Removed Twitter Account From Bio, Updated My Discord Account Name

The Early Therocene: 30 million years post-establishment

In Plains Sight: Life in the Noderan Plains

The continent of Nodera is thriving in the beginning of the new era of HP-02017's history: the Therocene Era. New forms of hamsters have gotten bigger and bigger as time went on, and thirty million years later they have finally attained the niches of megafauna, and spread upon the continents once the land bridges became exposed during a brief period of glaciation that marked the end of the Rodentocene Era 5 million years earlier.

Today the ecosystems of Nodera have attained a diversity like never before, as enormous creatures of various clades have spread throughout its grasslands and filled numerous herbivore niches. Most prevalent are the bipedal hopping boingos, large descendants of the jerryboas that have become widespread as the predominant plains grazers, with the boldly-striped streaky zibba (Saltozebroides melanoleuca) being one such example. Another common grazer is the massive Noderan plains mison (Buffalomys noderus), the heaviest megafauna of Nodera.

Despite competition from the mison and the boingos, the hamtelopes of Nodera are also thriving in the plains. Some have evolved to become much smaller, feeding on low-growing softer plants in the plains, such as the lesser plains phonie (Equinomimus minimus), while others went the opposite route, becoming the towering long-necked girats, such as the axehorn girat (Altocervimys securiceros) which became high browsers specializing on the sparse, thorny trees that grow sporadically throughout the open grassland.

Such a wide diversity of herbivores in one same ecosystem is made possible by the unique phenomenon of niche partitioning, where each herbivore specializes in eating different plants, or different parts of the same plants, and thus can coexist with minimal competition. Tall, tough grasses grow in abundance in the Noderan plains, and the mison greatly relish the leaves- but not the sheaths and tough woody stems. Once the mison have passed, the boingos move in: with teeth adapted for abrasive vegetation they feast upon the woody stems and twigs that the mison ignore, and once the boingos too move on, the grass begins producing tender new regrowth, which small hamtelopes such as the phonies in turn feed upon.

The abundance of herbivores brings about in turn a diversity of predators, which specialize to hunt in the plains. Ratbats-of-prey such as the northern striped hawkbat (Nyctaccipiter borealis) soar above the plains seeking out small prey, such as jerryboas and small hamtelopes, while on the ground, large carnivorous fearrets, known as the carnohams, reign as the top predator of the open grassland. The largest of them, the lion-sized grassland nottiger (Pseudopanthera tigrileo), is Nodera's biggest carnivore, and specializes on hamtelopes, boingos, and the young of girats and mison, though adults are far too large for them to tackle.

This diversity is but a tiny fraction of the large new life that has dawned on the planet in the Early Therocene. In other continents and other biomes, thousands of other species thrive and evolve: all from one single species millions of years ago.

It’s my favorite thing when a lesbian is just like “I got extra fries with my meal, gay rights” or an enby is like “wow trans rights I just got a free gift card to the movies” or a bi dude is like “finally found a plant that won’t die, queer rights I guess.” Like that is the funniest shit I don’t care.

Chicago Business District, 1898.

Catcalling :3

Update on me and this tumblr

TL;DR: I am coming back to tumblr but also kind of not really. Also I have no idea how to use this site or what I’m doing I stopped using this account because of I wanted to avoid a flood of bad takes about the Russia-Ukraine War. I thought I won’t come back until the war is over, but I underestimated how long that would take and I suppose by now the flood of takes are over.

I’m still not going to blog politics here; if you want my political opinions I’d be happy to share them on Discord. This blog is for random cool stuff and worldbuilding. Also since I haven’t really been active since June last year there’s probably all sorts of changes to tumblr and to my friends that I’m unaware about. I’d like to know more. Definitely a lot has changed, for both good and bad, in my life since then.

Probably still will be a little inactive in the near future because I’m low on ideas and motivation for worldbuilding.

July morning walk along the lake path.

it's so annoying seeing posts about Jewish culture—cutesy posts about fighting with g-d that appeal to Christian atheists' religious trauma, posts with Jewish music, posts with pictures of beautiful Jews—getting tens or even hundreds of thousands of notes, but the moment someone makes a post about antisemitism—about how it's built in to Western society, about how it's insidious and creeping, about how you've probably internalized it, about the difficulties we face and the grief we feel—they fail to break jumblr containment. Don't get me wrong, I love that goyim are celebrating Jewish culture as something beautiful and wonderful, but that can't be all we are to you. We're real people with real problems that you can't just ignore in favor of reblogging posts about bagels or whatever

Truth

I've heard High Valyrian has no words for grandparents, is that right? And what word might exist for that role?

It sure didn't—until I created them.

There are four terms:

kekepa "father's father"

mumuña "mother's mother"

kepāzma "mother's father"

muñāzma "father's mother"

In a conlang, there are always words that aren't there because they're supposed to not be there, and words that aren't there because they haven't been created yet. That latter category is always going to be much, much larger than the former.