A Silly Little Meme I Made For The Tenth Anniversary Kulinday, Hosted By @a-dinosaur-a-day.

one of the most important things, perhaps the most important thing I have learned in my life is that nice people can fuck each other up in monstrous ways. people can be bone deep kind and loving and self reflective and still lash out under pressure. people can be earnestly neighbourly and charitable and hospitable and generous and still find themselves in situations where they become selfish. people can be well meaning and easygoing and gregarious and hold deep seated opinions that turn them into vicious little bullies under the right conditions. nobody is just one thing, and nobody stays one way. every person is a kaleidoscope and they will surprise you. you will surprise yourself. it's not a warning and it's not a judgement and it's not an excuse, and it's certainly not a reason to stop trying or to stop trusting. it is just a fact.

Of course it's not over.

"Pride month is over"

WRONG! Your pride month is over! Me and all the other disabled queers are having pride month two: disability edition

Fossil Novembirb, the first nine days

Hello World. I never thought I'd be on this site, but here I am. This blog was created for the purpose of participating in a-dinosaur-a-day's Fossil Novembirb. Fossil Novembirb is a yearly art event founded by Meig Dickson, a vertebrate palaeontologist who, as far as I can tell, studies dinosaurs, especially theropods. Don't fight me or em over birds being theropod dinosaurs. Neither ey nor I want to have this conversation, so enjoy the art!

I started off my Fossil Novembirb with Vegavis iaai. What makes this fluffy anseriform special is that we found a fossilised syrinx (avian voice-maker) belonging to one of these, so we can reconstruct their sounds. This Vegavis was coloured based on a bunch of anseriforms that are alive today, like ruddy shelducks and cotton pygmy geese.

For Day 2, I did a bit of spec evo and pulled out a scientific name I told myself I'd assign to a newly-discovered fossil genus. This sketch has a Serina-like text description for Phantasmavis.

Tropicbirds! I chose to draw Clymenoptilon because I was hoping "tropicbird" meant "brightly coloured bird". Even though they aren't that brightly coloured, they're still cool. And Kumimanu (approximately to scale in this drawing) didn't really have the obligation to be black-and-white like most extant penguins (because Inkayacu), so I went... mild-wild with the colours.

No... one's... tall like Gastornis, no one calls like Gastornis! In the bottom right, no one feeds small like Gastornis!

I've seen the "Andy's Prehistoric Adventures" episode featuring these megafowl, realised it was Walking With Dinosaurs with a human inserted, and drawn a mildly speculative colouration for these Gastornis. To the left, two adults have their necks out towards each other and are calling into the sky. Whether this is courtship or a challenge, nobody knows. But a calmer scene happens in the bottom right, where a mother shows her chick red berries on a branch to show them that it is food.

"Don't make me fly up there, you punk!" is one way to interpret the screamerduck Anachronornis' call in the direction of the Primoptynx owl. This scene unfolds in the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum ecosystem of the Willwood Formation before it was rock.

It's a twilight hummingswift! We know the colour of this iridescent little birb from the Danish Fur Formation. I watched a tutorial on painting iridescence, but I'm not really satisfied with the parent feeding their chick to the left of the flying Eocypselus rowei. It's hard to see, but there's a baby hummingswift being fed a Cimbrophlebia scorpionfly.

London Clay has a lot of plant fossils. Not all of them are listed on Wikipedia, but there's a photo of a pencil-root mangrove seed listed. Featuring a speculatively-coloured Eotrogon, a Dasornis carrying away a mackerel, and a Prophaeton just gliding, and repeat telecasts Gastornis parisiensis and Eocypelus rowei, Eocene London was a birder's dream (believe me, I'm a kinda-birder).

This Tynskya art was somewhat late, rather dissatisfactory, and mildly rushed. I had an exam the next day. Don't judge me.

And here's a better Primozygodactylus! I couldn't tell the specific species because it wasn't listed for the Wikipedia image. But here we are: a bird that gives off ashy prinia/sparrow/orange-headed thrush vibes.

This concludes the first nine days! I don't know if I'll be doing the tenth because nobody's giving me straight answers about the palaeobotany of the Green River formation.

Enjoy!

Prehistoric Pride Vel-ace-raptor

Drew a rhizodus, an absolute monster of an animal that lived during the carboniferous period, roughly 5-7m in length (making it the largest freshwater fish that we know of) and a tetrapodomorph meaning it breathed air and is more closely related to us than to true blue and gilled fish!

We’ve even found land track marks from another genus of rhizodontid, they certainly got around!

I’d love to make some big stickers (and prints) of this fella if anyone was interested :-)

if you know where this meme come from i’ll give you a star

i want someone to make a remix of big shot with the song, it would be perfect

?!

The Collector's Species (TOH) and The Observer (Serina: The World of Birds) are Interestingly Similar

Despite being from two unrelated fandoms, both fulfill the exact same role.

First thing's first; Their designs.

The Collectors' are shown to wear robes with star and moon iconography, and generally seem to have an association with celestial events as shown in the paintings lining the walls of The Archive in "For The Future". They also seem to depict themselves as almost a part of the night sky.

The Observer, on the other hand, has a more ethereal form. They are described as having an eye that glowed bright like a star, whilst manifesting an aurora like physical form that was meant to be familiar to the intelligent life it was speaking to, as to not scare them.

This art (Drawn by Bombnyx) depicting the Observer talking to a character, further shows the celestial symbolism, showing him as if they are literally the stars and cosmic clouds that make up the space around the planet. (Including this because it's probably canon)

These designs visually imply that the space in which they reside (being everywhere around the planets they observe) is under their complete control, making them nigh omnipotent beings that are virtually unstoppable.

Secondly; Their Overall Goals

The Archivists are very mysterious beings, so we can only guess what they do based on what our Collector has told the audience. In "For The Future" the first part of the storybook that King reads to him implies that his species lives to observe life on planets change and evolve over long periods of time. In order to preserve their species in the case that they go extinct (naturally or not) they collect members of their species to be preserved.

The Observer does something very similar, albeit in a much less invasive manner. Instead, they terraform a previously lifeless moon and seed it with a select amount of organisms from Earth. The way they archive is through cataloging species in numerous posts, similar to a naturalist studying wildlife. By looking at the character development of The Observer during the story, it could be inferred that at first it seemed to almost not be "aware" of its own existence. As if it was a computer program simply executing code for an unknown goal.

Thirdly; Both Have Messed With the Native Intelligent Life

When the Archivists discovered that the dominant intelligence in the Demon Realm had magical powers that could cancel out theirs, they engaged in a covert genocide against them (the titans). They presented themselves as gods to the lower lifeforms, the original Titan Trappers, and presumably gave them weaponry and knowledge to wipe out the titans.

As seen in "O Titan, Where Art Thou" a connection could be made through allowing the Collector to access dreams, as seen with King in later episodes. (SPOILER WARNING) Furthermore, in "Watching and Dreaming" the Collector uses dream manipulation to torment King, Luz, and Eda with their worst fears.

Now, what does the Observer also do? Manipulates dreams, specifically with the intent to commit a genocide "for the greater good of the project".

For some background, the dominant species on Serina at the time are penguin like canary descendants known as Gravediggers. There are other intelligent lifeforms too, but they are not nearly as adaptable as the former. The Observer begins to realize the horrifying potential the species is capable of when they discover massive coal deposits, which they use to directly warm the planet. Granted, this is to keep the narrow waterway of their nearly frozen over planet from closing, but a Pandora's Box was now open.

The only way he sees the Gravediggers not plunging the planet into a hellish nuclear war is to directly intervene. Using his almost omnipotent knowledge, he finds the perfect candidate in the form of a crow like bird named Brighteye. He is special, being the only member of his species to be sapient and understand more abstract concepts, the only one with the ability to dream.

After experiencing his brother, Whitecrown, nearly get brutally slaughtered at the hands of his own family due to his albinism, the Observer swoops in to give him hope of a future for him and his brother. He pushes Brighteye to find others like him, and there they will be safe. But unbeknownst to him, doing these actions would make him a harbinger of the apocalypse.

The story is much more layered than what I'm describing, but by the end of it the apocalypse does come to fruition, and by Whitecrown of all characters. Him fighting and leaving his sibling was guaranteed by his instinctual behavior, something that the Observer always knew was going to happen. Although he isn't sapient, he is still intelligent, and replicates the fire making abilities of his brother to hunt animals.

Remember those "massive coal deposits" I mentioned earlier? Whilst flying above the grasslands, Whitecrown accidentally drops the burning stick onto one of them, causing a massive explosion that kills him and the rest of his flock.

As the smoke gets to Brighteye, he hears the Observer one last time...

The fire continues to expand outward, soon consuming the entire continent in flames. The warmth from the fire will melt all of the ice, plunging the land of the Gravediggers under several hundred feet of water. For a time, it also turns the atmosphere into something akin to an oven, cooking / suffocating anything that's too close.

Does this sound familiar?

In the second half of the storybook King reads, underneath scribbled crayon markings, it states;

"But should they meddle in our affairs..."

"...We'll clean the planet and scorch the air."

...

Now, there are a lot more things that I haven't covered, but I think these are the three most important ones. In no way am I saying one of them copied the other, considering that The Observer was first mentioned all the way back in 2015, and the fact that neither of these fandoms are connected in any way.

Still, I find it cool how remarkably similar they are to each other in those ways. If anyone is interested, here's the link to the Serina website, where the story of these strange birds continues:

sites.google.com

Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds

~~~ Imagine, if you will, a hypothetical world much like our own, but overseen by a mysterious cosmic entity. While our world's rich diver

brigheye you iconic motherfucker

Blaze and Brighteye

Some fanart I made of Serina - this is also posted on my DeviantArt, might post here too maybe?