Poogona [he/him]

(I am stealing that rfk line)

I have very few resources to offer anyone in need, as it’s really only by my basic unfair privileges as a cis white man that I even have a place to sleep, but I’m just trying to make it clear to the people I know that I have the space to house them/feed them if they are in crisis. Without much else to support them with it feels like the best I can do.

anyone who tries to claim there was any absolute standard of behavior for pre-industrial tribes like that is just doing fantasy worldbuilding

Every social organization you can think of was probably the way of life for someone out there, from patriarchy to matriarchy, communal to hierarchical

I get apprehensive around wasps too but it’s very funny to me how much hatred and distrust these animals are met with because they are able to force you to treat them with a little respect

Going from 256 triangles to 1024 triangles per model is a big deal that you can immediately see

Going from 10 million triangles to 100 million or whatever is very subtle and nobody notices

It’s usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)

Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.

Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes

Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.

I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.

(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)

Cockroach beneath bedbug? Ants and termites lower than a stupid ass butterfly?

I strongly disagree with this insect hierarchy and HARSHLY judge the character of its creator

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails “a bunch of lesbos” and he wasn’t even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

It’s a good article that showcases the way AAA games are basically hollow. They wear a lot of art, incredibly elaborate, expensive, art, but none of it comes together to make the experience it promises. Everything is built in separate pieces and stuck together later, and its boring gameplay that shows no interest in being art of its own is the glue. I remember Yahtzee did a video about the first Destiny that made this same point, about how the environmental art in a few areas was fascinating and clearly full of effort, but the gameplay was a slog that lacked the same ambition.

The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it’s heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn’t have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.

This is on-the-nose enough to be a Black Mirror episode jesus christ

It sucks ass but JP’s particular derangement is honestly pretty entertaining, moreso with the way his character has developed since his Journey Into the Dark (his brain damage from the medical coma). Get one of those ai tools to read in his deflating balloon voice and it should be bearable in chunks

Judging by all those babies on her back, that’s probably a wolf spider just trying to make it as a single mom. They are harmless in case you didn’t know.

Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly “eusocial” mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.

Yeah the real issue in a way is that there’s just so much evidence of evolution happening that it’s hard to find a single shared pattern to study

Sometimes ants can’t smell ants either and you get supercolonies