aethergeologist

[aethergeologist]

New Zealand giraffe weevil, Lasiorhynchus barbicornis, Brentidae

The New Zealand giraffe weevil is a species of straight-snouted weevil endemic to New Zealand. This species shows extreme sexual dimorphism: females can measure as long as 50mm while males can be as large as 90mm, with a snout as long as their body. Weevil larvae tunnel in wood for as long as two years before emerging as adults, but adults live only a few weeks.

Photos 1-4 by wild_wind, 5 by cheryldawson19, 6 by christopherstephens, 7 by schneehagen, 8 by craigwilson10, 9 by kiwifergus, and 10 by lisa_bennett

Bonus photo because it brought me soul-deep joy - an adult male emerging from a tree:

SNOOT. Photo by Christina Painting

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what if yugioh had stayed as the horror manga kazuki takahashi originally intended to write - Notes: Shadow games referenced are from: 1. Ch. 1 of the manga/E1 of S0 - “Money and Knife” 2. Ch. 4 of the manga/E2 of S0 - “Escaped Prisoner” 3. Ch. 8 of the manga  - “Poison Man”

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[aethergeologist]

Youngju Joung (Korean, 1970) - Memory 420 (2024)

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Yellow-breasted or Indochinese Green Magpie (Cissa hypoleuca), BATH TIME!!!, family Corvidae, order Passeriformes, Viet Nam

photographs by Leo Ngo

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lets all just. die

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general ch 3 and 4 spoilers but ive been struck by a thoight

i can't articulate it as well as i want to but i remember how before ch 3&4 the sort of narrative insistence on ralsei being cute was super suspicious, like obviously making people question him and whether he was secretly evil cause of it's overemphasis on how naive and wholesome he is right? like it obviously had to be misdirecting the player/kris & susie from him being connected to something bad or whatever

okay im struggling to put it into words but like i get the impression NOW after 3&4 that like the impression we got was half correct, in that the overemphasis on him being cute is definitely a misdirection, it's just that I completely missed what ralsei was actually pointing us away from. i was never an evil ralsei truther but i did still interpret it as "he's not evil he's just in some deep shit that is connected to antagonistic characters" and that COULD still be true. but im also convinced that Ralsei's whole deal is that instead of outright telling kris & susie not to care about him in the first two chapters, he's been like subtly dehumanising himself and representing himself as this cute plaything so that kris and susie don't get attached to him past Awww Fluffy Boy. except that obviously backfires with susie growing very attached to him and even kris starting to warm up to him in the recent chapters (reassuring ralsei that he doesn't look like asriel, yawning to obscure when the player insults him, often taking our suggestions to extremes like when they lie on the floor with ralsei when the option is only "comfort him" etc). it's only once he realises how attached to him that susie and kris have become that he drops that facade and tells them outright to stop caring about him as much as they would "real" lightners.

even then in chapter 4 he's still pushing that almost overplayed cuteness to distract you from worrying about him. there's that little jokey scene where you look at Susie and ralsei through a telescope and ralsei is pretty seriously searching a bookcase (assumedly for information regarding the prophecy and if he can avoid its fate) but when he notices you watching him, he immediately starts fluffing up his ears and smiling, trying to distract you from his problems. it's literally only when he's cornered by susie about what he's hiding that he breaks down and susie is just... so completely shocked by how burdened and stressed that she immediately forgets she was even mad at him. I'd wager a guess it's because she never even realised he was upset in the first place until he literally broke down in tears, she just saw him acting frantically and doubted him based on that.

honestly it just seems like everything suspicious about ralsei in chapters 1 & 2 were probably not hinting at him being evil but instead hinting at his smorgasbord of identity issues, existential crises, self esteem issues, etc, etc. he's fashioned his identity around the prophecy but once realising what that actually entails he's slowly come to grips with his fear of the future where once he accepted it. because he's realising how important friendship is to him but he's also very likely going to die for the prophecy or get separated from kris and susie permanently. i mean seriously he's got death flags written all over him. he doesn't value his life in the slightest but he's ashamed of letting kris and susie know that because it goes against his ideology of him not being "real enough" for them if they find out he doesn't let himself have a bedroom, so he just bombards them with so many cute/adorable things about himself in the hopes that they'll never notice.

mr toxic positivity having ass over here is reaching his breaking point though. he's only got so many performances in him before he can't keep up with smiling through the pain and fear. literally when he FOR THE FIRST TIME breaks down out of sheer stress he tells kris not to look at him and apologises for making everything about him all the time. i remember reading that line and being like "literally when have you made ever something about yourself (except for that one time in the acid tunnel of love) dude." it's so out of pocket from mr servitude himself to think that he's constantly making everything about himself but he's so new to friendship and vulnerability that he doesn't understand it's a two way street. that when susie confides in him she expects he'll be as vulnerable with her in return. he sees him confiding in her as him burdening her and making her care about him when he believes he should just be forgotten. GOD I HATE HIS SELF ESTEEM ISSUES HAVING ASS HE MAKES ME SICK /POS.

tldr or else I'll never stop talking about him. tldr ralsei needs some serious therapy man. also the actual tldr is that he's overplaying his cute "fluffy boy"ness to make us/kris/susie forget he's a real person with real feelings because he thinks he's lesser than his friends bc he's a darkner. and also he makes me sick to my stomach with love.

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"How can you kill a god?"

-Someone standing very close to the heart of a dead god

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SPOILERS OBVIOUSLY

Please someone correct me if wrong, as I obviously haven't finished the game yet, but why the hell did they have Solas say humans instead of elves? How the hell did this line get through with no one realising the glaring issue??

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We all knew Ralsei's whole deal was gonna be juicy, but I don't think anyone predicted that all his desperate kowtowing to and placating of the Lightners, concealment of information, and encouragement of them treating the Dark Worlds like a game is in fact, a distraction from the world and prophecy's dark underbelly- but that he does this not because he has sinister motives, but because the two are just legendarily doomed. That the missing piece of his "guy who's life purpose is to be a helpful NPC" thing was the part where his "protagonists" are the actual second comings of Monster Jesus from the Monster Bible who haven't yet learned of the Monster Crucifixion part, and he does not want to be the one to break it to 'em. If Sans is burdened with an in-universe version of the existential dread of knowing you're a video game NPC, Ralsei is that, if he was also like a friendly side character in season 1 of a 2010s children's cartoon, currently overhearing his storyboard artists brainstorm increasingly convenient, G-rated death substitutes that are actually way worse than death. Poor guy's trying to induce a case of Cerebus Syndrome so intense that Monster God himself decides it'd be too goofy to keep the overarching plot around, with the backup purpose of a temporary comfort to a couple unstable fifteen-year-olds before they [unspecified] for the world's sins. Who knew Ralsei was the one most concerned about the possibility of Kris and Susie getting Jevil-and-Spamton-ed by knowledge? Insane.

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In epidemiology, a disease vector is any living agent that carries and transmits an infectious pathogen such as a parasite or microbe, to another living organism.

[aethergeologist]

Parents, Freedom and how Carol Holiday has been present since the beginning

Carol is already climbing up there as my favorite character in chapter 4, if not of the whole game, and we literally just met her lol

But because of this I’ve been thinking about her a lot… and I realized that she’s been foreshadowed since literally the beginning of the game and it’s driving me actually insane.

Like, since the very first chapter, the bosses have all had this thing where they’re just incredibly shitty parents. And when they’re not parents they’re just incredibly shitty irresponsible adults.

In chapter 1 we meet king, a tyrannical ruler who doesn’t think twice about using his young son to further his own ends, and is a slimey coward to fakes remorse to take advantage of ralsei’s good nature.

This trend continues in chapter 2: Queen is an overbearing mother that, while genuinely wanting to do good for the lightners, assumes herself as smarter than them and forces all her decisions on them with no thoughg on whether they even agree.

Tenna is a bit more shaky, but since the TV dark world was created by Kris, I think Tenna is either:

        ⁃       representing kris’ repressed trauma and loneliness over now being alone in a once warm and lively house, wanting to get those days back (Tenna child of divorce memes are so real)

        ⁃       More generally Tenna acts like a very troubled parents who uses their kids (the lightners) as emotional support and validation instead of actually dealing with his own insecurities and problems, alienating them in the process

I personally think both of these observations are true.

The titan’s in chapter 4 also produce children versions of themselves, though I think that’s pushing it as the titan is more if a force of distraction than a character.

But who do we get introduced in chapter 4 who fits this theme? Carol Holiday that beautiful soul

The MOMENT, I swear, THE MOMENT SHE WALKS IN, THE WHOLE ATMOSPHERE CHANGES IN A DIME. It’s crazy, we’ve met tyrannical rulers and wire-mind controlling dictators, and we were forced to live the TV apocalypse by a man child, but this random, average, boring everyday woman is the single most hatable character in the whole game.

Because the tyrant, the dictator, the manchild, THEY ARE ALL HER!

Since chapter 1, we’ve been establishing this oppressive parental force in the form of the bosses, they’ve all been terrible but ultimately, before ch 4, it’s all been a game, you could defeat them. You can’t defeat Carol, she isn’t a game. Her mere presence is a blizzard. The adults don’t take her seriously, but Noelle, her own daughter, is terrified of her. Her whole character arc in ch 2 was standing up to Queen, but she can’t even look her own mother in the eye.

When it was revealed her and Kris are working together my jaw actually dropped. Because it means she’s been involved in the plot since the very beginning, even though we could never see her. If she’s the knight (which I don’t think she is, but this can’t be dismissed) it wouldn’t be out of pocket that the chapter bosses have been manifesting as they are because of her disposition, since chapter 4 establishes that the lighter that creates a fountain DOES influence the behavior and appearance of the darkners in some way.

Hey, this can work even if the knight is dess (which I believe), because she could be projecting her feelings of her mother on them as she’s making the fountains, intentionally or not.

And like… what better way to represent the game’s theme of denied choices, of having only one path you can follow through regardless of whether it’s actually good for you, of whether it’s beneficial at all, of whether you want it, than through an oppressive parent?

Like, being born is literally the shittiest gamble of all. You need to beg on your hands and knees that you’re gonna end up with decent enough people as your caretakers, because Jesus Christ, if they’re not, you’re FUCKED.

You can obviously still have a great life, but your parents will affect your life FOREVER, you have a part with them with you wherever you go, every single little action from them can cause a shift in you inexperienced soaking child brain that affects your ENTIRE LIFE. And that’s just the people, the economic status they come with can be even more deterministic of the kind of life you can have, most people will stay in the exact social class as their parent. Throughout history you’d have the same exact job as your parent, regardless of your talents or passions.

And goddamn, Carol SUCKS, and she’s obvious she’s got kris right where she wants them. I struggle and won’t put a definition on them yet, since the nature of their relationship is so vague, but I really don’t blame people for interpreting it as grooming, it does NOT look good. Even if kris was super on board on whatever the plan is, it’s obvious that they’re relationship with Susie and Ralsei is deeply affecting them and they not be so keen on going on with everything anymore, but they can’t do anything about it, with or without soul, they’re never free, there’s only 1 path.

I don’t think Carol is going to be complitely unredeemable, she could have very sympathetic motives, but her actions have an horrible effect of every single character in story. Like bro literally all the major characters have parents issues in some way!!!! And all the parents, while good people, fail to properly relate and understand them.

All of them except one: the Old Man.

Since his earliest scenes, this old turtle has proven to be the next best thing to warm bread. He’s so amazing he makes me cry.

He’s a happy, wise, truly free person that doesn’t need anything else from life, and wants the kids to be as fulfilled as he is, but, and this is important: THROUGH THEIR OWN MERITS.

He knows the kids need help, and he gives it to them, but not by imposing his views on them, or acting like he knows better just because he’s older, he knows the kids are smart and he lets them come to their own conclusion naturally.

He encourages them all throughout the chapter to not follow a prophecy just because it has been written, that they can write their own story, that’s the beauty of stories! He’s the FIRST character to suggest that the prophecy doesn’t have to be followed, and he himself as a character is a complete coincidence! He wasn’t meant to appear, since as the representation of a loved one he can only present himself in extremely specific circumstances, but now that he’s there he’s not gonna make any moment go to waste, he’s gonna guide these kids and make amends with his son regardless of the fact he’s literally dead and it wasn’t meant to be!

His appearance could legit be the catalyst for the prophecy being destroyed and it was all an accident. I’m obsessed with it.

There’s also the whole thing with Susie and her freedom, and how that so easily also corresponds to teenage rebellion to authority, she’s writing her own life dammit!!! Fuck you mom!!!! Fuck you society!!!!

This could have been the same for Dess as well at first, before it turned into a more negative, destructive, and selfish kind of freedom, but this is more speculative.

I’m so fucking excited for how this whole thing gets explored, there are so many possibilities and they’re all peak. The lighters could team with knight Dess to defeat Carol, or maybe Carol and the Knight are working together with Kris, or maybe Kris and Carol are working AGAINST the knight but for different reasons that the heroes, it’s all so hype.

These are my two cents but I love stories that take the small, private and personal and turn it into a metaphor for larger, more philosophical themes and I’m so glad deltarune is looking to be one of those stories. 

Susie kill that hag.

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glitterbugs

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We know our true name, we just can’t pronounce it (acrylics, 2022)

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Tupandactylus imperator with Ginkgo huolinhensis. Both species from the Early Cretaceous. There is an interesting paper which discusses how pterosaur pycnofibres may be synonymous with bird feathers featuring T. imperator. Cool stuff!

Colours and patterns were inspired by toucans, various parakeets and monarch butterflies :)

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being a little handsy

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