Ask a Worldbuilder!

Have you ever wondered how to make your own world? Dunno where to start? Or just need some tips or tricks? Fear not! I, Atlas, am here to help! And also to answer fun questions!

[crystalis]

There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.

At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.

Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.

Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.

The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.

At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.

Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:

仁智懷德聖虞唐，

貞志篤終誓穹蒼，

欽所感想妄淫荒，

心憂增慕懷慘傷。

In pinyin, it is:

Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,

zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,

qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,

xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.

Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng

The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."

Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:

傷慘懷慕增憂心，

荒淫妄想感所欽，

蒼穹誓終篤志貞，

唐虞聖德懷智仁。

The pinyin:

Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,

huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,

cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,

táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.

It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén

And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."

That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!

At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:

詩圖璇玑，始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."

Or reversed:

蘇氏詩圖，璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."

Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.

For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.

Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).

Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:

- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.

- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.

- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions

- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.

So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:

- A love letter (expressing personal longing)

- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)

- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)

- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)

- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision

And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".

Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.

The heart at the center was filled after all.

[teaboot]

I wish I could travel through time and transcend language to hold this woman’s hand and tell her “girl, he ain’t shit”

[bunjywunjy]

Do you know of any arachnids who ventured towards carcinisation?

no because the term "carcinization" was created to describe the tendency for marine decapod crustaceans to convergently evolve crab-like body plans, it was never supposed to be applicable to other animals!

I blame pop science for spreading it around as a funny term that got misunderstood and misapplied basically from that point onward. most other animal groups don't get their own term for this phenomena and carcinization does NOT apply because... these animals aren't evolving into crabs. only decapods do that ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(decapods are the marine crustacean group with ten legs- true crabs, lobsters, hermit crabs, robber crabs, mantis shrimp, prawns, slipper lobsters, and all of their infinite assorted relatives in the deep blue sea)

[laurasinele]

give us back carcinization, bunjy. first warning.

[bunjywunjy]

one more word from you and no dessert tonight

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

I like how LindsayNikole handled this one:

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

Here's a fun thought experiment:

Take a piece of paper, and draw a straight line down the middle. Try to reach it from edge to edge, but give yourself room to draw near the edges (you'll see why soon). Then, divide this line as evenly as you can into 4 sections.

Now put a dot at the far left end of the line. That is when the Earth and Moon were formed, through a giant impact.

Draw another dot halfway in the middle of the first section, just after the beginning we marked. That's when life as we know it first emerged - the smallest single-celled prokaryotic microorganisms.

Draw a dot in the middle of the 3rd section, to the right of the middle of the line. That's when photosynthesis began.

Put a dot now roughly inbetween that last dot and the end of the right end of the line - you should be in the 4th section. That's about when multicellular life first emerged.

Put another dot halfway between the last one and the end. That's roughly when the first vertebrates began to walk on land.

Another dot between that one and the end. We've reached the Age of the Dinosaurs now. Another dot, and the dinosaurs go extinct.

Another dot, halfway again. Antarctica starts to freeze, and whales have conquered the oceans.

Another dot, halfway to the end. Grass just evolved.

Another dot, halfway. This is when the first hominids emerged.

We're probably starting to run out of room; if you want to start drawing lines instead of dots, that's fine, but otherwise continue on.

Halfway again, we find the giant shark Megalodon. Halfway again, we reach the Ice Age.

Halfway again, we find Homo Sapiens - anatomically modern humans. Halfway again, the Ice Age ends.

One final dot just before the end is when human civilization begins.

And at the end of the line, practically atoms away from the end? That's when we started searching for alien life.

You can set down your pen or pencil now, I won't ask you to draw anymore dots or lines. Right now, just sit back and look at the line you just drew - 4 billion years of geologic history on one page. If we were to try covering the history of the Whole Universe, we'd need another 3-4 pages or so.

I don't think I need to convince you that the Universe is big - you've probably seen pictures of the Hubble Deep Field, or diagrams of those Intergalactic Filaments or whatever they're called. You probably knew space was big from the start. And thanks to this little exercise, you probably have an inkling of just how old the Universe is, as well.

Take a long look at the line - the history of Earth, as you've just drawn. I want you to think of all the other planets & solar systems out there just like Earth, just as old - maybe older - and with histories just as dense and storied as ours.

And I want you to answer me one question:

Why do you think we haven't found anyone out there yet?

[blond-shell]

"We will explore. We will build. We will build ships. We will visit again. We will construct science outposts. We will drive rovers. We will do radio astronomy. We will found companies. We will bolster industry. We will inspire. But ultimately, we will always choose Earth. We will always choose each other." —Christina Koch, Artemis II Mission Specialist

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

Never thought I'd live to see the day...

[herpsandbirds]

How did ancient bugs get so big? The prevailing theory may be wrong.

Flying insect respiratory systems suggest abundant oxygen can’t explain ancient gigantism.

About 300 million years ago, giant dragonflylike insects with half-meter wing spans buzzed through hot and swampy forests on the former supercontinent of Pangaea. Scientists have long debated what allowed griffenflies, as they’re known, and similar fearsome flying bugs to grow so big during the Carboniferous period. The atmosphere at the time held more oxygen than it does today, and the textbook hypothesis suggests these giant insects developed more respiratory tubes to deliver that gas to their muscles, enabling them to grow and grow. But a new analysis of the anatomy of insect flight muscles, published last week in Nature, undercuts that idea, suggesting past ferocious fliers didn’t incorporate oxygen into their muscles any more generously than their smaller counterparts do today...

Read more: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-did-ancient-bugs-get-so-big-prevailing-theory-may-be-wrong

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

News to me!

[apokrify]

THIS DRAWING WAS MADE 700 YEARS AGO BY A 7-YEARS-OLD BOY NAMED ONFIM WHO LIVED IN NOVOGROD.

[oarfjsh]

[zvaigzdelasas]

more of onfime’s drawings:

[trashboat]

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

For those of you who wonder if your art will ever be remembered, consider this ancient child artist, whose doodles show us how our mind's eye has not dulled since those days

[artbyblastweave]

Now obviously the hard part of launching a land invasion of Heaven will figuring out where they hid the hole. Finding the miniscule aperture, the hole in physical reality to which all souls are translocated at the moment of death, and then jamming something sturdy in there, getting it in reallll good and working it around until it's big enough to fit some guys with guns through. But the nice part is that the nature of Heaven means that, one, not many people get in in the first place, and two, none of them are good at fighting, because people who're good at fighting mostly don't go to heaven. Except us, when we find the hole. The point is that once we're in there's not much they're gonna be able to do. Pretty much we'll have free run of the place

[artbyblastweave]

Update! So we forgot about God

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

Does Heaven have land?

[officialprincefroggy]

Mrs. Claus opens "The Year Without a Santa Claus" by claiming the eponymous year took place "before you were born". Seeing as the movie was released in 1974, this means the year must have been before then.

Bounding this on the lower end is the presence of ice hockey - mentioned by Heat Miser - and the use of telephones. Ice hockey was invented in 1875, while Alexander Graham Bell built the telephone in 1876, meaning the year must post-date these. These figures give a range of approximately 100 years during which Santa may have taken his holiday.

Yet, narrowing this further is the presence of a December calendar counting the 1st to a Wednesday. Between 1876 and 1974, only the Decembers of 1880, 1886, 1897, 1909, 1915, 1920, 1926, 1937, 1943, 1948, 1954, 1965, and 1971 started on a Wednesday.

But still this can be narrowed further.

When Santa set out that Christmas Eve, we see what appears to be an almost full Moon in the sky. Within the years listed, only 1920 had a full Moon on Christmas.

Ergo, 1920 was the year without a Santa Claus.

[nylarac]

[prismatic-bell]

One of those things that makes me think someone at Rankin-Bass was actually doing their research, because:

Rounded collar on the man at left, both boys (white coat in front and pink shirt in back right) are wearing knickerbockers.

Santa, dressed but not in his suit, has pinstriped pants, spats, and a watch chain. We can assume he probably dresses a bit older than those around him because he's elderly and doesn't necessarily care about trends, and--what? What's this? A fashion plate from the Edwardian era?

No spats on this guy, but they were common at the time--it might be because spats were practical and the drawing is intended to be fashionable.

Now let's look at some of the parents. Once again, we can expect both that they're going to be dressed ever so slightly older, and also decades don't have hard start/stop lines in fashion and culture like they do on a calendar.

The dove-breasted dress front isn't present in AYEASC, but the length and collar are perfect compared to this photo from 1910, and if we assume the mom is wearing something just a couple of years out of date, the bodice shape lines up very neatly with the end of WWI.

Likewise, look at her hair and how loose it is around her face in spite of being in a bun, and then check out this photo of a Gibson girl:

And then we've got the dad, with his hair parted straight down the middle, his large shirt cuffs, and vest. Check it out:

Also please note Dad is in plaid and as you may see in this ad, that was A Thing in the time period. He's not the only one, either--several of the kids wear it.

Other than Santa's outdated Edwardian attire (which makes sense for his character as an old man), all of these styles date within five years of 1920. Most date to ever so slightly before. These are middle-class people, so we'd expect them to not look like the latest fashion plates. Not only does their clothing make sense for a 1920 date, it actually makes sense for real people of their socioeconomic class in 1920.

Like damn, I know Rankin-Bass looks kind of hokey these days because stop-motion has evolved a lot and their teeth decisions were...interesting, but fuck, I think they may deserve more respect than we're accustomed to giving them.

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

I'd always assumed it would've been some time during the 30's, myself. We typically associate the 1920's as an era of prosperity & novelty - the age bridging the Industrial Revolution with the Atomic Age, full of optimism, hope, and youth. In contrast, the Rankin Bass Crimbus specials typically portray the mundane non-Crimbus world as somewhat downtrodden & bland; probably the most extreme example of this is the (Germanic?) village in "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", where things are so dire and miserable that toys are literally being burned.

So to see it so conclusively proven that 1920 was the "Year Without a Santa Claus" is admittedly surprising! It makes sense, but it definitely contrasts with my previous assumptions.

[ilikewritingandspeedcore]

EXCUSE ME THERE IS A PLANT THAT CAN MIMIC FAKE PLANTS?????

IT'S CALLED A BOQUILA TRIOFOLIOLATA AND IT'S FUCKING WITH MY BRAIN

IT APPARENTLY CAN MIMIC OTHER PLANTS AND AT FIRST I WAS LIKE "oh cool man it must take it's genetic code and copy it or feel the roots or something like that!! :3"

AND THEN I READ AN ARTICLE ON IT AND THESE FUCKING PARAGRAPHS HIT ME LIKE A BUS

LIKE READ THIS SHIT

WHAT THE FUCK MOTHER NATURE

[rhyperographer]

I went to find the article. It's fascinating.

[digital-magus]

In retrospect, consider the number 1 thing every grade-schooler knows about plants is they take in light, the idea they might be able to see should not wreck my shit as hard as it does

[grandpriestessofthealpaca]

i genuinely beleived this was common knowledge, i gotta get my ass out of biology paper sometimes

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

Plants do not have nerves, in the sense of how we think of nerves. They have no brain or neural network.

And yet, they seem to be able to mirror or mimic these attributes. They can sense, they can move, they can see, taste, eat, and more.

I genuinely wonder what plants think about, and how they do it. They really do feel so alien the more you look at them...

[shadows-and-science-gone-mad]

Walking with Dinosaurs holds up so well because it wasn’t trying to be accurate.

They allowed themselves to show some speculative behaviors and anatomy, and the show definitely has a lot of educational elements, but the focus was on good storytelling rather than being 100% accurate to the fossils.

To compare, Planet Dinosaur came out over ten years after WWD, but holds up way worse. The information in both series is equally outdated, but PD prided itself on being completely accurate, to the extent where they cut away from the action every two minutes to show a specific fossil that supports their reconstructions. However, once the field progressed, PD had nothing else to fall back on. Without the accurate science, it lost its primary selling point.

The problem is that paleontology, ironically enough, is a very rapidly evolving field. The most accurate reconstruction ever is going to be horribly obsolete in six months. (Just look at what happened to Spinosaurus recently.) But, a good story will always be a good story.

Even though the science is wrong, Walking with Dinosaurs told a good story. And that’s why it’s still good.

[ridiculouslyphotogenicsinosauru]

Planet Dinosaur was about fossils. Walking With Dinosaurs was about the animals those fossils were examples of.

We don’t need another retelling of the story of the Fighting Dinosaurs specimen. We need the story of… just some random Velociraptor. How did its day go? How did it live its life? What other animals did it run into? WWD worked because it operated under the idea that the fossils we have represent the tiniest window into their corresponding animals. For every T. rex skeleton we have, thousands upon thousands more lived, died and never fossilised. WWD told their stories.

[shadows-and-science-gone-mad]

I think the only retelling of the Fighting Dinosaurs fossil that actually worked was “White Tip’s Journey,” and that’s specifically because it wasn’t the focus. It was just a random tragic accident that happened along the way. The story was firmly about White Tip, and she wasn’t the raptor in the fossil.

Incidentally, of all the countless copycats that the past two decades have spawned, Dinosaur Planet is the only one that I think really recaptures the magic of WWD. Because, like you said, it tells the stories of ordinary dinosaurs living ordinary lives.

(EDIT: That said, if there were any one fossil that deserved to have a documentary made about it specifically, it’d be TCMI 2001.89.1. It’s a Gorgosaurus with a crapload of different injuries, including broken ribs and vertebrae, osteomyelitis in its jaw, several missing teeth, a brain tumor, and a fibula splintered to be at a 60º angle from the rest of its leg. The fact that nobody has made a Big Al-styled docudrama about that specimen is, quite frankly, shocking.)

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

I've rebageled this once already, but I'm bringing this back to underscore something else I've seen.

Generally, paleo documentaries fall into one of two categories - educational & storytelling. On the educational side, you have shows like PaleoWorld/Jurassica, which focus solely on the science aspect - they show fossil excavations, explain paleontology, recent findings, history, and everything. On the other hand, you have the Walking with... series, which focused almost exclusively on telling a story, with the science taking a back seat. I'm not going to argue over which is better or worse, because both have their strengths and weaknesses.

What I instead want to focus on is a recent trend where documentaries try to be both story-focused and educational. Series like Amazing Dinoworld and, yes, the 2025 reboot of Walking With Dinosaurs attempt to combine aspects, mixing story segments and science segments together.

In my experience, this tends to end up with a documentary that's sub-par in all aspects. Without committing fully to one aspect over another, you wind up with a weaker program that fails to deliver fully on the impact that either of the other options would be able to. Without fully focusing on the story, you wind up with a shallow and bland plot that's easily forgettable, and without focusing solely on science, your science show will feel distracted and desperate to keep an audience.

You don't have to do everything in your science show to get views. All you need is to pick one thing, then focus on doing that one thing well. As an example, look at how well-received AppleTV's Prehistoric Planet has been. All it is is a nature documentary reskinned with prehistoric creatures, but it commits to the bit, and it works beautifully. I won't be surprised if people end up praising it as much as they do the original WWD ten years from now.

[playwrongs]

In King Ludwig II’s defense, if I had basically infinite discretionary funds, was accountable to absolutely no one, and was king of a country full of picturesque landscapes, you couldn’t stop me from building myself a big gay fairytale castle on a mountaintop either.

[playwrongs]

This post is spreading and I feel bad about it because it contains misinformation, so for the record: Ludwig II did not in fact have infinite discretionary funds. He only acted as if he did. He never dipped into the public coffers for his building projects, but he spent his own fortune extravagantly and borrowed heavily from everyone he could think of. By 1885, the year before his death, he was 14 million marks in debt.

[insomniac-arrest]

~ ✨✨ 14 million marks in debt ✨✨~

[centrally-unplanned]

I always find this inspiring because try to name another prince of a German state. What did the rulers of Hamberg do? The Grand Duchy of Hesse? Gone with the wind, no one knows them anymore. But Mad Lad Ludwig built a top 5 most famous castle in the entire world. Money is fake, castles are real. Go broke and die like a winner.

[the-barefoot-hatter]

EXCUSE ME, this is still wrong. He built 3.

Neuschwanstein, literally the inspo for the castles in Disney's Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella

Hohenschwangau, the practical castle

Linderhof, the final, the smallest, and the MOST fab.

Every room is incredible and the park is beautiful, but shoutout to The Bedroom, the biggest room

The Hall of Mirrors, which he probably wandered by candle light because he was a serious night owl

The Dining Room, with a wishing table that lowers to the kitchen, and rises with a crank, returning magically full of food

The Venus Grotto, constructed for the sole use of Ludwig to larp to his heart's content

A full artificial cave, it features a waterfall, fake stalactites, and a custom-designed swan boat floating on an artificial lake. The first electricity in Bavaria was generated here, to change the colors of the stage lights and to power Ludwig's fountain and wave machine.

Now THAT'S ~ ✨✨ 14 million marks in debt ✨✨~

[marzipanandminutiae]

I love that- and I cannot emphasize this enough -none of this was tax money

the public paid for zero of his fairytale castle hobby

rare European monarch W as far as spending money lavishly goes

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

See, as much as I love my medieval fantasy tropes regarding kingdoms and castles, I wish we'd see more of *this* in fantasy literature.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[twinflamedreams]

[plasticfangtastic]

Dunno if anybody will see this but this person made a how to guide on how to make this at home (this guide is from 2 yrs ago btw)

Lectern Book by Verdant Core

A handy spreadsheet to work out the dimension of the parts to cut

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

A NEW TYPE OF BOOK?!

[dinodanicus]

The streetlights had just come on when I was leaving work. It was dark out but as long as I kept to the lit sidewalk I would be home soon. Suddenly a strange voice broke through the night air. It sounded as though it was coming from a small stand of trees in a nearby field. The voice was weak and frail like that of an elderly woman calling for help. Thinking someone might be hurt I decided to investigate. quickly I made my way down the bank and  began walking through the tall grass to the unkempt cluster of trees and brush. The closer I came to the direction of the noise the more distorted it became. The call for help which I had heard so clearly began to disintegrate into a series of quickening vocalizations that only distantly resembled the initial plea. The closer I walked in the direction of the sound the more desperate the calls became. It sped and repeated like a damaged record becoming a terrible cacophony of agonizing cries. Finally I reached the edge of the woods and frantically began searching for the source of these nightmarish screams. When without warning the phantom voice ceased and an eerie silence fell over the field and trees. I stood heart pumping, hands shaking questioning if the voice I heard was ever even real to begin with. Then while peering into ominous gloom of the dimly lit underbrush I could make out the shape of two hellish pale eyes looking directly at me. Stunned I was unable to move as the creature carefully lifted its feathered head tilting it from side to side. Staring at me with one eye then the other. slowly it made its way towards me, the large claws on its feet digging into the ground with each step. Then spreading its vulture like wings it stopped a few inches from where I was standing. Looking at me it opened its reptilian jaws and repeated the phrase “help me”. I stood frozen in terror as the creature repeated the phrase again and again like a monstrous lyre bird. This was no desperate cry for help but clever mimicry meant to draw me in close for the kill. While petrified from this sudden realization the creature with all the speed and precision of a bird of prey launched itself at me. A blur of claws and teeth where all I could see as it ripped away hunks of flesh. During the savage confusion of the attack I managed to pull at one of its scaly black legs causing it to lose its balance and fall to the ground. Quickly I stood up and with all my remaining strength ran back through the tall grass to the now distant glow of the streetlights. As I ran I desperately yelled hoping people in the nearby houses would hear me. Occasionally I looked back to check on the pace of the creature. It was indeed following me but not as quickly as you might expect and I wondered if it had been injured when It fell to the ground. Suddenly I could make out the voices of concerned onlookers congregating along the edge of the walkway. I was almost there and with renewed vigor I hastened my step, swiftly reaching the end of the field. Stumbling I clambered up the small bank and hoisted myself onto sidewalk’s rough surface. I looked back at the field but the creature was nowhere to be seen. Breathing heavily and with blood dripping down my face I lifted my head to tell the others what had happened. As my eyes slowly adjusted to the light I recoiled in horror. I was surrounded by three more of these creatures all mimicking the voices and chatter of their prior victims. Then from behind I heard the distinctive call of my own hunter. As I turned around to face the demon I caught one last glimpse of its hellish pale eyes.

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

A spooky dino story for spooky month!

As a side note, I love love LOVE the look of the lammergeier, and I enjoy seeing that motif on dromaeosaurs. <3

[ruinedchildhood]

[songsofwaterandnight]

That's such a sick baby picture to have. The rest of us are all like "oh this is me tripping in the backyard when I was 2" and that baby's gonna have "yeah that's me in my mom's arms as she wins a mortal Kombat tournament". Iconic.

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Girl help they're selectively breeding the world's most powerful Mortal Kombat player.

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

I need to see this story happen.

I need to see this child grow up to be, like, naturally proficient at the game? But then they get bullied for it in elementary school, like "OOOH look at this kid! They learned how to play teh vibeo games from mommy!", and they suddenly get self-conscious about their skills so they hide it down and try to avoid it as they grow up?

BUT THEN when they get to High School, and they're like the super smart student? So they naturally get alot of friends and stuff? And then the school announces a Mortal Kombat tournament, to like raise awareness for some charity or whatever, but it also includes a small prize pool or something. And their friends are like, "Man, Mortal Kombat is so cool! Maybe we should enter and try to win!"

But of course, they feel insecure because of those childhood bullies, and it becomes this story where they have to face their past, overcome it, and then become the Champion of Mortal Kombat that their parents always knew they could be <3

Huh... I feel like I started rambling on this. Sorry. Lol

[elbiotipo]

Today in a genetics course I'm taking we played around with this website which is literally just a character creator for fruit flies

[elbiotipo]

here's my new OC I call her Recombinantia she has every single allele and her starry purple eyes refract the sunlight filtered by her dichaete wings

and her husband who is like, a guy

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

Y'all wanna post the link, so we can make our own?

https://www.sciencecourseware.org/FlyLabJS/

FlyLab JS fruit fly genetics simulator

[queeranarchism]

One of my pet peeves is when people describe cave-dwelling homo sapiens or even late hunter-gatherers with only names like 'grug' and 'ogg'. They're homo sapiens! They have the same brains and mouth and vocal cords that we do.

The earliest name we know from oral history is an Egyptian king named Iry-Hor, the earliest name we have written down is a Sumerian accountant called Kushim. The earliest known author is a Sumerian priestess named Enheduanna. Another name we have from that period is Enmebaragesi. I probably forgot some other beautiful names in this directly-from-wikipedia list. We can't look further back, but there is nothing to suggest that we were less capable of giving each other beautiful complex names.

Why does this matter? Because the idea that we as a species are constantly becoming superior is bullshit and is tied up closely with a lot of very harmful ideologies (capitalism, eugenics and fascism, to name a few). We're not becoming a superior species. We're passing on information and inventing more stuff and figuring out how to live longer, but those are social processes, they come from humans taking care of each other and valuing the preservation and free exchange of knowledge. They don't come from being fundamentally better than our ancestors, we're not.

[headspace-hotel]

This is true and you should say it.

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

Anatomically-modern humans (H. sapiens specifically) has been around for roughly 300,000 years of Earth's time. In that timeframe, the only major changes to our species have happened due to our changing of the natural environment to self-made ones. Growing bigger from access to better food, growing older due to better health care, etc.

Human society has only really existed for the past 9,000 years, since the discovery of agriculture and the development of permanent settlements around that development.

That leaves 201,000 years of history missing from our story. Over 200,000 years of people living, creating, exploring, learning, dying, then passing on their stories to others. And none of us know anything about them, because so little of theirs has survived the ages.

I often find myself contemplating those people, when I'm not thinking about daily concerns. The "Dark Ages of Prehistory", when people didn't or couldn't leave records for the future. How much have we changed since then? What would those people think about us? Would they be excited about the world we built, or grieve the world we destroyed to make it?

[elumish]

Actually I keep complaining about operational worldbuilding, so here are some recommendations for it:

Ask yourself "what is this organization accomplishing" and "would this organization, as written, accomplish that thing?" For example, magic academies/schools/universities for adults: what are they training their students for? Is it more like a vocational school or a university? Are students being trained for specific jobs? Is it a training for government? Is it primarily a place to foist the idle rich off to to get them out of the way? For a military training, is the goal primarily training or a weeding out process? Is it basic training or specialized training? If someone fails out of the training, do they end up in the regular forces or do they fail out of the military entirely?

Ask yourself "how did this practice come to be?" For example, a trial or competition system: why was this system established? Do the requirements for the trial/competition match what the end result is (e.g., fighting competition to win a fighting position)? If not (e.g., scavenger heart to become the consort), why is that the competition that is used? Do the potential outcomes of the trial (e.g., death) merit the rewards for it?

Ask yourself "if this system is horrible, why do people put up with it?" For example, a school or organization where people are allowed to attack and/or kill each other: why is it allowed to continue? Why do people send their children or voluntarily join it? If it is mandatory, do people fight against it, and if not, why not?

[atlas-the-worldbuilder]

Just as a side note, this isn't saying you have to have organizations that perfectly answer these criteria. Think about how things are in the real world - very rarely do things make logical sense, and when that happens, there are people who bring attention to it.

Maybe there's a protest group complaining about how magic school doesn't prepare them for society? Maybe there's people looking to cheat the trials? Maybe murder school is training its students to kill protesters who want to shut it down?

Look hard enough, and you can find a story just about anywhere!