Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School is a popular YouTube series. Tucker Foley is a star student.
Barbara Gordon's Cram School posts free online courses for both coding and computer engineering. Think Crash Course in terms of entertainment, but college lecture in terms of depth. Hundreds of thousands of viewers flock to it— students who missed a class, people looking to add new skills to a resume, even simple hobbyists. It’s a project Barbara’s proud of.
Sometimes, when she wants to relax, she’ll even hop in the comments and spend an afternoon troubleshooting a viewer’s project with them.
User “Fryer-Tuck” has especially interesting ones. Barbara finds herself seeking out his comments, checking in on whatever this crazy kid is making next. An app for collecting GPS pings and assembling them on a map in real-time, an algorithm that connects geographic points to predict something’s movement taking a hundred other variables into account, simplified versions of incredibly complex homemade programs so they can run on incredibly limited CPU’s.
(Barbara wants to buy the kid a PC. It seems he’s got natural talent, but he keeps making reference to a PDA. Talk about 90’s! This guy’s hardware probably predates his birth.)
She chats with him more and more, switching to less public PM threads, and eventually, he opens up. His latest project, though, is not something Barbara has personal experience with.
FT: so if you found, hypothetically, a mysterious glowing substance that affects tech in weird and wacky ways that could totally have potential but might be vaguely sentient/otherworldly…. what would you do and how would you experiment with it. safely, of course. and hypothetically
BG: I’d make sure all my tests were in disposable devices and quarantined programs to keep it from infecting my important stuff. Dare I ask… how weird and wacky is it?
FT: uhhh. theoretically, a person composed of this substance once used it to enter a video game. like physical body, into the computer, onto the screen? moving around and talking and fighting enemies within the game?
FT: its been experimented with before, but not on any tech with a brain. just basic shields and blasters and stuff, its an energy source. also was put in a car once
FT: i wanna see how it affects software, yk? bc i already know it can. mess around and see how far i can push it
BG: […]
FT: … barbara?
BG: Sorry, thinking. Would you mind sharing more details? You said “blasters?”
Honestly. Kid genius with access to some truly wacky materials and even wackier weapons, she needs to start a file on him before he full sends to either hero or villain.
[OR: Tucker is a self-taught hacker, but if he were to credit a teacher, he'd name Barbara Gordon's Coding & Computer Cram School! He's even caught the attention of Dr. Gordon herself. She's full of sage advice, and with how she preaches the value of a good VPN, he's sure she's not pro-government. Maybe she'll help him as he studies the many applications of ecto-tech!]
I love them. I mean, look at their big, shiny eyes! NO ONE can say that they aren’t cute as hell!
The other reason I love these animals is because they’re basically what happens when evolution tries to make a bat out of a bird.
These little guys are known as oilbirds (Steatornis caripensis), and are also called guácharo (and also several other things, because they are found in South America, plus Trinidad & Tobago, which all have INCREDIBLE language diversity).
Oilbirds are nocturnal, flying around the forests of South America at night looking for fruit to eat. They also live colonially in caves, which they navigate using echolocation.
So, to review:
(I’m making my Generic Bats a very generic fruit bat, for the record).
Oilbirds are the only birds with this combination of traits, which I think is pretty cool of them! Why are they so much like bats? Basically, when different types of animals evolve under similar selective pressures, they often evolve the same features! This is called convergent evolution, and wow I talk about it a lot on this blog! It turns out that nocturnal animals that live in caves and eat fruit can sometimes benefit from traits like these!
(they’re, like... spooky-cute. Cute-spooky? Either way, I like them a lot)
So, if these birds are flying around at night, how do they stop themselves from flying into things while searching for that tasty, tasty fruit?
Well, in the forest, they mostly rely on their AMAZING night vision (which is another trait they share with bats, fyi). That is why they have such big, adorable eyes, which has a lot of light-sensing cells called rods. They actually hold a record for the density of the rods in their eyes: one million per square millimetre. That is the highest density of any known vertebrate. It’s about 6x denser than the rods found in human eyes!
...still cute
Their amazing vision allows them to see very well in low light, which is how they navigate the South American jungles at night, searching for food under the moon and stars. That said, their vision just doesn’t cut it when it comes to flying in the caves they call home. Why? Well, caves are dark as hell, and even the best night-vision can’t do anything for you when there’s no light at all. Plus, flying into cave walls/ cliff faces hurts, so it’s good to be extra sure you’re not flying into solid rock!
So how do they find their way around these dark caves? Well, they use something very unusual for birds: echolocation!
Oilbirds are one of only a few species of birds that are known to use echolocation (the others are a few species of the closely-related swiflets (Collocaliini), but I HAVE DECIDED TODAY IS FOR THE OILBIRDS im sorry, swiflets, ilu2).
Look at them, not flying into rocks! I’m so proud (˃̣̣̥ ◡ ˂̣̣̥)
Also, a bonus fact, because idk where to fit this but I MUST mention it:
They have little whiskers around their beaks (which are technically called “rictal bristles”, but I’m going to call them “whiskers” because I like that word better). These whiskers are basically used to feel things that they have in and around their mouth, helping them find, manipulate, and eat their tasty fruit!
I recently watched that TikTok of someone building what's supposed to be a particle accelerator out of Hot Wheels track pieces
And at first I thought about actually making it work, but then I thought about those comments saying stuff like "Imagine how painful it is if it flung out of the track"
And of course I thought about Science Dad Au cause it tickles my brain and I love it as a concept so much
incredibly heated morphological debate in the hoenn region pokemon research community that while the flygon evolution line my exhibit many physical features similar to those of bug type pokemon including the sharing of egg groups it is actually the salamence line that qualifies for bug-dragon type because of a defined larva (bagon has many vestigial and underdeveloped features), pupal (shellgon is a walking cocoon), and metamorphosis (salamence emerges from a cocoon, looks drastically different and begins to fly) life cycle compared to flygon which does not undergo any sort of larva->pupa->metamorphosis within its evolution line especially when trapinch on its own is a functioning and accomplished ambush predator while bagons growth is entirely dependent on developing a shell to become shellgon, professor birch notably spotted being attacked in meteor falls in trying to answer this question
Because of Halsin's "nature made you wonderfully" lines that sprinkle all his romance, I desperately want to see a story a romance where the Tav is a clone or homunculus of some kind. Someone whose torn apart by themselves because they are very much not natural. Trying to tell him before being willing to start a romance.
I want to see Halsin upset for them. Maybe conflicted or maybe not, but certainly horrified by what they witnessed. A creature who never saw the sun til they were in adulthood? It's cruel.
And I want after a resolution them to fall apart crying because they believe Halsin when he says they are beautiful and he loves them. They believe him when he says that even as he sees a map of man made scars and body horror. He loves them, and sees more then a thing, even if it takes a while to get there.
Personality: This clown is spacy and distant, though not hollow or cold. Curious, but lacks the capacity to absorb and store knowledge for long periods of time.
Known Issues: Each limb was made with a different technique, causing a mismatched and bloated appearance as well as an inability to sit up without assistance.
quick note - this blog is gonna be sparse again for at least this week. trying new medications and tbh initial side effects are not super pleasant + actual effects build up. as a result: currently as if unmedicated for mental health, with anxiety+ side effect, extra fatigue, dizziness, and fatigue. it's uh, sure something.
totally recognize that most of y'all know we're absent at times due to health things, just wanted to give a heads up that this one is at least anticipated.
the rwd season 4 qna inspired me to start thinking about college au headcanons except a lot of these are gonna be really specific to my school and y'all are just gonna have to deal with that <3
Kyana feeds some of the school cats. she would feed all of them if she could
Dani smuggled Plug (the scrawniest black cat you've ever seen) into her dorm room illegally and somehow management hasn't caught her yet (based on a true story) (Kyana visits to see Plug all the time)
Finbar keeps an updated tier list of every canteen in the school with breakdowns of the best stalls/dishes for each
A senior from the school of engineering once said to me 'all the engineering people dress like rats cuz our classrooms don't have aircon' (context: tropics) anyway that's Dani
Kyana would probably be involved in a lot of freshman orientation events from second year onwards. she just likes talking to the new kids and giving them advice like she would be the kind of orientation group leader who'd get messages from her freshies asking about all kinds of random nonsense because she's made sure they know they can always contact her with questions
VR-LA is The Guy you go to for textbook pirating resources
(this is more of a 'wouldn't that be funny' but VR-LA is just Veerle's discord handle)
Docent is the name of VR-LA's old laptop that broke down so he gave it to Cassimere (computer engineering major he met once at a networking event) to fix except Cassimere got everything off the hard drive and then somehow managed to fuck it up Even More so he had to get a new laptop (and named it Emi)
Roy has gotten food poisoning from his dorm meal plan at least once (based on at least one true story)
The heap trio + Mandy would be those friends constantly playing majong in the dorm lounge and if all the majong tables are taken they just play in one of their dorm rooms on a towel to dampen the tile shuffling noises (it was Mandy's idea)
Every morning Dani goes to the drinks stall at her faculty and orders one iced coffee to the point where the stall owner starts preparing an iced coffee whenever they see her approach (based on my true story)
Roy would be one of those people who goes clubbing every other week and every time he tries to drag the rest of the heap trio and Egan almost always goes and Dani would go if she didn't have a good excuse but always begrudgingly. anyway Roy would always be the only one having a good time until Egan gets drunk enough to start having fun
Finbar actually uses the dorm kitchens instead of just buying canteen food and it always makes the hallways smell really good
Vhas also uses the dorm kitchen sometimes but like. one time i walked into the pantry on my floor and someone had left cut sweet potatoes and 2 eggs in an inch of water in a pan on the stove. that's Vhas
Kyana's constantly applying for overseas exchanges and international summer/winter school programmes. the world is large and she wants to see it!
Maxim's the definition of a hall phantom. you know he lives on your dorm floor because you pass him by in the hallways sometimes and literally nowhere else. sometimes you're not convinced that he actually exists
VR-LA and Maxim's friendship stems from them being from wildly different faculties (VR-LA's in STEM, Maxim's doing anthropology so arts/social sciences) but also having lots of weird interests they cant really bug anyone in their home faculties about
Elyse is in student government and every once in a while Finbar receives a series of angry texts about the newest idiocy she's had to put up with
MR-SN and AS-TR start a stargazing club together. other notable members include AS-TR's girlfriend E-DN, MR-SN's friend C-RA (the one who always volunteers to carry the heavy ass telescopes) and MR-SN's friend K-LB who he pestered into coming to fix one of the wonky scopes even though K-LB's actually in electrical engineering but he's the only engineering person MR-SN (an arts student) knows
oh and of course VR-LA joins because he genuinely just likes space (developing a crush on his club chairperson was not on his bingo card)
Kyana and E-DN were MMA sparring buddies at one point which is how she found out about the stargazing and joined immediately
honestly i can probably think of more but this post is fuckin long LMAO