drferox:

I just want to mention that in my last ask (if tumblr didn’t eat it) I
only ask about the apex predator thing cause I have an idea for a one
shot story. I am doing my own research but just wanted to hear what you
think from a medical perspective who understands it better

Opposable thumbs.

It’s a bit of a weird question, because animals and nature don’t work like this. There’s no animal that’s a ‘perfect killer’ or it’s going to out-compete its prey and starve. Real animals, especially apex predators, are also highly adapted to the environment in which they live. Tigers and Great White Sharks are both excellent and successful apex predators, but if you take one and put it into the habitat of the other, it’s not going to do so well.

Predators in general are killing to eat. If they’re not hungry then why spend the energy? There are always exceptions to the rule, of course (domestic cats, feral dogs, foxes) and these exceptions cause significant ecological damage when they predate too heavily on their prey species, and may even hunt their preferred prey to extinction.

An animal isn’t just a killing machine, either. As a species they need to be able to interact with other individuals for reproduction. They may need to groom themselves or construct shelter.

If the question is rephrased as ‘what traits make an animal especially destructive or good at killing other animals’ then the answer is versatility, adaptability and being just a little bit better at things than the other species living in the area. I mean, Brushtail possums were introduced to New Zealand and developed an appetite for birds! Just because they could!

So the traits required are highly dependent on the environment the animal is in, as well as what other species are present. But to be honest, humans do a pretty good job at fitting your original description.

Predators in general are killing to eat. If they’re not hungry then why spend the energy? There are always exceptions to the rule, of course (domestic cats, feral dogs, foxes) and these exceptions cause significant ecological damage when they predate too heavily on their prey species, and may even hunt their preferred prey to extinction.

The interesting thing, to me, with the three listed exceptions here is that all three of them are still only killing to eat, but they’re exhibiting forward planning. Foxes will hunt more than they can readily eat at one go, and cache the rest for later. Domestic cats will hunt more than any one individual can eat, because they’re social enough that they want to make sure that the whole cat colony can eat – the excess is usually given to pregnant or nursing females, and kittens who are learning how to hunt and ready to start eating solids; non-feral domestic cats exhibit a similar behaviour, which is likely due to them wanting to help support what they regard as their family. I wouldn’t be surprised if feral dogs engage in both of these behaviours.

homestuckhomestuckhomestuck:

(2011) Homestuck as a general phenomenon was very active and developed at a swift pace from the time it was published (2009) onwards, especially in 2012-2013, including and past the first years of the Homestuck Kickstarter Project, a.k.a Hiveswap.

Between 2009 and 2012, Homestuck as a webcomic was infamous for updating daily, constantly, multiple times a day, at all hours, for years. There was a calculated average that Homestuck updated 5.5 pages per day, dropping entire bundles of updates of character interaction and plot reveals frame by frame, posted as fast as Hussie could write it. Though it wasn’t immediately obvious, this pace was sleeplessly breakneck, Hussie allegedly didn’t do anything but live, breathe and dream Homestuck for at least four years straight. I’m serious when I say updates came at all hours. I would wake up 2am on a week night and idly check MSPA to see if there was a new update, sort of like a trained parrot. Then in five minutes I’d tab back over to the Homestuck tab and refresh, just in case. 

This lead to an phenomenon appropriately dubbed “upd8 culture,” which became the basis of the sheer evangelical furor people still associate with the Homestuck fandom. Quick history: MSPA fans originated and migrated over from the Penny Arcade forums, Reddit, and 4chan to nestle permanently within the bowels of 2011 – 2013 tumblr, and were best described from a distance as ‘zealous.’ Even remembering it now almost feels like recalling a distant riot. If you didn’t cosplay, write up a detailed theory post, or scribble up a crazy level of appropriately detailed fanart within 10 or so minutes any given upd8, you were buried under the force of post overload and were officially late to the party. After years of this, fans had some idea of just how dedicated it came off as, which was used to further spur on fandom and made Homestuck into the most meme filled in-joke community you could possibly imagine. 

What’s frustrating about describing Homestuck and Homestuck fandom is they both heavily affected each other and were both unique experiences within themselves, which makes actually trying to get across the atmosphere and of the early 2010s a wordy process. Homestuck heyday updates regularly crashed tumblr servers, which became an actual fake rss way of seeing how much the plot progressed that day, which is unusual even if the tumblr servers 2011-2013 were not very robustly programmed. The bigger the update, the faster the crash. I could tell you Homestuck dominated tumblr to the point it had a virulent hatedom of people who had never even read it and constantly saw it and never understood what was happening in it, and fans couldn’t stop themselves from chattering about it all the time. One thing that has to be noted is all this continual bickering and movement and development and competitive content production was honestly fun as hell. 

Besides constant updates and a continual stream of new content, the story was completely unpredictable. Game-changing plot twists continued to happen up until the very ending, and while this made Homestuck’s plot happily convoluted, for fans this meant one thing they never lacked for was barely solvable mystery. Even the (fan)artists and (fan)musicians hired to work on Homestuck had to guess what would happen next even if they were part of animating the next update. Under similar principles of an ARG, story presentation was created with the vague expectation fans would work together to explain to each other what just happened.

What this meant in conjunction with Hussie’s oddly accurate tabs on fandom theory was that when an update dropped you had to release whatever you were doing fast, or you would be outdated, wrong, inaccurate, or irrelevant at some undisclosed unspecific time, very soon. Canon and fanon directly pulled from each other, especially in the small character details. The very fact the comic spun on such accurate knowledge of fandom that was purposefully fostered between fandom and canon means that even now reading Homestuck while updating is considered an experience different from an archival read, even though Homestuck was always a self-contained story.  

Upd8 culture followed like this: Popular fan theories had multiple fanfictions written on them just to better explain what could happen next, and fan projects from voice acting to art to music to fiction were constantly being corrected, updated, and replaced by a deluge of new information and characters to pore over every single detail with a fandom magnifying glass. An endless amount of hyper ambitious fandom projects, games, animations, multi media fanstories made in rotating teams were abandoned for new starts JUST because the information they were working off became too outdated by the newest few weeks of updates. You threw everything out as fast as you could so someone else could build off of it. It did give a strong impression of collaboration and possibility. As the fandom grew bigger and younger Hussie seemed to shade more politic in his fandom communication, but it managed to maintain an “open channel” like feeling between fandom and comic for a long time.

Innovative form encouraged innovative output. The point was to create. Another aspect feeding upd8 culture was in the way Homestuck was told. Not only were Homestuck’s detailed plot points hard to predict, but so was what would happen to the site in a meta way.  A page could range from a scribble to a 3 hr fully programmed rpg or 18 minute asset heavy style swapping animation, or most commonly, sprite art followed by several hundred words of dialogue and character interaction. Pages came by different artists, different styles, different mediums, different paces and focuses, but with a breadth-spanning understanding of memes and the internet. Factors of style, innovation and novelty affected the diversity of fan output. Part of my extreme willingness to take part in Homestuck fandom was that Homestuck was so crammed to the brim with open ended creative potential, just the cool ideas and plot mechanics and vivid characters and weirdly novel framing that had really good ideas and existed literally nowhere else, and I say that as a huge sci-fi fan. Time travel in Homestuck was excellent. It was an ambitious story and I really do think it pulled it off.  Homestuck was once described as the fossilized excrement of someone’s personal creative experiments, and I think that’s a good way of putting it. Enthusiasm and confusing daring teemed off the page, and translated into a wide variety of fanfiction and art, in style, content, theme, and pov. 

Lastly, Hussie had a tendency to canonize fan content and hire fanartists and fananimators if their output was solid enough with a gentle horse kiss of approval and a naturally internet-transparent hiring process, like a forum. This was a purposely fostered atmosphere in the spirit of experimental adventure, and was just fucking nuts. Fans never wrote the story, but they did heavily influence aspects of how it was told and where it went (by design, fans were pretty much involved in making the comic) and even get to actually flesh out the details, like the main character’s names, memes, romances, character, and scope. Everything from canon sprite art to Caliborn’s character to Calliope’s art skill to music and trickster arcs were all originally based on years of fan jokes and fanon. Homestuck was definitely Hussie’s sole property and precious baby, but he built it as interactive-ish and creatively as he could. It added an extra layer of galvanizing egging on to fandom purpose. I don’t know how else to explain everything that came of it. Fandom was like a roiling morass of bullshit activity, like a breaking news bullpen 24/7, there was so much energy sparking off of all facets of fandom because it was just so fun. Fan output was borderline insane in 2010-2013.

Hussie said fandom grew exponentially at the introduction of the Trolls in Act 5 in mid 2010, but I can honestly say I think fandom really started treating Homestuck like a hidden gem worth prosetelyzing right after the events of [S] Cascade at the end of 2011. Before then, Homestuck was tenuously good, and had a rep on tumblr for having weirdly ubiquitous fans and over- detailed fancontent, but [S] Cascade was the moment every single gamble asked of the reader in the story actually paid off. In fact, Homestuck’s plot was generally constructed to climax at [S] Cascade, as was apparent from the big explosion of fan reaction after the fact. At this point, you would be hard pressed to find a fan that wouldn’t say, “Homestuck is good.”  

THE KICKSTARTER (2012)

Keep reading

vastderp:

rorleuaisen:

rorleuaisen:

jumpingjacktrash:

strictlyquadrilateral:

overheard from the hallway: “what do we do if we find more clowns?”

it’s ok, i have a scraper and i’m not afraid to use it. *strikes Mighty Dad Pose*

This was the best conversation to overhear btw.

Seebs: I don’t know if peeling the wallpaper off is a good idea. What if there are more clowns?

Jesse: Clowns?????

Seebs: Yeah like the one’s in Nick’s room

Nick, from the distance: Is somebody talking about the clowns??

Jesse: What clowns???? Show me these clowns!

(General movement noises as they leave my range of hearing. Something something excited noises and clowns)

The clown btw:

RIGHT AFTER WE MOVED IN THE CAPTAIN STARTED TO RIP THE WALLPAPER IN THE OLD SEWING ROOM LOOSE THROUGH THE BARS OF HIS KENNEL 

HE GOT A LITTLE PATCH OFF BEFORE I SAW AND MOVED THE KENNEL

THAT’S THE SAME FUCKING WALLPAPER AND IF THAT’S THE OLD SEWING ROOM IT SOLVES A HUGE MYSTERY FOR ME 

NAMELY HOW HE FOUND THE DETERMINATION NEEDED TO REACH THAT NASTY SHIT AND BITE ON IT

HE KNEW AND HE WAS PROTECTING US FROM IT

IT IS KNOWN THAT HE WAS THE GOODEST DOG. 

THE KNOWLEDGE THAT HE WAS HUNTING FOR CLOWNS IN THE WALLS ONLY CONFIRMS THIS FURTHER

MY BRAVE BOY WAS SAVING US FROM BOB GRAY

why-animals-do-the-thing:

tyrantisterror:

Tyrannosaurus was not the most dangerous animal in the park.  Having imprinted on its handler since infancy, the creature maintained a docile temperament all the way to adulthood, and indeed seemed to prefer feeding from its designated trough to pursuing prey.  Its interactions with staff and guests showed at most a mild curiosity, and the only real terror the beast inspired was when it snuck up on trainers to sniff their hats.

The raptors were not the most dangerous animals in the park.  Hollywood had greatly exaggerated their size, first of all, and while they had a mischievous streak (one individual in particular was fond of stealin zookeepers’ wallets), they were far from the hyper-intelligent murder lizards everyone expected.  Their intelligence was less of the predatory sort and more the comical intelligence of a corvid, devoted mostly to play and caring for their fellow flock members.

The mosasaur was not the most dangerous animal in the park.  Though it held no loyalty to the zookeepers, it had taken to training well enough, and would dutifully move to a specific section of the tank when signaled, giving the keepers space to carry out any business they needed to accomplish in its tank without fear of harm.

No, by far the most dangerous animal in the park was the Struthiomimus.  Everyone expected it to be easy – what were these animals in pop culture beyond being fodder for the carnivores?  Surely the bird-mimics couldn’t be much of a hassle.  Sadly, they weren’t just any bird mimics.

No, in temperament, the Struthiomimus mimicked a swan.

Highly territorial and vicious to the bone, more keepers had suffering brutal beatings by the struthis than had been hurt by the rest of the park’s fauna combined.  And when they learned to chew through the fences…

Well, let’s just say the Tyrannosaurus never experienced a more terrifying day in her life.

This is my new favorite story. 

thebibliosphere:

morgynleri:

deadcatwithaflamethrower:

Creative Writing Professor at a former college: Welcome to creative writing! By the way,
you will not write fantasy, ghost stories, pranormal, or science fiction
in this class, as this is a creative writing course.”

What the ever loving fuck is with “creative” writing professors who think that speculative fiction of any stripe ISN’T CREATIVE?

I still remember my own creative writing teacher telling me this because he saw the Terry Pratchett book on my desk and got this smug smirk on his face like “aha, gotcha”. He had the nerve to pick it up and call it “popularist fiction”, like somehow being popular and easily accessible made it less inherent in intellectual value.

I had it in my back pack because I did my final thesis on the evolution of mythology and folk tails into fantasy and sci-fi and the societal importance of telling stories (before anyone asks, no I don’t have it, I lost it when I moved continents), and I used Terry Pratchett because there wasn’t a single humanitarian issue the man did not touch on.

Which I told him. And then he kind of floundered and went “ah, well but, it’s…well I mean it’s not exactly high brow”, like neither the fuck was Shakespeare or Dickens you self-important turnip. Dickens was literally selling his stories by the chapter. He was the popular author of his time. Shakespeare was too, he fucking made up words and phrases all the time because the language he needed to express himself didn’t exist in the way he needed it too.

Intellectual elitism is nothing more than a hold over from class warfare and the belief that only certain people should get to be truly educated. And it needs to be smashed.