FOB Lyrics That Feel Incredibly Arospec To Me

I misread a post observing that a tyrannosaurus is chronologically closer to an iPhone than it is to a stegosaurus as claiming that a tyrannosaurus is taxonomically closer to an iPhone than it is to a stegosaurus, and I swear my first thought was “okay, what have those cladistics weirdos done this time“.

Me in fourth grade: I am a god above you all. I have a twelfth grade reading level. I'm one of the two biggest readers in school and everybody knows it. This book? Yeah, I started it yesterday. I finished it today. Yeah it's 600 pages, what about it? You fools are nothing compared to me.

Me now: I can only read fanfiction and comic books. I can't even reread my favourite books. Actually starting a new book? Not happening. Reading is still my favourite activity but I can't do it. I am physically incapable of reading more than ten pages. I had to google how to spell twelfth. My favourite books are all over 1000 pages send help.

I have eczema, specifically the type called Atopic Dermatitis. If you don't know what those words mean, let me break it down for you: atopic means "denoting a form of allergy in which a hypersensitivity reaction such as dermatitis or asthma may occur in a part of the body not in contact with the allergen" dermatitis means " a condition of the skin in which it becomes red, swollen, and sore, sometimes with small blisters, resulting from direct irritation of the skin by an external agent or an allergic reaction to it"

TL;DR means my skin hyper reacts to something wherever it feels like it

OR put even simpler, my skin gets MAD because of REASONS and then it yells "FUCK YOU" to me

I think it’s very important that everyone knows that palaeontologists keep small fossils in little gelatin capsules:

You know…like these things:

No comment on whether or not they grow in water, though.

Ironychan Presents: ten animals that used to be way bigger than they are now. I’ve done a couple of posts (here and here) featuring modern animals that look prehistoric.  This is the opposite: prehistoric animals that look strikingly like their modern relatives, except for the part where they were PANTS-SHITTINGLY GIGANTIC.  (Pictures from all over the Internet, chosen with an emphasis on ones that show just how pants-shittingly gigantic these beasts were.) ALLIGATORS - Deinosuchus rugosus (Late Cretaceous) Looked very much like an ordinary alligator such as you might find in your backyard if you’re unfortunate enough to live in Florida - except that it was about forty feet long and weighed darn near twenty thousand pounds.  This animal literally ate dinosaurs for breakfast, and I can’t think of anything more supremely badass than that. SEA TURTLES - Archelon ischyros (Late Cretaceous) The genus name of this bad boy means ‘king of the turtles’ and I don’t think anybody’s gonna argue.  Built very much like a modern leatherback, Archelon was a good fifteen feet long and tipped the scales at five thousand pounds.  Paleontologists speculate that they ate giant squid, probably because they can’t think of anything else that would sustain a turtle this big. SHARKS - Carcharocles megalodon (Early Pleistocene) Megalodon looked enough like a modern Great White Shark that some scientists place it in the same genus, but it was bigger than any great white outside of an Italian horror movie: sixty feet long with a gape you could drive a car into.  It ate whales, which we know because we’ve found fossil whale bones with giant shark teeth still stuck in them.   CONDORS - Argentavis magnificens (Late Miocene) Lest you think the sea had a monopoly on gargantuan nightmare beasts, I give you the largest flying bird that ever lived, with a wingspan of some twenty-five feet.  Most likely a scavenger, this is a bird that could literally have carried off a human corpse, had there been any humans in South America six million years ago. MILLIPEDES - Arthropleura armata (Late Carboniferous) Do you hate creepy-crawlies?  Don’t go time-travelling.  Arthropleura was a millipede eight feet long.  It was the biggest land-based invertebrate that ever lived, and one of the largest land animals of its time, period.  Scientists believe it was a peaceful herbivore, but should you disregard my advice about time travel, you probably still want to avoid pissing it off. MONITOR LIZARDS - Megalania prisca (Late Pleistocene) The largest living lizard is the Komodo Dragon, which is a pretty gigantic and horrifying animal on its own.  Scientists disagree on how big Megalania was, but most estimates range from twenty to thirty feet, and like its modern relatives, it was also venomous.  Astonishingly, these were around only forty thousand years ago, and the first people to settle in Australia probably saw them.  Even more astonishingly, those people stayed in Australia. PENGUINS - Kairuku grebneffi (Late Oligocene) Penguins are, let’s face it, pretty silly-looking things.  We watch them waddle around in the zoo and laugh at them, while we forget that they also get pretty big - an emperor penguin stands four feet tall.  Kairuku was as much as a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier.  This was a penguin that could kick your ass in a fight or in a diving contest: it could go deeper and faster than any living penguin. BOA CONSTRICTORS - Titanoboa cerrejonensis (Paleocene) Snakes swallow their dinners whole - a good-sized boa can swallow a sheep.  This snake could have swallowed a goddamn hippo.  It probably got to be fifty feet long, weighed between two and three thousand pounds, and was so big around that you couldn’t have given it a hug - although it certainly could have given you one.  I have no idea what it ate, and I suspect that nobody else does, either. DRAGONFLIES - Meganeura brongniarti (Late Carboniferous) At the same time as Arthropleura were rustling through the undergrowth on god knows how many legs, Meganeura was flitting around above the prehistoric swamps.  If your car hit one of these on the highway, the results would be much more dramatic than a splat on the windshield.  With a wingspan of over two feet it was the largest flying insect ever, and probably ate things like fish and amphibians as well as other insects. ORANGUTANS - Gigantopithecus blacki (Pleistocene) Orangutans are already big enough to beat the shit out of you if they want to.  If Gigantopithecus stood on its hind legs it would have been almost ten feet tall, and most likely weighed in at around twelve hundred pounds.  This animal could have tossed you around like the Hulk beating Loki-shaped dents in the floor of Stark Tower.  Some people have suggested that it still roams the isolated woods of the world and is occasionally reported as bigfoot, in which case I humbly suggest we leave it the fuck alone.

okay so @sevdrag asked for neat things and here is mine:

I FOUND A FOSSIL FOSSILS!

me back in september, driving across the Mojave Desert and camping under the stars to avoid all humans, meeting my parents at their condo in St George, Utah: I wonder if my poking around on geology and paleontology blogs and websites and documentaries and books and online courses has taught me anything yet.

*stumbles across the street in 100 degree heat and peers at some Rocks.*

Huh.

Well now THAT's fuckin odd. It's not like an intrusion of molten something or other; parts of it are just a crust on the surface, but parts are embedded. And it's PARTS.

And that's sandstone behind it. But not dunes, because there's no crossbedding. I think maybe water put it here. There's flowy bits.

Horseshoe crab tails? But some are too big. Plant stems? Again, some seem a little large. Or just some weird rust discoloration from ore, or a very odd sort of mineral that grows like a crystal without being quite regular in shape? But growing in sand/silt? instead of a fluid-filled cavity? Can that happen?

And then there's this. Small tracks on either side of a tail drag? Or a rolling pebble with water ripples on either side?

Fas t forward to May 2021. Vaccinated. Return to St George to meet parents. Visit St. George Dinosaur Discovery museum, which has some of the best-preserved dinosaur tracks in the world on ancient silty mudflats, including a bona-fide dino butt print where a dino sat down on its haunches and then wandered off.

I show my photos to a paleontologist working the desk, and she says, "Oh, that's just petrified wood."

Just. Because it's common in this part of the southwest.

So we go home and I show Mom the rock face. While we're standing back, she points out they're part of an entire fucking TREE lying on its side, branches fanning to the right, partly embedded in the cliff, partly eroded out of it leaving a light imprint in the siltstone.

That dark horizontal bit above the right side of the yardstick is the petrified skin of a treebranch (debarked, I think; there's other places that show a bumpy bark imprint whereas the brown petrified wood bits are smooth.) I think the "tail drag" mark might be a conifer twig with needles.

So I posted THESE to Twitter's #fossilFriday, and the curator of the museum spotted it and said he'd come by to document it, although I don't think he has yet because it's not in a very good state of preservation. Quoth he:

I agree with your identification as a portion of a tree with branches, and trees are very common in the Late Triassic Shinarump Member of the Chinle Formation buried in braided river systems some 230-225 million years ago. Unfortunately, from what I can see from your photos, most of the fossil is missing and I can't make out anything identifiable.

— Dr. Andrew Milner

Which means it just barely postdates the last survivors of the Permian die-off, my buddy Lystrosaurus, but not by much! (wrong part of the world, anyway; this isn't Gondwanaland.)

And after that email exchange I kept searching the cliff and found at least one more tree fossil as well. It's very definitely fossil treeroots from a tree that's lying on its side, but unless the top broke off and is not lying quite at the same angle, it's probably a second tree. It's behind the edge of my parents' neighbors' yard, so hopefully it's well-protected.

More bits of petrified wood from the first tree.

[Most photos May 8-9 2021]

And I'm just stoked, you know? I'm not a geologist, although there's lots of scientists in my family, and my maternal grandfather taught geology at a junior college. I've just gotten interested in this as a hobby of the past 10 years.

And there it is. An honest to gosh fossil tree, maybe one of the first to grow tall again after the end Permian extinction, shading the silty flats of a wide river down to what became lakes or the inland seaway. The first dinosaurs trotted past it, leaving tracks in the silt. That's a real tree that lived for decades or hundreds of years, and it moved in the wind and felt the rain, hundreds of millions of years ago, when the animals and insects that scurried on its bark were almost entirely different from today.

Fossils are amazing.

Change.org

Aromantic has been added to the dictionary! All three words added! We did it!

I have exciting news! Merriam Webster has added aromantic to the dictionary! That means all three words we were asking them to add have been

ASEXUAL, AGENDER, AND AROMANTIC ARE NOW OFFICIAL WORDS IN THE ENGLISH DICTIONARY

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

I feel rage (respectfully)

This is the last thing, I promise. Because, well, I want to spend my fandom time having fun and NotW is not that.

Beau DeMayo during his Q&A:

The books on which The Witcher Netflix is based (that the writers are meant to have read, absorbed and adored):

Bare in mind, Geralt was younger than five during all this, according to Netflix.

Elaborate, DeMayo? We shouldn't have to. You and your producer are being paid to know this.

I like to think of relationship anarchy as the foundation that shapes my understanding of aromantic theory.

It creates an inherently anti-amatonormative setting in which relationships are reevaluated and reconstructed based on the collective needs of the people involved. It's the reason I will always be against strict definitions of relationship types and the implicit requirements that come with that. The only people who can define a relationship and what that relationship entails and which label to give it are the people involved in said relationship. The only way to do that is through effective communication. The only way to fight amatonormative relationship hierarchies is through doing exactly that: discarding societies norms and instead explicitly defining your relationships based on mutual understanding, communication and respect.

Relationship anarchy gives aspec people the freedom to have any type of relationship they desire instead of being locked out of certain levels of intimacy simply because of some societal norm that dictates what you can and can't do based on which label you apply to a relationship.