artists, this is ur reminder to start drawing references or redesign your original characters before artfight in july this year

edit: if you dont know what artfight is, here's the link to the info page:

9, 23 for the end of year mem (and 1 because. Yes. must be acknowledged)

meme link / cc'ing shadowsplice because the lot of these concern him lmao

Best month for you this year?

june is a pretty reliable answer most of the time because it's my birth month, but this time around it was framed with catching spiderverse on said birthday + fall out boy live at the end of the month with t and i couldn't really top that. i almost want to say november but honestly the operative word in its case would be memorable lmfao—for the rest of my life i'm gonna have to explain that i began dating my boyfriend two days before i had my fuckin wisdom tooth surgery.

If you could send a message to yourself back on the first day of the year, what would it be?

in all legitimacy i think if i had the chance to hold a conversation with that me at that point i'd open my mouth and just start laughing. in a temporal prime directive type situation i couldn't hope to divulge as much as i'd like—as much as i'd think would be funny as hell—rather i'd clap myself on the back and inform with absolute unrepentant gusto that i was not coming back from this one. if i wasn't beholden to that... i'm not specifying it here!

Song of the year?

honestly! it's hard to pick! like yeah it's choosing from a bunch of fob tracks lmao but they've each meant something individual to me over the year. honorable mention goes to headfirst slide, which has little to do with the song's content but remains emblematic as a kickstart of several of the year's sentimental throughlines (and fucking owned to hear live, we were convinced we weren't gonna). apart from that it's, either: heaven, iowa—a song whose full significance i'm honestly not sure how to explain without. being extraordinarily roundabout, but which we also heard live, and; it might sound a little ridiculous or even just typical of concertgoing, but. it's hard to describe what it was like getting lost in the sea of the audience to that song, at that time, in particular. it's a junction, a crossed threshold of a song, and it will always be linked to a time and a relationship and a point—firmly centered in this year and the dead of summer desert heat, long after the sun had gone down, the air thrumming, the sky and sanity hazed over with spotlights, those specific circumstances. here we are, untouched, forever.

but on a slightly more personal note, i got a lot of mileage out of coffee's for closers this year, also. it's a song with a lot of significance for spencer, in particular immediately off the back of the Incident & during that lull in time while shiloh's healing and she's just trying to parse it. and i might write an entire essay on how and why, but suffice to say; change lies at the heart of spencer's story, especially her complicated relationship to it. change is not something she makes the habit of dealing in... granted the one notable exception of her transness. so the song itself has fucking nothing to do with that, but i drew the connection regardless.

it was also writing spencer this year that pushed me to start identifying with trans. as an individual and as a character, spencer cannot be excised from a hope for a better future—a participation in the choice for such. so as a song, it's a little uninteresting, ultimately underwhelming on its face, but that one refrain stuck in my craw. change will come. it's couched in a framework of disbelief, an explicit lack of hope—if you aren't in the position to get what you want now, you never will be—but always that inevitability. that inherent contradiction stuck with me, hit much harder than it would have otherwise. i think that strange tone of resignation and naïve cynicism woven with inevitability, the disillusionment & isolation but dense presence of catharsis, functions as a very specific marker of where i was at for most of this year. gonna be one of those tracks that always put me right back where i was at the time i memorized it.

Fun Fact: Togrutas are capable of echolocation

It was weird.

"V-Man!"

That man was completely blind... and yet. I could feel like he could see me.

I was right.

— Ectolocation AU

an assortment of bad batch memes for your perusal and enjoyment, lovingly handcrafted by yours truly

future lifeform (2020)

Ahsoka I love you but please never take your headband off again.

wait does this finally settle the question of "where are Ahsoka's ears"??

Dolphins and whales use sound to communicate, navigate and hunt. New research suggests that the collections of fatty tissue that enable toothed whales to do so may have evolved from their skull muscles and bone marrow. Scientists at Hokkaido University determined DNA sequences of genes which were expressed in acoustic fat bodies—collections of fat around the head that toothed whales use for echolocation. They measured gene expression in the harbor porpoise (Phocoena phocoena) and Pacific white-sided dolphin (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens). Their findings were published in the journal Gene.

Continue Reading.

Well, here are the designs for my AU!!!🐍

Made in commission by my lovely friend @yulyeong-k 💜

She did my girls justice!!!

𝖍𝖚𝖓𝖌𝖊𝖗 𝖕𝖆𝖓𝖌𝖘

this boop thing needs to be permanent. the serotonin levels i'm getting are comparable to hard drugs

💐💐💐💐 bouquets for ALL of your ocs!!! (or just the ones you want to write for lol)

I don't know what meme this was for to link it anymore but 'course I'm gonna do Spencer now.

desert bluebell

arizona poppy

blue lupine (change, cycle of life and death, hunger)

wormwood (absence, bitterness, judgement)

white azalea (familial duty, wealth, caution, femininity, also poisonous and employed in death threats!)

aspen leaves (clarity of purpose, sensibility at the expense of oneself)

blue flax (domestication, growth, devotion)

I don’t know what this means but I also know I get it I get their connection I understand

Grote's Bertholdia Moth: when bats are detected nearby, these moths emit a rapid series of ultrasonic clicks that act as a "jammer," interfering with the bat's sonar signals so that the moth can avoid detection

The Grote's bertholdia moth (B. trigona) is capable of emitting about 4,500 ultrasonic "clicks" per second. While there are other types of moths that use ultrasonic signals (in various ways) to avoid being preyed upon by bats, none of them have a more rapid-fire pace than this species.

The barrage of signals provides the moth with a way to remain hidden, because it interferes with the echolocation that bats use to navigate and locate prey.

As this article from Smithsonian explains:

... when approached by the bats, the moths produced their own ultrasonic clicking sounds at a rate of 4,500 times per second, blanketing the surrounding environment and cloaking themselves from sonar detection.

This article also expands upon the use of ultrasonic signals among moths:

Like other nocturnal insects, moths need to contend with bats. Unlike grasshoppers or beetles, they have soft bodies without spines or hard cuticles to protect them. Yet bats’ reliance on echolocation has given moths a way to avoid ending up as food: by tapping into their predators’ acoustic signals. Many have evolved ears that can hear the calls of bats. Some moths make ultrasonic squeaks, chirps, or clicks to warn their predators (honestly or not) that they are poisonous. Others generate near-constant, ultrasonic buzzes capable of jamming bat sonar. 

Sources & More Info:

Smithsonian Magazine: How One Moth Species Can Jam Bats' Sonar Systems

The Scientist: Many Moths Speak Up to Ward Off Bats

Science.org: Moths Block Bats' Sonar

PubMed: High Duty Cycle Moth Sounds Jam Bat Echolocation

Journal of Theoretical Biology: Neural Representation of Bat Predation Risk and Evasive Flight in Moths