Image at AUfeminin News, h/t to serendipityisabitch in comments for tracking it down
Happy upcoming Halloween, guys and ghouls! There are many creepy-crawlies that go bump in the night. Some man-made, some man-made-up; some all too real. On the latter, sure the Brazilian wandering spider is an unwelcome sight, some of its ancient, giant relatives, especially the Eurypterida, were even larger. But if you want to see something totally extant and really scary, check out this newly discovered bad-ass mama. And remember tonight, as you're drifting off peacefully, she's so creepy that you might hear her and even feel her, before you see her:
Known as South American Goliath birdeater, the humongous eight-legged creepy crawly creature has a body the size of a fist and a leg span the size of a small child. Harvard entomologist Piotr Naskrecki recently encountered one while taking a nighttime stroll through a rain forest in Guyana.
... Size isn’t the spider’s only chill-inducing quality. It makes loud clicking sounds with its front claws when threatened and defends itself by rubbing its back legs together to shoot clouds of microscopic barbs through the air that are highly irritating to the eyes and skin. If it chomps down on you with its 2-inch-long fangs, you probably won’t die, unless you are allergic. But its bite contains enough venom to make you sick for days.
- Google is hungry for brains, and they're gonna use those gooey, yummy sweet brains to build even bigger, artificial semiconductor brains that will no doubt enslave us all, or at least keep us company and stop us from writing hot checks. The horror!
- Speaking of brains, I've been waiting for the debunking of "Brain expanding games" to begin in earnest for a awhile.
- From the tangential field of technology and gaming comes a truly worthy diatribe, nay, a world class rant, from former Minnesota Viking Chris Kluwe, which expertly utilizes our newish digital medium almost as well as it skewers a small cohort of loud-mouthed, misogynist gamers who have no brains:
There’s this herd of people ... who feel that somehow, their identity as “gamers” is being taken away. Like they’re all little Anne Franks, hiding in their basements from the PC Nazis and Social Justice Warrior brigades, desperately protecting the last shreds of “core gaming” in their unironically horrible Liveblog journals filled with patently obvious white privilege and poorly disguised misogyny. “First they came for our Halo 2’s, and I said nothing.” These paint-huffing shitgoblins think they’re “gamers,” and it pisses me the fuck off.
- Via Maddow, Darrel Issa could clearly use a visit to The Wiz to get some brains. To put GOP Ebola hype into perspective, here's a blast from Daily Kos and Halloween's past: Don't Let the Bed-Bugs Bite!
Way back in the 'good ole days' of 1347, those carefree times of wanton slaughter, religious torture, and massive infant mortality, another abomination arose far more gruesome than any mere manmade method of killing. It swept across Eurasia, smothering it like a thick blanket, leaving many of the dark, foreboding icons we’ve come to associate with All Hallow’s Eve still hidden and lurking in its deadly wake ...