malymin

A monster-battler game with a small number of species that have high morphological variability.

That's a thought I've been having thinking about animal xenofiction and character adoption spaces.

The fantasy animal roleplay forums kallium talks about like Kats, which had both a "subtype" component and a "color" component in determining appearance and powers. Petz breeding, where you can wring so many unique animals out of just breeding the original breeds without modding just through color mutation and hybridzing features from different breeds. Closed species adoptable sites often have a list of features that can be added onto the default template or replace parts of the default template - different types of fins, wings, horns, special markings, etc. The Warriors fan-game Clangen contains tons of overlapping variables for appearance - mostly cosmetic, though a few (like lack of tail) confer disabilities. Genetics/breeding focused animal games often have only one species, maybe one or two more than that, but lots of variation within. Creatures, Wobbledogs, Niche.

People want their individual 'mons to feel unique, and this is what IVs and EVs in Pokemon are supposed to be for... but in practice it's just something to minimax for competitive players, that casual players barely notice. Early 3d Pokemon games had slight hue shifts on individual Pokemon to make them visually individual, but that was later abandoned.

I feel like taking a page from Persona's book, and having the starter be a "wild card" of sorts, able to absorb species and traits it encounters into a library that the player can swap out at rest spots. This lets you play with both mechanical and cosmetic elements at your own whims and deeply customize your starter, while not making your non-starter party slots redundant (since you can't switch the starter's build mid-battle).

Floated this idea by tresfoyle and she added:

Suggests some interesting directions re: the nature of your "starter" and what sort of plot you're in

My mind immediately leapt to something in the vein of "your buddy is a more benign equivalent to The Thing and you're doing some Svalbard seed vault shit with your whole local biosphere"

An angle that's intriguing... I feel like a lot of western indie "this will be pokemon for adults" mons games are sadly less interested in the biosphere of their monsters than Pokemon is.

There is something very alienating about trying to assert one's existence as a sex-repulsed asexual.

It's hard to ignore how the online response to conservative censorship of NSFW and queer art focuses on the fundamental universality of sex. That art without sexual desire fueling it is not simply real art, it is the realest art, and art made without a libido is barren in comparison.

It is hard to ignore that a lot of ace positivity on Tumblr frames aces in terms of their ability to serve allosexual needs. ("Handing out water bottles at the orgy," "aces make the best smut.")

It is hard to open any conversation about the right to not be a sexual body when minority-positivity is often wrapped up in affirming people's sexual viability. About the right to be sexless as a feminist issue, a rape culture issue, a racial issue and a transgender issue and more.

To assert one's sexlessness is to somehow "steal" a perfectly good resource from other people. To assert a right to acknowledge that a historical figure might have had our experiences, or ask if a character reflects our experiences, is to steal what could have been gay or lesbian rep, which is Superior, that to ask if they could be ace instead is inherently homophobia. A certain comparison to be made to how a trans man is seen as a "waste" and "stealing away" of a pretty daughter, that asking if a historical figure AFAB identified with manhood is stealing from women's history and lesbian history and feminism.

To be a sexless autistic is to be bad autism rep, because by being sexless you're infantilizing yourself, don't you know? You're playing into the idea autistic people are children, because sex is the difference between adults and children. Every weird unusual fixation will be read as a kink or fetish, and attempting to assert that it's not will be treated as a sign that you hate people with kinks or fetishes - or that you're just lying.

(In offline het society, people will often assume someone attracted to neither men or women is attracted to something worse - children, animals - because nothing is not actually an option. Because everyone wants to fuck something, so the person who fucks nothing is just hiding that they want to fuck something abhorrent.)

To be an aromantic asexual is bad ace rep and bad aro rep because allo-aces and aro-allos get offended by your existence. My existence makes them "look bad."

It's hard to talk about our society being structured around the idea that people will be cared for by their children and grandchildren late in life, because of course you're going to reproduce. That society is structured around monogamous partnership. Because obviously all asexuals want QPRs and those are basically like romantic relationships, right?

People who will open their ears when you say "listen, I know the series is homophobic, but this character reads as gay" will not listen if you try to talk about unintentional aro-aceness.

I will die alone. I do not want to get married. My mother has repeatedly told me no man would ever want to marry a woman who doesn't have sex; she does not believe it is possible for men to not want sex. She has repeatedly told me that nobody will ever prioritize a platonic friend over a romantic and sexual partner, that this is the nature of the world. That people will inevitably drift away when they fall in love. I constantly fear getting close to people, because I know they will leave me - if not because I'm annoying and unlikable, then it's because friendship is never as important as love.

I fear that when I have to reject an advance, people think I'm a bitch and I hate them.

I fear that I'm just a stupid adult-aged adult-sized child, developmentally stunted and sexless, that like the changeling parasitizes the home while never growing up. Being a manchild (or rather a womanchild, or a thingchild) isn't cute in your thirties.

Link here.

Psychopathic personality disorder – or psychopathy as it is commonly called – is one of the oldest and most researched mental health diagnoses. The first account of psychopathy seems to be a short text from 1786 by the American physician Benjamin Rush who described a mysterious medical condition that he called anomia – and later moral derangement – where people allegedly lost the ability to distinguish between good and evil. Although his work is highly speculative, it sketched out the idea of ‘the psychopath’ in a way that could be passed on to a scientific audience: as a biological disorder so extreme that it impairs the innate human capacity for moral attitudes and prosocial behaviours.

In modern science, psychopaths are typically described with reference to concrete symptoms, like a lack of empathy, remorse and conscience, or more explicit behavioural signs, like predatory violence, pathological lying and impaired impulse control. As the prominent psychopathy researcher Robert Hare writes in his book Without Conscience (1993):

"Psychopaths are social predators who charm, manipulate, and ruthlessly plow their way through life, leaving a broad trail of broken hearts, shattered expectations, and empty wallets. Completely lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they selfishly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret."

The psychopath has also become a well-known figure of fascination in popular culture, frequently portrayed in bestselling novels and cinematic thrillers. One of the more jarring examples is the assassin Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem in the movie No Country for Old Men (2007). Utterly deprived of any emotional resonance, Chigurh wanders through the arid Texas landscape as he slaughters innocent people like cattle. Though characters such as Chigurh are, of course, works of fiction and not serious attempts to portray real people clinically diagnosed with psychopathy, Chigurh-like characters still animate many of the central traits associated with psychopathy, such as emotional detachment and moral emptiness.

However, there’s a problem with this idea of psychopathy. While it has been researched across hundreds of empirical studies – especially since the explosion of research in the late-1990s – there is still remarkably little evidence that corroborates popularised claims about the diagnosis. Despite enthusiasm among researchers in the 1990s and 2000s, when a few studies seemed to validate theories about psychopathy, the past two decades have been sobering. Today, virtually every single claim about psychopathy has been either thoroughly refuted or failed to find empirical support in experimental settings. Psychopathy may not exist at all.

One annoying thing about the "Stardew Planner" tool is that it assumes you've cleared every bush from your farm; I like to keep them as decoration, and situate things strategically around and between them. So the only way for me to know how to plan around bushes is to build in game.

But! I found out that a fish pond can fit perfectly between a patch of bushes on the "beach farm" map:

( large image is large )

I often struggle to make fish ponds look "natural" in terms of integration with the environment, so this is quite nice.

I wonder whether or not to move my farmhouse to this nice green area. The frustrating thing is that there's no fast travel to Cindersap, so you have to walk from the top of the farm map to the bottom to get there... I hope ConcernedApe adds Cindersap totems in 1.7. u_u;

Have been advised to stop browsing Tumblr because it is "transparently bad" for my mental health. Probably good advice. Even little things can send me into a really awful spiral at this point, and its gets worse and worse every year.

Been rotating how to create an original species themed around CMYK color palettes, called the "c'myk" or something similar because it's funny to be that on-the-nose. The problem is that I have a lot of ideas for their basic color distribution, possible mutations of the "palette", etc, but not of what sort of clade the creatures actually are. I want them to have wings, but am torn between sparkle-mammalian, dino-avian, or draconic-reptilian. All four colors would be pigment-based, obviously. This is actually as much a fantasy feature as extra limbs or magic powers, if you'll believe it!

Most tetrapods get blue and green coloration from structural color - Tyndall effect, iridescence, etc. Blue organic pigments do exist in nature, though - Crustacyanin is a fun one. The Turaco family is the only bird clade known to have true green pigment - other birds overlay yellow pigment over a non-iridescent blue structural color (created from black pigment), create green iridescence from structural effects on black-pigmented feathers, etc. Here's a bit from Wikipedia on the turaco's unique pigments:

The plumage of go-away-birds and plantain-eaters is mainly grey and white. The turacos on the other hand are brightly coloured birds, usually blue, green or purple. The green colour in turacos comes from turacoverdin, the only true green pigment in birds known to date. Other "greens" in bird colors result from a yellow pigment such as some carotenoid, combined with the prismatic physical structure of the feather itself which scatters the light in a particular way and giving a blue colour.

Turaco wings contain the red pigment turacin, unlike in other birds where red colour is due to carotenoids. Both pigments are derived from porphyrins and only known from the Musophagidae into the 21st century, but especially the little-researched turacoverdin might have relatives in other birds. The incidence of turacoverdin in relation to habitat is of interest to scientists, being present in forest species but absent in savanna- and acacia-living species.

The reason you never see green or blue mammals is a combination of two factors: one, our clade's pigmentation gamut is limited to melanins. The brightest and most saturated colors in mammal fur - fox and tiger orange, lion tamarin gold, bongo chestnut - all come from phaeomelanin. It's also present in mammalian skin: in humans, outside of its contribution to certain hair color, phaeomelanin is most concentrated in our lips, nipples, and genitalia. (And, in those of us who have them, the freckles.)

Second, mammalian hair is too structurally simple to produce elaborate structural effects. Collagen structures in skin can allow skin to appear blue, and feathers can create both iridescent and non-iridescent color by manipulating their own preexisting complexity. Golden moles have structural oddities in their hairs that produce simple rainbow iridescence - but, as the entire family of animals is blind burrowers, they can't perceive their own appearance, so no sexual-selective pressures will ever make those colors more overt.

Bright blue in mammals is thus limited to skin. Mandrill and Golden snub-nosed monkey faces, for example. Literal blue-balls are amusingly also a feature in primates - the mandrill yet again, the vervet monkey. I think I'm going to copy a paywalled National Geographic article onto here, actually.

Unrelatedly: When you are art a bookstore or a library, and you see a gaggle of teenagers and one of them has a Gir hoodie or a fuzzy cat-ear headband in the year 2026, that is a blessing and you should be grateful.

made with nex3's grid generator

Blue is original; orchre is a red/blue channel swap. Red/green channel swap, GBR rotation, BRG rotation, and green/blue channel swap under cut.

( Read more... )

As Neocities is still blocked by Bing (and search engines that use Bing's indexing, like DDG), I used Google to find these sites.

The Meerkat's Burrow

Dee Dreslooh's dragons used to be all over the web. Good to be able to place a name on her. You'll also notice elsewhere on the page that (pre-brony) MLP sensibilities were part of the cyberpet scene, alongside the influences from Japanese media, and of course the giant influence of Anne Mcaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern - the novels about psychic, alien, color-coded dragons that wholesale invented the trope of the dragon-rider.

Shywell

"Jona's Weyr" has haunted me for decades - I had remembered the art close to crystal-clear (unusual for me, on account of my awful memory issues) in my mind, yet the name of the website and artist eluded me the entire time; only now, finally, can I reach catharsis, thanks to Shywell's own memory and records. While there don't seem to be any real direct records of Jona's wyverns left online, as the site had already shrunk into a shadow of its former self by the time Wayback first captured it... I remember those wyverns clearer than most things in my life: wings half-folded in front of then in midair, serpentine, small and legless. (This was before Dragonology, published in 2003, popularized amphiptere for winged, legless dragons.) The background image of the waybacked 2002 version of the page is evidence my memory failed me less than usual. The only thing I misremembered, it seems, was the heads being snakelike, instead of fully draconic.

Her "crystal wyverns" my first exposure to the concept of wyverns, and I've longed for those serpents ever since. I have no idea how old I was when I first found the site. Considering when I was born... I was probably very young. Her website, according to one of her affiliate sites, went down in 2005.

Arborwin

Don't remember these pets as much, but evidence that traditional art cyberpet agencies existed. For a scene I largely associate with the dragon/cat/wolf cluster of creature enthusiast, I forget that a lot of horse enjoyers were making pets too: pegasi and unicorns ranging from MLP-like to shockingly realistic. Naturalistic coats that display a love for the colors and patterns of the equine race, in addition to rainbow and pastel.

Unrelated to cyberpets, but related to the overarching Y2K era fascination with "virtual pets," "artificial life," and technology-based animals in general, I also found a fansite dedicated to a specific operating system of pseudo-Tamagotchi, known unofficially as the "bunnyrom" or officially as Jia Yuan.

Having such a bad memory is genuinely so painful.

It's like a never-ending feeling that I'm just stupid or don't care enough when I can't remember people I promised I'd never forget, places and things that were once important to me. I can't remember most of childhood, I can't remember most of adolescence, I can't remember most of college, I can barely remember anything a week ago. I felt the memory of what my Grandmother's face and voice were like slipping away even before she died.

When I'm the only person who can seemingly remember something, it horrifies me, because what I remember is a shadow of a shadow of a memory at best.

"If you cared, you would have remembered it."

"Why did you only just now remember it," when it's a miracle I remember anything at all.

Everything's a fog. If continuity of memory is necessary for consciousness, I barely count as a conscious being at all.

Visit by clicking this link.

This website was an absolute BITCH to hunt down evidence of it having ever existed, let me tell you. But I was able, at the very least, to eventually find record of its url to plug into the Wayback machine.

You navigate through a simple little text adventure to find pets to adopt onto your website! Click areas on the map (....on the homepage, not on this dreamwidth post) to navigate. :)

A one or two pages seem to not be archived on Wayback, though... so far most seem fine. Sometimes, though, Wayback will take you to a capture from after the website went down even if it has better captures to show you; if you can, see if there's an earlier capture on Wayback's timeline that's actually preserved. (The tiger cub page has this issue.)

In addition, you can get some "pet supplies" from the town on this page. These are purely for decorative and roleplay purposes - you can see them being used by a website that adopted from the island of Twiluu here. The objects aren't edited directly onto the pets themselves on that page, but overlaid behind or in front of the pet image.

You'll find even more pets if you brave the wilderness, of course... do you want to play in this place, with me? Dive into the bay for sea dragons. Watch a fairy.

The "forest stream" page, though, seems to be permanently lost, as its only capture is from 2023... long after Geocities as a whole shut down. In addition, there appears to have been a "castle" area that was never properly saved to wayback. The link to it, when it was functional, was the little island near the peninsula.

• "Castle Main" is archived, but the page before and after it are permanently lost.
• "Corridor 2" is archived, but the pages behind and ahead of it in sequence are permanently lost.
• "Curtain" is archived, but the page that leads to it is permanently lost. The pet that was available to adopt from it, the blue Draelon Cat, is also not archived, although you can see an adopted one (as well as yellow and pink ones, which I don't remember how to get) here.

And if you adopt, read the rules. It's just nice to respect people's wishes, even if (regardless of how the former siterunner may be IRL) it feels like they're stone-etched the wishes of the long dead.

Let me know what you discover!

EDIT:

• got a working capture of DarkCastle.
• got a working capture of TwoDoors
• got a working capture of Yarn. The alt text on the yarn image says: "I'm a magical ball of yarn! Remember these words: "tootsie roll!"  .... you may need it later!". Unfortunately, it seems like the "ghostrick" page that goes next in the sequence isn't archived.
• The Blue Draelon Cat gif is still not available.
• The skeleton page is still not available.