ocean met sky and the world drowned

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Georges Hobeika Haute Couture Autumn/Winter 2012

STOP! are you operating on an arbitrary set of terms and rules known only to you? have you created an ultimatum or specific if/then scenario for someone else without communicating it to them? have you considered making a decision and calculated all the consequences and potential reactions to those consequences and consequences for those reactions before you actually made the decision? it may be time to say some words out loud to another person!

I think of this post constantly so I made a graphic to send to other people

[ID: a graphic displaying the above text. End ID]

percy prob didnt know what annabeth said

I don't trust anyone who hasn't acknowledged their capacity for evil.

"I'm just a smol bean uwu" No sir, what you are is someone who is so habituated to thinking of yourself as innocent that you will continue to do so even when you're guilty.

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

XKCD

So that people don’t need to go through the notes:

- We have fossils of spider webs

- Paleontologists have reconstructed the larynx (voice box) of extinct animals and we have a pretty good idea what vocalizations they were capable of

- Fossilized pigments have been found in a variety of taxa

- Soft tissues fossilize more often than you think; we have skin impressions for like 90% of Tyrannosaurus rex’s full body (shoulder blades and neck are the only bits missing)

If pop culture is your only window into extinct animals, then you do not remotely understand how much we know.

We know the entire lifecycle of a tyrannosaurus. We know from the sheer amount of remains we have, from every stange.

We know exactly how other dinosaurs look, down to colors and patterns, because bones are not the only information that is preserved.

The Sinosauropteryx is one such dinosaur. Because pigmentation molecules were preserved in the feather impressions, we know it’s colors, and it’s tail rings (which one would argue would be it’s “iconic feature.”

(Art credit Julio Lacerda)

Microraptor is another! We know from feather impressions that it had four wings. We know from pigmentation that it was an iredecent black, like a raven.

(Art credit Vitor Silva)

This is not limited to dinosaurs, or feathers. We’ve found pigmentation in scales and skin. We’ve completely reconstructed two extinct penguins, colors and all. We’ve figured out the colors of some non-avian and non-feathered dinosaurs. We can identify evidence of feathers existing on animals without feather impressions.

We have feathered dinosaurs preserved in amber.

We can defer likely behavioral patterns through adaptations we see in bones, and from the environments they were found in. We can see how certain movements evolved through musculature attachments (yes, how muscles attached is often preserved). We know avian flight likely evolved by “accident” by the way early raptorforms moved their arms to strike at their prey.

We also understand behavior in extant animals and can easily speculate likely behaviors in extinct animals. (A predator running for it’s life is not going to exhibit hunting behaviors)

We learn and understand way more from “rocks” than paleontologists are given credit for. And if you watch a movie like Jurassic World, which has no interest in portraying anything with any sort of accuracy, and your take away is “We can’t possibly know anything about these animals,” then you don’t understand science.

As for shrinkwrapped reconstructions, we understand how muscles attach, and how fat works. Artists who lean into shrinkwrapping are are not generally concerned with scientific accuracy, or biology. They’re only concerned with Awesombro.

If true paleoartists tried to reconstruct a hippo, while they naturally would not get every bit correct, it would certainly look like a real animal, and not that alien monster that tumblr is so fond of using as “proof” that paleontologists don’t know anything (an art piece that itself was extreme and satirical, and a condemnation of the particular subset of paleoartists I mentioned earlier)

Every time paleoblr tries to show you how extinct animals actually looked, all we get is a chorus of “thanks i hate it” and “stop ruining dinosaurs!”

Loosing my shit at the knowledge that T-rexes nursed their loved ones back to health

@lusus–naturae​

@crystallinethoughts

You can find some fairly decent dinosaur sound reconstructions on YouTube. Based on how a Tyrannosaurus voice box and hearing worked, we can infer that it would have made low rumbling sounds instead of the iconic roars from the Jurassic Park franchise.

Something between the boom of a crocodile and the roll of thunder. It was a sound you would likely be able to feel, perhaps even before it was able to be heard. Far off thunder on a sunny day then the earth begins to shake and the thunder grows loud enough you can feel it in your stomach. That’s what it may have sounded like to be hunted by a T. rex.

In a very funny twist of fate some current animals don’t actually possess their iconic traits. For example, bald eagles don’t have a majestic screech, they fake that in movies and enough people believe it that it’s the accepted norm

really recommend getting a partner with a different religion than you and very little knowledge of your religion because the opportunities for explaining things to each other are just exquisite

yesterday she told me some story about the Buddha's wife and child and I was like. Wait. He fucked? And she was like yeah of course he fucked, why wouldn't he, he was the most attractive and loveable and and wise and etc. person who ever lived. why would he not fuck.

this morning she looked perplexed in the kitchen at me and said "did Jesus not fuck?"

Whenever I see a post talking about how it's okay to steal from huge corporations, when they have shit like self checkout, I always want to jump up and say they have cameras and are collecting your information and you need to be so careful because yeah like they're inflating the prices and running monopolies and price fixing with competitors but everybody is caring about shoplifters more and that's really fucked up, but you also need to consider that Target might be keeping track of every time you don't scan something or intentionally scan it wrong, and just waiting for it to add up to a felony.

Which feels entirely beside the point and almost inappropriate to bring up when the point is that the customer is already a victim of theft, but I feel like there are people encouraging others to do stuff that can absolutely end up with them in jail without mentioning at all that it's a risk.

This is real and here are some sources discussing facial recognition in various retail settings. fuck corporations but also go in knowing all the facts 🫡 Kashmir Hill is a great journalist who’s entire beat is facial recognition and how it’s deployed, and she’s an amazing resource if you want to learn more about facial recognition in general. highly recommend her new book on clearview ai too, it’s a great read

ACLU lawsuit that stops clearview from being sold to retail in the us (but doesn’t stop retail from buying other facial recognition tech) https://www.aclu.org/cases/aclu-v-clearview-ai

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/10/technology/facial-recognition-stores.html

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barred-from-grocery-stores-by-facial-recognition/

https://www.seattletimes.com/business/barred-from-grocery-stores-by-facial-recognition/

Targets privacy policy, scroll down to the camera section

You are the coolest person in the world to me for finding all those sources.

theyve been building felony cases for years already using the regular aisle cameras… never steal at self checkout its literally the #1 danger zone nowadays and if you do lift never conceal items in your bag in direct view of the overhead cameras either… if they dont have that video as evidence they cant build a case even if they do suspect you of stealing

Dogs: "Oh, look, new game. Yes, we can do that! Look how alike we are!! We are doing such a good job at socializing!!!"

Human: "Why do you mock my pain? Please, I just want to go sit down." 😭

Statue based on Leonardo daVinci’s famous concept for artificial wings.

Source: It is known among the wise