Doktor Archeville's Laboratory

bat stamps!! there are so many bat stamps out in the world with such amazing art 🦇🦇

I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.

Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!

It's glorious.

For me, the "Tom Baker pain expression" pretty much, says everything about why I love this era of Doctor Who so much. The central character is played by a man who just goes for it, every single time. That pain the Doctor is going through? It's real. It's horrible. It's terrifying. I think the word I'm searching for is... visceral.

And as you can see it is not like instant death, they too are just animals and they are often just gently curious about the presence of humans! But people who study and dive with sharks will tell you you're safe as long as you stay calm and know what you're doing. The world's leading professional night divers and experts on these squids, specifically??? Stress in every interview and article and paper they write in that you simply do not fuck around with these squids. They know what they're doing and they still all have at least one story of being attacked, in some cases having to be hospitalized. Considering just how rarely anybody puts themselves in the pitch dark nighttime ocean on purpose, let alone during a squid feeding frenzy, it sounds like they're quite a bit more likely to consider you potential food than other marine predators. We also don't know how many fatal attacks might have ever happened, because what humboldt squid like to do with large prey is just drag it away into the darkness forever. The two worst attacks ever proven involved two or three squid at a time latching on to a diver (in BOTH cases they were professionals and knew the risk!) and jetting straight downward with enough force that both divers suffered injury from the sudden pressure change alone, including burst eardrums, nearly passed out and they probably would have died if they hadn't broken free. In general, people who die drowning in the dark open ocean are either never found, or they're found in pieces picked over by enough scavengers that the precise cause of death can only be narrowed down to "the sea." But now you know ONE of "the sea's" possible murder weapons :)

There's a short section on Humboldt squid in Wikipedia's entry for Cephalopod attacks on humans:

And if you can get past some of Animal Planet's hokey presentation style, this video includes a bit of interview with one of those professional experts who still got nearly squidded from existence:

There is of course some debate about all this, with some arguing that all proven documented attacks occurred on people with reflective diving equipment, which they say the squid must have mistaken for the shine of fish. However, there are lots and lots of people who have to fish around these squids to survive, who do not have access to that kind of equipment, and also have a consensus that if you fall in the water when big squids are out hunting you might disappear without a trace or perhaps just get your head bitten open. With many modern science guys agreeing with this sentiment, this is one case where the "they're just misunderstood sea friends" crowd is kind of outnumbered. The sea at night is theirs and not ours is all. It's not ours during the day either but since we are neither marine nor nocturnal animals we are double fools in the eyes of the squids, which by the way are these eyes:

No for real:

Also because I can't reblog every addition together: