I Don’t Know If I Can Contain My “The Muppet Christmas Carol Has Better Costume Design Than Most

The Middle Rodentocene: 10 million years post-establishment

Better Ungulate than Never: The Hamtelopes

A small, but abundant and diverse herbivore common across the land during the Middle Rodentocene are the hamtelopes (family Cervimuridae), which are found on most of the continents by this point in the planet's history. Looking a fair bit like small ungulates, hamtelopes are browsers, feeding on higher vegetation such as bushes and shrubs, and thus avoid competition with grazing cavybaras when the two coexist on the same turf.

Among the many species of hamtelopes, the most remarkable is the Rusty Hamtelope (Erythrocervimys bambini), which is unmistakable due to its distinctive reddish-orange hue of its coat. On Earth, such a color for a forest-floor browser would be highly disavadvantageous, sticking the animal out into plain sight and leaving it vulnerable and visible to predators.

However, HP-02017 is distinguished by the presence of a second minor sun, Beta, that orbits further out from the main sun Alpha and for a large portion of the year is opposite the main star, making Beta appear by night and illuminate the landscape in a phenomenon called "Beta-twilight". Beta-twilight is when the rusty hamtelope is at its most active, as well as dawn and dusk: and in the fiery glows of sunrise and sunset, or the red-orange Beta-twilight landscape, the rusty hamtelope demonstrates that Earthly life can adapt even in conditions not normally found in Earth, camouflaging perfectly in the forest floor while the forest is bathed in a faint, scarlet hue.

But as remarkable as the rusty hamtelope is, the clade of hamtelopes is not merely limited to this one genus. Hamtelopes have reached peak diversity in the Middle Rodentocene, spanning several genera and dozens of species. Some, such as the long-legged ratzelles (Cervicricetus spp.) are daytime grazers of the forest floor, and indeed even share habitat with the rusty hamtelope by different times of activity to minimize competition. Others, such as the ramsters (Capramys spp.) are more at home in the alpine tundras and high plateaus, leaving a lifestyle akin to that of mountain goats, agile and surefooted as they climb up steep cliffs to graze on mountainside vegetation.

But by far the most unusual members are the toponies (Microhippoides spp.) which are plains-dwellers resembling tiny, tailless equids. What makes them particularly odd is how small they are, compared to the other genera: this in fact is due to competition with larger, bipedal hopping jerryboas that have usurped their niche out in the open plains. Able to travel longer distances with their more energy-efficient bounding gait and defend themselves from predation with sharp hind-limb claws, the jerryboas very quickly dominated the open grassland and savannah, leaving only the niche of small grazer vacant for the toponies.

As new lineages emerge and diversify in the Middle Rodentocene, their more divergent forms begin to clash with one another in ecological terms. In the end, some families will dominate, others will barely hang on and others will completely die out, as hamster diversity climaxes in the Rodentocene's halfway mark.

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it's so annoying seeing posts about Jewish culture—cutesy posts about fighting with g-d that appeal to Christian atheists' religious trauma, posts with Jewish music, posts with pictures of beautiful Jews—getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of notes, but the moment someone makes a post about antisemitism—about how it's built in to Western society, about how it's insidious and creeping, about how you've probably internalized it, about the difficulties we face and the grief we feel—they fail to break jumblr containment. Don't get me wrong, I love that goyim are celebrating Jewish culture as something beautiful and wonderful, but that can't be all we are to you. We're real people with real problems that you can't just ignore in favor of reblogging posts about bagels or whatever

a few days ago a coworker asked me to explain Hanukkah and I asked her if she knew what a menorah was. She said, “like the Northern Lights?”

I’m simultaneously haunted by and wild about this concept now. instead of aurora borealis, menorah borealis. menorah borealis

I cast Summon Kidney Stone

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.

Moving on with NO CONSEQUENCES!

It's like it happened, but it DIDN'T happen, because we're moving on.

cadmium red 🔥 all oil on wood panel, by me, 2022

Campbell Gardens by trisharooni

Seriously just ask me anything If I don't want to answer it, I just won't.

reblog if you’d like one of these in your inbox

- ask me things you want to know about me

- why you follow me

- what’s on your mind/what you’re thinking about

- a compliment

- make me choose between two things

- ask for advice

- tell me a secret

- things you associate me with

- anything!!!!