unrealistic in the process, and I genuinely can’t buy things like their aerial goblinoid Dimorphodon as being living beings, because they throw out everything everything realistic about them in favour of turning them into fantasy creatures that are all about blood and guts and murder.

I’m well aware of how outdated Jurassic Park is, but I don’t need an in-universe explanation. 

[scifigeneration]

Evolution tells us we might be the only intelligent life in the universe

by Nick Longrich

NASA

Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely – or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations – not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself – were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning the lottery … only far less likely.

The universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, and there are over a trillion galaxies in the visible universe, the tiny fraction of the universe we can see. Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number – there are as many planets as stars, maybe more – suggests lots of life is out there. So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there’s no evidence of it.

Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can’t study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth’s history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn’t.

Evolution sometimes repeats, with different species independently converging on similar outcomes. If evolution frequently repeats itself, then our evolution might be probable, even inevitable.

The wolf-like thylacine. Wikipedia

And striking examples of convergent evolution do exist. Australia’s extinct, marsupial thylacine had a kangaroo-like pouch but otherwise looked like a wolf, despite evolving from a different mammal lineage. There are also marsupial moles, marsupial anteaters and marsupial flying squirrels. Remarkably, Australia’s entire evolutionary history, with mammals diversifying after the dinosaur extinction, parallels other continents.

Other striking cases of convergence include dolphins and extinct ichthyosaurs, which evolved similar shapes to glide through the water, and birds, bats and pterosaurs, which convergently evolved flight.

Squid eye. PLoS Biology

We also see convergence in individual organs. Eyes evolved not just in vertebrates, but in arthropods, octopi, worms and jellyfish. Vertebrates, arthropods, octopi and worms independently invented jaws. Legs evolved convergently in the arthropods, octopi and four kinds of fish (tetrapods, frogfish, skates, mudskippers).

Here’s the catch. All this convergence happened within one lineage, the Eumetazoa. Eumetazoans are complex animals with symmetry, mouths, guts, muscles, a nervous system. Different eumetazoans evolved similar solutions to similar problems, but the complex body plan that made it all possible is unique. Complex animals evolved once in life’s history, suggesting they’re improbable.

Surprisingly, many critical events in our evolutionary history are unique and, probably, improbable. One is the bony skeleton of vertebrates, which let large animals move onto land. The complex, eukaryotic cells that all animals and plants are built from, containing nuclei and mitochondria, evolved only once. Sex evolved just once. Photosynthesis, which increased the energy available to life and produced oxygen, is a one-off. For that matter, so is human-level intelligence. There are marsupial wolves and moles, but no marsupial humans.

The vertebrate skeleton is unique. Smithsonian Institution

There are places where evolution repeats, and places where it doesn’t. If we only look for convergence, it creates confirmation bias. Convergence seems to be the rule, and our evolution looks probable. But when you look for non-convergence, it’s everywhere, and critical, complex adaptations seem to be the least repeatable, and therefore improbable.

What’s more, these events depended on one another. Humans couldn’t evolve until fish evolved bones that let them crawl onto land. Bones couldn’t evolve until complex animals appeared. Complex animals needed complex cells, and complex cells needed oxygen, made by photosynthesis. None of this happens without the evolution of life, a singular event among singular events. All organisms come from a single ancestor; as far as we can tell, life only happened once.

Curiously, all this takes a surprisingly long time. Photosynthesis evolved 1.5 billion years after the Earth’s formation, complex cells after 2.7 billion years, complex animals after 4 billion years, and human intelligence 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed. That these innovations are so useful but took so long to evolve implies that they’re exceedingly improbable.

An unlikely series of events

These one-off innovations, critical flukes, may create a chain of evolutionary bottlenecks or filters. If so, our evolution wasn’t like winning the lottery. It was like winning the lottery again, and again, and again. On other worlds, these critical adaptations might have evolved too late for intelligence to emerge before their suns went nova, or not at all.

Imagine that intelligence depends on a chain of seven unlikely innovations – the origin of life, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, complex animals, skeletons and intelligence itself – each with a 10% chance of evolving. The odds of evolving intelligence become one in 10 million.

Photosynthesis, another unique adaptation. Nick Longrich

But complex adaptations might be even less likely. Photosynthesis required a series of adaptations in proteins, pigments and membranes. Eumetazoan animals required multiple anatomical innovations (nerves, muscles, mouths and so on). So maybe each of these seven key innovations evolve just 1% of the time. If so, intelligence will evolve on just 1 in 100 trillion habitable worlds. If habitable worlds are rare, then we might be the only intelligent life in the galaxy, or even the visible universe.

And yet, we’re here. That must count for something, right? If evolution gets lucky one in 100 trillion times, what are the odds we happen to be on a planet where it happened? Actually, the odds of being on that improbable world are 100%, because we couldn’t have this conversation on a world where photosynthesis, complex cells, or animals didn’t evolve. That’s the anthropic principle: Earth’s history must have allowed intelligent life to evolve, or we wouldn’t be here to ponder it.

Intelligence seems to depend on a chain of improbable events. But given the vast number of planets, then like an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters to write Hamlet, it’s bound to evolve somewhere. The improbable result was us.

About The Author:

Nick Longrich is a Senior Lecturer in Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Bath

This article has been republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[sindumpster]

If you don't mind refreshing my idiot brain's memory hole, what's a pseudo-mammal again? I remembered the term but not the rest of what you said before reeeeeeee

It was in context with my dragons, and tbh I’m kinda realizing now it’s a pretty dated possibly wrong term so internet does not give you a lot of sources for it (or the sources aren’t what I’m referring to). But in biology and math, when “pseudo” is tied to a word, it usually means “partial” (or sometimes “incomplete”), and for a “pseudo-mammal” it’s referring to an animal that is “partially” a mammal. They have some traits of a mammal, but there are also things mixed in that don’t match what you’d see with mammals (like say they had feathers, or a beak, or were cold blooded despite having fur and live birth--basically muddled and mixed traits but some of it is very mammal-like).

Like I borrowed the term from old-ass sources where it was used to refer to the evolution process of mammals, cuz they didn’t just pop up fully evolved and ready to go. It took a long time for something recognizable as a “mammal” to appear, and before that you had animals that were kinda...mixed. Though very much also considered their own thing, calling them “in-between” forms of reptiles and mammals is a dated classification, but I digress.

[[And also this next part is just me going off on my fantasy science bullshit so feel free to skip to the next dashed line if it makes no sense. Partly writing it for myself just cuz I have an excuse to lmao]]

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So for reference, mammals essentially evolved from reptiles, specifically Synapsids (like this guy that might look familiar which gave rise to Therapsids (which gave you these guys: 1 and 2) around 250-200 million years ago which gave you Cynodonts (predecessor to the mammals that evolved along dinosaurs, they’re late Therapsids). Thing with evolution though is that all those traits you associate with a modern day animal don’t suddenly pop up at once, instead those traits evolve in a “mosaic”. So like slowly placing pieces for a mosaic, through evolution those ancestral animals slowly gained different parts of the picture at different times. So esp with the Therapsid examples, you can kinda see some parts look more like a mammal, and some that seem more like a reptile, and it was not a rapid change.

With my dragons, the idea was that, evolutionarily, they hit that morphing stage  between reptiles and mammals and decided that worked well enough for them, and shot off into a new branch from there. Maybe there was some unforeseen advantage with keeping it, maybe they needed to focus their energy on evolving/mutating another pair of limbs (wings)--regardless they only evolved traits that aided them in survival, and didn’t bother with the gimmicks that didn’t really help them. Or maybe they did go full mammal and sorta stepped back, like how life came from the ocean, and whales decided “hey ocean kinda worked out for us, so let’s readapt for that” altho imo less likely because doing so would’ve probably disadvantaged dragons, and nature doesn’t select for things that makes survival as a species harder.

And if you wanna get really technical, this would probs then place dragons in an class of their own, or as surviving non-mammalian Therapsids (but most likely a branch that evolved from Therapsids and became their own thing like mammals did). This would mean that dragons are not mammals, reptiles, birds, or anything else. They are their own thing. But with ancestors popping up from that reptile-mammalian split.

(and aside but Gorgonopsia/Gorgonopsids are considered to have been at least partially warm-blooded, so the fantasy bullshit dragon clade prolly would’ve had to arise sometime before or around them)

------------

ANYWAYS, main reason I opted to group dragons like that is because they never fully screamed “reptile” at me, at least in my canon where they would need certain mammalian traits, or possibly bird-like features. But with the whole bat-wings and the way I drew their legs positioned under them (most reptiles have their legs to the side, like alligators/crocodiles and lizards), and the hair, and certain social behaviors that were very mammalian, it implied to me that there had to be something else in the mix, and all those things pointed to mammals.

This also tied in with Jake and his whole deal with the sweatshirt. Dude wears the thing because his temperature regulation is poor, but if he were a full-on reptile, that sweatshirt would do jack shit keeping him warm. Sweatshirts are designed to trap air inside and let the wearer warm it up with their own body heat. But if Jake was an ectotherm (cold-blooded), he wouldn’t have body heat, so the sweater wouldn’t do anything for him. And I wanted him to have some cold resistance because throwing him in the snow is funny, but also it would be funny if extended cold made him feel gross and sluggish (and hey, defeating a dragon with some very easy thermostat tinkering is also very funny). So he needed to have some level of endothermy (warm-blooded-ness), and the idea was to make it partial. So there you go, legit biological nonsense canon I created just because I wanted to justify my character wearing a sweatshirt.

That said, “partial endotherms” do exist in nature, and they’re called heterotherms. Literally just creatures that are “mixed” warm and cold-blooded, or can temperature regulate only under specific conditions. Animals like certain sharks, tuna, some arctic birds (in their feet), leatherback sea turtles (fins), certain insects, etc...

So it made sense to push that route with dragons, especially with having them tied to those part-reptile part-mammal ancestors where they just, kept a lot of the intermixed traits. And made sense to have that be their source of heterothermy too. Hence, they’d have enough of their own body heat to function in colder places/more varied seasons without completely slowing down or needing to hibernate like a reptile, they can adapt to grow more fur if they need to insulate themselves, but even then extended and severe cold will slow down their metabolisms (make them slow, lethargic, and kinda grumpy), and they still take to warmer climates better, and they will bask to raise their body temps when they can get away with it. (Also hey, maybe fire has a use for self-heating now too).

...and yeah this is a lot more extra than it needed to be, but I enjoy the “merging fantasy with biology” stuff and I do what I want, and idk maybe someone would find it interesting too. But in the most basic sense, pseudomammal was just meant to mean “not quite mammal, but not quite reptile either”, but it’s not a common term, especially now.

[bibbleboo]

Could we get some headcanons/more background on Abbey and Doyle’s kids? 🥺👉👈 I love the premise of this AU

YEEEEE (im just gonna ramble a bunch about the backstory i have so far but ill put it in bullets so its easier to follow lol i apologize for it being long as fuck-)

OKAY SO,,, first of all,,, doyle and abbey timeline,,,, [i am looking respectfully]

in this au, they get back together and have a sort of ‘lovers pretending to be enemies’ chaotic on again/off again hookup thing off to the side just between the two of them thru like Most of the final season, they try to keep it a secret (especially doyle who doubts the saturdays would be hAPPY if he was seeing her again) but in the end, saturdays ofc find out, probably are unsure about it at first, but she gains enough of their trust to be there for the big finale battle in the weird world mansion.

when shit goes down and argost becomes the vessel for the two opposing kurs (regular kur, and the anti kur from zak monday) and they like. explode his matter or w/e, i imagine instead of kur just completely disappearing, the ‘anti kur’ gets shot back to its universe, while original kur gets forced into a new vessel in this universe... the closest of which happens to be the unborn child abbeys unknowingly carrying. basically, what if the two kurs just LOOKED like they evaporated but actually did what happens when you try to like tape two same sides of a magnets together and they YEETED-

So thats how we have Parker, their firstborn daughter! and this... also implies ‘Parker Monday’ exists which. 8^) i havent thought about yet so forgive me on that but hoo, 

they dont know parker is kur, they got no idea and rly just assume kur is gone for good. but after they find out abbeys pregnant (which is a huge emotional trip for both of them in its own right) they do eventually sort of agree they dont want their kid exposed to that whole world of mystery. like, ik its a vital thing to the whole family, and ik these two people were probably voted least likely to ‘settle down’ in high school, but i cant imagine they didnt escape the kur/zak situation without a LOT of trauma, so while the saturdays stay in the cryptozoology field, doyle and abbey slowly pull away from the mystery and mercenary stuff, and also instead of going for big dollar lifestyle settle with ‘independently wealthy’ parenting.

also, neither of them really . grasp the concept that theyve even started a family, and are ‘together’, and that this is REAL, until around when she gets pregnant with their second daughter, Kendall. and then theyre like. oh nooo wait are we actually like boyfriend and girlfriend EWW-

when kendall is born parker is 3, and the next like 10+ years are pretty smooth sailing. as far as what the kids know/see, they probably know the cryptids when theyre little but. (tw animal death sORRY TO BE DARK I JUST??????) idk,, how long komodo dragons live/how old komodo already is and i definitely dont know Anything about giant prehistoric birds and am not even sure if science knows that lifespan, so. im not sure how long they could really be in each others lives??? i almost imagine parker would have memories of them that she assumes she remembers wrong, like “oh yeah they used to have a lizard and a bird... my imaginative little kid brain thought they were a komodo dragon and a dinosaur”, and as for fisk im still working on it but i . actually kind of imagine he might have a much longer lifespan (since lemurians are like ancient or w/e? and also if hes by dna like a gorilla cat or w/e gorillas at least live long af) and also feel like once he got older and settled down a bit he might live somewhere in the woods, maybe even his old tree? and the saturdays see him ALL the time obviously, but hey zaks gotta go to college eventually, a gorilla cats gotta eat bugs in forest, we all have to grow up and leave the nest sometime,

so idk the last time parker has actually seen fisk and she might assume he was an imaginary friend or smth but, 1. if i do write a fic they absolutely have to meet again, 2. overall the vibe is they know the saturdays are cryptozoologists, like, the same way josh gates does destination truth, seeking answers and studying, they dont really. know that theyre REAL. to them its like, a hypothetical science. (this is also part of why they dont realize parker is kur, she isnt around cryptids and therefore whenever her powers would actually show up they wouldnt be recognized) anyways parker isnt embarrassed or put off by it but just thinks its a little wacky, meanwhile kendall is obsessed with the world of mystery/paranormal/cryptic lol

speaking of the girls personalities;;;

parker is like. not really normie/preppy, even if she seems it at first glance, shes nice and has a good head on her shoulders but also is a teenage girl (inherently unhinged) and shes THEIR teenage girl (+5 feral) so despite her success and charm shes also very witty/crass when she wants to be, and deep down shes closer to the kind of person that would on pure inexplicable instinct put something random in your mouth when you’re yawning so you bite down on it afterwards. or like. that video of the girl singing in the bathroom while her friends curl their hair and she grabs the curler to use as a microphone before realizing its burning hot??? shes. the voice of reason, but the voice is usually shrieking in fear, making a cursed joke, or half the time whatever shes saying is actually smart. she kinda wants to go to college and travel, but struggles with indecisiveness and anxiety, so she has no idea where to go, what to major in, etc. and is again kinda just livin thru the typical teen life in that regard

kendall on the other hand is like. weird kid culture, the kind of kid that believes they are secretly a new supernatural creature each year (mermaid phase, werewolf phase, alien phase, etc), probably completely accidentally starts cults or witch covens at school (didnt realize teaching peers how to become ‘blood brothers’ and ‘make potions’ from puddles and stolen school supplies would be taken so seriously by parents) , very into emo/scene/punk/alt culture but not rly in an overtly dark/edgy way, more of a having fun and expressing self way. she wants answers for everything, really loves mysteries and being open minded, and definitely a rebel/adventurer at heart, even if she gets naive or in over her head sometimes.

the girls get along well! parker is not dismissive of kendall she just. isnt really into the same stuff/is more freaked out by it most of the time, but she would tag along on certain adventures, especially if it was to keep her safe. and kendall definitely directs gentle mockery towards parker a lot but does see her as a good role model and guiding figure, their bond is really strong!

other details !

doyle and abbey prob decide to say fuck it and get married after kendall is born, they probably have a few rough patches but nothing is more important to them than the kids now and in the end they understand each other better than anyone else so . canon tension idk her! family ftw! power couple! they intimidate the teacher during parent teacher conferences together hand in shady little hand !

their parenting style is exactly what one would imagine, 70% fun and sass and controlled chaos where theyre the bigger children than their children, 15% ‘this is how you hack the government and dual wield swords-- i was not supposed to teach you that im sorry’, and 15% actual guidance / emotional depth / etc. flaws might be overcoming their own immaturity for the first few years, and then being lowkey overly protective (while claiming they arent, but just bc you semi jokingly tell parker she should join the football team doesnt mean you dont actually hide 60% of ur life from her and check that her bedroom windows are locked every night and have 24 people listed in her school emergency contacts and used to cut up her food till she was 7 and-)

so abouT THE BABY BOY (Phoenix), 1. his middle name is leonidas bc im gay and i love emotional turmoil babes , 2. fully unironically the idea behind such a late pregnancy is abbey would be mid fourties when hes born right. so like. [has two kids] ‘ok birth control time’ [when theyre teens many years later] ‘ok im old enough to stop taking this’ [the hyperfertility curse that plagues many women rears its ugly head with one last hoo-rah]

and finALLY a very quick elevator pitch of what id write an actual fic to focus on;;; kendall sneaks into the attic to look for old shit bc they BOTH know their parents have been hiding stuff over the years, she finds things like a cryptopedia (now offline), the claw, maybe even a piece of the kur stone, and ropes parker into the long haul of figuring out what all this stuff is. and ofc the second they ever find the naga relic and parker comes face to face with it, [rest in rip] time for mom and dad to find out and all this kur shit to start ALL over again-

[shmosnet2]

Humans May Be the Only Intelligent Life in the Universe, If Evolution Has Anything to Say

Humans May Be the Only Intelligent Life in the Universe, If Evolution Has Anything to Say

Are we alone in the universe? It comes down to whether intelligence is a probable outcome of natural selection, or an improbable fluke. By definition, probable events occur frequently, improbable events occur rarely — or once. Our evolutionary history shows that many key adaptations — not just intelligence, but complex animals, complex cells, photosynthesis, and life itself — were unique, one-off events, and therefore highly improbable. Our evolution may have been like winning the lottery … only far less likely. The universe is astonishingly vast. The Milky Way has more than 100 billion stars, and there are over a trillion galaxies in the visible universe, the tiny fraction of the universe we can see. Even if habitable worlds are rare, their sheer number — there are as many planets as stars, maybe more — suggests lots of life is out there. So where is everyone? This is the Fermi paradox. The universe is large, and old, with time and room for intelligence to evolve, but there's no evidence of it. Could intelligence simply be unlikely to evolve? Unfortunately, we can't study extraterrestrial life to answer this question. But we can study some 4.5 billion years of Earth's history, looking at where evolution repeats itself, or doesn't. Related: From Big Bang to Present: Snapshots of Our Universe Through Time Evolution sometimes repeats, with different species independently converging on similar outcomes. If evolution frequently repeats itself, then our evolution might be probable, even inevitable. And striking examples of convergent evolution do exist. Australia's extinct, marsupial thylacine had a kangaroo-like pouch but otherwise looked like a wolf, despite evolving from a different mammal lineage. There are also marsupial moles, marsupial anteaters and marsupial flying squirrels. Remarkably, Australia's entire evolutionary history, with mammals diversifying after the dinosaur extinction, parallels other continents. Other striking cases of convergence include dolphins and extinct ichthyosaurs, which evolved similar shapes to glide through the water, and birds, bats and pterosaurs, which convergently evolved flight. We also see convergence in individual organs. Eyes evolved not just in vertebrates, but in arthropods, octopi, worms and jellyfish. Vertebrates, arthropods, octopi and worms independently invented jaws. Legs evolved convergently in the arthropods, octopi and four kinds of fish (tetrapods, frogfish, skates, mudskippers). Here's the catch. All this convergence happened within one lineage, the Eumetazoa. Eumetazoans are complex animals with symmetry, mouths, guts, muscles, a nervous system. Different eumetazoans evolved similar solutions to similar problems, but the complex body plan that made it all possible is unique. Complex animals evolved once in life's history, suggesting they're improbable. Related: 13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens Surprisingly, many critical events in our evolutionary history are unique and, probably, improbable. One is the bony skeleton of vertebrates, which let large animals move onto land. The complex, eukaryotic cells that all animals and plants are built from, containing nuclei and mitochondria, evolved only once. Sex evolved just once. Photosynthesis, which increased the energy available to life and produced oxygen, is a one-off. For that matter, so is human-level intelligence. There are marsupial wolves and moles, but no marsupial humans. There are places where evolution repeats, and places where it doesn't. If we only look for convergence, it creates confirmation bias. Convergence seems to be the rule, and our evolution looks probable. But when you look for non-convergence, it's everywhere, and critical, complex adaptations seem to be the least repeatable, and therefore improbable. What's more, these events depended on one another. Humans couldn't evolve until fish evolved bones that let them crawl onto land. Bones couldn't evolve until complex animals appeared. Complex animals needed complex cells, and complex cells needed oxygen, made by photosynthesis. None of this happens without the evolution of life, a singular event among singular events. All organisms come from a single ancestor; as far as we can tell, life only happened once. Curiously, all this takes a surprisingly long time. Photosynthesis evolved 1.5 billion years after the Earth's formation, complex cells after 2.7 billion years, complex animals after 4 billion years, and human intelligence 4.5 billion years after the Earth formed. That these innovations are so useful but took so long to evolve implies that they're exceedingly improbable. An unlikely series of events These one-off innovations, critical flukes, may create a chain of evolutionary bottlenecks or filters. If so, our evolution wasn't like winning the lottery. It was like winning the lottery again, and again, and again. On other worlds, these critical adaptations might have evolved too late for intelligence to emerge before their suns went nova, or not at all. Related: Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us Imagine that intelligence depends on a chain of seven unlikely innovations — the origin of life, photosynthesis, complex cells, sex, complex animals, skeletons and intelligence itself — each with a 10% chance of evolving. The odds of evolving intelligence become one in 10 million. But complex adaptations might be even less likely. Photosynthesis required a series of adaptations in proteins, pigments and membranes. Eumetazoan animals required multiple anatomical innovations (nerves, muscles, mouths and so on). So maybe each of these seven key innovations evolve just 1% of the time. If so, intelligence will evolve on just 1 in 100 trillion habitable worlds. If habitable worlds are rare, then we might be the only intelligent life in the galaxy, or even the visible universe. And yet, we're here. That must count for something, right? If evolution gets lucky one in 100 trillion times, what are the odds we happen to be on a planet where it happened? Actually, the odds of being on that improbable world are 100%, because we couldn't have this conversation on a world where photosynthesis, complex cells, or animals didn't evolve. That's the anthropic principle: Earth's history must have allowed intelligent life to evolve, or we wouldn't be here to ponder it. Intelligence seems to depend on a chain of improbable events. But given the vast number of planets, then like an infinite number of monkeys pounding on an infinite number of typewriters to write Hamlet, it's bound to evolve somewhere. The improbable result was us. This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Live Science's Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.

https://ift.tt/385COJ4 . Foreign Articles December 02, 2019 at 04:09AM

[sciencespies]

Fossil colour studies are changing our idea of how dinosaurs looked

https://sciencespies.com/biology/fossil-colour-studies-are-changing-our-idea-of-how-dinosaurs-looked/

Fossil colour studies are changing our idea of how dinosaurs looked

In-depth fossil analysis could help us understand the true functions of colour. Credit: Aline Dassel/Pixabay, licensed under Pixabay licence

What colour were the dinosaurs? If you have a picture in your head, fresh studies suggest you may need to revise it. New fossil research also suggests that pigment-producing structures go beyond how the dinosaurs looked and may have played a fundamental role inside their bodies too.

The latest findings have also paved the way for a more accurate reconstruction of the internal anatomy of extinct animals, and insight into the origins of features such as feathers and flight.

Much of this stems from investigations into melanin, a pigment found in structures called melanosomes inside cells that gives external features including hair, feather, skin and eyes their colour—and which, it now turns out, is abundant inside animals’ bodies too.

“We’ve found it in places where we didn’t think it existed,” said Dr. Maria McNamara, a palaeobiologist at University College Cork in Ireland. “We’ve found melanosomes in lungs, the heart, liver, spleen, connective tissues, kidneys… They’re pretty much everywhere.”

The discoveries in her team’s newest research, published in mid-August, were made using advanced microscopy and synchrotron X-ray techniques, which harness the energy of fast-moving electrons to help examine fossils in minute detail.

Using these, the researchers found that melanin was widespread in the internal organs of both modern and fossil amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals—following up a finding they made last year that melanosomes in the body of existing and fossil frogs in fact vastly outnumbered those found externally.

What’s more, they were surprised to discover that the chemical make-up and shape of the melanosomes varied between organ types—thus opening up exciting opportunities to use them to map the soft tissues of ancient animals.

Secondary

These studies also have further implications. For one, the finding that melanosomes are so common inside animals’ bodies may overhaul our very understanding of melanin’s function, says Dr. McNamara. “There’s the potential that melanin didn’t evolve for colour at all,” she said. “That role may actually be secondary to much more important physiological functions.”

Her research indicates that it may have an important role in homeostasis, or regulation of the internal chemical and physical state of the body, and the balance of its metallic elements.

“A big question now is does this apply to the first, most primitive vertebrates?” said Dr. McNamara. “Can we find fossil evidence of this? Which function of melanin is evolutionarily primitive—production of colour or homeostasis?”

At the same time, the findings imply that we may need to review our understanding of the colours of ancient animals. That’s because fossil melanosomes previously assumed to represent external hues may in fact be from internal tissues, especially if the fossil has been disturbed over time.

Dr. McNamara says her research has also shown that melanosomes can change shape and shrink over the course of millions of years, potentially affecting colour reconstructions.

Further complicating the picture is that animals contain additional non-melanin pigments such as carotenoids and what is known as structural colour, which was only recently identified in fossils. In 2016, a study by Dr. McNamara’s team on the skin of a 10-million-year-old snake found that these could be preserved in certain mineralised remains.

“These have the potential to preserve all aspects of the colour-producing gamut that vertebrates have,” said Dr. McNamara.

She hopes over time that these findings and techniques will together help us to much more accurately interpret the colours of ancient organisms—though in these early days, she doesn’t have examples of animals for which this has already changed.

Two fossils found in China showed that flying reptiles known as pterosaurs had feathers, indicating the structures evolved earlier than previously thought. Credit: Zixiao Yang

Deep time

Many of the significant strides in this area have come out of a project that Dr. McNamara leads called ANICOLEVO, which set out to look into the evolution of colour in animals over deep time—or hundreds of millions of years.

The project’s starting point was that previous animal colour studies largely omitted in-depth fossil analysis, leaving a significant gap by basing what we know about colour mainly on modern organisms.

But it has since led to even wider investigation. Dr. McNamara says it is providing fresh hints on the kinds of biological structures and processes that are essential for survival in terrestrial and aquatic environments. “It looks like we’ll be able to look into much broader, exciting questions about what it means to be an animal,” she said.

Part of her research on two fossils found in China even showed that flying reptiles known as pterosaurs had feathers, potentially taking the evolution of these structures back a further 80 million years to 250 million years ago. The fossils contained preserved melanosomes with diverse shapes and sizes, one of the tell-tale signs of feathers.

“We were able to show for the first time that not only were dinosaurs feathered, but an entirely different group of animals, the pterosaurs, also had feathers,” said Dr. McNamara.

Another project she worked on, called FOSSIL COLOUR, compared the chemistry of colour patterns between fossil and modern insects. Again, says Dr. McNamara, these don’t entirely map onto each other.

“It’s already clear that the fossilisation process has altered the chemistry somewhat, so we’re doing experiments to try to understand these changes.”

What’s evident is that there’s lots still to find out about colour. “We’re just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to fossil colour research,” said Dr. McNamara.

Thermoregulation

Other researchers agree that there’s more to animal colour than meets the eye. Dr. Matthew Shawkey, an evolutionary biologist at Ghent University in Belgium, said that looking into properties and functions beyond colour’s use for visual means like signalling and camouflage will be critical to understanding its true significance.

“For example, how do colours affect thermoregulation? Flight? Such functions may be complementary to, or even more significant, than purely visual functions,” he said.

Dr. Shawkey is looking into such questions, with one of his recent studies indicating that the wing colour of birds may play an important role in flight efficiency by leading to different rates of heating.

“What started as a novelty of deciphering dinosaur colours has turned into a very serious field which is studying the origins of key pigment systems, how the evolution of colourful structures may have helped drive major evolutionary transitions like the origin of flight, and how colour is related to ecology and sexual selection,” said Dr. Steve Brusatte, a vertebrate palaeontologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Ultimately, we may be able to find out more about colour than once thought possible. “When I was growing up, so many of the dinosaur books I read in school said that we would never know what colour they were,” said Dr. Brusatte. “But as is so often the case in science, it was silly to treat this as impossible.”

He said he is excited to see what comes next, with the field just in its infancy: “Palaeontologists now have a whole new window into understanding the biology and evolution of long-extinct organisms.”

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New sources of melanin pigment shake up ideas about fossil animals’ colour

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#Biology

[horrible-monstrosity]

BOKU NO ACADEMIA, BEAST NO ARS, BRAND NEW ANIMAL,  WHATEVER, IT'S A REVIEW

Well first of all the show immediately shits pant with the opening sequence- like any mediocre smallbrained bit of writing that involves species or transformations it just slaps a 'HURR DURRR GENES LMOA" on there. It then follows up with a bunch of intermixed images of animals that aren't really used in the show like dinosaurs and fucking coelacanths, when most of the animals are normal shit like mammals and small lizards, in a way that implies hybridization in some kind of patchwork frankenstein-ian fashion... but nothing of the sort exists in the show. It doesn't even properly match whatever the fuck the main character's powers are, as she also seems to just turn into generic normal animals when she's not just... stretchy. Better yet, it implies a much more interesting scenario than the show actually has- one where instead of ordinary animal species, the characters are hybrids. Perhaps as the result of recent desegregation between animal species, the latest couple generations are all sorts of strange hybrid animal species on a wider scale than ever seen before, and the plot deals with the tensions between various animal factions as the social order is upheaved. Make our main character a non-obvious hybrid, whose tanooki genes give her limited shapeshifting powers to begin with, an innocent country bumpkin who came to the shiny big city with dreams or some shit only to be hit by culture shock and end up familiar with the grimy underworld. Great plot right there, no need for offscreen human blamesinks, and it even improves the wackyness levels by allowing weird fucking hybrid characters.

anyway... The feel of the show is actually pretty good during the earlier, quieter scenes, like when nooki girl is heading to the city, but you just know that's not gonna last with Trigger at the helm. The scene with humans attacking her already feels forced, shallow, pointless and ham-handed. I can't help but notice the poster that says 'let's hold hands' has 'beast rights' written on the bottom- so which is it, equality or special treatment? I bet even studio Trigger themselves don't know. There's scenes where the animation framerate shits the bed and seems to only have keyframes drawn, no in-betweens, and it looks really amateur and cheap. Better yet a lot of the backgrounds during the festival are completely still, making the scene look absolutely lifeless. For a studio that got famous on it's le wacky lively western-inspired animation, this is really kind of sad. Like, sadder than this mediocre work already is on its own. Reminds me of how everyone was cheering "muh hand-drawn robutts!!" during Franxx and maybe Griddlemang but then Promare just cgis the backgrounds and robots like completely. Or Gridmangle having just supremely shitty-looking traced cgi backgrounds for some of hte more painfully generic locations.

lolthief. humunz bad beastmunz gud but the second you get to beastmantown you get your wallet the fuck stolen. Another reason they should have just canned the human-vs-beast aspect and just went with inter-beast-species conflict. If they're going to rip off of Beastars they might as well actually commit to it. Or just, you know, not write like complete utter fucking retards, but thaaaaat's Trigger for ya

The wolf-vs-other guys fight just dragged on way too long after it established what it needed to- humuns bad, you can blame humunz for everything beasts do wrong, wolfman sooper strong badass who hate hoomanz we get it, and it didn't do anything well or interesting enough to justify its existance as a show-off setpiece.

And already I'm thinking, story woulda been fine if the girl was just a tanooki with tanooki powers from the start who had lived among humans for a while, and not some wacky superpowers special case. Or if they had done anything at all with the hybrid animals thing from the opening sequence make her just the person around with the most hybridizations or some shit rather than some walking mystery box. And that way, her defending the dudes with her tail powers would be something she knew how to do and not just... why does she know how to do this if she's still convinced she's human? And the idea that beastmanity is contagous just gives humans even more reason to be justified in hating and ostracizing beastmen.

Beastman society is terrible, no one even bothers to remember yesterday, disputes are settled with violent fights in broad daylight, pickpockets everywhere, no wonder humans want to be rid of these fuckers. Beastmen form gangs and beastchildren are retarded little illiterate shits but the real problem is hoomanz who victimized them... offscreen sometime in the past. meh. What a limp, unoriginal, unconvincing story. and then the madam fucking sells the fucking children without a singke fuck given pfgpprhpfpgdfpsdf so sympathetic much vitcims of human wow. andnthey aren't even victims of humans apparently, they're just normal orphans. holy shit how is this so bad, trigger wha're you doing The animation is fucking shitty here. Tanooki gril doing a le wacky sproingy squash-and-stretch animation because triggur watched a didney toon once while the scene would work so much better with something more somber is par the course for triggril, but I was not expecting her arms to go from normal to full noodle-stretch COMPLETELY OFF-CAMERA. And somehow she can't tell she's grabbed onto another beastperson and not a fucking lever. Even if she can't tell the size of what she's grabbed because her arms are stretched out, the softness, texture, shape, materials, everything should be obviously not a lever. Just have her say she grabbed the driver guy and yank him around deliberately instead of whatever the fuck this shit is where she has no idea what she's actually doing but some contrivance (him holding onto the controls with a fucking deathgrip the entire time somehow) makes it work out anyway. Retarded Trigger humor during a dark, depressing serious scene, just what we needed And again, this would have worked perfectly fine if stretching and shit was just part of the tanooki powerset in this world, and stretching that far was just the limit of her power, or even if this was tanooki powers but she was still not expecting she'd be able to do that. Or, since the kids make fun of her and call it disgusting even though she's saving their damn fucking lives, have her not want to do this move unless she really has to because she herself thinks it's kinda gross. So you can show her determination in that scene, that she was able to put that aside

and the reason you can tell she's a human is she's a decent person and not a piece of shit like the beasts psdfpfspgdfbehc5vhjth cx   w5f6r5e hah fugk lol

suddenly she bird, and even though she was freaking out over just being able to stretch just before this she makes no comment on it. Like, this is... the first time she's actually turned into another animal (the ears don't count because even if they're supposed to look like bunny ears or some shit they just look like her normal ears stretched out to catch more sound, which is how ears work after all) and there's just no fucking comment on it. Her entire powerset just changed or was recategorized in this moment and all it gets is a throwaway gag. what the fuck? "erhmagerd a smartphone it's been so long!!!" you just lost yours like a couple days ago on the way to the city wtf you mean

wolfboi smellz so good he can read the display on the timebomb, somehow what happened to the scentless bombs from episode 1? it barely amounted to anything then, but this episode acts like it was never a thing and the lack of smellz this time is some completely different scenario.

[shrubforhire]

All 65 questions

65 Questions You Aren't Used To

Do you ever doubt the existence of others than you? No, I believe ppl when they tell me they exist

On a scale of 1-5, how afraid of the dark are you? 2

The person you would never want to meet? Trump

What is your favorite word? Flustered

If you were a type of tree, what would you be? Cherry tree

When you looked in the mirror this morning what was the first thing you thought? Yikes thats me

What shirt are you wearing? An adventure time shirt lmao someone else gave it to me i swear

What do you label yourself as? 3.99

Bright room or dark room? Bright room,, i need the free vitamin D

What were you doing at midnight last night? Probably playing exploding kittens lmao look it up its fun

Favorite age you’ve been so far? Being 11 was probably pretty solid, I would say 4 but I think thats cheating bc i dont remember it

Who told you they loved you last? My mom hell yea

Your worst enemy? God

What is your current desktop picture? Grunkle Stan’s floating “I eat kids” blimp across a scenic landscape

Do you like someone? Eh, not really

The last song you listened to? Dissolve by Absofacto

You can press a button that will make any one person explode. Who would you blow up? I guess Jeff Bezos but I might as well just write [insert billionaire]

Who would you really like to just punch in the face? Isaac for sending me this

If anyone could be your slave for a day, who would it be and what would they have to do? Jeff Bezos, I would have him redistribute his wealth

What is your best physical attribute? (showing said attribute is optional) Ppl usually say my hair

If you were the opposite sex for one day, what would you look like and what would you do? I’d probably look like a fuckin manlet if I were 5 foot. But this question implies I get to choose what I look like, in which case I would be 5′7″ and buff as shit and I would spend all day hitting on straight girls

Do you have a secret talent? If yes, what is it? I can make my eyes shake lmao

What is one unique thing you’re afraid of? Sometimes when I open the toilet im like ooh i hope no ones in there

You can only have one kind of sandwich. Every sandwich ingredient known to humankind is at your disposal. salami mustard and cucumber on baguette dont fuck with me

You just found $100! How are you going to spend it? Guitar!!!!!

You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere in the world, but you have to leave immediately. Where are you going to go? NY babeyyyy

An angel appears out of Heaven and offers you a lifetime supply of the alcoholic beverage of your choice. “Be brand-specific” it says. Man! What are you gonna say about that? Even if you don’t drink booze there’s something you can figure out… so what’s it gonna be? I dnt even care abt the brand, just hard cider

You discover a beautiful island upon which you may build your own society. You make the rules. What is the first rule you put into place? Be nice 2 me

What is your favorite expletive? fuck

Your house is on fire, holy shit! You have just enough time to run in there and grab ONE inanimate object. Don’t worry, your loved ones and pets have already made it out safely. So what’s the one thing you’re going to save from that blazing inferno? My bass bc im borrowing it so id be fucked lol

You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be? My dad being alive rofl

You got kicked out of the country for being a time-traveling heathen who sleeps with celebrities and has super-powers. But check out this cool shit… you can move to anywhere else in the world! hawaii,,, infinite vitamin D

The Celestial Gates Of Beyond have opened, much to your surprise because you didn’t think such a thing existed. Death appears. As it turns out, Death is actually a pretty cool entity, and happens to be in a fantastic mood. Death offers to return the friend/family-member/person/etc. of your choice to the living world. Who will you bring back? My moms dad, he seemed like he’d be chill and she misses him a lot

What was your last dream about? I don’t remember lol

Are you a good….[insert anything you’d like here]? Im not a good anything

Have you ever been admitted to the hospital? Yea

Have you ever built a snowman? Ive built a shitty pile of show garbage, but i’ll say yes

What is the color of your socks? Pink n gray!

What type of music do you like? Folky poppy musical theatre pop rock synth guitars

Do you prefer sunrises or sunsets? Sunrises

What is your favorite milkshake flavor? Choccy milk

What football team do you support? (I will answer in terms of American football as well as soccer) I support the right to choose (for football)

Do you have any scars? I got 1 on my cheek

What do you want to be when you graduate? Happy

If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be? Give myself 17 years of dance training so I’d be a god

Are you reliable? I think so

If you could ask your future self one question, what would it be? Did you figure it out?

Do you hold grudges? oooooh it depends. yes and no. i hold grudges in v specific situations and i give a 4 year rule where u get a second chance 

If you could breed two animals together to defy the laws of nature, what new animal would you create? puppy plus bird. sofd.

What is the most unusual conversation you’ve ever had? all of them. ive had multiple conversations w different ppl abt what it would be like if a guy wore a strap on for sex and he had 2 dicks but he used the strap anyways lol

Are you a good liar? not at all

How long could you go without talking? i am so bad at it, i can barely go on vocal rest bc i dont shut the fuck up

What has been you worst haircut/style? I’ve had almost the same hair my whole life and its all been pretty tame. Im gonna say when i half sprayed my hair pink in middle school when i tried to cosplay fluttershy bc that was HORRID

Have you ever baked your own cake? hell yea, i baked a 3 layer cake once

Can you do any accents other than your own? I “do” southern, british, russian, jersey. whether i do them well is another question

What do you like on your toast? Avocado babeyyyyyy

What is the last thing you drew a picture of? I think it was a cat

What would be you dream car? A BIG ASS VAN THAT FITS LIKE 13,000 PEOPLE

Do you sing in the shower? Or do anything unusual in the shower? Explain. Yes. Define unusual ;))))) just kidding lmao

Do you believe in aliens? Idk, it doesnt rly keep me up at night. if i saw some aliens id be like lit

Do you often read your horoscope? v rarely

What is your favorite letter of the alphabet? idk fuckin Q i guess

Which is cooler: dinosaurs or dragons? Dragons. something spicier abt them

What do you think about babies? What do they think about me? Have they been talking about me??

Freebie! Ask anything interesting you can think of. haha idiot u forgot to add an end question oh wait you guys dont read these you just ask all of them blindly fuck u guys

[airoasis]

How to stop screwing yourself over | Mel Robbins | TEDxSF

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-stop-screwing-yourself-over-mel-robbins-tedxsf-24/

How to stop screwing yourself over | Mel Robbins | TEDxSF

Translator: Judith Matz Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic higher welcome! Hey, San Francisco! TEDx oh my God, blinding gentle! Hi, every person! How are you? (audience cheering) excellent?! Oh my gosh! Okay, so… My name is Mel Robbins, and for the last seventeen years, i’ve performed nothing however aid individuals get the whole lot that they need. Inside cause! My husband’s right here. So, I’ve carried out it within the courtroom, in the boardroom, in the bedroom, in people’s living room, anything room you want to be in, if i’m there, i will aid you get anything you need in any respect crucial. For the final three years I host a syndicated radio exhibit.Five days a week, i am going live in forty cities and i speak to guys and women throughout the united states who think stuck. Have you learnt that a third of american citizens suppose dissatisfied with their lives right now? That could be a hundred million persons! That’s insane! And i’ve come head to head with it in this new show that i am doing, which is also insane, it’s referred to as "In-laws". I move in with families across america (Laughter) You guessed it! Who’re at conflict with their in-laws. We move them into the identical apartment, I verbally assassinate every body, we open up Pandora’s field, and i get people to stop arguing about the donuts and who’s hosting Thanksgiving dinner, and talk about the true stuff. And that is what I need to speak to you about.I am here for you. I’m going to inform you the whole thing i do know in less than eighteen minutes about how you can get what you wish to have. So i need you to take a millisecond right now and feel about what you need. You! And i would like you to be egocentric. Screw Simon and the "We" thing. This is about me, proper now! (Laughter) (Applause) Sorry, Simon. What do you need? And here’s the deal. I do not want it to sound excellent to other folks. Being healthful won’t get your ass on a treadmill. Shedding your manboobs, so that you would be able to hook up with an individual, now that is motivation. (Laughter) So, I want to comprehend: What do you need? Do you need to shed some pounds? Do you want to triple your income? Do you wish to have to begin a nonprofit? Do you wish to have to find love? What is it? Get it, proper right here. What it is, don’t analyze it to loss of life, simply pick some thing. That is a part of the obstacle. You is not going to choose. So, we’re going to be speaking about the way you get what you need. And albeit, getting what you need is modest. But become aware of I failed to say it was once effortless. It is very simple. In fact, in the event you feel about it, we are living in probably the most potent moment in time. In order that thing that you’ve got up here, anything it is usually, you want to make use of healthful consuming to medication your diabetes, you need to figure out find out how to deal with the elders and start a brand new hospice core, you need to maneuver to Africa and construct a university…Bet what? That you can stroll right into a e-book store right now! And buy as a minimum ten books written with the aid of credentialed specialists on how the hell you do it. You might Google it. And also you could mostly find as a minimum, I have no idea – a thousand blogs documenting the step, by using step, by using step transformation that a person else is already doing. You can see someone online and cyber-stalk them! (Laughter) that you could just walk in their footsteps just use the science of drafting. Follow what each person else has accomplished, since a person is already doing it! So why do not you’ve gotten what you need, if you have the entire understanding that you just want, you’ve the contacts that you simply need, there are more often than not free instruments online that enable you to a business, or join a group, or do some thing the heck you want!? It all comes down to at least one phrase: F*#.Shut the front door, you already know what i am speaking about? The f-bomb. It can be far and wide! You hear it always! I actually don’t realise what the enchantment is of the word. I imply, you do not sound smart whilst you say it. And it is fairly not expressing how you relatively suppose. It is kind of a low-priced shot to take. And of direction you understand i’m talking in regards to the phrase "fine". "how you doing?" "Oh, i’m first-rate." Oh, really? You are? Dragging around those additional forty pounds, you’re high-quality? Feeling like roommates along with your partner, and you’re high-quality? You have not had intercourse in four months, you’re exceptional? Quite?! I don’t suppose so! However see, this is the take care of pronouncing that you’re quality: it can be really genius.Since if you’re first-rate, you don’t have to do whatever about it. However while you suppose about this phrase "fine", it simply makes me so indignant. Here we are at a conference about being alive and you are going to explain the experience of being alive as "fine"?! What a flimsy and feeble phrase! If you are crappy, say you are crappy! If you are effective say you are amazing! Tell the reality! And this not best goes for the social assemble: "Oh, i do not need to burden you with the fact that I hate my life", or: "hiya, i am robust! But that might make you consider horrible." The better quandary The higher trouble with "exceptional" is that you just say it to your self.That factor that you need, I guarantee you, you could have convinced your self that you’re fine no longer having it. That is why you are now not pushing yourself. It’s the areas to your life where you could have given up. Where you have got said, "Oh, i am quality. My mom’s under no circumstances going to vary, so I just are not able to have that conversation." "i’m exceptional. We have now bought to attend except the youngsters graduate, earlier than we get divorced, so we will just sleep in separate bedrooms." "i’m best. I misplaced my job, i will barely pay my bills, however whatever it can be hard to get a job." one of the vital reasons why this phrase also simply annoys me so much is, scientists have calculated Oh yeah, i’m coming down! (Laughter) Scientists have calculated the odds of you being born. That is correct. They’ve crunched the numbers. I see you up there. They’ve crunched the numbers on you Yeah, you guys standing up, you want to sit down down for this. They’ve crunched the numbers on you being born. And so they took into consideration all the wars, and the ordinary failures, and the dinosaurs, and the whole thing else.And do you understand that the percentages, the odds of you, yeah, correct right here, put your computer away, rise up for me, Doug! (Laughter) So the odds of Doug here, flip around, say "hi" to all people the percentages of Doug being born at the moment in time he was born, to the father and mother you have been born to, with the DNA constitution that you’ve got, one in four hundred trillion! Isn’t that strong? Doug: i am so lucky! Mel: yes! You’re now not excellent, you are excellent! You might have existence-changing ideas for a reason, and it can be to not torture your self. Thanks. Thank you, Doug. (Applause) Christine was once right when she stated all of you might be on stage. Considering all of you we’re all in this class. One in 4 hundred trillion. All day lengthy you will have strategies that could exchange your existence, that could trade the arena, that would change the way in which that you just believe, and what do you do with them? Nothing! (Grunts) confidently I will not moon you. (Laughter) You didn’t pay for that. (Laughter) And i want you to simply feel for a minute, on account that we all have i really like to use the analogy "the inside snooze button" you have these amazing suggestions that bubble up.You have been staring at men and women all day and that i assurance you, like ping pong balls bam-bam-bam and everytime you’ve gotten an thought, what do you do? Hit the snooze! What is the first determination you made this morning? I wager it used to be to go back to mattress. "Yeah, first resolution in these days, i’m one in four hundred trillion, i am going to go back to sleep." and that i get it! Your bed is secure! It is cosy, it can be heat! If you are lucky, you’ve got acquired a person that you simply love subsequent to you, or in my case, I’ve bought my husband and my two youngsters and potentially the canine. And the reason why i am mentioning this primary resolution that you just made in these days, and the inside snooze alarm, is on account that in any subject of your existence that you need to vary, any there’s one reality that you simply need to comprehend. This one: you’re in no way going to believe adore it. Ever. No person’s coming, motivation is not taking place, you’re in no way going to think like it. Scientists name it activation vigour. That’s what they name the force required to get you to change from what you are doing on autopilot to do anything new.So do that experiment the following day. You feel you’re so fancy, i do know, you’re attending TED. (Laughter) do that. The next day to come morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes prior. After which when it goes off, take these sheets, throw them off, and get up and your day. No snooze, no delay, no, "i will simply wait here for 5 seconds considering that Mel’s not standing here" Do it. And the purpose why i would like you to do it is when you consider that you will come head to head with the physical, and i imply bodily drive that is required to vary your behavior. Do you suppose that an individual who wants to shed some pounds ever seems like occurring a food plan? Of course no longer! You consider they ever believe like consuming boiled bird and peas instead of a croissant? I do not suppose so! The activation power required to get your ass away out of your computer and out the entrance door, to move on the stroll, you said that you just were going to head on, is the targeted equal amount of force that it takes you to push yourself out of a heat mattress and into a cold room.What’s exciting about being an adult is that whilst you grow to be eighteen, no person tells you that it can be now going to be your job to father or mother yourself. And by using "father or mother your self", I imply it can be your job to make your self do the crap you do not need to do, so you can be everything that you are presupposed to be. And you are so rattling busy ready to think like it. And you are in no way going to! My son under no circumstances looks like getting off his DS. That’s my job! Get off the damn DS! Kendall, smooth up the Barbies! If you’re going to have a nude party in my lavatory, at least smooth it up! (Laughter) God, chew along with your mouth closed! We’re not a barn, for crying out loud! All right, dinner is coming, get out of the pantry. As dad and mom, and you were a kid, your mother and father make you do the things you don’t consider like doing. Considering the fact that you will not. Ever. Not now, now not then, no longer ever! And even whilst you get excellent at some thing, you’ll be able to work out something else you do not want to do. And then you’ll plateau out, become bored, "I hate this job.Blah blah boring." however will you seem for a brand new one? No! You’ll simply bitch about that one. It’s very, very simple to get what you want. Nevertheless it’s not easy. You need to drive your self. And i imply force. And the purpose why i take advantage of the word "force" when Roz was up here and speaking in regards to the emotion tracking, and she or he had the photograph of two aspects of the brain I seem at the brain the special equal method. Simplest I describe one part of your mind as autopilot and the opposite aspect as emergency brake. That’s the only two speeds you get: autopilot, emergency brake. And bet which one your mind likes higher: autopilot. You will have had the experience where you might have driven to work and you get there and you’re like, "Oh my God, i do not consider ever using right here." (Laughter) you weren’t drunk! That was once your brain on autopilot. It was functioning just at this degree. And the trouble along with your intellect is that whenever you do some thing that’s specific from your ordinary activities, guess what your mind does emergency brake! And it has that response for the whole lot. The whole lot! You stroll into the kitchen and see everyone’s left their breakfast dishes for you.And also you feel for the hundredth time, "i’ll kill them. Actually i’m gonna depart it right here and i will make them do it." but that is not your usual activities, is it? So your intellect goes: emergency brake! And you go proper into autopilot. "i will just load it, and be pissed, and then not have intercourse. That is what i’ll do." (Laughter) (Applause) So, after I say "drive", anything that is a wreck out of your hobbies goes to require drive. And for those who believe about your lifestyles, it is style of humorous when you consider that we are kids and then we grow to be adults, and we spend so much time looking to push our existence into some kind of steady movements, after which we grow bored of it! You get up at the same time every day, you might have mostly the equal breakfast, you pressure to work the identical means, exhibit up at work, seem busy, prevent making calls, update facebook, you attend a meeting and doodle the whole time, return and update facebook, make plans for the night, you look busy some extra, then pressure dwelling the equal way, you consume largely the equal dinner or a style of it, you watch the equal sort of media, and then you definitely go to mattress, and do the equal thing all over again! No surprise you are bored out of your intellect! It can be the activities that’s killing you.I have this idea about why folks get stuck in life. So, most of you’ve gotten generally taken your normal Psych one hundred and one type, and you’ve gotten bumped into Abraham Maslow’s "Hierarchy of wishes"? Good, your physique is kinda cool. On the grounds that you’ve gotten these basic desires. And your physique is wired to send you indicators. If you need meals, what do you consider? If you need water, what do you think? If you want sex, what do you think? (Laughter) thanks. I suppose whilst you think caught or disappointed for your existence, it can be a signal. And it is not a signal that your life is broken. It is a sign that one of your most elementary desires are not being met.Your want for exploration. Everything about your life, about your body, grows! Your cells regenerate, your hair, your nails, everything grows to your whole lifestyles. And your soul wishes exploration and growth. And the only manner you can get it is with the aid of forcing your self to be uncomfortable. Forcing yourself to get external, out of your head. Thanks. If you are in your head, you’re behind enemy lines. That isn’t God talking, k? It’s now not! Correctly, if I put a speaker on it and we broadcast what you say to yourself, we’d institutionalize you. (Laughter) you would not hang around with individuals that speak to you the way in which you speak to yourself. So get out of your head! Your feelings! Your emotions are screwing you! I don’t care how you suppose! I care about what you need! And if you happen to take heed to how you feel, when it comes to what you wish to have you are going to now not get it.Considering you will certainly not consider adore it. And also you have got to get outside your comfort zone. It can be no longer about taking risks, it is about getting external your comfort zone. These first three seconds whilst you push your self off the bed, they blow. But as soon as you are up, it can be quality. Those first three seconds when you’re sitting here in a stadium like this and someone says, "get up and come dance," and you feel, "Oh, I must try this," and then you’re like, "Uhmm." that have that you simply had whilst you had the impulse to do it and then you didn’t do the activation vigor required to drive yourself, your emergency brake obtained pulled "i am sitting correct here. I’m now not going up with these crazy humans, i do not like to bounce…" What occurred for me is I got here up, and i bumped into Rachel, and then we started talking, and subsequent thing you know, she’s tweeting. And we’re friends. And boom! Get external. That is the place the magic is. That’s the place the one in 4 hundred trillion exists. So the whole lot I do oh, good enough, this is the final section.Sorry. So a further thing that you can use, I call it the five-2nd-rule. Your mind can process a facial features in 33 milliseconds. It may well move lovely rattling speedy. The other factor that it does very swiftly is in case you have a type of little impulses which can be pulling you, when you don’t marry it with an motion inside 5 seconds, you pull the emergency brake and kill the inspiration. Kill it! When you have the impulse to get up and are available dance while the band is taking part in, when you don’t get up in 5 seconds, you are going to drag the emergency brake. If in case you have an impulse about, you had been influenced by somebody’s speech in these days, and you do not do some thing within five seconds write a word, ship your self a textual content anything bodily to marry it with the notion, you’ll pull the emergency brake and kill the inspiration.Your difficulty is not strategies. Your quandary is you do not act on them. You kill them. It can be now not my fault. It is no longer any individual’s fault. You are doing it to your self. Discontinue it! I am counting on you. One in four hundred trillion. You bought stuff to do! And it’s no longer going to occur to your head. So i need you to apply this at present. Once we go off to social gathering, thank God it’s coming soon, seeing that I believe all of us could use a cocktail, i want you to follow the five-2d-rule. You see an individual and also you think you could have an impulse, they look interesting? Walk over there! You were stimulated with the aid of a person and you have a request? Make it! That’s why you are here! Test with it, and that i suppose you’ll be bowled over about what occurs.And another thing, i want you to understand that the whole thing that I do, whether or not it’s the radio exhibit, or the television show, or the guide that I wrote, or the column, it can be for you. And if there may be some thing that i can do, if i will do some thing to make you do the matters you don’t want to do, so which you could have what you want, i’ll do it. However you have got to walk over, you must open your mouth, and you must make the request. You acquired it? Good. Go do it. (Applause) thanks! Thanks, sure! Get up! You have the impulse, get up! Thanks! .

[batterymonster2021]

How to stop screwing yourself over | Mel Robbins | TEDxSF

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/how-to-stop-screwing-yourself-over-mel-robbins-tedxsf-24/

How to stop screwing yourself over | Mel Robbins | TEDxSF

Translator: Judith Matz Reviewer: Tatjana Jevdjic higher welcome! Hey, San Francisco! TEDx oh my God, blinding gentle! Hi, every person! How are you? (audience cheering) excellent?! Oh my gosh! Okay, so… My name is Mel Robbins, and for the last seventeen years, i’ve performed nothing however aid individuals get the whole lot that they need. Inside cause! My husband’s right here. So, I’ve carried out it within the courtroom, in the boardroom, in the bedroom, in people’s living room, anything room you want to be in, if i’m there, i will aid you get anything you need in any respect crucial. For the final three years I host a syndicated radio exhibit.Five days a week, i am going live in forty cities and i speak to guys and women throughout the united states who think stuck. Have you learnt that a third of american citizens suppose dissatisfied with their lives right now? That could be a hundred million persons! That’s insane! And i’ve come head to head with it in this new show that i am doing, which is also insane, it’s referred to as "In-laws". I move in with families across america (Laughter) You guessed it! Who’re at conflict with their in-laws. We move them into the identical apartment, I verbally assassinate every body, we open up Pandora’s field, and i get people to stop arguing about the donuts and who’s hosting Thanksgiving dinner, and talk about the true stuff. And that is what I need to speak to you about.I am here for you. I’m going to inform you the whole thing i do know in less than eighteen minutes about how you can get what you wish to have. So i need you to take a millisecond right now and feel about what you need. You! And i would like you to be egocentric. Screw Simon and the "We" thing. This is about me, proper now! (Laughter) (Applause) Sorry, Simon. What do you need? And here’s the deal. I do not want it to sound excellent to other folks. Being healthful won’t get your ass on a treadmill. Shedding your manboobs, so that you would be able to hook up with an individual, now that is motivation. (Laughter) So, I want to comprehend: What do you need? Do you need to shed some pounds? Do you want to triple your income? Do you wish to have to begin a nonprofit? Do you wish to have to find love? What is it? Get it, proper right here. What it is, don’t analyze it to loss of life, simply pick some thing. That is a part of the obstacle. You is not going to choose. So, we’re going to be speaking about the way you get what you need. And albeit, getting what you need is modest. But become aware of I failed to say it was once effortless. It is very simple. In fact, in the event you feel about it, we are living in probably the most potent moment in time. In order that thing that you’ve got up here, anything it is usually, you want to make use of healthful consuming to medication your diabetes, you need to figure out find out how to deal with the elders and start a brand new hospice core, you need to maneuver to Africa and construct a university…Bet what? That you can stroll right into a e-book store right now! And buy as a minimum ten books written with the aid of credentialed specialists on how the hell you do it. You might Google it. And also you could mostly find as a minimum, I have no idea – a thousand blogs documenting the step, by using step, by using step transformation that a person else is already doing. You can see someone online and cyber-stalk them! (Laughter) that you could just walk in their footsteps just use the science of drafting. Follow what each person else has accomplished, since a person is already doing it! So why do not you’ve gotten what you need, if you have the entire understanding that you just want, you’ve the contacts that you simply need, there are more often than not free instruments online that enable you to a business, or join a group, or do some thing the heck you want!? It all comes down to at least one phrase: F*#.Shut the front door, you already know what i am speaking about? The f-bomb. It can be far and wide! You hear it always! I actually don’t realise what the enchantment is of the word. I imply, you do not sound smart whilst you say it. And it is fairly not expressing how you relatively suppose. It is kind of a low-priced shot to take. And of direction you understand i’m talking in regards to the phrase "fine". "how you doing?" "Oh, i’m first-rate." Oh, really? You are? Dragging around those additional forty pounds, you’re high-quality? Feeling like roommates along with your partner, and you’re high-quality? You have not had intercourse in four months, you’re exceptional? Quite?! I don’t suppose so! However see, this is the take care of pronouncing that you’re quality: it can be really genius.Since if you’re first-rate, you don’t have to do whatever about it. However while you suppose about this phrase "fine", it simply makes me so indignant. Here we are at a conference about being alive and you are going to explain the experience of being alive as "fine"?! What a flimsy and feeble phrase! If you are crappy, say you are crappy! If you are effective say you are amazing! Tell the reality! And this not best goes for the social assemble: "Oh, i do not need to burden you with the fact that I hate my life", or: "hiya, i am robust! But that might make you consider horrible." The better quandary The higher trouble with "exceptional" is that you just say it to your self.That factor that you need, I guarantee you, you could have convinced your self that you’re fine no longer having it. That is why you are now not pushing yourself. It’s the areas to your life where you could have given up. Where you have got said, "Oh, i am quality. My mom’s under no circumstances going to vary, so I just are not able to have that conversation." "i’m exceptional. We have now bought to attend except the youngsters graduate, earlier than we get divorced, so we will just sleep in separate bedrooms." "i’m best. I misplaced my job, i will barely pay my bills, however whatever it can be hard to get a job." one of the vital reasons why this phrase also simply annoys me so much is, scientists have calculated Oh yeah, i’m coming down! (Laughter) Scientists have calculated the odds of you being born. That is correct. They’ve crunched the numbers. I see you up there. They’ve crunched the numbers on you Yeah, you guys standing up, you want to sit down down for this. They’ve crunched the numbers on you being born. And so they took into consideration all the wars, and the ordinary failures, and the dinosaurs, and the whole thing else.And do you understand that the percentages, the odds of you, yeah, correct right here, put your computer away, rise up for me, Doug! (Laughter) So the odds of Doug here, flip around, say "hi" to all people the percentages of Doug being born at the moment in time he was born, to the father and mother you have been born to, with the DNA constitution that you’ve got, one in four hundred trillion! Isn’t that strong? Doug: i am so lucky! Mel: yes! You’re now not excellent, you are excellent! You might have existence-changing ideas for a reason, and it can be to not torture your self. Thanks. Thank you, Doug. (Applause) Christine was once right when she stated all of you might be on stage. Considering all of you we’re all in this class. One in 4 hundred trillion. All day lengthy you will have strategies that could exchange your existence, that could trade the arena, that would change the way in which that you just believe, and what do you do with them? Nothing! (Grunts) confidently I will not moon you. (Laughter) You didn’t pay for that. (Laughter) And i want you to simply feel for a minute, on account that we all have i really like to use the analogy "the inside snooze button" you have these amazing suggestions that bubble up.You have been staring at men and women all day and that i assurance you, like ping pong balls bam-bam-bam and everytime you’ve gotten an thought, what do you do? Hit the snooze! What is the first determination you made this morning? I wager it used to be to go back to mattress. "Yeah, first resolution in these days, i’m one in four hundred trillion, i am going to go back to sleep." and that i get it! Your bed is secure! It is cosy, it can be heat! If you are lucky, you’ve got acquired a person that you simply love subsequent to you, or in my case, I’ve bought my husband and my two youngsters and potentially the canine. And the reason why i am mentioning this primary resolution that you just made in these days, and the inside snooze alarm, is on account that in any subject of your existence that you need to vary, any there’s one reality that you simply need to comprehend. This one: you’re in no way going to believe adore it. Ever. No person’s coming, motivation is not taking place, you’re in no way going to think like it. Scientists name it activation vigour. That’s what they name the force required to get you to change from what you are doing on autopilot to do anything new.So do that experiment the following day. You feel you’re so fancy, i do know, you’re attending TED. (Laughter) do that. The next day to come morning, set your alarm for thirty minutes prior. After which when it goes off, take these sheets, throw them off, and get up and your day. No snooze, no delay, no, "i will simply wait here for 5 seconds considering that Mel’s not standing here" Do it. And the purpose why i would like you to do it is when you consider that you will come head to head with the physical, and i imply bodily drive that is required to vary your behavior. Do you suppose that an individual who wants to shed some pounds ever seems like occurring a food plan? Of course no longer! You consider they ever believe like consuming boiled bird and peas instead of a croissant? I do not suppose so! The activation power required to get your ass away out of your computer and out the entrance door, to move on the stroll, you said that you just were going to head on, is the targeted equal amount of force that it takes you to push yourself out of a heat mattress and into a cold room.What’s exciting about being an adult is that whilst you grow to be eighteen, no person tells you that it can be now going to be your job to father or mother yourself. And by using "father or mother your self", I imply it can be your job to make your self do the crap you do not need to do, so you can be everything that you are presupposed to be. And you are so rattling busy ready to think like it. And you are in no way going to! My son under no circumstances looks like getting off his DS. That’s my job! Get off the damn DS! Kendall, smooth up the Barbies! If you’re going to have a nude party in my lavatory, at least smooth it up! (Laughter) God, chew along with your mouth closed! We’re not a barn, for crying out loud! All right, dinner is coming, get out of the pantry. As dad and mom, and you were a kid, your mother and father make you do the things you don’t consider like doing. Considering the fact that you will not. Ever. Not now, now not then, no longer ever! And even whilst you get excellent at some thing, you’ll be able to work out something else you do not want to do. And then you’ll plateau out, become bored, "I hate this job.Blah blah boring." however will you seem for a brand new one? No! You’ll simply bitch about that one. It’s very, very simple to get what you want. Nevertheless it’s not easy. You need to drive your self. And i imply force. And the purpose why i take advantage of the word "force" when Roz was up here and speaking in regards to the emotion tracking, and she or he had the photograph of two aspects of the brain I seem at the brain the special equal method. Simplest I describe one part of your mind as autopilot and the opposite aspect as emergency brake. That’s the only two speeds you get: autopilot, emergency brake. And bet which one your mind likes higher: autopilot. You will have had the experience where you might have driven to work and you get there and you’re like, "Oh my God, i do not consider ever using right here." (Laughter) you weren’t drunk! That was once your brain on autopilot. It was functioning just at this degree. And the trouble along with your intellect is that whenever you do some thing that’s specific from your ordinary activities, guess what your mind does emergency brake! And it has that response for the whole lot. The whole lot! You stroll into the kitchen and see everyone’s left their breakfast dishes for you.And also you feel for the hundredth time, "i’ll kill them. Actually i’m gonna depart it right here and i will make them do it." but that is not your usual activities, is it? So your intellect goes: emergency brake! And you go proper into autopilot. "i will just load it, and be pissed, and then not have intercourse. That is what i’ll do." (Laughter) (Applause) So, after I say "drive", anything that is a wreck out of your hobbies goes to require drive. And for those who believe about your lifestyles, it is style of humorous when you consider that we are kids and then we grow to be adults, and we spend so much time looking to push our existence into some kind of steady movements, after which we grow bored of it! You get up at the same time every day, you might have mostly the equal breakfast, you pressure to work the identical means, exhibit up at work, seem busy, prevent making calls, update facebook, you attend a meeting and doodle the whole time, return and update facebook, make plans for the night, you look busy some extra, then pressure dwelling the equal way, you consume largely the equal dinner or a style of it, you watch the equal sort of media, and then you definitely go to mattress, and do the equal thing all over again! No surprise you are bored out of your intellect! It can be the activities that’s killing you.I have this idea about why folks get stuck in life. So, most of you’ve gotten generally taken your normal Psych one hundred and one type, and you’ve gotten bumped into Abraham Maslow’s "Hierarchy of wishes"? Good, your physique is kinda cool. On the grounds that you’ve gotten these basic desires. And your physique is wired to send you indicators. If you need meals, what do you consider? If you need water, what do you think? If you want sex, what do you think? (Laughter) thanks. I suppose whilst you think caught or disappointed for your existence, it can be a signal. And it is not a signal that your life is broken. It is a sign that one of your most elementary desires are not being met.Your want for exploration. Everything about your life, about your body, grows! Your cells regenerate, your hair, your nails, everything grows to your whole lifestyles. And your soul wishes exploration and growth. And the only manner you can get it is with the aid of forcing your self to be uncomfortable. Forcing yourself to get external, out of your head. Thanks. If you are in your head, you’re behind enemy lines. That isn’t God talking, k? It’s now not! Correctly, if I put a speaker on it and we broadcast what you say to yourself, we’d institutionalize you. (Laughter) you would not hang around with individuals that speak to you the way in which you speak to yourself. So get out of your head! Your feelings! Your emotions are screwing you! I don’t care how you suppose! I care about what you need! And if you happen to take heed to how you feel, when it comes to what you wish to have you are going to now not get it.Considering you will certainly not consider adore it. And also you have got to get outside your comfort zone. It can be no longer about taking risks, it is about getting external your comfort zone. These first three seconds whilst you push your self off the bed, they blow. But as soon as you are up, it can be quality. Those first three seconds when you’re sitting here in a stadium like this and someone says, "get up and come dance," and you feel, "Oh, I must try this," and then you’re like, "Uhmm." that have that you simply had whilst you had the impulse to do it and then you didn’t do the activation vigor required to drive yourself, your emergency brake obtained pulled "i am sitting correct here. I’m now not going up with these crazy humans, i do not like to bounce…" What occurred for me is I got here up, and i bumped into Rachel, and then we started talking, and subsequent thing you know, she’s tweeting. And we’re friends. And boom! Get external. That is the place the magic is. That’s the place the one in 4 hundred trillion exists. So the whole lot I do oh, good enough, this is the final section.Sorry. So a further thing that you can use, I call it the five-2nd-rule. Your mind can process a facial features in 33 milliseconds. It may well move lovely rattling speedy. The other factor that it does very swiftly is in case you have a type of little impulses which can be pulling you, when you don’t marry it with an motion inside 5 seconds, you pull the emergency brake and kill the inspiration. Kill it! When you have the impulse to get up and are available dance while the band is taking part in, when you don’t get up in 5 seconds, you are going to drag the emergency brake. If in case you have an impulse about, you had been influenced by somebody’s speech in these days, and you do not do some thing within five seconds write a word, ship your self a textual content anything bodily to marry it with the notion, you’ll pull the emergency brake and kill the inspiration.Your difficulty is not strategies. Your quandary is you do not act on them. You kill them. It can be now not my fault. It is no longer any individual’s fault. You are doing it to your self. Discontinue it! I am counting on you. One in four hundred trillion. You bought stuff to do! And it’s no longer going to occur to your head. So i need you to apply this at present. Once we go off to social gathering, thank God it’s coming soon, seeing that I believe all of us could use a cocktail, i want you to follow the five-2d-rule. You see an individual and also you think you could have an impulse, they look interesting? Walk over there! You were stimulated with the aid of a person and you have a request? Make it! That’s why you are here! Test with it, and that i suppose you’ll be bowled over about what occurs.And another thing, i want you to understand that the whole thing that I do, whether or not it’s the radio exhibit, or the television show, or the guide that I wrote, or the column, it can be for you. And if there may be some thing that i can do, if i will do some thing to make you do the matters you don’t want to do, so which you could have what you want, i’ll do it. However you have got to walk over, you must open your mouth, and you must make the request. You acquired it? Good. Go do it. (Applause) thanks! Thanks, sure! Get up! You have the impulse, get up! Thanks! .