sophia_sol | Entries tagged with anent: dinosaurs and paleo

one

recently I was telling someone about crop milk and it is such a delightfully cursed bird fact that I have to share it here too!

did you know that mammals aren't the only living things to produce milk? a select few bird species have independently evolved it too! pigeons, flamingos, and emperor penguins all secrete milk from their crop to feed their young! lactation is even stimulated by prolactin, the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals!

crop milk has fat and proteins, like mammal milk, but no carbohydrates. it's also got the various immune boosting stuff and other similar intangibles

In pigeons, crop milk is....not quite a liquid. it's a pale yellow semi-solid that has been compared to cottage cheese.

flamingos have liquid crop milk! but it's bright red that looks like blood!!

(the colour fades over time though, it only looks like blood for the first week or so after hatching)

all I've been able to determine about penguin crop milk is that it is "thick"

two

I love being able to just go into the css stylesheet for my website and alter a detail about how lists are formatted....and then that change is automatically enacted for every list on every page of my site! it's so cool. coding is cool!

three

just finishing up listening to a podcast episode about pterosaurs and *dreamy sigh* pterosaurs are just so cool you guys

four

me spitballing funny fic ideas with a friend, and oh shit now I really want to write one of them!

it's amazing to me now that I used to struggle so much with coming up with fic ideas to write...these days I have far more than I can actually get to!

five

something I learned recently: it does not matter WHAT name I changed my irl name to, a certain type of cis people will find a way to hear a feminine name no matter what your name is, if they read you as female

I thought I had just insufficiently considered what my name could be misheard as! but no the problem is not with me.

posting about pterosaurs DOES mean I had to update my dinosaur tag. bc pterosaurs are not dinosaurs and I needed my tag to be actually inclusive!

one

I love how in the Merlin recordings of bird noises you can listen to, some are quite recent but some are decades old. The file for the song of the sora is from 1960! When I play it to learn what a sora sounds like, I'm listening to a bird from a different world... but its song is still relevant to me today

two:

xie lian's bamboo hat is a ship of theseus situation, right? there's no way it could survive intact for so many centuries, without any spiritual power to maintain it, so xie lian repairs it whenever necessary, and over time every single bit of bamboo is replaced (multiple times), bit by bit. but it's still the same hat!

three:

damn, early vaccine people were hardcore:

On May 19, 1924, Spencer put a large dose of mashed wood ticks, from lot 2351B, and some weak carbolic acid into his arm by injection. This vaccine worked, and for some years after it was used by people in that region to convert the illness from one with high fatality rate (albeit low incidence) to one that could be either prevented entirely (for many of them) or modified to a non-deadly form

(was I furiously googling tick-borne illnesses after finding a tick attached to me? MAYBE. ughghhhh I hate ticks)

four:

LOOK AT THIS DINOSAUR ART I COMMISSIONED. I'm gonna tattoo it on my body!

https://www.tumblr.com/sophia-sol/749827050436755456/artists-tags-commissionsart-by

five:

I enjoy that I've now been listening to enough paleontology podcasts that I can hear someone say "another case of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny" and just, like, nod along

translation: it's not unusual for the baby version of an animal to have traits that are shared with a more basal part of its lineage, which it loses as it grows up, just as its species lost that trait from its ancestors over time

in this particular case the animal being discussed is a beaked toothless archosaur, which comes from a toothed lineage, and the baby of this archosaur has teeth and then loses them and develops a beak as it grows up into an adult. very cool!

one

It's been about two months now of spending a bit of time working on my writing every evening at bedtime, and it continually amazes me how well it works and how much I like it. I enjoy the process of writing so much more like this! I never expected to be the kind of person with a daily writing habit; that seemed like it would never work for me and I thought people who did it were fascinatingly alien. guess I'm an alien lol!

my word count goal for each day is tiny (100-200 words) but I love to see my fic increase in size bit by bit, and to look over what I've written and see how much I like the story I'm telling

every time I stop writing for the night, it's at a point where I have no idea where I'm going next. all the next day I continue to not know, but I don't stress about it. and having so much time for my subconscious to process it between sessions of writing means that when I get back into bed for the night and open my fic to write the day's words, I'm able to figure out what to write next! and it feels so good

two

I have never gotten any tattoos before due to being afraid of needles, but I worked on that phobia and it's much less of a problem now....and I have a tattoo idea I love.

which is:

description of dinosaur-themed tattoo idea

dinosaurs are cool, right? and the scientific process is cool, and paleoart is cool! what if we take an example of a dinosaur which has gone through significant evolutions in our understanding of its appearance over time, and create line drawings of the scientifically accepted understanding of the dinosaur at two different points in the past plus our current most up to date understanding, and then line up the three versions of the dinosaur in a row on my forearm.... with space left for an even more up to date version to add onto it in the future as our understanding continues to grow

the thing is. I need to be able to get this art drawn by someone who has an art style I like, and has sufficient paleo background to know what they're doing in depicting these dinosaur variations, and is taking commissions!

I would definitely want this dinosaur to be a theropod dinosaur, one of the ones we're now sure had feathers. and I'm feeling fond of oviraptor in specific! not because it's my fave kind of dinosaur (I don't have just one fave!) but because it's particularly interesting in terms of its history in scientific misunderstandings of it, so it would be thematically resonant in this tattoo context

three

I just! am so fond of bingqiu! the way they're incapable of normal healthy emotional communication but are so crazy with respect to each other that they can yes-and each other into truly wild displays of horny possessiveness!

it's endlessly fun to play with. characters who WILL hold the idiot ball but only in extremely specific ways that nobody else could ever match. but they match each other! 🥰

four

"x character makes a different choice at a significant canon moment" is a fairly popular type of canon divergence au, and it's interesting to me to think about how it often doesn't work for me. in most contexts in a canon there's a reason the character makes the choice they did, so if the story changes their choice out of nowhere, it doesn't feel grounded in the narrative and in the character.

often these fics are about making things nicer for the characters in question because the canonical choice is ouchy, and I get why that's popular, but I usually find it boring!

Details on what I find more interesting than that

I think I'm just more interested in the question of why people make the choices they do. and less interested in "let's turn this story into straight-up fluff," though there is of course a spectrum of how much this kind of story is interested in going straight for the fluff.

I think to do this type of fic in a way I'm most likely to be into, is to write it so that there's a small but significant change BEFORE the moment of decision, which allows the situation to be just different enough that the character would make a different choice. and even then I'm more interested in exploring the things that lead up to that moment of decision, what makes the character choose what they do, how the change to canon has affected things. Ending the story with "they made the good choice" rather than beginning with it; that's the happy ending right there!

or make the fic an exploration of how you'd think that this choice would be immediate happy ending times, but actually has its own complications and problems as well.

or make it a time loop!

five

As you may or may not know, I have been a power user of online bookmarking services for nearly my entire time in fandom. I was of course on delicious back in the day, until it got altered into unusability, and then I switched to pinboard. I've been trucking along with pinboard ever since.

But I heard that the pinboard guy is a jk rowling supporter these days, and I'd been thinking about trying to leave pinboard anyway because it seems to be basically abandonware at this point. But the jkr support was the tipping point on overcoming the inertia of staying with what I know.

Extended description of my efforts and successes in setting up a self-hosted bookmark manager after finding no other good options online

I'd heard good things about raindrop.io but when I gave it a try, despite some interesting features, I ran into major problems. My biggest problems with it were 1. that it truncates all bookmark descriptions and tags after a certain length, to save space, and I use a LOT of tags and description space; and 2. that I couldn't actually get the website to let me log in on firefox. So that was a deeply disappointing result for something that had seemed promising.

I also took a look at larder.io because it looked intriguing, but it failed to import the description field from my pinboard export, so that was a nope right out of the gate!

After a bunch of reading articles and listicles about other bookmarking service options, all the other online bookmarking services I could find were even less suitable for my needs, and I was getting pretty disheartened.

But then I learned from a friend about the option of setting up Linkding on a personal website as a way to self-host bookmarks, so that you don't have to rely on a service provided by someone else anymore, and it was so exciting to think of having personal control over my own bookmarks like that! I knew I had to give it a try.

I am very glad I went down that rabbit-hole of teaching myself css earlier this year for the purpose of ao3 site skin development, because it made me feel a lot more confident in my ability to try out unfamiliar tech things, and indeed my rudimentary css knowledge was helpful in keeping me from feeling quite so lost in the process.

Linkding has particular requirements around getting it integrated into a website, so I gather this means that what I did to get it set up is playing "my first website" on hardmode. But here's what I did:

I followed the "start a website" steps at https://landchad.net/

And then the linkding instructions here: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-own-bookmark-manager-with-linkding/

It definitely involved some moments of deep confusion, but I figured it out eventually, and I'm super happy with the result! You can see my public bookmarks here: https://linkding.aviansoph.com/bookmarks/shared

Having my very own website with my very own bookmarking instance feels very "I am learning the forbidden magic" in a gleeful way tbh

But just because I have this set up does not mean I am done! For I would like to CUSTOMIZE my linkding instance!

Linkding has a built-in way to customize a user's view of it using custom CSS, but that's only for what that specific logged-in user sees, rather than changing the appearance of the public bookmarks page for visitors, so that doesn't quite accomplish what I'm wanting to do. I am investigating how to make more direct changes to my linkding instance but I'm still on shaky ground there. (if you have any useful advice, I'm all ears!!)

Also I want to do things with the rest of my website, aviansoph.com. As I mentioned above, I'm playing create-a-website on hardmode for the sake of linkding, so I can't follow most of the guides you find online for building a personal website. But it looks like if I set up an FTP server on my VPS I should be able to make a reasonable system for doing my website? I haven't had time to try this yet but we shall see!!

I can't believe it took me until my mid-thirties to become the kind of nerd who has their own website for the purposes of cataloguing information. I feel like this is one of the kinds of nerd I was destined to be all along.

whoops this week you get five things, I couldn't narrow it down!

one

the current state of research into feathers on dinosaurs (and pterosaurs!) is so INTERESTING, we keep learning new things that complicate our understanding, and it's possible that proto-feathers are a basal trait to the archosaur ancestor of both dinosaurs and pterosaurs?!! OR that feather-like structures convergently evolved like 4 or 5 times within archosaurs, which is ALSO super cool. either option is just so exciting!!!

we do know though that all coelurosaurs -- this includes tyrannosaurs -- are from a feathered lineage. so any coelurosaur either had feathers or was an oddity who evolved from feathered relatives to no longer have feathers.

It's hard to say for sure though about a lot of specific species because feathers don't preserve well in most contexts so we just don't have evidence.

but still. LOTS of feathered dinosaurs for sure.

so many feathery possibilities out there!

two

did you know! you could be a discovery type of writer and still find outlines helpful? it's just that you write the outline to cover the parts of the story you've ALREADY written, so you can better see your structure and remember your story beats as you keep going!

three

I love.... friendship 💖

I love all the different kinds of friendship one can have, and how they each bring a different kind of wonderfulness to your life!

four

in retrospect it was very trans egg of me in high school to be like "idk why this is but it is very emotionally important to me that I be allowed to sing in my school's men's chorus; I have a decent tenor voice and my gender shouldn't be a barrier"

AND to be able to TELL people I was in a men's chorus! I got so much satisfaction out of that!

(yes the men's chorus did let me in. thank you to the director for being a terrifying teacher but a decent person.)

five

a thought from 2022 when I was attempting to have a fandom-specific twitter presence:

pidw mobing is just.....so good to think about

I think they don't talk about it, they don't act on it, they maybe don't even realise they feel it, but they are each other's most stable and reliable connection, no backstabbing or politicking or pretense

even when they're angry with each other it feels like a relief. no secrets between them. lbh can safely let all his worst qualities be visible, no need to turn on the seductive charm. mbj can relax in the knowledge he's not being played by someone who pretends to care.

mbj will do whatever his lord requires of him. lbh will protect his trusted lieutenant.

any other feelings are unnecessary for them to analyse or pay attention to

I started to put together a list of things that I currently find it rewarding to spend time doing or thinking about or learning about, or am interested in getting into, and um. that is too many put some back.