Decorator crabs decorate themselves by sticking mostly sedentary animals and plants to their bodies as camouflage, or if the attached organisms are noxious, to ward off predators.
Floral triceratops by Vallavica
Watch the full voiced video here!
There's also a site now, explaining the synopsis and setting in more detail:
www.humansbgone.com
And a Patreon, if you want to help me get this out faster!
Some people assumed this must be a group project or that anyone’s paid to work on it so far but @revretch actually developed the concept for over a decade and spent the past year working on scripts, cg models, animations and voice work all on their own!
Anthropology major answer: “There absolutely was such a time! Modern humans and our ancestors shared territory numerous times over prehistory with cousin species like homo neanderthalensis, homo floresiensis, and many, many others!”
Folklore student answer: “Also, almost all cultures have something like djinn, faeries, hulder, fox spirits, and other similar creatures who can appear at least human and are very, very dangerous to humans!”
Both of these things are true, and may be connected both to the above and to each other. :D
Biology majors: it’s dead bodies guys. Corpses.
Listen I hate this take on the uncanny valley so fucking much because many subpsecies of homonids lived in the same areas but some of them got along well enough to coexist and neandertals had enough desirable genetic traits to the point where human women (see here for a blanket on female vs male choosiness) would often pass up incel homosepian for the chad neandertal.
Genetics aside, various hominid species didn’t start visually looking all that different until 50,000 years ago, while under the skin changes began as early as 89,000 years ago (ie the development of the Y chromosome but I might be oversimplifying at this point) Point being, even our non-human cousins didn’t. look. that. different. from. us. Especially comparing the diversifying of humans themselves crossing trans continental as it was. And even then neandertals still had advantagious traits for living in the Eurasian hemisphere.
Also I digress, regardless of it being intentional, and with few perserved records from that chapter in our species’ history, I don’t like the implication that the uncanny valley effect stems from humans being inherently racist (for lack of a word for hatred of non-human intelligences). I know that sounds off the wall but prejudice and sense of superiority by birthright is vastly different than othering by means of the sucess of social groups and the need to compete for territory or resources. Racism is entirely a Eurpean fabrication and it’s been proven time and time again to be a cultural outlier and purposfully designed to further the agenda of corroded theocratical religious divinity (here, here, here) and the financial benifits of the exploitation of colonism that otherwise has not been replicated by other cultures to the same degree. (this is the only example off the top of my head but I’m know there’s more.)
You know what’s older than racism?
You know what’s more flesh crawling than neandertals?
You know what LOOKS like a human but doesn’t ACT human ENOUGH? Do you know what might bite you and get you sick or turn you into something that also moves about in a non human way? Brain parasites that give you painful headaches and intensifies agression and confusion.
Say you’re a monkey and one member of your troop gets bitten by something. Later he starts twitching and swaying about. He keeps stumbling out of trees but barely feels anything when he hits the ground. He won’t eat sleep or drink. He makes guttural noises that keep alerting predators and he’s in obvious writhing agony. Suddenly he’s not your friend anymore. He doesn’t recognize you and he attempts to bite and claw at anything that moves.
Up until preventitive oral medications and vaccines were developed in the 1970s there was NOTHING stopping rabies and it still prevails today and kills hundreds of thousands of people in third world countries with limited medical resources a year. There’s no cure for rabies once youve got it and the only reliable diagnostic is a brain autopsy.
Rabies. TB. Leoprosy. Syphilis. Meningitis. Toxoplasmosis. Anthrax. Mercury Poisoning. Prion disease. These are all bad and in different varying degrees can cause limps, sores, agression, confusion or dazed trances, ambled pacing, convulsions or uncharacteristic behavior in humans.
Basically everything that people are terrified of when it comes to zombies. Vampires bite. Werewolves rip people apart. Demonic possesion? Easy. Changlings take the place of your loved ones.
Also I don’t think that it’s a conicidence that the things we find uncomfortable with the uncanny valley also just happen to line up with predatory behavior, smiling too wide or staring you down, blinking too slowly or moving towards you with a slow steady speed. It’s just a danger signal to keep other monkeys in a troop from getting bitten by an infected monkey. Simple as that.
After all what’s scarier? A dead body, or moving body that will MAKE you dead?
I’m not going to be a hypocrite by pointing out racism being excused as a stemmed human behavior without claiming that the deep seated primal fear of disease doesn’t make a good excuse for ableism as well. I mean we use othering to discern friend from foe, and then at some point decided that was a good enough excuse for racism. Theres legitimate proof that ancient homonids could and would be hospitible to the disabled out of compassion. The point of having these initial fears is to guage saftey measures first, but once someone or something is proven to be harmless that normally should be the end of it. I mean if an adult wild silverback gorrilla can look at a spycam and decide it’s chill after a moment of inspection then there’s really no excuse for any of us.
Healthy othering =/= newly invented racism.
healthy fear of infectious diseases =/= excuse to hate disabled people.
But yeah rabies is more likely the reason for the uncanny valley effect thanks for coming to my goddamn ted talk.
Reblogging this version bc of sources and I personally think this makes for much more interesting (and terrifying) lore than any other post in this thread.
Holy shit. I never thought of the “zombie virus” to be this take. It makes total fuckin sense. Shit
this may be an Unpopular Opinion (even on tumblr) but like the 8-hour workday is just Too Gotdamn Long
like even sitting in an office for eight hours a day isn’t particularly pleasant (or healthy, as we are beginning to see) but when we’re talking about doing *actual work* for that same amount time it gets pretty fucking brutal
doing literally *anything* (even leisure activities) for eight hours straight tends to be less than enjoyable but when we’re talking about things like construction, landscaping, factory work, and hell, even foodservice and retail, eight hours is a fucking ETERNITY
i might just be a lazy weak-willed bitch but honestly i think i’m not entirely wrong
this was being worked towards by leftist labor unions way back in the day after the time of FDRs new deal. people in the 40s and 50s were already starting to realize that we no longer actually needed an 8 hour work day or even a 5 day work week.
even with the comparatively primitive factory tech of the time we were already creating a huge amount of excess production back then and companies were making massive amounts of profit. So it already stood to reason that companies should either let their employees work less and thus each employee could work a shorter shift without lowering the yearly compensation of each employee, or in cases where businesses provide an active service they would shorten the shift but hire more people to cover the necessary operating time. but of course that would mean less money for people at the top so companies fought back hard and we ended up with nixon’s bullshit and so on and now its considered the norm for us to spend the vast majority of our lives doing work that really just amounts to waste.
The IWW realised this and were fighting for it all the way back in the 1930s. This is a take with a lot of historical and theoretical grounding, OP, so you’re standing in good stead.
I’d also like to add it’s also been studied and scientifically proven that after 6 hours, we have an extremely noticeable drop in productivity. Sweden saw nothing but benefits from a 6-hour work day, including worker productivity, happiness, and half the amount of sick-leave used when applied to nurses.
Just gonna add that the IWW is still kicking and basically anyone who is not an employer can join.
the basic emotional condition of capitalism is anxiety, fueled by insecurity. one of the most common, yet most effective, rhetorical moves used by the apologists of capital is to present this motive force as aspiration, rather than terror - that is, to disingenuously figure the motion of the system as a running-to, instead of a running-from. it is like if the camera were only ever positioned behind indiana jones, following him as he “aspires” to reach the exit of the cave, not once turning around to reveal the colossal stone sphere just inches from crushing him