the song that sings the bird

I tried to recreate this feeling I had while lying in the sun yesterday.

☀️SCALLOP ☀️A short comic about 2 boys finding something in the sand. 

Cytherea looked faintly amused by the blade that was a finger’s breadth away from being buried in her jugular. She drawled, “Is this meant to kill me?”

(no text version under the cut)

a sequel of sorts

An idea I had for Blood of Eden propaganda/recruitment posters featuring some of our favorite guys - combo of digital-print cyberpunk graphic design style with oldschool Saturday Morning Post covers like you'd see Leyendecker paintings on

I was gonna post these ahead of tabling at a small con and selling prints of them but ended up not tabling because turns out grad school is hard

Little fire ants (Wasmannia) doing something similar where the males and females are different species and there is so much sexual conflict that The females have evolved to make reproductive clone babies.  The males have evolved to wipe the female dna from eggs and make reproductive clone babies.  Basically, the male and female reproductive lines are operating in an entirely different evolutionary pool than the sterile workers, who are still made by mixing genes from both sexes.

And then we have a harvester ant with Genetics that are functioning as if they have at least 3 different sexes, divided amongst colonies.

Basically, we have two variants of ants and a queen needs needs to mate with the same variant as herself to produce queens and the opposite variant to produce workers. So a queen needs to have mated with both if she wants to have a healthy colony and be able to pass on her genes to future queens. And all types of colonies need to be present in a population to keep it stable.

Functionally, it can be argued to be more like FOUR operational sexes. IT IS VERY NEAT.

You know how humans and most sexually reproducing animals get half their genes from one parent and half from the other, resulting in two every gene? This is called diploid. (Diplo=2). The eggs and sperm have a half set of genes (one of each) and are called haploid.

But Ants-Bees-Wasps use a haplo-diploid system.

The females (queens and sterile workers) have two of every gene, 1 from each parent, and are diploid. But the males are born from underutilized eggs. They have 1 of every gene from their mom only, and are haploid.

This results in some complicated math about what percentage of genes each parent gets to pass on, but the net result is that females are more related to their own sisters (75%) than to their own offspring (50%). And thus, it is evolutionarily beneficial to remain in a large social group and raise sister-queens rather than go off and have your own daughters.