#complete metamorphosis

In this post, I’m going to go over all the stuff that I’ve written about on Tumblr to see what episodes, games, TV shows and movies I’ve enjoyed and enjoyed writing about. I’m still learning because I’m not a professional critic or a journalist but a novelist. I started this as a means for a portfolio to build-up work and I couldn’t be bothered messing about with making a website because I’m not exactly tech-savvy. This has been a lot of fun and I look forward to doing so much more. So much in fact, that I will have eventually written about everything ever.

Perfect Blue

I really loved Perfect Blue and I was very happy with what I wrote about it because it’s not exactly an easy film. I barely scratched the surface but I personally feel that it is one of those movies that isn’t really meant to be “got”. It has multiple layers and “reading too much into it” is a concept that the film itself makes comment on. The art allows you as a viewer to make what you think out of it and it’s a double-edged sword because at one end, it does mean that it’s an expertly crafted psychedelic, psychological thriller that achieves this mystery in the plot but on the other - in this modern age of post-grad, new-media analyses - people want to declare that their interpretation is exactly what the art is about. If you look up write-ups and reviews of Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue, research is riddled with all sorts of angles on the ideas that the film presented which is great but it’s frustrating that ultimately no-one really knows for certain what was real and what isn’t and that is the point of the movie but no-one can really accept that. Everything has to have conclusions and I tried to avoid that as much as possible in my post but just to talk about themes.

Having said that though, if I was to re-do it again right now, it would probably be completely different. In short, I still love the movie and almost everything about it. I do think it is ever-so slightly overrated and overstated. To date, it’s my favourite animé movie. If you want to read it, it’s here. It’s a biggun, mind.

Re:ZERO / Starting Life in Another World from Zero

i’m ups and downs about Re:ZERO and I still am. It was exhausting to write about every single episode of this fucking show because you don’t expect the world to be so complicated because of the silly way that it begins. Writing about it was not like anything that I had ever done before and I was thrown in at the deep end but in a lot of ways, I thrived from the challenge. It was my first real foré into animé that was outside my jurisdiction, as it were. Compared to what Japanese media that I absorbed before (Danganronpa, Persona, A Silent Voice, Madoka Magica and Steins;Gate), it was pretty out-there. I was still new to animé (I still am) so it was a little overwhelming. I routinely got things wrong, confused one episode’s contents for anothers and spelled character’s names wrong. Not only was I ill-experienced with animé, I wasn’t terribly interested in medieval fantasy either. In fact, I hate medieval fantasy.

All that being said, I still enjoyed my time writing about it and embracing the challenge. I like that there is a lot that I can say about most episodes despite what I actually think about it. Even though I’ve wrote two summary write-ups about the both seasons, I still don’t really think that I’ve settled in my opinions about it. It is one of those things that is admittedly quite good but there is just that certain thing that you cannot put your finger on for the life of you that would just make it that bit better.

For brevity, my favourite episodes [to write about] were The Sound of Chains, The Outside of Madness and The Witches Tea Party. There were more good episodes but they were so good in fact, that it was too hard to write about them. I’m not Vonnegut, you know.

To Your Eternity

I really loved the first few episodes of To Your Eternity. I was blown away by the weirdness of the concept and how they executed it in a really larger-than-life way. Although that I’m having a tumultuous time with it at the moment, I still think the first six or seven episodes were really good at doing everything it is that you can think of and then some. It was great at storytelling, building mystery and suspense, drama and fight scenes. Fumetsu no Anata is an incredibly competent show and the universe outside of the brewery is something that I’d love to explore for myself. I’ve not been too invested in anything for a long time and I’m going to stick with it despite the problems I’ve had with it in recent weeks. I upload a To Your Eternity write-up every Tuesday after the newest episode has come out and Episode #11 came out yesterday on my blog.

My favourite episodes are The Rambunctious Girl, A Small Evolution and Those Who Follow. This has to be the asterisk that these are my favourite episodes so far. The series is far from being done.

INSIDE

I loved Bo Burnham’s INSIDE as did everyone else but I felt like my write-up could’ve been a lot better after sitting down to read what everyone else had to say about it and it was all far more clever, poetic and beautfiul compared to me. It’s probably why I pre-emptively prefaced it with the adverb Gushing to implicate senseless rambling by a blogging idiot who doesn’t know how to properly review a film or what to say about music. I still do enjoy it and I wish that I could sit and write four hours and be incredibly dissectant in how the piece is put together. But my dissertation is on the way and I don’t really have time to be surgical for fun.

My favourite songs were White Woman’s Instagram, Welcome to the Internet, Comedy, Problematic, Sexting and Goodbye.

Berserk

I very much loved writing about all of Berserk from the original and iconic animé to the much maligned 2016 iteration. After rejecting a lot of it initially, the more and more I think about it, it grew on me. I had to go back and rewatch everything once Kentaro Miura died and I discovered that I actually, genuinely loved Berserk and I don’t know what I was thinking. It was nice to write about something so certain and so plainly obvious. Like I said in the original article, I don’t know what else I can add. It was just a lot of fun to express how I felt about it if it was ever so brief.

Persona 4: The Animation

Persona 4: The Animation has been present in my life for what feels like forever and I was bound to write about it once I started doing this i-have-an-opinion-blog thing instead of concentrating on my novelist pursuit. It’s something that has stuck with me ever since I first seen it and to me, it was my first animé that I ever watched and could remember all the way through. But it had been a long time since then so I decided to sit down and watch through it all again to see how it would fair on my now slightly cynical brain.

Now,

it wasn’t as great as I remember BUT, I still had a good time watching it. I found new favourites in the series and new things to like about Persona generally. I also found new things to utterly loathe and despair at the sight of it in the 26 episodes. To be fair, some of those certain things that I now hate about it are things that I would hate in all animé and they are disappointingly common things that you aren’t allowed to express distaste for because “it’s just an animé thing” i.e. Treating women like property, making fun of gay men, trying to find comedy in borderline sexual assault ETC. At the risk of putting myself in front of the cannon of annoying patois and verbiage from the terminally reclusive, I have to say that all those tropes had soured my friendship with Persona 4: The Animation but not enough to break the bond completely. Now, P4 is that friend who crosses paths with a different friend group of yours one day nd you sit there clenching your knuckles until they’re snowball white because you're constantly worried that embarrassment or offense might be caused at any point. You know it’s capable of it but you just hope the charm shines through all the cringe.

My new favourite episode was The Anniversary to Become a Family which you can find my write-up of here.

@hunteno64​ submitted:

So I just got out of an interview, and I see this QT. Any idea and what they are?

Why yes, I do. Looks like your bab was fixing to molt, so he appears a little unusual, but still easily identifiable. This was actually one I learned when I was a little kid, and was quite pleased with knowing as the smart-ass 7-year-old I was back in the day, although I didn’t know there was more than one species of these then. 

Here’s a sibling of your friend from my yard. Look at those cute little legs! His face is that TINY little thing at the very end at the front. He is a larva. When he pupates, he will look like this:

You can see his old baby clothes around the base of his pupa where it connects to the grass. And when he emerges as an adult, you will probably recognize him!

Your friend is specifically an Asian Lady Beetle, Harmonia axyridis. These can look quite variable, especially depending on where you live (in Texas, there are some that are BLACK with RED SPOTS, or GRAY with BLACK spots!). Most places, they are red or orange with black spots… or with no spots at all! In MOST places, the easiest way to identify them is by looking at their pronotum–the shield that covers their thorax. In the red varieties, it will be white with a black “W.” The other species of lady beetles (and there are SO MANY OF THEM!!!) will have different patterns there, and typically have a specific pattern of spots!

After this photo, though? You get these:

They have fun eggs! If you see a ton of lady beetles, it means there are lots of tasty aphids (and other plant-parasitic insects) around. And that usually means there is a lack of biodiversity somewhere, which allows the plant parasites to flourish. I have a huge swarm of lady beetles appear whenever the invasive grasses pop up in my yard. But that also meant plenty of opportunities to watch their larvae grow up and emerge from their pupae!

Thanks for asking!

Hello, Friend! Isn’t that ridiculous?? I only recently learned about Petrophila moths [link], too, and when I read that about their caterpillars, my mind practically exploded. Nature is so weird. But these moths with aquatic caterpillars caught my notice for a totally different reason initially: they are jumping spider mimics.

You can see from these photos that they’re not very large. If you weren’t really paying attention, you may not even notice anything unusual about them. The first time I saw them, I definitely didn’t notice that they were spider mimics. But one night, I went to a talk about moths, and the presenter talked about these and I thought it was awesome! She had a mercury vapor lamp set up outside after the talk for us to see some moths, and a Petrophila showed up. I was super excited! When I went to add the photo to iNaturalist, thinking I’d seen something new, it turned out I had already seen them at least four times.

You may not even be able to see how these are spider mimics. They don’t really *look* like spiders, do they? But remember, our eyes are much different than insect eyes, and we have the benefit of seeing things from far away. We can see this isn’t a spider. But imagine you are a small predatory insect or a spider, and you are in front of this moth looking at it. What will you see?

Jumping spiders above are Dimorphic Jumper (left) and Bold Jumper <3 (right)

Anyway, back to the aquatic caterpillars. I’m sure you know that most moths and butterflies have perfectly normal caterpillars who eat leaves, make poops, and turn into perfectly normal moths and butterflies. So finding out that one type refuse to play by those rules just seems super weird. But is it, really? Or is it just weird because… well, we have an idea of what caterpillars are supposed to be, whether or not that idea is accurate?

For example, look at some other insect orders with complete metamorphosis (they have larvae, pupate, and then become adults). Flies are a huge group. Where do fly larvae live? You know about maggots and food, but what about mosquitos? Those are flies too, and their larvae are aquatic. What about parasitic botflies that grow in animal tissue? What about gall midges who parasitize plants? Caterpillars will grow up in equally diverse habitats (although, I don’t know of an animal parasite… yet). Same with beetles–larvae will live on plants, underground, in water, in wood… 

But let’s look a little closer to moths and butterflies, since most caterpillars are fairly predictable in terms of habitat, and the exceptions aren’t very well known. Here’s a phylogenetic tree showing the evolutionary history of insects. In this tree, branches that are closer together are more closely related.

Note: I found this tree in an image search, but I was unable to locate the original source. I would love to credit it if I can! Let me know if you have seen this in a book before.

In this tree, I have circled the branch including Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies). Look at who else is in that circle: Trichoptera (caddisflies). Below are a couple examples of caddisflies. Chances are you have seen them before (they are pretty ubiquitous near ponds, lakes, streams, and rivers!), but had no idea what they were.

Caddisflies are also very difficult to identify. The one on the left is in the Macrostemum genus (zebra caddisflies), but the one on the right… uh… I’ll get back to you on that one.

There are a lot of moths that look pretty similar to caddisflies, so it’s easy to see that they are closely related.

Left to right: Yellow-headed Lichen Moth, Belted Grass-veneer Moth, Bluegrass Webworm Moth

These look so similar, in fact, you may ask how they even grouped them into different orders. This is easy to answer if you know your scientific names AND Greek! Moths & Butterflies = Lepidoptera (Lepido = scale; ptera = wing)Caddisflies = Trichoptera (Tricho = hair; ptera = wing)

Since I have an electron microscope at work (the “nano” in my username refers to my background in nanotechnology), I felt obligated to illustrate this. The white bar on each image shows the magnification. “um” refers to “micrometer,” or 1/1,000 of a millimeter. A human hair is typically about 100 um wide. (If you have questions about electron microscopes, let me know! These things are fun!)

Typical Lepidoptera (Moth & Butterfly) Wing

Above: Images of the scales on an American Snout Butterfly wing obtained with Scanning Electron Microscopy. Compare the scales in the middle of the wing to those on the edge of the wing.

Typical Trichoptera (Caddisfly) Wing

Above: Images of the hairs on a caddisfly wing obtained with Scanning Electron Microscopy. Note the similarities in the how the caddisfly hairs and butterfly scales attach to the wings.

Looking at these images, it’s pretty clear that they are different. But you have to look *very closely* to notice this difference, and when you look even closer than that, you start to see similarities again.

Guess where caddisfly larvae grow up! If you don’t already know about caddisfly larvae, oh boy, they’re fun!

It may be hard to tell, but I took this photo with an underwater camera. Caddisfly larvae build little cases by cementing together stones, pine needles, sand, or a variety of other things. You can sometimes identify the larvae based on what materials they use and what shape the cases are in. An interesting aside: if you raise these, you can get them to build their cases out of whatever you want. At least one person got creative, and I’m happy to see that she is still selling caddisfly jewelry over 20 years later!

I don’t mean to turn this post into an advertisement, but her stuff is beautiful and super interesting. She describes her process and some info about the species of caddisfly she raises on this page of her website [link]. Photo credits go to her–I totally stole these images.

Caddisfly larvae are exclusively aquatic. Moths and butterflies are slightly younger than caddisflies, so they have had more time to evolve their own method of development (mostly on land). I believe the Petrophila moths are one of the older moth genera (but definitely not the oldest!), so they could be like Cetaceans (you know, whales and such who had gone *back into the water* after they realized they were cooler than land mammals).

I have not yet had the honor of witnessing a little baby Petrophila scooting along the bottoms of ponds, eating algae and whatnot, so I don’t have my own photos to share, but there are a couple on their bugguide page [link] (just click the link for “caterpillars” to filter out all the adults). They more or less look like a normal caterpillar, except … a little wetter than usual. The females will go completely underwater to lay their eggs (they will carry a little air bubble with them, apparently). And typically moths don’t live too much longer after laying eggs, so who knows if they ever fly again. I’m sure the fish don’t mind finding them!

I hope I satisfied your desperate yearning for aquatic moth secrets! The closer you look, the weirder nature gets. Jeez.

Not a stupid question at all! I don’t know the details off the top of my head, but my understanding is that you are correct. When the chrysalis first forms, you can see a lot of the inner structure of the caterpillar’s insides (especially when backlit! I have photos, need to dig them up, though), but this disappears pretty quickly. As the butterfly becomes more developed, you can start to see signs of the new anatomy. This is most apparent after the scales on the wings develop, and the wing colors show through the mostly transparent chrysalis.

But what happens between these two stages? Nothing comes in or goes out of the chrysalis, and the easiest way to reuse materials is to break them down into essential components! It’s easier to reknit a sweater if you unravel the old one, and it’s easier to rebuild an insect if you liquefy it (or, rather, it liquefies itself). Living organisms are largely just organized proteins, chemicals, and minerals in water.

VERY IMPORTANT UPDATE!!! My house-sitter sent me these photos today! I am excited!

Last November, I was hiking in Lockhart, Tx and found a large cocoon. It looked damaged, so I assumed the baby had exited already. So I tore it open to get a look at the pupa shell but IT WAS INTACT. So I smuggled it home and hung it up in a hamper with a safety pin. I guessed it was a Cecropia moth (remember the caterpillar I drove four hours to see? They are Cecropia moth caterpillars!!!), and I really wanted it to emerge so I could feel proud if my ability to ID by cocoon.

I WAS RIGHT!!!! A CECROPIA MOTH!!! I have NEVER seen a living adult in person. I CAN’T WAIT. This baby is a boy 😭

Also! My lady beetle came out today too! In the photo, it is still soft after just emerging from the pupa. After hardening, it will be red and black. This is a seven-spotted lady beetle. So now I’ve seen/photographed all life stages (I found some eggs last week!!)