A side blog where I'll *try* to keep things organised.yeahthatsnotgoingtolastlong
241 posts
Latest Posts by thejunkdrawers - Page 3
A master post of Thomas Romain’s art tutorials.
There’s not enough space to post all of them, SO here’s links to everything he has posted (on twitter) so far : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12.
Now that new semesters have started, I thought people might need these. Enjoy your lessons!
Talk fantasy prosthetics to me.
An elf maiden dances on feet of living wood sung into shape, planted in soil and watered when she takes them off. Every year she plants the old ones and sings a new pair. (Incidentally, the pair of peach saplings from three years ago have produced an excellent crop- She makes preserves from them, and despite the inevitable jokes about “toe-jam”, they are appreciated.)
A dwarf king has a metal fist, all tiny gears and fine wires, kept wound by a mischievous mine-spirit bound to the spring as punishment- the more it struggles, the tighter the spring.
An orc chieftaness is regularly asked for the story of how she earned the name Wyrmthrottler- she boasts of how she strangled the dragon that ate her arm, and had her shaman make a new arm from its bones, with its fangs as the fingers.
A necromancer simply re-attached his old leg bones- Sacrificing a few mice each day keeps it going.
A pirate captain lost her arm to a shark attack: a passing selkie saved her, and gave her tattoos of kraken blood. Now she has an arm made of salt-water, that grows and wanes with the tides, and swings a cutlass as well as the original. (She doesn’t sail as far these days though: she doesn’t want her wife to worry.)
A wandering swordsman was broken at the waist- his ancestral armour allows him to walk again, as long as he keeps it polished, and burns incense to the ancestors regularly.
A high priestess has an eye made from a crystal ball- to predict the future, all she has to do is wink.
A bard was struck deaf by illness- he struck a deal with the god of music. Now he wears hearing-trumpets made from his old pipes, and dedicates his every song to the god of music- the better he plays, the better his hearing. (It is said his music could make statues weep, and he can hear a mouse fart at 60 paces.)
A princess has the arm of a golem, enchanted clay with mystic words carved in- her music tutor despairs of how her harp playing has become even worse, but her calligraphy tutor is ecstatic over her handwriting.
A goblin pickpocket has an arm made of whatever he steals- no-one feels his fingers, and even if they did, they couldn’t find their possessions amongst all the rest.
A witch has eyes made from shadow and starlight, given to her in a game with a demon. Nobody dares to ask what she wagered- they aren’t even sure she won.
A warg was born deaf and blind- his people learned of his power when the nearest birds started staring at them, and dogs pricked up their ears as he walked past.
Writing Specific Characters - Advice
*updated 28.03.13 - 29.05.13
a young character
a character who lost someone important
a flirtatious character
a villain (2) (3) (4)
a character based on yourself
a hit man or mercenary
an indifferent character
a bitchy character
a gay character
a dancer / ballerina
a vampire
a werewolf
a pansexual character
a character on the police force
a drunk character (2)
a manipulative character
a friends with benefits relationship
a natural born leader (2)
a nice character
a british character
a character with a baby
an assassin
a character with night terrors
a rich character
a witty character
a sociopath
an actor
a nerd
an eccentric intelectual character
a character under the influence of marijuana
Eski Kermen is a medieval town located just 6 km from Mangupa, in the Bakhchisaray region in Crimea. The town is located atop one of the flat-topped mountains called mesa, which are normal for this part of Crimea, and is famous for its more than 300 caves. The caves were built in the 6th century and was used for human habitation because of the safety they provided and the shelter that they offered from the elements. Over the centuries the dwellings grew and housed several hundreds of people at one time. Religious life was important to these people who had a few temples and churches built in the caves. One of the churches still has frescoes that depict Christ and Mary, although the frescoes are beginning to show the wear of the elements.
The “cave city” was inhabited until the arrival of the Mongols in the 13th century. Due to the mountainous terrain, the town is difficult to reach and was therefore one of the last to succumb to the Mongol onslaught. After the caves were abandoned by the residents, for a brief period, the neighboring villagers began to use the caves for commercial purposes. Today, the caves of Eski Kermen makes for a great day-trip and for hikes.
Let’s talk about Nightjars
they are these wonderful tiny predatory birds
With great camouflage for multiple environments
And lovely plumage dependent on their species
BUT BEST OF ALL IS THEIR MOUTHS, which look small then their beaks are closed (they’ve even got cute lil’ whiskers!)
BUT ARE ACTUALLY HUUUUGE
BEST BIRD
lahore pigeons are some of the most visually appealing birds out there. like in terms of visual design. very minimalist, good contrast.
But now I’m wondering how all these facial recognition algorithms we’re coming up with now are going to take to the Bright New Transhumanist Future
Like, okay, we know Google can recognise dogs. But what about stranger things? Is anyone training these things on lizards?
Imagine basilisks specifically designed to crash these algorithms: abstract-blocks-of-black-and-white-for-heads that, like the QR codes of old, carry a hidden message in their patterning, only it’s a payload, a virus that shreds the system of anyone who tries to capture it on camera, the natural evolution of anti-face-detection camouflage. Imagine things that don’t even have faces, that don’t have an equivalent and easily-cataloguable part; people who deliberately wear mass-produced, identical android bodies, the Guy Fawkes masks of the future.
Necropolis of Cerveteri
A major centre of Etruscan civilisation that was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004, the Necropolis stretches for more than two kilometres. This certainly makes it the most imposing in all Etruria and one of the most magnificent monuments of its kind anywhere in the Mediterranean basin. These monumental tombs are located inside tumuli, partly cut into the tufa rock and partly built over it. The purpose of these edifices was to illustrate the desire of a handful of aristocratic families to make a statement about their wealth and to perpetuate a lifestyle of the highest quality also after death.
Images and text via, additional images via + via
1) Risus Monkey Fantasy Language Cypher
This is amazing!!!!!!!!!!
Are you creating a fictional language? Do you need help coming up with words that sound like they fit with what you’ve come up with so far?
Just put your fictional language in the model text, type some words in the translation text, and click “translate”. It’ll “translate” whatever words you put in using patterns from your sample text.
2) Speed Distance Calculator
These calculators aren’t perfect, but they can help you figure out:
How long it will take your characters to get somewhere based on how fast they’re going,
how far your characters moved based on how fast they were going and on how long they were moving,
how fast your characters need to move to reach a certain distance in a specified time
The calculator was meant for cyclists, but you can use it to get estimates for other things too.
3) Fantasy Calendar Generator
Another amazing resource!
This can create a random calendar for you or you can input the year, the number of months, the name of the months, the number of moons, the number of days in a week, the names of each day, and more.
You can even save the data for your calendar so that when you go back to the generator, all you have to do to get to your calendar is paste the data.
4) Inkarnate Map Maker
This is a new resource that’s still in beta, so it’ll probably be updated in the coming months.
This map maker is easy to use and free. You can add different climates, mountains, trees, towns, cities, text, and notes. For an example of these maps, look at the quick map I made for this post’s header.
Read more about trilobite beetles and larva here!
Photos by melvynyeo
closely related to sharks but with long, flat bodies and wing-like pectoral fins, mobula rays are ideally suited to swooping through the water - here off the gulf of california - yet seem equally at home in the air, so much so that they have earned the name “flying rays”. mobula rays can reach heights of more than two metres, remaining airborne for several seconds.
mobula rays are quite elusive and difficult to study, so biologists are not quite sure why they jump out of the water. theories vary from a means of communication, to a mating ritual (though both males and females jump), or as a way to shed themselves of parasites. they could also be jumping as a way of better corralling their pray, as seen with them swimming in a circular formation.
what is known about mobula rays is that they reach sexual maturity late and their investment in their offspring is more akin to mammals than other fishes, usually producing just a single pup after long pregnancies, all of which makes them extremely vulnerable to commercial fishing, especially as a species that likes to come together in large groups.
TOP TEN WEIRDEST-LOOKING BIRDS
1. Tufted coquette
2. Superb Bird of Paradise (wat)
3. Gunnison sage-grouse
4. King of Saxony Bird of Paradise
5. Wilson’s Bird of Paradise
6. Shoebill
7. Magnificent Bird of Paradise
8. Long-wattled umbrellabird
9. Royal flycatcher
10. Standard-winged nightjar
Social Insects in Science Fiction
Hello, my name is Poetry, and I love social insects. Whether they’re ants, bees, termites, wasps, aphids, thrips, or ambrosia beetles, I find them fascinating to learn about. But if the sci-fi books I read as a kid had had their way, I should have run screaming from every ant colony I saw.
From the buggers in Ender’s Game to the Borg in Star Trek to the Vord in Codex Alera to ants and termites themselves from a morph’s-eye view in Animorphs, social insects, and the aliens or artificial intelligences that closely resemble them, are portrayed as “hive minds” with an emotional tone of existential terror. And I’m here to tell you that these portrayals are totally unfair.
What they get right
Here are some features that most portrayals of social insects and their analogues in sci-fi get right. Yes, social insect colonies have queens that are primarily responsible for reproduction. Yes, social insects have very different sensory modalities from ours. We primarily use sight and sound to communicate and navigate the world, while social insects use taste and smell and vibration. Yes, social insects have specialized division of labor to particular tasks, and yes, they are willing to sacrifice themselves in droves to protect the colony. And sometimes, they will enslave social insects from other colonies or even species to serve their own ends (x).
Thus ends what sci-fi portrayals get right.
What they get wrong: Queens
Almost universally in sci-fi, when you kill the queen, the hive disintegrates into chaos. You’ve cut off the head! The central intelligence of the hive is gone! They’re just mindless borg-units with no idea what to do!
Indeed, in some social insects, such as leafcutter ants, if you kill the queen, the whole colony will die – but probably not for the reasons you think. However, it’s more common for social insects to be able to carry on just fine regardless. In most ants and bees, there are “backup” queens that are reared up by the workers in case the current queen should die. And in many social insects, a worker can step up and become a queen in her place. (Hilariously, a worker ant that steps up to reproduce in place of a queen ant is called a gamergate.)
But here is the most important problem with the sci-fi trope of killing the queen to kill the hive. The queen is not the brain of the hive. She is the ovary.
If you think of a social insect colony as a superorganism, which it’s useful to do in many cases, different groups of insects within the colony act like organs. One caste protects the colony from invaders, which is like an immune system. One caste scouts for new places to forage, which is like a sensory system. Generally, science fiction has a good grip on this idea. Where sci-fi authors fail is that they think the queen is the brain of this superorganism. She is not. She is the reproductive system. The queen does not control what happens in the hive any more than your reproductive system controls what happens in your body. (Which is to say, she has some influence, but she is not the brains of the operation.)
The reason why leafcutter ant colonies die when the queen dies is because the colony has been castrated, not beheaded. Most animals die when they are no longer able to reproduce, even if their brains are still perfectly functional. For castrated colonies with no backup queen or gamergate and no hope of getting one, there is no point in carrying on. Their evolutionary line has ended.
What they get wrong: Swarm intelligence
Here is how social insect hive minds work in science fiction: the queen does the thinking, and the rest of the hive goes along with whatever she thinks.
Now, I’ve already told you that the queen is not the brain of the hive. So where is the brain? Well, that is exactly the point of swarm intelligence. The brain does not reside in one particular animal. It’s an emergent property of many animals working together. A colony is not like your body, where your brain sends an impulse to your mouth telling it to move, and it moves. It’s more like when two big groups of people are walking toward each other, and they spontaneously organize themselves into lanes so no one has a collision (x). There’s no leader telling them to do that, but they do it anyway.
Much of the efficiency of social insect colonies comes from very simple behavioral rules (x). Hymenopterans, the group of insects that includes ants, bees, and wasps, have a behavioral rule: work on a task until it is completed, and when it is done, switch to a different task. If you force solitary bees (yes, most bee species are solitary) to live together, they will automatically arrange themselves into castes, because when one bee sees another bee doing a task like building the nest, its behavioral rule tells it that the task is completed and it needs to switch to a different task, like looking for food.
Individually, a social insect isn’t all that smart, whether it’s a queen, worker, soldier, or drone. But collectively, social insects can do incredibly smart things, like find the most efficient route from the colony to some food (x), or choose the perfect spot to build their hive (x).
What they get wrong: Individuality
The existential terror of the hive mind in science fiction comes from the loss of the self. The idea is that in a social insect colony, there is no individual, but one whole, united to one purpose. No dissent, disagreement, or conflicting interests occur, just total lockstep. I totally get why that’s scary.
The thing is, it’s just not true of real social insects. There is conflict within colonies all the time, up to and including civil war.
A common source of conflict within colonies is worker reproduction. Yes, in most social insects, workers can in fact reproduce, though usually they can only produce males. So why don’t they? Because it’s not in the interest of their fellow workers. Workers are more closely related to their siblings and half-siblings produced by the queen than they are to their nephews, so they pass on more of their genes if they spend resources on raising the queen’s eggs. So, if a worker catches its fellow laying an egg, it will eat the egg. Not exactly “all for one and one for all,” is it?
Worker insects may also fight in wars of succession. If there is more than one queen in a species where queens do not tolerate each other (yes, there are species where multiple queens get along together just fine), such as monogynous fire ants, the workers will ally themselves with one queen or another and engage in very deadly civil war.
Finally, in some species, the queen needs to bully the workers into doing their jobs, and the dominant workers need to bully subordinate workers into doing their jobs (x). Yes, sometimes workers try to laze around and mooch.
Surprisingly human
Here’s what I find weird about depictions of social insects in science fiction. They are portrayed as utterly alien, Other, and horrifying. Yet humans and social insects are very, very similar. The famous sociobiologists E.O. Wilson and Bernard Crespi have both described humans as chimpanzees that took on the lifestyle of ants.
I think what fascinates people, including me, about ants, bees, and their ilk is that you watch, say, a hundred ants working together to tear up a leaf into tiny bits and carry it back to their colony, or a hundred bees all appearing out of seemingly nowhere to sacrifice themselves en masse to stop a bear from eating their hive, and it looks like magic. It really does look like some kind of overmind is controlling their collective actions.
But imagine you’re an alien who comes to Earth, and you know nothing about humans or the way we communicate. Wouldn’t we look exactly the same to them as ants and bees look to us? Wouldn’t they look at us sacrificing our lives by the thousands in wars, or working together to build cities from nothing, and think, Wow, how do they coordinate themselves in such huge numbers, why do they give up their lives to defend their borderlines, I guess there must be some kind of mega-brain they all share that tells them what to do, and they just march in lockstep and do it.
If there’s anything I’ve learned from the study of both social insects and humans, it’s that any system that looks monolithic and simple from a distance is in fact fractured, messy, and complicated when you look at it up close.
Social insects aren’t scary mindless robot-aliens. They’re a lot like you and me. As much as I was terrified as a kid by the Animorphs book where an ant morphs into Cassie and screams in pure existential horror at its sudden individuality, I actually think an ant would adjust very easily to being a human, and that a human would adjust very easily to being an ant – much more easily, in fact, than humans adjusted to morphing, say, sharks, in the very same book series.
What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?
yknow 1 of the little things i appreciate about kid icarus is how realistically pit’s outfit accommodates his wings
Source
Another weirdly amazing piece of nature: the llareta shrubs in the Atacama Desert
