#Ten Year Development Cycle

[felassan]

Jason Schreier for Bloomberg reports: 'Inside the ‘Dragon Age’ Debacle That Gutted EA’s BioWare Studio'

The latest game in BioWare’s fantasy role-playing series went through ten years of development turmoil. The failure of Dragon Age: The Veilguard, released in October, led EA to gut BioWare

[note: article is below cut after these tweets]

Jason Schreier: "NEW: What went wrong with Dragon Age: The Veilguard? Why was the writing so tonally inconsistent? Why did it feel so shallow? Why were there so few choices? Really, after ten years of turbulence, it was a miracle that anything came out at all. This is the story [link]:" [source]

Jason Schreier: "The fatal flaw for Dragon Age: The Veilguard wasn't just that it pivoted from single-player to multiplayer and back again. It was that after the second pivot, the team was forced to keep going rather than hit the reset button and take the time to create a new plan." [source]

Jason Schreier re: this old tweet from Casey Hudson: "Fun fact: when I first reported at Kotaku in 2018 that Dragon Age 4 was rebooted to become a live-service game, BioWare studio head Casey Hudson wrote this on Twitter. But it was not entirely truthful. In reality, the game was being designed around cooperative multiplayer, replayable missions, etc" [source] Casey Hudson's old tweet from 2018: "Reading lots of feedback regarding Dragon Age, and I think you'll be relieved to see what the team is working on. Story & character focused. Too early to talk details, but when we talk about "live" it just means designing a game for continued storytelling after the main story."

Rest of post/article under cut due to length.

(bold in the text below is mine for emphasis)

"In early November, on the eve of the crucial holiday shopping season, staffers at the video-game studio BioWare were feeling optimistic. After an excruciating development cycle, they had finally released their latest game, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, and the early reception was largely positive. The role-playing game was topping sales charts on Steam, and solid, if not spectacular, reviews were rolling in. But in the weeks that followed, the early buzz cooled as players delved deeper into the fantasy world, and some BioWare employees grew anxious. For months, everyone at the subsidiary of the video-game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. had been under intense pressure. The studio’s previous two games, Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, had flopped, and there were rumors that if Dragon Age underperformed, BioWare might become another of EA’s many casualties. Not long after Christmas, the bad news surfaced. EA announced in January that the new Dragon Age had only reached 1.5 million players, missing the company’s expectations by 50%. The holiday performance of another recently released title, EA Sports FC 2025, was also subpar, compounding the problem."

"As a result of the struggling titles, EA Chief Executive Officer Andrew Wilson explained, the company would be significantly lowering its sales forecast for the fiscal year ahead. EA’s share price promptly plunged 18%. “Dragon Age had a high-quality launch and was well-reviewed by critics and those who played,” Wilson later said on an earnings call. “However, it did not resonate with a broad enough audience in this highly competitive market.” Days after the sales revision, EA laid off a chunk of BioWare’s staff at the studio’s headquarters in Edmonton, Canada, and permanently transferred many of the remaining workers to other divisions. For the storied, 30-year-old game maker, it was a stunning fall that left many fans wondering how things had gone so haywire — and what might come next for the stricken studio. According to interviews with nearly two dozen people who worked on Dragon Age: The Veilguard, there were several reasons behind its failure, including marketing misfires, poor word of mouth and a 10-year gap since the previous title. Above all, sources point to the rebooting of the product from a single-player game to a multiplayer one — and then back again — a switcheroo that muddled development and inflated the title’s budget, they say, ultimately setting the stage for EA’s potentially unrealistic sales expectations. A spokesperson for EA declined to comment."

"The union between BioWare and EA started off with lofty aspirations. In 2007, EA executives announced they were acquiring BioWare and another gaming studio in a deal worth $860 million. The goal was to diversify their slate of games, which was heavy in sports titles, like Madden NFL, and light in the kind of adventure and role-playing games that BioWare was known for. Initially, it looked like a smart move thanks to a string of big hits. In 2014, BioWare released Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third installment in a popular action series dropping players in a semi-open world full of magic, elves and fire-spewing dragons. The fantasy title went on to win the much-coveted Game of the Year Award and sell 12 million copies, according to its executive producer Mark Darrah — a major validation of EA’s diversification strategy. Before long, Darrah and Mike Laidlaw, the creative director, began kicking around ideas for the next Dragon Age installment — code name: Joplin — aiming for a game that would be smaller in scope. But before much could get done, BioWare shifted the studio’s focus to more pressing titles coming down the pike. In 2017, BioWare released Mass Effect: Andromeda, the fourth installment in a big-budget action series set in space. Unlike its critically successful predecessors, the game received mediocre reviews and was widely mocked by fans. A few months after the disappointing release, the head of BioWare stepped down and was soon replaced by Microsoft Inc.’s Casey Hudson, an alumni of BioWare’s early, formative years."

"Like much of the industry, EA executives were growing increasingly enamored of so-called live-service games, such as Destiny and Overwatch, in which players continue to engage with and spend money on a title for months or even years after its initial release. With EA aiming to make a splash in the fast-growing category, BioWare poured resources into Anthem, a live-service shooter game that checked all the right boxes. One day in October 2017, Laidlaw summoned his colleagues into a conference room and pulled out a few pricey bottles of whisky. The next Dragon Age sequel, he told the room, would also be pivoting to an online, live-service game — a decision from above that he disagreed with. He was resigning from the studio. The assembled staff stayed late through the night, drinking and reminiscing about the franchise they loved. “I wish that pivot had never occurred,” Darrah would later recount on YouTube. “EA said, ‘Make this a live service.’ We said, ‘We don’t know how to do that. We should basically start the project over.’” Former art director Matt Goldman replaced Laidlaw as creative director, and with a tiny team began pushing ahead on a new multiplayer version of Dragon Age — code name: Morrison — while everyone else helped to finish Anthem, which was struggling to coalesce. Goldman pushed for a “pulpy,” more lighthearted tone than previous entries, which suited an online game but was a drastic departure from the dark, dynamic stories that fans loved in the fantasy series."

"In February 2019, BioWare released Anthem. Reviews were scathing, calling the game tedious and convoluted. Fans were similarly displeased. On social media, players demanded to know why a studio renowned for beloved stories and characters had made an online shooter with a scattershot narrative. In the wake of BioWare’s second consecutive flop, the multiplayer version of Dragon Age continued to take shape. While the previous games in the franchise had featured tactical combat, this one would be all action. Instead of quests that players would only experience once, it would be full of missions that could be replayed repeatedly with friends and strangers. Important characters couldn’t die because they had to persist for multiple players across never-ending gameplay. As the game evolved over the next two years, the failure of Anthem hovered over the studio. Were they making the same mistakes? Some BioWare employees scoffed that they were simply building “Anthem with dragons.” Throughout 2020, the pandemic disrupted the game’s already fraught development. In December, Hudson, the head of the studio, and Darrah, the head of the franchise, resigned. Shortly thereafter, Gary McKay, BioWare’s new studio head, revealed yet another shift in strategy. Moving forward, the next Dragon Age would no longer be multiplayer."

"“We were thinking, ‘Does this make sense, does this play into our strengths, or is this going to be another challenge we have to face?’” McKay later told Bloomberg News. “No, we need to get back to what we’re really great at.” In theory, the reversion back to Dragon Age’s tried-and-true, single-player format should have been welcome news inside BioWare. But there was a catch. Typically, this kind of pivot would be coupled with a reset and a period of pre-production allowing the designers to formulate a new vision for the game. Instead, the team was asked to change the game’s fundamental structure and recast the entire story on the fly, according to people familiar with the new marching orders. They were given a year and a half to finish and told to aim for as wide a market as possible. This strict deadline became a recurring problem. The development team would make decisions believing that they had less than a year to release the game, which severely limited the stories they could tell and the world they could build. Then the title would inevitably be delayed a few months, at which point they’d be stuck with those old decisions with no chance to stop and reevaluate what was working. At the end of 2022, amid continually dizzying leadership changes, the studio started distributing an “alpha” build of Dragon Age to get feedback internally and from outside playtesters. According to people familiar with the process, the reactions were concerning. The game’s biggest problem, early players agreed, was a lack of satisfying choices and consequences. Previous BioWare titles had presented players with gut-wrenching decisions. Which allies to save? Which factions to spare? Which enemies to slay? Such dilemmas made fans feel like they were shaping the narrative — historically, a big draw for many BioWare games."

"But Dragon Age’s multiplayer roots limited such choices, according to people familiar with the development. BioWare delayed the game’s release again while the team shoehorned in a few major decisions, such as which of two cities to save from a dragon attack. But because most of the parameters were already well established, the designers struggled to pair the newly retrofitted choices for players with meaningful consequences downstream. In 2023, to help finish Dragon Age, BioWare brought in a second, internal team, which was working on the next Mass Effect game. For decades there’d been tension between the two well-established camps, known for their starkly divergent ways of doing things. BioWare developers like to joke that the Dragon Age crew was like a pirate ship, meandering and sometimes traveling off course but eventually reaching the port. In contrast, the Mass Effect group was called the USS Enterprise, after the Star Trek ship, because commands were issued straight down from the top and executed zealously. As the Mass Effect directors took control, they scoffed that the Dragon Age squad had been doing a shoddy job and began excluding their leaders from pivotal meetings, according to people familiar with the internal friction. Over time, the Mass Effect team went on to overhaul parts of the game and design a number of additional scenes, including a rich, emotional finale that players loved. But even changes that appeared to improve the game stoked the simmering rancor inside BioWare, infuriating Dragon Age leaders who had been told they didn’t have the budget for such big, ambitious swings."

"“It always seemed that, when the Mass Effect team made its demands in meetings with EA regarding the resources it needed, it got its way,” said David Gaider, a former lead writer on the Dragon Age franchise who left before development of the new game started. “But Dragon Age always had to fight against headwinds.” Early testers and Mass Effect leads complained about the game’s snarky tone — a style of video-game storytelling, once ascendant, that was quickly falling out of fashion in pop culture but had been part of Goldman’s vision for the multiplayer game. Worried that Dragon Age could face the same outcome as Forspoken — a recent title that had been hammered over its impertinent banter — BioWare leaders ordered a belated rewrite of the game’s dialogue to make it sound more serious. (In the end, the resulting tonal inconsistencies would only add to the game’s poor reception with fans.) A mass layoff at BioWare and a mandate to work overtime depleted morale while a voice actors strike limited the writers’ ability to revise the dialogue and create new scenes. An initial trailer made the next Dragon Age seem more like Fortnite than a dark fantasy role-playing game, triggering concerns that EA didn’t know how to market the game. When Dragon Age: The Veilguard finally premiered on Halloween 2024 after many internal delays, some staff members thought there was a lot to like, including the game’s new combat system. But players were less impressed, and sales sputtered."

"“The reactions of the fan base are mixed, to put it gently,” said Caitie, a popular Dragon Age YouTuber. “Some, like myself, adore it for various reasons. Others feel utterly betrayed by certain design choices.” Following the layoffs and staff reassignments at BioWare earlier in the year, a small team of a few dozen employees is now working on the next Mass Effect. After three high-profile failures in a row, questions linger about EA’s commitment to the studio. In May, the company relabeled its Edmonton headquarters from a BioWare office to a hub for all EA staff in the area. Historically, BioWare has never been the most important studio at EA, which generates more than $7 billion in annual revenue largely from its sports games and shooters. Depending on the timing of its launches, BioWare typically accounts for just 5% of EA’s annual bookings, according to estimates by Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Robert W. Baird & Co. Even so, there may be strategic reasons for EA to keep supporting BioWare. Single-player role-playing games are expensive to make but can lead to huge windfalls when successful, as demonstrated by recent hits like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3. In order to grow, EA needs more than just sports franchises, said TD Cowen analyst Doug Creutz. Trying to fix its fantasy-focused studio may be easier than starting something new. “That said, if they shuttered the doors tomorrow I wouldn’t be totally surprised,” Creutz added. “It has been over a decade since they produced a hit.”"

Article by Jason Schreier. [source]

[thebibliosphere]

Hello! I hope you don't mind me asking, but do you have any thoughts on Howard Schubiner's Unlearn Your Pain, Mind Body Syndrome, treating neuroplastic symptoms, etc.? I was just referred to a pain management group that centers around these concepts, and I'm having some Feelings about the whole thing.

Just wondering if you've had any experiences with this type of treatment, or thoughts about its effectiveness. Thanks!

Okay, so this is going to be long, and I'm going to need you to stick with me through the tangent. I promise it's relevant.

I haven't read Howard Schubiner's work directly, but his colleague Alan Gordon was a key speaker at the Migraine World Summit this year. I found his talk interesting enough to buy his book and do some more research on my own, and I found it worthwhile pursuing on my own.

I know enough from my mast cell disorder to know that the body develops 'bad habits' around pain.

In the case of anxiety, stress, or panic, mast cells become more reactive, and this can make pain worse. This is true for everyone*; it's just those of us with MCAS or some other type of mast cell disorder who have more alarming symptoms like idiopathic anaphylaxis.

So, unfortunately, if I, as someone with MCAS, experience an acute pain from an injury or illness, the inherent stress response of the pain and the out-of-balance response from my nervous system can make my mast cells degranulate. They're little fuckers like that.

Mast cells can also put your body on an inflammatory cycle that is counterproductive to healing. They can literally get trained to anticipate reactions and pre-emptively react, because again, they are little fuckers.

To give you an example of this for me: my major migraines, the ones that land me in the hospital, occur on the dot every ten days. There are no hormonal factors to this that can be found or other consistent triggers or stressors, but I was unknowingly being exposed to an MCAS trigger roughly every ten days for a while. When I realized, I removed the trigger, obviously. Problem solved, right? Unfortunatley no. By then, my mast cells had trained themselves into a new pattern, and the migraine now is both the response and the trigger. It's some bastard thing called Innate Immune Memory. But it's also, partly, my subconscious anticipating the event and priming my body for a reaction, which I am susceptible to because of my MCAS and dysautonomia, which is a type of nervous system disorder.

And this is where the neuroplasticity comes in.

I'm currently in the process of trying to unlearn this response and better regulate my nervous system, which unfortunately makes me sound like a TikTok girly with a link in bio to sell you cortisol healing tea, but I promise you the only thing I'm interesting in shilling is my smutty vampire books. (And this post will be how some people learn I write books)

Anyway, why am I bothering to explain mast cell dysfunction like this in relation to neuroplasticity?

Because, yeah, if a pain doctor handed me a leaflet about 'unlearning pain' and I didn't understand how my body is routinely sabotaging itself on a cellular level in response to acute and neuroplastic pain, I'd also be rolling my eyes and feeling like I've just been handed a bottle of snake oil in the market.

God knows I've been handed 'mindfullness' leaflets by enough shitty doctors who don't actually understand what it means when we say "stress affects the nervous system" and just assume the patient is inventing symptoms to be annoying.

Thankfully, that is not what this is. At least I am hoping the doctor sending you there doesn't think you are causing your own pain. What they are hopefully trying to do is introduce you to something that a lot of chronic pain patients are reporting helps them feel more in control of their lives after many years of feeling at the mercy of their pain.

I don't attend the sessions at my brain injury clinic (yet), but I do know they use neuroplasticity therapy to help amputees with the phantom pain they experience from missing limbs. My physical therapist spent an entire session singing its virtues to me while I was fighting for my life on a balance board. Which is also why I decided to look into it after I heard Gordon talking at the Migraine World Summit.

So, do I think Schubiner's methods are hokum?

No, I think there's a lot of merit to the things he talks about and explains, but I also know the only reason I think that is because of the insight I have into the brain-body bundle through the experiences of my mast cell disease that has taught me there is nothing the brain is incapable of fucking up.

Do I think targeting neuroplastic pain will work well for everyone?

No. I think you need to try it and see if it's a good fit for you.

Some people who attended the World Migraine Summit think it's snake oil/just another way for pain doctors to foist us off into the realm of mental health care. Conversely, other people won't shut up about how learning to break the cycle of fear and panic around their pain has been life-altering for them.

For me, it's been more subtle and is part of a broader spectrum of therapies and medical treatment I use to keep my nervous system in check. It certainly hasn't done me any harm. If anything, I found it quite validating to hear someone say, "Oh, the pain is in your head? Of course it is. Let's try to fix that," and then gave me actionable coping methods. They might not work profoundly in the long term. I'm still a sick bitch with multiple acute causes of my pain. But it's also not harming me the way mindfulness was (many chronic pain patients can find it traumatizing).

I will say, I am concerned that some doctors will use the treatment of neuroplastic pain to dismiss treating acute pain with physical causes.

Just like how mindfulness has been abused by an overworked, underfunded medical system not equipped to handle chronic patients, there's also the risk of neuroplastic therapy being tossed over the fence in a similar fashion as a last ditch Hail Mary to treat patients they don't have time for. But I don't think it's widespread enough yet for that to be the case.

I dunno. Give it a try. If it's not for you, it's not for you.

Personally, I hate anything that revolves around group therapy, but I did find the book "The Way Out" by Alan Gordon insightful in helping me figure some things out. Maybe see if your local library has it before you drop money on any sessions?

_ _ _

*There has also been more compelling evidence recently that suggests that chronic pain conditions like fibromyalgia are also affected by wonky mast cells. Also arthritis.

[meta-sequoia]

Rose genetics and the law of unintended consequences (or, ten rose bushes, reviewed)

I have a number of longposts in the backlog, including updates on a number of garden improvement projects I undertook over the winter, but I kept putting off posting them because there kept being Horrors. However, spring is here - in California anyway - and plants wait for no one.

Over the winter of 2025, as a coping mechanism for the aforementioned Horrors, I got really into roses. Because of who I am as a person, deciding what roses I wanted to buy also made me feel obliged to reconstruct the history of rose breeding, just to make sense of the teeming confusion of the tens of thousands of named rose varieties. Humans have been raising roses for food, medicine, and beauty for untold centuries, and so they've really grown up with us. The history of the development of roses, it turns out, is the history of the development of humanity in miniature.

This post has it all: history, some light phylogeny discussion, material analysis of English folk ballads, a conceptual framework for understanding how different kinds of roses vary and why, a #haul breakdown of what bare-root roses I got and what I thought of them, and some philosophical musings on what it means for an organism to be subjected to a long-term selective breeding process, to be remade wholly in the image of human desire. All that, and pictures of roses, under the cut.

My general region of California is considered to have a good climate for roses, much good may it do us. It never gets too hot or too cold, so they essentially never go out of season, and even though our winters are wet, the rest of the year is fairly dry. This is absolutely critical, because the main problem that makes garden roses hard to grow is fungal disease. Modern roses are incredibly susceptible to fungal diseases, which are caused, roughly, by Damp. This has typically been combated with toxic sprays (though there are now less-toxic options) and aggressive pruning regimens.

Needless to say, this is a ridiculous fucking problem for a plant to have. California natives, by comparison, hate irrigation - they have a natural life cycle involving being dry in summer and wet in winter, like California itself, so if you grow them in a climate resembling their natural range, without too much added water, they will be mostly OK. Roses, as far as I can tell, actually hate all water, including rain and humidity, which is much worse because gardeners do not control the weather. If it rains too often after, say, noon, the rose's leaves might get wet, fail to dry off, get a fungal disease, and die. If there is too much fog, or it is humid, as it is in most of the country in the summer, the rose's leaves might get wet &c. If you have a sprinkler system - you get the idea.

Fungal disease can also weaken roses and make them more prone to insect infestations. This is bad because modern garden roses are, without any help from The Weather, already incredibly prone to infestations from aphids, mites, beetles, and a mite-borne disease undescriptively called "rose rosette disease", which produces a habitus that I can only describe as "rose bush eldritch horror".

Now, this may all have you asking one question. Probably, that question is "why are you so obsessed with a plant that wants so badly to die?" I will not be answering this question today. Instead, I will be answering a different question, which is "Why do modern garden roses suck so bad?"

Now, if roses are subject to some manner of curse, then it isn't a family curse, phylogenically speaking. Roses - genus Rosa species extremely miscellaneous - are a member of the family Rosaceae, which contains a massive number of useful and delightful plants. It is possibly the most economically important family of plants next to the brassicas. The rose family brings us not just roses, but apples, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, plums, peaches, apricots, and almonds. And the wild rose, untouched by human efforts, is a lot like a raspberry, actually.

Its flowers have only five petals, in pink or white. It’s got thorny stems that form thickets, and oval (or, technically, lanceolate) leaves with lightly serrated edges. Its flowers are fragrant, which is an adaptation to their long and necessary coexistence with pollinators and other insects - fragrance serves as a chemical signal for insects to "come here" or "go away", depending. The wild rose is hardy, like all wild plants, tolerant of various environmental problems that would kill a garden rose: shade, salt, normal levels of ambient insect and fungal disease pressure, drought, being consistently rained on in the afternoon or evening. It may reproduce asexually from suckers - strong shoots from near the base of the plant - and this makes it able to withstand browsing pressure from e.g. deer. (Put a pin in that.) It also can reproduce in the normal way, by having its flowers pollinated and forming seeds, which are borne in prominent reddish-orange fruits called "hips".

This is not a rose I bought, but here’s Rosa gymnocarpa, a California native rose. It’s a wood rose, so it’s shade-tolerant, and it’s often found in redwood forests specifically, so it tolerates relatively dry soil and very acidic soil.

Honorable mention: Rosa gymnocarpa (wood rose)

Source: Calscape

A raspberry plant in flower, for comparison. Source

The wild rose has another trait, which may be surprising to those who have only ever seen garden roses: it blooms once, usually in the summer. This is typical of flowers, which almost always have a season, for the exact same reason fresh fruit has a season. Flowering plants are on a tight schedule: they need to finish up their blooming, so they can set fruit, so they can get their seeds out before winter, in case the frost kills them off. And mostly we’re used to that: tulips are for spring, so you don't expect a tulip to make a second showing in fall, or to flower continuously throughout the summer. But roses have been bred to do this, and have done it for centuries, for so long we barely remember what it was like when "roses blooming" was a time of year, an event.

It's possible that for most of human history, roses were all the more treasured for being fleeting, which simply isn't an aspect of how we moderns understand roses. I am constantly subjected to traditional ballads at home, both in English and German, so I am very aware that multiple Child ballads mention roses as a way of placing the events of the ballad at a particular time of year. In 'Lady Isobel and the Elf-Knight', a song traditionally associated with May Day, one version of the chorus references the events as occurring 'as the rose is blown'. And at the start of 'Tam Lin', the protagonist meets her fairy lover while plucking a double rose, is "laid down among... the roses red" by him, and finishes the ballad on Halloween night heavily pregnant with his child. The course of the ballad is inextricably intertwined with the course of the seasons, and the bloom of roses is synonymous with early summer. (There's so much symbolism in 'Tam Lin', but especially around roses. Can I interest you in tam-lin.org at this time?)

European religious literature even uses "a rose e'er blooming" as a purely figurative phrase, something impossible and magical enough to be a metonym for the Virgin Mary - but in the modern era, most garden roses are ever-blooming. The perpetual-blooming rose is not the natural state of the rose plant, but a kind of technology that had to be developed. And I don't know, I just think that's neat.

So what have we learned? The wild rose is: once-blooming, tough, possibly shade-tolerant depending on species, very thorny, bearing simple pink or white five-petaled flowers, that are fragrant, pollinator-friendly, and produce fruit readily enough. In short, a practical, normal sort of plant.

The garden rose is…not that. There’s no other way to put this: the modern garden rose is the wild rose, but bimboified.

Now, in case today is your first day on the Internet - well, first of all, welcome, it’s bad here - but secondly, bimboification is a niche fetish where someone is transformed into a hypersexualized version of themselves that is also very stupid. Plant domestication is obviously analogous. I didn’t originate this joke; in fact, I reblogged a joke like this just last week.

Roses are like this but even more so. Like, wheat is clearly bimboified. Its sexual parts (seeds) have been remade, swollen to ludicrous proportions, and wheat is probably worse at being a plant than wild grasses. But we created modern wheat from wild grass because it was more useful that way, and wheat could in theory survive and spread without human cultivation. Roses are Like That purely because we wanted to make them a more perfect decorative object. Centuries of intensive selection pressure for appearance have rendered roses useless as an independent plant: they are so disease-prone they need extensive intervention to even survive, and they are often physically incapable of propagating themselves - one of the basic features of plants! - without human aid. That’s plant bimboification.

Source: Heirloom Roses. This one is called 'Oranges 'n' Lemons. Hardly seems like the same plant!

Here are just a few examples, of what we've done to roses. Humans love rose petals - eating them, distilling them into perfume, smelling them, just looking at them - so the garden rose has massive flowers that are so stuffed with petals that pollinators cannot get at their centers, rendering the rose incapable of reproducing except possibly with the help of a human equipped with a paintbrush. Humans love bright colors, so modern roses come in every color their natural pigments allow. Garden roses are often - though not always - less thorny than their wild cousins, because thorns are inconvenient to humans, and so have been somewhat bred out.

And what’s just as important is what was bred out of wild roses in the process of becoming modern roses - by accident. As mentioned above, modern roses are often useless to pollinators, and, not unrelatedly, can’t reproduce without human help. They often lose their fragrance, if not specifically bred for it. They are very susceptible to disease, because gardeners can keep alive, through sheer stubbornness, plants that natural selection would have culled. Likewise, they need full sun where many wild roses can get by even in the shade of big evergreens, and they can't tolerate nearly as much cold, heat, or salt exposure as their wild relatives.

This 'use it or lose it' thing, by the way, is a general principle of selective processes like plant breeding, or like evolution. If you have two independent traits, A and B, and you select hard for A, then B is likely to gradually drop out of the population, simply because the subset of A carriers that also have B is likely to be small. It's pure statistics. (It essentially is a human-created population bottleneck.) The more intense and ruthless the selection pressure, the stronger the effect. Evolution cares a lot about seed production and hardly at all about color, so wild roses are plain but make enormous rose hips; humans like beautiful roses the color of sunsets, and are indifferent to seed production, so modern roses don’t make hips at all. The failure to select for eventually becomes an implicit selection pressure against.

(Highly-bred organisms are thus less, I guess, well-rounded genetically even before you get to issues of inbreeding, and if you assume there is no biological link between your selected-for traits and other ridealong traits, e.g. domestication syndrome. Genetics is complicated!)

One adapted wild-type trait that - I speculate - was not bred out, due to its direct usefulness to humans, was the ability of roses to grow back vigorously from having leaves or branches removed. This is, it seems to me, an adaptation to herbivore browsing - if you are a rose with minimal regrowth ability, and a deer chews on half your canes, it’s curtains for you. But humans also fully remove half of the canes of their garden roses every winter - it’s critical to controlling the fungal disease that so plagues them. Specifically, pruning improves airflow through the plant, which evaporates the water that keeps falling on the leaves from the sky. (You know. The rain, that roses both hate and need to live.) In some sense, we are acting as caretakers here, shaping the plant in inscrutable ways for its own good. But to the plant, we are basically deer: just another in a long line of animals that want to steal its leaves. Unbelievable! It needs those! Fuck you too, buddy: here’s a faceful of thorns.

Truly, a tale as old as time.

This brings me to my first actual rose review, a kind of bridge between wild roses and the world of cultivated roses.

#1: Rosa rugosa, probably "Hansa"

Source: the author's yard.

This is a sucker - a vigorous young ground-level shoot - from an unnamed rosebush from my mother's house. I say "probably 'Hansa'" because we have no idea what this actually is, only that it is a rugosa hybrid, purchased from an unknown nursery in the Midwest sometime during the Bush administration.

'Hybrid rugosas' are crosses between garden-type roses and a wild rose species called Rosa rugosa, which is native to much of Asia. This particular rose bush has many traits carried over from its wild parent: it's violently fragrant, a glorious sweet-spicy combo that smells to me like childhood and home; it has wrinkly leaves (characteristic of Rosa rugosa in particular); its stems are practically coated in prickles; and it's quite tolerant of shade, drought, and salt (Rosa rugosa is a beach rose).

The main virtue evinced by this rose, derived from its wild parent, is the same reason that it is still here in my garden: it is extremely difficult to kill. My mother, after hearing me say I wanted this specific rose bush at my house the same way it had been at my childhood home, dug up a sucker from her instance, put it in a bag with some wet dirt, carried it by hand on a multi-hour cross-country plane flight, and handed it off to me. Once I received it, I stuck it in a pot, because I was ripping up my lawn and had nowhere to plant it, and mostly forgot about it, because I was busy ripping up my entire lawn. It lost its leaves suspiciously early in the fall. ("That's not good," my mother said, over FaceTime, brow furrowed. "Are the rest of your roses doing that?")

But as the saying doesn't go, "where there's green cambium, there's hope", and I continued to take care of it throughout the winter. I eventually even remembered to put it in the ground. It is now March, and in defiance of the mockery of certain judgemental housemates, who said things like "why do you have a stick in a pot?" and "it's giving 'dead', my guy", this "stick" has now decided to become a rosebush, and has a grand total of (approximately) twenty-five leaves.

Like I said: extremely difficult to kill. It is currently planted 10-ish feet from the base of a redwood tree, a tough environment where some hardy garden-style roses have nonetheless been known to thrive. Given that its resurrection has occurred entirely while it was planted under the redwood, it doesn't seem too mad about its environment.

Review: holy shit, it’s alive???

#2: Zéphirine Drouhin, the "old garden rose"

Source: Heirloom Roses

Rosarians have conceived of many groupings of garden roses, based on known ancestry, phenotype, genetic studies, and Vibes, but one major breakpoint is those bred before 1867, the "old garden roses", and after 1867, the "modern garden roses".

The old garden roses were derived mostly from ancient European and Middle Eastern stock, which had themselves been created from wild roses centuries prior. For example, this is Rosa x alba, an ancient European rose strain; it was used as the heraldic badge of the medieval House of York during the English conflict known as the War of the Roses.

Source: not mine

Some of these roses are perpetual-blooming, a trait introduced as late as the eighteenth century, and which is entirely due to trade contact with China: as far as I can tell, the genes for strong reblooming only come from the Chinese rose-breeding tradition, which was itself centuries old by that point. So the modern Western concept of perpetual-blooming roses as the default kind of rose - like so many other aspects of modernity - is a direct result of Europeans cribbing from everybody else.

Interestingly, France was a major center for rose development during the early modern period. You can see it in the way old garden roses are named: overwhelmingly after some eminent madame or monsieur. This is probably connected to the fact that Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte’s empress, was a rose fiend: she had two hundred and fifty new varieties of rose to be brought to her gardens at Château de Malmaison, which was probably pretty much all the named varieties of rose that existed then, and many of which were new to European cultivation at that time. Again, this represented a massive inflow of rose genes that were previously restricted to other countries or continents entirely. Inextricably, these gardens also represent the proceeds of early modern global trade, and of empire: Napoleon, on campaign abroad, himself sent her hundreds of specimens of flowering plants, and the French navy confiscated plants and seeds from ships captured and sea and sent them to her.

Anyway, Zéphirine Drouhin, created at the end of the "old garden rose" period and named for some now-forgotten madame or mademoiselle, is highly fragrant - one of the few roses said to really perfume the air - with a vibrant but old-fashioned color palette. (Apricot and yellow roses were also characteristic of the Chinese rose gene pool, and so were significantly less common in old garden roses.) Zéphirine Drouhin is also thornless, a rare trait that we nonetheless see in some old-fashioned garden roses, and a few modern garden roses as well.

Old garden roses have a variable but generally good level of disease resistance. Zéphirine Drouhin in particular, gets something of a bad rap for poor disease resistance; English rose breeder David Austin Roses says, tactfully, that it "prefers warmer climates" (versus, one must assume, rainy England) and that "controlling disease can be a problem". By this you should understand them to mean that it is a whiny little pissbaby that constantly gets blackspot, a diva that will defoliate at the drop of a hat (or the drop of, uh, water).

However, unlike certain other newer roses I will mention later, I have found Zéphirine Drouhin to be pretty healthy so far. I received this rose, like many in this post, "bare root", basically a stick, dormant in a bag of wood shavings. Upon being planted in a part-sun area, it has leafed out with only a scattering of aphids to show in terms of disease.

Review: So far, so good. Looking forward to the fragrance.

#3 and 4: 'Mister Lincoln' and 'Fragrant Cloud', the hybrid tea brothers

Remember how I mentioned that 1868 is the breakpoint between "old garden roses" and "modern garden roses"? That year marked the invention of a new type of rose, the 'hybrid tea', that is in some sense THE rose, the ARCHETYPE of a rose. If you ask someone who knows nothing about roses to draw 'a rose' - if you look up clipart of a rose - a hybrid tea rose is what you'll get.

Source: Star Nursery

This is Mister Lincoln, and although it was developed as late as the 1960s, it has the classic hybrid tea rose form. Hybrid teas have a very distinctive shape, described as "high-pointed", with a spiral of unfurling petals that curl at the edges, and they're borne singly on long stems, making them great for cutting and putting into vases and bouquets. They are not always strongly fragrant, and they are not generally very disease-resistant. They come in a very wide variety of colors, intense and subtle. They are reblooming.

Hybrid teas were developed by another East-meets-West cross, when the Chinese tea roses, freshly imported from Guangzhou in the early 19th century, were bred with the old garden roses. Tea roses have the same iconic form as the hybrid teas; they have those unique, pastel shades that were previously quite absent from European rose stocks; they smell like a fresh cup of tea. All these traits they impart to hybrid teas. Hybrid teas have been very popular ever since, and have been subject to a great deal of selective breeding for color and form.

Hybrid teas don't generally spark joy, to me. I find the 'cartoon rose' shape kind of twee, honestly. And the reputation for lack of disease tolerance puts me off. But I heard Mister Lincoln was incredibly fragrant, and that drew me in. Likewise Fragrant Cloud (1967), which also has the charming feature of being a violent neon coral that is allegedly very difficult to photograph.

Source: Heirloom Roses

“It'll be fine," I thought. "How much fungal disease can it get? It's not like it's humid here."

Never again. My trust is destroyed; fuck hybrid teas.

please, my son, he is very sick

This is my poor Mister Lincoln, planted from bare-root in mid-December. It has three different fungal diseases, and also an aphid infestation I can't seem to get it to shake. It looks like one of those diagrams of a liver in a medical textbook that has fatty liver and cirrhosis and liver cancer all at once, just so you can see what all the diseases look like. This is a rose that has every problem! No other rose in this flower bed comes close to having every problem! 'Munstead Wood' is also a modern garden rose (though from a very different lineage - see my review below) and it has no fungal diseases and not a single aphid!

Well, maybe the other hybrid tea I bought is doing better... well, nope, it rained last week and Fragrant Cloud has powdery mildew.

Review: Come on, man.

#5 Unidentified ‘sunset’ rose

I didn’t buy these roses; they came with my house. As a consequence, I have no idea what they are, but I am now intimately familiar with their traits, and I think they are very indicative of both the high and low points of modern garden roses.

On the surface level, the fact that these rose bushes are still with us is an impressive proof of their persistence under adversity. When I bought the house, these roses were being choked to death. Lily-of-the-nile had been planted way too close to them, and then permitted to grow unchecked and undivided for many years; their roots were completely infiltrated and surrounded with lily roots. The lily roots had also damaged the irrigation lines, which were dribbling uncontrolled amounts of water into the shared root zone. So when I excavated these roses, the whole area smelled strongly of rot, with visible mold throughout; the roots were fully wet even in the heat of August. The roses were also infested with blackspot, not surprisingly. I wasn’t sure if what I was doing was too little, too late.

But when they finally got some drainage, some direct sunlight, and some relief from the brutal root competition, they did start growing back, and even blooming. Come winter, I pruned hard, defoliated, and applied neem oil consistently. And they’ve made a comeback!

Source: these blooms are actually my roses.

They bloom, and they’re beautiful. They do this ombre thing, where the buds are bright yellow and as they open they go from yellow, to orange, and finally to red.

The growth is fairly vigorous, with no powdery mildew no matter how rainy it gets. But their foliage definitely suffers from blackspot, and occasional rose rust; the spores are probably ambiently present in the soil now, and they can’t quite seem to defend themselves, even with ample help from organic fungicides like neem oil.

They also have no fragrance. They smell like nothing. And that’s the standard modern garden rose in a nutshell, I think: beautiful color and form, shaky disease resistance, little fragrance. It’s a little sad, honestly.

Review: Okay, this one is really pretty, actually.

Interlude: Pesticides and the law of unintended consequences

So, yeah, you can sort of see how roses got a reputation for being picky divas. I can only imagine how bad this sort of thing must get in places that get (gasp!) rain or humidity in the summer.

Now, having created plants that are too disease-ridden to live, rose-lovers came up with practical and effective solutions to the disease problem they created. For the past century or so, the go-to fix for our increasingly disease-prone rose population has been chemicals: regular applications of synthetic insecticide and fungicide sprays, as well as plenty of fertilizer and herbicide to feed the roses and kill any competing weeds.

However, recall the theme of this post: the law of unintended consequences. In agriculture, the development of modern pesticides and fertilizers has been genuinely miraculous; the Green Revolution is estimated to have saved a billion people from starvation in the latter half of the twentieth century. Saving a billion people! Can you even begin to conceive of what it would be like to save a billion people, even grapple with the moral weight of that act? I know I can't; the number is simply too large for our moral intuitions to handle, I think. So I'm hesitant to bad-mouth pesticides and fertilizers too much.

But they do have massive downsides. Chemical fertilizers leach into the groundwater and cause algal blooms that make entire bodies of water go anoxic, rendering them uninhabitable to fish and the rest of the aquatic food chain. Insecticides are probably responsible for colony collapse, which endangers the pollinators that we rely on for our food supply.

And, well, even if you don't give a shit about the natural world - you are a part of the natural world. You are an animal, with all the frailty that implies. Our bodies use many of the same ancient metabolic pathways as insects and plants; the majority of your DNA is shared with a banana. And because you are an animal, it is very difficult indeed to create an insecticide that will poison other animals without poisoning you too, at least a little. Herbicides are somehow still worse, despite the more distant biological relationship between humans and dandelions: Roundup, for instance, is linked to non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which has led to Monsanto paying out massive legal settlements to cancer patients who used their products.

So if we can't grow roses without coating them in poison, maybe we should just… not do that? Go back to growing super-hardy nearly-wild roses like rugosas, forgoing forever the elegance and sublime color of a modern rose?

Give up this? ‘Glowing Peace’, Heirloom Roses

Not so fast! Maybe this technological problem has a technological solution. If we bred roses so that they sucked, maybe we should just not do that! Make different roses! Make roses that don't suck!

#6-#8, ‘Ebb Tide', 'Eden', and 'Lavender Crush': roses that don't suck

Over the last fifty years, people have become increasingly aware of the impacts of modern lifestyles upon our health and the health of the planet and its ecosystems. So maybe this has made the public less willing to buy roses that need to be treated constantly with toxic sprays. Or maybe it's just that growing disease-prone roses is an enormous pain in the ass. Spray, prune, spray, defoliate, fertilize, spray, fertilize, spray, water - but not too much! Oops, powdery mildew. Defoliate and spray some more.

So the genetic health of the newer varieties of garden roses is greatly improved. The two hybrid teas I struggled with above were bred in the 1960s. All the named rose varieties in this section were bred since the 1990s or later: Eden in 1997, Ebb Tide in 2004, and Lavender Crush, the baby of the group, was introduced in 2016. All of them are vibrantly healthy and quite vigorous; Ebb Tide and Eden are shade-tolerant too, and Lavender Crush is allegedly very winter-hardy. After a scant two months in the ground, they've started to put out flower buds. And they keep some of the glorious color and form of older roses. Look at them!

Source: Heirloom Roses.

I don't mean to say all 20th century roses are bad and disease-ridden. I also have purchased 'New Dawn' (introduced 1930), due to it being the fifteen-dollarest rose at the Home Depot. (My toxic trait is that I am an absolute sucker for a good deal. I don't go into TJ Maxx anymore; it's too dangerous.) 'New Dawn' has all the ancestral, throwback traits I laud here: shade-tolerance, fragrance, disease resistance. It even brings in the pollinators! But it seems to me there's been a noticeable uptick in the quality of newer rose introductions, particularly when it comes to disease resistance. I'm not wired into the professional rose world to know what that is; I'm Literally Just Some Guy. But it's a good trend.

Review: I am so excited for the buds to open, you have no idea.

#9: 'Double Knockout': the 'landscape' rose

Wait, no, I take that back. These roses have too much ease of care. Put some back.

The Knockout rose has one virtue: you cannot kill it with an axe. Literally.

This rose was planted right at the foot of a redwood tree in my garden, because the previous owner of my house was an idiot. This is a terrifically bad setup for roses and redwoods: redwoods acidify the soil, and suck up water and nutrients aggressively, leaving little for surrounding plants, and of course they provide dense shade. Roses hate the acid, the dry and low-nutrient soil, and the shade; this plant never bloomed all last summer. For their part, the redwoods hate having anything planted in their inner root zone - their roots are relatively shallow for such a large tree. This is not a good situation for anyone, so I hacked this rose back to the ground, dug out as much of the root ball as I dared, and in my naivete thought that would be the end of it. Well, it has grown back. Now I am faced with the dilemma of whether to risk root injury to my redwood tree, or just let the rose be, bloomless as it is. Probably the latter is better for the redwood tree, on the whole. Maybe it’ll get choked out if I don’t water it? Anyone’s guess, really.

The category of landscape roses is a 2000s invention. The first Knockout rose was introduced in 2000 after years of intensive selective breeding for being easy-care, free-flowering, and disease-resistant; the similar Drift line was the product of an amateur rose breeder in 2006 to much the same ends. Landscape roses are so named because instead of being demanding prima donnas suited only to those who love roses enough to take on the Rose Tasks, they’re just another pretty shrub in the landscape.

And I will say this for them: in that bad, fungal spore–inundated flower bed I mentioned, my landscape roses (plus Munstead Wood, see below) are notably free of fungal disease.

Also, I think that's leaf tissue proliferating at the center of the bottom left bloom?? A rare but harmless growth disorder of flowering plants.

This comes at a cost, of course, at least if you’re a snob like me. I don’t think landscape roses are very interesting-looking - though of course they come in a wide variety of colors, the better to coordinate with the color scheme of your house! - and they are generally, tragically, without fragrance. While I can’t complain about anything that gets US gardeners to use less pesticides, they are barely roses to me. They are, in fact, the closest roses come to being an inanimate object, a decorative thing you can just plonk down in your garden wherever, like a tacky concrete statue. They’re a commodity; the enchantment is gone. I wouldn’t rip them out where they’re well-sited, but I sure wouldn’t plant more.

Now, this is incredibly mean to people who love landscape roses, but here goes. I’m reminded of a thread from r/Ceanothus, the California native gardening subreddit, that is now burned into my brain. OP asks for a native shrub recommendation, but not just any native shrub. OP wants a native shrub that will grow very tall, but also stay very narrow - 1’ wide in places. OP needs a native shrub that will grow thick and vigorous, to block out their view of the neighbors. OP needs this thing to be evergreen; OP presumably wants low water inputs. And OP needs all this, in a shrub that will grow in full shade.

In fairness, OP was polite about it, and this is a common problem for urban gardeners. The dark, untended canyon between buildings is a very common phenomenon in Californian cities. I too have a narrow, shaded side yard containing a tiny strip of crappy, gravelly dirt, that I’d love to grow something in: how do you think I found this post? Dear reader, I am very much at that devil's sacrament.

And the ceanothusheads of r/Ceanothus tried gamely. But one commenter replied with something that fully changed how I think about gardening:

Source: Reddit

Sometimes, what you need is not a living organism, with its own needs, that will change over time in ways you may not endorse, that interacts with the world around it. Sometimes what you really want is a man-made object. Sometimes what you want to grow in your tall, narrow, lightless, bone-dry side yard, for your privacy requirements, is a fence. And that’s what I think about landscape roses. In Mediterranean and desert climates, as long as there's enough sun, you can always fall back on planting a succulent. But not every location can grow succulents outdoors year-round. In temperate climates, landscape roses could probably be successfully replaced with a particularly attractive boulder. Or, if what you want is a smart-looking, easy-care hedge: consider a fence.

Review: I’d maybe rather plant a fence a succulent.

#10: 'Munstead Wood': the old English rose, reloaded

‘Munstead Wood’, my final acquisition, is a credit to another major modern rose breeding program, this time out of England: David Austin Roses. The main idea of the David Austin rose-breeding project seems to be combining the particular charms of traditional English old garden roses - their fragrance, their romantic, sophisticated forms - with the virtues of modern roses - continuous blooming, a wide range of highly Instagrammable colors - plus disease-tolerance that twenty-first century gardeners now expect. And judging by their singular impact on the contemporary rose market, they seem to have been very successful at that goal. The Reddit reviews are glowing, the forums are abuzz for their hottest new releases (Dannahue restock wen?), their most popular roses are often sold out, and other rose sellers have catalog filters for 'English shrub roses' that allegedly share the looks and fragrance of David Austin's best.

From the author's camera roll. 'I can't believe it's not Dave [sic] Austin!'

Their marketing is also very slick. Their website is very informative, with separate filters for various kinds of roses you might want to buy ('Best for fragrance', 'For a shady spot', 'Thornless or nearly so'), all the rose varieties have literary or historical names or else are named after charming British locations, and are all beautifully photographed in their idyllic show garden, and the prose is carefully engineered to incite lust in the winter-weary gardener. They even do periodic drops of new roses, like a sneaker company.

So last November, I allowed myself to buy one David Austin rose, 'Munstead Wood'.

Source: David Austin Roses

'Munstead Wood' is really gorgeous, I think, blooming in a deep burgundy color. The website claims the fragrance is "Old Rose, with fruity notes of blackberry, blueberry and damson".

An interesting fact about 'Munstead Wood' is that it is actually region-locked. David Austin Roses sells roses in both the US and UK (and maybe other places; sorry I am so American), but the climate of the UK has been changing, with more extreme weather events and even more rain. And you know how it is with roses and the rain. 'Munstead Wood' was no longer able to thrive, and has packed up its little rucksack and gone out to explore the world as a lone vagabond - specifically, America.

So how is it doing here? Great, actually. It may have been rained on every day for the past week, but at least it's not in England, I guess.

'Munstead Wood' has no fungal disease. It looks like it's never even heard of fungal disease. I'm pretty impressed! I can't actually tell you whether the roses are good, but this is a pretty good plant, which is a good start.

Review: I'm holding myself back from buying more David Austin roses right now. God help me, I have two more open full- to part-sun spots in my garden right now.

David Austin, "Lady of Shalott". Call me the Lady of Shalott the way I'm languishing in my tower, gazing only at the mere reflections of the real world (stuck inside, looking at my phone, because of the rain) and am about to throw myself in the river with longing (to be out in the garden)

[lucydixon]

Under Flashing Lights

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Summary: Your band is playing a show, and you lock eyes with a tattooed stranger in the crowd and end your night in a grimy venue bathroom, bent over the sink while staring back at him in the mirror.

Warning: NSFW, unprotected p in v, like 10 seconds of hand stuff, dirty talk, Praise kink, but just a tiny bit

You’d always hated stage lighting. 

It was your least favourite part of live performances.  

Sure, it looked cool, and you could admit that any band would look ridiculous up op on stage with stagnant, fluorescent lighting. But you didn’t love being blinded by spotlights of varying colours while you were trying to focus on playing your bass. 

It hurt your eyes and made you want to avoid looking out at the audience so you could dodge the bright lights, but that wasn't exactly an option. 

You’d developed a bit of a strategy after years of spending your weekends playing grimy venues and dive bars.

Your hair was long, almost ridiculously so, and acted as an excellent curtain, shielding your poor eyes from the blinding glare. Only, you couldn’t spend the entire show hiding behind it, so you’d rotate through scanning the crowd, flashing your teeth at your bandmates at certain parts whenever you were moving around on stage, and bobbing your head with your hair in front of your face. 

You were halfway through your set when your gaze landed on him during a routine glance at the crowd. Usually, you kept your eyes moving, but you couldn’t help but falter, locking eyes with the dark-eyed stranger. 

He had an array of piercings on his face and tattoos creeping up the sides of his neck. 

Really, it was the look on his face that made you pause. You could see right through the practiced boredom, into his soul, even from as far as you were. 

He’d been looking at you already. That much was obvious. 

You’d done the same thing at far too many gigs when you were in the crowd instead of on stage, trying to grab the attention of whoever it was up there that you were fixated on. The trick was to try and make it look like you didn’t care that you’d caught their eye. 

Same as this guy was doing to you. 

Or trying to, really. 

Bullshit recognizes bullshit and you’d pulled that move more times than you could count. 

You finished your rotation before cycling through again once the next song started, and sure enough, there he was, in the same spot, still staring. 

You had a solo coming up in the following 30 seconds and felt a certain cockyness settle in your chest, urging you to maintain his stare while you plucked the strings of your instrument expertly. 

He looked the tiniest bit impressed, but did a good job covering it up. 

Still, it was enough to make you smirk softly.

Through the last few songs, you kept glancing over, and you kept finding yourself locked in a staring contest. 

You’d decided on the first pass that he was attractive. 

By the time you were closing out the last song, you’d decided that you wanted to fuck him. 

The show ended, and the crowd roared. 

But your stranger didn’t. 

He just held your gaze and cracked a little smirk when you nodded subtly to the bar before walking off the stage. 

You got yourself freshened up a little backstage, reapplying your smeared makeup before venturing out into the packed venue, working your way to the bar at a leisurely pace. 

There he was, in all his heavily pierced glory, leaning back against the bar, sipping a beer and looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. 

But he wasn’t. 

He was standing there, waiting for you.

His eyes landed on you when you were still a good ten feet away and raked over your body blatantly. 

There was something a little too confident in his gaze. 

Like you were a sure thing before either of you had even exchanged a single word. 

You didn’t like that and decided that you were gonna play with him a little. 

So, you brushed past him and rested your elbows on the bartop, waving over a bartender to order yourself a drink before he could even open his mouth. 

You didn’t have to look to know that he was taken aback. 

You could feel the blow to his ego in the air. 

Good. 

He seemed to need it. 

Only after you’d gotten your drink and taken a nice, long sip, did you turn to look up at him through your lashes. 

His lips were slightly parted, and he looked like he was trying to figure out what had just happened, but only for a moment before it was back to something guarded. 

“Oh, I’m sorry.” You bit back a smirk. “Am I in your way or something?” 

“I don’t know.” His eyes narrowed slightly, as if he was genuinely starting to wonder if he’d gotten it all wrong. “Are you?” 

“I don’t think so.” Your bottom lip was trapped between your teeth as you shrugged coyly. 

“Are you toying with me?” He asked finally, looking a little amused. 

“Maybe,” you cracked a smile. 

“Fuck, you’re mean.” he rested a palm on either side of you, pinning you to the bar while he leaned into you, smirking “I think I like it though. I'm Erik” 

“You think?” You cocked a brow before introsucing yourself.

“I do.” 

The air was thick with tension as you stared at eachother hungrily. 

“I was just gonna go to the bathroom.” You smiled slyly after slamming back the rest of your drink. “Wanna come?” 

Erik scoffed, but pushed off the bar, abandoning his half-finished beer to follow you through the crowd, not stopping until the two of you stepped into the graffiti-filled, yet shockingly empty bathroom. 

Before the door had even had the chance to shut all the way behind you, he had your back pressed up against it and his lips slammed into yours. 

You gasped into his mouth, not having expected him to be so abrupt about it, but after the initial shock passed, you reciprocated the kiss with the same intensity, weaving your fingers into his messy, dark hair. 

He reached out and turned to lock before hoisting you up in his arms, grinding the bulge in his jeans up against your clothed cunt with a soft growl. 

You moaned lowly, nipping at his bottom lip and tugging at the roots of his hair.  

The two of you were really kissing now, clawing at one another while your lips slotted together, moving at a near-frantic pace, tongues probing each other's mouths.

You were squirming, pinned between him and the door so tightly that you couldn’t rock your hips as intensely as you wanted, desperate for friction. 

“We just gonna make out like teenagers or are you gonna fuck me?” You muttered into his mouth, your voice breathy with a slight whine to it. 

“Anybody ever told you you’re inpatient?” He stared down at you, eyes full of hunger, and set you down only to start on the button at the top of your jeans with nimble fingers. “Needy little thing, aren’t you?” 

Before you could answer, all in one movement, he jerked your pants down to your mid-thighs and spun you around, bending you over the sink.

You gasped, bracing your hands against the porcelain and hissed when you felt the sharp sting of his palm on your ass. 

He could see the outline of your pussy through the dark lace and made sure that his fingers grazed it’s puffy lips when he spanked you again, harder this time. 

He glanced up at you, smirking through the mirror, and did it a third time while you jolted, unable to help the groan that tore its way out of your throat. 

“God, you’re just loving this, aren’t you?”  He chuckled darkly, reaching around your waist to cup your mound in his palm. 

He could feel how soaked your panties were, and his breath hitched in his throat. 

“You are!” He pressed his bulge up against teh swell of your ass, grinding it into you “Shit, you’re fucking soaked, you little slut.” 

“You get off having strangers smack you around?” He muttered into the side of your throat, nipping at the skin lightly, as he dragged the flimsy fabric down your legs .“Huh?” 

You nodded, gnawing on your bottom lip when he suddenly pulled your panties to the side and ran his finger along your slit.

It was his turn to groan. 

Your slick coated his finger immediately, drenching it as he nudged your clit with the pad of his thumb. 

Your back arched and you shook your ass lightly from side to side, rubbing up against his weeping cock. 

Erik dipped a finger into your dripping hole, teasing your entrance until you were whining, rocking back insistently, trying to get him to sink it further. 

He contemplated telling you to use your words, but you seemed stubborn, and he didn’t want to waste another second wondering just how good it would feel to feel your walls wrapped around it. So, he plunged it inside of you. 

You cried out and arched even further into him, whimpering pathetically. 

Immediately, he decided that it felt way too good and that he’d much rather have his cock in you than his fingers. 

You were in for a surprise, but looked slightly confused by the knowing smirk on his face while he started undoing his belt and dropped his pants. 

He kept his gaze locked on yours as he slid the head of his cock through your folds. 

You shuddered, brows pulled together slightly, clearly confused by just how different it felt compared to any other dick you’d ever fucked. There was something cold nudging your clit, but you couldn’t see what. 

He lined himself up with your entrance and snapped his hips forward suddenly, burying himself to the hilt inside your throbbing cunt. 

You both gasped at the feeling. 

You could feel the way his girth was stretching your poor, slick walls, and the strange, but all too pleasant sensation of something dragging along them. 

“Fuck, what is that?” You panted, still confused. 

One of his hands wrapped around the base of your throat, and he pulled you to a stand, holding you so that your back was flush against his chest while his hips rocked into you gently. He was pressing down on your throat enough that your breathing was restricted, but not enough to hurt. 

Suddenly, he withdrew from your warmth, and you whined from the emptiness your walls were clenching around. 

“‘Look.” his breath was warm against your ear. The hand resting on your throat grabbed ahold of your jaw and forced you to look in the mirror as he rubbed himself along your slit, bumping your clit as he went. Just barely visible, poking out from your glistening folds, was the head of his cock. The light caught the silver ball of a thick piercing protruding from his tip. “Ever seen one of these?” 

You shook your head as much as you could with his fingers still digging into your jaw. 

“Feels good, doesn’t it?” Erik continued nudging your clit, thrusting in between your thighs. 

“Real fuckin’ good” you hummed. “I’ve never felt anything that good, shit- put it back in” 

“Ask nicely.” 

“Please?” You whimpered, trying to shift your hips, but it was pointless, there was no way in hell you’d get it back in this position

“That’s it.” He chuckled, nudging you back down to bend over the sink before lining himself back up. “Good Girl.” 

You felt a rush of warmth at his praise, but only had a second to enjoy it before he was slamming back into you.

He set a brutal pace, using his grip on your hips as leverage to fuck you as hard as he possibly could. With every thrust, you felt that damned piercing dragging over that deliciously spongy section inside you, quickly working you up into a mess of whimpers and moans. 

It didn’t take long for you to clamp down around him, spasming as you were unexpectedly thrown into an intense climax, curling your toes as your eyes rolled back and a gruttoral moan fell from your lips. 

Erik cursed under his breath, overwhelmed by the feeling of your walls strangling his cock and spilled deep iside you, painting your walls white with ropes of hot cum. 

He grunted, allowing himself a few more lazy thrusts before pulling out and standing back to watch his seed ooze out of your spent whole while you both caught your breath. 

“Well,” You pulled your pants back up and buttoned them, straightening your top on your way towards the door. “Thanks”

“Thanks?” He choked out a startled laugh, looking amused.

“Yeah, that  was fun.” You shrugged, grinning as you smoothed your hair, stealing a glance at him through the mirror. “Wouldn’t mind doing it again. Look me up, I guess. You know the band, shouldn’t be hard to find me if you want to.” 

“Anyway.” You gave him a wink on your way out the door, not giving im even half a second to open his mouth. “Have a great rest of your night.” 

It took a whopping three days for you to get the notification from instagram. You looked down at your screen and laughed softly to yourself, shaking your head. 

Erik_Campbell has followed you.  Direct message from Erik_Campbell. 

Dividers made by @saradika-graphics MDNI Banner Made by @cafekitsune GIF by @jst2guyz

[senchosuwan]

--- Connections ---

This scene always makes me tear up...

Emma just told Killian she and Henry will leave again, and if that wouldn't be hard enough, he's presented with this wholesome family moment...

Look at that genuine smile, feeling happy for them, turning into a sad expression, being immediately reminded of not just what he doesn't have and probably never will — a family, but also of all the connections he'll soon lose yet again...

Because ever since their shared adventures in Neverland bonds had been knit, and not just with Emma — David had started to warm up, and he developed a caring, mentoring relationship with Henry after Neal's death.

The longing to be a part of them has never been more present...

He knows that they'll be apart the same way they were, when Emma and Henry had to stay, whereas he and everyone else was sent back to the Enchanted Forest a year ago. And even though David and Snow would stay in Storybrooke, they've a newborn to take care of and it wouldn't help curing his aching heart, either.

Making things worse, he once had thought it would be easy to just again become, who he was before meeting Emma and her family, but it was too late...His hardened heart had already softened.

He tried to pretend to be the same villainous pirate, in the end his real morale compass and awoken conscience made it impossible to continue being this person without feeling regret, though...

And he knows that the cycle is about to repeat itself as soon as Emma and Henry leave — the cycle that he'll end up all alone again, this time feeling ten times worse, though, because he's not ruthless Captain Hook anymore...

_____________

3x17 — "The Jolly Roger"

3x20 — "Kansas"

[sometipsygnostalgic]

Toby Fox is fucking crazy.

Usually with sequential videogames what happens is a company makes the first game, it's a hit, they make the second game, it's a hit, and then they go "oh shit, guess we have to make it a Trilogy and have the third game be a Grand Epic Finale", and then the third game is ass and they spend the entire fourth game either undoing their mistake or soft rebooting the series.

Toby has committed to making SEVEN GAMES, each with new variations to gameplay, dozens of new funny characters, entirely new soundtracks composed by himself, new backgrounds, dozens of paths, three thousand lines of dialogue, and at least two characters arcs and two major bosses.

He is aimimg to accomplish more with each chapter's release than AAA publishers can accomplish with a ten year development cycle. And he's already done it four times.

[crystaltoa]

Shoutout to @lesbioniclepod for reminding me about Whenua's kraata collection

It's really hard to imagine the other Turaga both knowing about and being okay with Whenua maintaining a collection of live Kraata that size. And yet, apparently the others contributed to the collection by catching Kraata in secret over the years and then presumably giving them to Whenua to be put in storage.

And I'd find it hard to buy that the Turaga would think that literally all the Kraata had to be stored in stasis and that killing them was not an acceptable option. Especially since none of them expressed objections to killing Visorak back in the day.

So, my guess is that the other Turaga let Whenua keep a collection of them in stasis so that they could be studied and better understood....

...but his siblings may not have been aware of the exact size of Whenua's collection.

I can imagine him telling the others that they ought to have at least one of each kind of kraata preserved in stasis. This seems fairly reasonable to the others. By kinds, he means kinds of power, right? How many types are there? Eight? Ten? Not more than a dozen, surely.

When he insists that nobody kill any kraata until he's had a chance to look at them and make sure he hasn't already got one of them, they begrudgingly accept that. Alright, they think. But this one's insect control, didn't you already have one of those that Matau caught for you a few years back? At which point Whenua admits that when he says "One of each kind", he's referring not just to breed, but also developmental stage. Alright, they think, he's the expert.

None of the others particularly want a lecture on all the gory details of how Kraata develop, which is of course what they'll get if they try to argue with Whenua. An evil slug wouldn't have that many stages in its life cycle anyway, would it? Two or three maximum, surely.

So the others are thinking Whenua has maybe two or three dozen Kraata stashed away somewhere safe. It wouldn't be good if they were released, but they could handle it if they had to.

Whenua, meanwhile is starting to think he should start a backup collection in case something happens to these specimens. He hasn't lied to his siblings... he said at the beginning that they should have at least one of each kind, and they agreed! So a few backups would be allowed. Maybe three or four of each should be sufficient. Or... five? Hmmm.... he doesn't really trust the number five. Six. Everyone likes the number six!

Anyway.

That's how we ended up here...

[inmemoriame]

(Spoilers for Multiple Eitos, Goodbye Eito, and Rebellion routes) I’m no smart guy about media analysis, but Takumi and Eito remind me of the war itself between Futurum and Humanity. In the Rebellion route, Takumi and everyone else agree to abandon humanity in favor of living their own lives on Futurum. They meet the Futurum rebellion and together are able to kill V’ehxness, and (if you choose to save Kamyuhn) over the next 15 years are able to end the war and the cycle of hatred and violence between the two sides.

The only way to get this route is by sparing Eito a second time; sparing him gives him the time to reflect on everything and the truth behind his existence. In Rebellion he wants to start working with everyone again now that they've given up on humanity but comes to genuinely care for them as his friends and finds beauty in their comradery. While I feel like Eito is taken less seriously in Rebellion, having his "hating humanity" schtick as more of a thing to go "oh, you :)" at he does genuinely become Takumi and everyone's friend again somewhat ending his own personal cycle of hatred for Takumi and humanity as a whole. (I don't think he really fully stops hating humanity, but a lot of the time he mentions it, it feels more like a defense used to hide his own social awkwardness.) In the Goodbye Eito route, after Takumi decides not to let him back into the SDU, Eito chooses to leave LDA on his own volition. While most of what I said about him in Rebellion carries over to this route, we see a lot more of his guilt and his desire to be forgiven in this route, really showing how much he's changed since the start of the 100 days. Now, in contrast to all of this, in the Multiple Eitos route, Takumi kills Eito in a fit of rage, accidentally absorbing his hemoanima which contains Eito's consciousness. Takumi continuing this violence and hatred causes Eito to develop an obsessive hatred of Takumi, more than anything seen prior to this or anything from the first timeline, wishing for him to suffer as much as possible before Eito is able to take over Takumi's body. He does this by setting up a challenge for Takumi; since Eito's consciousness was absorbed by Takumi, he also now has a cognitive disorder where everyone's appearance, voice, and speech patterns have been altered to be Eito's. Since there's ten other people, If Takumi is able to find and kill the 11th Eito that has his consciousness attached to it, he'll let Takumi go. Not only does Eito go onto have an obsessive hatred of Takumi, Takumi himself develops a strong hatred of Eito, more then he already had. The biggest show of this is in Ending 11, where Takumi's hatred of Eito gets out of hand and he ends up slaughtering everyone in the school and absorbing their hemoanima all in desperate attempt to kill Eito. I think this route and these endings show off how Eito and Takumi, like the war of humanity versus Futurum, have entered a cycle of hatred and violence that won't end until something changes. I'm not really sure what to do with this analysis, again I'm not particularly skilled at media analysis, but if anyone wants to add onto this or point out anything I missed, I'd love to hear it. I'm nowhere near finished with every route while writing this so I for sure missed something here. ok thats all bye

[victoriousscarf]

Hm.

How should I put this?

I am Bioware's #1 "it's complicated fan." I love going into critical tags, I love reading their choices for filth. I have happily complained for hours about every single Bioware game I have ever played.

But the thing is. I've played almost all of them since Kotor came out in 2003. I have lived through multiple development cycles, multiple shifts in direction, the dark energy controversy between ME 2 and 3, the way ME 2 took a whole different direction from ME 1, the way Inquisition took the set up and lore from DA2 out back and shot it in the face and threw the body in the garbage, the way DA2 changed not only the scope of the story but the aesthetics from DAO, not to mention the timeline fuckery from Awakening to DA2.

My god, I was there when the Revan novel came out, followed by SWTOR and nothing Bioware could do would match the betrayal and pettiness of undercutting everything Kotor 1 and 2 set up just because they contracted Kotor 2 out to Obsidian and decided they were gonna kill the Exile off in a little pissy fit and then drive Revan crazy for kicks.

I remember when Andromeda came out and there was no gay male full scale companion until we guilted them into patching one in.

And yet, I have played every one of these games multiple times. I have loved these games. Sure, it took me until the start of my third playthrough of Inquisition to forgive them for what they did to the story of DA2 (among other complaints I had), sure I sat there stunned at the end of ME 3 when I played it without DLC the first time, but I loved all these games anyway.

Which is to say.

You thinking fucking Veilguard is gonna phase me?

I love this game with my full chest, like I have loved all the other games, warts and all, that came before. I cradle Rook in my hands, and I treasure them the way I treasure all the others. I love the companions, the settings, the lore (which is there! Read the codexes and listen to the people, just like you have to in Inquisition), the plot, the missions, the world, just everything.

What honestly drives me the craziest about most of the critical posts that still come out is... y'all have ruined the Bioware critical tag for a while. But also. I'm starting to wonder if you ever played a Bioware game as it came out before because listen, everything y'all are whining about was whined about during Inquisition and DA2 too.

I am however excited to see how this game will be received in the next year, in the next three years, ten years, just like all the others have changed and matured over time. (And if you're going to insist but it's not! Well, they sure said that about DA2...)

[exhaled-spirals]

« Shubhendu Sharma studied his entire life to be an engineer. [...] “I went into supply development. Our role was to understand the entire process of how a tire is made, or a small part like a nut or a bolt. We would go to the suppliers, and then to their suppliers, until we got to the source of the raw materials. And I started seeing that almost everything starts from a natural resource, and it all ends up in a junkyard. There is nowhere else for it to go but the junkyard.”

[...] What he realized, when he considered every step in the process of making a car, was deeply unsettling to him. “Is it for the good of humanity that we’re making ten million cars every year? Or is it because we want to keep our jobs, keep our machinery running? Because one day, maybe it’ll be the hundredth generation, there won’t be anything left to convert from a natural resource to end up in a junkyard.” That’s when he met the Japanese botanist Akira Miyawaki, who had been hired by Toyota to plant one of his tiny forests at the factory’s campus in Bangalore.

[...] Miyawaki had been invited to explain his method of planting a dense, rapidly growing, self-sustaining forest on any small plot of unused land. An area the size of a few parking spaces would work, although a typical tiny forest is about the size of a tennis court. His ideas stood in sharp contrast to the industrial production cycle Sharma was starting to question. [...He] volunteered to help Miyawaki plant the forest at the Toyota campus. The method had been rigorously tested and systematized. It involved densely planting local native species in a plot of land that had been intensely cultivated and inoculated with soil microbes. Nothing more was required, beyond heavy mulch and a little supplemental water for the first few years. The roots would form a massive web, the trees would grow rapidly, and within a few years, the forest would be practically impenetrable, making it the ideal host for insects, birds, and other wildlife.

Once Sharma saw the method in action, he tried it at home, installing a tiny forest in his backyard. “This was so much more joyous than doing anything else. I could not get this idea out of my mind, that this was something I should be doing for the rest of my life.”

In 2010—just three years after that fateful meeting with Miyawaki—he quit his job. Today he installs tiny forests around the world and teaches people how to do so in their own backyards. As a result of his work, at least 4.5 million trees have been planted in forty-four cities across North and Central America, Europe, the Middle East, and India.

Sharma emphasizes that planting a Miyawaki forest is no substitute for conserving ancient, wild forests. What he does is not reforestation but afforestation, a process of planting a forest on land that is currently treeless. These pockets of forest, whether they’re installed on corporate campuses, in city parks, in unused areas around freeways or airports, or behind someone’s house, can still behave like natural forests by supporting wildlife, sequestering carbon, and controlling erosion. They’re also beautiful, especially in a backyard. Even a tiny forest evolves as the shrubs and smaller trees give way and the larger canopy trees mature. Leaves fall and build a new layer of mulch. Small fruits and nuts attract wildlife. Birds build nests, and caterpillars give way to butterflies. It’s an ever-changing natural panorama. “I think having a forest at your own house is probably the greatest luxury anyone can have,” he said. »

— Amy Stewart, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession

[bootleg-nessie]

Predatory Bananas: an Evolutionary Horror

(Pls read, I literally spent HOURS on this <3)

A friend sent me the following video about the various potential methods of banana locomotion. It got me thinking. How would a banana move? Naturally, as an autist with a special interest in evolutionary biology, I took the joke a little too far and wrote a whole piece on the matter, analyzing the feasibility of each method and the changes they’d need to evolve in order to achieve them.

(Video courtesy of Burning Onion Animation on TikTok, they make great content, go check them out)

The first and most likely way bananas would move is if banana trees evolved to spread their seeds through their fruits rolling down hills like the morphology of #1 suggests. The only major mutations that need to happen are a more pronounced curve and increased rigidity to facilitate rolling and absorb the impact from falling from the tree. Overall, evolving to this point is relatively straightforward. #1 is the most feasible and realistic answer.

For bananas to develop motility like in #4 is theoretically possible with the right environmental pressures and with enough time, though much more difficult. I see this working in one of two ways. First, they could evolve rigid structures that change shape depending on moisture content, using natural dry/wet cycles to move a little more each time it rains, much like the seeds of Erodium Cicutarium (pictured below). The fruits of the banana tree would most likely evolve to have hooks on the end of said structures, contracting and pulling themselves forward a little each time they dry out, and relaxing and resetting their grip on the soil each time they get wet.

The second way I could see this happening is if they evolved true locomotion. True locomotion in bananas would take at least a few million years to evolve (probably more like tens of millions), and even then, movement would be incredibly slow. There exists a plant called the “walking palm” (socratea exorrhiza, pictured below) that’s capable of “walking” using its roots, but it can only travel about 20 meters per year in ideal conditions, and has the resources of the entire tree at its disposal, not just that of a single fruit.

While this is the more likely explanation as to how #4 might happen, it’s not what the video depicts. The video clearly shows a banana dragging itself along like an inchworm, indicating motor cells such as those present in Dionaea Muscipula (venus flytrap, pictured below). Whenever this type of movement in plants occurs, it takes an extreme amount of energy and is generally rather inefficient and slow. In addition to this, the banana is moving its entire mass every time, so it’ll have to move much more slowly to compensate. This means that the banana would probably only be able to travel a few centimeters before decomposing beyond the point of functionality. After a few million more years it’s possible that bananas could evolve to travel as far as several meters after falling off the tree, but the further they go, the more fit each individual fruit needs to be, and the more energy and resources they need. Eventually, it’ll reach a point where the energy expenditure will outweigh the benefit and the fruits will stop evolving to travel any further, which I imagine would plateau somewhere in the 0.5 to 3 meter range. However, the fruits still require a significantly higher amount of energy at this point because they’ve evolved to move autonomously, so trees would likely evolve to produce fewer, but more developed fruits as a result. Overall this is the second most likely way bananas would evolve to move, but the video depicts a time lapse, not footage taken in real time.

The next most likely option is #2, which is where things start to get much more interesting. At this point we are quickly beginning to leave the territory of the banana being a fruit and stepping closer towards the realm of the banana being its own independent organism. Whether the banana is still a single fruit from a larger tree depends on if the video is stabilized or not. First, let’s assume that the video has automatically stabilized the banana within the frame. This means that the banana is moving erratically and aimlessly, with the goal of simply moving as far from its origin as it can. The most simple form of this would be a ballistic dispersal method in which the banana grows curved and under tension, falling off the tree when ripe. Upon impact, the tension is released and banana extends, springing itself upward and outward with a single bounce. But this isn’t what the video shows either, it depicts clear and repeated movement, again suggesting the presence of motor cells much like those likely found in banana #4. In this case it probably evolved in roughly the same way as banana #4, but works less effectively due to having a less stable method of traveling.

But what if the video ISN’T stabilized, and the banana’s staying upright all on its own? In the video, the banana isn’t just moving along a single plane with one set of motor cells like the Venus flytrap. It’s full on galloping. This requires multiple groups of motor cells working together in a coordinated effort. This banana has real-time sensory input to orient and stabilize itself. This means that the banana has evolved some sort of internal gyroscope, much like our inner ear that helps it determine what up and down is, and more importantly, angular rotation. While plants have been observed reacting to and even predicting stimuli in ways that still baffle scientists to this day, this is far more complex than any plant every discovered throughout human history. Everything here points to something more, perhaps rudimentary intelligence, dare I even say sentience.

This begs the question: is it even a plant anymore? At this stage it’s evolved sensory organs and can move independently. But why? Organisms don’t evolve the ability to move without reason. This could mean one of three things. First, it could have evolved the ability to run as a means of spreading its seeds further. But this can’t be the answer. Moving more slowly would be way more efficient for a banana in terms of energy expenditure, and spreading seeds the old fashioned way is still perfectly viable, so it wouldn’t have evolved that way due to lack of necessity. This brings us to the first legitimate possibility: the banana is prey. If the banana were prey, then the ability to gallop most likely evolved as a means of escaping predators and to avoid being eaten. This is further evidence that the banana has evolved beyond being a humble plant as this goes completely against the purpose of fruits, which evolved to be eaten on purpose. Now, the banana’s goal isn’t to be eaten so that its seeds may be deposited elsewhere, its primary objective is to survive. At this point it’s relatively safe to assume that the banana no longer comes from a tree, and now reproduces through fragmentation, or perhaps even live birth. Its lack of leaves suggest that it’s evolved beyond being an autotroph and relying on photosynthesis. But if it no longer gets nutrients from a tree, how does it subsist? It must be getting its energy from somewhere. The most likely answer to this is that banana is a herbivore, and gets its energy from plant matter, which contains a lot of the same nutrients that the banana recently used to get by growing on a tree. Overall, this is the third most likely way the banana would evolve locomotion.

But what if it isn’t an herbivore? This brings us to the other possibility: the banana is a predator. The banana that concerns me the most is banana #3. While all the other bananas have undergone major changes to their morphology, banana #3 appears to be identical to any regular banana, yet it still moves. The only way that such movement could be possible is if the banana had some sort of internal mechanism that moves its center of mass around rather quickly within its outer shell, which also requires an internal gyroscope for balance. I know what you’re thinking; “but this is an incredibly complex mechanism, wouldn’t it be easier to evolve one of the other ways?” To which the answer is yes, it would. But this raises another question with an even more alarming answer: why didn’t it? The answer lies in the banana’s identical appearance to that of a typical Cavendish. Clearly, looking like an ordinary banana is central to its survival strategy. At this point, it’s evolved well past the point of being a fruit and has become the first of an entirely new kingdom of sentient creatures descended from plants.

According to my estimates from the video, banana #3 is only able to move at a pace of around a tenth of a meter per second, maybe a quarter or half of a meter at the most. This means that it probably didn’t evolve the ability to move as a means of running from predators. Based on the physics in the video, my best guess as to how the banana moves is through the use of mostly hollow internal chambers with a central mass (probably a calcified seed) suspended by tendons that can move in any direction, accelerating the banana in that direction. Here I’ve collaborated with the massively talented @pholidia to bring my ideas to light.

Picture it. You’re a lone banana farmer in South America. You’re out harvesting your crops when you see a single banana on the ground. It looks a little weird and bruised, but still totally edible. “No good in letting perfectly good produce go to waste” you think to yourself as you pick up the banana. You go to peel it when suddenly, you feel a sharp shooting pain through your hand. You drop the banana, then fall to your knees. You look around for the wasp or whatever it was that stung you, but you can’t find anything. You collapse in a heap on the ground, unable to control your body. It’s at this point you notice the banana start to move. “Are… are those teeth?” you think to yourself. At this point the venom has taken full effect. You are alone and completely paralyzed, unable to do anything besides observe the banana as it starts moving towards you. Sharp teeth and beady black eyes are fully visible now. It ambles towards you clumsily, moving almost as if it were being controlled by invisible strings like a marionette. It reaches you and starts to chew. It is at this moment that you discover, much to your horror, that the venom is merely a paralytic, and not an anesthetic. Helpless to the venom, you can do nothing but watch as your blood slowly drains out onto the ground as the creature consumes you. Slowly, your vision begins to fade to black. You pass out, either from the pain or the blood loss, you’re not really too sure. You take one last look at the creature, then you’re gone forever.

[du-sailarar-nerilia]

Alagaësia Lore And Headcanons Series, Part 1.5: The Ra'zac Life Cycle

(please note that this is all headcanons)

The Ra'zac life cycle resembles that of a dragonfly, but their family behavior is closer to that of a bee hive and certain bird species

under typical condition, the Ra'zac are a highly social species living in hives

eggs are laid by fully grown Lethrblaka. they are smaller and longer than dragon eggs and their shell resembles porous rock

hatchlings are about the size of a cat and are very much like baby birds. though they are not blind and are highly curious about their surroundings immediately after hatching, they are weak and vulnerable. their exoskeleton remains soft for years and gradually hardens until they grow to the size of an adult human. early after hatching they are incapable of hunting on their own, but they are able to feed on dead or live prey if it is previously immobilized

older juveniles approaching the size of a grown human take on the role of caretakers. their smaller size in comparison to Lethrblaka and their dexterous hands allow them to efficiently care for eggs and younger juveniles (after the Ra'zac war and the near extinction of the species, this task was picked up by the Helgrind cult). Ra'zac whose exoskeletons have sufficiently hardened can also venture outside the hive and hunt on their own. in this life stage they are adept mimics, capable of reproducing human speech

when the right conditions are met, a Ra'zac will undergo partial metamorphosis. it will shed its exoskeleton piece by piece and wings will emerge from the hump on their back. this is an exhausting matter that may take hours and the Ra'zac is blind and largely immobile and dependent on its hive for protection. once free of its exoskeleton, it still retains its humanoid physique, its skin is soft and its wings are frail this intermediate stage may be the one corresponding with the fourth unnamed peak of Helgrind, since it is not technically a separate life stage on its own, it may be the source of questioning the worthiness of being worshipped by the cultists

a Lethrblaka will continue to grow for a few years after moulting, its skin will harden to a leather-like quality and its wings will develop powerful flight muscles. its whole physique becomes longer, sleeker and more aerodynamic, it will develop a head crest and a long tail to aid in maneuvering. these changes also lead to the loss of their speech-mimicking abilities

the role of a grown Lethrblaka is to hunt over large swathes of land, bringing in humans to feed the younger members of their hive. Lethrblaka themselves are capable of eating any other kind of animal, but need to eat relatively little, mostly focusing on providing for their hive. a single Lethrblaka with a hive of ten juveniles at varying stages of growth can easily decimate a village of 150 within half a year

while Lethrblaka are the reproductive stage, it is the Ra'zac that disperse to start new hives. when a hive becomes too large, a pair or a small group of Ra'zac take a number of eggs and settle in an area populated by humans, where they blend in and live undercover as long as they can continue stealthily killing enough humans to feed their younger siblings, or until one of them matures into a Lethrblaka

[gl1tt3r-gutz-and-r0b0tz-sl]

Okay. Stay with me, babes. But after five hours, and half a brain aneurysm, I did it.

SO

One Cybertronian day, let's call it a Rotational Cycle, is 1000 human hrs.

Rotational Cycle: 1000 hrs

There are 41.667 human days in a Rotational Cycle.

9^9 gave me 387,420,489.

There are 387,420,489 Rotational Cycles in a Cybertronian ‘month’.

There are 9 ‘months’ in a Revolving Cycle or ‘year’.

So, multiplying 387,420,489 by 9 gave me 3,486,784,401 Rotational Cycles in a ‘year’

This means there are 145,283,845,636 human days in a Revolving Cycle.

Which means each cycle is roughly 398,037,933 human years.

And because every Cybertronian's spark is linked to a star, their life span is roughly ten billion years, which means they live to be about 25 Revolving Cycles.

Speaking of those 25 Revolving Cycles, they're broken up into five different categories, kind of.

The first Revolving Cycle is the incubation period, when the parental figures combine reproductive energon and fill the tank of the ‘carrier’ i.e. the Dame/maternal figure (it doesn't have to be female), and then put that tank into a pod for the sparkling to form.

Once developed into the shape of a smaller, weaker Cybertronian, the sparkling reaches its infant period, then child, then young adult, then adult. All in five cycles.

Think of it as going from 1 to 20 out of 100 years in five instances.

After that, they just age and age until they hit 25 Cycles and go supernova with their assigned star.

Like I said before, a Revolving Cycle has 9 months in it, all representing the nine primes as each month's Zodiac.

There are three seasons in a year:

Ruby, Citrine, and Sapphire.

Ruby is the coldest season because it represents the red stars. It's also the darkest period of a Revolving Cycle.

Citrine is like a Spring or Fall, being the middle period between Ruby and Sapphire. Representing yellow stars, it's still cool, but not near as cold as Ruby.

Sapphire is the hottest season of the Cycle. It represents blue stars, which are the hottest.

If a sparkling is produced in a Ruby month, they will have red optics and will typically possess a bigger, stronger body type, due to red giants of course.

If they were to be born in a Citrine month, then they would be smaller but more intelligent.

If a sparkling is born in a Sapphire month, then it will be “closer to Primus” due to him being a blue star himself being the star the planet revolves around from about 10,000 or more Astronomical Units away. Those of the Sapphire months will be the strongest, but most average appearing, due to being in “God's image”. It's also why now more typically those who become primes in the newest eras have blue optics.

These seasons carry three months within, though I'm still working on names for them, we'll just use their zodiac to define them.

These three are the Ruby season

Megatronus Prime Nexus Prime Onyx Prime

These three are the Citrine season

Solus Prime Quintus Prime Alchemist Prime

These three are the Sapphire season

Alpha Trion Zeta Prime Prima

The beginning of Ruby and the end of Sapphire are where most clash. Take D-16 and Orion Pax. D-16 was produced on the Megatronus month while Orion was produced on Prima's. Both are the most intense of these seasons and don't mix very well.

Cybertron is split into three territories relating to the seasons. Ruby's territory is the coldest and darkest despite it getting plenty of sun, its inhabitants have exceptional night vision and typically have darker paint jobs.

The Citrine territory is more of a goldilocks kind of area, with little to no overexposure to heat and an overall advance in technology.

The Sapphire territory is the hottest and its inhabitants are typically lighter in color due to the stars fading their paint.

Well, I haven't slept at all and it's 6:40 AM here for me. Bye for now, pooks~!

[artbyblastweave]

Any ideas to connect SU Diamonds and Worm Entities for a crossover?

For the past three years and change, I've been kicking around the idea of the Gempire as the residual result of an entity that botched its own cycle so badly that the central Zion-style figurehead holding the entire operation together is a hundred-thousand-year-gone memory. The result amounts to an entity with serious brain damage; The gems retain elements of the original programming for the cycle- namely, the ability to create anthromorphized avatars reflective of the local culture, and the drive to reproduce and consume planets to perpetuate themselves- but they've completely lost the plot on other important elements, namely the importance of hybridizing with local host species, their historical record, the full extent of their dimensional manipulation capabilities, best practices for resource extraction, and, most crucially, mutation, change and innovation as a desirable outcome.

Rather than an avatar, White Diamond is an intelligence analogous to a Endbringer or Titan who slid into the vacant role as the next-most-powerful autonomous portion of the network, holding the consolidated, stretched-thin remains of the original Network together by her fingernails while also deleteriously superimposing her own residual instinct from her original role onto the entire network- namely, to pacify, homogenize and sterilize host planets if and when a cycle is beginning to get out of control. This hybridized with residual data from previous host species that caused the gempire to organize in a fascimile of imperial structures encountered back when their cycle was still functional; essentially "Playing House" at the societal level, aping the culture of a host species without really remembering why.

The result of this is a "cycle" that's bad at everything it's supposed to do but effective enough that it limps on regardless- supremely energy inefficient, stripping planets bare rather than experimenting, and utterly developmentally stagnant. In the unlikely event that an entity were to cross paths with the Gempire, they'd have an uncanny-valley reaction to it and likely attempt to euthanize it, but compared to most entities the Gempire is tiny- while Shards canonically deploy in the hundreds of millions, the gems tend to reproduce only a few tens of thousands of themselves each time they claim a planet, and they usually only strip mine the handful of "active" worlds that would feature in a normal cycle rather than obliterating all dimensional iterations of it.

Yellow, Blue and eventually Pink are similar constructs to White, brought online to assist her in the project after the "imperial" territorial holdings grew too vast to micromanage. Unfortunately (for the cycle) another one of the things that got lost in translation were the controls meant to keep individual shards from developing autonomy or attachment-to-hosts. When the Gempire hit Earth, Pink Diamond and a significant contingent of the network, after patterning themselves after humans and spending a significant amount of time on the ground, pulled a fragile-one and went native, leading to a localized civil war that ended under unclear circumstances when the other the diamonds glassed the planet from orbit and pulled back their operations to prevent whatever affected the rebels from spreading.

All of this happened about 8000 years before the events of Worm, in a universe about 43 dimensions down the line from anything seen in the Earth Bet Cluster; due to the Gempire having mutated so much as to no longer be immediately recognizable as fellow Entities, and with so few active gems left on the planet in the aftermath of the rebellion, Zion ignored the crystal gems and folded them away into the inaccessible dimensional space, where the events of the show played out much as they did in SU canon. Ironically, Steven is the first ever example of this cycle successfully empowering a host, in the most roundabout way possible.

In my notes, and in keeping with the religious-theme-naming of the canon entities, I usually refer to this whole situation as Nirvana (what else would you call it when they break the cycle?)

[vicetrevni]

I talk about this a lot more on my TikTok, but I'll post about it again here.

ProShipping allows pedophelia.

ProShipping grooms minors.

ProShipping is not a healthy cope.

If you are ok with ProShipping, remember there is a reason why so many despise you and anyone else who is part of that group. There is no genuinely 'good' excuse to be part of that group or even be accepting of it.

Because there are cases where pedos use this as an excuse to groom minors into believing minor x adult is 'healthy'. And that's all it is. To allow pedos to groom children in an 'acceptable' way.

It's the same thing as pedos trying to infiltrate the LGBT community. Because that's what these creeps want, they want the 'acceptance' to harm children as they please and to have their victims accept it as 'healthy'.

Our brains do not stop developing until 25.

Women's sex organs, despite some starting their cycle early as 5 years old, do not fully mature until 18-20.

And consent laws are so children can experiment with one another without breaking the law, not for adults to 'wait it out' or for a 17 year old to get with a ten year old.

And pedos know this, they just don't care. They want to fuck around with kids, regardless of laws or biology. And they'll say that these kids are so 'mature' for their age, that they can 'handle' a 'serious' relationship like an adult can.

BUT THEY STILL WANT TO FUCK A KID.

Fictional or not, you are showing that it's ok for these creeps to sexualize anyone underage and that you are ok with them doing so.

I obviously am not for censorship at all. And for good reason - because we already have anti-pedo laws in place, and we should fucking use them. Especially if these creepy try and use fictional media to effect the real world, their goal is to absolutely have the world 'accept' the fact that they think fucking kids is 'ok'.

If you are a ProShipper (or rather a DarkShipper bc that's the correct term for you all), go get fucking therapy to work through your trauma. Or just maybe not think that sexualizing minors will help you 'cope', because the reality is you are a predator if you think any of this is ok to do.

If you accept this, but are against the exploitation of any women, then you are fucking gross. Because you are accepting of female minors getting groomed/raped/assaulted, but not when they become adults. And that is a *you* problem that needs to get fixed. You are harming *everyone* around you.

FICTIONAL OR NOT, THIS STILL EFFECTS REALITY.

[aromantic-ace]

Humans Are Weirds/SpaceOrcs: Junkers

I've seen that quite a bit but what if the thing that made humans so strange and deadly was their ability to use anything in any state, what if the aliens are so much advanced technologically that they have developed some safety mesure such as not using a component if it got the slighest damage, "just buy a new one" they say "or go to the workshop and get a fresh one, decadent component shouldnt be used". And then, here come the humans.

It was my first time on a human vessel, my superiors warned me about the human and their excentricity, that i should read carefully the Intergalactic Manuals About Humans and learn the most i could from the specie still using a technology old enough that even my grandparents barely heard of it.

I wasn't expexting much when i boarded on the ship, it seemed nice and i was here for 14 cycles to help the humans explore the void of space, some kind of guide telling them where they could go and where they couldn't. To be honest i was kind of curious to see how those fleshbags were going to navigate.

The captain, a Lady of roughly 49 humans years with a missing eye welcomed me and offered to give me a tour of the ship, it felt weird for the captain of a vessel to give a tour to a guest but i already knew human were weird but.. have they got no shame ? To be so open like that ? It's dangerous, more than one specie would take advantage of that. But anyway i accepted her offer as i had to live there for the next 14 cycles and everything seemed right at first, i met Colonel Stabby their... cleaning robots with what looked like a military knife strapped on it and explored quite a bit of the ship. All was good, just a few holes to patch after a rough travel in a asteroid field, until i saw the state of their engine room.

I don't know how to describe it other than by saying "How are they still alive ?", their reactor looked no where like the picture we were sent, wires were coming out of the side in a chaotic mess, the core looked like it was pieced together multiple time before being strapped on to make sure it wouldn't move, i'm pretty sure i saw some kind of caged wheel being used as a way of kicking the reactor into action and one of the crew was using the heat produced to Cook food ! When i asked the captain about this she simply shrugged and told me that this reactor was doing fine for over twenty humans years and that there was no reason for it to not continue doing so, apparently humans tech is built to stay usable even when damaged and for extremely long period of time. Her reactor was supposed to be changed at least ten humans years ago !

I immediatly asked to leave the ship on the instant and went back to bring my reports to higher ups, i was stunned to learn that it was no special case, those kind of ship were well known and called "Junker" because they were full of junks. But the weird thing was that out of all the humans vessels those were the most dangerous in a fight, because the humans usually pieced together old and new tech to fight, making it hard to know what would hit you, they apparently roam in the battlefield arter battles to collect scrap to add to their vessel. I asked to have my affectation changed and promised myself to never step in a ship where every component could be throw at the bin again, Humans are definitively too weird !