ETNO: Houseplant, Ambiguous, Diet

 The intent was to make this round's words a pretty light lift, so I was reaching for immediate associations and familiar patterns. All the recent news/coverage for Super Mario Bros Wonder means I have platformer design on the brain, so from "Houseplant" and "Diet" I immediately pull Little Shop Of Horrors and Piranha Plants...

    At this juncture I'd like to detour a bit to talk about one of the many tiny ways in which "the algorithmic gods" like Google are slowly and steadily making the internet less useful. In talking about the above with my partner, the topic shifted to whether or not the Piranha Plants in Mario games were originally inspired by Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors, or if they were arrived at organically via a similar synthesis and monsterization of real life carnivorous plant life.
The former sounded more likely to me than the latter, but I typed "little shop of horrors release date" into Google just to be sure. Before even fully completing the string, its algorithmic hunger to simply answer the question and keep me from bouncing out to some other source of knowledge caused the browser to report:

December 19, 1986

    Now, in the context of what I'm looking for, this is the wrong answer; if I'd believed Google's "ad hoc" info and not scrolled down or dug a little deeper, a false narrative about how "Piranha Plants appeared in Super Mario Bros. in 1985, just ONE year before Little Shop of Horrors came out," could form. It's easy to imagine a kid telling their classmates that Nintendo and the film industry seemingly arrived at this monster design independently based on that cursory search.
This is a GREAT demonstration of exactly how our current informational landscape can warp the future! The algorithms know roughly how old myself and the majority of people searching for things on the internet are, and they correctly assume that when we talk about Little Shop of Horrors, statistically we want to know about the film adaptation of the musical that became popular within the bounds of our average lifetimes, not the original 1960 black & white film that was produced before we were born.
Google can't know the CONTEXT of my query, which isn't;
"When did the version of this idea I'm probably attached to come out?"
...But any netizen with search engine experience could tell you that attempting to feed a query like;
"When did this idea enter the collective media zeitgeist?"
Is going to return vague and semi-helpful links to academics papers and media studies pages.

    It turns out the initial release date search IS what you want, but instead of focusing on the first page or so of algorithmic "fast answers" and promoted/advertised content, you just need to click through or scroll down a bit to where Google is behaving a bit more like its old helpful self. The version of search that was considerably worse at making money. The one that would likely shuffle you off to some grubby non-profit like wikipedia, where you would quickly find that the film you've seen was based on a musical you haven't, which in turn was an adaptation of another film.
"Ah, interesting; they dropped the initial "The" from the title," you might exclaim, secure in the knowledge that not only are Piranha Plants based on Audrey the First, their initial Super Mario Bros. design SPECIFICALLY resembles the more vertical/pointy 1960 iteration rather than later designs for Audrey II. This makes sense given the time frames, and it's super interesting that later Nintendo designs clearly pivoted alongside the series to rounder and more grinning forms.

    Food for thought, next time you're wandering near the algorithm's revenue-hungry jaws.

    To get back on track, my personal favorite iterations of the Piranha Plant seem to be the extra bulbous and vine-y ones found in Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island if my drawing is any indication.

The "Ambiguous" part of the prompt made its way into the question mark shape of the plant's vines, but quickly got echoed again in the "UI indicator" pointing into its mouth when I realized that I was missing a tangible "Diet" component and hadn't really left room for any meaty snacks; the diet would have to be implied, which itself is another layer of ambiguity.

    If anything, this piece stands as a reminder that improving my depth, dimensionality, and accuracy is going to take some approaches OTHER than directly bonking color and shape into MSpaint freehand with a mouse using my favorite Crayon brush... at some point one of these little challenges should start as a sketch that helps refine the forms so they aren't so flat.