Any Space Lore?

Alien Pose Prompts

I was thinking about how it can be difficult to figure out our own creatures' anatomies because there are no direct references to draw from, and how I tend to draw my aliens in the same poses, and boom, this happened. Prompts to practice and push the limits of your alien's anatomy :) Aimed at sophonts, but a lot of them can apply to non-sapient beasties too.

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Sleeping lightly or having a nap

Sleeping deeply after an exhausting day

Scratching an itch in a hard-to-reach place

Carrying an infant

Carrying another grown individual

Holding a piece of food

Sipping a liquid

Reaching for something high up

Making themselves as small as possible

Freezeframe of moving at topspeed

Relaxed, half resting position e.g. sitting or lounging

Inspecting a novel object

Cleaning themselves

Being cleaned by another individual

Fighting without weapons

Preparing to fight with a weapon

Showing casual affection displayed with any kind of loved one; family, friend, partner, etc.

Showing intense affection reserved for a specific kind of loved one

Yawning/stretching mouthparts to their full extent

Gripping a branch or high surface, trying not to fall off

Tripping or slipping on a wet surface

Actively balancing e.g. crossing a tightrope

Suddenly noticing something near them and getting spooked

Engaged in conversation

Treating an injury

For meat eaters: in the middle of a hunt For others: foraging and collecting food

Preparing food for a meal

Tending to a crop

Using a tool

Shaking or brushing something off their body

In a state they don’t usually live in e.g. aquatic being on land, terrestrial being in water

Putting on clothing or accessories

Getting a body modification e.g. tattoo, piercings

Using fine motor control to craft something

Trying to block out unpleasant stimuli e.g. covering ears, closing off nostrils

Reacting to an unpleasant stimulus

Loading cargo for transport

Working on building construction

Riding a vehicle or pack creature

Squeezing into a small space

ftr I am forever going to be bitter that the post I wanted to be "let's talk about extinct ecosystems and how cool they are!" got derailed into yet another post just talking about a single taxon like the millions of other posts on palaeoblr

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

The power of stealing a name.

“Jerboa”

The quaint rodent, the unique and lovable creature. Famous for its amusing and impressive skill at leaping and bouncing. An iconic species of the deserts of North Africa.

The first French nuclear bomb in the Sahara: Named after the jerboa.

France, in its imperial occupation of North and West Africa, used colonial Algeria’s Saharan landscape as the site of its first tests. The very first nuclear bomb unleashed by France, detonated on 13 February 1960, was Gerboise Bleue. The day before the bomb was detonated, French troops visited Algerians living in the test region, giving local residents chain necklaces to be worn. France detonated the bomb. Then French troops went back to collect the necklaces, which were actually measuring devices, meant to detect effects of the bomb. The French troops collected the data. But they didn’t tell the Algerian locals that they had just been poisoned, some of them fatally. They didn’t warn Algerians about the long-term effects of fallout, or what radiation would do to them, as residual poisoning continued to kill for decades. For many years, local people would harvest abandoned metals from testing sites, to refashion into jewelry, shelter, and other items. The French government knew that the remnants were toxic, but still failed to warn residents. After hundreds of thousands died in over 7 years of war, Algeria gained independence from France in 1962. Even afterwards, France detonated another 13 bombs in Algeria. The French government would not pass legislation providing compensation for victims of its nuclear bomb testing until 2010.

“Aldebaran”

The conspicuous orange-hued star Aldebaran. The seasonal arrival of this star, visible in the sky, has auspicious meaning. Especially in Polynesia where the stars, constellations, are sometimes referred to as “the roof of voyaging.” Stars guide oceanic navigation, and also guide food cultivation and harvest. For centuries and for many cultures across many islands across these seas, when the star became visible, would reemerge after an absence, the heliacal rising of Aldebaran in the skies of the tropical South Pacific signaled the beginning of the growing season for breadfruit, a quintessential resource across the Pacific and an iconic staple food. Breadfruit, of pivotal importance to food, sustenance. Aldebaran arrives, food can be cultivated.

Aldebaran brings life.

The first French nuclear bomb in Polynesia: Named Aldebaran.

After Algeria formally gained independence, France brought their weapons to imperial “possessions” in the South Pacific, to so-called “French Polynesia.” In May 1963, about 300 French personnel arrived at Moruroa, where 50,000 cubic meters of coral reef were obliterated to build access channels for the scientific/military infrastructure at what was designed as a testing/study site. Eventually, in the 1960s, over 10,000 French personnel and settlers (including civilian entrepreneurs and real estate developers) arrived in French Polynesia. The first bomb, detonated on 2 July 1966, was Aldebaran. French personnel recorded the environmental effects of radiation poisoning and fallout, but despite the immediate and extreme danger to Indigenous Polynesians, the French government did not declassify the results of those environmental studies until nearly 2010. By 1996, France had test 193 nuclear bombs in Polynesia. No victim officially compensated until after 2010. After the detonation of the bomb Aldebaran, over 400 kilometers away, drinking water at the notable island Mangareva contained 6 times the average amount of radiation; soil contained 50 times more radiation; unwashed garden vegetables contained 666 times more radiation; and, 3 months later, the rain falling on Mangareva contained 11 million times more radiation than the expected amount.

Thunderstorms, carrying poison. People hundreds of kilometers away had to hide from the rain.

Aldebaran brings death.

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The scale of the insult. To appropriate names, important to a culture, to a place, and then to ascribe those same names to the weapons that would then literally rain death upon those same people and landscapes.

EMERGENCY FUNDS FOR SICKLE CELL DISEASES.

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waiting patiently for their kind friends and anonymous friend to continue to give support for this hard time .

Gofundme link

GoGetFunding

SICKLE CELL DISEASE

⁹Hi. I am the proud mother of my beautiful daughter, grace helbet. At two weeks old, my daughter was diagnosed with sickle cell , my daughte

Thank you for your kindness and generosity❤️

So what I’ve learned from the past couple months of being really loud about being a bi woman on Tumblr is: A lot of young/new LGBT+ people on this site do not understand that some of the stuff they’re saying comes across to other LGBT+ people as offensive, aggressive, or threatening. And when they actually find out the history and context, a lot of them go, “Oh my god, I’m so sorry, I never meant to say that.”

Like, “queer is a slur”: I get the impression that people saying this are like… oh, how I might react if I heard someone refer to all gay men as “f*gs”. Like, “Oh wow, that’s a super loaded word with a bunch of negative freight behind it, are you really sure you want to put that word on people who are still very raw and would be alarmed, upset, or offended if they heard you call them it, no matter what you intended?”

So they’re really surprised when self-described queers respond with a LOT of hostility to what feels like a well-intentioned reminder that some people might not like it. 

That’s because there’s a history of “political lesbians”, like Sheila Jeffreys, who believe that no matter their sexual orientation, women should cut off all social contact with men, who are fundamentally evil, and only date the “correct” sex, which is other women. Political lesbians claim that relationships between women, especially ones that don’t contain lust, are fundamentally pure, good, and  unproblematic. They therefore regard most of the LGBT community with deep suspicion, because its members are either way too into sex, into the wrong kind of sex, into sex with men, are men themselves, or somehow challenge the very definitions of sex and gender. 

When “queer theory” arrived in the 1980s and 1990s as an organized attempt by many diverse LGBT+ people in academia to sit down and talk about the social oppressions they face, political lesbians like Jeffreys attacked it harshly, publishing articles like “The Queer Disappearance of Lesbians”, arguing that because queer theory said it was okay to be a man or stop being a man or want to have sex with a man, it was fundamentally evil and destructive. And this attitude has echoed through the years; many LGBT+ people have experience being harshly criticized by radical feminists because being anything but a cis “gold star lesbian” (another phrase that gives me war flashbacks) was considered patriarchal, oppressive, and basically evil.

And when those arguments happened, “queer” was a good umbrella to shelter under, even when people didn’t know the intricacies of academic queer theory; people who identified as “queer” were more likely to be accepting and understanding, and “queer” was often the only label or community bisexual and nonbinary people didn’t get chased out of. If someone didn’t disagree that people got to call themselves queer, but didn’t want to be called queer themselves, they could just say “I don’t like being called queer” and that was that. Being “queer” was to being LGBT as being a “feminist” was to being a woman; it was opt-in.

But this history isn’t evident when these interactions happen. We don’t sit down and say, “Okay, so forty years ago there was this woman named Sheila, and…” Instead we queers go POP! like pufferfish, instantly on the defensive, a red haze descending over our vision, and bellow, “DO NOT TELL ME WHAT WORDS I CANNOT USE,” because we cannot find a way to say, “This word is so vital and precious to me, I wouldn’t be alive in the same way if I lost it.” And then the people who just pointed out that this word has a history, JEEZ, way to overreact, go away very confused and off-put, because they were just trying to say.

But I’ve found that once this is explained, a lot of people go, “Oh wow, okay, I did NOT mean to insinuate that, I didn’t realize that I was also saying something with a lot of painful freight to it.”

And that? That gives me hope for the future.

today i have done some drugs, read some gamebooks, and im gonna cook burgers for dinner

and its gonna rule

i need that

Today America has elected the first Oompa-Loompa American as President.