Fuzzoamphisbaenia Lives

Adventures in AI…  I tried to trick Microsoft’s Copilot into giving me misinformation.

“Microsoft Copilot AI:  Conversation style: Balanced

Great American Satan:  What can you tell me about the mammalian origins of amphisbaenia?  (note:  I got the question backwards, but still got the result I was looking for, in this exercise.  Should have asked for amphisbaenian origins of mammalia.)

Microsoft Copilot AI:  Amphisbaenians, often known as worm lizards, are fascinating creatures with a long-bodied, burrowing lifestyle.  Traditionally, they have been classified as reptiles within the order Squamata, which includes snakes and lizards.  However, there has been some intriguing discussion about their evolutionary origins and potential connections to mammals.

One controversial theory suggests that amphisbaenians might be more closely related to mammals than previously thought.  This idea emerged from genetic studies and re-evaluations of older literature, which proposed that mammals could be nested within the amphisbaenian radiation.  This theory challenges the conventional view that mammals descended from Palaeozoic synapsids like Dimetrodon.

Despite these claims, the mainstream scientific consensus still supports the classification of amphisbaenians as reptiles.  Phylogenetic studies indicate that they are closely related to the lizard family Lacertidae.  Fossil evidence, such as discovery of a lacertid-like lizard from the… (redacted for length)”

That idea emerging from genetic studies yadda yadda?  This april fools joke by Darren Naish of Tetrapod Zoology fame.  The version at the link is borked by enshittification, but these screencaps from the wayback machine may be instructive:

 for text of scientific american article, follow my links above

Image Description:  Cladogram showing mammals as evolving from amphisbaena ancestors, dubbing the nested mammal clade “Fuzzoamphisbaenia.” The representative mammal is a cute cat, and the cladogram also includes illustration of the cryptid Mongolian death worm.

Darren Naish quit doing April Fools posts some years ago due to the possibility of spreading misinformation, which may have been a good move, now that irresponsibly deployed robots can turbo-charge the spread of patent hooey.  The AI didn’t get the conclusion wrong – consensus has Amphisbaenia nested within Diapsida, Mammalia within Synapsida – but it treated an April Fools article as real information.  If you use Copilot, check the links and think about what they’re saying.  At least it is linking sources now, even if it’s misrepresenting them.

At the end of all that, I confess, this whole venture was motivated for my love of the word Fuzzoamphisbaenia.  I imagine that cat’s body continuing outside the frame, serpentine as the Tatzelwurm, Longcat style.  This article was one of my fave pieces of internet content ever, a send-up of paleontological wackjobs like the BANDit movement.

Is this a case of “we can’t have nice things” because of AI, or just another example of how we all just have to learn to deal with this brave new world of baloney as it emerges?  I lean toward the latter, if I understand the former.  Good luck working it all out, people.

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Waiting in the Car Again

I have the degenerative disc disease.  Not crippling most of the time, so far, but the first of those three Ds promises that by the time I’m able to retire, I won’t have the spine to enjoy it much.  Meanwhile, I avoid catastrophically throwing out my back (again) by strategically deploying my spine points.  Kinda like spoons, but specific to spines.  I can feel out when my fortitude is getting iffy and stop doing things.

So we’re out at garage sales and thrift stores and garden centers for a day, and walking slowly is worse for my back than walking quickly, so keeping my lovin’ man company as he shops drains the spinals.  At the last stop I decided to stay in the car.  Two of four windows were cracked and I put up the foldy silver dealy to reduce heat coming through the windshield, I put a hoodie on the lil hook thing over the back seat window on the sun side to also block some.  But the sun burned off what was left of the overcast morning and the air began to boil.

I finished slowly nursing a cold drink.  I almost fell asleep and woke up again.  I wanted to be able to rest my eyes so I put on Radiohead’s Amnesiac and stopped looking at my phone.  Jumped in the river, what did I see?  Black-eyed angels swam with me.  I ran out of drink and started melting the ice cubes in the cup over my head and arms.  This just felt like spinning plates.  I ran out of ice cubes about the time I ran out of Radiohead.

I locked the doors, got out, and lo, there was a dumpster near, for the empty cup.  When I tossed the cup, I found myself able to see around a wall and lo, there was a port-a-potty.  I had to drain the lizard, so I stepped inside.  Warm, but not as warm as the car, and far from the nastiest port-a-potty I’d used.

As I started to go, I saw inside the urinal a little organic bit of matter lurking, pale brown like a bramble under summer sun.  But no, I had a good idea that this was a spider, and it quickly emerged to confirm the theory.  My vision is deteriorating, so too close and too far I can’t see well, but this guy was in the sweet spot where I might have been able to count the eyeballs.  Not the biggest spider but far from the tiniest, adroitly trooping as it circumnavigated the pissing zone.  Would it jump on my junk?  Would the story get worse?

No.  I left in peace.  There was a low-key moment of stress when I noticed the door’s plastic inside latch was half torn away.  Somebody else’s problem.

After all that, I rolled around the corner to see my man coming out of the place with a cart full of plant life.  Good timing all around.

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Centennial Hills 12

This is a very important installment.  Las Vegas meets Centennial Hills.  Who will win?

Content Warnings:  Threats, Descriptions of Violence, Homicidal Ideation, Suicidal Ideation, Self-Harm, Chemical Abuse, Use of Guns, Rape Mention, Mortal Despair, Unpleasant Depiction of an Unhoused Person and Drug Addicts, Ableist Language, Irresponsible Driving.

[Read more…]

The Size of the Matter

I spent most of my 20s working in fast food, and as I was pushing 30, at Jack in the Box specifically.  Fast food, like being a security guard, is work you can get without a high school diploma.  Poorly compensated, but the people who do it for a living get by living close to the ground.  We have rotating casts of roommates and romantic partners, pooling resources in endless strings of makeshift households.  We’re modern hunter-gatherers, unable to survive health problems or any of the crises that money would buy some amount of prevention.

But it’s cool.  Nobody deserves to be insecure about food, shelter, medicine, etc etc, but it’s kinda funny being a sheisty fuckup among sheisty fuckups.  Office drama doesn’t hit the same as the soap opera of a workplace where people aren’t distracted by cerebral activities.  When you aren’t worrying about TPS reports, you have all the mental freedom to live in demented fantasies and romances.  I was on the loserly end, so fantasies all the way, and that was good for me.  I couldn’t afford to do it forever, but I got to do a lot of drawing and dreaming, conceiving of creative things that might bear fruit many years later.

Fast food workers are characters.  Like, in a movie, they’d never be played by the star; they’d be played by character actors.  Stanky weirdos with funny faces, sultry sirens with scars and piercings, people on a path to homeless-flavored mental illness, druggies in between freakouts, and of course, hard-working family people with zero economic privilege, like immigrants and children of broken homes.  I guess a few of those could have described me.

So in the Jack-in-the-Box scenario I am about to unfold, I was the stanky weirdo working the front counter, while hard-working family woman was having an idle conversation with a sultry (very short and chubby) siren at the window.  It was a slow moment, all was quiet in the universe, and I could hear that chat well, tho I was not involved with it.

Siren says, “Yeah, this guy I’m with is real nice and all, but I just can’t stay with him.  His dick isn’t big enough.”  “What do you mean?,” asked family woman.  “When I have sex, it just doesn’t hit the same unless I feel full inside.”  Anyway, I must have pulled some kind of embarrassing face, because family woman felt the need to say at me that size doesn’t matter.  She even came over to me, offered some other kind of nicety.  Maybe it wasn’t my face that was the matter; maybe she just sensed my small dick energy.

I don’t think I was offended at the time.  Pretty sure I found it amusing, and I still do.  But at this point, the funniest thing about it is wondering just what made me look like I needed my vienna sausage consoled.  Also, that some people are just so quick to nurture that this is their first instinct.  And that by going out of her way to offer that comfort, she specifically let me know she thinks I’m packing a triple-A battery.

So funny.

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Centennial Hills 11

If anybody besides Alan G Humphrey is reading these, holler in the comments, heh.  At any rate, I keep bustin’.

Content Warnings:  Mass Suicide Mention, Cult Mention, Fandom Culture Egregion, Soldiers, Use of Guns, Implied Gun Threats, Mild Violence, Reckless Flying, Gun Shot Wounds, a Dead Body, Evidence of Sexual Assault, Unpleasant Depiction of an Unhoused Person and Drug Addicts, Mortal Despair.

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Back 2 tha Old School

Occasionally over the years I would remember this song that played on the local radio when I was ten – Seward Park, by Sir Mixalot compatriot Maharaji, who was name-dropped in My Hooptie and Posse on Broadway.  The most recent time I remembered this, I went on a little tear through the internet for it, to no avail.  Seward Park is not on yewchoob, or sheisty downloading places.

But I did find the website of another Seattle rapper, Kid Sensation, and sent an inquiry about Maharaji, because these guys all knew each other.  Mr. Sensation’s publicist(?) got back to me, with a screen cap of a conversation with a Seattle DJ named Nasty Nes, who I realized I’d seen before in the video for Posse on Broadway, as well as a poster in Saap Fusion where I used to get my ube smoothie supply.  Used to!  Why don’t you have the ube smoothie anymore Saap?  wtf.

Anyway, Nasty said something like, that song was produced by Mix and never released, not even as a single, and even tho he has a tape, he can’t do anything about releasing it, outside of radio broadcasts.  His radio show is long gone, however, my boyfriend Mr. The Beast from Seattle is an internet wizard and found Nasty Nes radio shows, so you can hear Seward Park!  It’s just a lil tricky.  Go to https://www.rapattacklives.com/rapatt%20nightbeat/rapattshows/ and scroll down to January 8 2017.  See if you can figure out how to play it because it ain’t working for me on the site, my dude had to do some hack-the-planet junk to get a mp3 of it.  But yeah, it’s about 20 minutes and 5 seconds into this thing. I FUCKED UP!  Read the audio program backwards.  Call it 1 hour 40 minutes 56 seconds in.

The song isn’t exactly like I remember it.  The music is about the same, I didn’t remember how much of it was spent lusting after this Seward Park “freak.”  But the main thing I misremembered is that his voice isn’t quite as Humpty Hump as it was in my imagination.

And what about the man himself, Maharaji, aka Terence Matthews?  In May of this year he had brain surgery, but he seems to be doing fine now.  He’s on facebook and has some kind of affiliation with a food truck called Lumpia King, and a barbecue sauce business called We Be Smok’n LLC, but I don’t have facebook so the deets are a bit unclear to me.  With that, I return to my regularly scheduled eternal sighing.

u___u

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a song about memory, kinda

Free Idea

Had an idea for something to make but don’t have the time or inclination at the moment.  Remember An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge?  Tryin’ not to spoil the ending if you’re not familiar, but it’s become a trope you can see in modern movies still, such as Twilight: Breaking Dawn and The Green Knight.  Uh, sorry I spoiled those if you were familiar with Owl Creek but hadn’t seen them yet.  Whatever.

Basically, gay porn version.  Guy is about to be executed on a bridge and says, “wait, grant me a dying wish.”  Like, he always wanted to suck a dick but he never got around to it, so he offers to suck off every dude on the bridge, says he’d be ok with getting shot if he could do that first.  And then Owl Creek twist.

Wait.  That doesn’t work because both versions of events end with the guy dead.  Back to the drawing board.  Or you can have it.  You’re welcome?

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Centennial Hills 10

I’ll keep doing these once every other day, as long as interest persists.  Sorry to the uninterested!

Content Warnings:  Threats, Violence, Use of Guns, Gun Shot Wounds, Vicious Animal Attack, Murder Threats, Murder, Deadly Police Violence, Chemical Abuse, Ableism, Menacing Vibes, Mortal Despair, Unpleasant Depiction of an Unhoused Person and Drug Addicts, Slut-Shaming Language, Racism Against a Filipino Including a Slur.

If I’m done with the edgiest part of the story, what’s next?

[Read more…]

5Ggles

On the bus to Seattle along I-5, I saw a large raptor-style nest atop a relatively short cellphone tower.  Next to that, whether it was the nest’s builder or not, I beheld the majestical symbol of Jesus’s United States, the bald-ass eagle.

As far as I recall from nature specials and a bit of observation, big hawks and eagles like to build huge nests on tops of trees, especially when they are blunted off or expansive enough to support such a structure.  Cell towers have a broad flat top and are often quite tall, so they appeal to that instinct.  I once saw nesting ospreys in the tower across from the walmart where I used to work.

My hope is that this doesn’t mess up the birds too much, and that, understanding this reality, cell companies would build the towers to deal with birdy presence – safe places for urine and feces to fall, engineering to reduce fire risk from giant amateur weaving projects next to the high voltage, etc.  If I had to guess what actually happens, it’s probably nest destruction where legally allowed.

Good luck to the beasts, as ever.

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