295 posts
Latest Posts by musical-fish - Page 2
Me: “The food webs we try to teach children and the public are too simple to get the point across. Why do they never bother to show the more intricate relationships between specific species? It can’t be that hard to represent with basic teaching tools... I’ll make the thing!”
The thing:
Me: “....I get it now.”
accepted that I'm still too inexperienced in animating boss movement to be able to speedrun my pa contest lvl 😔 have a few screenshots though
I was cookin up something in the background for the call for hatred au as you can see
So, let me guess– you just started a new book, right? And you’re stumped. You have no idea how much an AK47 goes for nowadays. I get ya, cousin. Tough world we live in. A writer’s gotta know, but them NSA hounds are after ya 24/7. I know, cousin, I know. If there was only a way to find out all of this rather edgy information without getting yourself in trouble…
You’re in luck, cousin. I have just the thing for ya.
It’s called Havocscope. It’s got information and prices for all sorts of edgy information. Ever wondered how much cocaine costs by the gram, or how much a kidney sells for, or (worst of all) how much it costs to hire an assassin?
I got your back, cousin. Just head over to Havocscope.
((PS: In case you’re wondering, Havocscope is a database full of information regarding the criminal underworld. The information you will find there has been taken from newspapers and police reports. It’s perfectly legal, no need to worry about the NSA hounds, cousin ;p))
Want more writerly content? Follow maxkirin.tumblr.com!
It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.
What is the Rot? Why is the Rot?
Spoiler Warning and Holy Wall of Text Batman Warning. I got WAY too into questioning the turbo-cancer here, hopefully my rambling makes sense.
So, the Rot is… weird, from a biological standpoint. Really weird, if you stop to think about it. It’s most frequently described as some variation of cancer, and it certainly fits the criteria for it. Caused by damage to DNA? Check. Multiplies uncontrollably? Check. Comes in both benign and malignant forms, one stationary and the other mobile? Big fat check. Heck, even the Rot cysts eating other creatures kind of fits, according to some research I’ve done – there are apparently cancer cells that will eat other cells, which makes sense in hindsight since cancer cells are cells that have lost important genetic restrictions, which may include whatever lets cells identify other cells as “do not eat.”
(I ain’t a biology whiz and I’m doing research on the fly while getting my thoughts out here, so take whatever I say about biology with a grain of salt)
So, Rot is clearly cancer of some kind, right? Case closed. Except when me and a friend of mine were talking Rain World theories on Discord, she brought up some interesting points that got me thinking.
First point: Rot cells obviously mutate in a way that affects FAR more than just cell replication and termination. Some of the cysts can HEAR. As far as I know, cells in the body do not hear sounds. They communicate via chemical signals and maybe, MAYBE react to temperature. Hearing involves complicated, specialized sensory apparatus to pick up on vibrations in the air. Even if you simplify it and say that it’s only vibrations, that’s STILL a multicellular thing, not a single-cell thing. It’s something that took millions of years to evolve on Earth, if not billions.
And while Rain World’s timeline goes on for long enough that it those kinds of mutations might happen eventually, Rot cysts have the ability to hear pretty much right from the start – because even the Proto-Long-Legs react to your presence like the Daddy Long Legs do, and the Rot in Spearmaster’s campaign, where Pebbles has recently contracted it, reacts the same way as it does in later campaigns. It’s already able to hear.
As far as I know, cancer just means the same cell duplicating over and over again. Are more mutations possible with each division, as errors are made in the DNA during splitting? Probably. But not to THAT extent. There’s no way a lump of cancer somehow mutated the exact complicated genetic blueprint needed to grow organs, at least not without outside interference.
Second point: Cases of Rot are way too consistent across the board. Now, we don’t have a huge sample size to work from, but from what we see from both Pebbles’ Rot, and Hunter Long Legs, they’re… pretty similar. Hunter Long Legs is basically a mobile Rot cyst. They move the same way, seem to grow the same way (starts as a growth inside/on the body before eventually freeing itself from whatever wall/flesh it grew from in some capacity and moving elsewhere), they have the same senses, and they even eat the same way, via something like phagocytosis (how white blood cells “eat” invading organisms via engulfing them and breaking them down in a sac in their main “body.”)
Now, this doesn’t tell us much, because cancer, when it does emerge, is pretty consistent in symptoms/what the mutated cells do once they start replicating. It’s pretty much the same regardless of whatever organism the cancer is happening in. But what ISN’T consistent is what causes the DNA error in the cancer cell in the first place. IRL, cancer can be caused by all kinds of things – smoking, radiation poisoning, being out in the sun too long, drinking deadly chemicals and whatnot, anything that damages DNA. But in RW, the only time we ever hear Rot talked about, or see it present, is in the context of an iterator having f*cked up while mucking around with DNA. Pebbles was trying to create an organism that could change his own genome, and No Significant Harassment created Hunter as a messenger and probably mucked something up in the process in his haste to get them to Moon.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t other causes of it, of course, we’re working with a sample size of two in an apocalyptic world with who knows how much potentially DNA-damaging stuff around, but… that’s still awfully consistent.
So, combining these points and everything we know to be canon, Rot is:
an organism that lives inside another organism
Until a certain condition is met, it cannot harm said host organism.
Once said condition is met, it goes out of control, wreaking havoc on the organism’s systems and mutating, giving it sensory capabilities and an appetite
Said condition is apparently someone messing up when re-arranging genomes, in yourself or others
It is widespread across multiple different species, at least iterators and slugcats but potentially other species as well.
Once you have a bad case of it, it is apparently NOT CURABLE. Pebbles tried everything he could think of but apparently exhausted all of his options by the time of the Survivor/Monk campaigns.
So, with all the context FINALLY laid out, here’s my wild theory: Rot isn’t a cancer. It’s a symbiote turned parasite. Specifically, I believe it’s a symbiotic microbe that lives inside the cells that make up every other creature in Rain World, and is held in check by a specific gene that all species share, and altering or getting rid of that gene causes it to go berserk, taking over and eventually mutating the host cells.
Yeah, I did watch Parasite Eve let’s plays as a kid, why do you ask? Anyway, hear me out here.
There is precedence for single-celled organisms living inside of other single-celled organisms. They’re referred to as intracellular endosymbiots (hopefully I got the spelling right there), and the most well-known one is probably the mitochondria. The powerhouse of the cell is thought to be descended from some bacteria way, WAY back that was engulfed by a larger cell and not only survived it, but BENEFITED from it. Since then those ancient proto-mitochondria and eukaryotic cells have mutually evolved to be dependent on each other. So it’s entirely possible for something similar to have happened in Rain World.
However, I don’t think it happened NATURALLY, here. Because something that’s able to take over a cell entirely and begin wildly mutating it is NOT something your average cell wants inside of it. There’s a VERY high chance of extinction if you do that. Which means that of course those funky bio-tech loving Ancients either took a look at a wildly dangerous cellular parasite and went “hmmm we can use this” or made one themselves.
Why did they do this? Who knows! Currently, I’m tied between “they needed a better powerhouse for the cell to power the various weird adaptations they’re building into various creatures,” “there was some sort of disease that this parasite gave immunity against and they wanted to make use of it,” and “it gave their creations massively powerful regeneration factors that made them much easier to maintain.” Possibly it was all three. Whatever the reason, the Ancients either found or created this parasite, and put it into their creations’ cells, hoping to reap the benefits.
Well, they got the benefits, but they also got a microbe that hijacked the cells and harnessed their pre-existing DNA blueprints to build organisms disguised as great big blobs of cancer. Which is not exactly ideal, but hey, they just had to figure out a way of keeping the cell hijacking from happening! And the way they ended up going about it was to alter the thing so that so long as there was a specific DNA sequence in the cell, it laid mostly dormant. All the benefits, none of the risks – so long as that specific string of genes remained intact.
And then BECAUSE it was so beneficial, they spread their artificial symbiote and it’s genetic reins throughout ALL of their creations, from the smallest pipe-cleaning slugs to the iterators. Which meant that as their purposed organisms replaced most of the original ecosystem, they spread the symbiote as well. Thus making it possible for pretty much ANY creature on the planet to come down with a bad case of the Rot. And with the iterators, I wouldn’t be surprised if this symbiote is tied to their self-destruction taboos. Try to cross yourself out? Well, it’s gonna maybe happen now, but it’ll be a slow painful death as you’re eaten alive from the inside and all your own parts turn against you, so was it really worth it?
And they never told their creations this perhaps even actively hid it, because why tell them the cause of the main deterrent to them mucking with their taboos? They might find a way around it. The iterators were left ignorant of how Rot works, and because of this they never figured out that Rot HAD a cure after all: rebuilding that genome that reins in the symbiote. Because why in the name of the Void would they repeat the same mistakes that gave them Rot in the first place, and potentially make it worse?
The 20 year old accidentally bonsai'd apricot tree that I finally planted in the ground has truly established himself and has chosen a branch with which he will form his main trunk. He's putting all his energy into this one branch and it's making dozens of tiny offshoot branches and it is rapidly growing taller
I fucking hate seattle man. the liberals have built a living superstructure that towers over the city and covers the sky in rain and fog. I'm fuckin moving to the countryside
after some observation, this is how the farm arrays machinery must've worked
here I made it turn the crop immediately into a pulp for the sake of a cleaner loop, but I do think it most likely was turned into nectar/had the nectar extracted on site
Still, the possibility of the crops being transported as is somewhere else is still there
Reference screenshots under the cut
As you can see, almost all of these machines were aligned with a crop "notch" on the arrays
I feel like any aliens that were prey at some point in evolution would have an odd fear of humans. Mostly cause they look like predators, act a bit like predators, and ARE predators. One perfect example is when we're focused on something like a mosquito that's been bugging us for a long time and we are just done.
Alien: "What. What..?"
Human: *HUNTING down a mosquito it saw*
Alien: ".... yeah I am really uncomfortable...."
Human: *quiet footsteps, pupils dialated, intense focus,*
Alien: *WAR FLASHBACKS*
Human: "Found you." *absolutely desimates the mosquito, squashing it into a million pieces as it's guts and various body parts liquidize into blood of the bloodthirsty, now stained on the palm of the human. A living being now reduced to a useless corpse as the human wipes the remains on their pants*
Alien: "I feel like I've just gained trauma."
why does the roblox front page always look like this
i put “All I Want for Christmas is You” through a MIDI converter, and then back through an mp3 converter
the result is this garbage
i love AI characters in media!!!!! its so interesting to see how humans invision what an artificial human would act like!! we barely even know ourselves, but we imagine the minds we could create!!! do robots have morals? emotions? fears? do they dream? can they love? give me all of it !!!!!!!
I redrew a couple moments from when me and my friends played Regretevator a few days ago!!
I like drawing Sebastian with circle eyes hehe. I'm about to post a bunch of stuff btw :3
An ancient symbol
finally at last they are here!! A slugcat design of mine that doesn’t drive me mad!! This is separate from my old lizard spec post “what if they were bugs”, meaning there’s a chance in the future I’ll make another one of these for lizards (how I commonly draw them!)
Five selfcheckouts
Why in the actual fuck would you send me this? Have you gone insane, little creature? Do you need me to call someone to come pick you up?
Well too bad. The only thing picking you up is a king vulture. That's right, I've told my messenger to leave a vulture grub at your exact location. Soon you will be devoured by a horrible creature from the sky. No scavenger will be able to save you. They shall freeze in place from fear the moment they see it descend from the sky. Lizards shall flee as soon as they notice it's shadow. Even the mightiest creatures inhabiting this world will tremble in fear when it arrives. It will pierce you with its tusks, and tear you apart with its beak. It shall feast on your corpse like a miros bird that's been starving for 15 cycles. Your karma will go down so much you won't ever be able to build it up again. Miles away, all iterators will receive message of your demise. A live video will be streamed from one of my overseers to every public channel available, and every single iterator out there will watch as the terrible bird swoops down and grasps your helpless corpse. And even if the vulture fails, I have sent a messenger to find every single intelligent creature alive and tell them of your horrible act. You will only be remembered by the crime you have committed. Not a single creature will ever love you again. Cycle after cycle you will find that you are unable to experience the beauty this world has to offer. And deep down you'll know that it all started when you sent me this horrible message. After an near eternal amount of cycles, you will finally decide to follow my advice and head west, past the farm arrays. Where the land fissures, you'll go down into the earth and search your way deeper. Then you will bathe in the void sea and contemplate your actions. You'll know that you could have prevented all of it. You could have been happy. And knowing this, you'll leave this world. Filled with regret.
How to kill an iterator- summon the spooky white eye guy from the funny block game and watch your world burn i guess
Rain world x Omori stuff i made ages ago
RAINMORI MERCH (that’s not real)
