Sylph's Space

I have no idea what I'm doing with this thing

[zombooyah]

Highlander (1986) dir. Russell Mulcahy

"There can be only one!"

[igneousbody]

"In the 1960s, after his seminal work on barn owls, Roger Payne switched his attention to whales. In 1971, he published two historic papers. (...) The second showed that fin whales—the second-largest animals after blue whales—make extremely low-pitched calls that can be heard across entire oceans. It nearly destroyed Payne’s career.

That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.

Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.

Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.

In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)

Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.

Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?

Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.

Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.

Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."

- Ed Yong, An Immense World : How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

[wotrot]

I’m currently re-reading scenes set in the White Tower for my fanart project, picking up little bits of information I missed initially, and I’m starting to get the picture that from The Great Hunt to The Shadow Rising, Galad is going through his “Gone Wild” phase mostly off screen.

Indulge me for a moment. I think I can make a case for this.

Galad is a guy whose lived most of his life being a good son to his step mother and following all the rules, so he’s primed for rebellion against that life and just needs a change of circumstances and a little freedom to facilitate that rebellion.

He gets to go to the White Tower with his half brother and sister, two kids who sound like they’ve been muck ups their whole lives, and finally, he’s off Morgase’s apron strings, and doing the right thing doesn't seem like so much fun anymore.

At the White Tower, Galad isn’t there to fuck spiders. No, he’s there to try fucking Egwene. He hits on Egwene as soon as he meets her. Like, literally on their first meeting. She’s just hanging out with Elayne, and Galad thinks it’s cool to hit on his little sister’s friends while mogging his bro Gawyn. Wtf dude.

Later, and arguably, he shows interest in Nynaeve too, since later Elayne has a thought wondering if Galad was still interested in everyone’s favourite walking Braid Tugger™. Did something happen off camera? I think we see a bit of attempted flirtation from him when Nynaeve turfs G&G out of her room in the Accepted’s quarters, because he’s trying to turn the charm on her after he hits on Egwene again, right in front of Nynaeve. Also infront of his little sister again. Fkn shameless.

I bet if Tinder existed in Tar Valon, Galad would be the guy swiping right on all the girls to see who he matches with, and then copy/pasting “sup” to every one of them to find out who has low enough self esteem to reply to his lazy text. A looksmaxxing is fuckboi is still a fuckboi, Galad.

Then, after the girls are gone from the Tower in The Shadow Rising, we hear from Gawyn that Galad is heartsick Egwene is gone (she left him on read when he texted her “wyd” actually), and that he’s not coming to Warder training as often.

“...the last time he bothered to come to the yard.” (TSR, Chapter 17, Deceptions) Gawyn tells Min, so we know Galad is slacking off which is not doing the right thing at all.

THEN Galad goes and hits on Min, offering to take her to a dance and smiling at her, and we all know that when Galad smiles, it has this CHA +100 effect. Min’s impression is that he’s unaware of what he’s doing, but I disagree with her. He’s tried that smile on Nynaeve, who withstood it because she is Nynaeve™, and I bet he’s been trying that smile on plenty of girls at the White Tower because it gets him further than “sup”.

And THEN we learn the reason Galad is slacking off training and allegedly ‘heartsick’.

He’s not. He’s drunk. Gawyn thinks that Galad doesn't even get smashed on his birthday, but I think Gawyn doesn't know shit about what Galad's really been getting up to.

Sure, Gawyn knows his brother has been going out into Tar Valon and drinking in taverns with Whitecloaks. WHITECLOAKS! But I’m going to assume our friend Dain Bornhald is there, and we all know he drinks like a high school English teacher on the weekends. So I bet he’s there just frat boying it up with Galad, and being a bad influence while Galad is ditching Warder school.

Valda, that predator epic level asshole, is there too and he’s busy grooming Galad to join his cult by giving him personally autographed propaganda and making him feel like a Special Boy, all while under the influence of alcohol, which Valda probably bought for him and got the bartender to serve doubles, but told Galad they were singles, so Galad gets white girl wasted.

And that’s how this all ends, like many average university experiences, with Galad joining a cult and running away from home.

So that’s my “Galad Gone Wild” hypothesis.

[mythopoetry]

this is my cat Thanatos. He is 16 years old and Sunday is his last day on earth. I have had him since I was 17, half my life, and all of his. He's very large and very cuddly and he hates when people wear shoes in the house. I can't begin to tell you the adventures we've gone on, or the reasons this last year has been the best in his life (and mine). All I can say is I wish I had more time,. 20 years wouldn't be enough with this cat; his massive claws are dug into my heart permanently. I think I have to believe in an afterlife, at least for cats, at least for this one, to think he gets an infinity of treats and pets and toys. I'll add more photos to this post as I think of them. I just wanted someone else to see him, and know that he is the best cat I could've dreamt of.

[millenniallust4death]

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

[millenniallust4death]

Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️

[psycorax]

Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.

[leavescrown]

Love that this is well beyond 7000 people now and still going

[millenniallust4death]

@leavescrown Exactly! It’s a beautiful gift. Martin and Bosco out there travelling around the Tumblr community, continually making new friends.

[millenniallust4death]

@sseanettles

#hello again martin and bosco!! sending you boys round for another go :)

Reading your tag made me laugh out loud. It’s like two old friends unexpectedly stopped by your porch for a quick visit. XD

[petermorwood]

I’ll always reblog Martin and Bosco when they splash across my dash, because of Reasons.

What’s loved, lives.

[perlukafarinn]

Shane does an interview after they're outed where he says, kind of off-handedly, that the one thing that still bothers him about having to keep their relationship secret for so long is that there are no pictures of them together as a couple from those years.

Someone clips it and it goes viral.

Over the next few days, Shane and Ilya's mentions start to get flooded with pictures. Mostly it's screenshots from various games they played against each other, meticulously picked through by dedicated fans to find every moment Shane and Ilya looked at each other on the ice.

Some screenshots get shared by hundreds of different people because they stand out so obviously: Shane and Ilya meeting each other's eyes during a face off; Ilya looking at Shane while his back is turned, naked longing visible on his face; Shane chasing after Ilya with a small but delighted grin.

There are also pictures from press events, award ceremonies, behind the scenes at All Stars. Seemingly any time Shane and Ilya got captured in the same frame gets dug up and shared.

Finally, a couple of weeks later, the director of Shane and Ilya's CCM commercial posts outtakes from their shoot. It's captioned 'Took a bit of digging but I knew I still had these somewhere! I had to make my contribution to the #HollanovArchives even though this must have been a while before they got together. These kids had crazy chemistry, right from the start!'

Shane hasn't responded to the onslaught yet, too overwhelmed by the (slightly terrifying) dedication of their fans as well as the fact that he now has dozens of pictures clearly displaying his and Ilya's love for each other during a time in their lives when it was so desperately hidden.

He does respond now, sharing the director's post with a sincere (and publicist-approved) caption thanking him and the fans.

Ilya also shares the post, tacking on 'yes if a while means a few hours 👅' like he didn't cry when Shane showed him the videos.

[ilyena-sylph]

Yep, this is in fact How Fandom.

[jazetallo-art]

pov: you're making history. you're working with the most advanced technology in the world. outlook still doesn't fucking work.

[wheelwheelwheel]

If you say that “every night in the dark [Elayne and Aviendha] shared another secret never told to anyone else” and then a few pages later imply that Elayne has to psych herself up to talk to Aviendha about Rand so that’s not the secret WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO THINK ROBERT

[cannoli-reader]

You are clearly not supposed to think it is sexual, since the major feature of both their sex lives has never come up in those conversations every night.  

Elayne is the daughter of a Queen, an Aes Sedai and the glue that held the Tower personnel togther in the Stone of Tear, she taught the Dragon Reborn how to rule, saved the Panarch of Tarabon and taught her a social conscience, and arguably laid the groundwork to shake off her slavery indoctrination down the road.  She worked as a circus performer, reverse engineered an a’dam on a ticking clock that consisted of a Forsaken coming out of anesthesia, reinvented ter’angreal, ran more than one con on a village full of Aes Sedai, lectured Aes Sedai on leadership to make them ashamed, and was currently on a mission to save the world from Shadow-wrought global warming. 

Aviendha is a trained warrior, who stood up to the Wise Ones for a time over her vocation (bearing in mind that Rhuarc, more than once held up as a the sole person capable of doing so, tacitly admits the Wise Ones nagged him into joining the search), had an eventful if brief career as a Maiden before giving it up to apprentice as a Wise One. She was given the responsibility for teaching their prophesied savior about their culture, and the unspoken responsibility of making him care about their people. She faced two Forsaken who nearly killed her, before marching into a lion’s den of Aes Sedai who wanted to conscript her into the Tower, all in order to fulfil her honor.  Like Elayne, she was on the mission to save the world, and came up with the first breakthrough idea on how to accomplish it.  

But to some readers, the sum total of what these two women could possibly talk about is limited to their sex lives, and if they are not discussing the only man  with whom either of them have swapped spit, they must be having sex. That’s it. Only the chance to talk about a man can keep them out of each other’s pants.  They are nothing but sex robots, and their careers and duties are just there to pass the time between winter-themed sexcapades and carpet cleaning, or else those careers and duties and missions exist to facilitate their sexual adventures. 

Robert Jordan was not a pervert.  His readers on the other hand ... 

[millenniallust4death]

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

[millenniallust4death]

Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. ❤️

[psycorax]

Reblog to have your dashboard be visited by the spirit of joy that death can end but not erase.

[leavescrown]

Love that this is well beyond 7000 people now and still going

[millenniallust4death]

@leavescrown Exactly! It’s a beautiful gift. Martin and Bosco out there travelling around the Tumblr community, continually making new friends.

[millenniallust4death]

@sseanettles

#hello again martin and bosco!! sending you boys round for another go :)

Reading your tag made me laugh out loud. It’s like two old friends unexpectedly stopped by your porch for a quick visit. XD

[petermorwood]

I’ll always reblog Martin and Bosco when they splash across my dash, because of Reasons.

What’s loved, lives.

[phoenixlionme]

PSA: For all Missouri voters, please read this

Some of you may not be aware but our "lawmakers" in the state, sometime last year, decided to rush through two ballot proposals to do away with abortion rights and how citizen led ballot initiatives

Abortion One - Yeah, even though voters voted to have accessible abortions, these assholes do this. They are trying to spin it as voters not understanding. And in their ballot proposal, they ask the voter if they wish to appeal or affirm reproductive rights and then they added something knowing that it will cause some voters pause: In he same ballot, they also gender affirming care for children. In short, they are using trans care to get people to say no on the ballot, as it's divisive issue in the state. It's known as "Missouri Amendment 3 (the 2026 Prohibit Abortion and Gender Transition Procedures for Minors Amendment)"

Citizen Initiative - The lawmakers put in the proposal that would do this: "If passed, it would require that future citizen-led constitutional amendments (initiatives) win a majority of votes in each of Missouri's congressional districts (currently 8) — essentially a "concurrent majority" or geographic supermajority requirement — rather than just a simple statewide majority." In other words, it would make voting for citizen led proposals harder and they way they worded it might actually confuse some voters to mistakenly vote for it. It's known as Missouri Amendment 4 (the 2026 measure officially titled "Require Approval in Each Congressional District for Citizen-Initiated Constitutional Amendments, Prohibit Foreign Contributions, and Penalize Petition Fraud Amendment")

Right now, the Respect Missouri Voters group is collecting signatures that would force Missouri lawmakers to not overturn citizen led initiatives unless they get 80% or something like that. They started in September and are still collecting and have reached over 127,000; they need at least 300,00 by May I believe. Please Missouri people, don't let these sneaky, underhanded assholes trick you. I'll provide a link where you see where signatures are collected and how to become a signature gatherer if you want.

In short, if you do not want those assholes to trick you, please follow these instructions:

Sign up for the proposal by Respect MO Voters, tell others, and keep people inform. If enough signatures, it'll be on the ballot. Right now, the official words aren't known but once they are, I will emphatically encourage you to VOTE YES on that one. If I don't know the official ballot wording of the proposal, please go to the Respect MO Vote website for clarification.

VOTE NO on Missouri Amendment 3 (the 2026 Prohibit Abortion and Gender Transition Procedures for Minors Amendment) - no matter your feelings for trans issues, put that aside and don't let them use that to take away the right you fairly voted into law

VOTE NO on Missouri Amendment 4 (the 2026 measure officially titled "Require Approval in Each Congressional District for Citizen-Initiated Constitutional Amendments, Prohibit Foreign Contributions, and Penalize Petition Fraud Amendment") - they are trying to make it harder for you to pass your votes while cloaking it as a "protection".

PLEASE REBLOG, SIGN, and SPREAD AWARENESS

Respect MO Voters

For those I list, please spread this however you can and encourage Missouri voters to vote:

@reasonsforhope @thethiefandtheairbender @blackfemmecharacterdependency @theflyingredrobot @the-aila-test @profeminist @proudbinerd @barb-l @barblaz-arts @mosaic-briar @briar-mosaic

[cheshire-cat-lenalee2]

[unclefather]

can’t risk it

[bentejam]

THIS PIECE OF PICTURE WORKS. 

[fakesurgery]

Gotta take all the chances…..

[fit-beach-tea]

Never risk it

[bbylilithian]

Too close to final’s week

[maggierobots]

I could use it.

[derpylittlenico]

why tf not. let’s do this

[ilyena-sylph]

[wickedsick]

today we post everett true

[shotofchinaco]

February 16, 1917 (via Outbursts Of Everett True on Bluesky):

[anarchistmemedistro]

more than 100 years later and all of these are still problems

[m-o-p-e]

The Outbursts of Everett True - Wikipedia

[katherinecrighton]

Favorite "humans being human" history posts, please

I've seen the collections of favorite tumblr fiction posts; now I'd like to see what your favorite "humans being human" historical posts are. (Because sometimes it is Nice to be reminded that compassion is not something easy for us to lose; we laugh at the same bad jokes; there are entire fossil records of our kindness.)

Here are my favorites-- add on yours.

The story of the RMS Carpathia, with a follow-up (aka one of if not the best pieces of short nonfiction historical writing in the modern age and one that reduces me to tears every goddamn reread)

Bronze-age grave of teenage gamer girl lovingly buried with her sheep ankle bone collection

The 1st-2nd century CE Roman tombstone with a bar joke that reads like a Dril tweet

And even earlier: A 4500-1900 BCE Sumerian bar joke

"Please know that there's an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that's beautiful to you"

Reconstructing Otzi's shoes

The Paleolithic grandmother and the child's fingerprint

Stone-age toddlers had art lessons

Ice-age children played in megafauna-footprint puddles

There once was a little boy who loved ducks

The oldest human burial found in Africa is a toddler; they made a pillow for his head

Henry Kenelm Beste's father loved him very much

"A Timeline of Humanity"

"I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them."

"I got to hold a 500,000 year old hand axe at the museum today. It's right-handed. I am right-handed"

A 3rd century dog carved on a marble tomb; a 1st century dog lovingly described and named for posterity

Patrice, a 1st-2nd century dog, was dearly loved

And: we found a Paleolithic dog, buried with its bone

Humanity, unified across time by everyday experiences

The Golden Record sent into space in the 1970s

Ancient Egypt had archaeologists

Egyptian figurine of a woman waiting for her bread to finish baking

The graffiti of Pompeii

Ancient Greek tourist graffiti at the tomb of Ramses V

Hidden messages on circuit boards

The earliest examples of someone chewing on the end of their pencils

"im having feelings about the uffington white horse again"

The vast relatability of Medieval marginalia (and cats peeing on things)

Potoooooooo

What our ancient ancestors would think, seeing us prosper

Engage with older art; it keeps you from forgetting their humanity

"They were just like you and me. They write don't forget eggs, and wondered if their neighbors secretly hated them or if they are reading into it too much. They loved and were loved and they wondered. They wondered about you."

"Why do you study history" web-weaving

And ending on a high note: Ea-nasir and his shitty copper

[vaspider]

In case you missed this.

[stevishabitat]

[vaspider]

She knows what the fuck she's about and she has always been a real one.

Cyndi is 72 years old. She's been a very loud ally since the 80s; her sister Ellen is a lesbian. True Colors United, the organization she founded in 2008 to fight queer homelessness, runs a 30-bed shelter in NYC which also offers job placement assistance. She wrote the music and lyrics for Kinky Boots, collaborating with Harvey Fierstein, who wrote the book.

She does not give a fuck what this administration or anybody else might say about her. She knows who she is and what she stands for.

[queer-joy-detector]

Queer joy and pride detected!

[vaspider]

Can't embed the video here but

[nerdybluephoenix]

"This should do it." It looked down at itself, pleased.

The two - rather long - legs jut out under it's torso. It used it's new - ew - five fingers to feel along it's skin, feeling the bumps of a ribcage underneath. A heartbeat too.

In front of it was a mirror, and staring back at itself was a human. Well, an illusion of one.

Time and time again, the newly star bound aliens, humans, had infiltrated it's species ranks through elaborate disguises. They got better at it every time.

Not only were humans great with what they call "make up" but they had a way of mimicking their behaviors. It's species tried to replicate this. Failed to. In the end, they had something better.

A team of highly immoral scientists who were given boundless permission to try whatever the hell they wanted. And they went with genetic mutation.

It was a painful change, and slow. Agonizingly slow. But now, it was a super solider with one superpower. A shape-shifter.

And it was time to test it out.

It strolled out of the bathroom and into the eating area where various alien species were seated. Only one human - the unwitting test subject - was present.

If this could pass for normal conversation, this could pass for war.

It strolled right up to the other creature - a man who had not yet seen him - and sat down.

"I'm glad to see one other human on this station," it said.

The human non-committedly looked up. Only to jump with a start after taking it in.

"What are you?" he said.

"A human?" it said. If it's species could sweat, it would do so by now.

The man stared at it a moment. He turned to the alien on his right and pointed to his left.

"Forgive me if this question is batshit insane, but what do you see?"

"Two humans?" The alien had three eyes.

Her species' third eye was famous for detecting the most miniscule details and then committing it to subconscious memory. The rise and fall of a chest. The careful rythem of a human heart. How often - or little - a human blinks. Even human's make-up tricks couldn't bypass her species' extra form of security.

"So it is," said the man. She turned away and it found itself blinking quickly in relief. It cut that out when the human turned to it. "Sorry, I guess you're just real ugly."

"Ugh, rude." All humans are ugly.

He scooted in closer on the bench and leaned in towards it. It found itself leaning away, but couldn't help but notice the bead of sweat on the human's forehead and how the pupils were shrunken as far as they could.

"Wanna hear an old Earth tale?"

"I'm sure I know it." Was this a test?

"I doubt you know this one. My grandfather experienced it himself." He leaned away. It had stop itself from blinking too rapidly again. "This is about an Earth cryptid."

"Bigfoot?" it said, but nodded as if it already knew.

"Everyone knows Bigfoot," he laughed. "No, he was driving down a dark country road unlit by street lights. He didn't have his brights on - that's important to the story, you see - but heaven knows why."

Brights??? What are brights???

"Down the road an animal was crossing. A simple male deer with antlers. He couldn't see its body yet, but he was familiar with the eyes. They glowed as his car sped closer."

"He slowed as the deer became more apparent, and eventually came to a stop when the creature wouldn't move. By now, he could see the antlers, the four legs, the neck. Not in detail, mind you, but he could see it "

Other aliens in the room- not hearing this conversation - were trickling out of the room. There was no dramatic reason for this, they simply finished their lunch. The human, not paying any attention to his own lunch, continued the story.

"It's not uncommon for deer to freeze, especially when lights flood their eyes. So my grandfather gave it a moment to realize it should run. When seconds ticked by, he honked at it."

"There was something... off... about the deer. It looked every way like a deer, but the longer he stared, the longer that just didn't seem right."

"Was it a deer?" it said.

"It was not."

"What was it?"

"Not a deer."

The alien found itself frown at this in a perfectly human way.

"Time went on, and my grandfather decided to turn on the brights to try and see the creature better. And it was still... a deer... but not..."

It found its frown deepening.

"What's worse was it began to move. Similar to a deer, but all wrong. Like maybe its legs bent the wrong way. Or perhaps the legs were too long. It was every way like a deer, but it just was not."

"He drove home as soon as that not deer was out of his path. And yes, he found himself alive the next morning. But that encounter disturbed him, so he recounted it to everyone. And many people - especially in that town - could tell him their own stories."

"...okay?"

"Well, that story is funny. Probably a figment of his imagination, but it does reflect a very real human instinct."

This was another test. "Would this be something I know of?"

"It's called uncanny valley. It occurs to us when something looks human... but is not."

"Why?"

"Well, rumor has it that it was a instinct formed from a predator. Something that looked human but was not. A not human."

"A not human? Is this true?"

"No," he said. He laughed. "No, we most likely developed it for something a lot more practical. Corpses, you see. They carry a lot of bacteria, so we have a fear of them."

"...interesting."

"I have that very same feeling of you," he said. The room was empty besides the two. He reached for his bottle above his lunch tray.

"But I'm not a corpse?"

"You're about to be."

The human tossed down the bottle, effectively cracking off the bottom half and forming his weapon.

It shape-shifted as it scurried away to retreat from the very much human.

[nerdybluephoenix]

Every once in awhile I get a "I was LOOKING for this post!" reblog, and it's always this specific post. I'm bringing this back to the top of my page so you guys can find it better

[cryptidstatusbreached]

A way the uncanny valley effect might become relevant in storytelling

[nosimpincurly]

You’re not depressed. You just need $250,000 in your bank account.

[catherinebunnington]

Reblog to materialize $250,000 in prev's bank account