you ask it, i answer it

it can be hard to get the answers you need. but not for me

[moxmanual]

how to use moxmanual

submit any question you like to the ask box

wait until i, mox, answer it manually

read the response to your question

share it with everyone you know* *optional

==============================

rules

no do-overs. these are like strong bad emails. every one should be me doing a lot of work to give you a response that's as fun and thorough as i can make it.

i gotta be able to read what you send me. i was born in 1992. i'm not great with tone indicators or knowing what a word you censored out might be, and if i have to guess, i'll make something up.

don't roleplay in the inbox. you can come to me as a character if you want and i'll play in the space for your answer, but i'm trying to use my eagerness to help and what education and resources i have to answer questions for which people are struggling to find good information.

==============================

about the blogger

briefly- i'm a trans woman in her thirties and i like to talk. i'm pretty good at it and i have spent the past decade making lengthy posts and expecting people to read them when they didn't ask.

so, i've created a venue where getting a lengthy answer to something you literally did ask is the entire point, to take advantage of this particular skill. also, with popular search engines growing weaker and less reliable all the time, i thought it would both be an entertaining challenge and a worthy social endeavor to use what ability i have to help others, even in this very small way.

if you're looking for something truly academic, you're gonna want a .edu website. but if you're looking for context, for a second set of eyes on something you're trying to scrutinize, or if you've just had a wonder and you're getting conflicting answers- or just answers you know aren't correct- then you can feel free to come to me, and i'll do some of the heavy lifting and package it conversationally for you.

==============================

disclaimer: absolutely no article of text, no image, no link, not a single pixel of this blog can or should be taken as actionable legal, medical, psychological, social, or financial advice. we're sincerely just shooting the shit. you just happen to be talking to someone who cares a lot about giving you an answer to your question that's reasonably well-researched and couched in relatable human context. for entertainment purposes only.

the blog's icon is a cool fish i saw at the aquarium.

[moxmanual]

Have you seen Iron Lung? Literally just watched it so it's on my mind.

i've got plans to! i have seen the video game played a great many times by different youtubers (The Librarian, Vinny Vinesauce, ManlyBadassHero, cr1tikal, etc.) but i'm not a Markiplier fan so I wasn't there for the moment it really blew up. seen it from a lot of angles and perspectives, though.

i think staking your entire game on the dread and anticipation of a single big scare is fucking awesome. we see a prototype of this in Squirrel Stapler, also by Szymanski. it reminds me of Vincent Price and the 1959 film "The Tingler," a movie about a spinal parasite that feeds on fear. they spent half a million 1959 dollars on rumble paks installed in some of the seats to get you tingling, but further, they'd have hired goons and puppeteers stage a real-life Tingler infestation to scare the unholy dogshit out of everyone in the theater.

that big pop, that sudden swing to You In Your Seat, whether you're getting breached in Iron Lung or Tingled in a movie theater while Price monologues, for me captures this moment where the distance closes between the horror and you. it's just a movie or game, it can't get you- and yet, there it went, it fucking GOT you.

i admire that. it's structured just like a good joke, but the punchline can keep you up at night. remind me to tell the story about my dad taking me to The Grudge after the theater manager told him Team America wasn't appropriate for a kid my age. shit can really stick with you if it lands just right.

[moxmanual]

coolest fish possible?

two animal questions in a row? is this because of the fish icon?

anyway, during the previous post, i encountered the least cool fish possible, so let's go ahead and demonstrate how low the bar is:

phallostethus cuulong is a fish discovered in southwest Vietnam that has an evolutionary specialization that's extremely unique!

...its dick is on its head.

and i'm sure it works great for that fish's environment, but calling it "cool" would be one hell of a stretch. it's necessary for how it lives.

so that's the bottom of the cool-o-meter. let's get to the top.

the royal gramma or fairy basslet is that cool little bicolor job you sometimes see at petco that's purple in the front, yellow in the back. it's extremely striking and effectively dazzle camo- it breaks up their silhouette, making predators confused about where to strike. i'd place such an elegant and fun specialization right in the middle of the cool-o-meter. great job, little pet store fish!

but for the cream of the crop, the coolest fish i've ever seen...

last post i established that if you're dead, you get no points. but i'm gonna briefly mention the disqualified dunkleosteus, because it's awesome. look at its skull. from wikipedia:

but we don't live in the era of devonian placoderms, so let's see what dope jawed fish 2026 has for us-

this is a guitarfish, named because it's shaped like a guitar. it's not usually too useful or accurate to think of animals as "between" two other kinds of animals- evolution isn't linear like that- but visually it's hard to ignore that it looks very much like the midpoint between a stingray and a shark. wikipedia even describes it as intermediate between the two.

it's a jawed fish you can find in places like the Maldives, Brazil, New Zealand- warm water and close to shore. they're bottom-feeders that like a good crab or shrimp. i just like the cut of their jib. a good collection of useful features for a specific kind of living. it's like they comparison shopped their body plan.

are they the coolest? i dunno, maybe. but if you ask me who's really the coolest, it's this angel shark from the old zoobooks commercial:

she's had 20 years to make an impression. i can't think about the ocean without seeing... this. which makes her kind of a celebrity! which is pretty god damn cool for a fish.

[moxmanual]

best qualities of niche mammals?

the way mammals specialize for their environment can be pretty exciting. naked mole rats use "behavioral thermoregulation" to essentially behave as if cold blooded like a reptile, which is an enviable level of control over their own body. but you asked for best, and i'm not exactly a natural when it comes to tier lists, so we're gonna try and make a little scale here.

basically, more specialized, more better. for the purposes of this ask. so, what's the most specialized mammal on earth?

there was a marsupial lion (thylacoleo) in australia, but it's been extinct since the late pleistocene. no points for no-shows. thylacoleo isn't here.

the dorcas gazelle can live its entire life without drinking water (getting hydration from eating plants only) and concentrate its piss into dry pellets so it can retain more water, which kind of makes it an ungulate that's trying really hard to be a cactus. to me that's really remarkable.

the cali museum of paleontology at berkeley says that we gotta hand it to cetaceans, and i think they're right, but it's awful broad. i think we gotta narrow it down to beaked whales, and maybe specifically Cuvier's beaked whale, which can dive to a depth of nearly two miles and hold its breath there for nearly four hours. it's a level of fucking off that no other beast on this earth can aspire to, and i can't help but admire it. i wanna do that, but i'll get the bends and turn into chum.

anyway, the cool thing about mammals on earth is how malleable they are. you create an extreme environment and usually the biggest thing in it is either a mammal or a reptile, and big things are easy to study. mammals give us some pretty awesome models of how we evolve and specialize because of all their familiar qualities that make it so easy to compare and really see the where and how and why that changes took place. it's neat!

go check out the wolf skulls at the la brea tar pits sometime. there's a wall with like 400 of them they hauled up out of the tar. don't treat it as a model of evolution, but check it out and see how they're not identical. you can see how they worked on their environment, and how their environment worked on them. it's those conditions that their genes responded to in trying to make a more effective wolf!

[moxmanual]

what's your fav bit of early web history

eternal september. it's kind of the starting gun of my entire life, and i never even knew it until i had been an active participant for over a decade. the first time i was online it was fall of 1997, and eternal september had already been underway for four years.

it was when internet service providers of the era began to broadly offer usenet access to their users. usenet was how we bothered each other online before forums or IRC or youtube comments or tweets. per wikipedia, new and inexperienced internet users flooded onto usenet.

usenet users were usually only expecting a crapflood of new users at the beginning of the fall college semester, because it was only colleges that had access to that kind of thing, pre-1993. now there were new users Every God Damn Day, and it really weirded up the flow of interpersonal communication.

this of course changed the expectation for how people were going to behave online, how webmasters needed to run their sites, and created the internet as we came to know it for about twenty years.

it led to "web 2.0," which was for the longest time the internet that millennials remember, where it's collaborative, full of user-generated content, and was kind of a burgeoning new third space, right there in your living room. in the cabinet. you know, the big wooden cabinet you had, where the computer lived.

it also led to like, SomethingAwful and the bodybuilding forums where they debated over how many days are in a week, and eventually 4chan- which, love it or hate it, was one of the iconic pillars of global human interaction before the behind-the-scenes conservative takeover in the 2010s.

all because you could suddenly get usenet at home, and annoy people who had been using it for years.

it's currently September 11,976, 1993. wild.