gremdark

Monkeys With Smaller Testicles Scream Louder to Compensate

It's a "calls vs balls" tradeoff.

It’s a long-held belief that loudmouths overcompensate for something, but in the case of howler monkeys, science has confirmed it’s a biological fact. A landmark study by Dr. Jacob Dunn at Cambridge University, along with 2026 follow-up research, has established that monkeys who scream the loudest effectively “pay” for that volume with significantly smaller testes and lower sperm counts.


You gotta wonder if this applies to humans and some of their absurd behavior.

Snowflake Challenge 8: Creative Process

Talk about your creative process.

This challenge looks at what goes on behind the scenes to produce all the wonderful fannish contents that come to be in the world. By ‘create’ we don’t just mean fic or art or videos -- there’s a process behind every blog post, comment or any other kind of fannish engagement. We’re all creators -- and every creator loves to know about other peoples'.






I write fanfic "derive in, extrapolate out." This means I look for something in the canon that could use more explanation, think about how it could have gotten that way, then consider how that could influence further stories.

My biggest fanseries is Love Is For children (The Avengers). Several of these entries dig into the backstory of the characters, starting with a scene in canon that shows something already developed which must have had a way to get started but that part is never mentioned. So I used the character as known, and the context, to build something that would logically fit into that gap.

In the first Iron Man movie, we see Tony Stark build the Mark I suit in a cave, with a box of scraps. Specifically, we see him swinging a hammer, like Hephaestus at his forge. Now blacksmithing is one of those things that cannot be learned entirely from a book. It requires muscles and muscle memory; you actually have to do the work, a lot, over a long time. If you want to learn efficiently and also not set yourself on fire too much, it also requires a master blacksmith to teach you the tools and techniques. But the movie says nothing about how or where or when Tony learned any of that; it shows the end result of a mastersmith building a supergizmo out of junk.

I wrote "What Little Boys Are Made Of" to fill in that part of Tony's backstory. The earliest sections describe, also inspired by canon, examples of Tony's relationship with his father and Howard Stark's A+ parenting. Then it covers college, Tony's boredom because it's too easy, and his continuing efforts to get Howard's attention. The real key comes when Tony revisits Museum Village in Monroe, New York. There he meets a blacksmith and hits on the idea of working as an apprentice for the summer. And the rest is history.

Consider the Six Layers from Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. With fanwriting, a creator necessarily starts at the surface of the canon element, in this case a movie. "Derive in" means picking a point on the surface, then delving underneath into the structure which supports it, and often consulting the idiom. To create something new requires an idea, which is the first or core layer. From there, "extrapolate out" simply works back up to the surface again.

There in a nutshell is the process for most of my fanwriting. It works equally well with all sizes and media. I use some other methods, but I usually pair them with this one.