The official post-Cohost permanent URL for this piece is https://irenes.space/leaves/2024-09-29-cicadas
some broods of cicada do this thing where they wait many years between swarms, just reproducing slowly and sustainably until one year they reproduce really quickly and there's suddenly a lot of them.
In particular, they wait a prime number of years. The reason it's a prime number is to minimize the chance of them having to deal with other broods that wait a different number of years.
We like to imagine a fantasy setting in which there are multiple vampire societies that don't interact with each other, with entirely different cultures and traditions, each one hibernating on a different prime-numbered cycle.
Not where you thought we were going with that, right? :D Okay, now we've said it, have fun with it.
All the world designers look at bugs when designing their hive minds, but where is the attention to bugs when designing their vampires. :D
After all, bats are bugs, right?
image description: A panel from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin, a young boy, is standing in front of his class at school. All his classmates are shouting at him in unison: "Bats aren't bugs!!"
[this thread was originally posted to Twitter in 2020, and revived briefly in 2021 when everyone got interested in cicadas. it is reproduced here with only one very minor change to better fit the Cohost format]
(edit: add image description, which is from the original)
