Latest Posts by sieveplayer - Page 4

I recently discovered laundry stripping and y’all, no matter how much of a crock of shit you think fast fashion is, you’re underestimating.

I've been getting into the habit of drawing traditionally as a way to wind down before bed. Granted it's while my room is dim as fuck so I mostly get out scribbly sketches from it but either way

Pomni is my boyfriend

Ragatha and Pomni should be yuri

And I hate Jax and I don't trust him <3

In 1944 a kitten named George (short for General Electric) was saved from drowning by a U.S. Navy crew member. George was then photographed and given a liberty card and detailed health record. Source.

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

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

Video game I saw in a dream. It was in this low poly style like an older video game. You play as this character I think was meant to be a lamb, or maybe a weird mix of a lamb a mouse and a rabbit, (while not really looking like any of those things) and you’re running away from a wolf. Your objective is to last as long as possible before the wolf catches and eats you.

The house you’re running in is endless and bizarrely put together like most building interiors in dreams are (like the infinite toilet dream dimension on Reddit lol) the layout of the house is pretty detailed, you can stop and hide in places like closets or bins while the wolf looks for you, you can go up and down stairs and into rooms etc.

You never actually know where the wolf is or how close it is to you until it appears in your line of sight, it makes no noise and the game gives you no way of knowing where it is, and it’s pretty unpredictable it doesnt move at a consistent pace. When the wolf catches you there’s an animation showing it eating your character

Borzoi White Mohair with zipper (box for pajamas), glass eyes

Nahhhh not a therapist saying this what do you think you get paid for

Me as a parent

hallucigenia fossils

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

One of my favorite gags from contemporary SCP was from this article about a pointlessly dangerous extradimensional convenience store with layer upon layer of fatal death traps installed at every stage in the shopping process, one of which is a pit full of poisonous snakes below the checkout line. And then there’s a footnote saying that rather than being a confusion of terms between “venomous” and “poisonous” the snakes themselves are actually fangless and completely docile but anyone who falls into the pit and sees the snakes comes under a compulsion to start stuffing the snakes in their mouth

Three Suns

Three Suns is a sci-fi setting I’ve been making for use in roleplaying games like Mothership and Stars Without Number and maybe any other sci-fi system I find interesting. 

The basic history is that by the year 2100 the Earth went to shit, in spite of greater investment into space than our own world and knowledge of extraterrestrial life, climate change still ravished the world. World War 3 started over dwindling resources and Earth’s colonies on the moon, Mars and the belt were cut off from Earth. These colonies eventually underwent enormous civil strife and warfare due to being cut off from needed resources from Earth. 

In response to this, 3 projects were initiated to get out of dodge and settle other star systems: The Ararat, the Zheng He, and the Basilisk, though only the first two were proper generation ships, with the Basilisk being a data ship that I’ll talk more about later. These ships completed their journeys and the Ararat even went on to continue their journey and settle two more star systems before being retired after a failed attempt to conquer an alien civilization. All settled systems were more or less isolated from one another until the discovery of Slip Space in the late 2500s.  

Slip Space is essentially your classic alternate universe used to travel at FTL speeds, however Slip Space is not empty and host to all sorts of things not allowed under the rules of our reality. In essence, it’s the source of weird SCP shit you’d see in your average Mothership module and also the reason people are placed under cryostasis during FTL trips. Despite this, Slip Space FTL has allowed the previously isolated star systems to contact one another in a matter of months. 

However, the Sol and Alpha Centauri systems have rebuilt themselves drastically differently than those settled by generation ships, with the former abandoning capitalism and adopting ideologies inspired by anarchism and socialism and the latter retaining capitalism and perceiving themselves as the last true successors to the old UN. Naturally this has led to conflict that has led to both factions scrambling to use Slip Space for resources, prestige and simply denying their rivals access to nearby star systems. Now it’s the year 2626 AD, you are one of the poor schmucks sent into the void risking death and worse to explore new frontiers and get paid.

We need more scary infinite variants of manmade environments like the Infinite IKEA or the Backrooms.

May I suggest, The Lot:

Been making Post Apocalyptic Pride Patches ! These are for tradin n givin away at Wastelans Weekend >:3

Baki and Shattered Pixel Dungeon, so a rogue-like with naked buff men beating monsters with their fists.

fun fact!! it turns out that now when u make a new blog, tumblr forces you to follow 3-4 people before you can change your icon or modify your blog in any way!! this, of course, means that, yes, some of the "potential bots" many of us have been automatically blocking could have possibly been genuine new users who were only just seconds in to having an account!!! tumblr is literally screwing new users over!!!!

The wildest thing about the reactions on that dinosaur post is that I never said it's wrong to point out inaccuracies, but made fun of people who point them out in an overtly rude way. Are these particular dinonerds taking offense to that because they feel that rudeness is justified, or something? It's important to them to be mean about it? Or did they just imagine I said "never educate people" because their defensiveness is that hair-trigger? I didn't have a negative view of them before at all. It was supposed to be more of a friendly ribbing of a post. Now in only hours I've come to feel that the internet dinosaur community may have some uhhhhhhhhhhhh mighty peculiar characters to say the least

I mean what is this. WHAT is this. Who is out here insinuating that inaccurate movie dinosaurs are a slippery slope to an ecological apocalypse. Good lord, calm the heckarooni down, that is not remotely how anything works, society's collective understanding of the environment is indeed dismal but I'd actually bet good money that it is not significantly impacted by the number of people who have an obsolete mental image of a Spinosaurus, and frankly I don't care for the implication that "lack of education" or "scientific ignorance" is what's destroying our world rather than, you know, the corporate greed of people who absolutely do know better. This kind of outlook is more or less blaming the poorer, lower class majority for issues they have no power over at all. "The Properly Educated are the heroes who hold back the teeming throngs of mindless zombie idiots from annihilating society" is to put it gently not a terribly realistic or fair perspective. It's really in fact more of an anime villain monologue.

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

and its gonna rule

i need that

hii, i wanted to ask what you didn't like about ringworld, i was going to start reading it, but now i'm wondering if i should just not lol

I didn't like.. most of it, tbh.

It's very misogynistic and has a weirdly lukewarm/probably for the best :/ stance on eugenics, the characters are either complete cartoons, or truly awful people. The protagonist is just a vile person, but in that author self-insert way where he can only be validated, Teela is written like a precocious child and cocksleeve for the protagonist (and when she disapears, a new cocksleeve immediately replaces her.))

The aliens are also really stupidly written, the carnivores are warlike meatheads and the herbivores are pathetic and cowardly. The exploration of the ringworld isn't even fun because when they get there they mostly run past all of the inhabitants because they determine theyre just stupid savages and need to keep looking until they find civilized people, which was very jarring and frustrating after finishing several of Le Guin's Hainish books.

The scale of the ringworld is cool, and they way puppeteers look is cool. That's about it.

I have a folder called Time is a Flat Circle in which I collect evidence of humanity. Here is most of them.

Map of my current fantasy world, Theia. The one on the top is an updated version of the map with some improved borders, bottom is a more outdated version of the map, but with accompanying lore, though I'll fully update everything in the future. Main premise is that the world is undergoing a cold war between major mago-industrial powers with one story I'm working on taking place within the Io Consortium, which is an unstable megacorporate state being fought over by the Demonic Confederacy and the Avalonian Empire.

be free!!

Some sketchy concept stuff that I'm posting because I liked it but couldn't be bothered to refine it into an actual artwork.

These submarine behemoths are the Mermares (Clade Euhippocampiformes), secondarily aquatic descendants of the domestic donkey. The group first appeared around 29 million years post-cataclysm, in the late Nerian stage of the Diluvian period. They evolved from an animal called the Seabra, a descendant of the Donkey which adapted to exploit a niche with, thus far, zero competition - that of a large marine herbivore.

On earth, marine ecosystems are notable for the distinct lack of vascular plant life, a condition caused by a number of factors - most notably the osmotic stress caused by the saltwater. Most photosynthesis is carried out by algae. On Spero, however, things are different. Because Spero's oceans were generated relatively recently, from extraterrestrial ice particles, there just hasn't been enough time for erosion and the water cycle to deposit dissolved minerals in the water. As a result, Spero's seas are made of freshwater - a much more tolerable condition for most plants, and thus the diversity of marine vascular plants is much, much higher than on earth. Also, due to the flatness of the flooded landscape and lack of any real tectonic features, enormous swathes of the seabed lie within the photic zone, less than 200 meters from the surface. Thus, endless expanses of marine grasslands - the "seagrass prairies" - extend from the shore, often for hundreds of miles before the water finally gets too deep for photosynthesis to occur.

All of this plant life is an extremely attractive prospect for herbivores, and it was likely what drew the ancestral Seabra to forage in shallow coastal meadows in the first place. But as the oceans got deeper and life adapted, the Seabra had to adapt in kind - their hind legs rotated backwards to act as a pair of propulsive flukes, their forelimbs developed into steering flippers, and their nostrils retreated to sit on their foreheads.

One notable feature of the Mermares is hyperphalangy, a condition where the fingers have too many bones. It's very common in large marine tetrapods in Earth's history - whales and dolphins, Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs, and Mosasaurs all exhibited hypoerphalangy to some degree - and seems to be associated with the specialization of the limbs into flippers. We would expect to see similar patterns in marine lineages on Spero. What's unique about the Mermares, however, is the sheer number of extra phalanges in the finger; at least fifteen in the shorter-finned species, and more than thirty in the longest-finned forms. And because Mermares - being equids - only possess one digit per limb, the result is a single long chain of flat, squarish bones which, in some cases, can reach over forty feet long - the longest arms ever to exist.

These ridiculous appendages produce a lot of drag and are merely adequate for steering and stabilization. So why do the Mermares have them?

The answer is that they're weapons. And particularly devastating ones, at that.

Mermares use their flagellating flippers as bludgeons, against both predators and conspecifics. The flippers are connected to powerful neck muscles and can be swung forward with impressive force; combined with a well-timed twisting of the giant horse's torso, the huge flippers can impact hard enough to shatter bone and pulverize flesh. The flippers themselves do not escape unscathed, and older individuals often have scarred or mangled flipper-tips from numerous battles over the years; but it's a small price to pay for survival.

When not being used against their enemies, the flippers may be folded back against the sides of the animal to reduce drag, or used as props to keep the animal's belly up off the seabed when feeding. Mermares spend up to 18 hours per day grazing, using their long neck to crop aquatic grasses and other vegetation in a wide arc without moving their bodies and occasionally dipping up to the surface to breathe. Mermares are keystone species in the seagrass prairies; as hindgut fermenters, they are not as efficient at processing plant matter as ruminants like goats, and produce large amounts of nutrient-rich dung which acts as fertilizer for the meadows and helps keep the environment productive. The dung also acts as food for a variety of fish and invertebrates.

Let's look at some of the Mermare's diversity, shall we?

Drepanarion (center right) One of the smaller Mermares, Drepanarion nonetheless grows to nearly 12 meters (39 feet) long. It is immediately recognizable by the bold black-and-yellow striping on the heads and necks of the stallions, and by the tall, narrow nuchal crest which extends from the withers and makes the stocky body look even more powerful. Unlike most other Mermares, which live in small groups of less than ten individuals, Drepanarion can be found in herds of over a hundred in the seagrass prairies of the Savanian (41 - 50 million years post-cataclysm). These nomadic throngs graze patches of seagrass nearly to the roots before moving on, giving the ecosystem time to regrow before returning in a few years' time. Drepanarion exhibits the most extreme sexual dimorphism of any Mermare, with stallions being both larger and more brightly coloured than mares; during the annual rut, males will fight each other in brutal bludgeoning matches to establish dominance and secure mates. To this end, they have some of the most extreme flipper anatomy of any Mermare; though not especially long (indeed, they have the shortest flippers of any derived genera), each phalanx bone has a protruding bony tubercle on the anterior edge which extends into a keratinous knob. These knobs both protect the flipper during combat and focus the force of the blow into a smaller area, dealing more damage.

Hipposeidon (bottom left) First appearing in the early Imberian (50 million years post-cataclysm), Hipposeidon is the largest of all Mermares and, indeed, the largest animal ever to exist on Spero, with stallions regularly reaching over 24 meters (80 feet) long (mares are slightly smaller). Extremely large specimens may even reach 30 meters (100 feet), although this is rare. This ludicrous size - nearly rivaling even the mighty Blue Whale of Earth - is possible only due to the sheer abundance of its food. Hipposeidon appears at the height of the seagrass prairie's extent, and can pack away almost 900 kilograms (1900 pounds) of seagrass per day. This superlative food requirement has important consequences for Hipposeidon's behaviour; this animal is migratory. Seagrass prairies are extremely productive ecosystems, but nonetheless Spero is a seasonal world; as the summer growth gives way to the winter die-back, the greatest of the Mermares must migrate across the equator to seek out a continuous food source to fuel its immense bulk. In this way Hipposeidon experiences a perpetual summer, interrupted only by the biannual migration from north to south and back again. Female Hipposeidon are pregnant for about one year, timing the birth of the single large foal with arrival to the feeding grounds; the six-meter-long foal enjoys a long childhood nursing and playing in shallow summer waters, gathering strength before making the long swim across the barren tropical zone to pastures new.

Bathypegasus (top left) The last and possibly the weirdest of the great Mermares, Bathypegasus is the only member of the clade which is not a grazer. Instead, it is a specialist feeder on pelagic, free-floating ferns. These ferns are a seasonal bounty, growing in huge numbers in the tropical summers of the late Imberian (60 million years post-cataclysm), where the planetary ring system shades out large portions of the planet for half the year. A close relative of Hipposeidon, Bathypegasus has left its ties to the seabed behind, becoming a fast, powerful swimmer which spends most of its life far above the sea floor. Its flippers have adapted to be even more ludicrously long - the longest forearms of any animal, ever, with each one measuring nearly 14 meters (45 feet) in length and each containing at least 35 individual bones. No longer used to prop the animal up off the seabed, these whiplike flippers are narrow and streamlined and can be whipped through the water at speeds of nearly 20 meters per second (that's over 40 mph) - the most extreme weaponry of any Mermare, and used to great effect against predators. Bathypegasus, like Hipposeidon, is migratory, following the blooms of pelagic ferns across Spero's oceans. Thanks to this midwater diet it is the only genus of Mermare to survive past the mid-Imberian extinction, when rising sea levels and steepening coastal slopes caused the seagrass prairies to disappear. Bathypegasus finally died out in the Ultimoxerian stage, around 75 million years post-cataclysm, the last and weirdest of the giant marine horses.

If you're writing a story and a voice in your head says 'maybe this is too much fucked up mad science, you should dial back the fucked up mad science', that is the devil talking.