What are locusts and what happened to them?
explosion-scratch.github.io
explosion-scratch.github.io
Behavioral ecologist Stephen Simpson has proposed the cannibalistic forced march hypothesis[36], that is, the forward motion of a locust swarm is essentially sustained by each individual’s imperative to avoid being eaten by the locust behind it: 1) Align their body axis with neighbors (parallel) to minimize the chances of a side-on attack and present their narrowest possible profile to the individual behind. 2) March forward to bite and feed on the abdomen of the locust immediately ahead.
A billion crazed insects marching through eating all your crops while cannibalizing each other does seem relatively twisted and demonic.
One small detail I remember was when the sun was just behind a building, you could see this glow around the building which was the sun reflecting off all the locusts that were flying around it
They were ravenous things. That ate everything. Not just "food," either, though eating a snack outside was certainly impossible and merely being outside was treacherous.
These bugs ate things like window screens, cut slivers from a vinyl swimming pool, and dined upon the siding of the house. It was really fuckin' weird even being inside of the house, since the noise of it being pelted by grasshoppers (locusts?) never really slowed down.
That was probably 25 years ago. It never happened again.
Though the locusts had a huge migratory range stretching all the way to the eastern seaboard, its reproductive range was only a handful of river valleys in Wyoming and Montana. Once plowed, irrigated and trampled by livestock the species had nowhere left to lay eggs.
Drought and fire are two natural factors that destroy their migration routes’ food supply. Another is agriculture.
Folks like Monarch Watch and Xerces encourage planting of the few milkwood species (ie weeds) that the butterflies depend on for energy or egg-laying.
Restoring prairie is also effective. But there’s still drought and wildfire.
It’s well-worth reading the whole thing.
I don’t enjoy horror movies. But the locust was a horror!
[0]: https://github.com/Explosion-Scratch/locusts/blob/main/src/c...
Maybe prompt the user if they like bugs and then add the auto-hop (and more) bugs to those who say yes?!
[0]https://i.ibb.co/Y4nwnpgP/Screenshot-20260601-165536-Gallery...
I love what a gnash equilibrium (I think) it is of their behavior - and really funny, the constant march of canibalism haha
Note that it is AI-generated. It appears to be based on a human-written outline: https://github.com/Explosion-Scratch/locusts/blob/main/artic...
Or maybe it's my browser.
On that page you can click “read sample” and then search for “chicken” and the reference on page 3 seems to be the main source of that claim. Where that is quoting, I’m not sure.
> Although the insects had no defensive chemicals in their bodies, a diet saturated with locusts rendered the eggs and flesh of chickens inedible. Studies at the time found that the locusts were remarkably rich in a “reddish-brown oil of very pungent and penetrating odor,” and perhaps this accounts for the tainted meat.
They were not "rich" in this oil:
https://archive.org/details/firstanuualrepor01unit/page/442/...
Oil, .004 percent. Still, a little oil can go a long way, so perhaps.
To OP: I have a very lateral thinking process during writing and I have been experimenting with how to format that in my personal site https://hankdoes.ai/posts/we-have-the-model-why-do-we-need-y...
Lots of Jank still at this point in its life but the hover to popover extra context has been really helpful to keep the main post body more focused than it would otherwise be. I'm not that good at structuring my thoughts yet because I'm so new at writing (the post I linked isn't even finished).
Really interested to see others who are clearly much farther along in their writing journey experimenting with asides and popovers. Your underline animation is very cute. I am trying out a click-to-expand-acronym typing animation that I thought was kind of whimsical.
Are your about personal and about website pages the best place to get introduced to (what feels like) your Gwerniverse?
I also agree that the adjusted value should be displayed and if you wanted to you could popover the original value.
Edit: Actually, while I have you here: do you think that the modal popups for links (the ones that pop up when you hover on a link) should be a standard browser feature? I'd be curious to see if a web extension could replicate it more generally for all sites.
Locusts are just grasshoppers on prozac?
Probably psychologically helpful, anyway.
Ah, so like how Wurmple may evolve into Silcoon or Cascoon and thence Beautifly or Dustox. Cool.
Why would you write a formal, historical article intended for a long read and then add jump scare animated locusts to scare people?
The two things aren’t compatible.
1: The article is a draft but a mostly complete one - I wrote it in two sittings mostly linearly after doing a bunch of research. I intend to revise it to meet my personal standards sometime soon ish
2: About half of the point of this article for me was to present an article in as pleasing, interesting, and useful way as possible, here are the major features of the site to play around with:
- Hover over the title
- Table of contents is animated, thanks to https://kld.dev/toc-animation/ for the tutorial for thsi
- Squiggle line tooltips: inspired from Codrops but then I procedurally generate the squiggles per line and draw them - I see tooltips as a way to answer questions, and the hovercards as a way to inspire curiousity
- Hovercards on the side of the article: Meant to encourage people to enjoy what they're reading - Skim! Pause! Skip! I don't care - reading things like this should be fun and I wanted to encapsulate that, the hover cards are very pleasing in that sense to me
- Background images on hover: There are many times I wanted to include visual aids but said visual aids weren't quite important enough to break the reading flow, that's what those are for! This effect I had created several years ago for my portfolio: ( https://explosion-scratch.github.io/portfolio ) and got to reuse it here
- Money conversions: A fun component idea that I had, converting old monetary values to present ones accounting for inflation (and back again), turned out nicely I think
- Side timelines: I really wish I had these when I would read articles, it helps me skim and brings clarity to what's going on. I put a lot of work into making these work bidirectionally
- The spanner (grasshopper banner across the page): I really like having this banner and can repurpose it with any other images later =) - Try clicking them
- The jumping locusts: This was the most fun part of the site but it seems people either very much like it or very much don't! I intend to make it more subtle in the future, but double clicking spawns a locust, on which you can click to make it jump lol
- All the jokes and cheesy bits of the article: I am not writing a textbook, I'm writing something I personally would want to read
Also some people commenting about AI usage: I didn't use AI for any of the article content itself (the article was entirely written by me, after tons of research, outlining, etc). The article was essentially written linearly after I made a detailed enough outline to go from there. Someone said that the article was created with AI based on the human outline, this is tickling but no– humans write based on prior outlines too! I'm sure the process is different for everyone! The code _was_ aided by AI though I had a very very heavy hand over it and wrote / repurposed (my own work) much code personally. The site itself represents a UI I personally am very proud of, put countless hours of work into, and take responsibility for! This was a case study for me personally to find a productive usage of AI - not for the content of the article, nor the ideas, nor the creativity, but simply as a tool to guide me towards that.
Thanks for reading everyone, and star on GitHub if you get the chance =)
If you don‘t see it you probably did not read the article…