Allied-menace - Hiiiii Heloooo

deep sea creatures are so fascinating, I don't care how scary they are. I wanna see how fucked up and nightmarish these little guys can get.

God I adore them and how crazy they are like?

Look at this guy, the Barreleye fish. First off I adore critters that are see through, but this dude's cool because those green balls? Those are his eyes, the ones on the front of its face aren't real. Not to mention it's eyes are pointed straight up? Like? My dude hunts by looking at shadows above it.

In a similar vein meet the fish that looks like it has chapped lips despite living in the water, the telescope fish

Like the Barreleye, these guys hunt by staring towards the surface, using the minimal light to see shadows of their prey. They're only about 20cm long but they can extend their jaws and swallow prey twice their size and fold it in half in their stomachs.

Okay, let's take a quick break from fish, let's take a look at a different sleep paralysis demon, the Pycnogonida or sea spider

There's so so many species of these guys, but my favorite thing is that since they're basically all leg, that's where all their organs are too.

Okay break over, let's do one last one, my baby, one of the most beautiful ocean critters, the frilled shark

These guys are like, the blueprint for sharks, they've been around for 80 million years and despite their mouths genuinely looking like the gate to hell, they're not that dangerous to us. In fact we're more dangerous to them due to the way their bodies are pressurized and built for the freezing depths they live in, after leaving a certain depth it's basically an insta death. But, they can get up to six feet long and live roughly 25 years (scientists aren't quite sure on their lifespan) they're also pregnant for over three years which is like. Yikes. But those teeth, 25 rows with over 300 in total. Crazy. No worries though, their jaws are pretty weak and they tend to eat squid, like it's 60% of their diet, the rest mostly being made up of smaller sharks and bony fish.

Anyway, these aren't horrifying deep sea critters (Google hatchet fish if you want that) but these are a few I had off the top of my head!

Today I learned

Shout out to when Pokecord was still a thing and Technoblade had the bot installed to Technocord and he made everyone who played it pull up their pokemon list and if you had any Beldums and didn’t immediately trade them to him you got kicked from the discord. And then if a Beldum ever spawned and you dared claim it before him you also got kicked. It was the funniest shit

baby coelacanth

baby coelacanth.

Standard Art Print Sizes (in & px)

4” x 6”        (600 pixels x 900 pixels) 5” x 7”        (750 pixels x 1050 pixels) 6” x 6”        (900 pixels x 900 pixels) 8” x 10”      (1200 pixels x 1500 pixels) 8.5” x 11”   (1275 pixels x 1650 pixels) 11” x 14”    (1650 pixels x 2100 pixels) 12” x 12”    (1800 pixels x 1800 pixels) 12” x 16”    (1800 pixels x 2400 pixels) 16” x 20”    (2400 pixels x 3000 pixels) 18” x 24”    (2700 pixels x 3600 pixels) 19” x 13”    (2850 pixels x 1950 pixels) 20” x 24”    (3000 pixels x 3600 pixels) 24” x 24”    (3600 pixels x 3600 pixels) 12” x 36”    (1800 pixels x 5400 pixels) 24” x 36”    (3600 pixels x 5400 pixels)            

https://snaily1999.tumblr.com/post/613717569515487232/i-am-still-reeling-from-this-experience

in case you don't actually know the one

number one mudkip fan

number one mudkip fan

i am.. still reeling from this experience :/

based off that one comic (you know the one). furry look

The southlands next week

-@allied-menace

I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence

Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.

Switch to linux, it's free and it's good.

This is a free coupon/excuse for you to infodump on the current topic you’re obsessed with. Take some time away from internet discourse and share with us something you find interesting.

Today I read about Precambrian animals!

The above one is Thectardis, which is an animal so weird we have almost no inclination of how to categorize it. We know it was alive and it was cone shaped. That’s it.

The thing about fossil life from 500+ million years ago is that there often aren’t really any living analogs for it? Many of the animals from that time were sessile, many filter feeders, without much in common with what comes to mind when we think “Animal”—something that moves around and has a brain and thinks. The strata that preserve these animals are very rarely accessible, and these glimpses we have are hard to interpret.

Many of these creatures are known from a single fossil. Many are too weird to interpret or classify even tentatively.

Here’s another organism from that time, Eoandromeda:

Look at this thing. I can’t explain why, but Eoandromeda makes me feel some kind of deep dread. Like...we don’t know what this thing was. We don’t even know if it was an animal. I look at that shape and I want someone to tell me what that thing is. But we don’t know. We don’t have the words for What That Thing Is.

Imagine something so alien, so divergent from the paths life took to the present day, that we can’t look at it and say “That’s a worm” or “That’s a sponge” or “that’s a jellyfish” or...anything. The words for it literally don’t exist, because nothing like it now exists, and we know nothing about it. We’re not looking at different versions of the same categories of creature we have now. We’re looking at something that is too obscure to have a category. We can guess what it might have looked like. But it is so utterly unlike anything that exists now that we know nothing—except that undeniably, it existed.

Namacalathus. Be honest, doesn’t this make you scream inside? Or is it just me? This was a real animal that existed. It doesn’t know or give a fuck what a “snail” or “bird” is.

Learning about dinosaurs is DIFFERENT. We know what bones are. We have them! When we say that sauropod dinosaurs ate plants, we can imagine those plants. We can describe dinosaurs as having a “neck” and “claws” and “legs.” And I think that’s comforting because whatever I feel when I look at Namacalathus is not that.

This one invented muscles! Muscles are okay! I have muscles! That should make me feel better, right!

...Not really! Put it back!

For millions of years these things existed, living their unknowable lives. There was an entire world of these organisms. This was EARTH, our world.

People mostly haven’t heard of these. I think people care less about these strange early creatures because they seem less charismatic, not having brains or doing anything, but I think there is a lot of charisma to the Unknowable Cone Animal, the Dread Spiral, and all the other unsettling animals of the Precambrian.

*"stress dream" = dreams you get when under large amounts of stress or anxiety irl, that may or may not relate to your current situation irl.