As I look upon my hands, I see them sprinkled, flooded in red. I look up and see the raspberries, of which I was eating. I’m full now, the juice on my hands a sign of just how many of these juicy fruits I ate. I get some more and bring them home.
I’m washing the red from my hands, it’s mixing with the water and turns it a very faint red as well. The raspberries are somewhere safe. As I finish scrubbing I look into the dirty mirror. A man, neither young nor old, with a black beard, cut short hair and a very tired look in his brown eyes looks back at me. I should clean the mirror. I keep going, prepare food, eat and go sleep.
I meet with him again. Unplanned. Unpleasant. Also welcome. This time I’m prepared. I throw my knife into his eye. While skinning and cutting out the best meat for transporting home, I notice that my hands are sprinkled, flooded, red again. I go on, while I cut, I remember the species that owned everything here before I came. I’m a bit like them, bipedal and intelligent.
I’m washing the red from my hands again. Again it is mixing with the water and turns it bright red again. I put the meat somewhere safe, so I can prepare it a bit later. I scrub until my hands are clean, I look up and notice I still haven’t cleaned the mirror. I stagger over a bit, it seems that behind the man looking back at me, in the far distance is another man. I vaguely remember that man. At the same time the mirror is showing something impossible, as directly behind me is a wall. I keep going anyways, prepare my food, eat and go sleep.
I look down on the creature in my arms. My vision becomes shaky. My hands are sprinkled, flooded in red, but the creature is a human this time. He is very heavily wounded. I try to stabilize him as best I can. I look into his face. My vision is clear now. I know this man and he means a lot to me. He meant a lot to me, as I thought I had seen him die before. I try to fight down my mind which is telling me to end him and enjoy the meal.
I fight it down. I still try to save him. He looks up at me and while I try to save him, with all his last strength he held a hand to my face, locks eyes with me and whispers: “It’s okay, my love, it will all be good again.”
a couple months ago someone sent me an ask asking if I’d ever heard of Boquila trifoliolata and I was like ‘no way. this can’t be real’ and i looked it up and it was and I forgot about it until just now when my supervisor and I got sidetracked and I looked it up again to prove to her that it’s real and found out that not only does this plant vaguely mimic the leaves of whatever plant it’s vining on, it does it when it climbs on fake plants too so any theories about how it does it that include gene transfer or chemicals or touching it in any way are just out the window and those were like, the only theories the original researchers had about how it might be doing it. so anyway I am screaming and crying and whatnot
Boquila feels more like a cuttlefish or an octopus; it can morph into at least eight basic shapes. When it glides up a bush or tree that it’s never encountered before, it can still mimic what’s near. And that’s the wildest part: It doesn’t have to touch what it copies. It only has to be nearby. Most mimicry in the animal kingdom involves physical contact. But this plant can hang—literally hang—alongside a host tree, with empty space between it and its model, and, with no eyes, nose, mouth, or brain, it can “see” its neighbor and copy what it has “seen.”
One theory from that above White & Yamashita paper is that Boquila does this using plant ocelli—a very basic type of eye! If you’re interested in a brief infodump about ocelli: Many animals have ocelli, like jellyfish and insects. Here’s a picture of a wasp head—you can see its two main eyes to the side, and those three dots in the middle are ocelli.
These ocelli don’t form sharp images, but instead probably detect light and shadow for sleep patterns, directionality, flight stability, etc.
Some reptiles and amphibians also have a light-sensitive third eye called a parietal or pineal eye! It’s similarly right on top of their heads. Again, they’re not forming complex images, but instead use general light information to regulate other things. It’s also why even tame reptiles may bolt if you reach at them from directly overhead, out of range of their normal eyes—that third eye sees an incoming shadow and goes HAWK, RUN.
So with that in mind, plant ocelli…Basically they think the upper epidermal cells have evolved to have a particular convex dome shape that focuses light. I don’t know what proportion of cells are ocelli, if it’s just some or all, but basically the leaf itself IS the “eye”.
Plant ocelli were first proposed over a century ago but they haven’t been well studied since then. Cyanobacteria (a photosynthetic bacteria) focus light. Arabidopsis thaliana has been documented to recognize other Arabidopsisplants…basically when competing for resources, if the Arabidopsis recognizes it’s competing with other Arabidopsis plants, they’ll cooperate and move leaves so that they don’t shade each other, ensuring each plant has access to nutrients. But if the competing plant isn’t Arabidopsis,screw ‘em, they’ll shade it. Crepy & Casal narrowed this down to a light-based response, not just chemical identification, so it’s possible Arabidopsis is visually identifying friend from foe. At any rate, that’s about the extent of plant ocelli research that I was able to find. So this Boquila thing is cool and weird.
What we don’t yet know is how precisely Boquila is seeing the world. Boquila is clearly getting some level of resolution in order to be able to copy shape, size, AND color. Unlike an insect’s 2-3 ocelli, it has tons, so even crude data over a lot of inputs might lead to a pretty good picture. The paper also says the mimicry gets more accurate over time, so there appears to be some learning involved. I would also love to know if it has some equivalent of depth perception! If the target plant is near vs. far, does Boquila produce the same appropriately sized mimic leaf? Does it adjust? They’re going to keep studying it so hopefully we have some answers in a few years!
Anyway here’s a picture of the variation of Boquila mimic leaves.
*These feathers are brought to you by CONVERGENT EVOLUTION!
So, here’s the Alucitidae Family!! Commonly known as the many-plumed moths!! (Note, there’s also just plume moths, in the Pterophoridaefamily,but I wanted to talk about these ones today)
Their wings are really something else! Each wing is made up of about 6 flexible spines from which bristles (similar to the barbs of bird feathers) project laterally forming feathers! There are about 200 species known, they are pretty small, the wingspan of adults ranging from 7-28mm. They are distributed in temperate and subtropical regions worldwide and, not surprisingly, are mostly nocturnal and some crepuscular. Their larvae tunnel through the leaves and buds of various shrubs, the larvae of the type species for example, Alucita hexadactyla (pictured above as adult, as larva below), feeds on honeysuckle!
ALT
Also as a little fun fact, until 2004 there was only one species of many-plumed moth known to live in North America, A. montana (lowest photo)which was by the way mistaken to be the same as the European type species I talked above, since then however, two more species have been discovered by Bernard and Jean-François Landry, A. adriendenisi (left) and A. lalannei (right)!
unsurprisingly atm feeling incredibly emotional about Jonathan Sims Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute London I–
he tried so hard! he tried so hard all the damn time! in the face of things much bigger than he was that he could not possibly begin to understand, struggling against something that set him up for failure from the very beginning and laughed at his worst fear realised, confronted with something that seeked to eradicate everything human in him, he just kept trying.
and he made choices and sometimes they were bad but they were the best he could possibly do with what he had. he did his best.
he was always expected both by himself and others to give out so much of himself, to carve out so much of himself and repent bloody and kneeling for things that weren’t his fault, and he did, constantly attempting to make up for everything, even if it wasn’t his burden to carry in the first place. and he just kept splintering under the weight of it with scarcely a kind word in return, constantly eyed with distrust and hatred and resentment when he was just scared too. he was scared.
he was so scared.
barely a word of understanding for so long, so little effort to ever reach out to comfort him at his lowest, and the whole time he was so alone and he was soscared.
do you have any idea what it does to me that the last thing he ever got to hear was that he was loved?
right there at the end, when all the threads had finally converged and all the cards were drawn, and he thought he had finally given in completely to the monstruous part of him, I love you was the last thing he ever heard.
and the pain was sweet with it, and the knife was held as gently as it could have been. and the very last thing he ever knew was that he was loved.
This man is the modern day equivalent of the clockwork masters who made strange, intricate wind-up toys for extremely wealthy people. Exceptionally talented, astonishingly inventive, brilliantly skilled, and the pinnacle of craftsmanship that serves to astonish and delight.
what the fuck chocolate man
(no but @haliderants is right you could make a version of the nutcracker with this guy as the old toy maker but instead of toys it’s chocolate)
I enjoy videos explaining the history of speedruns and the strats involved, but the mindset of speedrunners is beyond my understanding
“And after an amazing run, runner bowser_lover_64 was able to shave off 300 milliseconds from the previous world record, also held by himself, and all that in just 4 months of grinding with approximately 1440 runs.”
Every time I see this post I think about the dude who speedruns Mario 64, but instead of a controller he has all the buttons mapped to an electronic drumkit, so he plays the whole game as an aggressive drum solo. His current record is 21:54. He hasn’t been able to make progress on that for awhile, because he broke his arm after setting that record, but it’s okay! He very quickly moved on by creating a new challenge, which is speedrunning Mario 64 using a drumkit as a controller and only one hand. He hasn’t set an official record for that one yet; his time on the one handed speed-drum is still just over an hour, and he says he’ll post a run once he gets his time under an hour.
To be clear, this is one guy. He has no competition on the speed-drum field, he’s the only speedrunner out here doing this (although he’s also posted tutorials for setting up button mapping on a drumkit, so he’s clearly on board with the idea of having competition). The only person he’s been racing so far is himself.
ALT
