Leucism or pigmentation loss results in partial coloring in individuals, like this amazing Bohemian waxwing:
Very striking, isn’t it! A white waxwing would catch your eye anyway, but the red and yellow wing and tail tips are the truly arresting parts. Wow.
I just can’t but wonder how well one would do in nature. In northern Fennoscandia it would be okay in the winter, because even with the climate change the northern Nordic areas get snow, but summer might be tough.
We’re not seeing much new plotwise, just some beefed-up scenes from the first trailer. Glimpses of the Red Wizards and the orifice are on par with the typical medieval-inspired D&D worlds, but WHAT ON EARTH is going on with that broomhead wall?!?
The roof looks properly thatched, but I have serious doubts of the durability of the facade. There’s obviously plenty of timber available in this area of the world for framing the house with, so the little detail above the door must be decorative. Perhaps there wasn’t quite enough to do the whole outer wall? Or the straw is there for easy repairs?? The original builders blew all of their money on framing and had to make do for cladding???
Anyway, if a trailer commentary can be so easily stolen by funky set design, the question arises whether the trailer in question really did fulfil its function or not… I hope we’ll get another, better one before the release day.
According to IMDB, Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves is now expected on April 07, 2023, but the trailer still says “this March”, so go figure.
Image: screencap from Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
According to her website, Fjäll is also historical reenactor who sews some of her own clothes. That explains why Spidey’s Viking version looks so authentic. (As far as I can tell, the only piece where artistic license was taken is the lower head covering inside the hood and the spiderweb decoration on the red fabric.) Kudos all round!
In Making Stuff we share fun arts and crafts done by us and our fellow geeks and nerds.
The mossy frog or Vietnamese mossy frog (Theloderma corticale) comes from Southeast Asia. (Apparently it’s known by many other names, too, like Tonkin bug-eyed frog, but that just sounds offputting, doesn’t it?)
Not the only animal with camouflage to play dead when threatened, the mossy frog does it cuter than others, if you ask me. Very effectively, too, if the photo below is any indication:
Just think if your fantasy role-playing game had a party of player characters traveling through a clearing in a wild, overgrown forest dotted with mossy boulders, which suddenly started moving… and turned out to be huge frogs! Or a secondary world story with villagers somewhere in the boonies struggling to catch and cook these abnormally large frogs before they eat the village’s harvest.
As a total side note: while writing this post I learned that one of the synonyms for camouflage is the phrase plain brown wrapper. I’ve no idea how I’ve never come across that before, but now I know it. It’s one of the joys of language learning to me: you never really stop picking up new words and expressions. 🙂
Images: On a stick by Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Rawpixel via Flickr (CC BY 4.0). Camouflaged by mamojo via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?
I stumbled upon a Tumblr post by Peter Morwood on non-electric light sources in period and/or fantasy writing and screen adaptations, and found out about a brilliant (no pun intended!) historical lighting aid. It’s simply a spherical water bottle or a glass globe arranged in front of a candle to concentrate the light.
It’s surprisingly effective as a magnifier: placing a candle behind the bottle does diffuse much more light around than placing a candle beside it. Morwood tried it in his kitchen with good results.
The principle works with electric light bulbs, too, as the photo below with a woodcarver shows.
Morwood even refers to one in Peter Jackson’s movie Fellowship of the Rings:
Well, what do you know! From the extensive making-of documentaries I already knew how carefully the Weta teams worked on the Lord of the Rings props. This just proves it again. Great job!
The Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest is hosted by National Maritime Museum, part of the Royal Museums Greenwich in Britain. In 2022, the competition was run for the 14th time. This shortlisted photo by Alexander Stepanenko didn’t win the award for auroae, as astounding as it is:
Stepanenko’s shot was taken in Murmansk, Murmansk Oblast, Russia, and was highly commended by the jury.
Spectacular, isn’t it? As a Finn who grew up two hours south of the Arctic Circle, I’ve seen my share of northern lights, but never this, hm, I guess curvy is the right word. I know they undulate and can therefore make fancier shapes; I’ve only managed to see them fairly linear, though, or curving over quite a large swath of the sky, just like I haven’t seen any purple or yellow ones myself.
Come to think of it, there is a thin lining of white and purple at the right edge of this aurora. Wow! Is it any wonder that natural scenes like these have lead the earlier hominids and humans to think of magic and gods?
Image by Alexander Stepanenko, found via Colossal.
Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.
This fall we’ve worked on catching up on Doctor Who, including some reading. Apparently, the romantic signals between Yaz and the Doctor essentially came from the actors, Mandip Gill and Jodie Whittaker, after they saw some fan speculation in social media.
Intriguing! I have often wondered how much say actors typically have over their characters, but I guess there isn’t a typical situation. At least on the basis of movie and series documentaries, it really seems to be up to each individual showrunner / writer / director how much creative control they’re willing to hand over to anyone else.
As I don’t read fan fic of any kind, this development was surprising to me. It was played nicely, though—subtle, not a hammer to the head (like some other stories I could point to).
Anyway; delighted to finally have a female Doctor! I’m looking forward to what writer Russel T. Davies and actor Ncuti Gatwa have in store for the fifteenth Doctor.
It’s still hard or impossible to say what the story is about. De-aging Harrison Ford looks impressive, from what we can see. But yay, more archaeology fan fiction with our favorite grumpy professor!
Hey, look! We found a thing on the internet! We thought it was cool, and wanted to share it with you.
Flying cars have been dreamed of as long as cars have been around. If certain projects or companies are to be believed, flying cars will actually become available soon. For certain values of soon, anyway, and for certain values of car.
Current designs are as varied as the propulsion technologies and terminologies: flying cars, hovercars, gyrocopters, passenger drones, quadcopters, VTOL aircraft, eVTOL, maglev cars, personal air vehicles… Whatever you call them, aircraft that look less like airplanes and more like other small personal vehicles do seem be closer than ever to everyday reality.
For example, Volocopter’s air taxis have been demonstrated in Singapore (2019). The Dutch PAL-V Liberty gyroplane has not only test flown (2012) but also been approved for road use in Europe (2022). The AirCar by Klein Vision (pictured above) has completed a test flight between two cities(!) in Slovakia (2021) and received a certificate of airworthiness from the Slovak Transport Authority (2022). Reportedly, recent projects are also ongoing in Turkey and China. And, related to flying cars, a smart city and tourist destination being built in northwestern Saudi Arabia—dubbed Neom—has been planned for rail traffic and air taxis according to some reports.
Now, I’d assume all of the above is predicated on plentiful energy. How P*tin’s attempted extortion of Europe’s energy market (which has wider ripple effects, I’m sure) affects the development of flying cars will remain uncertain for some time yet.
I have to say, if flying cars do become common enough to be relatively easily available, I am tempted to get a pilot’s license (whatever kind might be required)—if I’m not too old by that time. (Planes are too high a hurdle, but small personal vehicles might just do for me.)
As a linguist, though, I’m mostly engaged with the question of a handy everyday name. That, too, is likely to be wrangled over at least as much as the technology side of their development.
A group of French researchers published their study of a conch shell from the Upper Paleolithic period based on an assumption that it was used as a musical instrument. The article includes a sound sample gained by blowing into it—the first such sample published.
The conch shell in question, a Charonia lampas—a handsome marine mollusk—was found already in 1931 at the cave of Marsoulas, which is a so-called decorated cave. The shell is dated to roughly 16,000 BCE. And, interestingly, the shell was not only modified—presumably to make it fit a human mouth more easily—but also decorated with traces of colors and engravings.
The color is mostly found in fingerprint-sized and -shaped red dots on the internal surface of the shell. They are similar to motifs present on the cave walls, including a bison covered with a layer of red dots (seen in the background of the image above).
Aren’t the dot decorations fascinating? Apparently, similar conch shells have been used around the world as musical instruments in later periods, with similar modifications. Also, the oldest known flutes discovered thus far come from earlier paleolithic periods, roughly 40,000-20,000 years BCE, so the the concept of horn or flute should have been known. It certainly would make sense, then, that this shell was a horn.
You can hear the sound by downloading an audio file attached to the article.
Fritz, C. et al. “First record of the sound produced by the oldest Upper Paleolithic seashell horn” in Science Advances, Vol 7, Issue 7 (10 February 2021). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abe9510
Image by G. Tosello via Science Advances
An occasional feature on music and sound-related notions.
Co-Geeking 