Poogona

joined 2 years ago
 

This funky-looking snake is the Tentacled Snake

To answer your question, the tentacles are little sensory organs. They hunt fish underwater, so maybe they help? They have a better tool than those tentacles for hunting fish, though, and it's behavioral.

For context, fish have a few extremely quick "starts" that are deeply embedded instinctive responses to threats. They happen quicker than a larger animal can really even think, and they start with a specific bend of the body. The most studied (and the most common I think?) is the "C-start", so named because it involves the fish bending its body into a C-shape away from a threat before they start swimming away.

Snakes have quick predatory reflexes, but a fish small enough for them to eat will be quicker. To overcome this fact, tentacled snakes have an incredibly simple and elegant trick.

To put it simply, the snake "herds" the fish into its mouth. It will slide in alongside the fish out of striking range, and suddenly flick a few vertebrae down the length of its body, on the opposite side of the fish from where the snake's head is. When the fish then instinctively "c-starts" away from the movement, it flees directly into the snake's waiting mouth.

Yes, this snake abuses the fish's aggro mechanics for maximum farm efficiency

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Honestly I think it might be why expression is something people (or at least I) seem to need. Bundling up the way I feel into a little "scene" to be distributed to others means that I have turned my grim ass emotions into something more solid that I can maybe pick apart and recontextualize. The cloud of death becomes something I can point to and moan about, maybe even joke about, instead of being my reality that I am stuck with.

edit: What plants are you growing?

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago (4 children)

The grief hurts but I think the part that has me particularly fucked up is the constant presence of death in my home now. Two pretty old parents and the remnants of many absent pets means it feels like everywhere I look I am reminded of mortality, and that's without mentioning the awareness of genocide in the wider backdrop.

I gotta get started back up writing something bigger than little practice exercises soon I think, it's the only method I know for processing this type of mental sewage

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 16 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Man I lost like 3 pets this year and I'm feeling lonely as fuck and I can't really complain to my friends about it because they are dealing with much bigger problems right now, this sucks

Yeah yeah, your marriage is struggling, okay yeah you are making a lot of extra suicide jokes lately, yes yes I am happy you're recovering from your gender reassignment surgery

I happen to miss my dog and I reserve the right to be sad today

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago

I kinda want to defend cumtown but also I don't think cumtown wants to be defended so I won't

At least I remember Nick Mullen making jokes about IDF soldiers bravely requesting APCs to clear out orphanages back in like 2017

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 4 points 1 week ago

Who doesn't love a bit of class betrayal?

I often think of Quixote and Sancho being an example of two people becoming "proletarians" (for lack of a better term) from opposite directions. Quixote's madness makes him become more of a genuine person who takes part in the world around him for a change while Sancho's exposure to such madness carves away at his more selfish lumpen tendencies as he realizes how the madness of his companion reflects upon him in the eyes of others. See also: Julian and Ricky from trailer park boys

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

I feel like I have seen this done but still miss the point, you know? Like there's the classic duo of sheltered princess and gritty merc, but in my experience it usually it winds up being about the sheltered person proving they are actually very "with it" in their own way and the gritty guy learning that royals are actually cool and fine.

To really capture the literary significance of a Quixotic figure, I think they must be in many ways pitiable and ridiculous to the point of frustration, with the pragmatist coming off as a bit of a user since Sancho at first is planning to just let this rich weirdo self-destruct as long as he gets paid along the way. This could still be done with the sort of beautified anime style, but in a sense I almost feel like it's a dynamic that works best with people who are maybe a little bit uglier.

I don't think it's a shortcut to being compelling but it breaks the mold of the usual "opposites who learn to like each other" buddy dynamic.

(Also don't let me deflate any ideas of yours I'm just discovering with these posts how much I apparently care about a book from the 16th century)

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Any characters with the duo dynamic of Don Quixote/Sancho Panza is top tier imo

Privileged fancylad whose delusional mode of existence is born from his alienated life but paradoxically is also what allows him to connect with people in a way that is free of judgement, alongside a devoted pragmatist born of poverty who discovers the vocabulary for a kind of imaginative happiness through being unable to deny his instinct to care for the ridiculous person he is forced by circumstance to travel with

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago

It is based it IS based and the people who do it have extremely correct opinions and are attractive

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 19 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails "a bunch of lesbos" and he wasn't even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 7 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Friend: You finished your book? Let me read it!

Me (clutching my face with white knuckles, shivering, wide-eyed): Of course dear friend, just needs a few tweaks

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Skeletons = infrastructure of the body

Skeleton warriors are just armed proletarians

[–] Poogona@hexbear.net 9 points 1 week ago (3 children)

These losers want to turn one of our greatest evolutionary gifts, our ability to recreationally nut, into a problem

Fuck that, I'm not going back to breeding seasons or heat cycles.

 

Title is a relationship I see brought up a lot when people are trying to figure out what individual compulsions or tendencies might be at the root of fascism, conservatism, etc. I remember Matt Christman bringing up the trauma of WW1 when describing the rise of European fascism and also describing Glenn Beck's awful Xmas special coming from a trauma-inspired hyper-sentimentality. (The state of Israel seems relevant here too but it feels super obvious and uninteresting to add it)

It makes a kind of intuitive sense to me, this idea that wounded people who lack the emotional vocabulary understand how they are hurt would propagate their trauma onto others and let this drive their politics. But I'm also annoying and therefore cautious of things that make intuitive sense, and this feels a little too "just-so."

I dunno, this site has a bunch of smarty pantses who have read about more things than funny-looking animals, which is all I know. Has anyone read anything or have anything to share about this relationship? I like a good narrative and it is a very compelling one

 

So there's this documentary I saw many years ago called Onibus 147. Long story short, it's about a kid in Rio who held some people in a bus hostage. I think it was an incredible experience to watch it but it has been like a decade since I did. Still, for some reason it has never left my mind. I can't say it traumatized me or anything, but I was a different person after watching it. I'm not sure if I would have the political opinions I have today without watching this documentary.

Look, I just want to talk about this movie. If you are reading this thread and you've seen it jump in here and say something because it makes me really sad to think that the name Sandro Nascimento will someday be completely forgotten. Being exposed to the story of Nascimento and the way it ended was probably the first time I remember truly feeling anger at the good ol boys in blue, the first time I was able to truly conceive of what poverty means, the first sight I caught of the grinding, meat-splattered gears underneath the floorboards.

Maybe it's not even an amazing movie, maybe I shouldn't rewatch it and open that old wound, but right now it doesn't really matter because I can't find the god damn thing anywhere. If you know where it's uploaded or where it can be found let me know.

view more: next ›