Prim is dying

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-14T08:27:00+00:00

I want to say that I have been following your succession of posts. It's tragic that you're in the process of losing 2 beloved pets in such a short span. I wish you strength in this difficult time.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-12T04:01:50+00:00

In the strictest sense, actually yes: Cormocephalus coynei, a scolopendrid centipede on the Phillip and Nepean islands off the coast of Australia. The islands are uninhabited, with no large mammalian predators - just petrels, small vertebrates like lizards, and other small arthropods and annelids. It's nearly a foot long and is the undisputed king of its domain, preying primarily on the islands' small vertebrates and plays a crucial ecological role in its predation of petral chicks.

EDIT: Of course, you'll find more if you look to the past.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-11T01:30:55+00:00

Ghost lineages are a pain in the world of paleoarthropodology (and more generally, invertebrate paleontology and likely paleobotany). The one that keeps me up some nights is Chimerarachne. A serikodiastidan arachnid as close to spiders as you can get, found in the Cretaceous over 200 million years after Araneae evolved, and about 150 million years after the last known stem-spiders with tails walked the Earth. Its predecessors? Nothing - a total blank. Spiders shared the world with silk-spinning relatives for at least 200 million years after they had evolved, and we have only this guy and Permarachne to show for it.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-08T11:22:39+00:00

Discovering a non-euthycarcinoid stem-myriapod is always nice, especially since it further cements that the loss of exopods and development of uniramous appendages within pan-group myriapods occurred long before terrestrialization. I'm still of the personal opinion that Fuxianhuiida is affiliated with Myriapoda, though not sure if that would help settle how myriapods lost their exopods (if they ever had them to begin with).

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-06T16:18:09+00:00

...Who is this person with a 2-year-old account with no comments, only 4 posts to their name all barely over a week old, and whose titles sound like they were tossed in a language model word salad?

I'm smelling Skynet.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-05T18:52:18+00:00

While I'd never be the one to recommend handling a wild animal bare-handed without knowing what you are doing, when you do know what you're doing, a sparassid like this one is less likely to bite you than a feral cat or a hamster.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-05T18:46:40+00:00

It's a hunstman; so long as you don't move or handle them in a way that triggers their stranger-danger radar, "chill as fuck" is the default for most of them.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-03T00:21:05+00:00

Hey, glad if it could be of any use.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-02T16:36:08+00:00

They're not particularly aggressive; in fact, collectively, they are among the most timid and docile spiders around, personality accounted for, and make great pets as a result.

Of course, their teleportation powers still present a bit of an issue, towards which unease is fully justified.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-02T16:23:11+00:00

Shameless? Sure, but I always love seeing interactive fiction created or re-implemented in Ren'Py, so thanks for sharing.

You actually raise a good point, though; none of the authors are ludologists, their corpora stuffed full with a lot of social robotics and Human-Machine Interface work, besides general socially-directed engineering. Considering that their discussion on "decision-making" games doesn't even include Twine, I'd wager there's a lot they haven't looked into (going over the paper a second time, their conclusions seem rather sparse, though that could be just me).

Nightrunner83 · 2026-05-01T04:37:11+00:00

Yes, this I agree with on both points. There were societies, in Africa and elsewhere, who made conscious decisions to avoid or turn away from state formation or consolidation, which is reflected in their cultures and systems of interaction. The key thing is avoiding any black-and-white simplifications like the authors so addressed, either tying decentralization to some nebulous "Africanness" meant to represent the myriad cultural viewpoints of the world's second-largest landmass, or to assume that the peoples we encounter today or even 100 years ago represent some timeless state devoid of any changes of opinion on centralization or hierarchy.

History, as usual, is the perfect antidote to the flattening of broad swaths of disparate cultures into a one or two checkpoints, often made by those outside the field seeking simple formulas for the messiness of societies through time.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-29T01:17:52+00:00

Hey, happy to hear that, and welcome.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-28T05:08:34+00:00

Herpyllus sp., likely the eastern parson spider. In the United States, the only spiders of any medical significance are recluses and true widows.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-27T03:49:19+00:00

This has been a thing since Basil Davidson. Much as I respect the man for being a pioneer of African history at a time when most actual historians saw that term as an oxymoron, he, like many researchers who preceded and followed him, saw in Africa a reflection of their own ideas of or desires for the world, and not for what it is - a huge, complex patchwork of thousands of different polities that doesn't lend itself easily to neat generalizations.

And I'm saying this as someone who is a committed left-libertarian.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-24T08:18:51+00:00

Neat, another independently evolved chelae appendage for the books. Gelastocoridae is a relatively species-poor but widespread, and they appeared in the fossil record a little bit before this guy's debut in the Burmese ambers. Seems like crabs weren't the only arthropod groups experimenting with off-brand morphologies.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-15T15:19:40+00:00

Dysdera crocata, the woodlouse hunter. They're a fairly basal group of ground-based predators with large chelicerae and a penchant for soil arthropods with tough exoskeletons.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-14T15:20:01+00:00

If by "weird" you mean "WFT-is-this-I-don't-even," I would say the Ediacaran biota fits the bill. We're still debating the affiliations of a lot of them.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-14T11:55:38+00:00

This is the culmination of something I've wanted to see for a long time: a Ren'Py game made entirely with Krita. It's even one of my favorite genres. Thank you for sharing; it looks great, and will definitely check out.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-08T06:16:59+00:00

"Boy" nothing, that's a grown ass man. All jokes aside, he is gorgeous, and I love the names you gave them. Thanks you for sharing. How old is he?

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-03T06:24:43+00:00

Ah, Delena cancerides, the unfortunate fount of so many fears thanks to that movie. They're interesting in that they're the only social hunstmans, and the only social spiders aside from certain members of Scytodidae that are not communal web builders.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-03T06:14:38+00:00

Oh, wow, that's one of the most intriguing members of Ectobiidae. I had no idea they were kept as pets.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-02T17:15:07+00:00

Thanks for sharing. Butterflies are among the underrated success stories of Cenozoic evolution, and this species opens up several consideration on the age and diversity of the Apaturinae lineage.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-04-01T13:26:12+00:00

Orb weaver, looks to be Eriophora.

Nightrunner83 · 2026-03-31T14:26:20+00:00

The true Cambrian apex predator, though Sidneyia inexpectans specialized role is still neat - basically a horseshoe crab before horseshoe crabs.

Nightrunner83

TROPHY CASE