Monterey Bay Aquarium
d e v o n
occasionally subtle
tannertan36
Xuebing Du
tumblr dot com
RMH
AnasAbdin
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Love Begins
DEAR READER
#extradirty
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@theartofmadeline
Origami Around
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
ojovivo
if i look back, i am lost
$LAYYYTER
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@jakaltimes
Hi folks! I am recruiting PhD students for my new lab housed within the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History at the University of Oklahoma. If you are interested in fish macroevolution, geometric morphometrics, specimen-based research & phylogenomics please reach out.
More info here: fishdiversitylab.weebly.com
Please share widely!!!
Did you play AD&D? I can't remember how old you are, so hopefully that's not too offensive. If so, was a typical game really as hostile as people say it was?
That's one of those question where the answer hovers somewhere between "no, with a couple of massive caveats" and "yes, but not in the way most people think".
A lot of AD&D 1st Edition's GMing practices are pretty hardass by modern standards; however, they need to be understood in the context that the game's authors were writing for a target audience who mainly played the game in college wargaming clubs, where players would frequently transfer between groups and group sizes tended to be very large – six players per GM was considered a bare minimum, and up to a dozen player characters in a single party was by no means unheard of!
In particular, players would often bring their character sheets with them when hopping between groups, and it was considered a faux pas for a GM to reject an incoming player's existing character or request any substantive changes be made, so managing expectations could be quite challenging; even as late as 2nd Edition, the Dungeon Master's Guide contains extensive discussion of how to gracefully handle players bringing existing characters with them who aren't necessarily a good fit for the present game's tone or resource economy.
The upshot is that the culture of play these iterations of Dungeons & Dragons are targeting inherently obliges the GM to take a much firmer hand to keep things on track than a pickup game that draws players exclusively from within the GM's established friend group might – and to be sure, some GMs abused these expectations to act like petty tyrants, but some contemporary GMs do that, too.
A big part of the modern perception that 1E and 2E were extraordinarily player hostile, meanwhile, has nothing to do with the previously discussed GMing practices; rather, it emerges from the transition away from that culture of play in a slightly unexpected way.
In brief, back when D&D was mainly played by wargaming clubs, it was fashionable to run pre-written adventure modules competitively at conventions; the competition wasn't between players, but between parties, with multiple groups running the same adventure in parallel to contend for prizes. Tournament play sometimes chose its winners based on the fastest real-time completion of the module in question, or set specific objectives within the module which would award points when completed, a bit like speed-running or achievement-hunting in a video game (though neither practice existed yet at the time).
It was the survival module, however, that quickly emerged as the most popular tournament format. In a survival tournament, each player would provide or was furnished with a binder containing a fixed number of pre-generated character sheets, switching to the next character sheet in the set as each preceding character died; the winning group was the one whose last surviving character's corpse hit the dirt furthest from the dungeon entrance.
Many of 1E's most popular adventure modules, including the infamous Tomb of Horrors, were originally written as survival modules to be run at tournaments in conventions. As such, they were designed to kill off player characters both quickly and efficiently, so as to reduce the likelihood that the tournament would run overtime and get kicked out of the convention venue. When they were later cleanup and repackaged as commercial adventure modules, their text rarely bothered to explain any of this – who doesn't recognise a survival module when they see one?
The answer to that question, of course, is kids who didn't come up through the mentorship system of the college wargaming clubs, but taught themselves how to play D&D from first principles using books they bought at their local hobby stores – and when D&D's popularity unexpectedly exploded in the early 1980s, there were suddenly rather a lot of them!
These kids purchased the repackaged survival modules along with all their other D&D books; having no frame of reference, they assumed that these represented what a "standard" D&D adventure was supposed to look like – and since they weren't experienced players with whole binders full of pre-generated backup characters at their fingertips, the result was a lot of seemingly unfair total party kills, and a lot of kids concluding that the previous generation's GMs must have been objectively insane.
There is an additional amusing point of order here, which is the answer to the following two questions. I once had a discussion with someone in Gary Gygax's gaming group, who was involved in early TSR work a bit. Allow me to paraphrase my questions and his answers.
Why publish survival modules as your primary format of published adventure?
"Because that's what we had -- they were already laid out for publication. Why not publish them and make some money off it?"
Did it ever occur to you at the time that publishing adventures like these would shape the larger D&D culture's expectations of what play was supposed to look like?
"No, why would it?"
One of my favorite anecdotes about early D&D, from Blog of Holding:
"It’s hard to get that context just from reading the original Dungeons and Dragons books. If nine groups learned D&D from the books, they’d end up playing nine different games.
"Mornard told us about an early D&D tournament game – possibly in the first Gen Con in Parkside in 1978? Gary Gygax was DMing nine tournament teams successively through the same module, and whoever got the furthest in the dungeon would win. You’d expect this to take all day, and so Mike was surprised to see Gary, looking shaken, wandering through the hallways at about 2 PM. Mike bought Gary a beer and asked him what had happened – wasn’t he supposed to be DMing right now?
“It’s over!” replied a stunned Gary Gygax.
"Gary described how the first group had fared. Walking down the first staircase into the dungeon, the first rank of fighters suddenly disappeared through a black wall. There was a quiet whoosh, and a quiet thud. The players conferred, and then they sent the second rank forward, who disappeared too. The rest of the players followed.
"The same thing happened to the next tournament team, and the next. Players filed into the unknown, one after another. And they were all killed. The wall was an illusion, and behind it was a pit. Eight out of the nine groups had thrown themselves like lemmings over a cliff; only one group had thought to tap around with a ten foot pole. That group passed the first obstacle, so they won the tournament.
"Gary and his players couldn’t believe that the tournament players had been so incautious. But, to be fair, none of those tournament groups had played in Gary Gygax’s game. They had learned the rules of D&D, but they had no experience of the milieu in which the book was written. Of those nine groups that had learned D&D from a book, only one played sufficiently like Gary’s group to survive thirty seconds in his dungeon."
#ngl survival module sounds fun as fuck. maybe i gotta torture my current group a bit (via @nadaismus)
It's worth bearing in mind that tournament-style survival mode developed in the context of a version of D&D where you can create a new character and hit the ground knowing everything you need to know to effectively play them in just a couple of minutes. 5E isn't structurally terribly well-suited for the binder-full-of-backup-PCs approach, and it's definitely a recipe for disaster in 3E or Pathfinder unless your entire group consists of a very particular flavour of high-effort masochists.
that’s his little guy!!
I wish I had what they have...
I want to try so many little hobbies. Candle making, soap making, basket weaving, wood carving, book binding, baking, weaving, I want to try them all.
I almost made a post about this the other day (unless i actually did and totally forgot) but there’s so many
I was going to make a list, but then i realized this is a good time to share this book
Making Stuff and Doing things is a whole collection of old punk DIY zines about making and doing just about anything, even things you probably never knew you wanted to do.
Book binding? In there.
Making bowls from old vinyl records? I made a whole ton for my brother’s grad party last year.
Basics of guitar? Making rubber stamps? Silk screening? Composting? Homemade beer, root beer, and wine? Soymilk?? Quill pens??? All in there.
Since it’s more punk, it doesn’t have a ton of the folksy, cottage vibes/hobbies, but it’s all about being resourceful and sustainable, which they both have in common.
If i ever need to do anything I’m not sure of, I double check this book to see if there’s anything in there. It’s one of the only books on diy I’ve ever needed.
Handbook of basic life skills for a young punk or activist, or anyone without a lot of money.Following some of the advice in this book could
You can download the entire book as a PDF in the link above.
This map was designed by Kenyan artist Priya Shah.
You can read about it here: https://minds-africa.org/fabric-map-of-africa-the-art-of-storytelling/
and buy copies of the map here: https://www.miakora.com/fabric-map-of-africa
saw your tags @did-sm1-say-catfish and yes, that link is broken! I looked into it, and it's because there are now multiple maps, including a map of India—
Here's a new link for purchasing purposes
WOW THIS IS SO COOL :O
dog i gotta move like yesterday
“Subverting” Catholic art? Oh, okay. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You log onto the internet and you post about how “Wound of Christ” from Psalter and Prayer Book of Bonne de Luxembourg, attributed to Jean le Noir, c.1349, for instance, looks like a vulva because you're trying to tell the world that you enjoy Catholic art and imagery in an alternative, queer, risqué way that challenges Christian beliefs. But what you don't know is that that stigma isn’t just a vulva. It's not just a mandorla. It's not just yonic. It's actually intentionally erotic. And you're also blithely unaware of the fact that around 1297, Saint Angela of Foligno experienced a vision of Christ himself, who called her to put her mouth to the wound in his side and lick the freshly flowing blood. And then I think it was Saint Catherine of Siena who drank blood and a clear liquid from the wound before receiving a ring made from Christ’s foreskin? And then graphically erotic encounters with the side wound of Christ quickly showed up in the writings of eight different mystics. And then the yonic interpretation of the stigmata filtered down through the illuminated manuscripts and then trickled on down into some pseudo-intellectual corner of the internet…where you, no doubt, fished it out of some Pinterest board. However, that interpretation represents hundreds of years and countless visions of religious ecstasy. And it's sort of comical how you think that you've come up with an idea that exempts you from Christian theology when, in fact…you're posting an image that was sexualized for you by the very Medieval saints you think you’re so different than…from “subverted” Catholic art.
this just in. our whole ass pope has politely announced the crusade against slop
my most sick and twisted fantasy
I was honestly a bit nervous to draw and post this one, because it's such a deep rooted and genuine issue I struggle with. It's a thing I wish could be fixed in some way, but I feel pretty comforted it resonated with so many others too
I feel so insane about ai. I've had face-to-face conversations with people who use it for therapy, who use it to calculate the safety of pill interactions, who use it for all their emails and grant applications and legal documents and academic papers and finance sheets and for every single question they have about the world, and if you tell them about the ecological costs they just laugh and say "I guess I've used a lot of water." and I've been in multiple gatherings of 10+ people where I'm THE ONLY PERSON who doesn't use chatgpt. it's turning me into a ranting raving pariah, because how don't you people see??? why don't you understand??????? this bullshit didn't exist five years ago, you absolutely do not need it, and it is destroying everything
I like to say "my mises! They're not en place!" sometimes when I forget something while cooking but no one ever thinks it's funny
#my mises aren't even en SCENE Tags by @copperbadge
AKIHIRO HIGUCHI 樋口 明宏
*Whimpers*
This is the jumping spider Neobrettus tibialis photographed in Indonesia by wildsumatra on iNaturalist.
Dorsal view by the same photographer:
And from the side:
Frother Moths: when these moths feel threatened, they secrete a frothy yellow substance that is noxious and distasteful to predators
Above: Amerila astreus with two large globs of defensive froth
Moths of the genus Amerila are often described as frother moths, because they're able to secrete a frothy, foul-tasting substance that helps to deter predators. The fluid is produced by the prothoracic glands, which are located near the base of each wing (just behind the moth's head) and a distinctive "sizzling" or "hissing" sound is emitted as the frothy substance bubbles out.
Above: Amerila astreus
As this article explains:
If molested, resting adults produce quantities of a frothy, orange fluid from their prothoracic glands, accompanied by a sizzling sound. The froth not only has an aversive odor to humans but also contains PAs (pyrrolizidine alkaloids) which are taste-repelling.
Above: a frother moth producing its defensive secretion
The adult moths of this genus are pharmacophagous, which means that they acquire the chemicals that are used to create their defensive froth by ingesting plants that contain toxic or noxious compounds; those chemicals are then sequestered within the moth's own body, where they are repurposed and transformed into a frothy secretion.
Above: genus Amerila
Frother moths also use aposematic markings to signal their toxicity and/or unpalatability. Their legs, thorax, and abdomen are all decorated with reddish-pink markings, and they have large black spots that stand out against their mostly-white bodies.
Above: Amerila crokeri and Amerila rubripes
The genus Amerila contains dozens of species, and they are all known to have this defense mechanism. They are widely distributed throughout many different parts of the world; depending on the species, they may be found in the Himalayas, Indochina, Southeast Asia, Melanesia, Australia, or Africa.
Above: Amerila crokeri
Several other moths from the subfamily Arctiinae can produce a similar defensive secretion when threatened, but the color, consistency, and composition of the substance differs greatly from one species to the next.
Sources & More Info:
iNaturalist: Genus Amerila
Metamorphosis Australia: Australian Arctiid Moths
Australian Lepidoptera: Amerila crokeri
Metamorphosis Australia: Weird and Wonderful Moths
Entomo Brasilis: Defensive Froth in Arctiidae Species in the Rio Grande do Sul State, Brazil (PDF)
Moths of Australia: Adult Adaptations for Survival
Neotropical Entomology: A Fieldwork-Oriented Review and Guide to PA-Pharmacophagy
