The Sunbittern Is A Bird Found In Tropical Regions Of The Americas. Despite Its Name And Misleading Body

I said it in the notes on the last post but I’m gonna say it again.

I’m married to someone with severe memory problems. Automation of household appliances & systems helps him a lot and helps me a lot because it reduces the number of things I have to keep in my brain at all times. I love doors that lock themselves, being able to schedule dog food being delivered, a thermostat I can manipulate from wherever. Beyond my little bubble it should be noted that voice controlled appliances can be really good for people with mobility concerns. Appliances that can measure and talk and remember little tasks can be such a blessing for people.

I will never forgive Amazon and Google for taking technologies that could be really helpful and weaponizing them, and fuck everybody who acts like its some kind of conspiracy theory that those devices are spying on you. You absolutely should be distrustful of those devices but just make sure you’re getting angry at the right people.

About 7,000 years ago, a vast lake spread hundreds of square kilometers across north-central Africa. Known to scientists as Lake Mega Chad, it covered more than 400,000 square kilometers (150,000 square miles) at its peak, making it slightly larger than the Caspian Sea, the biggest lake on Earth today. 

The Middle Rodentocene: 10 million years post-establishment

Silence of the Hams: Predatory Hamsters of the Middle Rodentocene

The increase of species diversity in the Middle Rodentocene has also put pressure on food sources, with different species competing over resources and access to available niches. With so many different hamster species abundant all over the various biomes, some of the species have turned their attentions to other, more viable food sources: other hamsters.

Even the ancestral hamster species they all spawned from wasn't exempt from occasionally snacking on one another, or more infamously among pet owners, of hamster mothers devouring their own babies when disturbed. As such, predatory behavior likely first emerged as a means of getting rid of competition: but with them both disposing of rivals and getting nutritious meals as a beneficial bonus, it wasn't long until some became obligate hunters of their fellow rodents. Multiple, unrelated lineages would separately and convergently become predators, relying on a diverse array of tactics for capturing their prey.

One of the most basal lineages of predatory hamsters are the hammibals (family Pantherocricetidae) a clade of small predators that possess dentition and anatomy that physiologically resemble those of a typical rodent. However, rodent teeth are fairly well-suited for gnawing on both plants and meat, and so the hammibals specialized into a different niche while keeping their anatomy conservative. Their grisly behavior meant that they no longer had to compete with other hamsters over food -- they became their food.

The largest of the hammibals is the Leopard Hammibal (Pardocricetus lecteri), growing up to the size of a large rat. While still mostly insectivorous, a significant portion, almost half, of its diet consists of smaller hamster species which it ambushes in their burrows or pursues when they emerge to forage. Grasping forelimbs with sharp claws seize the prey in an instant, and once secured in its grasp, the hammibal begins to feast on the struggling victim, chomping away on the unlucky prey headfirst until at last the desperate squeaks fade into silence.

But while a basal rodent body plan is suitable for predation of smaller rodents, tackling bigger prey proves for more of a challenge. As such, the fearrets (family Mustelocricetidae) have specialized their body plan far more than the hammibals did, developing stabbing points on their incisors and moving their first molars forward to form shearing teeth that can easily slice mouthfuls of meat from bigger carcasses. This peculiar dentition, closely reminescent of the prehistoric Earth marsupial Thylacoleo, allows the fearrets to take on much larger prey, typically hamtelopes and jerryboas but also young cavybaras on occasion.

The largest species, the Grey Fearret (Mustelocricetus atrox), is roughly the size of a pine marten, and as of this era is currently the biggest carnivore of HP-02017. An ambush predator that specializes on hamtelopes, it hunts during the daytime, where its favored prey, the long-legged ratzelles, are most active. Fearrets hunt by using their incisors to puncture bloody wounds into a victim's neck, before quickly retreating: to avoid injury to themselves, they repeatedly lunge, attack, retreat and attack again, wearing the prey down until it eventually succumbs to exhaustion and blood loss.

Grey fearrets mate for life, and mated pairs are known to hunt cooperatively, with one partner chasing prey in the direction of its concealed mate preparing for an ambush. Each pair produces yearly a litter of 2-4 pups at a time, which are dependent on their parents for several months until they are old enough to hunt on their own.

But not all predators in this time period are active hunters that pursue and grapple with their prey. Others, such as the scabbers (family Vermicaudamuridae) rely on other tactics: namely, stealth and deception, luring their prey to them instead of expending much energy in a chase.

The mottled scabber (Vermiformicauda pettigrewi) is one such bait-hunter, preying on small rodents that live on the forest floor, primarily insectivorous ones. Its coat is mottled with light and dark spots to blend in almost seamlessly with the leaf-litter of the ground, and rolling among the fragrant dried leaves to disguise its scent. However, while it is well hidden, one part of its body is very conspicuous: the very end of its long tail, which is flexible, hairless and segmented-- bearing very close resemblance to an earthworm, a favorite meal of many forest-floor hamsters.

Hiding quietly among the dead leaves, the mottled scabber exposes the tip of its tail and twitches it in imitation of a worm. Attracted by the movement, small insectivores eagerly pounce on the wiggling lure...and right within striking range of the camouflaged hunter, which lunges in a blink of an eye and quickly dispatches its quarry with a bite to the back of the neck, crushing its spine and ceasing its struggles in an instant.

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In case if anyone's interested. I am another person one can interact with about this, and can think of many others. Conlanging is much more than just David J. Peterson. In fact, and I mean this without any disrespect for him, I am a bit annoyed how much Peterson, Paul Frommer, Marc Okrand and Tolkien have become in popular conscience pretty much the only conlangers - and so many of those that do know others only know YouTubers. There's so so many of us, and some of the best work is made by those who are of the community but not particularly famous outside the hobby. And some of the best resources on conlanging come from such circles.

so, i don't really know anyone who might find this as exciting as i did, so i thought i'd share it with you instead, lol. i recently wrote a fic in which i did not properly construct a conlang, but i did get to create a lot of place names and colloquialisms based on linguistic shifts and influences from surrounding languages, and it was just so much FUN? like, getting to examine the patterns of the surrounding (related) languages and determine what would be the most likely shifts for the languages in this fictional spot, and then looking at the history of the place itself and the waves of invaders, and how that affected the place names and people names and general linguistic borrowing of the surrounding areas, etc etc.

anyway, i just had such a good time, and i wanted to share it with someone else who might enjoy it! thank you in advance for letting me drop this in your box. <3

That's wonderful! If you enjoyed it here, you'll probably enjoy doing it just for the sake of it. Something I that I think would behoove fantasy authors is having a fleshed out world in which to set stories, and that includes their languages. If you work on them ahead of time, you can then drop in and write the story you want in whatever part of the world you want and all that work will be there for you to draw from. It'll be more like writing a history than writing a story, and all the places where you usually get hung up (what's this character's name going to be...? What's their family...? What's the name of their home town...?) will be easy, and you can focus on the writing itself.

Anyway, glad you enjoyed it, and I hope you can enjoy more in the future!

Same is happening to me with worldbuilding

Noticed that the porn bots are now trying to get to me by tagging their shit 'linguistics' so it appear in my normal feed because I follow the tag.

Tigers in the Forest

10,000 IQ Deduction (EGSNP)

Nonchalant Ashley (Sketchbook)

Larry cleverly deduces that Ashley has transformed herself at the mall and hopes that no one, especially Rich, notices.

Wait, that doesn't sound right.

It would be even weirder if it was also natural (it isn't, it was made in 1991)

Neitokainen is a body of water in Finland, which is shaped like Finland

Some handy keyboard shortcuts for Windows:

[win] + [arrow key] : snap the current window (left or right snaps the window to the corresponding half of the screen, up maximizes the window, down un-maximizes or minimizes the window; if a window is already snapped right or left, up or down will make take up the higher or lower quarter of that side of the screen)

[win] + [;] : bring up an emoji picker

[ctrl] + [shift] + [escape] : bring up the Task Manager (this used to be [Ctrl] + [alt] + [delete], but in recent versions of Windows that combination brings up several possible actions, like locking the screen or switching users, in addition to launching the Task Manager

[win] + [L] : lock the screen (so you'll need to enter the password to unlock it)

[win] + [D] : show or hide the desktop (minimizes all windows so you just see the desktop, or brings all windows back up)

[win] + [E] : launches a File Explorer window

[win] + [I] : opens Settings

[alt] + [tab] : brings up all windows and let's you cycle through them by repeatedly hitting [tab]

[win] + [shift] + [S] : take a screenshot of part off your screen

[win] + [U] : opens accessibility settings

Also in general, [tab] will cycle between selected things (eg fields on a web site or Excel cells) and [alt] will activate the menu.

Also, if you hold [shift] while pressing the arrow keys in a text field, it'll select text in the direction you press. It'll go letter by letter if you just hold [shift], but adding in [ctrl] will make it select word by word. These, combined with [home] (go to start of line) and [end] (go to end of line) let you do a lot of text manipulation without ever needing to touch the mouse or touchpad!