the looney tunes live in a bald male nudist society

WHY I HATE RIO PART 1: THE BIRD DESIGNS

If anybody knows me on my main blog or irl i’m sure you are aware I am an avid theropod enthusiast, I predominantly draw birds. When I first saw posters for Rio I was exited because I did like the first ice age, and I actually did like how Blu looked design wise. I did not see it in theatres, for whatever reason a school friend dragged me to see the 3D yogi bear movie instead (it was horseshit). Eventually I rented Rio on DVD to see with my mom and it was…….meh? and then mostly forgot about it. 

But that was younger me before I critiqued movies and had fermented in bitterness. So being a bird lover with a lot of things to say I decided to crack this into two separate posts because covering the designs alone will make this posts long and image heavy.

Why am I cracking down so hard on ‘realism’ in this movie’s designs? Well mostly because the “theme” of this movie is bird conservation. In a realism-based setting. Unlike, say, Seuss’s original Lorax. it has an environmentalist message but has a well developed Seussiverse where nonsensical creatures fit the nonsensical habitat. With rio however, it is based in our world in our present time. I expect the creatures shown to be based on reality. Otherwise you break reality, making your conservation message weaker by showing animals in this context that don’t even exist. These bird designs come off as lazy recolourings where the story and setting is just under researched.

Most clearly this can be seen with the “blue macaws”. 

Blu and Jewel are in fact supposed to be a real species of parrot, they are Spix’s macaws (which look adorable). They are critically endangered, and only one wild individual is known that was spotted earlier this year. Too bad they look nothing like the design, they couldn’t even at least make Blue a more turquoise tint.

Rio seems to model all of their macaws as Aras, the genus of larger macaws including the stereotypical scarlet and bluegolds. Spixs arent Aras, they are the only Cyanopsitta species, a smaller macaw which would be about under half of Blu’s size and roughly half a pound in weight. If you took a colourless image of Blu i would assume he is an Ara macaw, or even the giant Hyacinth’s macaw. (In fact, most images that come up when i look for ‘Rio bird species’ places him as a hyacinths.) They also use Ara calls for his noises… 

Call me old fashioned but I think when you’re trying to make a movie about a real critically endangered species, I think you should at least try to competently represent it. Had he been a large species i would have loved his design.

However personally that doesn’t bother me as much as the background birds do. All of the macaws are odd recolours by which i mean hardly discernible species. In the top photo I see what may be a blue and gold, a scarlet or green-wing, and maybe even a red-shouldered macaw… which makes no sense because they are the smallest macaw, at 0.3lbs. BUT THEY ARE ALL OFF COLOUR AND NONE OF THEM INCLUDING BLU HAVE BARE SKIN ON THEIR FACES. i guess for whatever reason they thought it would look ‘too ugly’ :/

I literally had no idea what these bottom ones are, the only bird I’ve ever seen like that first one is a leucestic blue and gold, the green one may be a military macaw???? its just so frustrating to look at. So I went on the wiki and there they called them golden conures and peach fronted conures… that are large macaw sized..

(a golden conure with a large macaw trio, rio’s are the same size and shape..)

fhghjkkk

Then there’s the stock passerines… these guys are supposedly finches and there’s again a variety of recolours in the movies. but they are all just ‘ball with eyes’, a bird design stereotype that i really hate. I thought the blue one may be fairy wren but those are only endemic to australia soo

Other background birds included in Rio 1 are waders and other passerines or near passerines. I’m alright with the jamie foxx and will i am birds. I actually enjoy the cockatoo design as well as the toco toucan, but there’s more birds I dislike than ones I like. 

 I’m also bummed they had no raptors because south america some really cool ones like the harpy eagle, an abundance of diverse owls, and falcons. Other neat birds include hummingbirds, woodpeckers, herons, guans, hoatzin, cock-of-the-rock, curassows, and the potoo, just off the top of my head. Basically it just feels under researched on blue sky’s part when they set out to have a movie about birds and endangered species, but i’ll talk about my resentment for the plot later…

design nitpick round:

Incredibly fucked up that flowering plants weren’t really a thing until the Cretaceous.

Think about it. We had all of these huge, big-brained vertebrates well before we had grass

Stegosaurus never ate fruit because fruit didn’t exist yet

I know in my heart he would have fucking loved berries

Thankfully, some stegosaurians lived until the mid-Cretaceous!

Hopefully one of them had the opportunity to try berries... 🥺

y'all know one of the favored hypotheses for stegosaur extinction is that they were so adapted for eating cycads that the rise of angiosperms caused their decline? like it's correlation at this point but in paleo that's often all we got

the point being, I really don't think stegosaurs would enjoy berries. it's entirely possible berries would poison stegosaurs

Crazy to think a whole scientific study is based on some bones and some random plant fossils and complete made up wild ass guess theories

it's actually based on parsimony and total evidence analysis as well as phylogenetic computation and ecological modeling, but I'm too busy doing all of those fucking things all the time to explain it in detail to random internet strangers

"made up wild ass guess theories" you are aware that all science starts with these. they're called hypotheses. they're then tested. in paleo, we test them with old bones and circumstantial evidence. but they're still tested.

one of the best supported theories - which, in science, means a hypothesis that has been repeatedly supported and refined with evidence - in science is only known because of paleontology (evolution). We know more about evolution than gravity. By a lot. Because of paleo.

I try to not get into internet arguments anymore bc they're all for the sake of folly but idk how you expected to insult my field in my notes and not be argued with lololololololol

We date the rocks because of the bones found in them and we date the bones because of the rocks we found them in. Sounds pretty circular to me. Carbon dating is not that accurate when used on extended time lines.

Please tell me about the dinosaurs found with skin and fatty tissue still attached that somehow survived from the cretaceous that was supposedly 100 million years ago.

it's not circular, actually. We date the rocks using the decay of the elements found inside them, which go through radioactive decay at a specific rate (known as a half-life). We then date fossils using those dates.

We used to figure out how old fossils were relative to one another - meaning, by the principle "old things get buried under new things" (which you can see in the pile of laundry in your living room), we can figure out that taxon A comes before taxon B because it is deeper in the rock record. The use of radioactive dating allows us to assign a specific time to those rock layers we can correlate.

The skin and fatty tissue have been mineralized like other fossils, they aren't actually soft tissue. While some proteins are able to survive and have been analyzed, most other biomolecules cannot. In fact, we don't have examples of ancient DNA older than the Quaternary iirc (not my specific subfield, but @raptorcivilization would know)

you think there are a million holes in this field because you don't know anything about it but apparently terrible anti-science propaganda. I recommend reading some books by people who know what they're talking about. But I'm officially done explaining this to you, because I legitimately have better things to do with my time. Bye.

having a cat is like having an advertisement for taking a fat nap running in your house 24/7

i'm trying to do stuff and she mrrps in her sleep and i'm like "that's a really persuasive point"

this post brought to you by i slept all day with my face on my cat's belly and it was worth it

Hey guys let me tell you about advance fee scams

I hope y'all are familiar with these in this day and age, especially my artists out there, because they're incredibly common.

About half an hour ago I posted a drawing and tagged it #artists on tumblr, and very quickly received this comment.

My scam radar went off immediately, due to the generic blog name and lack of any emotion in the comment, but I decided it might be an entertaining venture so I dmed them. They asked for a drawing "of these", and sent me a random selfie. I got the details and told them it would be $15, and they promptly offered me $300. At this point I know it's a scam, but I play along for funsies and give them my paypal. Shortly, they send me this image for "confirmation" (I blocked out my email)

And they began to insist that I checked my email. I looked in my spam folder and found the following email.

This is fake. This is not a thing. And the "you're to refund the $200.00 back" is the scam. They send vaguely official-looking emails at you to "prove" that they sent you the money, then have you send them $200 (or however much the scam is for). Then, surprise surprise, you're out $200.

I continued to play along for a bit, and in the second email "Paypal" told me that I had to refund the $200 before they could "credit the $300 to my account", along with these lovely threats.

And yeah, it's silly. But it's not silly if you don't know and get scammed. So. Spread, please! And thank you very much to @mlaurel for the opportunity to get these screenshots.

This is a variation on a much older scam that often results in the victim being out money and also out whatever they were selling. It goes something like this:

- victim posts an item for sale on craigslist or w/e

- scammer contacts asking if a check is ok

- scammer then asks if they can write a check for more than the agreed-upon price and for the seller to give them the overage back as cash, often with some excuse about it being an out-of-state bank, they don't have a card and need some cash for something else, or whatever.

- scammer gives check, gets cash and item, and bounces

- guess what the check does, too

ANY kind of structure where you supposedly get money but have to give some of it back to someone should twig your scam radar, frankly.

Reblogging because some people need to refresh their scam radar, or start building theirs. I see far too many people fall for traps, and don't dare say for a second "this will never happen to me" because all it takes is a momentary lapse in judgement.

in loving memory of my favorite shirt

turmeric kun update

Incredibly fucked up that flowering plants weren’t really a thing until the Cretaceous.

Think about it. We had all of these huge, big-brained vertebrates well before we had grass

Stegosaurus never ate fruit because fruit didn’t exist yet

I know in my heart he would have fucking loved berries

Thankfully, some stegosaurians lived until the mid-Cretaceous!

Hopefully one of them had the opportunity to try berries... 🥺

y'all know one of the favored hypotheses for stegosaur extinction is that they were so adapted for eating cycads that the rise of angiosperms caused their decline? like it's correlation at this point but in paleo that's often all we got

the point being, I really don't think stegosaurs would enjoy berries. it's entirely possible berries would poison stegosaurs

Crazy to think a whole scientific study is based on some bones and some random plant fossils and complete made up wild ass guess theories

it's actually based on parsimony and total evidence analysis as well as phylogenetic computation and ecological modeling, but I'm too busy doing all of those fucking things all the time to explain it in detail to random internet strangers

"made up wild ass guess theories" you are aware that all science starts with these. they're called hypotheses. they're then tested. in paleo, we test them with old bones and circumstantial evidence. but they're still tested.

one of the best supported theories - which, in science, means a hypothesis that has been repeatedly supported and refined with evidence - in science is only known because of paleontology (evolution). We know more about evolution than gravity. By a lot. Because of paleo.

I try to not get into internet arguments anymore bc they're all for the sake of folly but idk how you expected to insult my field in my notes and not be argued with lololololololol

Y’all I want to throw massive kudos out to the Roger Williams Park Zoo for a choice they made today: rather than joining in on a GenAI trend all the zoos are doing right now, they chose to support and spotlight an artist on their staff!

The big thing right now is these GenAI “figurine toys” of zookeepers or zoo management. And instead they shared a version drawn by one of their staff!

Go give them some love, if you’re on FB. Too many zoos are really getting into GenAI and just whitewashing the climate change / copyright issues that come with it, so I want this zoo to get as much positive feedback as we can muster for making a better choice.

i luv gouache… and i luv tigers…. so here’s a gouache tiger!!

Vampire: the Masquerade is one of the most "newbie friendly" systems out there, and despite all her problems, I don't think we appreciate that enough.

"Ooooh I can't play because I don't know the lore!" Good. You weren't supposed to know the lore. There's a lore reason for why you don't know the lore. Now, I'm going to erase everything you are, turn you into a vampire, and we're gonna go through the horrors together just like god intended.

Paleontologists and taxonomists, please forgive the oversimplified descriptions

Thylacoleo.

Australia has no large native carnivores left - the largest left is the Tasmanian devil, and they're only found in, well, Tasmania. Let's change that :)