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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
wuxiaphoenix
headspace-hotel

Learning about plants has made my biopunk novel much more complicated like damn now I have to think about all the species and stuff

headspace-hotel

Generically vague settings are ruined for me forever. do y'all have any idea how specific the plant life in an area gets???

headspace-hotel

*Stares at the plants in novel set in fictional place with suspicion and criticism*

headspace-hotel

actually, i wanna talk about nature tropes in fantasy/otherwise "speculative" media because fiction has these stock tropes about nature that are so universal throughout everything from books to video games, and it turns out that they have nothing to do with reality

For starters, did y'all know that (with the exception of one species) cacti are ONLY native to the Americas, and deserts on all other continents have NO CACTI?

beppothebadger

Does that mean that Africa, in similar situations, mostly has spiky shrubs (without those water-consuming green things called leaves) and yams-like storage roots?

Or are there further concepts?

What does Australia do?

I know about succulents, and that they're also fairly common in the Alps (I don't know if they're native there, but the local name, "Hauswurz" - literally "house root" or "home root" - indicates as much).

Which aren't deserts in the narrower sense, but also not exactly known for rich flora, due to the altitude, low amount of topsoil, and cold.

Have you reached a level that permits you to see patterns that shape plant life in an area? It sounds a bit like you're in an area of frequent enlightenment...

headspace-hotel

Well the thing about plants is that they are much, MUCH weirder than animals are about radically altering and reshuffling their basic body forms and plans over the course of evolution, even within the same genus.

If you saw this plant, what would you assume its closest relatives are?

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If you answered "violets," good job! This is Viola atropurpurea, from the same genus as your common backyard violets.

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This is weird. Can we talk about how weird this is? This is like if tigers and lions shared the genus Panthera with some kind of tiny aquatic salamander-like thing.

Cacti are a specific plant family. Succulent plants have convergently evolved approximately a billion times and come from (almost) every corner of the plant family tree. The universality of cacti as the iconic Desert Plant has much to do with the average person not knowing the great variety of desert adapted plants, and mentally categorizing unrelated succulent plants as cacti because "cactus" is the closest word they have.

Desert plants are weird y'all. A ton of them look like weird mushroom- or barrel-like bulges and tubes. Like, just look at this thing.

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This is called "Sand Food" and it's edible

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This is Yareta and there are no photos of it that are like "Yeah that is a normal, real thing." (It's not moss! It's a flowering plant!)

plants
keeperofgems
the-bear-woman

The Australian Ballet is doing Alice in Wonderland again and on one hand I’ve seen it before, and on the other, their Queen of Hearts has my favourite costume in anything every

the-bear-woman

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It’s just this and her court pushes her around the stage on wheels and every act it gets taller until she towers over everyone

the-bear-woman

Also in act 3 (I think) it swings open at the front and her husband is sitting inside reading a newspaper

the-bear-woman

I saw this again on Tuesday so here are some things I’d forgotten about:

  • This is the only Alice adaptation I’ve ever seen that doesn’t cut the caucus race
  • The mad hatter wears taps throughout and it’s so jarring and surprising it’s perfect
  • The executioner shadows almost everyone who dances with the Queen
  • Lewis Carroll is a character in the ballet and becomes the white rabbit who leads Alice into wonderland which is bad and wrong because Carroll is the dodo but does work very well
  • They started dropping rose petals from the ceiling onto the audience when Alice looked through the door to the garden and it was utterly magic
  • The Cheshire Cat is made of about 10 different puppets that dance around the stage
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  • Which reminds me Alice is styled after Alice Liddell rather than the John Tenniel illustrations
  • I don’t think the king of hearts actually dances he just wanders around looking confused
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bisexualcryptkeeper

here’s a video

bisexualcryptkeeper

more. (btw this is a parody/reference to the very famous “rose adagio” from sleeping beauty)

bisexualcryptkeeper

the Caterpillar is pretty neat too

(all of these videos are from the Royal Ballet’s productions in 2014 and 2017)

the-aefe

Finally an adaptation that makes feel like I’m going to have stroke, it’s perfect

video dancing alice in wonderland
galahadwilder
yiffmaster

I feel like witches are sedentary and wizards are migratory. A witch has a home, a cauldron, herbs, you go to them with your problem. A wizard wanders, disappears, shows up at inconvenient times to fix nothing. am i making sense

yiffmaster

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some good theories in the notes but I choose to believe those are made by a village or perhaps king as an artificial home, to attract and keep a wizard. like a beehive

cursmudgeon

While artificially built towers do attract wild wizards a wizard will naturally build their own tower as they enter the later stage of their life cycle. For the first couple hundred years of their lives wizards are extremely mobile and may travel almost anywhere in the world or even beyond. A tower usually begins as a workshop which the wizard returns to during their migration in order to store trinkets and artifacts which they collect during their travels. As the collection outgrows the available space in the workshop a combination of the concentration of volatile magical energy and the wizards natural desire to build secret passageways causes them to begin expanding the workshop. This usually starts with basic "bigger on the inside" magic but due to constraints around energy usage for sustained large scale spacetime warping they will eventually turn to more traditional methods of building. There are some documented cases of wizards whose workshops expanded outward instead of upwards, resulting in labyrinth structures rather than the more traditional tower. It is still unclear what environmental pressure causes these divergent structures. As the wizard ages and their exploratory phase winds down their travels will focus on a progressively more narrow subset of arcane knowledge until they find one secret of the universe complex enough to prompt their transition into the final stage of the wizard lifestyle. By this point they will almost certainly have a fully fledged tower or have settled into one they've found already existing. Their desire to travel is generally severely reduced by this point and outside of quests to discover certain highly specific items related to their studies it's possible that they might not leave their tower for months or years at a time. In some cases they may begin this phase several times if the secret they started pursuing is less challenging or less fundamental to the operations of the universe than expected. When they do find their final subject of study and find the answers they sought, they will finally reach the end of the wizard life cycle, either via death caused by hubris, merging with a larger consciousness, ascendence to a different plane or to godhood, or metamorphosis into a litch. Other wizards may sometimes occupy the abandoned towers of a former wizard but most will move on in order to build their own before entering into these later stages. Very rarely a particularly social variety of wizard may build several connected towers and share resources, these are called schools and over time they will tend to attract a large number of younger and weaker wizards seeking shelter.

macleod

Absolutely brilliant analysis of wizards and their migratory patterns through the ages. I can personally verify that this is accurate, and you may now consider this properly peer reviewed and accepted.