Location Taken: Hurricane Ridge, Olympic National Park, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008
For some reason my brain is nominating just about every photo I look at tonight for “Best Photo Ever!!!”
So yeah, stopping looking through my photos before that gets too extreme. Don’t need my brain exploding from exponential awesomeness.
Enjoy this random snow bank!
I mean, look at the trees! And the fog! And the feeling of endings, thanks to the melting snow!
Isn’t this, like, the perfect photo?!?!
Time Created: May 2006
Like many of my art pieces, this one was an experiment. I decided to use a reference image.
And not just any reference. I took a screenshot of a nifty looking area in a game I was playing a lot at the time and just outlined all the features.
And then added in a samurai, because what the heck, the area was asian-themed.
This technique does have one major benefit. You’re sure to get the perspective right. It would also work well with photos. So if you’re trying to figure out a background for an art piece you’re doing, just pull up one or more photos and copy away!
Just remember, taking your entire artwork from one place is stealing, but taking it from many is inspiration!
No, seriously, that’s how it works.
Bonus points if you can name which game I copied the background from!
Location Taken: Port Angeles, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008
Mutants! There are mutants out there! Run around screaming! Aaaaaaaa!!!
…Ok, it’s a simple mutation. Just a case where a seed pod design that normally has two seeds instead has three. Not that big of a deal.
Well, perhaps.
The two-seed design is there for a reason, after all. I think of these as propeller seeds. When they fully mature, dry up, and detach from the tree, they spin around in the air like a propeller. It’s rather nifty to watch them spinning slowly towards the ground, hovering just a bit in the air.
That slow spin, mind you, lets the seeds spread further away from their parent tree than they would have if they’d just let gravity do its thing. Which means any that manage to root themselves and start growing won’t be competing directly with the parent, and might have even found a good clearing. Which means the plants with the propellers do just a bit better than they would have otherwise.
I don’t know how well a three-seed propeller would work. It might not spin right, might just fall straight down. There it would languish in the shade cast by its parent. Or perhaps it might be just a bit better, though the extra weight along argues against it. But if it is, and it manages to prosper, perhaps this small mutation is the start of a new breed of three-seed propellers.
If you think about it, mutations are neither inherently bad or good. Sure, some are obviously bad, like one that makes a plant stop growing seeds entirely, and some are solidly good, like a different fur pattern that just happens to be a perfect camouflage, but the whole concept of mutation is neutral. They just are, these small variances in the genetic code, and the good ones make rolling the dice for each generation worth it.
Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: April 2012
It’s National Appreciate Unappreciated Wild Plants Day!
Go out there and stare at all those weird-looking leafy things sticking out of the sand! Those scraggly thorns cluttering the nearby ravine! The jumble of untamed trees that grew in that abandoned lot!
All plants need your love, not just the pretty ones!
Location Taken: National Zoo, Washington DC
Time Taken: March 2010
Hmmm… Imagine what our species would be like if we’d developed fabulous sex-specific characteristics like the peacock’s tail. Can’t you imagine guys wandering around with massive feathered tails, or intricate fur patterns, or a rainbow-colored throat sac for mating calls?
…Clothing would be very different, wouldn’t it, just due to having to adjust for proper display of these attributes.
And it usually is the males that have the really fancy stuff. In most species that have the male/female split, the females bear a much larger cost for reproduction since they have to actually, you know, carry the baby while it’s developing. This makes the females just a bit pickier about their mates, which means that males have to show off, which means the ones that show off best get to have kids, and it just escalates until you’ve got a gigantic tail that gets into everything.
I suppose we humans are lucky to have come from the primate line. Not too many extravagant displays there.
Though we, oddly enough, have an unusual display on the females of our species that few others even in the primates have. I’ll leave you to figure out what things I’m talking about. They are solidly awesome, though. Which is probably half instincts speaking, but hey…
