Hah! I love it. If it helps at all, the color fidelity in this photo isn’t great. The mountains are actually a non-vibrant shade of blue-green that gets turned much darker by my phone’s camera. The natural lighting today also doesn’t help with it raining outside. We specifically chose the color of the White Mountains of New Hampshire through the haze of a warm summer day.
I have found photographing this project to be especially challenging. Between the changing light throughout the day and the limits of my phone camera, it is hard to get both accurate colors and a proper impression of the texture of the wall.
I am only running the lights along a channel in the uppermost boards that will make the topmost mountains, so I will not need a complex path. My goal is to have a sunrise-behind-the-mountains effect.
Thank you to everyone who commented. If these cracks do not come back it was worth the time to do it right. If not, then at least I got to practice my drywall finishing skills.
I grabbed some tape and will do that repair. Thankfully, I have taped drywall before so this is not new. I don’t think my wife will be thrilled that this is going to add a day or two until we can paint, but she will agree that it is better to do it right than fast.
Can I do mesh tape over the cracks as they are (with some initial sanding to remove high points), or do I need to strip it down to drywall first? Getting down to drywall would be tricky without damaging the drywall
Any settling should be long finished. The bedroom is on the second floor, and the additions that border these walls were completed ~30 years ago. The drywall in this room predates that addition, but these cracks are through layers of paint that came after the additions. Upon further inspection, I think the weak drywall is limited to a much smaller area than I first anticipated. That area has no cracks and will be trimmed with a cover out in for better plumbing access anyway.
Oh, this is great. There may have been more results since I was working on a field project studying them, but to my knowledge we have absolutely no idea! They are not particularly well adapted to the cold, but their range keeps extending northward. This well predates the rapid climate change caused by humans, so we cannot use that as a reason. They are a bit of a mystery.
My guess would be that they are occupying a niche where limited brain and limb development (problems all marsupials face) are not limiting factors on success. Maybe their lack of a close genetic relation when surrounded by placental mammals gives them some pathogen resistance when scavenging? Those are just mildly educated guesses. When I was working with them we had no idea, and our field results were not at all enlightening.
I do not mean to be pedantic, but this is topic I love.
Marsupials do not fill a niche by virtue of their lack of placement. Instead, they have survived so long by virtue of their isolation.
It turns out that the adaptions required for marsupials to birth and raise young without a placenta make them inferior to placental mammals in almost every scenario. They get out competed and die off in almost every instance. South America had marsupials, not placentals, until it formed a land bridge with North America. What happened then? All the marsupials died off with the weird exception of the American possum. The placentals straight up out competed them across the board.
Australia has kept marsupials only because of its extreme isolation. When any type of placental mammal has been introduced to Australia, it has ruined the ecosystem and taken over the niche it fills.
Independent of humans, marsupials are a dying design. We just happen to live at a time when we can see that extinction in process. Yes, humans have sped it up by more rapidly introducing placental species, but we can see how it happened without human intervention as well.