#like. we could have more of that. that niche could still use filling! we can do SO much more with this!!!
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alright. know what? with Secrets of the Obscure right around the corner and plenty of new Mists-related sky island settings coming with it, I'll just bite the bullet and interest-check a little something I've been turning in my head for a long, long while.
would YOU be interested in a Mists-based GW2 roleplay guild that uses a lore compliant multiverse system to allow canon, canon-adjacent, lore-breaking, and otherwise 'contradictory' muses to coexist in the same setting?
simply put: every writer's cast would be set in their own self-contained universe. as such, everyone could bring whatever muses they want with their own personal headcanons, and no one could dictate what is or isn't canon for anyone else. so long as your muses are GW2-based, you're good to go! bring your Commanders, bring your canon-divergent OCs, bring your canon muses-- and yes, even the ones that are 'supposed' to be dead. who can say what might have happened in a strange world far across the Mists, after all?
neutral hubs and in-character safety guardrails would be in place to keep all muses on a relatively even playing field regardless of their power, history, and prestige, too. play hardball if you like, but it might not end quite the way you'd hope. the main rule would be to maintain good OOC etiquette at all times: no godmodding, no metagaming, no theft, don't blend IC and OOC, and so-on.
if that sounds like something you might have interest in, please interact with this post! and if you've got questions or concerns, I'd love to hear them; feel free to send an ask or a DM, or just reply to this post!
#GW2 roleplay#GW2 rp#GW2#my posts#so there's a LOT of reasons why I'm putting this forward#but the biggest is that I really want there to be a place that's actually inclusive for all the creativity that exists in this fandom#there was exactly one Mists multiverse event a while back and it was well-received from everything I saw!#i know i for one had a lot of fun AND felt a lot more welcome and comfortable than i have at any other event#and then... we proceeded to just never have another again.#like. we could have more of that. that niche could still use filling! we can do SO much more with this!!!#and especially with SotO coming out we could have some REALLY interesting locations to meet up too!#I'd be happy to kickstart this stuff but the thing is: it WILL need support. I just can't do it all alone and that's a fact#example: if we want a guild hall in-game we'd have to work together to get one; that'd be great for hosting public and private events#my personal goal is 5-10 participants so that we can have enough to run small events and mingle muses a bit#IF there's enough interest i'll roll out more information at that time. for now tho i'll just leave it at this to test the waters#reblogs are HIGHLY appreciate here: i'm a smallfry in a big sea and not many people check the tags. spread the word if you want to see this#on that note: thanks for reading and hopefully i'll hear from some of you soon. o/#(side detail: that sky pic is a screen i snapped at night in Istan. it's so pretty there ok)
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The Epitaph of Anything Goes
I decided that this morning I would talk about The Museum of Anything Goes and the subject of lost media.
For the uninitiated, The Museum of Anything Goes is an obscure "game" released in 1995 by Wayzata Technologies, a company that is so far under the radar that I was unable to find any useful information about it outside of TMoAG.
All I could uncover is that they published a few multimedia projects (which are essentially lost now) alongside some asset discs (clipart, SFX, etc.). That's it.
The brains behind Wayzata are even more difficult to locate these days: there are only two main names credited inside of TMoAG - Michael Markowski and Maxwell S. Robertson.
The game alleges that Michael and Maxwell are well known in the art world, but any additional information about the duo is scarce beyond the confines of the museum. Attempting to search for either name online turns up plenty of rabbit holes - but none of them have anything to do with the Michael and Maxwell responsible for TMoAG.
This is particularly fascinating because it essentially means that TMoAG is the only accessible record of their lives. Before we dig any deeper into that statement, let me step back and actually address what this game is.
The Museum of Anything Goes is, by definition, a virtual art museum. Functionally it's a prerendered point-and-click adventure game where you can explore a bunch of multimedia exhibits that give the surface-level impression of a children's edutainment game, but once you start exploring further it reveals a side that firmly plants the game's feet into a haze of substance abuse and surreal humor.
Many exhibits are essentially just toying around with the astonishing new powers of CD-ROM. Everything has to make noise. Everything has to spin and flitter around. There's an air of genuine excitement for the medium, and I can't help but find it extremely charming.
The game also functions as a scrapbook, filled to the brim with photos of random trips to the zoo and snow-mobile rides with friends. At one point we even get insight into something as specific as Michael's one-year job as a tutor at a Chicago middle school, where he talks about how it opened his eyes to how poorly funded and mismanaged the school system is.
It's simultaneously quaint and chilling to see so much personal history packed into a world doomed to obscurity. As I explore the deeper parts of the museum, I contemplate if the creators are still alive today. It's a bit morbid, but imagine that - you create a single obscure game with your friend and it's all the world can see. TMoAG is currently the only surviving piece that gives any insight into who these two men were.
While many exhibits are lighthearted or nonsensical, there are occasional moments where the game dips into the eerie.
One exhibit has the player kill a man by dropping him from the sky, and after burying him you open the coffin to a video of a rotting pig carcass being put into an incinerator.
Other exhibits just feature simple 3D renders shifting around a dark screen while haunting groans play in the background.
While I would never refer to the game as "scary," its darker moments combined with the occasional mature subject matter definitely begs the question: Who is this game for?
You have to remember that this game came out long before the concept of "alt-games" had become codified in the digital space. Sure, unconventional digital art had been around before the advent of 256 colors, but TMoAG was being sold on disk as a game! It came out 2 years after DOOM hit shelves!
The trend of using the PC for entertainment was certainly on the upswing around that time, but It's not like TMoAG had a massive audience to find a niche in. With its mature themes it certainly wasn't suited for the kids market either, so who was it for?
At the end of the day, it's a moot question. We already know the target audience for The Museum of Anything Goes: Nobody. It doesn't have an audience because by its nature, TMoAG wasn't being made FOR someone, it was being made BY someone. It's a raw, unfiltered form of personal expression.
I think games like these are pivotal, because they question why people assume a game has to exist for the sake of being a consumable product. TMoAG certainly has the shape of a product: it features an intro cutscene, it has a tutorial, it features intuitive UX, it even has a map! These are all features that are solely integrated to provide comfort to an end-user. But once you actually wander around the museum for a bit, you realize how bizarrely its packaging fits its contents.
I think TMoAG is criminally underrated. It's not because its core content contains some earth-shaking truth, it's because the game defied all odds and cheated death.
How many thousands of other personal projects were deemed a little "too exotic" to be archived? How much history was lost these past 40 years as the digital space evolved and ate its old skin?
God knows how many other TMoAGs we'll never learn about because they weren't lucky enough to be preserved.
The Museum of Anything Goes isn't just some nonsensical art piece, it's a grave marker for so much lost media. Its existence is a reminder that some people's lives were fossilized, then macerated into nothing because a construction company built a skyscraper over them. The only evidence we have of those other games existing is this little fossil that somehow slipped out from under the skyscraper unscathed.
Even though so much has been lost, TMoAG survives as an epitaph.
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you mentioned in recent tags about a horror comic you drew- i understand not wanting to link publicly to it to avoid creating MORE misinterpretations, but i really like your storytelling and now i’m curious?? so if you could, that’d be great! no pressure either way!
(i’m sending this off anon so you have the choice to respond to it privately anyways) (love your art thanks) (and the dungeon meshi reacts)
Thanks for the kind message!
And it's not a secret or anything, it's straight up this post:
I used language comparing humans and other animals as two separate things (for the sake of drawing the narrative conclusions I needed to, in order to make the concept understood in only a few pages), like this:
But because of this simplified language, people drew their OWN wild conclusions about me as a person.
For example, this guy on twitter:
I never actually said humans WEREN'T animals, never said humans were somehow 'above' biology...I was simply putting them into a separate category capable of a specific set of skills for the sake of the comparison I made in the last couple of pages as the punchline.
But they decided that it must "clearly" mean I believe X, Y and Z.
This has happened MORE than enough times!
Writing is difficult, and writing for varied audiences with different dialects, different levels of reading ability, and different attention spans is hard! Sometimes, people don't want to sit through 2 pages of 'well humans are animals but due to a specific evolutionary niche we fill our ability to use language and calculate mathematical equations to the degree that we do is really unique--'
Now, mind you... I STILL got grief for trying to be soft-boiled in my delivery. People (who don't have a linguistics degree) IMMEDIATELY also messaged me to tell me that chimps CAN learn language - and haven't I seen that one video with the gorilla, the dolphin, etc?
And that's it's own can of worms. (No, other animals cannot learn language the way humans can. Yes, they can communicate in complex ways. No, language is a very specific human thing as far as leading scientists are concerned, at least based on current data. Yes, I went to University for this. I have a degree. Please just trust me.)
It happens, I'm not actively mad about it... Humans tend to take whatever we read and run with it.
But we make this mistake often! I know I also make this mistake. We come conclusions based on scarce evidence! We jump to the worst case scenario! We presume that we know better than that person what they believe, based on minimal interaction with them.
It's yet another thing that's unique to humans thanks to... wait for it... language!
It's the price we pay for having memes.
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I think your article today did a good job laying out why Play Boosters had to come about, but I'm still feeling mildly apprehensive about the change. I reread your articles "Project Booster Fun" and "Set Boosters" and one of the throughlines in those articles was player agency. I liked that Set Boosters and Draft Boosters filled different niches and purchased both types of boosters depending on my needs. Play Boosters feel like a compromise that is going to leave both parties less satisfied.
As a drafter, I don't like the idea of a draft pool being warped by the List slot. If you continue to do premier set Universe Beyond tie-ins (like the Transformers and Jurassic World cards), I don't look forward to drafting those (even if I can appreciate them design-wise). The "extra value" that you mention doesn't matter as much to a drafter if they are passing that value to the left (although, I guess in fairness, they could also be passed value, but it does exacerbate the age-old dilemma of do you draft for value or do you draft for your deck?).
As a collector, it's disappointing to see the loss of a guaranteed art card (although I'm sure I'm the minority in that). The odds of opening a card from the List also seem a lot lower and the List taking over a common slot instead of the Token/Ad slot feels worse. The List in the Token slot was always a bonus, even if it was only a common or uncommon. If you continue to do premier set Universe Beyond tie-ins (like the Transformers and Jurassic World cards), I'm worried that the designs will be limited by keeping Limited in mind rather than making the best design for the IP.
That's just my two cents on the matter. I'm sure you folks have thought about it a lot more than I have and we'll have to wait until Markov Manor to see how Play Boosters...play out.
The market didn't want two core booster packs. It turns out more Magic players enjoyed having a fun booster opening experience than enjoyed playing limited formats, so set boosters were edging out draft boosters.
Our move to play boosters is us trying to keep player agency. We want players who want to play limited formats to continue to have the opportunity, but we wanted players who enjoyed a more exciting booster pack opening to keep having access to that as well, so we basically changed the set booster such that it also allowed limited play.
This is not us trying to lessen Magic for anyone. We're adapting to the needs of the players while staying true to the needs of the market. The history of Magic is constant evolution, and this is just the next step in the game being the product that makes the greatest number of players happy with it because it lets them have the greatest options of how to interact with it. If we were shrinking agency, we'd just make set boosters and stop having limited be part of the game.
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I feel like it’s time for me to share my theory about 1D’s formation (and why it had been planned well before this X-factor video was shot - though this video did very well at making it seem organic)
A lot of this theory comes from reading stuff from @verily-i-say who, if you weren’t around when she was, worked with reality television and talked about how casting for reality shows works (ie everyone is assigned a role before they are even cast and you just try to find someone who can fit the roles that you need)
Liam giving that talk a couple months back about how 1D was something he believed Simon made for him because of their talk only solidified this theory for me. So lets get into it.
Let’s start with what was going on in pop culture in the start of 2010, and what 1D was originally supposed to be. Because remember, 1D was never supposed to be as big as they ended up being! By 2010 boy bands still weren’t as big as they had been in the late 90s and early 00s. There were the Jonas Brothers who were starting to wind down their activities just by the nature of how long they had been. The producers of X-factor would have known this without any sort of inside knowledge it’s just how pop bands are. They have shelf lives. K-pop was trying hard to pierce the western market but so far nothing had stuck and there was a feeling at the time that kpop would never make it big in the west because of how their bands were crafted/promoted.
What that means is there was room for a boy band. I think Simon and the people in the X-factor knew it was a good time to make a boyband. There was a market for it, and something that needed filled. So they start crafting their story. No group had ever won the X-factor because pre-made groups kinda sucked/weren’t fully crafted the same way they used to be. Clearly this meant they would have more success making a group than anything else.
We know the producers knew of Liam and Louis. I think they started with Liam - and again this is all before we even got to the filmed auditions. I think they had the idea to make the band with these 5 boys from the original auditions and it was ALWAYS going to be them.
Niall filled the Irish niche. They had just opened auditions to Ireland. This was an easy way to gain success in Ireland.
Zayn filled the “ethnic” niche. How else is the group supposed to be “diverse” if they don’t have a POC?
Liam filled the group leader. The band was originally crafted around Liam and I will die by this.
Harry filled the “baby” role. He was the youngest. You think it was coincidence his age was brought up during his filmed audition? No it was meant to cast him as the “baby”. It’s not as intense a role as the “maknae” in kpop groups but it’s a role to fill. It also leads into him being marketed as “adorably slow”. He’s baby.
And Louis? Well Louis filled the “gay” role. Vee has talked about how obvious it is to anyone with eyes that 18 year old Louis was gay. I’ll get into why they needed a gay member in a moment.
So that was their initial set up: Irish, POC, Leader, Baby, Gay. Those are the roles the X-factor deemed they needed for a boyband in early 2010 and then they went about looking for people who fit those roles.
Now, like with any casting, it doesn’t always work out perfectly. You see it constantly in tv shows and reality shows. Audience reaction to people and also just general “character development” changes where people fall. Liam’s role of “leader” and “face” of the band swiftly fell apart because Harry is SO FUCKING CHARISMATIC. If you rewatch any X-factor stuff you can see it happen almost in real time. I could go on a whole tangent about how this affected Liam and Harry’s relationship but that’s not exactly the point of this post and it’s already way too long lol.
But what happened to Louis being “gay” and why did they need a “gay” member to begin with? It goes back to the idea 1D was never meant to be as successful as they are. In 2010 being gay and coming out/or being outted was like… pop culture candy. It was trendy. It got you promo. I’m not saying it’s right but that’s how it was. So I think they always wanted a gay member so that way they guaranteed a 3 album commitment from the boys. Album 1 rides off the back of X-factor. If Album 2 wasn’t as successful you pull out the gay card and BOOM instant interest in album 3. Enough to get Simon’s money worth from the band before they’re allowed to fade into obscurity.
Obviously that didn’t happen. Why? Well for starters the band was INSANELY popular. And secondly 🤷🏼♀️ Larry? They got put in a position with Larry where they couldn’t out Louis even if they needed to without outting Harry and ruining his “role” in the band.
And there’s my theory ✌🏻
#the XFactor video is nice#but I will always stand by the idea 1D was formed in the producers room back in early 2010#before they even stepped foot on the audition stage in June/July
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I just discovered your blog and I love it a lot! You have such a rich understanding of dnd and a lot of creativity! I was wondering if you could do a monsters reimagined on illithids/mindflayers? They are so iconic and I love them, I think a good idea for them is to keep the weird hivemind and brain eating and psionics, but ditch the tadpole concept. I would also just like to know how they came to be as they are right now, like. How did we get here?? Thanks!!
Monsters Reimagined: Mindflayers
The illithid have been a popular ask for reimaginings but It's taken me a while to get around to them in part because unlike a lot of the other features on monsters reimagined, their lore/execution within the game doesn't rest on a specific problematic trope or inconsistent storytelling. Mindflayers as they stand IMO are one of d&d's great villains, and if anything suffer from being too successful to the point of overexposure.
It took the asker remarking on how much they liked mindflayers for me to give them the onceover they really deserved. Yes, they worked great as antagonists ( being irredeemable slavers who violate the minds and bodies of those they subjugate, working inevitably towards the most awful ends), but their villany was born out of the same shallow bioessentialism as “always evil” orcs,IE inherent to their character. I’m a firm believer in the idea that if something is capable of making decisions, it’s capable of deciding not to be a bastard, so If I was going to overhaul the illithid, I’d need to get to the roots of why the squid headed bastards were the way they were.
TLDR: What we know today as the mindflayers are in fact the remnants of a long dead world, with many of their most monstrous qualities being bioengineered attempts to stave off the inevitable and hold onto their power. The “Elder brains” which rule the illithid are tyrants, the ultimate class parasites, who indoctrinate and mentally dominate the other mindflayers into acting as tools of domination over the peoples they consider chattel. Is possible for an individual illithid to break free of this system, but doing so is difficult, as it requires them to not only break out of any magical compulsion, but to abandon the paradigms that have defined their existence.
Spoiler alert: we’re going to be talking about white supremacy in this one
I think someone described it pretty succinctly that alien invasion stories are something that industrial nations invented when they started imagining what would happen if a more advanced people came along and started doing to them what they’d be doing to everyone else in the world. Mindflayers (and a few other aberrations) fill that niche in oldschool d&d, with the low levels made up of the feudal heroes largely picking on “uninteligent” tribal brutes, only to hit level 7 or so where all of a sudden they’re fighting creatures who’s intelligence exceeds their own.
The weird thing is how in the alien invasion stories, the aliens always want to enslave humanity.. Despite imagining the technology required to cross the vastness of space, the authors were unable to conceive of a world outside of the hierarchies of exploitation, even in the case of benign colonization like “day the earth stood still” and “childhood’s end”.
I’ve talked before about how d&d has a lot of baked-in tropes that assumes colonialism and racial supremicy as a default, but today we’re going to look at things form the other angle. Namely: can we use the mindflayers to talk about systems of oppression and how they manipulate us into being complacent tools with colonialism and genocide.
First though, a detour on illithid biology/feeding, and how I’ve tried to make it make sense:
In addition to a mostly vestigal digestive system, mindflayers possess adaptations that allow them to turn psychic energy into health and wellbeing, with their feeding being something like running a magnet over a computer screen except that the screen is a brain. This can be done delicately so as to case no long term damage, but sometimes it’s faster to just shuck the brain out and be done with it.
On their homeworld, the illithid cultivated a form of “thinking fungus” that draws in stray thought energy from the astral sea, the stray equivalent of radio static. This fungus grows around many mindflayer settlements and is one of the dead giveaways that they’ve moved into the region.
The goal of every illithid is to prove themselves so at the end of their life (or sooner) they can join with the elderbrain, a grotesque amalgamation of all the most bastardly awful mindflayer’s brains that lives in a big tank in the center of their settlements ( or pilots their spelljammer ships) and mentally influences everything in a 5 mile radius. The elder brain creates a reinforcing social pressure: if you’re not doing everything you can to serve it, you’ll be culled, and if you don’t do your absolute best ( or if the elderbrain is just feeling cruel) your whole life will be for nothing. These brains are not a natural part of the illithid lifecycle, and are instead more equivalent to liches: influential mindflayers that learned that they could force others of their kind to tribute psionic energy through thier bonds, extending their life long beyond where their bodies can keep up. By ensuring that only those most useful join the gesthalt, the original ego ensures that no other personality is capable of overtaking their own.
Every so often in their life, mindflayers reproduce by regurgitating a load of parasitic tadpoles into the elderbrain pool where the weak ones get to be its snacks, and the strong ones get implanted into the skulls of promising candidates who’s brains are eaten as they’re transformed into new midnflayers. All of this is super squick, but what’s almost nonsensical is the fact that left to their own devices the tadpoles grow up into colossal, borderline feral worm monsters, meaning that in their natural state no one would be around to put the tadpoles in anyone’s heads. I rationalize this as the result of extensive biomancy augmentations that occured in the illithid’s development, a “cure” for the sterility imposed by their dying world and a handy means of population control/indoctrination for the elder brain, who’s able to etch the basics of its own personality onto each tadpole as it prepares to take a host.
And here we’ll bring the two ideas together, about how illithid can help represent white supremacy: Like all imperialist or autocratic systems, the society of the mindflayers is self reinforcing, creating a population of desperate individuals and using their desperation to turn them into a tool to benefit those at the system’s top. Every illithid is not only born with the elderbrain’s world view as the foundation of its mind, the society in which it is raised is set up so that the only metric of growth or success is being useful to the elder brain, with any deviancy from expectation ( incluging over ambition) are dealt with harshly to the point of execution.
An indivual illithid could break free, but that would require a depth of personal examination is frowned upon in mindflayer circles, as well as the acceptance that there is a way to live outside the elderbrain’s guidance without going hungry and devouring their own sapience like the pale and wretched creatures that outsiders call “illithid vampires”
Much like racism,misogyny, imperialism, capitalism and fascism, the society of mindflayers creates a desperate population that are convinced that the only way to be is to be in a particular way that ends up benefiting those at the very top. Breaking free takes a tremendous amount of bravery, and a willingness to alienate yourself from all you thought familiar and true in the process.
Art
#Illithid#villian#monsters reimagined#spelljammer#Slavers#heavy topics#scifi#dnd#dungeons and dragons#d&d#5e#dm advice#dm tip#dm tips#dm tools#writing advice#psionics
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Hello everyone!
We'd like to take this time to talk about something that's fallen to the wayside in roleplay lately, but remains very important and key to the hobby: communication between players and group participation in general. In recent times, I'm sure we've noticed how while our group is still sizeable, it's definitely gotten smaller and with smaller communities, it becomes very important to help newcomers, returners, and even already existing members feel comfortable and welcomed. While we as moderators can absolutely help in this, and do, there's only so much we can do to facilitate communication between people and so we come to you today with a few helpful hints, tips, reminders, and otherwise general advice that may or may not help get your posts noticed or responded to or give you that push to respond to other people's posts as well!
Take care in making sure that your post is appropriately tagged and able to be responded to. A post in the "#isola mini" tag should be something that someone can easily respond to! While we know it can be hard to think of something interesting to start off with, it's important to ask yourself if what you're posting and tagging as a mini is actually able to be responded to. Some good examples of what would classify as a mini that could be responded to are:
Muse has a non-rhetorical question they're just asking anyone (non-descript setting usually, at least to start)
Muse asks for help with something (e.g. "how do I start the laundry machine?", "do you have an umbrella?")
Muse is having trouble/wants to do an activity (e.g. baking a cake, getting something out of a tree, lost a possession of theirs, playing a video game, etc.)
Take a look in the "#isola mini" or "#isola open" tag before you make your own mini to see if there's something you can respond to! A lot of the time, we find that the mini tag is often filled with minis that have yet to be responded to. We're sure it'd make someone's day if you took the time to give them a response!
Speaking of tags, we'd like to reiterate that the "#isola mini" and "#isola open" tags are not supposed to be interchangeable! While we understand that it's easy to gloss over or forget what either tag is supposed to be used for, we'd like to remind you that the "#isola mini" tag is for short, quick, open threads that are supposed to be under two paragraphs. The "#isola open" tag is used for longer open threads that are two paragraphs or longer. We'd really love to see the "#isola open" tag to get a bit more usage, but we also understand that taking the time to write something substantial can be exhausting when you put time and effort into something only for it not to get responded to. With that being said, we'd like to ask that you all check the open tag more often and if you see something that hasn't been responded to and you'd like to respond to it, please respond!
Get into the habit of liking other people's starter calls instead of making your own! Or if you see any empty ad, give it a like if you can see yourself being interested in the character! Like the mini tag, often we'll see that there are plenty of ads that have no notes. We know that this can be disheartening and make someone feel unwelcome. We understand that some may feel nervous to like an ad in fear of the person not wanting to write with you or that you may be forcing your character on them, but a large majority of the time this simply isn't true and you may be surprised at how thankful someone can and will be for you to give their character a chance! We also acknowledge that the more niche a character is, the less likely they are to get any notes on their ad. To this, we'd like for everyone to be open to giving them a chance. Some of the best sorts of characters end up being niche, after all!
Another point regarding starter calls, we often notice that someone will make a starter call and not do any of the starters but in fear of being "too late" they just make a new ad. We understand that feeling of having waited too long and that the people on your previous ad may not appreciate a late starter, but this is often not the case! Usually, most people appreciate receiving a starter even if it's late as we're all aware that life can get in the way of this hobby one way or another. So, we'd like for you to make an honest effort to write starters even if they're late. Additionally, it's never a bad idea to send a quick message to people whose starters you haven't written yet if you want to confirm if they're still interested or need a bit of help with an idea!
Regarding plotting, we know it's difficult to come up with solid ideas a lot of the time but we'd like to encourage people to plot more. Sometimes the smallest of ideas can turn into something substantial as long as there's a baseline. We take notice that more than a few permanent plotting ads get ignored in favor of general starter calls, and while we by no means want to control thread lengths, we want to encourage you to go outside of your comfort space when plotting with someone. Don't just let them do all the legwork, give an idea or two yourself! A lot of the time, having a general idea of how an interaction or character relationship will go can give people more motivation to reply. An idea can be as simple as giving a setting, time, and place! You could also stand to think outside of the box in what your character may be interested in doing with others. Ask yourself, what direction would you like to take your character? What relationships would you like for them to have with others? Gather some courage and approach characters you think you could collaboratively work with to achieve this!
On that note, we feel like it'd be beneficial to fully fill out your character's stats page to include locations they may be found and little tidbits of information that may make for interesting things to include in starters! It doesn't have to be expansive information, but the more detailed you are, the easier it may be for someone to craft a starter that can be beneficial for your interaction! Winging it always acceptable, of course, but this may improve your experience! We'd also like for people to check out other people's stat pages when writing starters! If you're having trouble writing an starter, taking a quick look at someone's stat page could be immensely helpful! There is a basic stats page available on the masterlist for you to fill out at your leisure if interested.
We'd also like to soft promote putting out advertisements for pre-established relationships between characters! If you're a little tired of doing the same random encounter starters, which are still fine and good, you may want to consider establishing a bit of a relationship between characters so they can avoid that! It can be as simple as they've met before in the city for whatever reason or as expansive as having been friends for a few months beforehand. It helps in really deciding the dynamic between characters and helps explore what kind of relationship they'll be able to have with one another, all decided by you!
Tying into above, we acknowledge that it's very hard to take the first step and message someone, but we'd like for people to start doing exactly that! A lot of the time you may see a capped starter call or may have an idea of your own that isn't present on someone's plotting ad. You may think to yourself that you're nervous to message this person and that they won't want to thread with you, which is very often not the case. Most (if not all) of our members are open to being messaged regarding threads, in fact it can make their day! So that character you want to thread with? Send them a message! Talk about your ideas! We love seeing creative minds collaborate to bring interesting threads to read on the dash and we're sure other people would agree!
With the above being said, we'd also like people to respect other's boundaries and we'd also like for people to be succinct in communicating said boundaries. If you message someone with a thread idea in mind and they politely decline, then you'll have to accept that. If you message someone asking if they'd like to thread in general and they decline, don't push it further. It can be disappointing, of course, but ultimately we must respect people's personal space and needs.
If someone doesn't write your character a starter, we'd like to ask that you not dwell on it. For one reason or another, sometimes people just aren't able to get to writing some starters for an ad. Additionally, there's also some characters who just don't mesh well together and people may not be interested in writing! Again, while disappointing, it happens! And you shouldn't hold a grudge over it. Writing is supposed to be a collaborative hobby, after all, and if you're both not getting enjoyment out of an interaction then who is it really for?
On the opposite end, if someone messages you with a thread idea and you're not particularly fond of it: don't be afraid to say no! We can often feel like we have to say yes in order to keep others satisfied at the expense of our comfort, which shouldn't be the case. All in all, please respect each other and respect that no means no in any circumstance.
As a final note, we know that communication is not always easy but we'd like for everyone to make an honest effort to reach out more. It can be easy to stick to your own private circles, but the purpose that we created this group in the first place was because we enjoyed seeing so many different people and characters write together and we'd like to continue to foster that sort of environment, hopeful that we'll come out with new writing partners and perhaps even friends at the end of it all. But we can't force everyone to interact with each other, nor are we expecting anything close to that. We simply ask that you respect one another and, again, make an effort! Take that first step in writing or responding to someone today if you have to. A group can't be a group if it's members aren't interacting with one another, after all.
We also plan to make some changes to our discord! Joining the discord is entirely optional and we have no intentions to make it mandatory or push it further, as we believe that all extensive plotting shouldn't be in a space that not everyone wants to join. Nothing is set in stone yet regarding this, but we'll have more updates for you in the next few coming months! Again, we thank you for reading, we know this was a bit of a long one but we feel that it was much needed to be open and transparent with you guys!
-- the island stars.
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for the omegaverse au, who is the alpha and who is the omega?
Explain my non-standard omegaverse system, thereby clarifying important themes and plot points within my story?? Don’t mind if I do!!!!!
I was going to do this anyway at some point because I know a lot of people avoid A/B/O due to some widely used tropes. If you (whoever reading this) are potentially interested in my story but hesitant due to past omegaverse experiences, this may help you make a final decision. Here’s a quick rundown of my treatment of common tropes in list form, and THEN I will answer your very simple question.
When in heat, do male omegas feel an unstoppable, uncontrollable horniness that overpowers any reluctance to have sex?
Not in my omegaverse. Dubcon winds up in a lot of omegaverse story tags because of this trope. But in my version of A/B/O, a male omega’s heat symptoms can look like any number of things. Horniness can be a symptom, but it isn’t for everyone. And even when it is, it presents itself like more of an itch that wants to be scratched. If a male omega in heat is horny but isn’t around someone he wants to fuck, then he will not fuck. This will cause him to feel irritated, though. If sex is among his body’s primary ways to feel safe during a heat and accrue the most biological resources, he may go on to have a really bad time psychologically. But at no point will he be trying to have sex he doesn’t want to have.
Mpreg?
Not in my omegaverse. I have no beef with it, it just doesn’t play a role in my stories. However, I would like to point out that trans, intersex, asexual, and other flavors of queer people exist within my universe. So a male person WITH a uterus could get pregnant if they were able to.
When alphas are in rut, do they possess an uncontrollable urge to mate with someone in heat?
No, and I call that out explicitly in Marrying the Hangman as a line alphas use in court to try and get out of assault charges. Do bigoted in-universe people actually believe this happens? Yes. Does it actually happen? No.
Are alpha and omega designations synonymous with ‘top’ and ‘bottom,’ ‘dom’ and ‘sub,’ respectively?
Absolutely not! Anyone could be any combination of these things, including vers/switch. A male omega in heat who experiences horniness might personally scratch that itch by way of topping in a more assertive manner, for example. I refer to being alpha/beta/omega as a biological sex, not a gender.
The biggest reason why I chose to piggyback this info on that ask submission is because the answer to the question of who is alpha and who is omega is loaded with assumptions due to the nature of commonly seen tropes. So when I say
Maverick is the alpha and Ice is the omega
that does not impact their characterization in the ways you [general You] might think. I saw a post a while ago scoffing at the idea of Iceman being an omega, and that is almost certainly because ‘male omega’ generally amounts to the following overpacked suitcase of assumptions: passive, helpless, sex-obsessed, ditzy. None of those things apply to Ice. While we’re here, none of those traits are inherently Bad, either. It is our treatment of our assumptions and not merely the assumptions themselves that speak to our biases. They just don’t apply to MY story. Ice IS omega. He’s also still Ice.
The big question, then:
So what is the purpose of heating and rutting?
In my verse, each of the six ‘standard issue’ biological sexes come with their own niche to fill. It’s not just about steamy smut. There are Reasons, god help me, why humans evolved four distinct hormonal/pheromonal types. And sex makes up but one piece of a massive evolutionary tapestry.
We humans are strongest in groups, yes? We form communities. We specialize so that no one has to do everything. We protect our own. My omegaverse reflects that. Heats and ruts, as a result, are all about creating and maintaining those social bonds. And sometimes, that involves sex.
For plot purposes, I focus the most on male alphas and male omegas, but here is a rundown of all six sexes.
Typing Characteristics
Male Omegas
0.001% of male population
In-universe stereotypes that are based on bias, not fact: ditzy, impulsive, irresponsible, unintelligent, weak-willed, slutty, high-strung
Average sperm count
Produce slick
Throw out a LOT of Find Me pheromones during a heat—sex was one of evolution’s many great ideas on how to attract and subsequently recruit nearby alphas/betas as protection and (ideally) long term partners.
Evolved to be community leaders. Their hormones are very chatty, always reaching out pheromonally to make connections with other types. The thing that makes them unique is their ability to synthesize pheromonal bonds between individual people. In the same way periods will sync up among people in proximity who have them, a male omega’s pheromones get all of their People on the same heat/rut schedule to maximize group power and efficiency. When they heat, that ability becomes especially strong.
A male omega’s heat is driven by an external goal. Once a month, their bodies release a stockpile of hormones that compel them to identify and carry out ‘missions’ that strengthen their community. They take more risks (with success) during this time, relying on their sharp senses and protectors to balance out any dangers. [see notes for more clarification]
Their biologically-driven goal is to become the center of a community that helps nurture and protect their unique gift. Because they are so singularly focused on their goal during a heat, they need protection. Alphas and betas offer them that protection.
Heats can go ‘bad’ for a number of reasons. The two main triggers for heat sickness (toxic hormone accumulation) are (1) failing to have their personal heat care requirements met and (2) catastrophically failing to achieve their goal.
Male Alphas
30% of male population
In-universe stereotypes that are based on bias, not fact: sexually aggressive, domineering, always horny, can’t think too horny!
Higher than average sperm count
Somewhat more likely to produce more male alpha children
Strong instinct to provide for and protect their People
American taboo: male alphas don’t bottom. It just isn’t done! That’s for wimmin and gays [male omegas]
Have the ability to knot during a rut
Four types of ruts!
Unbonded annual rut: without the influence of pharmaceuticals, this will happen every year for a male that is not part of a stable community, ideally one with a male omega at the center. For a period of about a week, his senses will magnify, especially his sense of smell, and he will feel an extremely powerful urge to roam. This is Finding Mode. He wants to find a community to protect and nurture.
Bonded annual rut: without the influence of pharmaceuticals, this will happen every year for a male that IS part of a stable community. For a period of about a week, his body will completely flush his alpha hormones, effectively hitting a reset button. During this time, it is critical that his community support him; he will feel vulnerable, his protective urges will magnify beyond what is sensible, and that can turn into paranoia and even psychosis at the extreme end. Make him a pillow fort or something and he should be fine.
Unbonded pseudorut: the US military gives alphas pills to trigger these for combat. This version of the pseudorut is a dumbed down version of a bonded male’s heightened sensory period with feelings of purpose. The military becomes a stand-in for a true community leader, and the male alphas will become more aggressive and intent on following orders.
Bonded pseudorut: these are naturally triggered in an alpha male’s body every time he is around a male or female omega he is bonded to, who is also in heat. His senses heighten, and he becomes completely focused on seeing to his community leader’s needs, whether that means following them into combat as their wingman or getting them more snacks from the fridge.
The other groups see less screen time, so I will shorten their descriptions.
Female Alphas
In-universe stereotypes that are based on bias, not fact: basically every sexist thing that haunts corporate women—bossy, mean, not a team player, etc
15% of female population
Average fertility, slightly more likely to produce more alphas both male and female
Experience ruts functionally identical to those experienced by male alphas
Charlie is an alpha female in this story. She is also an ace lesbian.
Female Omegas
In-universe stereotypes that are based on bias, not fact: stupid, obsessed with babies, always want sex
High fertility rates
15% of female population
During a heat, they become even more fertile. Their bodies throw out copious amounts of protect-me, find-me pheromones. They will feel varying levels of desire to reproduce, and that desire can manifest in various ways. It is a spectrum. Some of them will conform to the stereotypical Horny Time model, while others may not care about sex itself so much as the mechanical act of fertilizing their eggs. Still others may feel little to no sex drive, but they are a minority.
Likelihood for twins, triplets, etc very high
Natural partners for male omegas in terms of community leadership. Working together, they both gain full benefits of being surrounded by dedicated protectors. Taboo in some cultures for them to be sexual partners as well.
Female and Male Betas
In-universe stereotypes that are based on bias, not fact: boring, dispassionate, genetically useless, The Other Guys, mediators
The stabilizing factor of every chemically/hormonally bonded community. They keep the balance when they’re bonded to a group by naturally assisting with pheromonal equilibrium.
Their bodies can produce rutting or heating chemicals that don’t trigger their own ruts or heats but instead “keep the peace” in terms of making sure the core team’s train doesn’t go flying off the tracks
Will play more of a role in the sequel
Other Notes
The term “heat” is used for both omega males and females due to various scientific misunderstandings that happened across many cultures many hundreds of years ago. Throughout history there have been periods of activism where researchers advocate for a more nuanced naming system, but how successful those efforts were are highly dependent on culture. American culture likes its three types, six sexes model. Makes bigotry so much easier! You fit in this box, you act this way. Step outside of it and you will be punished. The ‘It’s Complicated’ models are the ideal.
But I said earlier there are four true hormonal types, not three, and this is how: because male and female omega heats are based on entirely different hormones and evolutionary purposes, they really should not be classified together at all. The four “true” types are: male omega, female omega, alpha, and beta.
On the subject of male omegas’ heat missions: those come in various forms, and various levels of intensity. It all comes down to what the individual male omega wants to do (or is told to want to do). That could look like any number of things: a big hunt or agricultural project, leading a military unit, or starting a new company initiative. It could also look like one male omega, one female omega, three alphas, and three betas (they’re using the trunk obvs) driving to a paintball place once a month to annihilate everyone present and then leave. It’s not all about blood and sex and drama. A group of teenagers who live in a culture that eschews pharmaceutical hormone control could form a hormonal bond around a male omega that is really into skateboarding, and they all come together to built a non OSHA compliant skate park in someone’s backyard. Groups can also shift in membership over time, too. Six months later and the group’s membership and ‘missions’ could look totally different.
Okay I’m done. For now.
#icemav#top gun#writing#ask#top gun fanfiction#omegaverse#principles of aviation#lore that no one asked for but which you SHALL receive#pro queer omegaverse
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Tumblr seems to be sliding in a downward spiral, and it feels like the start of the end of a fandoming era for me. I've been through it before; platforms are born then die, and life fandom finds a way. I'm just not looking forward to floundering for a bit, and dreading what the next hub will look like.
AO3 isn't really a place geared or meant for the same thing, and that's fine.
My only fandom-related activity took place on AO3 only for a few years between my leaving LJ and joining Tumblr, and I lived ;-) But during that time, I was my own little island in fandom. Reading, leaving a few comments, not being super active.
It's only when I found a community again that I was back to being really active in fandom once more.
And it's not that I actually use Tumblr to post about myself, but I do use it to read and reblog cool things - art, gifsets, science stuff, discovering new fandoms, and the like. I'm not sure where else I could find my people, with sameish purposes. The other sites I've tried didn't fill that niche in a way that suited me, in part because of how they look and work, in part because of who and what is(n't) there.
I have DW & PF accounts just to be safe, but I'm not very fond of group chats Discord-style - and without Tumblr, IDK how I'd even hear of new communities where I might pop in once in a while, loins girdled and everything. The micro-blogging platforms are not what I'm looking for either.
Sure, I can follow a few DW comms and blogs; I already occasionally do and I will be more consistent about it if I must.
But one of my greatest fear is that the next platform will be phone-based, app-only, or some such BS - and that is something I just won't be able to deal with.
Phones are tiny, it's uncomfortable to write anything, I don't like touch screen and much, much prefer a proper keyboard and a mouse (copy-pasting on a screen? (x_x) << it me), art/pics are too small to properly appreciate, a phone isn't comfy to hold for a long time for me, and the app system means you have no control over anything as a user… and that anything there must be Apple Approved, dick-free, blood-free, and tasteless.
And I say this as someone who's pretty much uninterested in sex IRL or in my entertainment ;-) I still support and want the tits, the gore, the everything, and as long as I have the tools to curate - oh, wait. Curate things myself? That's not something that's popular these days, is it? It's not going to generate money, if I'm happy ;-)
So… I guess I'll play some more on Neocities, and see if anyone wants to have webrings again? (it would be fun and nostalgic, but not really viable on a large scale; people who haven't known those would just laugh and point and go on the InstaTok of the time).
So here is my little cane-waving rant of the day! I know things evolve and change and that in ten years I'll be rolling my eyes at my moping. It's only that I feel tired of moving from one shitty platform to another, of fearing I won't adapt (or more accurately won't want to adapt given the annoyance/benefit ratio) to whichever new place things will move in a few years.
It's saying goodbye to a former home, moving, and hoping you'll make another home elsewhere kind of sniffles today!
--
We already know the next platform. It has been Discord for a few years now.
If you want the one after Discord, I think you're looking at waiting things out for quite a few years (or until Discord makes a major misstep as a company).
True, real time chat is not for everyone, but small discords with well-chosen channels can operate more asynchronously. Just like a lot of people who hated the look of Tumblr early on eventually capitulated, a lot of chat haters have jumped ship to Discord already.
Realistically, 90% of fandom always goes where the action is, no matter how much they claim the features make that space impossible, and 10% disappears.
We might get the 10% back on the next platform or they might leave fandom for good. There were LJ-haters who resurfaced post LJ era.
But as for where you'll find out where people are... probably AO3 author's notes.
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why did the ray finned fishes win out in terms of speciation and population in the water compared to us lobe finned fishes? did we lobe finners just have a skill issue (or gill issue if you will) and fumble the aquatic niches?
Ooh, what an exciting question! I didn't know the answer myself, but this news article provides an interesting and good (in my opinion) hypothesis for how. The article explains that in the Devonian, the now-extinct class placoderms and lobe-finned fish were the two dominating animal groups of the aquatic world, no doubt closely followed by sharks who also diversified greatly. So, we did in fact thrive and dominate over ray-fins for a while! However, the Hangenberg event, also known as the end-Devonian extinction that took place about 359 million years ago, sadly brought an end to the placoderms as a whole, along with many, many lineages of lobe-finned fishes that used to exist: heck, over 96% of all vertebrate species were lost during this time! With great losses of diversity like this, entire classes of animals gone, well... a power vacuum forms. With only some cartilaginous fishes and ray-finned fishes left, it took them no time to diversify and fill in those previously full niches! Looking at the current diversity of ray-finned fishes, it really doesn't take much to assume that they took this opportunity with stride.
How come sharks didn't quite get as diverse, then? Well... I'm not sure. Perhaps the ray-finned fishes were quicker to reproduce? Maybe bony skeletons are just that much better? Some ponder that a bony skeleton would've been more protective and offered more points of attachment for muscles to allow for more powerful movement. It could also just be that bony fishes can live in freshwater as well as saltwater which allowed them to diversify away from cartilaginous fishes! But these are just guesses.
TL;DR: Us lobe-fins didn't have a gill issue at all — heck, two of of the "fishy" lobe-fin lineages are still alive today after other numerous extinction events! Though, perhaps us tetrapods did in fact develop a literal gill issue soon enough... we were rather quickly on our way to colonise the land and follow in the footsteps of invertebrates during and after the Devonian. In any case, the ray-finned fish just saw an opportunity once a power vacuum emerged, and took it! Super happy for them for taking that chance ngl, clearly it worked out really well for them. Now they're the most diverse group of vertebrates!! Love to see a heartwarming success story of the underdogs winning haha
#some tetrapods seem to have regretted not taking that chance to recolonise the water after the devonian. just look at how many groups of -#tetrapods have returned back to aquatic life!! but the ray-fins were quicker ;)#(granted we are some of the most fearsome predators in the ocean ecosystems now... just look at whales... but thats beside the point.)#(i want to give the fishes a win!!! i think they did indeed win when it comes to vertebrates because holy moly)#asks#kennedy-the-genderfluid-punk#love the name! hope you learned something kennedy! i sure did writing this :D#fish
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Science fact of the day- Liquid rocket engines!
Because solid rockets are not quite effiecent enough and lack control, other types of engines are very needed. Liquid engines make up the other type of chemical rocket, although these two come in two main types.
Pressure Fed engines are the simpler type of engine. these engines will have their fuel tank, and then behind that, there will be a large tank filled with pressurized gas of some kind. whenever they need to burn the engine, they open valves and the pressure pushes the fuel down into the engine so that it can burn inside the combustion chamber. There are a few major advantages to pressure fed engines: for one, theyre incredibly reliable. with other engine types like we'll see later, there's a lot more systems that all have to work better for the engine to work, and if just one fails, your engine could be done, or even worse, your whole rocket could explode. with a pressure fed engine, theyre far more likely to just work when you turn them on, every single time. Which is another advantage- they can be used over and over and over again as long as you have fuel. they're great for missions that will need to do multiple smaller burns, such as those exploring other planets. Cassini, for example, fired its two engines a combined 200 ish times or so in order to line in up to have the best orbit for studying different things about Saturn as well as lining up orbital encounters. Only a pressure fed engine can have that sort of reliability. however, they have a major downside: theyre not super effecient- in fact, theyre often similar to solid rocket motors, in that 2 ish km/s range. still, for the reliability they provide theyre still often the best option.
I should also mention cold gas thrusters- theyre basically this taken to the extreme. they cut out the middle man by just straight up pushing out pressurized gas instead of pushing fuel into a combustion chamber. they're incredibly simple, they're incredibly reliable, and they're like, way less effecient. they do still have a good use, and that's attitude control. if you look at a picture of the space shuttle, you see all these little holes in the front and some itty bitty thrusters on the back- it's a large number of cold gas thrusters that can be used to rotate the spacecraft in literally any way they need. because cold gas thrusters are really really simply and reliable, this makes them the best suited to this tast, which requires precision in firing the engines and reliability to opperate them literally hundreds of times, maybe even within a single mission. these kinds of systems are called Reaction Control Systems (at least it was on the space shuttle) and that's basically the only niche these guys fill but theyre still pretty neat
finally, we have pump fed rockets. these are the real big boys, your F-1s and your RS-25s and your Merlins and your Raptors. The defining aspect here is a turbopump- basically its a pump built to spin at insanely fast speeds (on the RS-25, it was THIRTY THOUSAND rpm), and with high torque too, because they need to to move this much fuel, and again using the RS-25s as an example, it was something like 800 kilos per second for each individual engine, although the F-1 engine burned like 2500 kilos per second per engine, which is like an entire car's weight of fuel in a single second flowing through those pumps. so this raises the question? how the fuck do you power a pump that powerful? well, we have a bunch of rocket fuel lying around, so why not use just a little bit of that? only a very small amount of fuel is actually burned in the turbopump, so its a fairly small price to play for being able to achieve the absurdly high thrusts of rockets. Now, the engines i've talked about here are probably doing more than the average rocket engine, most probably have rpms in the 1-10 thousand range, and handle far less propellant per second, but i like going to the extremes to show the kinda shit these engines do.
You can probably see why these engines are so complicated. However, the benefits are easily worth it. They're the only way you can come even close to the power of solid rocket boosters, and they have the added bonuses of being more efficiency, while also being controllable. while many of them are made to only fire one time, they can usually be gimbled (pointed a little bit to steer the rocket) while executing their burn, and some of them can be operated multiple times in one flight, or at least be refurbished between flights (such as the RS-25). so how do they do on efficiency compared to the other engines? well it actually depends massively on their fuel- which i'll talk about tomorrow so byeeeeee
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Is it ethical to resurrect fossil pokemon?
The answer to that is a solid: It depends.
For the most part, I would argue that yes, it's fine to take a fossil to a lab. The biggest worry most people have is that "if it gets out, what about the eco-system?" but in truth, the fossil pokemon is the one most in trouble for the simple fact that.
Well.
The eco system has moved on and the old niche is filled by pokemon with millions of years of natural selection against the resurrected one. For an example, lets look at lileep. Back in its time period, where the diversity of the eco-systems was still a new thing, lileep colonies stretched for miles. They were the dominant life form. You can't stub your toe in Hoenn without turning over a lileep fossil. Because they were the first really successful grass type, the ocean beds were theirs. Nowadays, though, the sea floors they used to rule are crowded with corsola, sea weed, kelp, shellder beds, etc. There's no room for the fairly basic lileep to get a foot hold.
Sometimes even the basic environment itself is an issue. Anorith struggle in modern oceans due to changes to the ocean such as pH and salinity.
One of the few exceptions to this is omanyte, which is becoming quite prevalent. However, a number of fairly smart water type pokemon are working out how to get into that tough shell to get the meat inside, and so its likely the eco-system may eventually resettle once its position on the food chain is established. Until then, omanyte meat is very slowly picking up as a delicacy. (Though frankly, you'd have a better time eating an old boot.)
Another reason they pose little threat to the eco system: most of their food no longer exists naturally. Aurorus, for instance, can just barely hold its own against rivals like tropius, but their natural diet of large cycads and ferns are hard to find or just plain extinct. Combined with the warmer temperatures of today, and a large pokemon that could have been destructive of the eco-system is rendered incapable of doing so.
However, these pokemon often thrive in human care, as we can use science to make supplements that fill in the nutritional gaps and provide care and enrichment to help them enjoy their new life. A well loved and looked after fossil pokemon is a fascinating window into a past so different it may as well be another world.
However, there is one more thing I must address.
"Professor" Cara Liss is a hack who got her PhD from the back of a cereal box.
Those poor pokemon she resurrects are travesties of science. Though it is our responsibility to provide the current specimens living today with the medical care they deserve, it is DEEPLY morally wrong to create more of them. A dracovish might have a good reputation as a battler but it can barely function without a diet that is almost half medication by volume (I exaggerate, but only slightly).
Fossil pokemon do need some thought, as there are extra elements to their care, but if you want to bring your lucky fossil feather back from the dead as an arceops, go forth and do so if you think you're ready.
Just don't give it to that fraud in Galar.
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PART TWO!! TEXT VERSION
it was so long since i posted the first one haha hope you didn’t forget 🥲🥲
again, if there’re any mistakes - please tell me ^^
part 1
part 2 art
The next 24 hours all I did was hiding in the wall even though I was quite literally starving. You can’t blame me though, I was fearful for my life, okay? After such a day anyone would have stayed in bed and questioned their life choices…
However, it was pretty much a life and death situation, so I had to get up and find something before deciding if I should stay here or find new home. It’s a decision that you can’t take on an empty stomach, every borrower knows that.
Before you ask, I wasn’t worried all that much about this guy telling other people about me as seeing small people is quite abnormal for them and in best case nobody would’ve believed him, in worst… he would’ve probably ended up in hospital, but we will never know.
So, like that, I collected my thoughts, emotions and gear and went out on another attempt to get food. To be honest, i think my stomach was at the point of acceptance, I didn’t feel any hunger until I finally got to the kitchen counter and saw some fruits. Human wasn’t there but it didn’t mean anything to me anymore, I was too traumatized by yesterday’s experience. *Sighs dramatically*.
Maybe because the day before was extremely unlucky, I was rewarded with something delicious. There were grapes which are super convenient to borrow as humans won’t see any of them missing, some raisins and nuts. I took one grape right away and my stomach growled so loudly, even a half-deaf human granny would’ve heard, I swear. I bit it and transparent juice started to run down my chin which I wiped off right away. It was such a relief to finally eat something, I can’t describe this feeling honestly. Better would probably be the feeling of relief after you endured your piss or, even worse, poo, for an indescribable long time and then you finally get to the toilet and it’s just… ahh.
Anyway, back to the story. As I said, I finally had access to food, but I couldn’t afford to fill my stomach to the fullest at that exact moment since it would’ve been too difficult to climb back home in that case. That’s why I only ate one grape and took another one home as well as a couple of raisins and some nuts. And then the idea popped in my head. What if I left some food that can be stored for a long time to that one my favourite hiding spot? I thought it was a smart decision since in the case I ran out of supplies or had to make an urgent stop I would have something edible waiting for me. So, with that I went straight to the place where human saw me not so long ago. Imagine my surprise when I saw that he left something there. On the other hand, it was quite expected… I was terrified to even look at it yet alone touch, but I couldn’t avoid the smell it had. I tried something like this only at my 10th birthday and my mom told me it was chocolate that we ate as a treat. It was some kind of desert that beans eat for pleasure. Maybe the human I lived with wanted to poison me with that? Or to somehow use it to make me become his pet? I still wonder about this at night, but even though I was really curious about that “offering”, I was more interested in surviving, so I went straight up behind the books where there was a small niche for me to hide. I placed all the things carefully and returned to the counter to pick some more. This day was pretty chill since the human showed up at his usual time and didn’t bother. He was as quiet and relaxed as ever with the only difference, that when he was in the kitchen, I could have heard the music from his phone. It wasn’t unpleasant, on the contrary, I liked it. The guy hummed along with it and his voice wasn’t so bad either to be honest, so I just lay in bed and listened till I fell asleep.
For the next few days nothing weird happened, everything seemed to go back to normal with the only difference that now the human was openly listening to music and sometimes sing very quietly along with it. I didn’t hate it, it didn’t bother me, so it was fine. Till that one day when I was, again, hiding behind the books (I swear, that spot must be cursed, but it was too dear for me to give up and abandon it) after taking a shower in human’s sink in the bathroom and being already on my way home. He showed up in the house earlier today again and I just barely had time to react and hide. When he entered the kitchen, I already sensed that something was off. The way he threw the keys on the table, how he tossed the bag on the floor and his jacket on the couch showed that he was really frustrated about something. Honestly, he was quite scary in that mood, though I didn’t see him being like that too often. Hell, I only remember that happening once in the whole year and I was in the walls, safe but watching this up close was kinda… unsettling.
However, to my surprise, that didn’t last for too long. The guy calmed himself down within like five minutes or so, trying to take deep breaths, then he sat on the chair at the table and… yeah, he started crying. He was crying very quietly, as was everything he did, holding back tears and sobs, as if he was scared someone might hear him…
wait a minute… do you think he might’ve been thinking about me? He definitely couldn’t have forgotten out encounter, right?
I sighed. This human wasn’t making my life any easier. It’s not like I was pitying him or anything, humans are monstrous creatures, evil and cruel and every borrower knew that… Nah, lying has never been one of my strengths so, frankly, I did feel bad for him. This human didn’t try to do anything nasty to me for the whole week, which was a complete opposite of what I heard about them, so I couldn’t help but hope that he wasn’t that awful. I suddenly got curious about him. If he had so many opportunities to catch me and hurt me, why didn’t he do that already? And why was he crying right now? Was he hurt or something? Is human life that difficult? Borrowers usually aren’t sentimental, we only cry on very rare special occasions such as when we’re badly hurt or it’s a deadly situation, or when we break two or more bones at once and there’s no one for us to help to escape and we’re left there to die alone. But this guy didn’t seem to be physically hurt or in any danger, so why was he sobbing?
I couldn’t help it and finally set my eyes on the “offering”. It turned out to be a small round box, which most likely was a human bottle cape with some continents: a piece of chocolate (as I already knew) and a note. Oh no, he wanted to communicate… so it could’ve been a trap in the end… even so, I was already beyond fixing and too far from following the borrower rules, so maybe it wont hurt if I read it just this once…
thank you for reading ^^
comments and suggestions are appreciated
@gtzel @smallsday
#g/t#g/t community#borrowers#gt community#giant tiny#giant/tiny#gt writing#tiny#ocs#oc#my ocs#borrower
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Random bird facts! (Mostly about birds from my country cause that's all I really know but they're really weird birds here so you get some neat facts!)
. My country's airforce mascot is the Kiwi bird. A very well known, FLIGHTLESS bird. Which I will never not find funny.
. When we were trying (and failing) to do a flag design referendum, one of the actual flags proposed was a clip art and ms paint rendition of a Kiwi bird with laser beams being shot out of its eyes. Sadly, that option did not make it to the final voting stage. But it got close.
. Kiwi birds lay a single egg that is roughly about 2/3rds of its total body mass. The thing is MASSIVE for it's size! How it doesn't kill the bird is still a mystery.
. Kiwi bird feathers are very similar to fur, they have WHISKERS, they take up the same evolutionary niche of most rodents, and their nostrils are at the tip of their beak rather than the base like most other birds. The point of the nostrils being there is to help them sniff out little grubs and fruits in the leaf litter on the forest floor, but it also has proven useful during floods as they will simply flip their beak up like a snorkle and bob their way to dry ground. They're not great at swimming but they are great at floating.
. Kiwi birds are nocturnal and watching them play on trail cams and nightvision cams is incredibly entertaining, they are so goofy, highly recommend.
. Most of my country's birds are flightless as the islands they live on were mostly predator free until the introduction of humans. Due to the isolation, they all ended up evolving to take up a lot of evolutionary niches that would normally be filled by other animals. We have birds that are very similar to rodents and we used to have bird that took up the grazing/hunting niche that looked like massive ostriches called Moas, they most likely hunted smaller birds and grazed on ferns and grasses, and the only thing that dared to hunt them before humans was a giant fuck off eagle that was known as the largest eagle in earth's history called the Haast eagle. Sadly they both went extinct but we still have viable dna stored in labs so....could possibly bring them back? Maybe? Not sure if that's a good idea as they probably wouldn't do well with humans.
. We have the world's only alpine parrot! The Kea! They're our equivalent to crows as they are just as intelligent, but like if a crow had a knife and knew how to use it cause Keas have massive beaks and no fear of humans and have been recorded tearing open CARS to get inside because they saw something they wanted. Tourists are often told to NOT feed the Keas and keep all shiny objects and food hidden in the trunk of the car so the Keas won't see it through the windshield because they CAN and WILL destroy your car/purse/vehicle/bags/etc... to get what they want. They are not actively malicious btw, they're just like toddlers with inhuman strength and no sense of boundaries. They're very curious and playful, again they're very similar to crows and ravens, and they love playing in the snow!
. We also have Kaka's, the Keas slightly more shy and better behaved cousin. Only slightly though. I got bit by one who saw I hid a bag of chips in my backpack and it landed on me to try and undo the sipper on it so I wrapped my arms around the bag to hold it shut and it literally looked at me and slowly pinched my arm with it's beak while staring at me like "open the bag, OPEN THE BAG! I want treats!!! How dare!" Didn't break skin but still, little guy was basically threatening to eat me if I didn't give my chips.
. Kakapo are our super endangered flightless parrots that look like fuzzy green melons I swear. There's been attempts to try and get them repopulated but unfortunately, unlike the Kea and Kaka, Kakapo are very....stupid when it comes to reproducing and I will not say more.
. We have giant fucking pigeons called Kereru and they are notoriously bad at flying to the point there are warning signs on roads near where they live that warn drivers of them potentially falling out of the sky.
. The majority of our birds are named after Pokemon naming conventions! As in Pokemon are named after the sound they make, and our birds are too! If you listen to their songs or the sounds they make (such as with the Kereru, it's mostly quiet but it has a whistle feather that makes a sound when it flies which is the sound it's named for) they sound very similar to their names! I think it's cool!
. We have burrowing penguins.
OH THESE ARE WONDERFUL!
I actually knew quite a bit about the Kiwi bird because I did a presentation on them in middle school for some reason (we all had to pick an animal and I was a weird kid I guess) but I love the bird facts :D thank you!
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the Unity thing is fucked up in so many ways that other people who are smarter than me have covered in terms of, like, economics and game studios and stuff, but one thing I find particularly sad about it is that Unity was THE indie game engine for so long, not just 'big' indies that went mainstream, but specifically the engine people who wanted to get into gamedev immediately gravitated to, at least in the post-Flash era when I grew up
'back in the day' people wouldn't DREAM of trying something as fancy as Unreal and no-one had heard of Godot or anything like that, so unless you were somehow a Flash throwback or maybe an RPG-Maker fiend (both niche in their own ways), you jumped on Unity and cobbled together whatever your heart desired as best as you could with nothing but spit and a dream
there were a million tutorials for every little thing, or it felt like that anyway, and this depth and breadth of community support and such just created a feedback loop which continued to solidify it as the engine of choice for people starting out in gamedev, many of whom went on to bigger and better things yet often still using Unity all the way (because learning a new engine sucks), and even those who stopped there had still made something and put it out in the world, you know?
I just feel bad that there might not be anything left to fill the niche for those who come next, right? Like so many things on the modern internet, it feels like. What, is Roblox going to continue to subsume all of kids' creativity, even more than already (and would that maybe be a good thing...? Probably not...) Unreal exists, sure, but Epic doesn't have the best track record either, and it still feels like it has that shiny pro veneer that makes it less approachable. I suppose the best we can hope for is one of the smaller, more ethical, and probably currently/eventually BETTER engines stepping up and getting that now-lost cultural force behind it like Unity once had
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Is a Bat a Dragon? We Asked James Rollins
By now, Tor is at the forefront of research into what exactly constitutes "dragon." We've entertained many queries throughout the years, determining if the umbrella of dragon extends to hippos, snakes, and Godzilla. Now, we turn to the expertise of James Rollins to advise on the dragonic status of bats. If you've read The Starless Crown and its sequel The Cradle of Ice, you probably know the answer.
Check it out!
by James Rollins
My love for the natural world and all its myriad creatures was one of my main drives for pursuing a career in veterinary medicine. Even today as a full-time writer, I’ve not fully stepped away from that profession. As I’ve stated many times during book talks—yes, I can still neuter a cat in under thirty seconds.
Still, my greatest fascination about Nature is how it adheres to a dictate stated so succinctly in Jurassic Park: Life will find a way. I’ve always been captivated by the manner in which animals and plants discover innovative survival strategies to fill different environmental niches and how that fight has resulted in all the marvels (and horrors) found in the natural world.
While growing up, I found a new way of exploring this subject matter: in science fiction and fantasy novels set on different worlds. I found myself especially drawn to material that explored life’s resilience across fantastic worlds. Whether it was the sandworms of Herbert’s Dune, the engineered landscape of Niven’s Ringworld, the many species of Card’s Ender’s Game, or a universe of other writers tackling how life finds a way.
Even when it came to those novels that featured dragons, I found myself most interested in the biology and the circumstance of their origins. How did the telepathy and bonding in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern books come about? What steps were taken to harness the physicality of dragons to become warriors in Novik’s Temeraire series? In Martin’s books, could dragon eggs truly be encysted for ages and require fire to bring them back to life? If so, how and why?
When it came to crafting my own fantastic world in the Moonfall Saga, I took a similar scientific eye to its construction. The series takes place on a tidally locked planet, a world that circles its sun with one side forever facing the sun, the other locked in eternal darkness. The only truly livable clime is the band between those extremes of ice and fire. Across such a harsh and unforgiving landscape, I wanted to build a biosphere of flora and fauna that made evolutionary sense. How would species survive the extreme cold and lack of sunlight? Could life find a way in the sunblasted hemisphere?
And what about dragons?
In the novel, one of the apex predators is a species of massive bat, with a wingspan of ten meters or more. We first see them in Book One (The Starless Crown). They inhabit the vast swamplands of Mýr—found in that more temperate climate of the world. They are nocturnal, haunting a drowned forest and roosting in a volcanic mountain. I wanted those bats to make biological sense, to have them fit that environmental niche in a natural way. Being arboreal, they would likely have evolved prehensile tails. As nocturnal creatures, they would need bell-shaped ears and still use ultrasonics to navigate. And without giving away any of the surprises in the books, there is a significant aspect to their biology that will allow them to bond to certain people.
In the books, I also wanted to add a level of verisimilitude to the bestiary by adding naturalistic sketches, drawings that you might find in a turn-of-the-century research journal.
Here is the Mýr bat:
Keep in mind, life will find a way, so this species is not limited to those swamplands. A subspecies evolved in the dark, frozen half of the world. It adapted to fit that harsh niche, becoming smaller and stockier, with shaggy fur, and nasal flaps that could seal to conserve body heat. Likewise, in this treeless landscape, that prehensile tail would no longer be needed. They make an appearance in the second book in the series, The Cradle of Ice.
Here is their sketch:
But what about the title of this blog post: Is a bat a dragon?
In the third volume in the series (A Dragon of Black Glass), which will be coming out in 2024, this species has also adapted to the sunblasted half of the world. To survive, they would need to burrow to survive, growing larger claws for digging, and bodies that would be hairless and elongated, with fanned tails for aerial maneuvering when out of their burrows. They would become known as “sanddragons.”
Here is a sneak peek at their preliminary incarnation (with the final version still to come):
I must note that all of these drawings were beautifully executed by graphic artist, Danea Fidler—as were all the other creature sketches featured in the books. I look forward to sharing the final versions of these “dragons” in 2024 when A Dragon of Black Glass hits bookshelves.
#tor books#dragon week#james rollins#is a bat a dragon#fantasy#booklr#the starless crown#moonfall#the cradle of ice#a dragon of black glass#danea fidler
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