#roderick williams

[countesspetofi]

3 Poems by Walt Whitman: No. 2, A Clear Midnight

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless, Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done, Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best, Night, sleep, death and the stars.

--Walt Whitman, 1881

[bodybybane]

Baritone Roderick Williams: ‘I once heard a singer at a party say: “No peanuts. I’m singing in three days!”’ https://www.theguardian.com/music/2024/sep/29/baritone-roderick-williams-interview-oxford-international-song-festival-

[spiderliliez]

Madeline and Roderick 🌹 Based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (2023)

[+] ..more on “TFOTHOU” 🎬

[milesworld96]

back on my shit yalls, these are so fun to make

[mindisinmars]

COMING TO TERMS WITH THE FACT THAT ILL NEVER BE A TEENAGE BOY IS HARDER THAN IT SEEMED ❗❗❗

[blizzardsuplex]

A collection of random snippets from Roderick Strong's LiveJournal, 2004-2005

So, unlike people like Punk or Joe, he never used his LJ extensively; there are still some fun/interesting posts from 20 to 21-year-old Roddy, though. Screenshots under the cut (with alt text and occasional commentary):

[the way he types always makes me laugh. So many exclamation points...]

[More exclamation points. Also, didn't know he worked CZW.]

[first time he worked IWA...wild.]

[first PWG match! Also him going out with Steen, Generico, and his "best buddy" Shelley, LMAO]

[Jamie Gibson becoming ROH champ, Punk leaving the indies, Roddy debuting the trunks, and them going to The Weiners Circle, which is thankfully not NSFW to read about.]

[Watching the Joe/Kobashi match backstage must've been wild. Also aww his mentor match!]

[agir1ukn0w]

so like I haven't seen any of you geniuses (I mean that sincerely, y'all are freaking brilliant 99% of the time) make this comparison yet, but it was pretty fucking clear to me from the get-go that Roderick and Madeline are Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. I'm not sure if this was an intentional move on the writers' part, but their dynamic just screams mastermind power-hungry queen and her not-quite-as-smart but in the end equally ruthless king (she even calls him a "king" towards the end, and he calls her a "queen"), who both end up being wracked with so much guilt they start hallucinating and seeing the ghosts of the people they've killed/caused the deaths of (tho that's more Roderick's thing). I'm just saying, it's a pretty cool comparison to make, even tho they're siblings not a married couple, I feel like they fit the bill pretty damn closely and I would love to hear @flanaganfilm address it in an interview at some point🩸

[ribbedpleasure]

venn diagram with fnaf labelled on one side, tfothou labelled on the other, “old men fucking” in the middle

[joearlikelikeswrestling]

[your-fave-isdoomedbythenarrative]

The entire Usher family in Netflix’s TFOTHOU is doomed by the narrative (yes, including Lenore)

The Usher Family from The Fall Of The House Of Usher is doomed by the narrative and trying to escape.

[comicwaren]

From Miles Morales: Spider-Man Vol. 2 #015

Art by Federico Vicentini, Federica Mancin and Bryan Valenza

Written by Cody Ziglar

[cryingadenium]

Characters from "Tunnels" part 1 When will I make the second part? Who knows...

[thevondoom62]

Of course, Spidey looks good with any villain you put him against (or just Venom again.)

[reppyy]

[doyouwanttoseeabug]

oh OOOOOOH their deaths mirror each other. Tamerlane and Leo are both driven to what looks like suicide chasing hallucinations around an apartment that architecturally represents their psyche (as they destroy it), shortly after leaving/planning to leave their loving partner. (Both of them invite her in, at first. Both of them want her there. But now she's in the mirrors. She's in the walls.)

Vic and Camille are both killed/driven to death by Vic's experiments, their rivalry leading to both their deaths (Camille to prove it doesn't work, Vic to prove it does), immediately after they get left by people they are using in professional/personal ways - Camille hires Toby and Tina to sleep with them, Vic dates Ali to get her to work with her on the heart mesh.

Perry and Frederick both die in the same warehouse, looking at the ceiling, waiting for death to come to them - Perry with a look of ecstasy, Frederick in terror. Both of them are in that warehouse because they've been humiliated by Roderick and are now determined to prove themselves. Both get led here by drugs. Both involve the mutilation of an innocent, Morrie. Both of them see Verna not as another character, but something like her true self. And there's the parallel between all the mercy that Verna offers Perry - the most she offers any of them, other than Lenore - and her glee in explaining to Roderick exactly why he deserves to die like this.

And then you get the final pairing/quartet of deaths - Eliza Usher + William Longfellow vs Madeline and Roderick which is obvious but oh my god. oh my god you guys. Eliza's wall of crucifixes and clinging to Christian faith and the sanctity of pain as a way of hoping for reward after death vs Roderick putting Madeline through the agony of vivisection to 'honour' her + grant her Egyptian immortality. Both William and Roderick eat their young. Fuck.

[mineralsrocksandfossiltalks]

Monday's Musings: The Development of Biomineralization

William Buckland first noted the seemingly rapid appearance f fossils in Cambrian strata in the 1840's.

And Charles Darwin discussed the then inexplicable lack of earlier fossils as one of the main difficulties for his theory of descent with slow modification (natural selection) in his 1859 book which you've probably heard of.

This seemingly sudden appearance of fauna raised three big questions: was there actually a mass diversification of complex organisms over a relatively short time during the early Cambrian? What caused such rapid change? What does it imply about the origin of early animal life?

Edward Lhuyd, the curator of Oxford Museum in 1698, first discovered Cambrian fossils in the forms of trilobites. From that point on, trilobites became some of the most important fossils for dating Paleozoic rocks (these are called index fossils). Buckland recognized that a dramatic step-change in fossils occurred near the base base of the Cambrian thanks to trilobites and Adam Sedgwick and Roderick Murchison used them for dating Cambrian and Silurian strata.

Charles Walcott suggested that there was an interval of time prior to the Cambrian fauna that did not preserve fossils or was simply not in the fossil record (maybe the rocks had eroded away before Cambrian deposition).

Today, we have fossil evidence that the earliest like goes back 3.8 billion years ago. Rocks of that age in Australia contain stromatolites,

colonies of microorganisms called cyanobacteria.

Fossils of more complex eukaryotic cells called Grypania have been found in China and Montana in rocks dating 2.1 billion years old.

Rocks from about 600-541 Ma have also been found to contain fossils that we now call the Ediacaran Biota but that deserves a post all on it's own.

A reevaluation of the Burgess Shale fauna in the 1970's sparked a renewed interest in the explosion.

Harry B. Whittington realized that many of the animals Walcott had found were just as complex as modern animals but they were also very different. He noted that Marella was clearly an arthropod but not a member of any known class.

He also noted that animals like Opabinia and Wiwaxia were so different than anything alive that they must belong to their own phyla.

Now, we know that there was complex life at the end of the Proterozoic Eon so the Cambrian is not the "beginning of life" like we used to believe. So, why is the Cambrian explosion still so important?

Biomineralization. This is the time period where hard parts began to develop. This is the process by which living organisms produce minerals often resulting in hardened or stiffened mineralized tissues. An example you probably don't think about is your own skeleton. Your skeletal tissues are made up of collagen and calcium phosphate. Other types of biomineralization include silicates in algae and diatoms (these often create chert in limestone) and carbonates (such as chalk) in invertebrates.

Why did hard parts start showing up in the early Cambrian and not before? One hypothesis is that atmospheric oxygen was finally high enough to allow metabolisms to work efficiently enough to create collagen, a protein made of amino acids that provides structural support in connective tissues.

Another hypothesis is an increase in the concentration of calcium in seawater. Animals that create hard parts from calcium carbonate do so in a very specific way. First, carbon dioxide gas must be dissolved in seawater. It then reacts with the water to create bicarbonate and hydrogen ions. That bicarbonate then reacts again with the water and creates carbonate and hydrogen ions.

Calcium is also an ion just floating about in the water column. Animals then absorb these ions.

The calcium ions bond with the carbonate ions to form calcium carbonate crystals inside the shell.

This increase in calcium could also have caused a high rate of erosion (a thought for another Monday).

A final hypothesis is that of predator-prey competition. There is evidence of predation in the Ediacaran fauna such as holes drilled into animals called Cloudina. While the appearance of predation wouldn't trigger hard part development, an increase in predators probably would. In the Burgess Shale alone there are dozens of carnivorous worms, anomalocarids and other arthropods, carnivorous molluscs, lobopods and early jellyfishes that would predate opportunistically.

Likely, it was a combination of all these things that led to the rapid development of hard parts. And hard parts stuck around too! Thank goodness or my job would be even harder than it already is.

Fossilize you later!