laurelnose

[laurelnose]

[laurelnose]

anyways. i was looking at pictures of sphaeromatids bc sphaeromatidae is the best. it’s a largely marine nearshore/intertidal family of isopods, which, unusually for marine isopods, can conglobulate, curling up into perfect spheres just like the terrestrial roly polies. they are commonly known as seapills and they are all SO fucking cute. have some correctly-identified sphaeromatids

Exosphaeroma echinensis by fiestykakapo (plus kina sea urchin). BUTTFINS

Cerceis tridentata by paul_isotope, contemplating life as a frond of kelp

Sphaeroma serratum by raf44. eats them

absolute UNIT of Sphaeroma serratum by swimjamie

god they’re so fucking shape. Gnorimosphaeroma oregonense by kcram

this one is armed: Isocladus armatus by crispychipp

marine isopods just have so much Tail compared to terrestrial ones (bc they use it for swimming). I can never get over it. Sphaeroma serratum by agapakisgeorgios

also this one described this year is like. what! why are you a seashell pretending to be an isopod! Moruloidea urocerata

[laurelnose]

OP’s only other post tagged #isopod is also Ligia pallasii misidentified as G. oregonense, so I am assuming that at some point they looked for “oregon isopod,” somehow came to the conclusion that the Oregon seapill must be the only marine isopod on the Oregon coast, and never looked at another picture of an isopod again. i legitimately don’t know how else you would consistently mistake Ligia for Sphaeromatidae. they’re not even in the same suborder!

[laurelnose]

this is an absolutely WILD misidentification. The above isopod is Ligia pallasii, the common rock louse or sleepy sea slater. Ligia are large isopods, and female L. pallasii have these unique wide coxal plates that yes, are kind of trilobite-y.

Actual Gnorimosphaeroma oregonense are extremely round, almost spherical. And they’re tiny!

Anyways, this wouldn’t be a big deal, except this specific reblog from cyan-biologist of a ten-year-old tumblr post with 300 notes is currently the FIRST RESULT for Gnorimosphaeroma! what the fuck!!

The “Oregon pill bug” Gnorimosphaeroma oregonensis, an intertidal isopod:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnorimosphaeroma_oregonensis

Trilobite, amirite?  Hug Point, 6 August 2016.

[laurelnose]

this quote is from Bitch by Lucy Cooke, and it’s straight-up misinformation! chalk bass never change sex, because they’re simultaneous hermaphrodites and have both types of gonad their entire lives. what they actually do is just... swap off which one lays the eggs. contrast wrasses and damselfishes, which are sequential hermaphrodites and actually physically change their ovaries to testes or vice versa. this process takes weeks to months. because it requires a great deal of time and energy to transform a functioning gonad into the other type, bidirectional hermaphroditism is rare. coral gobies are one of the few groups that do it, and they do it because they are small and travelling between isolated corals is a risk, so it’s to their advantage to be able to go either direction if necessary. and none of the actual bidirectional hermaphrodites can do it twenty times a day, holy fuck, can you even imagine the energy investiture. that shit is expensive!

that’s so crazy

[laurelnose]

after [REDACTED] weeks tinkering with page order digitally, I went back to Christian Swinehart’s fascinating analysis of the organization of the early CYOA series, re-read the part where he suggests they were originally ordered by hand, sighed, and bit the bullet.

they are in order now.

okay, i didn’t follow his algorithm exactly. he suggests it might have gone like this:

Pick up the first page and put it face down on a table or something.

Pick up all the pages referred to by the first page, and stack them (face down) on top of the first page.

Pick up all the pages that those pages you just added to the stack refer to, and add them to the stack.

Repeat step 4 until there are no more pages on the floor.

if i do this again (i. will probably do this again) i would index my original pages Excel-style as AAA–ZZZ instead of numerically. page AG → page 33 is soooo much easier to process than page 43 → page 33.

but in the case where page X links to several asides that send you right back to X when they’re done, I don’t want those to appear consecutively, I want them to appear in isolation, similarly to how they appear in the original game. so I put my list of pages through a randomizer first and then laid it out on the floor to manually check for things like linked pages appearing consecutively, two-page spreads starting on even numbers, endings concentrating towards the back half, illustrations evenly distributed, etc. then you just have to write them all down as a list so you can go “ok, ‘4’ is going to appear on page 12 of the finished text,” and update all the links to match.

[laurelnose]

I was so enchanted by Kraut-type-a-fuck that I looked up the designer and I think I have a new favorite decorative typeface

fonts will be named shit like viscera antique, 16 bit dreams, doctor's orders, bingo condensed, googly, wish you were here

[laurelnose]

water change finished and i only salted my own wounds a little bit! my stickyfins is mad because i wouldn’t pull any of the limpets off the glass for him like i usually do. hunt your own limpets, lazytail, i’m injured.

...i technically need to mix more salt but uhhhh i don’t wanna >.>

i need to do a water change tonight but i have paper cuts on both hands so instead of doing the water change i’m having sort of a staring contest with my saltwater barrel, like that will somehow fix my essential problem, which is Ouch

[laurelnose]

i need to do a water change tonight but i have paper cuts on both hands so instead of doing the water change i’m having sort of a staring contest with my saltwater barrel, like that will somehow fix my essential problem, which is Ouch

[laurelnose]

@swankitty #SAW THIS AGAIN #EXQUISITE!!!!!!! #is that cheris and mothdao omggggg

lol yeah, the calico is Cheris and the black* mackerel tabbies are Jedaos 1 and 2 💛

* the vast majority of “brown” tabbies are genetically black but displaying varying amounts of rufousing, which is a polygenic trait that influences phaeomelanin expression and makes the coat “warmer.” Abyssinians (ticked tabbies) have very high rufousing and silver Bengals (rosetted tabbies) have a phaeomelanin inhibitor gene i.e. zero rufousing. so, brown kibty w/ white toes = black mackerel tabby, low white spotting. i made this choice mostly bc black mackerel is The standard barn moggie phenotype (farmboy <3) but you can feel free to read into the base black coat → red overlay genes thing if you like.

i spent like. all day doodling cats

[laurelnose]

@strikeslip YOUUUU understand. the one (1) group with an actual use case for an immutably time-stamped ledger based on a consensus algorithm, it’s the hexarchate’s calendar perverts here to make everyone else miserable

cut so I can talk crypto nonsense for a hot minute, sorry everyone

you know how crypto evangelists were like, “eventually you can put everything on the blockchain, like your important personal documents!” and normal people were like “wow that sounds like the worst idea ever for many reasons”? ok well I think the Rahal are actually doing that. or more specifically they’re storing actual files regularly and using the blockchain as a time-stamping service / calendrical validator for their documents by hashing the files and storing the hashes on the blockchain. modifying a timestamped file produces a different hash which causes it to fail calendrical validation. HERETICAL.

i envision a delegated proof-of-stake system where Rahal participate using non-fungible non-transferrable tokens indicating rank, where higher rank gives you a higher stake. their chain was probably originally intended for documents directly related to the calendar, i.e. observations, remembrances, calendrical data (rot presence etc), that sort of thing, and at this point it contains like, everything somebody at some point decided was Very Important to calendrically stamp even mostly unrelated things like fuckin. department memos and shit. 

now my understanding of crypto as not a software engineer is that the blockchain is a ledger of transactions and a cryptocurrency is a quantity awarded to a “wallet” (the public/private key pair that signs your transactions) for various activities such as “buying into an initial coin offering,” “successfully validating a new block,” or “facilitating a crypto transaction.” it isn’t like an inherent feature of the blockchain itself. the currency acts as incentive to use blockchains, but a blockchain doesn’t have to generate or be attached to a cryptocurrency, you can use it as just a ledger of something else if you want. which could be how the Rahal are doing it. the calendar is the only important thing money is secondary

if the Rahal chain does have a cryptocurrency tacked on the side of it, the most reasonable way to do it would probably be a fiat-backed stablecoin. (least reasonable would be to make it possible to mine the cryptocurrency thru what in this scenario is just regular government activity. Insane incentives. The faction culture is probably too ascetic to approve of this though.) but the eternal crypto question: how 2 spend? you could use it mostly as a way to shuffle money around between Rahal stations/departments. or, writing transactions to this blockchain might be Rahal-only but you could issue wallets without stake tokens that could then be treated like government bonds (eventually bought back with fiat currency + interest) (is this a good way to handle a stablecoin? probably not, this probably does weird things to the value. although stablecoins existing does weird things to their value. I’m not a finance guy) and traded as securities. or both. or a completely separate currency chain(s)? the faction is old and sprawling enough that they certainly have multiple, horrible overlapping architectures going on

and. one of the main reasons this is interesting to me is the thing about MoE where calendrical values are like—a measurable property of the local universe?? that can be altered in real time?? if the timestamp, obviously related to current calendrical values, is included in the block hash, then a block stamped under one calendrical regime might be immutable and unmodifiable under that calendar, but vulnerable to alteration through calendrical rot. calendrical crypto heist. i’ve spent so much time thinking about this

anyways /chinhands talk to me about financial fraud. i love financial fraud. everyone should do less math and more creative accounting

tbh. i think blockchain technology was genuinely revolutionary for the Rahal. those guys are using the blockchain for everything

[laurelnose]

real life blockchain smart contracts are a bad way to do normal code things because blocks are 1) not very big, so you can’t fit a lot of code in them, making it inconvenient to do anything complex, 2) public, so everyone can tell if you fucked up and left a security loophole, 3) uneditable, i.e. impossible to patch. and blockchains as a whole have some, hm, let’s say major quirks that make them a bad substitute for regular fiat currency. they make a decent speculative finance toy but these days everything is a speculative finance toy so like, whatever.

you know what blockchains are actually really, really good at? timestamps. the distributed digital ledger is built on the work of cryptographers who were primarily interested in date verification.

What is needed is a method of time-stamping digital documents with the following two properties. First, we must find a way to time-stamp the data itself, without any reliance on the characteristics of the medium on which the data appears, so that it is impossible to change even one bit of the document without the change being apparent. Second, it should be impossible to stamp a document with a time and data different from the actual one.

read Staber & Hornetta 1991 ‘How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document’ and see my vision. it’s actually a really accessible paper i prommy. or this vice article is a decent summary

tbh. i think blockchain technology was genuinely revolutionary for the Rahal. those guys are using the blockchain for everything

[laurelnose]

imagine the ethereum/ethereum classic hard fork or the bitcoin satoshi nakamoto impersonator hard fork or [insert contentious fork of choice here] but the losing branch gets fungally vaporized every time

tbh. i think blockchain technology was genuinely revolutionary for the Rahal. those guys are using the blockchain for everything

[laurelnose]

tbh. i think blockchain technology was genuinely revolutionary for the Rahal. those guys are using the blockchain for everything

[laurelnose]

oh my FUCKING god they’re already sending out surveys for summer 2026. we haven’t even gotten prize reorders for summer 2025 yet. ...the deadline for feedback is TWO WEEKS before the end of THIS SUMMER?

[laurelnose]

distressing things to say to your friends

[laurelnose]

@syncogon: #thank you for linking idt i would have found this otherwise. good shit #edit: but i still can't find this passage? TT thought i'd gone through all the options

this is two different quotes cut together at the [...] mark. if you still haven't found it, you get the first one by, starting from the top, selecting open your eyes → What an unremarkable ceiling.

From there you can get to the second passage by playing: look away → your long-lost secret twin? → he'd look like the first you -> the intruder is speaking → You have. → reaches down under the covers → he does sometimes respond to sarcasm → "No, really?" you say sarcastically → You thrust up against him.

which then leads to two different endings not accessible otherwise.

...i am totally normal about TFP.

the deliberately open robe is my favorite part of turnabout’s fair prey for sure like:

The man in bed with you is—your long-lost secret twin? Except you’ve never owned robes like that, sheer silk draped over brocade, black over gunmetal gray. The robes are carefully arranged so as to gap open over the chest, revealing scars that you know all too well. [...]

But you twist out from underneath him. He could stop you, but he doesn’t; his eyes are sideways-glittering with curiosity. Then again, you've always known that he doesn’t fear you.

“Why,” he adds after a while, “am I that unappealing?” His smile is just slightly chilly. “I always did advise you to get the scars removed. It’s not like it’s that hard.”

what an INSANEEE neg. show up unexpectedly wearing your man’s body and then when he doesn’t really want to fuck you like that, ask him if it’s because his own scars are off-putting and remind him you think he should consider cosmetic surgery (with you) (you’ll do it for him)