You’d get FEATHERS on dinosaur HRT anyway

Yeah the reveal of the linguistic imperialism theme was pretty cool and it just makes me sad that the game was so undercooked, it’s right in line with the rest of kojima’s style of “I just read some good shit and I’m gonna use it”

anyone who tries to claim there was any absolute standard of behavior for pre-industrial tribes like that is just doing fantasy worldbuilding

Every social organization you can think of was probably the way of life for someone out there, from patriarchy to matriarchy, communal to hierarchical

I get apprehensive around wasps too but it’s very funny to me how much hatred and distrust these animals are met with because they are able to force you to treat them with a little respect

sometimes when I read posts here that say something like “cis people are so fucked up they all do x” I get this reactionary jolt where I’m like “hey that’s not fair I don’t do that, don’t paint us all as–”

Then I blink and realize I’m literally just being extremely uncool and humorless and literally doing exactly what the memer is saying “we” do by reacting that way to the slightest bit of teasing.

I think too often “magic” ends up existing in that sort of story as just alternate technology. It can make the dichotomy between them seem like little more than an aesthetic difference, and it’s especially obvious when the magic is highly systematized. A wizard who threatens to shoot fire from his hands, who is loaded up on his mana resource and has great aim with his hand-blasts, seems to me like little more than a person with a fancy gun.

There are some examples of “system” magic that still feels distinct though, like in Earthsea or Discworld, where magic is a tool that interacts with the world like technology, but cannot be manipulated without something special that is difficult to exploit. Discworld’s magic is basically 40k orks, magic that stems from collective belief, which is hard to manufacture inorganically. Earthsea’s magic comes from understanding things deeply, being able to capture the essence of things in a word and then being able to manipulate it. The “magic” ends up being the same hard-to-define relationship between the world and the words we use to break it into pieces. In a way, it’s like technology’s shadow, the same drive to control and understand but in the opposite direction.

Going from 256 triangles to 1024 triangles per model is a big deal that you can immediately see

Going from 10 million triangles to 100 million or whatever is very subtle and nobody notices

I haven’t seen much anime, but considering the genre’s reputation for melodrama and exaggerated characters I’m curious if there are examples of anime which depict friendship on its own well without it hinting towards this. It’s surprisingly hard to think of examples even outside of anime

I guess Dorohedoro had a pretty good “strong friendship” that wasn’t really a covert romance plot (nikaido and kaiman), maybe?

how is Hitler there he literally killed Hitler

It’s usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)

Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.

Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes

Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.

I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.

(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)

Cockroach beneath bedbug? Ants and termites lower than a stupid ass butterfly?

I strongly disagree with this insect hierarchy and HARSHLY judge the character of its creator

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails “a bunch of lesbos” and he wasn’t even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

It’s a good article that showcases the way AAA games are basically hollow. They wear a lot of art, incredibly elaborate, expensive, art, but none of it comes together to make the experience it promises. Everything is built in separate pieces and stuck together later, and its boring gameplay that shows no interest in being art of its own is the glue. I remember Yahtzee did a video about the first Destiny that made this same point, about how the environmental art in a few areas was fascinating and clearly full of effort, but the gameplay was a slog that lacked the same ambition.

The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it’s heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn’t have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.

This is on-the-nose enough to be a Black Mirror episode jesus christ

It sucks ass but JP’s particular derangement is honestly pretty entertaining, moreso with the way his character has developed since his Journey Into the Dark (his brain damage from the medical coma). Get one of those ai tools to read in his deflating balloon voice and it should be bearable in chunks

Naked mole rats are considered an example of a truly “eusocial” mammal analogue to ants. More evidence for the idea that social behavior/societal grouping, once established in a species, characterizes it more potently than just about anything else in its genetic history. Chimps might be our closest genetic relatives, but the way we live and think is probably much more similar to these guys.