Lasuir

Hey, y'all. I'm Lasiurus/Lu, she/they/he. I like literature, biology, and much more. Multifandom. Chronic reblogger.

[borealasiur]

Obligatory Intro

Hey, y'all! I'm Lasiurus, long for Lu, and my gender is butch. Call me whatever pronouns you feel like, I generally use she/they but I do not care. I get my blog name from the Eastern Red Bat, scientific name Lasiurus Borealis.

In the way of interests, I have many, influding;

Biology, chemistry, animal science

Animals! Especially penguins.

Lefty politics and alternate socioeconomic systems

The arts, mostly music and literature

Lots of media

Goth music and fashion

Crafts like embroidery, clothing and jewelry making

Probably more that I'm forgetting at the moment

Please send asks, even if just to say hi or to ask a stupid question. I crave online interactions. The posts tagged #lu elucidates are my original posts.

Anyway. Hi!

[satan-offical]

jazz band has made me talk about jazz things to my non-jazz friends who don't know anything about jazz

"Doing 16 bars of scatting in the Blues A Minor Scale is fun and all but it's SOO hard not use notes during the solo that aren't in the scale, do you get that sometimes?"

"uh.. nnoo"

[xanaxfarts]

Bats getting glamour shots

[snapcracklepop-myjoints]

happy disability pride month to mean cripples, nasty addicts, people with down syndrome who arent nice and talk constant shit, wheelchair users that WILL run you over, autists that dont care and arent about to pretend to, people who lie to their psychiatrists, people that sit on the floor in public places with no benches, amputees that lie profusely about "what happened"; to the "noncompliant", the "drug seeking", the "mean", the "difficult" and the "undeserving", and so on and so forth, i love us all and we deserve the world actually mwah mwah

[bebsi-cola]

when you tell people passports don't need to exist and people should be able to travel as they did throughout most of human history they think that's going too far because in their mind there exists a hoard of nameless faceless immigrants waiting to flood their country and "take over". without realising that there is nothing inherently superior about the imperial core countries - the culture, the food, the clothing, the architecture is not superior than that of the rest of the world. all you've got going for you are the benefits reaped from hundreds of years of historical colonisation and the continuing benefits of modern day imperialism. do you think if people's homes weren't subject to manufactured violence, artificial scarcity, and systematic disenfranchisement they'd all just wanna leave? can you not imagine a life where someone would be happier living in uganda than the usa?

[fashionmajor]

one thing i wanna say though is data centers being built in rural areas is environmental racism + classism so when i see ppl bitching about locals bitching about data centers im like oh it’s literally because it’s not your backyard being demolished and your air not being polluted and your waterways not being ran dry and your soundscapes not being raised to unhealthy decibels ….

[graves-yard]

People that just do some big aesthetic scar over Simon’s nose are cowards. Where are his skin grafts from the hemorrhaging boils on his face??? Where are the glistening red burns that melt and pull his skin??? Where is the missing hair that won’t grow back because of the scarring???

Give him his boils rn I swear to god.

[borealasiur]

my uterus has me so fucked up I almost cried thinking about mitski lyrics.

[faintlyglow]

“I’m not a bad dog, I don’t know why I bite” is compelling for Simon BUT. I think more fitting is amending it to be “I don’t want to bite.” He knows why. He was raised to be the butcher. But clearly he doesn’t revel in embodying that role.

[i-dreamed-i-had-a-son]

Actually, rewatching the ending of Iron Lung, I think I finally understand what happened.

The final shots we see of Simon show him being assimilated by the blood ocean. We hear Simon's screaming gradually distort into a roar, and there are fang-like teeth growing on the side of his face:

The blood is mutating him into another monstrous fish. This implies the voice speaking to Simon had once been human too, but had since become the monster we've seen throughout the film, having burst out of (not bitten into) the SM-8.

The voice says, "We can save everyone, within us!!" which makes sense if we recall the line from earlier in the film about the blood ("It's us"). It's stated that the blood is human blood, and may even be what remains of the humans that were taken in the Quiet Rapture. As people (like the woman from the SM-8, and like Simon now) are sent down into the blood ocean, are irradiated, and mutate, they are absorbed into a sort of hive-mind connection with the blood itself. (It's sort of an antithesis to the repeated refrain of "It's bigger than us"...no, it literally is us.) Simon and the ship are already part of it--an iron lung, built by what is found in blood (perhaps distilled from it) and refilled with oxygen as if the blood is a body using it to breathe.

Then we follow Simon under the surface of the blood and see the following shots (I've taken down the saturation for clarity). The tree pendant cracks and shoots out tendrils:

Simon resurfaces, and his eye (below) flashes and changes color, becoming more like the giant eye we've seen throughout the film. His mutation seems to be progressing.

It cuts to black and the voice says, "We live." Then it cuts to an exterior shot of an explosion, ripping through the monster, and dark shapes start to shoot out from the center of where the ship had been.

Some people have interpreted this as the completion of Simon's transformation, but it isn't. This isn't a fish or even a tentacled sea creature. It's a tree. The trunk is the upper portion, and the roots are the tendrils spreading out towards the screen.

Simon's choice to hold onto hope allowed what was intended for evil to be used for good. The piece he carried of the Last Tree touched the blood, and, as if to fulfill what Eden had said ("our bodies will become the soil"), used it to grow, destroying the monsters as it did. The blood can nourish something now ("we live"), as it is meant to, even if (just as with the data) we don't get to see what it becomes.

Simon is gone, but the Last Tree lives again. And thanks to him, maybe humanity can too.

[j3nbug]

Having a moment

[soapybananaz]

I haven’t drawn gore in forever but this was really fun practice for some upcoming art

[ctrl-shift-alt-9]

I've had enough of Eel monster Simon. With all the friendliness in the world.

Where is the SHADOWMAN in everybody's fics ??? Y'all forgot about his existence. This is what the Eye predicted Simon's future form to be if the tree hadn't mutated. THIS IS CANON MONSTER SIMON.

STOP BEING COWARDS. 🗣📢

OP your art is wonderful and deserves a gold star.

[borealasiur]

So the Shadowman. I thought it was a hallucination, but now connecting both of the scenes it's in, it's weird timey wimey stuff. While yes, this is Simon's future, it's also Simon's past. Both times we see the Shadowman it is Simon, just in a different place in time. The first time we see the Shadow, at the back of the SM-13, that is Simon seeing his future self seeing his present self.

The Shadow in the chair was Simon, earlier, seeing his future self (the first instance of the Shadow), walking at the back of the ship.

[ctrl-shift-alt-9]

So I watched Iron Lung for the first time yesterday. I came across your blog today and holy shit. I put some things together, but this blog makes so many things much clearer. This is fantastic.

[ctrl-shift-alt-9]

Nobody talks about how David, despite his temper and arguably justifiable hatred of Simon, was acting as rationally as possible during the entire movie.

David...

Vouched to get Simon more oxygen despite knowing what he'd done.

Tried to level with Simon and imagine a timeline where Simon got to atone and help rebuild a life for himself, possibly even help rebuild Filament Station (idealistic but positive nonetheless).

Only really got pissed when Simon came off like he was telling David to go fuck himself, after he did his best to level with the same guy who killed an entire ecosystem of people.

Only got pissy after Simon killed his fucking friend and their best welder. He's a loyal crew member and it seems they've been around together for a long time, so I can only imagine his grief (it comes out in rage).

Made a risky call against his own Captain's will to cut the line off the Tow Ship from the SM-13 because the entire ship was literally going down (countless crew lives and safety came before a singular convict, I don't even blame him for this).

Vouched for Ava's safety and called her crazy for delving into a known death zone to save some lab equipment (lives are more important to him than some data which was SO real of him).

It seems like David's actually the empathetic type, but still very bitter. Emotional more so than Ava, even. Despite being cruel in his own ways and having a crude temper due to extreme circumstances, he really seems like the person who is Ava's rational voice.

We have no idea if he had family on Filament or not. We really don't know, but he seems like we caught him in the middle of a spiral during this movie.

His captain, his friend whom he cares for, is losing herself to "The Slogan".

His other friend has terminal Acute Radiation Syndrome.

Possibly lost people he knew and cared for during Filament Station.

The very ship he lives on was threatened by the recklessness of his captain.

He's struggling watching the figureheads of the COI choose "the mission" over countless people, but knows that if he has to make the tough call, he will chose the people he is loyal to. That's fair.

This guy is just... he's complex in his own ways. He doesn't have hardly any screen time, and yet, every single time he speaks, I learn something new about him.

David, guys. DAVID!!! USE DAVID AS A CHARACTER MORE!!! RAAAAH.

[bert-1919]

Watched Iron Lung and doodled instead of sleeping. Monster Simon my beloved! Also apparently my concept for tree Simon wasn’t totally wrong! Watching on my own tv made it easier to notice the ending where the tree killed the creature… anywho.

I watched fall guy after because, like Mark apparently, I wanted to escape from the horrors of the blood ocean and run into Ryan goslings arms.

[ctrl-shift-alt-9]

Did anyone else notice Simon turns his facial expressions "off" while he's talking to other people? But when he thinks he's alone, he's extremely expressive.

Look at his face when Ava can't see him. You can clearly see hope twisting into distrust and fear, looking behind him in paranoia. It's dark and he keeps shoving his whole body closer to the light of the porthole:

Compare that to when they are talking face-to-face, his eyes go almost completely dead, he's baring his teeth, the light in his eye is red instead of that sparkle we saw in the first photo:

Forced To Look Tough All The Time my beloved. </3

[wordpress-blaze-36008770]

Reflections on Changes since 2015

Final weekend in June 2026. Summer has returned with a vengeance. Fortunately, the air conditioning was fixed a while back. Looking like it will be a long summer.

One good thing about the heat and humidity is that my joints don't hurt nearly as much now as they did in the winter. At least until the thunderstorms arrive.

I'm thinking a lot about my grandmother. She was born on June 28, 1918. She died in 2015. I'm thinking of all the changes she saw in her lifetime. I wrote a blog entry about this on this date in 2018. I'm now starting to think of the changes I've seen just since my grandma passed in 2015.

We had the world where Donald Trump was a real estate man and not a politician. Britian has had several prime ministers come and go. Brexit happened. We had a pandemic that killed millions of people all over the world. AI has become as common as smart phones. In 2015, AI was still mostly in the lab and not very good. Search engines were still a big deal before they branched into AI. Nvidia was known mainly by serious computer gamers. SpaceX and Tesla weren't household names. Open AI wasn't around. Drugs to treat obesity weren't available to mass market. Podcasts were still niche. Self-driving cars were still experimental and not really available. EVs were mostly a niche luxury market. AI friends and lovers were science fiction. I liked Scarlett Johansen in the movie 'Her.' Turns out that is now science fact and not the science fiction it was a dozen years ago. Crypto currency was mostly limited to bitcoin and still very niche. Everyone (me included) thought 3D printers would be in every home the same way desktop computers were before the development of smart phones. Some predictions didn't pan out.

As far as I know, I think more people in the world own smart phones than have easy access to safe drinking water. The level of AI we have today, well in 2015, was considered several decades away by most people. Hardly a day goes by where at least one company isn't announcing layoffs (driven in part by automation and AI). China's economy is probably bigger than even the U.S. economy. Most developed countries had birth rates decline below replacement level, whereas fifty years ago most people were worried about people having too many children. Turns out that prosperity and mass education reduced population growth to the point that many people are now worried that we won't have enough people to keep civilization functioning at our current levels. Who can even guess what people of the 2070s will be worrying about in those regards?

In 2015 we weren't spending trillions of dollars on building data centers and upgrading the power grid to power AI. In 2015, global trade was still relatively easy. Russia and Ukraine hadn't gone to war. The US at war with Iran and Venezuela was unthinkable. Groceries were probably less than half the price they are now. Housing was still somewhat affordable. Gig work was mostly for younger people and retirees looking for extra income and not the necessity it is now. The idea of a person having a net worth of over one trillion dollars was the stuff of dystopic science fiction. Multi generational housing wasn't common. Now it's a necessity for many people. Heck, even I lived with my parents for two and a half years looking for a permanent home I initially thought would come open in only a few months.

I think the biggest change most people, me included, didn't expect by 2026 was that white collar office jobs would be easily automated by AI. I figured it would happen eventually, I didn't think it would happen by 2026. So now we have people who have tens of thousands in student loans because they were told that office jobs were safe from automation as recently as five years ago. The kids who would have never thought about the trades in 2015 are seriously looking at them now. The idea of Universal Basic Income was radical. Now it's starting to look like might be needed if we don't want millions of people in the streets starving and rioting.

Even though millions of jobs have been displaced and millions of people died during the pandemic, the stock market is doing better than ever. I imagine some people made more playing the stock and crypto markets than they ever did in a regular forty hour a week job. The stock market has gone from a rich person's activity to almost a necessity for anyone wanting to manage money. Heaven knows banks won't pay enough interest on savings accounts to even keep up with inflation. So much for the internet revolution making life cheaper. That was definitely the big prediction I personally got wrong.

A heck of a lot has changed since my grandma died in 2015. It seems like almost a lifetime of change was forced into barely over a decade. No wonder people are withdrawing and discouraged. I understand why many fear we are already living in a cyberpunk dystopia in 2026. We literally have near Star Trek like technology with the political and social leadership that hasn't updated since at least the 1990s. Too many of our politicians, at least here in the west, still think like it's 1996 and not 2026. In fact, many of the politicians we had in 1996 are still in power.

Source: Reflections on Changes since 2015