The party walking into literally any organization:
this never fails to take me out. like jesus fucking christ kojima did you really have to word it that way 😂
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A sudden, terrifying thought
When you see an animal with its eyes set to the front, like wolves, or humans, that’s usually a predator animal.
If you see an animal with its eyes set farther back, though—to the side—that animal is prey.
Now look at this dragon.
See those eyes?
They’re to the SIDE.
This raises an interesting—and terrifying—question.
What in the name of Lovecraft led evolution to consider DRAGONS…
As PREY?
I know this isn’t part of my blogs theme but like this is interesting
i know this isn’t part
of my blogs theme but like this
is interesting
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The eyes-in-the-front thing (usually) only applies to mammals. Crocodiles, arguably the inspiration for dragons, have eyes that look to the sides despite being a predator.
hey what up I’m about to be That Asshole
This isn’t a mammalian thing. When people talk about ‘eyes on the front’ or ‘eyes on the side,’ they’re really talking about binocular vision vs monocular vision. Binocular vision is more advantageous for predators because it’s what gives you depth perception; i.e, the distance you need to leap, lunge, or swipe to take out the fast-moving thing in front of you. Any animal that can position its eyes in a way that it has overlapping fields of vision has binocular vision. That includes a lot of predatory reptiles, including komodo dragons, monitor lizards, and chameleons.
(The eyes-in-front = predator / eyes-on-sides = prey thing holds true far more regularly for birds than it does for mammals. Consider owls, hawks, and falcons vs parrots, sparrows, and doves.)
But it’s not like binocular vision is inherently “better” than monocular vision. It’s a trade-off: you get better at leap-strike-kill, but your field of vision is commensurately restricted, meaning you see less stuff. Sometimes, the evolutionary benefit of binocular vision just doesn’t outweigh the benefit of seeing the other guy coming. Very few forms of aquatic life have binocular vision unless they have eye stalks, predator or not, because if you live underwater, the threat could be coming from literally any direction, so you want as wide a field of view as you can get. If you see a predator working monocular vision, it’s a pretty safe assumption that there is something else out there dangerous enough that their survival is aided more by knowing where it is than reliably getting food inside their mouths.
For example, if you are a crocodile, there is a decent chance that a hippo will cruise up your shit and bite you in half. I’d say that makes monocular vision worthwhile.
Which brings us back to OP’s point. Why would dragon evolution favor field of view over depth perception?
A lot of the stories I’ve read painted the biggest threats to dragons (until knights with little shiny sticks came along) as other dragons. Dragons fight each other, dragons have wars. And like fish, a dragon would need to worry about another dragon coming in from any angle. That’s a major point in favor of monocular vision. Moreover, you don’t need depth perception in order to hunt if you can breathe fucking fire. A flamethrower is not a precision weapon. If you can torch everything in front of you, who cares if your prey is 5 feet away or 20? Burn it all and sift among the rubble for meat once everything stops moving.
Really, why would dragons have eyes on the front of their heads? Seems like they’ve got the right idea to me.
Worthwhile cryptozoological discourse
Sewing Machines & Planned Obsolescence
I've got these two sewing machines, made about 100 years apart. An old treadle machine from around 1920-1930, that I pulled out of the trash on a rainy day, and a new Brother sewing machine from around 2020.
I've always known planned obsolescence was a thing, but I never knew just how insidious it was till I started looking at these two side by side.
I wasn't feeling hopeful at first that I'd actually be able to fix the old one, I found it in the trash at 2 am in a thunderstorm. It was rusty, dusty, soggy, squeaky, missing parts, and 100 years old.
How do you even find specialized parts 100 years later? Well, easily, it turns out. The manufacturers at the time didn't just make parts backwards compatible to be consistent across the years, but also interchangeable across brands! Imagine that today, being able to grab a part from an old iPhone to fix your Android.
Anyway, 6 months into having them both, I can confidently say that my busted up trash machine is far better than my new one, or any consumer-grade sewing machine on the market.
Old Machine Guts
The old machine? Can sew through a pile of leather thicker than my fingers like it's nothing. (it's actually terrifying and I treat it like a power tool - I'll never sew drunk on that thing because I'm genuinely afraid it'd sew through a finger!) At high speeds, it's well balanced and doesn't shake. The parts are all metal, attached by standard flathead screws, designed to be simple and strong, and easily reachable behind large access doors. The tools I need to work on it? A screwdriver and oil. Lost my screwdriver? That's OK, a knife works too.
New Machine Guts
The new machine's skipping stitches now that the plastic parts are starting to wear out. It's always throwing software errors, and it damn near shakes itself apart at top speed. Look at it's innards - I could barely fit a boriscope camera that's about as thick as spaghetti in there let alone my fingers. Very little is attached with standard screws.
And it's infuriating. I'm an engineer - there's no damn reason to make high-wear parts out of plastic. Or put them in places they can't be reached to replace. There's no reason to make your mechanism so unbalanced it's reaching the point of failure before reaching it's own design speed. (Oh yeah there is, it's corporate greed)
100 years, and your standard home sewing machine has gone from a beast of a machine that can be pulled out of the literal waterlogged trash and repaired - to a machine that eats itself if you sew anything but delicate fast-fashion fabrics that are also designed to fall apart in a few years.
Looking for something modern built to the standard that was set 100 years ago? I'd be looking at industrial machines that are going for thousands of dollars... Used on craigslist. I don't even want to know what they'd cost new.
We have the technology and knowledge to manufacture "old" sewing machines still. Hell, even better, sewing machines with the mechanical design quality of the old ones, but with more modern features. It would be so easy - at a technical level to start building things well again. Hell, it's easier to fabricate something sturdy than engineer something to fail at just the right time. (I have half a mind to see if any of my meche friends with machine shops want to help me fabricate an actually good modern machine lol)
We need to push for right-to-repair laws, and legislation against planned obsolescence. Because it's honestly shocking how corporate greed has downright sabotaged good design. They're selling us utter shit, and expecting us to come back for more every financial quarter? I'm over it.
My Mum had an Singer treadle machine on a wooden stand, inherited from her mum, my Gran. According to Mum, Gran got it "the year old King Edward died", meaning 1910.
Machines like that weren't cheap (up to a couple of months' average wages) so it probably did dual service as a household machine and in my Grandad's saddlery shop.
As @viridianriver mentions about their machine and which I saw done more than once (repairing my leather schoolbag, for instance) it could put a needle and a waxed linen thread through thick leather with no effort at all, and do it fast.
The only update Mum gave it, sometime around 1975-ish, was an electric motor with variable-pressure foot-pedal, though she still preferred the treadle or even the hand-wheel for delicate work.
About that same time Dad bought her a fancy new Brother machine which could do all sorts of tricks, but it was only ever used for fancy work, and not much of that since Mum already had years of practice on the older machine.
The Singer even folded down into its stand, which had its own corner in the living-room and doubled as a table for a flower vase, so was also handier to use.
Like so...
Clever…
Mum's Singer was running like a sewing-machine (hah!) right up to her death in 2007, and my sister still uses it now and then.
Nearly 115 years isn't a bad service record. These machines are solid.
"It’s a FAT ZERO. HELLO!! A little LATE ADDITION to the numerical symbol chart brought to us from our friends in Arabia, a little bit of trivia that I happen to know about the history of numbers. That kind of little tidbit would serve me well in most trivia games, unless it had been RIGGED FROM THE BEGINNING!"
[ID: Image one is a Spotify playlist titled "i’ve only just begun to pull the thread on this sweater". Its cover image shows Brennan Lee Mulligan on Game Changer saying "I know what's going on here." The following images are all the songs on the playlist. Together, they spell out his whole monologue for the "Brennan Cannot Win" game, as follows (with added punctuation):
"Friends, you would think in a game where there are only two possible correct choices, that one would stumble into the right answer every so often, wouldn’t you? In fact, the probability of never guessing right in the full game is a statistical wonder, and yet, here we are. Introduced at the top of the game as a champion, what do you think that means? Icarus, flying too close to the sun. But it seems Daedalus, our little master crafter over here, had some wax wings of his own, didn’t he? Wanted to see his son fall. Fall from the sky. Oh, how close to the sun he flew! Well I’m not having it. I solved your labyrinth, puzzle master! The minotaur‘s escaped and you’re gonna get the horns, buddy! I cannot win!" End ID]
[Caption transcript: "It’s a fat zero. Hello!! A little late addition to the numerical symbol chart brought to us from our friends in Arabia, a little bit of trivia that I happen to know about the history of numbers. That kind of little tidbit would serve me well in most trivia games, unless it had been rigged from the beginning!" End transcript]
wake up babe, new reason to ditch FANDOM/Wikia just dropped
![Zelda Wiki twitter: Fandom refused to take this wiki down after we returned to independence and now it looks like they are using generative A.I. for "quick answers" which are spreading misinformation. Please stop using Fandom. We do not approve of our past work being used like this. [Screenshot of FANDOM Zelda Wiki with Quick Answers feature]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/55df791ecf5b885002a8ef164826ff07/cca355bad3b8715c-54/s1280x1920/948ce234abb745ea67c95d7bc58aade423eb7712.jpg)
ALT![Zelda Wiki twitter: IN one case, it provides "answers" for a completely unrelated franchise. [Screenshot of FANDOM Zelda Wiki with Quick Answers feature]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/dba0adad0a30f2d590ae05c4f7c0a839/cca355bad3b8715c-7d/s1280x1920/e7de260bae3d90e01cad8ae1a3e6032e202e3c79.jpg)
ALTPreviosuly
- corporate monster infested with ads which devoured Gamepedia and other companies (feat me on their shit policies, SEO and migration process)
- turning entire articles into ads if paid enough
- limited functionality preventing admins to even fight vandalism
- merging and removing of LGBT+ wikis (and forced domain change for educational [think serious] wikis to "fandom")
- official wiki status has no meaning in controlling shit
- very much censorship (same good ol' allergy to adult stuff)
- gets paid by US Navy to advertise their events (one, two)
Alternative free wiki hostings (aka wiki farms)
- Miraheze - started in 2015, non-commercial - no ads and runs on donations, wide array of MediaWiki features, wide array of allowed types of wikis and content, much autonomy for projects, custom domain and private wiki options
- wiki.gg - started in 2022 by former Gamepedia staff, limited to video games, accent on involvement of game devs and thus hosting official wikis, has ads for anons (but only of games having wikis here)
- Telepedia - started in 2022, limited to entertainment (although might allow other themes upon review), has ads for anons, replicates Miraheze structure
- WikiTide - started in 2023, no ads and runs on donations (but also tied w/ premium version called WikiForge), largely replicates Miraheze but has stricter content policies, custom domain option
Other free options I'm aware of are either too limited in allowed content or are very outdated/unstable in technical department to recommend here (or in case of Neoseeker - I'm completely unfamiliar with it, and can't say anything about it), but you still can check them out, alongside paid hostings, on this MediaWiki page.
If you (or your community) are brave and dedicated enough you can go with self-hosted MediaWiki instance (aka independent hosting), like JoJo Wiki (who started on Wikia and succeed at overtaking the SEO) or NIWA wikis. This option, of course, requires funding and technical knowledge, but it's still very much possible.
How to find existing alternative/independent wikis
- try to use "-fandom" filter for search query in Google, or use other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo
- Indie Wiki Buddy browser extension - it modifies search engine results and performs redirects based on its centralized list of independent wikis; a new indie wiki has to be requested/submitted to get added [ Firefox / Chrome ]
- Redirect to wiki.gg browser extension - same as IWB but for wikis moved to wiki.gg (as I understand, works automatically without dedicated listing) [ Firefox / Chrome ]
- (simple) Redirector browser extension - in case the wiki is neither on IWB or wiki.gg, and it doesn't filter out search results - only performs redirect on whatever you get; a redirect has to be set manually - see this tutorial [ Firefox / Chrome ]
Fuck FANDOM, support real people, support indie wikis
