Mudita & Schadenfreude

I'm not here for anyone's pleasure but my own. This blog will show a lot of the ocean, animal, science, occasionally sex, feminism. I have really strong opinions yet rarely express them here. Sex Blog is lustdripsfrommylips; featuring a lot of blood, blades, and vampirism, plus bdsm stuffs. 25 he/him

[hjarta-deactivated20260124]

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

[scienceoftheidiot]

They existed *before beetles*

[somethingaboutsomethingelse]

[soulmeitu]

[frawgs]

shaking my ass in a mirror tempting my alternate universe self

[harry-crane]

Who wants to join my gang we’re gonna go to theme parks and boardwalks but never before sundown.

Requirements:

Must be gay

Must have no sense of fashion

Must be alarmingly interested in vampires

[thefriendlywitch]

[ilovedirt]

@marvelousanodyne when I visit

[emilylorange]

“It is this adventurer’s opinion, therefore, that the only evidence dragons exhibit any ‘wealth-hoarding’ behavior is their tendency to disrupt golf courses.” 🐊

[ilovedirt]

@marvelousanodyne

[kedreeva]

I feel like if we had sky whales we would be building a lot more things under ground than we do now.

[kedreeva]

Thinking about this again, and how much a world would be changed by the idea of very giant, flying, alive things. We do not have very giant, flying, alive things. We have planes and we have to coordinate those so that they don’t run into each other despite the sky being a very large place. Birds run into windows all the time. Anything above the ground would have to either be built to withstand whale strike or built so that whales wouldn’t touch it or would stay away. Architecture hostile to whales. Possibly city guardians that would be able to deter whales and other very large sky animals from getting into a city.

Like we went over this once before that they’d rub on buildings and poop on stuff, but I don’t think that sentence really encapsulates what would have to change to cope with something that big. A blue whale poops something like 200 liters/50 gallons in one go, which isn’t as much as I was afraid of but it’s still a LOT and could probably kill someone. It might wreck cars. Forget having a farmer’s market in the open.

No to mention that if we did have sky whales, you’d have to have a whole sky ecosystem with, like, sky krill and shit. You’d have to have sky algae blooms for the krill to feed on. And that’s assuming just the baleen whales, if we’re counting toothed whales like sperm whales then we’re getting into sky giant squid territory, and if it’s anything like the ocean then those things would be up at the edge of space, and we probably would almost never see them because when they die they probably go into fucking orbit or something. You’d have to have sky fish. Might as well have sky dolphins and porpoises too, which means orcas who are basically hunters and bottlenose dolphins who are kind of dicks.

sky sunfish.

sky oarfish

sky coelacanths

sky sharks

[mindfulwrath]

What if the ocean structure wasn’t inverted, though?

The atmosphere is much deeper than the ocean, and we are at the bottom of it.

Average ocean depth is about 2.3 miles. Deepest point is ~6.8 miles.

The atmosphere is about 60 miles thick.

Your skykrill at whatnot, then, would be at the edge of space in the thermosphere, where they receive the greatest amount of solar radiation and do not have to contend with the (relatively) extreme pressure down here (about 14.7 psi at sea level, which, compared to the near-vacuum conditions at the edge of space, is Flat Shrimp territory). Your giant squids and skywhales would hang out in the mesosphere, between 31 and 53 miles above the ground (but really, if we’re 1-to-1ing the ocean:atmosphere relationship, no lower than 47 miles above the ground). No danger of building collisions or even airplane strikes there. Your abyssopelagic sky animals might pose a threat to weather balloons. Below that, it’s uncharted territory, because our oceans don’t go that deep.

(And perhaps the sky fauna live in terror about what lurks in the horrible depths of this charmed and airy existence, what braves the crushing pressures and subsists on something other than their brilliant ultraviolet sun, beneath the ozone layer opaque to that most abundant and energetic light, of which they catch only glimpses when the fog tatters)

What we WILL need to worry about is debris. And I’m not talking whale poop, or even whalefalls, although those would be both disastrous and hideous. I’m talking sky phytoplankton raining literally billions of tons of calcium carbonate on us yearly.

We wouldn’t have a choice about our structures being underground.

[mindfulwrath]

Update: I did some math, and it turns out to be a little less dramatic than that….

So the total amount of calcium carbonate that accumulates on the ocean floor from phytoplankton is on the order of 3 billion tons per year. The linked article states that 40% of all produced calcium carbonate dissolves on its way to the ocean floor–which would not happen in the atmosphere, because air doesn’t do that to calcium carbonate. So we’ll call it 4 billion tons.

But wait! There’s more! The oceans cover ~75% of Earth’s surface. We’ll assume here that the photic zone of the ocean and the nu-photic zone of our atmospheric sea are the same thickness, and just multiply our 4 billion ton number by an additional 1.25. That gives us somewhere on the order of 5 billion tons of calcium carbonate dust snowing down on Earth every year. Sounds like a lot.

EXCEPT, the surface area of the Earth is about 500 TRILLION square meters (I am using meters for a Very Good Reason). That’s a lot of surface area to cover. How thick would our calcium carbonate layer be, if spread out over the Earth’s entire surface area?

Well, let’s assume the ‘snow’ packs nicely, and give the layer a density of 2710 kg per cubic meter (the density of calcite). That’s about 3 US tons per cubic meter. Let’s convert our 5 billion tons per year into volume: 1.67 billion cubic meters per year.

Now divide that by the 500 Trillion square meters of Earth surface area, and you get….

About 0.05 millimeters per year. Or, one millimeter every twenty years.

Granted, it would probably come down thicker over the tropics, and have almost zero accumulation at the poles (assuming, of course, that our sky phytoplankton still photosynthesize). Weather would also significantly impact distribution patterns. Until you get to timescales of thousands of years, kedreeva’s concerns of megafauna byproducts by far outweigh the impact of phytoplankton snow. Especially given that 75% of it is going to be falling into the ocean.

Now, the indirect effects of all those lofted foram skeletons on albedo, cloud seeding, and the alkalinity of every single water source on Earth, that may be a completely different story….

[kedreeva]

#i’m sorry for doing this on your post #please let me know if you want me to stop

under no circumstances are you to STOP if you are doing MATH about the sky whale verse. This was absolutely LOVELY to read!!!

But also, I don’t think calcium carbonate would be a worry, exactly. It WOULD mean that there’s probably more limestone around the world (especially if it has been falling for a long time before us), and it probably means humans are building more things out of limestone.

Personally I would design it with the mainly livable atmosphere still being closest to the ground, but mostly because I want to see the sky whales not just know they’re up there somewhere and also I do not want to deal with megafauna anglerfish instead of sky whales. I do want to think about megafauna oarfish being up there somewhere, and only showing up where we can see them when there’s about to be a hurricane or something. 

[hamelin-born]

Personally, I like the implication that in a sky-whale world humans are the equivalent of those eerie, uncanny forms of life that inhabit the Hadal-pelagic Zone.  

Also, can you *imagine* what a whalefall would be like in a sky-whale world? 

[ilovedirt]

@marvelousanodyne

[191195-deactivated20240210]

where's my beloved where's my beloved where's my beloved WHERE is my beloved where is he where is MY beloved

[fanghusband-remade]

put on your fangs boys we're heading out

[wildermouse]

dark rainforest aesthetic

[fanghusband-remade]

gender is stored in the fangs

[fanghusband-remade]

man i wish i had glowing eyes so bad

[grimae]

upokoy

[cirrates]

you know what I see a lot of memes about garlic and a few other food memes here and there but I never see any about paprika.

[cirrates]

here...for all the paprika enjoyers out there

[likepeanutbutteronthebrain]

If I was a bug I'd want to be one of those real good camouflaged ones. Then I'd scare the fuck out of people. I'd sit there for hours so you really would think I was just a leaf but no 😈

[ilovedirt]

@marvelousanodyne

[manie-sans-delire-x]

*waves hello and smiles to a dog*

*completely ignores the owner*

[marvelousanodyne]

am I making a playlist specifically for sex bc I have bluetooth lights that are sound-responsive? Yes. and I want your input.