Ventomology

Working Adult Person | she/her | goofball this blog has my art, my friends' art, random people's art, and really terrible jokes. please send me requests!!

[ventomologist]

The current DnD party! A bit darker than the last one, eh?

[steampunktendencies]

This is a literal "Hammerhead" shark created by artist Matt Sanders.

The sculpture is made from 685 reclaimed steel hammer heads and weighs 500 lbs (about 227 kg). It took approximately 2,500 hours of work to weld together. Sanders even used sledgehammers for the eye sockets and ball-peen hammers for the eyes to give it a realistic look.

It was displayed at the Aquarium of the Pacific in California and remains one of the coolest examples of upcycled art out there.

[ventomologist]

[mismedleym]

recollections

[mrporg]

[iguessweallcrazyithinktho]

Imagine being in your 80s and looking this good 😭 they so badass

[ventomologist]

It's almost poetry time

[purlturtle]

The moment I saw these double doors in our apartment, I knew I wanted to put colorful foil on them:

Today my wife did it, and I couldn't be more stunned and happy:

Isn't it amazing? This is a dream come true, and it makes me so happy! 🩵🧡💚💛💙❤️🩷

[purlturtle]

The doors continue to delight:

(pics taken as the sun shines through the doors, making all the colors shine and projecting some of them across the hallway floor) (edited this reblog to add a second pic)

[purlturtle]

This post is almost at 11,111 notes and I hope someone screenshots it when it happens!

[rathenarts]

@purlturtle here you are I got it for you!

[purlturtle]

what if I told you that I am RIVETED to my notifications at the moment, for fear that I will miss it

[purlturtle]

[purlturtle]

The galaxy map of this post's reblogs is a thing of beauty:

This isn't a post from a big blog that a ton of people reblogged from that one big blog. This isn't even a post that got big because one big blog reblogged it. Yes, there were a few big-name boosts, but almost all of these reblogs are just, this post ambling through Tumblr making people happy.

And that makes *me* happy. Thank you, fellow Tumblrinas!

[purlturtle]

Y'all.

My wife found this incredible rug to go into the living room, that matches the doors so so so well!

Isn't it fabulous?

(ID: wide angle shot of a living room with a rug in the center that is 5x8 panels of different colored squares)

[elizmanderson]

aside from the fact that I came home super hungry bc this event went longer than scheduled (bc every single one of us decided to go hard on our design, so we needed more time), it felt so good to just sit at an art studio and do something super tactile for three hours

let this be a lesson to me the next time I don't want to leave my house to do a thing (i.e., every time I'm supposed to leave my house to do a thing)

[elizmanderson]

at long last I get to see how she looks post-glaze-firing!! we glazed these the week after building them, but we can't pick them up until May since they'll be part of an art installation downtown. so I didn't get to see the final birdhouse until today, when I remembered they should've been long since fired again by now and that I could ask for a picture and oooooooooooooooomg look at her!! the colors turned out just like I wanted!! magical!!

[ushirominya]

last christmas man me a sand but the very next day man car door hook hand

[ushirominya]

me n u both buddy

[finnwolfhards]

this is superior humor

[duke-chainsaw]

I have some to add:

[pyros-random-thoughts]

M O R E

[oh-great-autistic-gay]

I hope you enjoy

[bravelycowering]

[ventomologist]

8/8 of the new dnd party! These ones took a little longer since they didn't include The Slime hahaha.

[ventomologist]

New DnD campaign, new art. 4/8 done, so we're halfway through!

[elizmanderson]

clockmaker Arthur Throckmorton lives a quiet life with his sister and her children, only dreaming of adventure. so when a wealthy client offers him a job that involves traversing Shiftleaf—an enchanted forest that claimed his father decades ago—he reluctantly accepts. the forest is treacherous, but the money will change his family's lives.

the journey quickly turns perilous. fleeing monstrous birds, Arthur stumbles upon a hidden vale where he meets the Lord of the Wood—a figure from his father's many stories. instead of the fairy prince Arthur always imagined, Ira is a morose man, slowly transforming into a beast, his power over a dying forest waning.

Arthur enjoys the safety of the vale, and Ira's company. but he yearns for his family. to safely return home and rescue Ira from a cursed and lonely existence, Arthur and Ira must reach the heart of the wood to heal the forest. except the farther they venture from the vale, the more beastly Ira becomes. if they can't complete their mission before he turns completely, Arthur could lose the man he's falling for—and never see his family again.

links: TheStoryGraph | Goodreads | Bookshop

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Editors Protecting Wikipedia from AI Hoaxes

A group of Wikipedia editors have formed WikiProject AI Cleanup, “a collaboration to combat the increasing problem of unsourced, poorly-written AI-generated content on Wikipedia.” The group’s goal is to protect one of the world’s largest repositories of information from the same kind of misleading AI-generated information that has plagued Google search results, books sold on Amazon, and academic journals. “A few of us had noticed the prevalence of unnatural writing that showed clear signs of being AI-generated, and we managed to replicate similar ‘styles’ using ChatGPT,” Ilyas Lebleu, a founding member of WikiProject AI Cleanup, told me in an email. “Discovering some common AI catchphrases allowed us to quickly spot some of the most egregious examples of generated articles, which we quickly wanted to formalize into an organized project to compile our findings and techniques.”

9 October 2024

[rosslynpaladin]

If you can, Go Donate to Wikipedia.

[bob-artist]

Crimetober 1-9

Because birds are criminals.

[cordspaghetti]

really factual recounting with no embellishments whatsoever

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

[parttimepunner]

Please tell me more about these extinct ecosystems. Why did they go extinct? Could an ecosystem like that return?

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

When I say "extinct ecosystem", I mean those ecosystems that have existed in the past, with extinct animals and plants etc. inhabiting them

by their very definition, they are gone forever

there are ones that were truly unique, like Polar Tropical Forests and Fern Prairies, that we just could not have today

but there were ones that have equivalents to today, as well, like the first savannahs and steppes of the Miocene - they just have earlier versions of the plants and animals

there were so many because there are so many today, and each one had its own flora and fauna and was glorious

There's the wetlands and forests of Hell Creek in the Latest Cretaceous

the bizarre Volcanic Lake Forests of the Jehol Biota

whatever the hell the Ediacaran Reefs were

the Scale Tree Swamp Forests of the Carboniferous

"Mesozoic 2" aka pre-human Aotearoa

the Western Interior Seaway dominated by Mosasaurs

and so many other things, I couldn't possibly list them all. Every time period had its own biosphere and biomes, and they were all unique.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

#i wanna see the Aurora Borealis over a tropical forest#BC Canada has a Boreal Rainforest so you can definitely get that

that isn't what I mean by "Polar Tropical Forest"

I mean a tropical forest

at the poles

ie, the ecosystems present during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum

we have fossils of plants that showcase how different tropical plant lifestyles had to be up at the poles because of the light weirdness

the important part is "tropical", not "wet/rainforest". those are two different things

Temperate and Boreal Rainforests are wonderful and some of my favorite living biomes, but they aren't what I was talking about

[adeptarcanist]

May I ask about the fern prairies? That sounds really cool!

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Grass is a relatively recent thing

it first evolved in the latest Cretaceous, but it didn't actually take over everywhere until the Miocene, when grasses that process light differently (look up C3 vs C4 photosynthesis) evolved and just took the fuck over the planet

before then, other plants formed the low ground cover over the earth, and in many places those plants were ferns - spread all over the ground and covering it, much like grass, but significantly less dense. Dirt would have been much more common everywhere.

This is why I am begging every single game developer to remember that grass is not a neutral ground cover

[im-flashtoo]

My favorite extinct ecosystem, if it counts while being as physically tiny as it was, is the floating logs that existed in the ocean between the first appearance of woody trees and the first appearance of organisms that could break down wood - floating reefs of a sort, trailing enormous filter-feeding crinoids below them. The baleen whales of their time

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

yeah that counts! And how bizarre those must have been!!!

[i-draws-dinosaurs]

Speaking of reefs, we're so used to rocky or coral reefs in the moderns world but there have been so many different reefs throughout prehistory that were made of things that straight up don't exist any more!

Like the reefs of the late Devonian, which were made of stromatoporoids, which may have resembled corals but were actually a highly diverse extinct group of sponges!

This is one of my own reconstructions of a stromatoporoid reef off the coast of Devonian Australia (plus anachronistic underwater baited camera):

The Cretaceous also had some wild extinct reefs which are known as carbonate reefs and were dominated by a group of bivalve molluscs called rudists!

[ferncube]

Scale tree swamps are the only one of these I know anything about and they were SO WEIRD. There's definitely some controversy about how they functioned cause these things are hard to work out from fossils, but the current thinking is that these trees shot up to around 100 feet tall in 10-15 years, grew more tightly packed together than basically any modern forest, produced spores one time and then promptly keeled over and died. Forests just do not work like this anymore! It's not just different types of trees, it's a whole *different type of forest* that has gone extinct! Different nutrient cycling, different natural rhythms, different everything!

Even today there are all kinds of niche hyperlocal ecosystems that function in their own distinct ways - shale barrens, waxcap grasslands, cataract bogs. What else have we just never seen??

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Anxiety over all the prehistoric organisms we’ll never know, meet your big sibling: anxiety over all the prehistoric ECOSYSTEMS we’ll never know

[sepdet]

I want to see those big fungal spike tree things that were the first tall plants.

I want to see the vast braided river plains of Rhodinia, because before root systems could hold together riverbanks, single, stable river channels were nearly impossible — there were vast boulder and silt and gravel fields like 100x versions of this glacial/lahar runoff channel I photographed below Mt Hood that clinked and clattered...

I want to see the first fall colors on Earth, the vast Edenic forests of glossopteris trees, like nothing in the world today, spanning the whole of Gondwana's subcontinents in an unbroken canopy halfway around the planet. Did they pile up in drifts too fast to break down? Were they an adaptation to cold or insect predation?

i want to see the dinosaur-tended Amazon forest, huge tree columns and a sort of ferny open parkland beneath, far more fertile from all the dung but kept open by the long reach and numbers of giant grazers.

I want to see Earth's purple oceans during the Boring Billion— wearing a gas mask and oxygen supply, of course — with perhaps a pale green sky, due to more sulfur but low oxygen. I want to see how the acidic rains of CO2-rich and sulfur-producing bacteria (binding with water to produce sulfuric acid) accelerated weathering on the lifeless, rusting land, creating a Martian landscape scoured by Dune-sized dust storms and sand storms, an accelerated nutrient delivery system for early life in the euxinic oceans.

I want to see the higher-oxygen carboniferous swamps that made giant insects possible, but also mega wildfires, and may even have made lightning bolts more colorful.

I love this thread and all of it. I'm not a paleontologist, so I may have some of the details wrong, but I devour articles, books, and documentaries (which appear to be well-researched) on exactly this kind of thing.

(Nova's "Ancient Earth" miniseries last year, with interviews with scientists interspersed with CGI reconstructions of what early Earths may have looked like like, was a real treat).

[the-haiku-bot]

I want to see those

big fungal spike tree things that

were the first tall plants.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[prof-grace-aspen]

C4 grasses mention!!! These grasses also incorporated more silica into their structures compared to C3 plants, but this makes them more abrasive... which meant animals that wanted to eat this brand new food source taking over the dry plains had to either already have teeth that could handle the constant abrasion or evolve adaptations! Early Zebras were among those who already had equipment that could be used for C4 grass. Equines had long teeth to help them grab leaves off trees, and these long teeth were able to stand up to the abrasion of the new C4 grasses!