yeah, and ants will tear open eggs that are struggling to hatch

Apologies in advance for severe treatbrain

Steven Erickson''s Malazan series had a big bad introduced in the third book named the Crippled God who was the personification of this, a mind subjected to terrible pain with no rehabilitation in the aftermath of its trauma. This god quickly establishes himself as the biggest player in the game, with torturous power that contorts people's bodies, and so pain is presented as something fundamental, something antithetical to meaning that is more powerful to living creatures than the spheres of any other God.

To counteract the treatbrain I'll also bring up the fact that solitary animals do not tend to cry out in pain like social animals do. They do experience pain, even though some people will try to classify it as something lesser with words like "nocicpetion," but the important distinction is that they aren't usually sent into fits of screaming and paralysis like social animals. This tells me that, for social animals, pain is something that MUST be answered, even to the point of wanting revenge when the pain is gone. The CEO (I spit on him let's be clear) would be alive today if Luigi's pain had been addressed properly. But if this CEO had pushed such a policy, my guess is that he wouldn't have been made CEO in the first place.

When I found out that leech saliva was antimicrobial I decided leeches are good and that disliking them is lookism

Even without a centralized brain, jellyfish can both learn from past events and change their behavior to preempt expected events.

No need to look for aliens in space when we've got plenty of them to make contact with underwater

EMBRACE DISCO ELYSIAN THOUGHT

SOMEWHERE IN A SAD LITTLE CHURCH THE FUTURE IS DEFEATING THE PAST

I have very few resources to offer anyone in need, as it's really only by my basic unfair privileges as a cis white man that I even have a place to sleep, but I'm just trying to make it clear to the people I know that I have the space to house them/feed them if they are in crisis. Without much else to support them with it feels like the best I can do.

anyone who tries to claim there was any absolute standard of behavior for pre-industrial tribes like that is just doing fantasy worldbuilding

Every social organization you can think of was probably the way of life for someone out there, from patriarchy to matriarchy, communal to hierarchical

I get apprehensive around wasps too but it's very funny to me how much hatred and distrust these animals are met with because they are able to force you to treat them with a little respect

how is Hitler there he literally killed Hitler

It's usually justified to make fun of STEMlords but scientists with highly specific skills are still a vital part of our societal whole (I choose to believe this for my own sake)

Oh yeah the Marine iguanas, incredible footage, some of the best ever imo.

Really feels like I picked a bad time to be interested in amphibians sometimes

Definitely jealous of getting to work with condors, sounds awesome.

I visited a lab where some of the last remaining dusky gopher frogs are cared for.

(reminder that frogs may be in what is considered the sixth mass extinction ever on earth)

Cockroach beneath bedbug? Ants and termites lower than a stupid ass butterfly?

I strongly disagree with this insect hierarchy and HARSHLY judge the character of its creator

I talked with a researcher who bluntly called whiptails "a bunch of lesbos" and he wasn't even being funny, they still sorta kinda have sex to stimulate egg production.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8556411/

That study has a great diagram:

Observe the science man presiding over the lizards and their inscrutable hormones

It's a good article that showcases the way AAA games are basically hollow. They wear a lot of art, incredibly elaborate, expensive, art, but none of it comes together to make the experience it promises. Everything is built in separate pieces and stuck together later, and its boring gameplay that shows no interest in being art of its own is the glue. I remember Yahtzee did a video about the first Destiny that made this same point, about how the environmental art in a few areas was fascinating and clearly full of effort, but the gameplay was a slog that lacked the same ambition.

The entire album Symbol by Susumu Yokota might hit the right nerve, though it's heavier on the dreamlike side and doesn't have lyrics. I use it for driving, writing, anything that needs a kind of hypnotized but functional state of mind.

This is on-the-nose enough to be a Black Mirror episode jesus christ