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ludozoologist · 1 year

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Welcome to the Official Tumblr of the [HOMETOWN NAME HERE] Branch of the Institute of Ludozoology!

This page is managed by Head Researcher @fredbydawn

Ok time to break kayfabe a bit.

This blog is a side blog for/archive of some of my ludozoology posts.

What is Ludozoology?

Ludozoology is a type of speculative biology, also known as speculative evolution or speculative zoology, based on toys. I certainly did not invent this concept, but to my knowledge I'm the first to use this name for it (Ludo meaning "I play" in latin so the whole word loosely translates to 'the study of animals you play with').

Can I be a Ludozoologist/use the Ludozoology tag?

Absolutely! Anyone can be a ludozoologist. My personal specialization is in Furbies and the itemlabel toys, you can make ludozoology post about these or any other kinds of toys you want. As I said, I didn't come up with the concept of toy speculative biology, so I super don't have the right to pretend like I own it. And as for the Ludozoology tag specifically, I really love seeing other people use it and interact with the lore I create and make up their own.

Is everything that's posted/reblogged to here "canon?"

I do have an internal "canon" for the Furby lore, but I like to share just little bits of it at a time when relevant to asks and/or interactions. That being said, reblogging another person's ludozoology post to here doesn't necessarily make it a part of that canon. But it also doesn't make it not canon. IDK you decide ;). I'll also rb stuff to here if it fits the general vibe like nostalgia posts of toys, virtual pets, etc. or shitposts about Furbies or the like. (Which of course if I've reblogged a post of yours and you're not comfortable with it being associated with ludozoology or for whatever reason, just let me know and I'll remove it no questions asked). Generally speaking, all things that are written by me are canon, but again, it's just my personal canon, not the official canon of ludozoology as a whole.

So yeah, anyway, welcome to the world of Ludozoology! Have fun and remember: The best thing about Ludozoology is that everyone is wrong :D

#ludozoology

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rxttenfish · 2 years

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May be a little late, but, I've seen your au stuff floating around via following you for a bit now and don't know where to look to start, so I guess, if you're up for it as a distraction, would you give like, basically a beginners\introductory course into some of your fav parts of it?

no worries no worries!! if it helps, there's not truly... a beginning, to it?

i first started making the redesign universe largely out of just messing around with miranda and the merkingdom. this is why it still largely focuses on them so much, and why merfolk have so much more figured out in comparison to everyone else. i liked miranda, and i didnt like how the fandom or even how canon was handling her, so i wanted to write her myself.

from there, i added in speculative evolution concepts, and changed her body plan over time, and slowly i ended up with what i have now.

the rest of the AU is basically just extrapolation from this. looking at the other characters, and rethinking over their designs. what would they actually look like. what would they actually behave like. what would their society have to look like, their culture, their personal lives. how could you tie all of it together, make them more monstrous, give them a bigger world to live within.

unfortunately, this means there's no good place to jump in - all of my information is scattered across various platforms and most artwork is already outdated, and even what i do have needs to be polished up so much before i start actually sharing it with people.

so there are several options for how to introduce it that i'm left with

the first is: this is an AU where i take the characters and setting of Monster Prom/Camp and tweak the designs to make more sense with biology and appear less humanoid, and retroactively add a lot of world building i feel was missing.

there's also: this is an AU that presents an alternate earth, where there were greater pressures for multiple different sapient species to evolve, alongside the existence of magic. travel by sea has been impossible for a long time, and while there are ships made for rivers and lakes, the various societies had to create planes and teleportation magic to be able to cross the ocean. the merkingdom is a very old, very powerful society, that is only now beginning to interact with the rest of the world and make beginning introductions, and miranda was sent up to land as both an ambassador for the merkingdom and as a subtle power move and threat.

there's also: this is an AU that discusses empire and abuse and recovery, how to reconcile all the opposing parts of a single personality, how to form an identity when that has been denied of you for all of your life and when it is something that has been forbidden of you, the vast mental gap in even the most closely related species, the chronic inability to understand the world from someone else's eyes, the failure of authority and the cycle of abuse, how to learn to heal, how to become a better person, how to forgive yourself, how do you live within your own body, how do you balance a world that was not made for you and hurts you by design but lets you feel love and safety with a world that was made with you in mind but wants to eat you whole, how can you understand other people's bodies, how do you actually and truly navigate a relationship, a friendship, a family, between different people, different species, different worlds.

there's also: this is an AU where the exact events of monster prom occur, except that they look a little different.

there's also: this is an AU where nothing happens as it does or as it did, and people are more monstrous and more human and you never know if you are talking to a person or a predator.

and there's also: this is my fun sandbox setting AU where i get to fuck around with spec evo and slap it on the MonProm setting.

#asks #all the care guide says is 'biomass'#samsonstone #monster prom reanimated #Monster Prom: Reanimated #im so sorry this is SO vague #and that kinda shows where im at rn #i still have yet to figure out a good way to introduce whats going on because theres SO MUCH actually within it that im tinkering with rn #which may like. fundamentally alter the outcome of this project as i go further into it.#like figuring out wtf i wanna do with liam here because right now he is VERY underdeveloped #i have a general idea for vampires. but i am putting him specifically off #and it might get REALLY funky from there #there's also the question of how i want to balance the violence and horror elements and that is gonna be a REALLY important tone thing #that i have been putting off because. holy shit thats a lot that hinges on that.#if you go through those mpr tags tho then you should get. a decent enough chunk of the ongoing lore at least.#if not the plot because HOOOO i am not sure how much i want to place down here #which is funny because the fic im writing has everything to do with that

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grox-empire · 2 years

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HIIII delirious-basement here just wanted to say that your spec bio tboi headcanons. Are very cool and poggers I love these wretched little beasts (/pos) ‼️

Thank you so much!!! Your stuff’s actually what inspired me to do spec-evo-ified TBOI in the first place, I’ve had a spec-evo special interest for a long ass time so basically everything I touch gets the speculative evolution virus!! It’s really fun to do actually!!

I may or may not have incredibly detailed biology headcanons for basically every media I am into (Spore's grox mostly.)

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fluxbugs · 3 years

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ive been seeing all tomorrows stuff all over my youtube feed, and i just recently read it and loved it a lot. a couple yrs ago i started to develop some little ideas for alien species before but i had no idea that this little interest i had was actually something people have been publishing books about? i had no idea speculative biology/zoology/evolution was the name for what i was looking for... all tomorrows has so many ideas i really want to take inspiration from :) i love that its equally existentially horrifying and hopeful and i love how the main message is how ephemeral life/humanity/sapience is but also how enduring life is. a lot of body horror is like specifically focused on the horror aspect but i like how all tomorrows can show that they are all just different weird cousins where some are still distinctly human and like music, technology, making stuff, and having fun

#fluxbugs.txt #all tomorrows

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 4 years

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book blogging #1: Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation

by Olivia Judson, published 2002

Question: what do you think of when you think of books that are “fun” to read?

For me, a lot of speculative fiction comes to mind. Recent books that I found fun include Space Opera (Catherynne M. Valente), The Beautiful Ones (Silvia Moreno-Garcia), and everything by Sarah Gailey that I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Though I haven’t gotten ahold of it yet, I’m pretty sure Gideon the Ninth (Tamsyn Muir) is going to be spectacularly fun as well.

These are books that aren’t necessarily my favorite stories of all time, but they have been some of my favorites to read. They’re all propelled by zany premises and whirlwind plots, enjoying themselves way too much for anyone to ever stop and worry about the parts that don’t make that much sense. When Sarah Gailey says “I have a crew committing a heist while riding hippopotamuses, do you want in?” I don’t ask questions. I just say yes and go along for the ride.

But there’s one major anomaly that always comes to mind when I think of books that I’ve had fun reading, and that’s David Sax’s The Tastemakers: Why We’re Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue. It’s a 2014 work of nonfiction, and as the title suggests it’s an analysis of popular food trends and the forces that power them. The Tastemakers isn’t what this blog post is actually supposed to be about, so I won’t go into too many details, but suffice to say that I was engrossed despite the fact that I know pretty much nothing about the world of culinary trends or foodie fads - or cooking in general, if I’m being totally honest. But there’s something really delightful about learning things that are entirely outside your wheelhouse without having to worry about the material showing up on a test later.

Given that I’m posting this on a blog with relatively few followers and that this is a write-up of a very niche book that was published eighteen years ago and could not be further from trendy, I’m well aware that anyone reading this is probably already at least passing familiar with me and what I do, so you folks might be saying, “Hang on, Makenzie. Are you seriously trying to say that this is outside your wheelhouse? The title on your Tumblr has been “Ask The Sex Witch” since 2015. You’re a whole sex educator, for fuck’s sake!”

Well, yes and no. Judson is a real-deal evolutionary biologist and gets into some pretty serious science in this book, which is pretty wildly different from what I usually do. I talk to people about sorting out their likes and dislikes, their boundaries, their sense of personal sexual autonomy, and so on. Although I definitely advocate for introspection and self-examination, I rarely go looking for answers far beyond the individual level. Judson asks big biological questions to figure out how some truly peculiar-looking behavior evolves: Why is it worthwhile for some animals to fight to the death trying to fuck? What’s up with some species of insects eating their mates? And who, pray tell, is engaging in the noble art of penis-fencing? Clearly, this is a totally different ball game on many levels.

(Speaking of ball games, did you know that the male shiner perch’s testes completely shrivel up over the winter? That’s rough, buddy.)

Offering sex advice to humans is hard enough, but Judson - writing as chipper sex advice columnist Dr. Tatiana - easily offers education to an impressively vast variety of species. The framing device of the book is a charmingly weird one. Each segment opening Dear Prudence-style, with a short letter from an animal badly in need of advice. The first chapter, for instance, begins with a query written by a stick bug called Twiggy (aww) wondering how to get her boyfriend to stop having sex with her after ten continuous weeks of intercourse. (Answer: Girl, he’s not gonna. Apparently that’s how he stops any other stick bugs from getting it in.) For the final chapter Judson mixes it up by formatting a discussion about the pros and cons of asexual reproduction as a hectic daytime talk show, complete with microscopes to view the tiniest guests and seating that offers both saltwater and freshwater tanks for aquatic audience members to sit in, like something out of Zootopia.

(I haven’t seen Zootopia and the only thing I know about it for sure is that in one scene there’s a DILF-looking tiger, but I’m pretty confident in the assumption I’m making here.)

Judson does an admirable job of providing pretty comprehensible explanations for a lot of evolutionary science, and while I did have to power skim through a few segments that were really beyond my grasp, it did make a pretty lively read out of the biological pros and cons of producing sperm bigger than your own body. It’s not exactly a book that’s difficult to put down, but I had a perfectly pleasant time reading it in the moments between doing anything else - eating a meal, resting in bed, getting some sun in my backyard - and even learning a little while I did so. I fully intended to use Dr. Tatiana as a break between the two installments of N.K. Jemisin’s Dreamblood duology, and it has served that role magnificently.

Am I recommending this book to you? Not exactly, unless you’re extremely interested in evolutionary theories that are nearly two decades old or a science fiction writer looking to give your non-human characters some thoroughly non-human sexual habits. I’m not supremely interested in making recommendations with the blog in general, unless someone specifically asks for them; I’m hoping this will be more like writing up my personal thoughts about books and then hurling them into the virtual void like messages in bottles. If they wash up on your shore and you read them and come to the conclusion that this is something you, too, would like to read, that’s pretty rad. I love that for you! But it wasn’t necessarily my intent.

Strictly speaking, I didn’t even recommend this book to myself. In 2019 I tried to stay pretty intentional about my to-read list, really whittling it down to stuff that I actively wanted to engage with rather than anything that sounded vaguely not awful. I was hoping to keep that trend up in 2020, but like many other things that are much more serious, this whole pandemic situation has scuppered those plans a bit. I get most of my books by borrowing them from the public library where I work, and that’s been closed for nearly two months. Unlike many book bloggers I’ve observed I don’t keep a massive stack of unread books around at all times, so I’ve really been relying on the kindness of friends to keep me supplied in these trying times.

My friend Paige slipped me Dr. Tatiana’s (along with the aforementioned Dreamblood books and several volumes of Kurtis J. Weibe’s comic series Rat Queens) in exchange for some books I lent to her, because we all have to look out for each other in These Trying Times. I trusted her good taste, despite having no idea what the book was about and more than a few reservations.

At other times I think this book might have sailed right over my head - not to sneer at the so-called soft sciences, but there’s a reason I gave up on my childhood dream of marine biology and got a sociology degree instead - but right now, as I’m finally adjusting to the slower pace of life in quarantine and remembering how to focus, I’m finding that it fits my needs. It’s unlikely to live on as an all-time favorite, but it’s something to do and gives me an occasional excuse to gasp and tell my roommate something absolutely wild, like the fact that spiders have two penises and that the dual arachnodicks are located on their faces, on either side of their mouths.

My basic understanding of evolution is that change rarely happens based on logic or reason, but by finding something that works and then sticking to it, no matter how improbable it may seem. When male elephants get horny they apparently develop an insatiable bloodlust and piss so constantly their penises turn green (yikes!), which is definitely not the most practical way to do things, but evidently it’s been getting the job done. Getting through quarantine has been sort of like that, has it not? A lot of behavior that might not be the most intuitive but is somehow enabling ongoing survival, like occupying myself with books that I might not have given a second glance in the halcyon before times.

That’s totally the same thing, right?

Right.

A note about the appearance of this book:

I’ve been talking a fair amount lately about my dislike for what I see as pretty transparently romanticized materialism in a lot of book blogging spaces, with an emphasis placed on acquiring and showing off as many pristine books as possible. I don’t own this book, and it looks like ass. It looks like Paige stole it from a library in North Carolina, which would not be shocking. When I noticed the large brown stain in the corner I jokingly asked if she’d dropped it in coffee, and she unflinchingly confirmed that yes, she had.

#bookblr #in which makenzie is a book blogger until she forgets about it

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