Call me Rem. Nonbinary (she/her), 31, BiAce. MA in Medieval Literature, currently working on my MLIS. I reblog a lot of Dragon Age, Mass Effect, Shakespeare, Good Omens, books & the like.
Fun Fact, thats, more or less, something that wealthy people in China and Japan did, they were called “musical floorboards.” Designed to squeak when stood upon. A person could make noise all the way down a corridor.
The residents and servants knew which floorboards made a sound and avoided them. But a burglar, or assassin didn’t. If you heard the creaking of floorboards, you knew danger was coming.
Even better, despite what movies may show, a lot of the old west was founded by Chinese immigrants, so there could have been carpenters around who knew how to make the musical floorboards!
In Japan these are called “Nightengale Floors,” which I love.
I pinched the nightingale floor idea for my first novel “The Horse Lord”, called them ‘singing floors’, and described them as being installed in all the corridors with access to the Lord’s private apartments.
So far, so good, but back then (1983) I had no idea how they were made, what they sounded like, or any way to find out, so I guessed they were floorboards laid loose so as to rub against each other, and the sound would be a high wooden creak.
Turns out I was close but not spot-on: it involves metal spikes and brackets, and the actual sound is much more squeaky. Listen to this and try to imagine it without background chatter or shod footfalls:
BIOLOGY: ok so for personal hygiene we have a few opti-
JEWEL STAR: cover me in jaws
BIOLOGY: -what?
JEWEL STAR: a living carpet of destruction upon mine flesh, a barbed back of bestial horror, a sea of tearing talons to obliterate fouling foes
BIOLOGY:
JEWEL STAR:
BIOLOGY: bro
Behold the power of pedicellarias! These two and three-toothed pincers cover many a species of sea star. They keep the backs of the animal clean from plankton that may try to settle on them, and ward off pedestrians that may be ambling by. Some species have been seen to use their pedicellarias to catch food, including small fishes!
I love it when science comes out with a new terrifying Biology Fun Fact, as it puts the fear of The Great Unknowable into me and also gives me something to inflict on my friends and loved ones.
Wishbone was a PBS series about a terrier that assumed the role of literary characters like Frankenstein and Odysseus and dressed up.
I’ve found it’s very hard to explain this one to people who weren’t there.
The best part is, in the real-world scenes, Wishbone is a totally ordinary dog. We know what he’s thinking because of the voiceover track, but he’s not, like, a Talking Dog or anything.
Then in the parts where he’s acting out the story, he dresses and acts like the character and everyone acts like he’s just a Totally Normal Human. And the human characters in these scenes can hear the voiceover track as ordinary speech.
It is wild.
And someone put the entire series into a YT playlist, so everyone can see why some of us 90s kids loved this show so much.
this spider measures 3mm and was found in the mount coke state forest, south africa. not much else is known about the species and it remains undescribed since these photos were taken in 2014.
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The wild euphoria of “Yes YES” ”](https://66.media.tumblr.com/a6e5c01b8bdf4a10456af8b370e85868/tumblr_prgm37ABGO1rqgazso1_1280.png)
