Vivian Rose

opossums are possums

Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Some List Animals Until Failure players tell me American opossums are not possums, and Australasian possums are not opossums; in other words, possums live in America, opossums live in Australasia. However, according to Wikipedia (the game's source of truth) opossums are possums.

A paragraph in the gameover screen explains this. But maybe what you need isn't a paragraph. Maybe you need an example.

So consider Virginia opossum. Not even the whole page; just consider the first two sentences. What is this animal called?

The Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana), also known as the North American opossum, is a member of the opossum family found from southern Canada to northern Costa Rica, making it the northernmost marsupial in the world.^[7] Commonly referred to simply as the possum,^[8] (distinct from the Australasian possum) it is a solitary nocturnal animal about the size of a domestic cat, and a successful opportunist.

Already from this one species we can conclude that “possum” and “opossum” are not mutually exclusive terms. In the similar case of wallabies vs kangaroos, I made the same (controversial) conclusion: since the antilopine wallaroo is referred to as both a wallaby and a kangaroo, you can't get two points for listing “wallaby” and “kangaroo”. You have to list a specific non-wallaby kangaroo to get the second point. Similarly, if by “possum” you really mean “Australasian possum”, then type that. Otherwise, it's fair to assume you might mean the American (o)possum

I know what you're thinking:

opossum independence

if we're gonna be pedantic and make chipmunks and squirrels the same thing we should be pedantic enough to know the difference between opossum and possum

Well, hear me out.

My game strives to agree with Wikipedia. The first five words of Chipmunk are:

Chipmunks are small, striped squirrels

So of course chipmunks are squirrels. On the other hand, Possum is not even its own article. It is a disambiguation page including American opossums.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Possum may refer to:

Animals

American possums

Opossum, or Didelphimorphia, an order of marsupials native to the Americas
Didelphis, a genus of marsupials within Didelphimorphia
Common opossum, native to Central and South America

Virginia opossum, native to North America

White-eared opossum, native to South America

Australasian possums

Phalangeriformes, also called (o)possums, any of a number of arboreal marsupial species native to Australia, New Guinea, and Sulawesi
Common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula), a common possum in Australian urban areas, invasive in New Zealand

Common ringtail possum (Pseudocheirus peregrinus), also common in Australian urban areas, absent from New Zealand

Phalangeridae (possums and cuscuses), a family of marsupials native to Australia and New Guinea containing most of the species referred to as "possums" in Australia

But even historically

The Virginia opossum has been called a possum longer than Australasian possums have. The Virginia opossum was the first (o)possum to be named in English, loanworded from Powhatan (aka Virginia Algonquin). “Possum” was first recorded a few years later.

Then, the possums of Australasia were named after the Virginia (o)possum for their visual resemblance. So if the Virginia (o)possum were not a possum, then the Australasian possums would never have been possums either. Australasian possums are called possums because American possums are called possums. The American and Australasian possums have shared an English name for as long as they have both had English names.

For all I know, there could be a strong case against all this, and Wikipedia's statements could stem from Americentrist bias, or could simply be incorrect. But List Animals Until Failure is based on Wikipedia. If you have a strong argument that opossums aren't possums, then by all means email me to argue, but more importantly, update Wikipedia. If Wikipedia stops claiming opossums are called possums, I'll update my game. List Animals Until Failure has always been a bit of a ploy to get people to update Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Why you should replace your hormones

Sat, 12 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Because you would like the effects of replacing your hormones?

Read the Effects section of the Feminizing hormone therapy or Masculinizing hormone therapy Wikipedia article. I've copied part of the former here for quick reference:

Feminizing HRT quick reference

Effects of feminizing hormone therapy in transfeminine people
Effect	Time to expected onset of effect^[a]	Time to expected maximum effect^[a]^[b]	Permanency if hormone therapy is stopped
Breast development and nipple/areolar enlargement	2–6 months	1–5 years	Surgically reversible
Thinning/slowed growth of facial/body hair	4–12 months	>3 years^[c]	Reversible
Cessation/reversal of male-pattern scalp hair loss	1–3 months	1–2 years^[d]	Reversible
Softening of skin/decreased oiliness and acne	3–6 months	Unknown	Reversible
Redistribution of body fat in a feminine pattern	3–6 months	2–5 years	Reversible
Decreased muscle mass/strength	3–6 months	1–2 years^[e]	Reversible
Widening and rounding of the pelvis^[f]	Unspecified	Unspecified	Permanent
Changes in mood, emotionality, and behavior	Unspecified	Unspecified	Reversible
Decreased sex drive	1–3 months	Temporary	Reversible
Decreased spontaneous/morning erections	1–3 months	3–6 months	Reversible
Erectile dysfunction and decreased ejaculate volume	1–3 months	Variable	Reversible
Decreased sperm production/fertility	Unknown	>3 years	Reversible or permanent^[g]
Decreased testicle size	3–6 months	2–3 years	Unknown
Decreased penis size	Conflicting reports, with none reported observed in transgender women but significant albeit minor reduction of penis size reported in men with prostate cancer on androgen deprivation therapy.	Not applicable	Not applicable
Decreased prostate gland size	Unspecified	Unspecified	Unspecified
Voice changes	None^[h]	Not applicable	Not applicable
Footnotes and sources Footnotes: Jump up to: 1 2 Estimates represent published and unpublished clinical observations. ↑ Time at which further changes are unlikely at maximum maintained dose. Maximum effects vary widely depending on genetics, body habitus, age, and status of gonad removal. Generally, older individuals with intact gonads may have less feminization overall. ↑ Complete removal of male facial and body hair requires electrolysis, laser hair removal, or both. Temporary hair removal can be achieved with shaving, epilating, waxing, and other methods. ↑ Familial scalp hair loss may occur if estrogens are stopped. ↑ Varies significantly depending on the amount of physical exercise. ↑ Occurs only in individuals of pubertal age who have not yet completed epiphyseal closure. ↑ Additional research is needed to determine permanency, but a permanent impact of estrogen therapy on sperm quality is likely and sperm preservation options should be counseled on and considered before initiation of therapy. ↑ Treatment by speech pathologists for voice training is effective.

Sort the effects into pros and cons. If the pros outweigh the cons, start HRT.

If you want the effects of swapping your hormones, swap your hormones. If you don't, don't. In general, if you would like the effects of an action, do that action.

The rest of this page addresses two misconceptions that stop people from acting on their preferences: the misconception that gender is real, and the misconception that HRT is a big deal.

Gender is fake

Please do not think I should only take estrogen if I know I'm really a woman inside or similar nonsense. Disregard the terms “man” and “woman”. They don't mean anything. You may as well make decisions based on astrology or MBTI or Homestuck classpect.

Some value the man's-brain-in-a-woman's-body narrative. I disregard it. If I want to take estrogen, I'll take estrogen. It's not like the phantasm of Gender pharmaceutically interacts with hormones. I don't need to be Really A Woman On The Inside to prefer soft skin over hairline recession. Do what you want.

Customizing hormones is not a big deal

Some women who suffer acne are prescribed spironolactone, a testosterone blocker common in the US, since testosterone can be a cause of (oilier skin, and therefore) acne. In other words, they are bothered by an effect of testosterone, so they take a pill to block testosterone, so the effect goes away.

This is considered normal and not a big deal. Yet when someone with an M on their birth certificate does it, it's suddenly weird, because they aren't “supposed to” have low testosterone? There is no such thing as supposing to. You won't defy some grand, divine, Correct plan by replacing hormones. Do what you want.

I think sex ed should teach teens about HRT, so the horrified ones can opt out of default puberty. I'm sure more people would, if they knew how. Instead, most never learn it's an option.

I helped a moth today

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Moths/butterflies need to hang vertically (like on a wall or tree) shortly after they eclose for gravity to inflate their wings with fluid.

Cicadas are the same way. If you've experienced a periodic cicada emergence, you may have noticed a cicada with shriveled wings. If it's vertical (likely hanging from its exuvia), it's probably inflating its wings. If it's on the ground, it's probably seeking a vertical surface, or already failed to mount one in time and thus can never fly.

Today I found this creature crawling on pavement:

Coworkers thought it a bee or hornet, but I recognized it as a moth with tiny wings. I gave it a folded napkin to perch on, even though its wings were so tiny I doubted they would inflate properly. The moth hung vertically as soon as it could, and inflated its wings to full size over about 20 minutes.

Here's a macro photo that makes you want to run a hand through its fur:

It knocked off a lot of scales on its first flight attempt, and also shed some while merely buzzing its wings. I'm guessing this is normal for clearwing moths?

I like knowing enough about bugs to help them. If you find a moth/butterfly/cicada on the ground with crumpled wings, consider offering it a vertical surface. (If you do this, I should warn that the moth does take a piss as soon as it's done gaining flight. It's been in a chrysalis for a long time; wouldn't that be second on your to-do list, too?)

Another favorite trick of mine: If you catch a spider indoors, offer it a tiny wet piece of paper towel (or a wet cotton ball). The spider is likely thirsty, so you can watch it lick water from the paper.

about list animals until failure

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I made a web game, List Animals Until Failure. You just name as many animals as you can. Play it and show me how far you get.

Inspired by a meme

Each animal grants a point. You can be vague, but you don’t get extra points for nesting categories. E.g. you only get one point for listing “mammal” & “primate” & “human”, since those aren’t different animals.

How it works

I used Wikidata and Wikipedia. Read on for technical details.

Datamining

This was the sort of datamining project that goes like this:

I can parse [all these entities] and that will be a good start.
That got me 90% of the way there, but there’s this other case I need to handle.
Now I’m 95% of the way there, but there’s another edge case.
Now I’m 98% of the way there, maybe if I parse this other thing too…?

General strategy

Mine Wikidata entities representing taxons. Use those to build a phylogenic (evolutionary) tree. Get the taxons’ names from Wikipedia (since Wikidata entities link to Wikipedia pages, and Wikipedia has good judgement about what things should be called, and has good redirects). If an entity lacks a Wikipedia article, it’s probably not worth including — or if it is, the player should write a Wikipedia article for it! Also get names from the Wikidata entity itself since I later realized this would cover some missing cases; e.g. Person is its own Wikipedia article, but Wikidata lists it as a name for Human.

Combining sources

The Wikidata entity doesn’t always have both taxon data and name data. For example, Cat represents the common name (and lacks taxon data), while Felis catus represents the species (and has poor name data).

How to reconcile this? The taxon known by this common name property links the two entities, so I use that. Get names from the common name entity and its Wikipedia page; get taxonomy from the species entity. I want to use common names as much as possible ingame; the phylogenic tree is just a means to construct a hierarchy of terminology.

More cases

Handle disambiguation pages: if an animal (as identified by previous steps) is the first (fully-nested wikilink in a wikilist) in a term’s disambiguation page, then recognize that term as the animal. Example: Blood worm.
Same with Category:Set index articles on animal common names. Example: Pumpkin spider.
Same with Category:Set index articles on snakes since those aren’t marked with the previous category for some reason. Example: Diamondback rattlesnake.
If there’s an animal called “common X”, then use it as a fallback for “X”. Example: guessing “Coquí” is equivalent to guessing “Common coquí”.

Paraphyly

Ducks, egrets, gnats, buzzards, hawks, mites: none of these are defined solely by a phylogenic taxon; they’re what you might call “form taxa”. In other words: iff it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

I handle many of these manually. As a last resort, the game grabs the closest common ancestor of the group, or one arbitrary taxon belonging to it, which can cause bugs.

Trout doesn’t have a paraphyletic group infobox, maybe because it’s so colloquial a term, and even if it did, many barely-related fish are called trout. So I manually add a redirect to a single representative for the group: “trout” becomes “brown trout”.

If you know of Carcinization, you can imagine the difficulty of defining crabs. So “crab” becomes “brown crab”.

Away from phylogeny

A wasp is any Apocritan that isn’t a bee or an ant.

(diagram by several Wikimedia Commons contributors)

Everything in Apocrita is a wasp, except bees and ants.

If you’re an entomologist, or an evolutionary biologist, you might say “well, bees and ants are just wasps, really”, and I respect that. But colloquially, bees and ants aren’t wasps. If this game insists on a purely phylogenic approach, then it’s like, come on, I can’t get a point for saying wasp and ant? That’s unreasonable. If I ask a 2-year-old to list animals and she lists wasp and ant, I’m not gonna break out the DNA sequences like “Ohh well evolutionarily ants are technically wasps”. I’m gonna say yeah, good job, that’s two animals.

So I promoted bees and ants to siblings of wasps rather than descendants. Now bee, wasp, and ant count as different animals. My animal term hierarchy is thus not phylogenic; phylogeny is just its starting point.

I sorted out other groups, too; for examples, these groups of groups of birds distinguished chiefly by size: crows/ravens, hawks/eagles, ducks/geese/swans. (Ravens are bigger; Eagles are bigger; Geese are bigger and swans are yet bigger.)

My friend Devin argued for a strictly phylogenic hierarchy:

evolutionary biologists are professional animal listers
so they should be the source of truth
and I think it’s cool to learn that wasps or egrets or stuff are paraphyletic

Phylogeny can be fun (e.g. Metazooa) but that's not the game I wanted to make. Maybe I’m failing to educate my players about phylogeny, but I’m learning a lot about phylogeny myself; so it averages out, you see.

Performance

Initial page load includes the full list of animals; the game avoids network calls to instantly respond to guesses. Initial load is 18MB compressed, 58 MB decompressed. That's about how much outlook.com loads while logged out (19MB compressed, 33MB decompressed) which makes you wonder why a marketing page needs as much information as a list of every animal known to humanity.

Visuals

I learned about SVG filters.

Here's the colorful background that shows up when you exceed 50 points. It's just the raw output of the builtin turbulence filter. I like it.

The source code is pretty short.

    <svg width="400" height="400">
        <filter id="f" x="0" y="0" width="1" height="1">
            <feTurbulence numOctaves="1" baseFrequency="0.008" stitchTiles="stitch" />
        </filter>
        <rect width="400" height="400" filter="url(#f)" />
    </svg>

These clouds show up if you list enough birds in a row.

The source code is only a little longer.

    <svg viewBox="0 0 400 400" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg">
        <filter id="f" width="1" height="1" x="0" y="0">
            <feTurbulence numOctaves="5" baseFrequency="0.015" stitchTiles="stitch"
                          width="400" height="400" />
            <feColorMatrix type="matrix"
                   values="0    0    0    1    0
                           0    0    0    1    0
                           0    0    0    1    0
                           0    -.3  -.7  2    0" />
        </filter>
        <rect x="0" y="0" width="400" height="400" style="filter:url(#f)" />
    </svg>

Emoji summary

At game over, you get an emoji summary like this:

https://rose.systems/animalist 144 animals listed 🦀🦞🐦🐦🕊🕊️🦅🦅🐦🐟🐠🦈🦁🐅🐻🙀🐜🐛🐌🐦🐦🐦‍⬛🐦‍⬛🐦𓆣🐪🐊🐬🦈🦈🦈🐟🐡🦔𓇼🕸️🐦‍⬛🕷🐛🐋🐳🐋🫍🐄🦌🐺🐕🦬🦖🦕🐒🦍🦡🦨🐰🐙🐌🪱🪰🐛🦭🐓🦢🦆🐌🐛℥🐆𓅣𓆉🐢🪰🪰🪰🐛🪳🐛🦥🐦🐛🐛🐝

Internally I call the emoji “mononyms” because they aren’t all emoji. Any single-character alias for an animal is a possible mononym for that animal. (Or any more-specific version of that animal; any bird becomes 🐦, unless a more specific mononym applies, such as 🦅 or 🦉.)

Most of these aliases arise from Wikipedia redirects. Wikipedia typically redirects emoji to what they depict, unless the emoji itself is notable. For example, 🕷 redirects to Spider. Some mononyms I had to add manually; e.g. 🦖 is somehow notable enough for an article.

℥ means ounce (as in the unit), but “ounce” also archaically means snow leopard. This silly indirection is cute enough to leave in.

1600s bestiary excerpt: The Ounce

The Ounce is a moſt cruel Beaſt, of the quantity of a village or maſtiffe Dog, having his face and ears like to a Lions, his body, tail, feet, and nails like a Cats, of a very terrible Aſpect, his teeth ſo ſtrong and ſharp, that he can even cut Wood in ſunder with them; he hath alſo in his nails ſo great ſtrength, that he only fighteth with them, and uſeth them for his greateſt defence…

The gall of this Beaſt is deadly poyſon, it hateth all creatures, and deſtroyeth them, eſpecially men; and therefore it may well be ſaid to be poſſeſſed with ſome evill ſpirit. It loveth none but his own kinde. And thus much for the Ounce.

The History of Four-footed Beaſts and Serpents, p441-442

Remaining bugs

There are still animals requiring manual intervention. Goanna for example isn't easily dataminable; it's a normal article with no infobox, and its Wikidata entity lacks a taxon. Maybe I could iterate over every article in every category like “Reptile common names” and look for a list of animals under a Species heading, but sometimes it's headed Taxonomy or Classification or Genera, and sometimes it's in paragraph or table form. So these cases are staying manual for now.

Hit me up with bug reports. Or ideas. Or complaints, or whatever.

new blog

Thu, 01 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I want to write an abandoned blog. The kind that has a handful of posts over a year or so and then trails off.

The blog will follow this archetype, 2–5 posts total:

One pretty good, if unreadably boring, blogpost about a project of mine
The lowliest form of human literature: blogging about blogging. Maybe about writing plans, or about the static site generator.
Maybe a final post, after a hiatus, stating intent to get back to writing sometime this year — or maybe as a New Year's resolution, so it can be put off until next year — but then the blog tapers off and never updates again.

I'll do the blogpost-about-blogging first; it can introduce the goals of the abandoned blog. I won't really publish it first, though; I'll write all the posts in one go and backdate them. Then I can release the abandoned blog in one push instead of taking months or years.

I'd rather write the good blogpost about something recent though, so I'll date it 2026 to avoid anachronism. So you'll have to wait a few years for the abandoned blog vibe.

There is a slim chance the whim strikes to write additional posts in the future. If this happens, I'll include them with real publication dates. I will consider this project a failure if I end up uploading longform blogposts semi-regularly for over a year.

You can find the rest of my blogposts on the blog index page, or below:

^This list is dynamically generated in case something possesses me to write subsequent posts.

I'll set up an Atom/RSS feed here: feed.xml. If all goes according to plan, you can add it to your reader without getting bothered by notifications.