Help What Were Those Little Graspy Hands That Held Stuff People Used To Wear On Their Skirts Called

TO THOSE MAKING NATIVE OCS

I see this a lot, no one has actual names, or any reference for names, that are legit Native American, varying among the tribes, for their characters.

Babynames.com and shit like that will give you names made up by white people.

However, I’ve got your solution.

Native-Languages  is a good website to turn to for knowledge on a lot of native things, including native names. If you’re unsure about the names you’ve picked, they even have a list of made up names here!

Please don’t trust names like babynames.com for native names, they’re made up and often quite offensive to the cultures themselves.

My most favorite outfits from 2015 - pants edition I wish you all a wonderful day and a great new year’s eve! ｡◕‿◕｡

long-distance mech pilots don’t need to worry quite so much about traveling light. when you’re walking around in several tons of metal, especially one built to wander, you aren’t quite to the point of needing to choose which of two keepsakes you have room in your bag for— there’s plenty of space for both.

Things are different for interstellar knights.

You see, whether wandering alone or setting off on some quest for their lord, a knight’s only home is their armor. Anything they bring with them, they must carry within that armor, even through battles— and as such, every gram and every cubic centimeter can make the difference between life and death, and every calorie chosen to replace a keepsake can make the difference between survival and starvation. As such, a knight’s inventory is heavily optimized— and so is their armor itself. What matters more, the heating system or the EVA boosters? The extra fuel storage or the emergency release mechanisms? Pick one, and you’ll have no room for the other unless you can cut corners somewhere else. Every single element of a knight’s armor is there because they made the conscious decision to put it there. Every weapon they’ve attached to their shell had to replace some traditional aspect of a life support system. Every inch of their shells are packed full of every system that can fit until it’s tight against the pilot’s skin to leave them bruised whenever they exit their shell.

it doesn’t take long for them to realize which superfluous components are the weakest link.

They start small, at first— often as simple as a haircut to help a tighter helmet fit better. Some try to lose weight, but quickly regret it when they find themselves near starvation on some distant moon. The ones that survive past their first year are the ones that are willing to take things a bit further— the toes on both feet, to make room for a slight jump booster. One of their ribs, perhaps— replaced with a battery that connects to the armor through a cable that winds around bones and muscles. It’s only a matter of time before they do something about those bones and muscles too.

those who have only heard the stories will say that a knight’s armor is their home. Those who have met one, seen them exit their armor and seen just how little is left of the body inside— they will say that a knight’s armor is a part of their body. Integrated into them until they cannot survive without it. Both are wrong. Even some knights cannot pin down the true answer— what they really feel as they connect their armor to the components of it that they have placed inside of them. The best ones do, though. They know it well.

A knight’s armor is not a part of their body. Their body is a part of their armor— their home, to be renovated and optimized as they see fit. To be replaced, improved, amputated and eviscerated so that it can be remade into the glorious works of art that the heroes of the galaxy become as they charge into battle and become a story worth remembering.

As the armor learns to reach into your veins, pulling oxygen from the carbon dioxide you exhale and weaving it back into your blood, the space once taken up by inefficient organic lungs becomes the home of the heating system, warming you from within no matter what part of the void between stars you find yourself in. As it recycles amino acids into proteins again and infuses them back into what tissues remain, you’re free to remove your old digestive organs and find a home for your armor’s main computer, kept safe at the center of your shell. Many knights choose to put their own organic brain down there next to it, incidentally making room for more optical systems in their skulls.

Your armor is no longer simply “a part of you” and you are no longer simply “a part of it.” It is you. You are it. Your bones, its power cells, your organs its systems. You are its brain and its CPU in equal measure and its beautiful exterior plates, painted with the symbols of the lord you serve or simply the cause you stand for, will inspire others to take up arms themselves and let themselves become part of it.

your body, your home, your masterpiece

Chai tea bag + lil but of brown sugar + apple cider packet + 16 oz. mug of hot but not quite boiling water

it will not Fix You but like. maybe. maybe.

World Building

Types of Government

♛

⤷ anarchy

➝ society without enforced government

⤷ aristocracy

➝ small, elite ruling class holds power over lower socioeconomic strata ; members chosen based on wealth

⤷ autocracy

➝ controlled by one singular person of power without restraints

⤷ communism

➝ state owns and operates industry on behalf of the people ; citizens are apart of a classless society that distributes goods & services as needed

⤷ democracy

➝ power held by the people through voting in order to ensure fair representation and prevention of abuse of power

⤷ dictatorship

➝ power held by one person or a group of people who control the masses

⤷ fascism

➝ control of the people by promoting ancestral/cultural values & eradicating foreign influences

⤷ federalism

➝ union of smaller states which are self-governed yet united under a central government

⤷ junta

➝ militaristic rule after taking over by force

⤷ monarchy

➝ authority is vested in a single figure for life and passed down hereditarily ; level of power may vary from absolution to nonexistent

➝ constitutional monarchy: limited power as outlined in a constitution // absolute monarchy: unlimited power

⤷ oligarchy

➝ authoritative power rests with a small faction of people or families who are deemed worthy due to wealth, education, and/or family history

⤷ plutocracy

➝ ruled by the wealthy

⤷ republic

➝ democratic model in which the people elect representatives

⤷ socialism

➝ collective and cooperative ownership of production, opposed to private

⤷ stratocracy

➝ ruled by the military following wars and expansion

⤷ technocracy

➝ scientists are decision makers ; rulers are chosen based on experience/knowledge/skill

⤷ theocracy

➝ power rests with religious figures ; scriptural laws and legal codes are coincided

⤷ totalitarian

➝ total control by government including the prohibition of opposition & extreme regulation of public/private life

⤷ tyranny

➝ absolute control by ruler with an oppressive power

Pulp sci-fi illustration by Italian artist, Aldo Di Gennaro (b. 1938).

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.

I can feel…the serotonin and dopamine dropping…i need to make…Crafts

i must make…

b e a d l i z a r d

ayo i found 2 pages with head angles of humans and animals, could be useful to anyone reading this

hoomans

animals

yule monsters