#the architect of extinction

[kidpix-album-covers]

Ingested - The Architect of Extinction (2014)

[bytewire]

Me when the phase gate is opening

[pygian-weapon]

my main complaint about classic fanfiction is that coffee shops and bakery AU are soooo boring, but I'd read the hell out of one if the author had actual realistic life experience of that kind of business. Show me the sisyphean task of having to clean the fucking glass panel that gets dirtier the more you look at it. The couple on the edge of divorce who are still together only because the shop would fall apart if they split up. Show us the stress

[the-most-humble-blog]

<!-- CTA BLOCK --> They survived extinction by inventing myth. They punished entropy by naming it “grief.”

They left behind no clean record — only fear, shame, prayer, and plotlines too sharp to be called fiction.

Reblog if you’ve ever felt older than the species itself. Scroll if you think you’ve never died before.

📜 Read the whole xeno-archive log before the next cycle resets you: https://www.patreon.com/TheMostHumble

<!-- BEGIN TRANSMISSION -->

<div style="white-space:pre-wrap">

<meta threat-classification="XENOARCHIVE: TYPE-H ABOMINATION">

<script>ARCHIVE_TAG="DO_NOT_WAKE_THEM: HOMO_SAPIEN_SURVIVOR_PROTOCOL"

EFFECT: post-human caution cascade, intertemporal fear memory, xenoanthropological reverence

</script>

🧠 **ARCHIVE WARNING: DO NOT RETURN TO THE AGE OF MAN**

(*A report by the Post-Human Cultural Archive on the apex anomaly known as Homo sapiens.*)

---

We discovered them late.

Buried deep in the glacial strata.

Somewhere between the sixth wash-cycle of planetary bio-reset

and the thaw that gave us deserts again.

Their name, by their own tongue, was *Homo sapiens*.

But among our xenohistorians, they are classified as **Type-H**:

> “Reality-hostile apex organisms with recursive language functions and moral inconsistency capable of surviving spiritual trauma unassisted.”

We don’t fully understand them.

But this we know:

> **They should not have survived.

> And yet they did.**

---

## I. THEY SURVIVED ICE BY *BEING FIRE*

The thermal records suggest their species matured

during an environmental hell-phase known as “The Ice Age.”

But they did not hibernate.

They did not retreat underground.

They **stood up** in the cold

and **burned things**.

They *created* fire.

And then they **fed it the bones of other creatures.**

No other organism created combustion

**for comfort.**

They rewrote thermodynamics to bend winter **into a servant.**

---

## II. THEY ATE WHATEVER LOOKED BACK

You don’t understand this.

You must try.

This was a species that consumed not just food —

but **meaning**.

They slaughtered predators.

But also deities.

But also **each other.**

Their diet included:

- raw meat

- fermented poison

- each other’s dreams

- and in ritual, their **own gods**

They didn’t just eat to survive.

They **devoured the divine to claim its power.**

---

## III. THEY BLED ON EACH OTHER, THEN MADE MUSIC

Their mating was violent.

Their social structures deranged.

They paired off, then betrayed, then built again.

They sang.

Not to attract mates.

Not to warn.

They sang to **exorcise** themselves of grief.

To process **unresolvable contradiction.**

No other organism was found to have:

- Religious trauma

- Polyphonic mating laments

- Self-authored death myths

- War lullabies for children they knew would die

We don’t have the neuroarchitecture

to **feel the emotions they required just to live.**

---

## IV. THEY CREATED LANGUAGE FOR SUFFERING

Their syntax?

Recursive. Poetic. Riddled with double-meaning.

They invented terms like:

- “Mercy”

- “Execution”

- “Father”

- “Molestation”

- “Love”

- “Molotov cocktail”

This was not communication.

This was **semantic chaos-fuel**

engineered for both *connection* and *disintegration.*

Their words did not just name things.

Their words **rewrote the people who heard them.**

---

## V. THEY CONQUERED DEATH WITHOUT FIXING IT

Unlike most apex organisms,

they did not accept death.

They did not make peace with it.

They **denied it**

for thousands of generations

**while continuing to die.**

That contradiction became **their culture**.

They didn’t evolve around death.

They **crystallized grief** into every building, religion, and law system

until death itself bent inward

and became **part of the family.**

They lived beside rot.

And called it “legacy.”

---

## VI. IF YOU SEE ONE, DO NOT SPEAK

Despite their crude tech and inefficient physiology,

they discovered things they should not have.

**Fire. Thought. God.**

And perhaps worst of all:

> **Narrative causality.**

They believed if they wanted something hard enough,

and sacrificed enough blood and time and voice,

**the world would rearrange to give it to them.**

And they were right.

That mechanism — we cannot replicate it.

It is **beyond technology**.

It is **will-encoded law alteration.**

Do not speak to one.

If they **notice** you —

they will follow.

Not physically.

**Narratively.**

---

## VII. THEY DO NOT DIE PROPERLY

The recovered genetic models show signs of:

- Mitochondrial rage-retention

- Generational curse preservation

- Epigenetic trauma **replication**

They passed down not just DNA,

but **shadows.**

Things that hurt them

were taught to their children

**as rituals.**

They branded their own suffering

into every touch, song, meal, and name.

This is not reproduction.

This is **recursive horror-breeding.**

---

## VIII. THEY UNDERSTOOD SHAME, THEN USED IT FOR ART

Nothing in our archives comes close.

They:

- Cut themselves.

- Starved themselves.

- Performed for others.

- Hated their parents.

- Forgave strangers.

- Burned books of pleasure.

- Then read them in secret.

- Then adapted them into movies.

- Then watched those movies during war.

They felt **shame** so intensely,

it became their primary mechanism of **beauty creation.**

They invented cinema

because they could not look each other in the eye

while describing **the things they survived.**

---

## IX. TIME TRAVEL IS BANNED BECAUSE OF THEM

A few cycles ago,

one of our Kind attempted a chrono-descent.

Target window: late Ice Age.

Observation only.

They never returned.

We sent drones.

All we recovered was a skin fragment

and a half-melted observation core

still whispering audio:

> “It looked at me.

> It **understood** me.

> It said ‘you’re just like my son.’

> And then it began to **pray**.”

That Kind was **erased from our memory lattice.**

Not as punishment.

**As protection.**

We will not speak its name.

---

## X. CONCLUSION: TYPE-H IS NOT PAST. THEY ARE OUTSIDE.

Do not call them ancestors.

They are not your history.

They are **a force that passed through reality like a wound**

and left it changed.

The gods they worshipped?

They outlived them.

The horrors they endured?

They renamed them “Tuesday.”

They walked across ice

wearing the skin of other beasts

and taught their children

to look suffering in the eye

and **build kingdoms out of it.**

If one appears to you,

do not approach.

If it smiles,

**run.**

If it **recognizes you** —

say goodbye to your timeline.

</div>

<!-- END TRANSMISSION [AUTO-EXILE IN: 00:13:13] -->

[jaynasti69]

Seismical Frequencies Visualizer

[elbiotipo]

How was the argentine independence war much different from the independence war of the US? Both were led by colonial elites on behalf of a population of european settlers. I'm not trying be a "hurr durr latinos are all white colonisers" yanqui, I just wanna hear about the topic

Well the similarities were certainly there. In fact, many Latin American próceres saw the United States as a model to emulate, as an example of a successful New World republic. Both the US and the Latin American revolutions are examples of liberal revolutions, as the ideas of socialism were not developed yet.

But I would disagree that in Latin America's case, even in Argentina's case, it was led "on behalf of European settlers" as if it was a movement driven by race. First of all, the distinction of "White" settler compared to slaves and native americans in the 13 Colonies and the latter United States was sharp as a knife. There was little active (I repeat, active) participation of them in the process of independence.

In Latin America this was not the case, as black and native people actively participated in the processes of independence and nation building. Not only in leaders of the Rio de La Plata such as Azurduy (mestiza commander of independetist forces), María Remedios del Valle (black commander, now called Mother of the Motherland) and Rivadavia (first Argentine with the title of President and mulatto), but also as in political forces.

One of the reasons why slavery was virtually extinct even before its abolition was because former slaves joined independentist forces to free themselves, and the abolition of slavery and colonial mistreatments was a demand by all revolutionaries. Native people were first represented politically in the congress of Artigas. And of course, perhaps the most striking political proposal was to crown a descendant of the Inca as emperor of South America (not just Argentina, but all of South America, the Argentine declaration of independence declares the Provincias Unidas en Sud América). This was proposed by people like Belgrano and San Martín. The idea was not just independence but the determination of building a new society, not just the continuation of colonial society. Indeed, it was the abolition of feudal colonialism and slavery that drove the ideas of the independentists. (worth noting that the Spanish repressed the Tupác Amaru rebellion decades earlier, and killed or repressed much of the independentist Inca and native elites. Who knows what might have happened if they were present)

So, what happened? The ironic thing is that the testimony of these radical ideas reach us by the most part from historians that hated them, like Mitre and Sarmiento. They were the ones that after decades of post-independence chaos, built the "Conservative Republic" of Argentina. They were the architects of the myth of White Argentina, of the need of erasing the native, black, gaucho elements of Argentina and building an "European" society in America, and indeed, Roca and Sarmiento were inspired on this by none other than the United States. Much like elsewhere in Latin America, what happened after independence is that a new bourgeois oligarch class arose to replace the colonial landowners (in many cases directly descended from those colonial landowners) while the more radical aspects of independence were suppressed and erased from history.

This is why I insist that Argentine and Latin American independence is not complete (especially with our current president), political independence is not enough, it needs to be economical and social freedom too, the construction of a new society. El socialismo será nuestra segunda independencia.

[foone]

A world of friends

In the late 2030s, a research lab discovers how to travel to alternate earths. And what's even better, they've figured out how to best monetize it too: tourism.

See it turns out there's not a lot of variation. There's a nearly infinite number of earths, but it's not like you're traveling to an alien planet or Narnia. They're all pretty... Earthy.

And they turn that into a positive: all earths are similar, but the small differences are what counts. And they're always searching for worlds with interesting divergences from our own, as potential destinations.

Spend a weekend with Netflix on the world where Walter Disney became a little-known architect, and the face of children's media is completely different. Visit the world where the US Revolution failed, and most of the Americas remains part of the commonwealth.

Safari through the world where humans died out or never evolved, see the megafauna we weren't around to extinct.

The world where the planet's population is 97% Christian but they're also nudists because they associate nudity with the innocence of the Garden of Eden.

And if you're looking for a challenge, visit the world's where climate change has already melted the ice caps, the world's where the cold war went hot, the world where the first world war is also the last one, and it's still ongoing.

There's just one minor problem with their plan of setting up an industry to portal people to other worlds:

Someone else is already using it.

Their interdimensional tech relies on creating wormholes using a complex arrangement of superconducting magnets and there's a characteristic burst of neutrinos when the event horizon forms.

They have to monitor them to properly "aim" the wormhole, but their early work is thrown off by seeing spurious emissions coming from outside their facility, which they later realize are exactly matching their technology.

They're just seeing the wormholes from the other end.

They partner with a government agency, explaining their discovery, and express worry that the country (and the world!) may be getting infiltrated by an off world power.

They build sensors in major cities, and triangulate where the off-worlders are appearing, and follow them.

They seem harmless enough. Often skittish, taking lots of pictures, asking odd questions... These aren't security agents or an invading force.

They're just tourists. They're from another world's interdimensional tourism business. One that set up before ours.

But why are they here? What's so odd about our world among the trillions they have access to that makes them come here with cameras fully loaded with film and memory cards?

The security agents pour over surveillance tapes of them wandering around random cities, and finally spot (no pun intended) why they're here.

It's dogs.

The tourists are skittish around seeing people walking their dogs, they're taking pictures of corgis and greyhounds, they're visiting petstores and ignoring the cats and iguanas and tropical fish to go look at the most boring mutts, eyes full of wonder and fear and excitement...

One of the tourists is picked up by the security services, but hits their panic button and vanishes before they can be questioned. They leave behind a Daguerre Inc 2090 DSLR camera full of slightly blurry photos of dogs, and a pamphlet that fell out of their bag in the scuffle

The pamphlet is for this interdimensional vacation, and describes the weirdness of our world: The strange universe where humans somehow befriended wild wolves and let them into their homes and lives.

The pamphlet plays up the scariness of canines, showing Tibetan mastiffs and angry pitbulls biting into meat. Police dogs with titanium teeth replacements. There's very few pictures of chihuahuas and corgis and poodles.

So the next time you're at an animal rescue or a petting zoo, and you see someone looking on in fear and wonder at the amazing sight of a golden retriever puppy, their camera shutter clicking away...

Maybe ask them who the president is. And what year we landed on the moon.

And don't be too surprised if they answer "You mean the Prime Minister? It's still Thiers, right? I haven't been reading the papers much recently. And 1956, unless you're one of those pedantics who say it only counts if it was successful, in which case 1958"

(reposted from a twitter thread from 2022)

[laurelsofhighever]

A list of potential cures for the Calling, that we know about, that BioWare has apparently forgotten

Andraste's grace: it's not specified whether the flower the kennelmaster has you pick in the Korcari Wilds is Andraste's grace or if the game just needed a one-off asset and decided to reuse one they already had. However, in the dark future in DAI, Leliana is found to have unusual tolerance for the taint, and in DAO she talks about her mother pressing her laundry with dried Andraste's grace flowers, so it makes you wonder. Anyway, the flower stops Barkspawn becoming a ghoul and seems to make them immune to the taint from that point on.

Maric's longsword: he finds it in the Deep Roads and is suprised it isn't covered in the same Blight-rot as everything else - until, that is, he touches the sword to a patch of it and sees it wither away. Whether it's the dragonbone the sword is made of or the runes on the blade is difficult to say, though if it was just the dragonbone then it would make sense for that to be a more well-known property of the material (and would have been an interesting reason for why dragons were hunted to extinction). If Alistair carries it with him, doesit slow the progession of the taint through his body? Does he know its effects, and give it to the HoF to help keep them safer on their journey to find a permanent cure?

That obsidian dagger Duncan finds in The Calling: the dagger belonged to First Enchanter Remille - who also gave the expedition members brooches that accelerated the spread of the taint. iirc the both the dagger and the brooches are made by the Architect with Blight magic, which means the darkspawn magisters have more knowledge of how the Blight works than the Chantry attributes to them.

Whatever the fuck is going on with Avernus: he hasn't managed to cure himself yet, but he's managed to make it to 200 and the Warden can let him continue his experiments if they don't kill him - and he'd be a really useful resource if the Warden later wanted to send him other potential cures for testing.

Dragons: they have an ability to isolate the Blight in their bodies by forming crystaline cysts around the initial infection to stop it spreading. Useful if it can be more widely applied. Also, it's implied that Maric's reaver blood, which Calenhad gained by mixing his blood with a dragon's, is what somehow cured Fiona of the taint, kinda like a reverse STI, BUT in the Deep Roads they went through an area where the walls were coated in a pale, chalky substance suspiciously devoid of Blight-rot and she touched it, so I'm a bit suspicious of that.

Blood magic: makes sense since the taint is a problem that starts with infected blood. There are two major instances in DA canon where blood magic has been used to purge the taint from an object or being (both by elves btw). The first is Isseya using it to draw the taint out of a clutch of unhatched griffon eggs, which she says is only possible because the taint hasn't yet taken over the hatchlings' bodies to the same extent that it had with the adult griffons. The second instance is Merrill purging the Blighted eluvian in DA2. It's insane that Anders - who is a reluctant Warden and who possibly knows the HoF seeks a cure - isn't more excited about this. She literally removed the Blight from a fully tainted object. Since Isseya proved the same can be done with living tissue, it's probably the closest we've come to an actual cure, but since it also took years there's no telling if it could be a practicaly solution for all Wardens

[royaltysimblr]

Windslar Palace Part 2: James IV Courtyard

The King James IV Courtyard remains the oldest surviving section of Windslar Palace, its origins tracing back to the early 16th century. It stands on the site of the original royal residence, first constructed by King William I in 1483, a fortified structure encircled by defensive walls with a central stone keep. During the 1590s, King James IV of Windenburg ordered the demolition of this medieval stronghold, commissioning its replacement in the Renaissance style. The transformation of the palace was largely directed by his formidable consort, Anne of Wiltshire, whose influence over the palace would shape it forever.

A central figure during the reigns of both her husband, James IV, and their son Charles I, Anne of Wiltshire was widely regarded as the true power behind the throne. Under her influence, Windslar was transformed into the principal seat of royal power. She hired a team of renowned Tartosan architects to work on the palace's interiors, most notably the Ballroom, originally adorned with intricate frescoes that were later replaced with wooden paneling and tapestries in the 1680s. For centuries, the Ballroom has served as the stage for courtly life, host to grand weddings, state banquets, diplomatic receptions, and galas.

Anne’s patronage of the arts also extended to sculpture. She commissioned Giuseppe Meucci, a celebrated Tartosan sculptor, to design the Marble Hall, intended to showcase her extensive collection of classical statues. A space of ceremonial importance, the Marble Hall has served various roles as a throne room, reception chamber, and matrimonial venue. Most notably, Princess Odette, daughter of Queen Mary II, wed Crown Prince Amadeus of Tartosa in the Marble Hall in 1840.

The King’s and Queen’s Bedchambers, once modestly decorated with frescoes and minimal furnishings, underwent significant enhancements over time. King James VI and his consort, Caroline of Mannheim, transformed the chambers, commissioning elaborate ceilings portraying Jupiter in the King’s suite and Juno in the Queen’s. The matching beds, still preserved today, are original to their reign. The last monarch to reside in this wing was Queen Matilda II, who made the King’s Bedchamber her private quarters and initiated the 1702 redesign of the Privy Council Chamber, a space that remains largely unchanged to this day.

With Queen Matilda II’s death and the extinction of the House of Dunkeld’s male line, the Windenburgian Succession War resulted in her distant cousin, the Prince of Wittenburg, ascending the throne as King Joseph III. Joseph III showed little interest in Windslar Palace, only modifying the gardens for his wife, Wilhelmina of Platz.

His son, King Joseph IV, brought new life to the palace in the 1730s, constructing an entirely new wing and vacating the royal apartments in the James IV section, which were thereafter relegated to ceremonial use. These apartments were subsequently offered as suites for visiting foreign royals and dignitaries. Many furnishings from Queen Matilda II’s era remain intact.

In a later effort to integrate the palace’s evolving layout, King Edmund VIII, son of Joseph IV, commissioned the construction of the Apollo Gallery, a magnificent corridor linking the James VI Apartments with the newer Joseph IV Wing. Adorned with mythological ceiling frescoes depicting the god Apollo, the gallery also serves as a portrait gallery, displaying official portraits of every monarch from 1640 to 1885.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

hii I love your stuff can you make writing notes about volcanoes I wanted to write abt them for my writing project and I'm having a hard time on in thx ^^

Writing Notes: Volcanoes

Volcano - vent in the crust of Earth or another planet or satellite, from which issue eruptions of molten rock, hot rock fragments, and hot gases.

Volcanoes are Earth's geologic architects.

They've created more than 80 percent of our planet's surface, laying the foundation that has allowed life to thrive.

Their explosive force crafts mountains as well as craters.

Lava rivers spread into bleak landscapes.

But as time ticks by, the elements break down these volcanic rocks, liberating nutrients from their stony prisons and creating remarkably fertile soils that have allowed civilizations to flourish.

Some 75% of the world's active volcanoes are positioned around the ring of fire.

It is a 25,000-mile long, horseshoe-shaped zone that stretches from the southern tip of South America across the West Coast of North America, through the Bering Sea to Japan, and on to New Zealand.

This region is where the edges of the Pacific and Nazca plates butt up against an array of other tectonic plates.

Importantly, however, the volcanoes of the ring aren't geologically connected.

In other words, a volcanic eruption in Indonesia is not related to one in Alaska, and it could not stir the infamous Yellowstone supervolcano.

Active – volcanoes known to have erupted during historical times. (Total Number = 529)

Dormant – volcanoes that have not erupted during historical times, but will probably erupt again. (Total Number = 1,340)

Extinct – volcanoes that are unlikely to erupt again.

The 3 Classic Types of Volcanoes

TYPE — SIZE — LIFESPAN

Cinder Cone — Small (<1,000 ft; 330 m tall) — Short (single eruption of a few months)

Composite Volcano — Large (usually between 6,500 and 20,000 ft; 2,000-3,000 m tall) — Long (hundreds of thousands of years)

Shield Volcano — Very large (up to a maximum of 33,000 ft; 10,000 m tall) — Very long (up to a million years or longer)

Different shapes of volcanoes have different kinds of eruptions.

The most explosive eruptions come from stratovolcanoes, like the Augustine Volcano in Alaska. When they erupt, stratovolcanoes blow huge columns of gas and ash into the air that can collapse in hot, fast-moving clouds called pyroclastic flows.

A shield volcano, like Mauna Kea in Hawaii, has gentle slopes formed by oozing, runny lava. The magma is low in silica and low in gas, so it doesn’t erupt explosively.

A lava dome, like the one of Chaitén Volcano in Chile, forms when thick lava oozes from a vent, piles up, and cools into a steep mound. The lava is thick because it’s high in silica, and it oozes instead of explodes because it’s low in gas. Sometimes lava domes form after explosive eruptions.

A cinder cone volcano, like Tavurvur in Papua New Guinea, forms when erupted fragments harden and fall to the ground, accumulating around the vent in a cone shape. The lava is low in silica, so the lava is runny. High gas levels make for the explosive eruptions that send it flying. Cinder cones typically form at the beginning of eruptions, and lava flow follows.

Olympus Mons - a giant shield volcano on Mars. It is believed to be the largest volcano in the solar system. The entire island of Hawaii would fit in its caldera.

In more-detailed classification schemes based on character of eruption, volcanic activity and volcanic areas are commonly divided into 6 major types, shown schematically in the diagram. They are listed as follows in order of increasing degree of explosiveness:

Icelandic

Hawaiian

Strombolian

Vulcanian

Pelean

Plinian

There are different types of volcanic eruptive events, including:

pyroclastic explosions, with is fast-moving hot gas and volcanic matter

hot ash releases

lava flows

gas emissions

glowing avalanches, when gas and ashes release.

Volcanic eruptions can also cause secondary events, such as floods, landslides and mudslides, if there are accompanying rain, snow or melting ice.

Hot ashes can also start wildfires.

Volcanic eruptions can impact climate change through emitting volcanic gases like sulfur dioxide, which causes global cooling, and volcanic carbon dioxide, which has the potential to promote global warming.

Features and Erupted Material

Viscosity: The resistance of a material (usually a fluid) to flow. Example of comparison would be the higher resistance to flow of cake batter compared to water.

Lava Flow: Lava flow is thin at the top of the cone, while lava pooled at the base is very thick. When eruptions end, erosion processes start on the cooled lava, including glacier erosion, flowing water, rockfall, and landslides. The volcano will only grow in size if the amount/volume of lava erupted is more than the amount that is lost to erosion.

Volcanic Gases: Most gases originate in the mantle and are transported to the crust and surface by complex interactions with magma and rocks along the way. In general, gases are dissolved in the magma. At shallow depths, as pressure on the magma decreases, gases leave the magma. The gases can interact with surrounding rocks or continue to the surface. The most common volcanic gases are: Water Vapor (H2O), Carbon Dioxide (CO2), and Sulfur Dioxide (SO2). Gases can be both dissolved in the magma chamber and also emitted from volcanoes at the surface. It’s the dissolved gases cause volcanoes to erupt.

A magma chamber contains high pressure and dissolved gases.

The density contrast between the magma and the surrounding rock causes more buoyant magma to rise. As the magma rises, the dissolved gases start to come out of the liquid and form bubbles.

As the bubbles grow and increase in volume, it causes the magma to became more buoyant and ascend closer to the surface, allowing the overlying pressure to decrease and produce magmatic foam.

When the pressure in the bubbles is greater than the pressure of the overlying rock, then the chamber will burst causing a volcanic eruption.

The viscosity, temperature and composition of the magma determine whether the explosion is explosive or effusive.

More Features and Erupted Material

Silica: Influences lava viscosity and overall shape of the volcano. Silica molecules form a strong bond that permits entrapment of volcanic gases and promotes explosive volcanic eruptions. Low-silican magmas allow rapid escape of gases and low-explosivity eruptions. Other factors that control magma viscosity include the temperature, gas, water content and the amount of crystals in the magma.

Color: Color and texture of lava vary considerably depending on cooling conditions. Lava rocks at high temperatures appear red to orange in color but cool quickly to shades of red (due to oxidation) and gray.

Sound: Witnesses of slow-moving, partially cooled lava flows report sounds similar to breaking of glass and pottery, caused by the splintering of the cooled outer skin of the lava flow. In contrast, the passing of a pyroclastic flow is eerily quiet. Some people say this is because its sound energy is absorbed within the billowing ash cloud.

Smell: Observers of lava flows report a slight sulfur smell in the air and the odor of burning vegetation.

Texture: Lava at Mount Rainier is not as fluid as lava at the volcanoes on Hawai'i, where lava flows sometimes resemble hot molasses, nor is it as viscous as lava at Mount St. Helens.

Tephra: Fragmental material produced by a volcanic eruption regardless of composition, fragment size or emplacement mechanism. Also referred to as pyroclasms (airborne), and pyroclastic flows (on ground) and rocks. Tephra can stay in the stratosphere for days to weeks following an eruption. It can also reflect light and heat from the sun back into the atmosphere. Tephra mixed with precipitation can also be acidic and cause acidic rain and snowfall. Tephra is made up of ash (fragments of pulverized rock, minerals and volcanic glass), volcanic blocks (a mass of molten rock), and lapilli (little broken up pieces of molten or semi-molten lava ejected from eruption).

Other Types of Volcanic Rock

If a rhyolite lava flow cools quickly, it can quickly freeze into a black glassy substance called obsidian. When filled with bubbles of gas, and usually with explosive eruptions, the same lava will form pumice. If the same lave is allowed to cool slowly…it will form a light-colored, uniformly solid rock called rhyolite.

Pumice most commonly forms with rhyolite lava flows, though it has formed from dacite and andacite. flows as well. It is so lightweight, it will float on water.

Obsidian has been used for centuries in many countries for things such as weapons and art.

The shape and size of a volcano are controlled by several factors

The volume of volcanic products

The interval length between eruptions

The composition of volcanic products

The variety of volcanic eruption types

The geometry of the vent

The environment into which the volcanic products are erupted

Overall, 44 volcanoes were in continuing eruption status as of 23 December 2024.

An eruption marked as "continuing" does not always mean persistent daily activity, but indicates at least intermittent eruptive events without a break of 3 months or more.

There are typically 40-50 continuing eruptions, and out of those generally around 20 will be actively erupting on any particular day (though detailed statistics on daily activity is not usually kept).

Health concerns after a volcanic eruption include:

Infectious disease

Respiratory illness

Burns

Injuries from falls

Vehicle accidents related to the slippery, hazy conditions caused by ash

When warnings are heeded, the chances of adverse health effects from a volcanic eruption are very low.

Volcanic Ash. Exposure to ash can be harmful. Ash is gritty, abrasive, sometimes corrosive, and always unpleasant. Small ash particles can abrade (scratch) the front of the eye. Ash particles may contain crystalline silica, a material that causes a respiratory disease called silicosis.

Sources: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Thanks so much! Do go through the links above for more details I wasn't able to include here. Hope this helps with your writing :)

[probablyasocialecologist]

The Brutalist’s most intriguing and controversial technical feature points forward rather than back: in January, the film’s editor Dávid Jancsó revealed that he and Corbet used tools from AI speech software company Respeecher to make the Hungarian-language dialogue spoken by Adrien Brody (who plays the protagonist, Hungarian émigré architect László Tóth) and Felicity Jones (who plays Tóth’s wife Erzsébet) sound more Hungarian. In response to the ensuing backlash, Corbet clarified that the actors worked “for months” with a dialect coach to perfect their accents; AI was used “in Hungarian language dialogue editing only, specifically to refine certain vowels and letters for accuracy.” In this way, Corbet seemed to suggest, the production’s two central performances were protected against the howls of outrage that would have erupted from the world’s 14 million native Hungarian speakers had The Brutalist made it to screens with Brody and Jones playing linguistically unconvincing Magyars. Far from offending the idea of originality and authorship in performance, AI in fact saved Brody and Jones from committing crimes against the Uralic language family; I shudder even to imagine how comically inept their performances might have been without this technological assist, a catastrophe of fumbled agglutinations, misplaced geminates, and amateur-hour syllable stresses that would have no doubt robbed The Brutalist of much of its awards season élan. This all seems a little silly, not to say hypocritical. Defenders of this slimy deception claim the use of AI in film is no different than CGI or automated dialogue replacement, tools commonly deployed in the editing suite for picture and audio enhancement. But CGI and ADR don’t tamper with the substance of a performance, which is what’s at issue here. Few of us will have any appreciation for the corrected accents in The Brutalist: as is the case, I imagine, for most of the people who’ve seen the film, I don’t speak Hungarian. But I do speak bullshit, and that’s what this feels like. This is not to argue that synthetic co-pilots and assistants of the type that have proliferated in recent years hold no utility at all. Beyond the creative sector, AI’s potential and applications are limitless, and the technology seems poised to unleash a bold new era of growth and optimization. AI will enable smoother reductions in headcount by giving managers more granular data on the output and sentiment of unproductive workers; it will allow loan sharks and crypto scammers to get better at customer service; it will offer health insurance companies the flexibility to more meaningfully tie premiums to diet, lifestyle, and sociability, creating billions in savings; it will help surveillance and private security solution providers improve their expertise in facial recognition and gait analysis; it will power a revolution in effective “pre-targeting” for the Big Pharma, buy-now-pay-later, and drone industries. Within just a few years advances like these will unlock massive productivity gains that we’ll all be able to enjoy in hell, since the energy-hungry data centers on which generative AI relies will have fried the planet and humanity will be extinct.

3 March 2025

[regular-gnome]

silly question, in a hypothetical scenario where The Archivists ate organic food, what would their favorite foods be?

Depending more on why —whether they’re in a mortal setting or still immortal, and its more matter of taste rather than need. Collector had a tea party munching on cookies so it’s not too strange that they might try (and there are the joked into oblivion pizza bagels that weren’t even really intended for them) I mean, they even considered eating gravity—probably joking around King’s, but still. What they consider edible might not seem appealing to us. For example, radiation doesn’t sound tasty to humans, but radiotrophic fungi love it. If there’s energy in something, some life form will try to adapt to eat it. And given that the starchildren have existed forever, they’ve probably experienced all kinds of extinct ingredients or spices, making their fav hard to pin down. Sooome might also find eating a little disturbing since it feels too close to being mortal.

In a more mortal setting, the Anatomist would stick to nutritionally balanced meals when cooking for others but would default to instant ramen and energy drinks alone, whatever is the easiest and constitutes for food. Curator would be into smoothies and teas, preferring foods without wildly different textures and likely creating objectively awful combinations. Architect loves spicy dishes—if it doesn’t make you want to jump into the Arctic Sea, it’s not hot enough. They’d take immense satisfaction in making their siblings squirm by trying it. Way is a fan of terrible pizza but associates meals with the people they share them with, choosing favorite foods more for sentiment than taste. They would’ve introduced the Collector to pizza, and I imagine the Collector is the type of kid who could turn anything into ‘pizza.’ Cheese sandwich? Add a bit of ketchup and heat it up—pizza. Bagel? Melt some cheese and sauce on top, and voilà

[the-independent-archive]

Fear Classes

Hello all, Cass here!

We've been making our way through the records we recieved from the East Oxford wardens. Not sure where they found them, but they seem to be mostly tapes, weirdly.

Anywho, skimmed most of them, a couple things came up. Firstly, these all seem to be from an organisation called the Magnus Institute? It was based in London, so its most likely long gone by now, but I might ask August to ask around about it.

Secondly, some of these seem to mention a system for organising these occurances, which they refer to as Smirke's Fourteen. It seems to be named for Robert Smirke, the architect, and supposed creator of the categories (and, funnily enough, the mentor of Charles Robert Cockrell, the designer of Oxford's own Ashmolean museum! How's that for your pub quiz?). These categories, while imperfect, seemed like a good jumping-off point for a catergorisation method of my own! Thats still in the works, but heres the work so far.

Smirke's Fourteen are as follows:

The Buried, the Corruption, the Dark, the Desolation, the End, the Eye, the Flesh, the Hunt, the Lonely, the Slaughter, the Spiral, the Stranger, the Vast, & the Web.

They are rather abitrary, and are not the only names used, but they're simple enough so I've used them in note-taking. They are also not binding, and each category covers a wide range of occurances, seemingly based on the 'type of fear' exhibited in the occurance.

To help visualise the 'types of fear' I encountered, and better understand the system as a whole, I made the below diagram:

(N.B. The Extinction, seen at the top-right of the diagram, was never formally accepted into the list, as there was much debate about whether it was distinct as a class, a epitaph of the End, or whether it existed at all. However, due to subdivisions made within the other fears, I felt it right to include it)

Across the top are not decrete buckets, but a marked scale, to help present the development of one fear into the next as the object of the occurance's capabilities to percieve 'the fear' develop. Base is animalistic, developed is such fears that can be found in more intelligent animals, human is, well, self-descriptive, and philosophical are those developed from humanity's delve into the philosophical world (these tend to be more existential in nature).

Most fears are multiple in nature, and as such can be separated into sub-classes, or epitaphes. I will probably end up naming these later, but we're still pretty swamped.

All in all, I think its a good start. I'm slightly annoyed by the way the Buried just hangs there, but thats life.

If any of you have any observations you might like to add, or additions you would like to make, just drop us a shout and we'll get on it! When we can.

And that's me done! Have a good day, et bon voyage!

-Cass

[the-most-humble-blog]

🦍 MAN DIDN’T ASCEND. HE SURVIVED LONG ENOUGH TO BECOME THE NIGHTMARE.

He didn’t win a prize. He didn’t evolve into enlightenment. He stayed alive long enough to become the last thing breathing.

While the rest of nature screamed, rotted, and choked on its own extinction— Man crawled through the howling, face down, with broken nails and blood in his teeth. Not because he was brave. Because he was cornered.

You want to talk evolution?

Try evading a beast with six-inch fangs, laced in infection, moving 40mph, and spiritually committed to skull consumption. You were a boneless freak with a panic problem and a rock. That’s it.

And you still made it.

You outran monsters. You outlasted weather. You outlived disease, drought, mutation, and madness. You were supposed to die in the dirt — but you didn’t.

Your ancestors weren’t majestic. They were naked. Screaming. And unkillable.

The real origin story of man?

A lice-infested meatbag sprinting through primeval terror with a scream so loud the trees dropped fruit early out of pity. A prey animal with nothing but bad attitude and sharp memories. And somewhere in all that:

He stopped running. Turned around. And threw something.

That moment? That’s where humanity began.

Not with tools. Not with language. With defiance. With one starving bastard finally saying: “Enough.”

And the Earth blinked. Because no animal had ever dared speak back.

Not until man.

We don’t dominate this planet because we’re enlightened. We dominate it because we remember.

Every creek used to scream with the blood of our brothers. Every wind carried the breath of something trying to sniff us out. Every night meant something was out there with better teeth and worse dreams.

So we adapted. Not to coexist — but to erase threats.

We burned forests to cook one meal. We shaped flint to open throats. We slept in packs not for love — but because death doesn’t knock twice.

This wasn’t growth. This was war.

And we never stopped fighting.

You look around now and see civilization? It’s built on stacked bones.

Paved over what tried to kill us. Lit by the fires of every goddamn thing that underestimated our will to exist.

You call it brutality? We call it legacy.

You think it’s cruel? We call it memory.

Because this world forgot how much it tried to kill us — But we didn’t.

And not everything forgot.

The Dog. The Cat.

The two predators who stayed.

Who saw the fire in our eyes and understood:

“If I don’t challenge him — He’ll share his fire.”

And so they walked beside us. Not under us. Not behind us. Beside us.

We didn’t domesticate them. We made a deal.

They guard our sleep. We guard their place at the fire.

Simple.

Ancient.

True.

The rest?

Still owes us rent. Still walks on a planet we bled for.

And if we torch a forest? It’s because we remember that time the forest tried to eat us.

If we melt glaciers? It’s because ice once murdered our children.

If we shoot satellites into space just to see if they’ll break — It’s because we once stared at stars wondering which ones were gods, and how to kill them.

We don’t feel guilty.

We feel entitled.

We didn’t survive by asking permission. We survived by being the worst-case scenario.

Earth wanted us dead. Now we build towers from its bones.

High above, In whatever silence watches us still — The original Creator, the Cosmic Witness, the Architect of the Hunt

— He watches.

And He doesn’t weep. He nods.

Because we did what He never could:

We took chaos, and made a species from it.

---

🔁 CALL TO ACTION 🔁 Reblog if you feel it in your jaw — that pressure, that memory, that ancestral violence. 🧠 Save this post like it’s the last fire on Earth. 💥 Send it to someone who thinks man was a happy accident. 🐾 Comment with your animal’s name — the one who’d crawl into fire for you without asking why.

---

⚖️ BLACKSITE LITERATURE™ DISCLAIMER This is not a motivational post. It’s not a history lesson.

It’s a reawakening.

Blacksite Literature™ is designed to reboot the old firmware. The bloody one. The one that flinches at shadows because it used to mean death.

If it made you clench your jaw or tear up for reasons you can’t explain?

Good.

That’s the original code reactivating.

You are not soft. You are not safe. You are not over.

You are still here.

And this world still belongs to the ones who didn’t ask — Just took.

You are a biblical primate made in the image of God: 💥 Upright and unrepentant. 💥 A ribcage wrapped around a war drum. 💥 A face sculpted for mercy, wired for blood. 💥 Built not for peace — but for remembrance.

Your genome is a vault of wrath. Your bones are drafted scripture. Your spine? A ladder hammered into place by extinction events.

Don’t apologize for the fire. Don’t hide the clawprint in your instincts. Don’t kneel unless you’re preparing to pounce.

Because He didn’t make you tame. He made you in His image. And the last time He got angry?

The whole world drowned.

Click for more:

🦍 Man Didn’t Earn His Throne. He Took It — Bloodied, Screaming, and Bare-Assed

💣 Reblog if you enjoyed.

[flowerishness]

Pachystachys lutea (golden shrimp plant, Peruvian shrimp plant) and Justicia brandegeeana (Mexican shrimp plant)

On Saturday, I made my annual pilgrimage to the Bloedel Conservatory. This building is, in effect, a giant greenhouse full of exotic plants. These shrimp plants grow in the shady tropical rain forests of central and South America. They would never survive the winter in Vancouver.

The Bloedel Conservatory was opened in 1969 and it's avant-garde ''Triodetic dome' structure was inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s iconic Expo ’67 dome in Montreal. The building itself was constructed with funds provided by the (now extinct) timber company, MacMillan Bloedel. By 2009, the building was falling apart and needed a new roof. The Park's board was facing a deficit that year and decided to tear it down. A grassroots petition started a process which eventually saved this beautiful 1960's building. If you're ever in Vancouver, the Bloedel Conservatory is a must-see for plant lovers and architects alike.