@manticoreimaginary / manticoreimaginary.tumblr.com
Kagu, a bird on the brink of extinction meets one of its own kind
Trapped by the night
my personal pick for most underrated animal is the european legless lizard, which i think is often taken to just look like a normal and rather plain snake, but if you're familiar with reptile anatomy at all it looks more like some sort of bizarre heraldic fantasy creature than basically anything else on earth
it's called the lateral groove and is literally a sort of seam in it's body that's always present:
I /think/ what's going on is that these evolved from something like alligator lizards, which have very rigid, slippery underbellies next to soft, stretchy skin on their sides (where their legs are situated), but now that they've evolved to be a "snake" and don't have legs that need to move around, that soft skin has decreased and turned into a weird little seam so they can move easier and don't have a big weak point in their sides. it's compensation to have nice smooth scales all over and a flexible size like a snake does, using the lizard anatomy they're working with (edit, just to clarify: it does stretch out and help with movement and such since their scales can't spread like a snake's can, I more mean that this is evolution's weird attempt to create that adaptation out of the place where the legs used to be in lieu of the scales being able to flex)
basically it's the leg removal surgery scar evolution dealt them
STAR TREK: VOYAGER (1995–2001)
Back in February, decided to have a gander at drawing a fake cover for my novel in progress! You may recognise these from a piece back in 2023 that became my favourite of the year, and I'm so so excited for the world to meet these characters when it's all ready. The novel WIP is a blend of Angela Carter-esque gothic, fairytale romance and the grim obsession of one mortal woman for all things other that leads her on a katabasis of both the self and underground space she's longed to visit since childhood (inspired by the PhD thesis I wrote on hellspaces and journeys in modern literature!)
*reminder that all my pieces are nightshaded!*
Pictured: Luis Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat. He's photographed at his house, which has a green roof.
"Cassiano is the founder of Teto Verde Favela, a nonprofit that teaches favela residents how to build their own green roofs as a way to beat the heat without overloading electrical grids or spending money on fans and air conditioners. He came across the concept over a decade ago while researching how to make his own home bearable during a particularly scorching summer in Rio.
That is, until Cassiano decided to team up with a civil engineer who was looking at green roofs as part of his doctoral thesis to figure out a way to make them both safe and affordable for favela residents. Over the next 10 years, his nonprofit was born and green roofs started popping up around the Parque Arará community, on everything from homes and day care centers, to bus stops and food trucks.
When Gomes da Silva heard the story of Teto Verde Favela, he decided then and there that he wanted his home to be the group's next project, not just to cool his own home, but to spread the word to his neighbors about how green roofs could benefit their community and others like it.
Pictured: Jessica Tapre repairs a green roof in a bus stop in Benfica, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Like many low-income urban communities, Parque Arará is considered a heat island, an area without greenery that is more likely to suffer from extreme heat. A 2015 study from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro showed a 36-degree difference in land surface temperatures between the city's warmest neighborhoods and nearby vegetated areas. It also found that land surface temperatures in Rio's heat islands had increased by 3 degrees over the previous decade.
That kind of extreme heat can weigh heavily on human health, causing increased rates of dehydration and heat stroke; exacerbating chronic health conditions, like respiratory disorders; impacting brain function; and, ultimately, leading to death.
But with green roofs, less heat is absorbed than with other low-cost roofing materials common in favelas, such as asbestos tiles and corrugated steel sheets, which conduct extreme heat. The sustainable infrastructure also allows for evapotranspiration, a process in which plant roots absorb water and release it as vapor through their leaves, cooling the air in a similar way as sweating does for humans.
The plant-covered roofs can also dampen noise pollution, improve building energy efficiency, prevent flooding by reducing storm water runoff and ease anxiety.
"Just being able to see the greenery is good for mental health," says Marcelo Kozmhinsky, an agronomic engineer in Recife who specializes in sustainable landscaping. "Green roofs have so many positive effects on overall well-being and can be built to so many different specifications. There really are endless possibilities.""
Pictured: Summer heat has been known to melt water tanks during the summer in Rio, which runs from December to March. Pictured is the water tank at Luis Cassiano's house. He covered the tank with bidim, a lightweight material conducive for plantings that will keep things cool.
But the several layers required for traditional green roofs — each with its own purpose, like insulation or drainage — can make them quite heavy.
For favelas like Parque Arará, that can be a problem.
"When the elite build, they plan," says Cassiano. "They already consider putting green roofs on new buildings, and old buildings are built to code. But not in the favela. Everything here is low-cost and goes up any way it can."
Without the oversight of engineers or architects, and made with everything from wood scraps and daub, to bricks and cinder blocks, construction in favelas can't necessarily bear the weight of all the layers of a conventional green roof.
That's where the bidim comes in. Lightweight and conducive to plant growth — the roofs are hydroponic, so no soil is needed — it was the perfect material to make green roofs possible in Parque Arará. (Cassiano reiterates that safety comes first with any green roof he helps build. An engineer or architect is always consulted before Teto Verde Favela starts a project.)
And it was cheap. Because of the bidim and the vinyl sheets used as waterproof screening (as opposed to the traditional asphalt blanket), Cassiano's green roofs cost just 5 Brazilian reais, or $1, per square foot. A conventional green roof can cost as much as 53 Brazilian reais, or $11, for the same amount of space.
"It's about making something that has such important health and social benefits possible for everyone," says Ananda Stroke, an environmental engineering student at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro who volunteers with Teto Verde Favela. "Everyone deserves to have access to green roofs, especially people who live in heat islands. They're the ones who need them the most." ...
It hasn't been long since Cassiano and the volunteers helped put the green roof on his house, but he can already feel the difference. It's similar, says Gomes da Silva, to the green roof-covered moto-taxi stand where he sometimes waits for a ride.
"It used to be unbearable when it was really hot out," he says. "But now it's cool enough that I can relax. Now I can breathe again."
-via NPR, January 25, 2025
I really enjoy kiwi slang. love to eat my scroggin while tramping. you shouldn’t wear jandals on a tramp but you COULD wear togs I guess. I’m going to take a squiz around the corner to see where this trail goes. a rekkie if you will. aw man okay it’s steep as. I don’t want to trip and cark it. I love words
does it know it is alive?
Melantho might have betrayed Penelope, but Penelope betrayed Melantho first, to be honest.
She took that girl (a slave) away from her parents and raised her "like a daughter". She put Melantho in (a relative position of) privilege, giving her affection, making her a part of the small royal family, and then, what... when she was too old by whatever metric, she proves none of that affection by the Queen of Ithaka matters!
Penelope puts Melantho back where she "belongs" - as a slave, to work as a slave, for the woman who raised her "like a mother".
Why should Melantho take such treatment with grace? Eumaios might have (and I'm honestly fucking baffled he did, since he wasn't just born free but just as noble and royal as Ktimene and Odysseus and has at least some memory of that), but Melantho is her own person. (Well, as much as a slave is allowed to be their own person, never mind a person at all.)
Let me be clear:
Penelope not freeing Melantho is the betrayal.
She takes this slave as if she is a toy, and when she has tired of her, she puts her back in the chest. Melantho being to Penelope as her own daughter isn't enough to earn her the personhood of freedom (which Penelope could give). Whatever does Melantho owe her owner?
Not even loyalty to your master earns you the personhood of freedom!
Eumaios and all the other slaves that have been unquestioningly loyal to their owners do not get freedom - or, in the case Odysseus' gift to Eumaios might indeed be freedom (which it might not actually be, from what I've read), then the rest of those loyal slaves do not, as far as we know, get the same boon.
We don't have any of the Alexandros plays in a complete enough state, so we have no idea how Paris' herdsman foster father gets treated at the end, or if he simply disappears after his "job" is done. But, given everything, I would bet the foster father/Agelaos does not get given freedom for having raised this lost prince nor for having intervened and made sure he isn't killed. His service has been exactly that, and is viewed as "proper service" from a slave to his owners. But he, too, owe exactly squat to his owners.
And for all we know his actions might be far less about loyalty to his owners so they don't kill the son they think is already dead, but affection for and loyalty to the child he raised. And who is, by that very act of affection and loyalty, removed from him.
Into freedom, yes, which is the best to hope for, but Agelaos himself gets left behind. A slave's loyalty is "proper" and "expected" and yet also completely unremarkable exactly BECAUSE it's what a (good) slave should be - as the slave's owner views it, of course.
And to come back to Melantho, she is given much... and yet nothing at all. There's no privilege in that, nor any loyalty owed. She's not even a paid servant. She's an animate belonging.
Babygirl I know fandom history that you wouldn’t even care about
i know fandom history that even I don’t care about
