laurelnose

[laurelnose]

dark yoon ha lee give me the forbidden hajoret family backstory

#THINKING ABOUT HIM AGAIN #the thing is before he was admitted to Nirai Academy Prime he was living in a Vidona orphanage #so this had to have happened BEFORE the heptarchate annexed Erchanno #and frankly i don’t have textual support for this but i get the vibe that he was already on his own when Halash picked him up #which means he was LITTLE when they died! #what the hell does ‘responsible’ mean for a fucking. ELEVEN year old? YOUNGER?? what HAPPENED!? #nirai kujen #machineries of empire

[laurelnose]

one of my favourite things is seeing posts like this that are clearly a reference to some fandom or piece of media, but having no idea what it’s referencing, so i’m just reading it like. yeah that would be weird huh

#oh good this is going around again #imperial radch

[laurelnose]

7.2k into this nightmare of a 2nd person fic and the “what the fuck am I DOING” mood is starting to hit. giving me access to a word processor was a mistake. I wanted a quick little two-scene oneshot but it’s getting longer

#being sick makes it so difficult to do anything other than write #being in pain makes my writing uhh... weirder? grosser? worse? #the combo makes for a very strange relationship to have w/ my writing #i feel like i need to write something wholesome. very weird feeling for me #am i incoherent? it’s bc of the printer questions. my ears are leaking brain matter. if anyone else asks me about printers i will bite

[laurelnose]

Sylvia Legris, The Principle of Rapid Peering

#poetry #i feel. soooo normal about her newest collection #i have regular emotions about the collection about names & taxonomy & seasonality #& her use of LANGUAGE my GOD i’m going to read the whole thing out loud to myself #but also. i’m just going to tag this specific one. uh #🦋🦊

[laurelnose]

Andean Marsupial Frog (Gastrotheca orophylax), female carrying eggs, family Hemipharctidae, Santa Clara, Alto Putumayo, Colombia

Photograph by Camilo Zapata

#why are frogs always going for the most disturbing possible forms of ovoviviparity #like i get you don’t have a lot of room on the ventral side But Also #(i did look this up and the eggs are both matrotrophic & receiving oxygen from mom’s vascular tissues. in my book that’s ovoviviparity) #(even if they’re going about it in kind of a weird roundabout way that requires laying the eggs first) #i will tag #trypophobia #for the squeamish; altho’ unlike Suriname/pipa toads the little ones are just going to come out the same pouch opening that the eggs went in

[laurelnose]

if you’re wondering how it’s going, yesterday I coordinated my jewelry to what I intended my outfit to be, as I do every morning, and three hours later I went in the bathroom and realized I’d put on the wrong fucking shirt

#i don’t have to go to work today so I’m down to a single bracelet out of disgust #(also i am hiding under blankets from the radiant tyranny of the sun and don’t want to get tangled) #(too bright! this is homophobic)

[laurelnose]

like. tfw you’re mathematically predestined for damnation and trying to make the utilitarianist best of it and then your ███ saves your life in a way that is so morally repugnant to you that you somehow end up shacking up with Mr. All-Caps I Love Genocide because he’s got an idea that will save your entire species from hell

tfw you’re the most senior scientist left because everyone else fucking died, including your boss because of information you gave him that turned out to be incomplete, and you’re struggling with a contagious infocancer with vectors that are opaque to you and one of your people is exposed, but she’s not showing symptoms yet and if you tell anyone they’ll fucking murder her, and you love her, and how far is too far to go to contain a threat like this?

tfw you’re isolated from your home and people and struggling to maintain a normal social life because of the trauma of something heinous you were forced to do as a child and an alien crashlands in your bathroom and tells you, we’re soulmates, serendura, our destinies are intertwined, I need to obtain a weapon that will save your species from enslavement and you’re the only who can help me because our souls match, oh btw mine is ontologically evil. jsyk.

tfw you and your best friend since childhood start an organization to do extrajudicial murder of people who will never face normal justice together but he does way more extrajudicial murder than you thought he was going to, so you expose him to his wife, your other best friend from childhood, and she dumps both of you forever, so now it’s just you and him, locked together, you hate him, you love him, you can’t let him do anything as evil as that ever again, don’t think too hard about the part that you did

tfw an alien shows up in your office and says do exactly what I tell you or I’m destroying the entire fucking planet, and you’re like, well, fuck, okay, I may have to commit some true atrocities, but there’s nothing that can possibly be worse than the extinction of humanity, and it never even occurs to you that you could have bargained with him before selling out Earth until it’s almost too late

#IT’S MORAL INJURY AND SURVIVOR’S GUILT ALL THE FUCKING WAY DOWN!!! #exordiablogging

[laurelnose]

the Venom comparison they kept making in marketing is almost completely spurious but the Michael Crichton comparison isn’t bad. it reminded me the most of qntm’s There Is No Antimemetics Division and the best of the pataphysics tag. (As a scipper, it did charm me to death that it’s one of the Russians who introduces the word ‘infohazard’ into the conversation.) And to some extent the Southern Reach trilogy.

...there’s also a element of High Wizardry in how certain character dynamics unfold once Clayton ▇▇▇▇▇▇, which perhaps isn’t a comparison I would have made on my own but Dickinson brought up Young Wizards first, so

EXORDIA is perfect. It’s fantastic. What did they say about Traitor? “A beautiful, perfectly formed crystal of a novel.” Yes. That. The first act hooks you in the throat right away and then it unfolds slow, spreading at the pace of molten glass, you spend a lot of pages thinking, well, this is a bit slow, there’s a lot of names to keep track of here, but the mystery pulls you on, inch by bloody inch, and then, and then you get it, the moment of brilliant clarity strikes, prajna, this is how it all works, and the whole thing hurtles forward in perfect giddy inevitability, every domino it set up so carefully in those previous pages meeting its monstrous tipping point, and everyone here is so so terrible and I like them all so so much and the magic system absolutely fucks. Like this is high-concept hard military sci-fi but there is also a magic system and it FUCKS. Just so you know.

#Un-Follow Me Now This Is Gonna Be The Only Thing I Talk About For The Next Week etc etc etc #hilariously enough i think iruvage reminds me more of venom than ssrin does #or at least he’s the one who keeps vocally fantasizing about subjugating and eating humanity at his people #however. my strongest recommendation of exordia. is that if you like moral injury. you will like exordia #exordiablogging

[laurelnose]

ouuogh sleep deprivation migraine

#i mean it’s the fucking sinus infection migraine still i’ve done 37 days of antibiotics and the Goo is still in there #pseudoephedrine is the only thing that has helped which is fucked up #but i made it worse by not sleeping #worth it.

[laurelnose]

EXORDIA is perfect. It’s fantastic. What did they say about Traitor? “A beautiful, perfectly formed crystal of a novel.” Yes. That. The first act hooks you in the throat right away and then it unfolds slow, spreading at the pace of molten glass, you spend a lot of pages thinking, well, this is a bit slow, there’s a lot of names to keep track of here, but the mystery pulls you on, inch by bloody inch, and then, and then you get it, the moment of brilliant clarity strikes, prajna, this is how it all works, and the whole thing hurtles forward in perfect giddy inevitability, every domino it set up so carefully in those previous pages meeting its monstrous tipping point, and everyone here is so so terrible and I like them all so so much and the magic system absolutely fucks. Like this is high-concept hard military sci-fi but there is also a magic system and it FUCKS. Just so you know.

#this is the kind of book that is incredible on reread. i can tell. i’m doing it right now #chapter three! the ubiet TOLD Anna she was self-similar! #fractally serendura!!!! #also. also. there IS sexual cannibalism. just a little bit. at the end. in case youve read the first 4 chs & were wondering about the Vibes #you know the vibes. once you’ve met ssrinsahautha you will know. #IT’S 3AM I HAVE TO SLEEP. FUCK #laurelnose.txt #also. ALSO! INFOCANCERS!! I LOVE INFOCANCERS!!! BEST KIND OF INFOHAZARD!!!!!!!!! GOODNIGHT!

[laurelnose]

Every time one of these polls goes around people start mentioning Dewey or LoC and I gotta ask. How the hell are you all making that work in a home library. Are you actually making spine labels for your books? Or are you just doing like, a rough Dewey “social sciences come before earth sciences come before health and cookbooks” order? Are you memorizing 3-7 digits for each book? What’s the deal here? Who’s your cataloging resource? Your local library? WorldCat? LibraryThing? I have to assume none of you have an OCLC subscription. Also, why would you willingly submit yourself to Melvil’s nonsense?

I personally sort in a vaguely Ranganathan fashion, in that I respect the hierarchy of PMEST — personality, matter, energy, space, & time — but the exact headings and their order in each level are up to me and I decide them based on my personal whims. (Fiction is sorted only by personality and no finer categories, which is to say, entirely by vibes.) Cataloging only has to make sense to the user of the system, who is meeee! I do not use spine labels; I keep a personal digital catalog and mostly the collection is small enough I just remember where stuff goes when I reshelve. Furthermore I do this only because Dr. Ranganathan’s system enchants & delights me. It is not necessary to organize your books in any particular way and in fact it is staggeringly modern to do so. Medieval library catalogs were functionally just physical inventory lists ordered by either physical shelf location or by subject and those two things didn’t always correlate. Basically everybody maintaining a collection of books before the invention of the printing press had few enough items that they could more or less have everything’s location memorized and you can too!

Anyways while I’m at it fuck Melvil Dewey and also tbh fuck LoC, cataloging and associated shelving systems are socially contingent and no system can or should meet all needs (which is why Other is sweeping), and also, there’s literally so many methods out there. Dewey and LoC are enumerative systems (two among many), and their alternative is faceted systems. S.R. Ranganathan’s Colon Classification was one of the first faceted systems, and the Universal Decimal Classification system is a modern, internationalized faceted system. There are the BISAC Subject Headings and the Glades hybrid model. Consider people such as Dorothy Burnett Porter Wesley (who performed major revisions to Dewey’s antiblack framework), Alfred Kaiming Chiu (Harvard-Yenching Classification System; developed in order to synthesize the sìkù/fourfold system and Western schema; one, two, three), and Alec Brian Deer (Brian Deer Classification System, an ingenious system for classification of materials by/about North American indigenous peoples). Check out the Metis system, designed for children’s materials with the majority of input from children. Go back to before alphabetical order was invented! Sort your books by the theological order in which the subject was created like a 12th century Christian encyclopaedist! the point is: you can do whatever you want forever

#also read Batley 2015 Classification in Theory & Practice. #or don’t. but it’s very good

[laurelnose]

You’re married to your phone background/lockscreen how fucked are you

#lockscreen baru homescreen cheris #i opt to fob cheris at baru and flee the country

[laurelnose]

everything in Syngnathiformes (seahorses and their allies) is so fucking weird is the thing. This is the most Shaped order of fishes of all time, except for maybe Tetraodontiformes (boxfishes, puffers, triggerfishes, and everyone’s besties the molas).

Like. There’s the seamoths above. One of their closer relatives in Syngnathiformes might be the flying gurnards and sea robins, which unlike just about everything else that evolved to walk on the ocean floor, made these horrid little witch fingers out of the first three fin rays instead of just making their fins into paws like frogfish or batfish. WHY ARE YOU A SPIDER!!

The cornetfishes and trumpetfishes are also in Syngnathiformes. This one is a red cornetfish (Fistularia petimba).

This one is a trumpetfish (Aulostomus chinensis) demonstrating what the mouth is for. It is a vacuum. Also I always forget the underside of jaws isn’t bony until some fucker adapts the whole apparatus to be stupid long and reveals the stretchiness inherent in the system.

Male rainbow belly freshwater pipefish (Microphis deocata) showing off his egg pouch. (On top of being the Most Shaped Guys Order, Syngnathiformes is also the Male Pregnancy order.) Most of the pipefishes just get a bit fatter around the middle while pregnant but this species put rainbow stripes on the pouch and adapted it for display. Well, I sure am looking.

If you like to look at animals on the internet you may already know what leafy seadragons are but did you know those come in uhhhh leafless? This is a ruby seadragon (Phyllopteryx dewysea). I was trained in a taxonomy lab so I have an extremely broad mental model for “shaped like a fish” and this is still the least fish-shaped fish I have ever seen. Why is it so...wiggly.

Banded bellowsfish (Centriscops humerosus). What the FUCK are you and WHY are you that shape

At first glance the shrimpfish (Aeoliscus punctulatus) appears mostly normally-shaped, with the weirdest thing about them being that they swim vertically with their heads pointed downwards. However, if you look closely you will notice they have shifted the dorsal (back), tail, and anal (belly) fins to ALL BE ON THE BELLY SIDE, to support their perversely-oriented lifestyle. You can SEE the 45° bend in their spine that makes this happen. Holy fuck.

False pipefish (probably Solenostomus halimeda). This is a cactus.

Another false pipefish (Solenostomus paradoxus) because the false pipefish family is wild. I think this is for camouflage? Most of the false pipefishes are Shaped for camouflage? And it kind of resembles the frondy thing with the yellow tips behind it? But also. What.

And of course, seahorses. You all know what a fucking seahorse looks like. Suffice to say they are also really weirdly shaped. Endless forms most beautiful but also endless forms most bizarre. This isn’t even touching how weird syngnathiform skeletons are.

Have another moth. (Pegasus laternarius)

thinking about seamoths (pegasidae). no teeth. bony armor plates under the skin. sheds the whole skin bit in one piece every 1-5 days. monogamous broadcast spawners. might be a seahorse but also might be something else. strongly resembles an animate piece of rubble with wings. inexplicable. adorable. i kiss him (Eurypegasus draconis) on his stubby little nose

#long post #laurelnose.txt #this post really strained my ability to write image descriptions ngl #Fish. but not shaped like any normal fish

[laurelnose]

they also come in Long (Pegasus volitans)

thinking about seamoths (pegasidae). no teeth. bony armor plates under the skin. sheds the whole skin bit in one piece every 1-5 days. monogamous broadcast spawners. might be a seahorse but also might be something else. strongly resembles an animate piece of rubble with wings. inexplicable. adorable. i kiss him (Eurypegasus draconis) on his stubby little nose

#laurelnose.txt #this one is more an animate blade of seaweed than rubble

[laurelnose]

thinking about seamoths (pegasidae). no teeth. bony armor plates under the skin. sheds the whole skin bit in one piece every 1-5 days. monogamous broadcast spawners. might be a seahorse but also might be something else. strongly resembles an animate piece of rubble with wings. inexplicable. adorable. i kiss him (Eurypegasus draconis) on his stubby little nose

#laurelnose.txt #all Weird Little Bottom Dwellers are cute but the pegasids are ESPECIALLY cute #even with the full-body skin sloughing

[laurelnose]

being obsessed with a character is so fucking embarrassing like I'll be getting dressed in the morning like "I bet the 12th doctor would wear these socks" bitch shut the fuck up

#my stupidest example of this is that the refrigerator is currently broken and i’m having a Moment

[laurelnose]

belated update: the National Galleries of Scotland were fucking hilarious

really feels like it was kind of a quiet April Fool's Day on the internet. minecraft recreating scp-1689 was mildly amusing but reddit dropped the ball completely. there were a few fake announcements but not particularly interesting ones. tumblr might have been an all-around stand-out tbh.

bulbapedia was very simple but it did fucking get me, I was wondering wtf was wrong with my display settings for a solid minute.

#laurelnose.txt