a meeting of creatures…

some context from Twitter preceding this historical and entirely uneventful moment

It’s practically every day I think of them. Credit to @shingworks on Twitter

My boyfriend has to go to the ren fair for work but i can come and he wanted to do a matching costume. He was like “I want to be Frodo” and I was like “oh cool I can be Shelob” which was, apparently, not the couples costume he was thinking of

I was like “babe she has the most screen time of any woman in Return of the King” and my boyfriend was like “that cannot be true,” looked it up, and said “i can’t believe that’s true”

finally a strong female character who doesn't shave her legs

why do they always show cranberries in thos big pits n its implied its wet and possibly swimmable. do cranberries really grow like that. wh

You’ve never heard of The Bog?

th

the what

EACH ADDITION TO THIS POST MAKES MY BLOOD RUN COLD

This is a cranberry bog (unflooded) it’s how cranberries grow. Once they’re ripe, the blog is flooded and the cranberries harvested.

Basically by using big floaty things to round them all up and then scooping them out of the water.

thank u. i hate it a little less but the horrible little man in my head is still screaming “BOG BODY BOG BODY BOG BODY”, but i appreciate the education,

oh here is a fun lil perspective on cranberry harvesting i never heard about anywhere else. the guy who owns the restaurant right down the road from the farm, who fries our chickens sometimes, is from Boston, with the strongest Boston accent ever, and in a former life before he started slinging reasonably priced barbeque and occasional organic chicken, he was a cranberry farmer.

His farm was on the leading edge of kinda using organic/sustainable pest control methods, and one of the things that they did to keep insect damage down was that they encouraged wolf spiders to live in the cranberry field, to eat the bugs. 

This was all fine and good until they flooded the bog. Now, you don’t just like flood the bog and then go around it in a boat or whatever. No, you use hip waders to get in there and put the big floaty things where they go and get all the berries and such.

Well when you’re in the bog in hip waders, that makes you the tallest thing. Wolf spiders can swim a bit, but they don’t like it, so they’re, quite understandably, looking to climb out of the water onto a tall thing.

So yeah the first interview question he always asked potential cranberry bog harvester hires was “are you cool with spiders?”

“You’d be amazed,” he said to us, shaking his head a little, “how many guys would just straight lie. Like, you think I’m asking you that question to be cute? Nah man you’re gonna have like a hundred wolf spiders trying to climb your eyebrows, you gotta be chill, those wolf spiders are fellow employees. You really gotta be chill with spiders if you’re gonna work a cranberry harvest.”

It’s frog, must be cranberry and fall

other scorpions have really badass tail stingers and claws, but the lesser known tailless whip scorpion has an even better defense mechanism:

just grab shit

hello i have learnt more spider facts

I am terribly afraid of spiders and most of this list makes me want to hide in the shower forever but that bit about the spider mom’s adopting anything vaguely egg-sack shaped makes me terribly sad so please give the spider moms their egg sacks back.

@glumshoe

Doctor Who Without Context 11x04

hello i have learnt more spider facts

Cave in a Fantasy Setting: *exists*

Giant Spiders:

So I just had the shit creeped out of me.

I’m not someone who believes in ghosts, but I was sitting in my room, alone and in the dark, and I heard the strings of my violin being softly plucked. 

My violin is hanging on the wall several feet away. 

So I gathered my courage, grabbed my phone, and used the camera light to investigate. 

And found this.

A goddamn spider was playing my violin. Not even joking. The little shit.

I think I’d have preferred a ghost….

So anyway…. *tiny incoherent cough exhumes from spider* Here’s Wonderwall.

bwa ha ha ha

I hesitated before posting, but I bet I know what’s going on here. The plucking was pretty rhythmic, right?

Male spiders pluck the webs of female spiders in a pattern to determine if the female is interested.

That spider was trying to mate with your violin…

Ahh so it’s a boy(I just assume every insect I see is a girl) that’s such a cute mating ritual!

He just wants love!

The behavior would indicate that it is a male. Only females weave webs. Male spiders have to be careful not to be mistaken for prey and eaten, so they pluck the web. Poor thing didn’t exactly get any this time!

Poor spider thinking “Damn this web was made by a strong spider, a real awesome spider, can I possibly get with this boss ass spider??”

poor little hyperion, dreaming of the moon

Concept: an RPG setting where the ruling class consists of talking spiders with a penchant for fancy hats. Not anthropomorphic spiders - just regular-looking spiders, about the size of a largeish dog, that are sapient and capable of speech. The setting isn’t a horrifying arachnid dystopia or anything; it’s actually a fairly conventional high fantasy milieu, except that all the royals, most of the hereditary nobility, and a fair chunk of the gentry are spiders, with all the cultural strangeness that implies.

(Stairs are considered lower class - the spiders climb, of course - so wealthy humans build multi-level dwellings with no stairs and develop their free-climbing skills in order to imitate their eight-legged neighbours. The spiders, for their part, pointedly ignore the handholds cunningly disguised as decorative moulding, because it’s rude to draw attention to a person’s disability.)

But what about the servants? How does the human maid get upstairs to dust Lord Huntsman’s rooms?

Two options:

1. The servants’ passage have stairs, obviously - but of course, no gentleman would be caught dead rubbing shoulders with the help.

2. The setting has made great strides in folding-ladder technology. (Just don’t leave one sitting out in plain view - so déclassé!)

So my understanding of medieval history and society isn’t the best, BUT to my knowledge, feudalism and the social hierarchy of the time was at least partially an answer to the question of how to fund, maintain, and equip heavy cavalry. (And heavy infantry, and castles,and share power..). Okay, it’s way more complicated than that, but the interesting thing for us about the spider upper class is 1. Did (at least some of) the spider nobility historically fight as knights and ride horses? OR 2. Was the development of spider nobility due to some other useful development, militarily, socially, ect.? As fun as it is to imagine spiders riding around horses it seems a bit impractical? At least in the sense that it’s hard to imagine a spider holding a lance like a knight. But maybe they’re really good scouts. Spiders are probably naturally attuned to defending, if not managing, a castle, as it’s all one big death trap. So it’s not impossible that they have a similar role to human nobility. I guess it also depends on what species of spiders we’re talking about, but that could lead to some regional/national flavor. Why people lead by bird-eating spiders developed differently than say black widows, or jumping spiders, will be the subject of historians and sociologists, even pop books such as Guns, Germs, and Silk.

That’s an excellent question, and one I’m going to toss back to the crowd as a prompt: how did spiders end up dominating the ranks of nobility in this setting?

There was very little central authority among the humans as in the not too distant past a great empire had fallen leaving the largest human nations as petty kingdoms.

The spider take over however was not by force but was economic. Spider silk is incredibly strong. Cloth woven from it is as strong as a Kevlar vest. Once the most intelligent spiders noticed how useful the silk was to humans it wasn’t long before they began to sell it. Spider armor and ropes dominated the markets allowing the spiders to transition to other goods, notably arms.

By this point high ranking and rich spiders were entering the human nobility. Some were gifted titles in return for service, others simply bought their way in. After this it would only take a couple generations for the spiders to begin consolidating new spider centric Kingdoms.

Of course it was not the great noble spiders that were making silk for the market. That “honor” belonged to the spider commoners, who before the adoption of human hierarchy served because they were smaller than the soon to be nobles and did not want to be eaten.

I think this one is my favourite because it posits a hierarchy among the spiders themselves. Historically, hunting was often a privilege reserved for the nobility (hence the development of “heroic poacher” myths in the mould of Robin Hood et al.); here, that practice is reflected in the non-web-building hunting spiders lording over their web-building subordinates. Presumably webs function as an analogue for argriculture in this scenario, with web-building serfs tending their hunting masters’ “crops”. Many high fantasy settings feature giant, non-sapient insects - perhaps the weavers raise them as livestock? What would a spider noble’s hunting preserve look like?

(I’m picturing differences in fashions as well. The “noble” hunting spiders would be as described above; the weaving spiders, conversely, would on average be about the size of a hefty housecat - with adorably squeaky voices to boot - and, rather than the high, stiff hats of the nobility, would favour soft cloth and knit caps in a variety of patterns. Can you picture a housecat-size orb weaver spider sporting a beanie or a cabbie hat?)

Now here’s a fun one: if there are spider commoners, how did the respective species’ social classes integrate - or not, as the case may be - following the spider nobility’s economic takeover of the human petty states?

I can honestly say that i have never “NOPE’D” at a picture SO HARD IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!

no this is the cutest thing i have ever seen. i want to scoop them up.

nooo why would you bother harvestmen aaaa. they were looking so snug like that.

the real life version of those little black dustball ghibli critters

This is the stuff that tribbles are made of.

I feel them crawling wall over me