ㅎㅅㅎ

Studyblr: physishit

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Baby Horseshoe Crabs: these eggs contain tiny horseshoe crab embryos; the hatchlings emerge after 2-4 weeks, but it takes another 10 years for them to mature into adults

Horseshoe crab eggs are initially opaque, with a greenish-gray, blue, or pink appearance, but each egg becomes increasingly translucent as the embryo matures, providing a glimpse of the tiny horseshoe crab developing within.

The legs become visible about five days after fertilization, and the embryo starts moving shortly thereafter, eventually flexing its legs and twirling its body around in the egg. It molts for the very first time after about a week; the embryo will shed its skin three more times as it develops, before it's finally ready to hatch.

The hatchlings usually emerge after 13-33 days. Their bodies are less than 1cm long, and they look just like miniature versions of the adult horseshoe crabs, except that they don't have tails/telsons and their exoskeletons are still soft and translucent. The larvae are sometimes described as "trilobite larvae."

A horseshoe crab can lay more than 80,000 eggs per year, but very few of those eggs actually survive to adulthood. Most of the eggs are eaten or destroyed before they can even hatch, and many of the remaining larvae perish at some point during the 10 years that it takes for them to reach full maturity (i.e. the age at which they begin to reproduce).

Some wild horseshoe crabs can live to be more than 20 years old.

Horseshoe crabs have existed for at least 445 million years, which makes them about 200 million years older than dinosaurs. Their basic physiology has changed very little since then, and modern horseshoe crabs still look strikingly similar to their fossilized ancestors, which is why they're often described as "living fossils."

Despite their common name, horseshoe crabs are not true crabs. In fact, they're not even crustaceans; they belong to a completely different group of arthropods known as chelicerates, which are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than they are to crabs.

Sources & More Info:

Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute: Horseshoe Crabs

Maryland Department of Natural Resources: Horseshoe Crab Life History

Current Zoology: Developmental Ecology of the American Horseshoe Crab Limulus polyphemus

National Wildlife Federation: Horseshoe Crabs

U.S. Fish & Wildlife: Horseshoe Crab (PDF)

The Horseshoe Crab: Lifecycle

iNaturalist: Atlantic Horseshoe Crab Eggs

[at-the-edge-of-the-solar-system]

Sweater by @acefergusonstudio on Instagram

[bigfrozensix]

“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“

Meanwhile Ariel with legs;

Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.

Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.

[gae-bolg-alternative-dot-exe]

[atalana]

and i mean hell this has been talked about before in more depth than i can, but when people complain about how the ending was changed (the original fairytale does not give ariel a happy ending, she dies trying to protect the prince), i think about the fact that this was written by a gay man in the 1980s

and i think it’s entirely valid (and gives her an extremely strong connection to the queer community) to change the story so she doesn’t die because of who she loves

[starlitskvader]

Triton made escape a necessity. Once someone goes to the point of destroying your possessions in a violent rampage, there is no staying and sticking it out, there’s no safety. (And Ariel, even in Ursula’s lair, gave Triton more thought than he deserved at the time.) Nowhere in the ocean she could go and be safe. Everyone’s always ‘why don’t they just leave :|’ in abusive situations until the leaving is not something they find 100% worthy of approval.

Ursula made it about Eric. She didn’t have to. Ariel had to get out from under Triton’s thumb, it could have been literally anything. Ursula took advantage of a desperate victim for her own agenda. Realistic predatory behavior toward a vulnerable person.

And also

There’s always the ‘Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek’ criticism - FIRST OF ALL he started out looking for a woman who wasn’t silent, and second of all what part of the carriage driving bit (or any of her other actions on land) is meek, exactly?

People above have noted the queer subtext. Now, on the subject of Ariel being willing to leave her family, aside from the baseline ‘this is an abusive environment and she was not safe there’ angle I already mentioned, consider: Ariel’s father made it clear he would stop at nothing to crush and tear down who she was and replace it with what he wanted her to be. Now - what demographic might that resonate with? And given Ashman’s involvement, do you think that was a coincidence?

[tokidokifish]

there has been scholarly discussion about the idea that the og little mermaid story, where she dies at the end, was written as a queer allegory.

so taking that into account… there is something very touching about taking this story from hans christian andersen from beyond the grave and being like “things are different now. they get to be happy. she gets to live.”

[ruffboi-mags]

also in re: “Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek” the meek part’s been discussed but can we please talk about how when he first met her he thought she wasn’t the girl with the voice that he was trying to find and was disappointed, but that he slowly fell for her anyway? He’d explicitly wanted Ariel WITH her voice, but came to love her without it.

[tuulikki]

The bit about Howard Ashman being queer is finally giving me some glimmer of understanding of why the teenaged girl mermaid is named “Ariel.” Because, although the Disney movie single-handedly changed popular perception thereafter, Ariel is a boy’s name. Howard Ashman absolutely knew that.

(Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest also has male pronouns, in case anyone was struggling to remember.)

[raymondshieldsofficial]

have you lot heard about the tiktoker who’s taking on the actual government over a parking ticket? because she’s a hero

[raymondshieldsofficial]

her name is Zoë Bread and she doesn’t show her face, and she’s a British artist whose videos are basically her fucking with people in harmless ways - like, asking retail workers if they want an “official” picture of King Charles that is in fact a cartoon and filming their bewilderment (the person is never in the video; she films the floor and her shoes while she’s doing this). she also calls up companies who have stuff like “call us to talk about [X]!” written on their products to see if they’ll really talk to her about [X] and if the person at the call centre doesn’t know (“full unedited silence” is a feature in most of her videos), she will dig and dig until she finds someone who can. or, until she gets bored, which. fair. can’t fault that.

I’m currently trying to get a member of the british peerage to give me £50 because we’re distant cousins. I appreciate her.

she travels around for these videos and one day she went to Manchester and parked on a road called Collier Street.

Collier Street has (or had, at the time) another car park at the end of it - the SIP car park. SIP is a private company that runs these. the signage on Collier Street indicated that the payment machine there was where you’re supposed to pay, so Zoë and a fuckload of other people assumed that that was where you got the tickets. Zoë put it on her car and went about fucking with whoever she decided to confuse today

she gets back to her car, has a parking ticket, and is confused

again - she paid for a ticket. she wasn’t trying to get out of paying.

because she’d bought a ticket from the machine that the SIP car park instead of the council run machine that is actually on a different road, she’d been ticketed. and, rightly so, she contests it and the person at the council says that the rules are the rules and there’s clear signage

Zoë: the signage is misleading

council: we don’t believe it is

Zoë: well, I was misled

council: we believe the signage is adequate

Zoë, being Zoë, doesn’t agree with this. she pulls up literal years’ worth of data on the history of that sign, the parking on the road, and the number of people who got ticketed. very early on, she says she’s not actually bothered about her own ticket, but she’s upset that people are being caught out and sees that it’s a money-making scheme for the council. she speaks to parking wardens, who mostly seem to agree that the signage is misleading. she has data. she calls them back. same response.

Zoë, being an artist, makes her own sign. which she puts up below the official one. and then she waits to see how long it is before it’s taken down.

[note: there was a side quest sometime during this - it went on for months - where she put cones in the parking spaces. the council moved them onto the pavement/sidewalk. this made it inaccessible for wheelchair users, people with prams, other people who can’t just move around them, which is illegal. so she called the council repeatedly to complain about the cones and monitored them until they were moved. this took ages - we are talking weeks.]

Zoë’s sign gets taken down.

the signpost it was attached to, with the misleading sign, becomes a point of pilgrimage for British people who appreciate a good bit of humour with the intent of bullying the local government. it is COVERED in stickers.

her sign is taken down. the sign is not changed. more people get tickets.

[there was a second side quest, where Zoë discovers that the SIP car park - the private one - doesn’t have planning permission. she doesn’t let this slide.]

not happy with this, Zoë calls in to the local radio station. which has a Q&A with Andy Burnham. the Mayor of Manchester. she calls in and asks him about this. Andy Burnham says he’s taking her concern into consideration and will look into it, and get back to her if she calls in next week.

she’s not put through next week.

she contacts his office.

no response.

she calls in again and brings it up.

[all this is happening while she’s repeatedly ringing the council to ask them about it]

she has gone from “harmless tiktok prankster” to “calling out government incompetence”. with a MASSIVE platform.

eventually, after her being interviewed by the BBC, Manchester City Council puts up a sign saying where the actual car park for Collier Street is (there is a running bit where a council worker misheard her and thought she said “Collyhurst Street”, which to my knowledge does not exist. Zoë now exclusively refers to it as that, including in her radio appearance and on her phone calls)

she isn’t done. she now has a petition to force the government to change vague signage. the government said no, all their signage is adequate. she’s now fighting with them. in one of her most recent videos, she was on the phone with the House of Commons enquiry department trying to figure out how to contest it. she’s brilliant.

anyway, this is why the art of Fucking About must never be lost. big up Zoë

[vulgarirex]

Years ago I drew a few leafhoppers for an exercise at school. These are still the most popular thing I have ever posted on the internet. So I drew some more and made a poster. These little guys are very fun! finding all their scientific names was a pain though!

If you would like a print:

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/vulgarirex/leafplanttree-hoppers/

[heycollage]

@onenicebugperday

[baddingtonbitch]

made this in protest of censorship

[mudwerks]

AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

Copyright class actions could financially ruin AI industry, trade groups say.

AI industry groups are urging an appeals court to block what they say is the largest copyright class action ever certified. They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

well…darn

[flippyspoon]

like to charge reblog to cast financial ruin of the AI industry 🔮

[ryan-sometimes]

what’s an incredibly nieche piece of lore you can share about brazil? like something only a local would know?

I’m gonna do you one better and tell you a piece of lore that even most Brazilians don’t know. So I’m from São Paulo, which has a LOT of Asian immigrants. It actually has the world’s largest Japanese population outside of Japan, and there’s an entire city district for Japanese culture/restaurants.

Anyways, I’m from a part of the city where there are a lot of Chinese immigrants in addition to Japanese immigrants. Now, I don’t know why this is the case, but a lot of the Chinese Brazilians in my neighborhood don’t use banks and instead hold their entire wealth in cash. They gut their sofas to stuff them with cash, have “dry” toilets to stock the tank with cash, and even have entire empty mattresses that are filled with cash. They don’t have credit cards and pay everything in cash. Rent, groceries, you name it, and it’s always in cash.

The local criminals have learned this, and so they have started targeting houses and buildings with a lot of Chinese immigrants. Keep in mind that most Asian Brazilians are of Japanese descent, and my neighborhood also has a lot of Japanese Brazilians. A lot of these families have been in Brazil for multiple generations and don’t speak Japanese/Chinese anymore. But the Japanese immigrant families in my neighborhood use banks. This means that the criminals have been keeping track of anyone remotely Asian, and then watching them at local drug and grocery stores to see if they pay with cash or card. If they pay in cash, the criminals deduce that they must be Chinese and have furniture in their apartments stuffed with cash.

[ryan-sometimes]

Another random af thing about my neighborhood in São Paulo is that when I was in high school, the guy who sold the best weed in the neighborhood was Muslim, and he did not sell anything during the Muslim holidays, including the ENTIRETY OF RAMADAN. Meaning that you had a bunch of stoner teens in my neighborhood who religiously kept up with the Muslim holidays because they affected the flow of marijuana

[datasoong47]

#one of those stoners was me and one time I told the only muslim boy in my grade at school eid mubarak#and he was like thanks but why do you know it’s eid#me: 😃

[ryan-sometimes]

what’s an incredibly nieche piece of lore you can share about brazil? like something only a local would know?

I’m gonna do you one better and tell you a piece of lore that even most Brazilians don’t know. So I’m from São Paulo, which has a LOT of Asian immigrants. It actually has the world’s largest Japanese population outside of Japan, and there’s an entire city district for Japanese culture/restaurants.

Anyways, I’m from a part of the city where there are a lot of Chinese immigrants in addition to Japanese immigrants. Now, I don’t know why this is the case, but a lot of the Chinese Brazilians in my neighborhood don’t use banks and instead hold their entire wealth in cash. They gut their sofas to stuff them with cash, have “dry” toilets to stock the tank with cash, and even have entire empty mattresses that are filled with cash. They don’t have credit cards and pay everything in cash. Rent, groceries, you name it, and it’s always in cash.

The local criminals have learned this, and so they have started targeting houses and buildings with a lot of Chinese immigrants. Keep in mind that most Asian Brazilians are of Japanese descent, and my neighborhood also has a lot of Japanese Brazilians. A lot of these families have been in Brazil for multiple generations and don’t speak Japanese/Chinese anymore. But the Japanese immigrant families in my neighborhood use banks. This means that the criminals have been keeping track of anyone remotely Asian, and then watching them at local drug and grocery stores to see if they pay with cash or card. If they pay in cash, the criminals deduce that they must be Chinese and have furniture in their apartments stuffed with cash.

[ryan-sometimes]

Another random af thing about my neighborhood in São Paulo is that when I was in high school, the guy who sold the best weed in the neighborhood was Muslim, and he did not sell anything during the Muslim holidays, including the ENTIRETY OF RAMADAN. Meaning that you had a bunch of stoner teens in my neighborhood who religiously kept up with the Muslim holidays because they affected the flow of marijuana

[datasoong47]

#one of those stoners was me and one time I told the only muslim boy in my grade at school eid mubarak#and he was like thanks but why do you know it’s eid#me: 😃

[prokopetz]

I've always liked to interpret Dracula going by goofy aliases like "Mr. Alucard" and "Lord de Ville" as an actual aspect of the vampiric curse, like you're compelled to correctly identify yourself when asked, though you're allowed to cloak it in riddles or wordplay, because imagine if your true name was, like, Steve.

[datasoong47]

I mean, that was explicitly indicated in Carmilla. Her name in life was Mircalla and also used the pseudonym Millarca. Baron Vordenberg explained that "The vampire is, apparently, subject, in certain situations, to special conditions. In the particular instance of which I have given you a relation, Mircalla seemed to be limited to a name which, if not her real one, should at least reproduce, without the omission or addition of a single letter, those, as we say, anagrammatically, which compose it."

Stoker was influenced by Carmilla, so I suspect that may be where he got the idea

[thoodleoo]

classicists will make the ugliest least functional website in the history of html and it will contain the entire library of fragmentary papyri of the works of aeschylus. for free

[no-siema-co-tam]

the best references of bronze age armor and weapons are on a site called salimbeti.com that literally looks like this:

[ancient-rome-au]

Last update 19/02/2025

Oh, so it's not like this because no one has touched it in 25 years. They are keeping it this way on purpose because Stefanie & Andrea are people of culture.

[tredlocity]

hey whats a gender-neutral word for boyfriend/girlfriend?

[eldritchkraken]

Matesprit

[tredlocity]

ok i dont need anymore answers thank you

[pankendev]

[weatherwhim]

yeah sometimes words are like that

[monstermonger]

Fantasy-ifying the Pacific Coast 🐲

(journal sketchpage wip)

[monstermonger]

c r a b

[femmenietzsche]

Thinking about the history of Prussia and shaking my head in disbelief

[femmenietzsche]

However, in July 1750, the Prussian king teasingly wrote to his gay secretary and reader, Claude Étienne Darget: "Mes hémorroïdes saluent affectueusement votre v[erge]" ('My hemorrhoids affectionately greet your cock'), which strongly suggests that he was sexually involved with men.[7][8]

This isn't even that weird, the Teutonic Knights going Protestant is much stranger

[femmenietzsche]

To muddy Frederick's homosexual reputation, Frederick's physician von Zimmermann claimed that Frederick had convinced himself that he was impotent[85] due to a minor deformity he had received during an operation to cure gonorrhea in 1733. According to Zimmermann, Frederick pretended to be homosexual in order to appear as still virile and capable of intercourse, albeit with men.[72] This story is doubted by biographer Wolfgang Burgdorf, who is of the opinion that "Frederick had a physical disgust of women" and therefore "was unable to sleep with them".[86][87] The surgeon Gottlieb Engel, who prepared Frederick's body for burial, indignantly contested Zimmerman's story, saying the king's genitalia were "complete and perfect as those of any healthy man". [88] In similar terms, the doctors who were involved in washing Frederick's corpse on 17 August 1786 reported that the recently deceased king showed no abnormalities whatsoever in the genitals. Ollenroth, Rosenmeyer and Liebert, the three surgeons of the 1st Life Guards Battalion, wrote that "the blessed king's external birth parts were healthy and not mutilated". "The two testicles were in their natural position without the slightest defect; the spermatic cord could be clearly felt up to the entrance of the abdominal ring without the least hardening or distention; the male member was of natural size; there was not the slightest bit in the soft parts of the pubic region characteristic of a scar or induration, or of any disease ever involving these parts."[89]

This bit's a li'l weird

[deadgenerations]

"Our faggot king's cock was good and normal, as our crack corpse cock examination team has demonstrated. We reject all slanderous declarations that he was merely gay for clout."

[khealywu]

hey! that’s our dead gay king you’re talking about and i happen to KNOW his penis was actually VERY nice and totally normal!!!’

[ownencyclopedia]

☀ cross stitch of a cat , which is about 1000 years old !

A textile fragment was found in Peru. It belongs to the Chimu or Chancay culture (pre-Columbian era X - XV centuries)

[word-for-today]

Word for today: wrench attack

Within the crypto community, to physically threaten or attack someone to force them to grant you access to digital assets; name inspired by xkcd #538

[he-needs-enrichment]

The absolute grip that xkcd has on the it nerd world... Probably around 40% of my comp sci university classes had at least one xkcd comics in their slides.

[greatmountainfloofsquatch]

It's like how The Far Side was ubiquitous in the 80s and 90s.