avisect

birds, avi, or avis all work fine || they/them ||dragon sideblog bc im insane: @mothkeeperrising

[justsomeguycore]

as per my last straw,

[alleesaur]

the productivity creatures

[doffy2]

My Melody when she’s put in a picture of some abandoned house with glittery red trauma text overtop of it for no reason

[mrhealyourgirl]

happy pride to losers who get no bitches and stack no paper

[harbinger-of-silly]

All gays will go to hellsite

[king-of-oreo]

What if in hellsite but not gay

[punky-beaver-offical]

[king-of-oreo]

NO!

[avhira]

[hellsitegenetics]

String identified: A ga g t t at t t t ga T tag g a Ag agag Acctac ! T tag g a Ag agag Acctac

Closest match: Psylliodes chrysocephala genome assembly, chromosome: 4 Common name: Cabbage Stem Flea Beetle

(image source)

[graveexcitement]

[kebbopulos]

[spaghettihell]

[crabussy]

Would you audition for Taskmaster?

I would put my entire crabussy into that audition just to bother paul williams at every available opportunity if I got in

[babyjanedough]

Already know I wanna send this to people on June 1

[isuckattechnology]

Audio:

Erika, referencing ebenezer scrooge: You, boy! What day is it?!

Brennan, as a young boy: It's Pride, bitch!

[otiksimr]

im a big fan of dating sims but i don’t really care for the whole self-insert part so I genuinely just imagine myself like this.

[otiksimr]

[pariambod]

(thanks (@)noufelow for translate help!)

[pariambod]

[yesterdaysprint]

Hartford Courant, Connecticut, March 9, 1906

[heedra]

if i couldn't have any of the obvious first choice superpowers i would want my power to be the power of i can go anywhere and its not a problem. the way this power would work is that as long as im peaceful and respectful i can go anywhere and nobody will see it as weird or see me as a target for hostility. i can walk into a cool house to politely peep the decor or walk into a tall office building to politely peep the decor or walk around a city at night alone to politely peep the decor or walk into a strange facility to politely peep the decor or walk onto a plane and ride the plane to its destination and then walk around there to politely peep the decor and its fine as long as im chill. no need to make me faster or anything i can just walk at a normal pace. its good for the soul.

[yardsards]

but i stay silly! *←said in the most world-weary voice you ever did hear*

[fizzlepop-frog]

“but I stay silly!”

[sensiblereblogifposts]

Reblog you stay silly

[weaselle]

on it boss

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[maryellencarter]

I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:

Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?

I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.

There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.

Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.

(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)

[sunflowergardens-world]

Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.

[mysteryteacup]

This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.

[wolfythewitch]

Phm doodle requests from twt

[not-terezi-pyrope]

It's freaky how the brain will just plasticly learn novel motor output interfaces on the fly. It's almost like instead of hard coding a control scheme for anatomy that changes every few million years the strat that brains went for was to be openly reconfigurable to fit around whatever its nerves seem to be hooked up to via observed feedback.

I think they've done tests on this by getting people to pilot novel bodies in VR. But you don't tend to notice it day to day until something weird happens like just now. I was reading a paper book and it had a line of text blacked out as if redacted. Instinctively I go to move my cursor over the black line to see if I can read any text if I highlight it.

Except it's a book and not my computer screen, so the cursor my brain thinks it's moving across my field of vision in front of me doesn't exist. At the same time, my right hand is making a bunch of small involuntary movements next to me. I didn't intend to move it and didn't even notice it was moving until I saw it with my eyes. What I intended to move was my Cursor, something that my brain had learned to understand that it has, and the way it moves this is by actuating the muscles in my right arm, an action that is entirely disconnected from any intent to move my arm, which is a different thing.

I love being a pattern atop this eldritch mess of neurons, it's great

[pfaugh]

father I cannot click the book

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

let's put Scooby and the gang in a genuine horror movie situation, i wanna see what these freaks are truly capable of

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

"didn't they already do this with—" no. put them in a slasher film. put them in a BLOODBATH. put this van full of weirdoes in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre scenario i have FAITH in them

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

THEY'D DO WELL IN SAW

[batneko]

okay I'm thinking about this

not Saw specifically but a slasher with a legit body count. Summer camp slashers are overplayed but I think it really works because it's the type of thing the Scooby gang WOULD get caught up in.

like some of the counselors didn't show up (got got) so the head counselor calls his younger cousin to see if him and his friends can fill in last minute. They show up and they're a bunch of nerds, one of them even has an anxiety dog, and they don't have a big role at first. It seems like the movie is setting them up as cannon fodder.

and then the deaths start and suddenly the nerds are locked the fuck in. The little one with the glasses actually fixed the phone line and is taking stock of all their supplies in case the vehicles go out. The counselor's cousin who seemed like a himbo has set up a perimeter and made makeshift alarms for all the doors and windows, knows all the entry points. The anxious one and his dog are keeping the mood up with the snacks and activities that were supposed to be for the kids, making sure nobody panics and starts making dumb decisions. Somebody tried to grab the redhead and she flipped him over and had him zip-tied before anybody noticed. Weren't they a D&D group or something? What is happening???

[lizardlicks]

Fuck the slasher movie just effectively becomes Home Alone but with Four Kevin McAllisters

Bro's fucked.

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

art by Daviddv1202

[dawen]

at one point the kid with the anxiety dog says, "man, why does this keep happening? this is, like, the eighth time thid year!"

it's barely June. abruptly all the normal councilors understand a) why he has an anxiety dog, and b) why the dog has anxiety too.