Nyktomorphia @nyktomorphia - Tumblr Blog

Today's accomplishment has been writing up brief descriptions of all of my ongoing projects on a single page for easy reference. I don't think the menu even appears on mobile, so if you're wondering what in the world "cosmodesy" or "panhumanity" or "frecosystem" mean, there you go. :P

#thinking out loud

nyktomorphia

[me] travel the galaxy, discover interesting new ecosystems, and incinerate them with engine propellant

[me] *and litter

[U] Grace taking the human urge to litter and upgrading it to litter heavy duty Eridian xenonite

[me] hopefully whatever exotic metallurgy is under the xenon is as neutral in Adrian's atmosphere as it is in Earth's (probably, the real question is how it reacts with xenon at all)

[U] Sequel: Adrian’s intelligent life has to go on a space journey to seek an answer to the poison recently introduced to their atmosphere that is killing the planet… (I don’t know why going to space would help here though)

nyktomorphia

I put more thought into this than is probably evident and I want that to be appreciated. :P

The book doesn't say much about the planet Adrian, at least that I can recall — it has a surface gravity of about 1.4g, and its upper atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide and opaque on the human visible spectrum. However: it also contains astrophages, the most ludicrously overpowered phototrophs in the known universe, as the base of its ecosystem.

The maths should be doable, though I haven't bothered to actually do them. An organism's trophic level is calculated based on how many links of the food chain are between it and its basic energy producers. Only about 10% of any creature's food is retained after digestion, which means the total energy available decreases exponentially; the apex predators of Earth's biosphere cap out at about trophic level 5 at most, because between them all combined they have only 1/100000th the energy of all the plants in the world and that isn't enough for anything else to survive by specialising in hunting them. But Adrian's base trophic level aren't mere plants, they're migratory sky plankton that sup directly from the solar corona — they'd easily overshadow the energy input of ordinary photosynthesis.

That isn't even getting into the fact that astrophages didn't evolve in the vacuum, and there are certainly other species in its family tree with the same specialised organelles for absorbing light, that just didn't develop the adaptations that turned astrophages into a celestial plague. Adrian's ecosystem must be ludicrously energetic.

Back to the premise. U wasn't sure why going to space would help, but it makes sense to me that if the problem is poisonous rocks falling from space, the obvious solution is to throw them back. Technically, that doesn't require space travel — if you don't care about the integrity of the payload, all you need is a really big cannon that can fling shrapnel at escape velocity. But, once you put all that effort into building a giant railgun... are you just going to expensively dismantle it again? What if we put a computer in it and shot it a little more slowly so it could look around and then fall back into the atmosphere and tell us what it saw? What if we gave it a little fuel so it could alter its ballistic trajectory and stay up there? What if we put someone in it? And I'm really enticed by the idea that the native Adrians' first spacecraft would make Jules Verne proud, because that means humans, Eridians, and Adrians would all have three completely different methods of basic orbital spaceflight informing their approach to the stars.

Humans gave up on the space gun idea because it frontloads all the acceleration into a single sudden impulse that would pulp anyone in the projectile. But do you know what kind of multicellular organism evolved to handle incredible g-forces without effort? Peregrine falcons.

So what I'm imagining as the structure of Adrian's biosphere is something like Earth's oceans. All the major energy producers are atmospheric microbes, drifting on the surface of the clouds where the sun still shines, being fed on by larger and larger organisms that slowly pass the energy all the way down to the abyssal zone; except, unlike Earth, there's so much energy to begin with that even the abyss is vivacious. And Adrians descended from flock-hunting bats-of-prey (feathers are a bizarre evolutionary fluke), with a touch of Humboldt squid: they nest on the surface but regularly soar up to several kilometres above it, and their ancestors could dive-bomb their prey en masse while shrugging off the pressure changes from the altitude. Large eyes are far-sighted and sensitive to longer wavelengths that aren't absorbed by the clouds, while the smaller lateral eyes are short-sighted. Their analytical intelligence derives from the need to quickly react to subtle changes in the wind or far below them (they can't throw, unless you count "spitting" or "swooping-and-dropping", but this does give them a instinct for ballistic motion in common with humans that Eridians do not share), while their tool use is originally nest-construction related, and their social instinct emerged from the advantages of flocking to gang up on larger prey with worse reflexes and to protect each other from competing predators.

nyktomorphia

In Earth's prehistory, the first uppity cyanobacteria to evolve photosynthesis did so in an environment where carbon dioxide was abundant and biologically useless. Not only was this an energy source that could be found everywhere, they exhaled oxygen as a waste product, and their prolific success slowly flooded the entire atmosphere with a reactive toxic gas and caused the Great Oxygenation Extinction. (Then other species evolved to depend on it for their own respiratory processes and established an equilibrium.) I think whenever proto-astrophages first evolved what I guess I'm thinking of as their "neutrino sheathes" (because I don't think they were given a name in the book and I have no idea if they've been given one elsewhere), it must have caused a mass extinction of the same level on primordial Adrian. Even if they hadn't evolved to migrate through the vacuum yet, the ability to efficiently absorb EM radiation of any wavelength would outcompete any other phototroph that was dependent on some narrower subset of the spectrum. And once they became numerous enough to form vantablack clouds on the edge of space, they would also just directly eclipse that part of the spectrum as well, preventing any other microbes from using that energy except by evolving to eat them.

#project hail mary #thinking out loud #speculative biology

nyktomorphia

[me] travel the galaxy, discover interesting new ecosystems, and incinerate them with engine propellant

[me] *and litter

[U] Grace taking the human urge to litter and upgrading it to litter heavy duty Eridian xenonite

[me] hopefully whatever exotic metallurgy is under the xenon is as neutral in Adrian's atmosphere as it is in Earth's (probably, the real question is how it reacts with xenon at all)

[U] Sequel: Adrian’s intelligent life has to go on a space journey to seek an answer to the poison recently introduced to their atmosphere that is killing the planet… (I don’t know why going to space would help here though)

nyktomorphia

I put more thought into this than is probably evident and I want that to be appreciated. :P

The book doesn't say much about the planet Adrian, at least that I can recall — it has a surface gravity of about 1.4g, and its upper atmosphere is largely carbon dioxide and opaque on the human visible spectrum. However: it also contains astrophages, the most ludicrously overpowered phototrophs in the known universe, as the base of its ecosystem.

The maths should be doable, though I haven't bothered to actually do them. An organism's trophic level is calculated based on how many links of the food chain are between it and its basic energy producers. Only about 10% of any creature's food is retained after digestion, which means the total energy available decreases exponentially; the apex predators of Earth's biosphere cap out at about trophic level 5 at most, because between them all combined they have only 1/100000th the energy of all the plants in the world and that isn't enough for anything else to survive by specialising in hunting them. But Adrian's base trophic level aren't mere plants, they're migratory sky plankton that sup directly from the solar corona — they'd easily overshadow the energy input of ordinary photosynthesis.

That isn't even getting into the fact that astrophages didn't evolve in the vacuum, and there are certainly other species in its family tree with the same specialised organelles for absorbing light, that just didn't develop the adaptations that turned astrophages into a celestial plague. Adrian's ecosystem must be ludicrously energetic.

Back to the premise. U wasn't sure why going to space would help, but it makes sense to me that if the problem is poisonous rocks falling from space, the obvious solution is to throw them back. Technically, that doesn't require space travel — if you don't care about the integrity of the payload, all you need is a really big cannon that can fling shrapnel at escape velocity. But, once you put all that effort into building a giant railgun... are you just going to expensively dismantle it again? What if we put a computer in it and shot it a little more slowly so it could look around and then fall back into the atmosphere and tell us what it saw? What if we gave it a little fuel so it could alter its ballistic trajectory and stay up there? What if we put someone in it? And I'm really enticed by the idea that the native Adrians' first spacecraft would make Jules Verne proud, because that means humans, Eridians, and Adrians would all have three completely different methods of basic orbital spaceflight informing their approach to the stars.

Humans gave up on the space gun idea because it frontloads all the acceleration into a single sudden impulse that would pulp anyone in the projectile. But do you know what kind of multicellular organism evolved to handle incredible g-forces without effort? Peregrine falcons.

So what I'm imagining as the structure of Adrian's biosphere is something like Earth's oceans. All the major energy producers are atmospheric microbes, drifting on the surface of the clouds where the sun still shines, being fed on by larger and larger organisms that slowly pass the energy all the way down to the abyssal zone; except, unlike Earth, there's so much energy to begin with that even the abyss is vivacious. And Adrians descended from flock-hunting bats-of-prey (feathers are a bizarre evolutionary fluke), with a touch of Humboldt squid: they nest on the surface but regularly soar up to several kilometres above it, and their ancestors could dive-bomb their prey en masse while shrugging off the pressure changes from the altitude. Large eyes are far-sighted and sensitive to longer wavelengths that aren't absorbed by the clouds, while the smaller lateral eyes are short-sighted. Their analytical intelligence derives from the need to quickly react to subtle changes in the wind or far below them (they can't throw, unless you count "spitting" or "swooping-and-dropping", but this does give them a instinct for ballistic motion in common with humans that Eridians do not share), while their tool use is originally nest-construction related, and their social instinct emerged from the advantages of flocking to gang up on larger prey with worse reflexes and to protect each other from competing predators.

#yes it did occur to me that their basic space tech could easily just be astrophage-powered... afterwards #contrariwise the dangers of activating an astrophage-based engine inside an atmosphere are well-documented #so there #creature design #speculative biology

[me] travel the galaxy, discover interesting new ecosystems, and incinerate them with engine propellant

[me] *and litter

[U] Grace taking the human urge to litter and upgrading it to litter heavy duty Eridian xenonite

[me] hopefully whatever exotic metallurgy is under the xenon is as neutral in Adrian's atmosphere as it is in Earth's (probably, the real question is how it reacts with xenon at all)

[U] Sequel: Adrian’s intelligent life has to go on a space journey to seek an answer to the poison recently introduced to their atmosphere that is killing the planet… (I don’t know why going to space would help here though)

#my art #fanart #project hail mary #silly art #artists on tumblr #creature design

monsterblogging

I think one important step in decolonizing fantasy is to recognize how wildly anti-environment Europeans became, and how this affects the way we look at the nonhuman world. Like, in England wolves were driven to extinction because they were perceived as threats to sheep. And white people absolutely carried this kind of mentality everywhere they colonized. We see it in people who think rattlesnakes should be killed on sight. And it comes out in fantasy when every kind of creature that's challenging to humans is degraded, unpersoned, and treated like something to kill or keep contained out in the deep wilds.

to-the-tune-of-pinkponyclub

I HAVE FELT THIS FOR SO LONG!!! Like I was always like "It's kinda fucked up that monstrous creatures/people in fantasy fiction are only approached in terms of being conquered or killed, right? Or in terms of only how they serve humans and that's IT." and it's fucked!

monsterblogging

Yep! That's literally the colonialist mentality at work. If you want to feel even more vindicated, I recommend checking out Robin Wall Kimmerer's books and/or watching her interviews and speeches on YouTube.

fantasy-anatomy-analyst

Normal carnivorous animals always being portrayed as relentless hunters even if it causes them more harm than good. Fantasy monsters that are supposedly a natural part of the world but don't seem to have any actual purpose within their environment for no reason (like at least make them an invasive species or an artificial creation or something? that could be neat!)

This definitely also falls in line with the portrayal of any group of fantasy people as a flat stereotype of "evil" or "good".

I have caught myself worrying that the fantasy creatures I've put in my own world aren't epic and dangerous enough, because I make them in a way that actually gives them an environmental niche, and their behaviors are just normal animal behaviors. So they may not feel as fantastical and monstrous. But more and more I think it's just not worth it to me to force them to be monsters just for the sake of fitting a trope into my writing. I like my big olm-like amphibious wyrms. They don't need to be ravenous hunters. They're just big fat wet noodles.

#even specbio suffers from this a bit sometimes but it's contrary to its ethos and that's what I like about it #insofar as it often turns into justifying packing as many cool monstrous features as possible into the same ecosystem #the typical way the environment gets to be important to the plot is on a 'Death World'#where every carnivore is a knife-covered persistence hunter with a uniquely fucky digestive process #every insect is a swarming telepathic hivemind #every parasite is either a body horror parasitoid or a brain-altering zombie infection #every fruit is either bait for a giant flytrap or laced with a neurotoxin to turn erstwhile pollinators into fertiliser #(it's always neurotoxin because the neuro- means fast-acting and incurable)#and something is secretly sapient and coinflip if that means smart enough to communicate or just smart enough for sadism #if it has tentacles then probably the latter #basically even artists who consciously value the environment often fail to create interest in anything but how flashy and dangerous it is #something that applies to things I admire like Scavenger's Reign #worldbuilding #cosmodesy #speculative biology #creature design

pawthorn

Really hate that most people don’t understand the difference between “self-expression” and “artistic-expression.”

I say this as someone who sells pottery, and many people who see my art assume I am using art as an outlet to “express myself.”

I am not.

I use art to challenge myself. A lot of what I do is the equivalent of doing a hard sudoko or a half marathon, answering the question of “can I do this?”

I use art to question things and explore ideas. Finding physical synthesis between concepts and working out a design to its end state.

I use art to make money. I make some things just because I suspect they’ll sell well, and I keep making them when they do.

This idea that an artist is “putting themselves out there” every time they create is not only stupid, but harmful, and it kills critique and analysis.

Yes every creative work is influenced by its creator, but the most preliminary step of analysis is to define the purpose of a work of art (functional, narrative, entertainment, persuasive, decorative, ceremonial, etc.) and a vanishingly small percentage of that is self-expression. Even then, it’s generally tied to the self’s relationship with something else—perception, society, etc.

It’s very tiresome to have people assume they know you because they like (or dislike) your art, to make assumptions about who you are and how you approach the world. It’s nothing new— people called the Impressionists insane and the Fauvists degenerate. And now people are expected to hand out their identities and traumas to prove they have the right to explore certain subjects.

But to actually understand art, you have to contextualize it beyond assuming it’s just what the artist felt like making at the moment and it’s somehow coming from their deepest soul, or you’ll badly misinterpret most art you come across.

cat-the-comet

devastating: artist who has not practiced fundamentals enough to execute high concept idea eats shit

hikikoii

how I look when I draw

#not my art

valtsv

ever since i was young i've been drawn to narratives where a character acquires powers by being premeditatively attacked, subdued, and forcibly empowered by some kind of invasive procedure, leaving them feeling guiltily ashamed, alienated from their own body, and violently uncomfortable under any amount of attention drawn to them despite their new enhanced ability to defend themself and others. for no particular reason.

Illustrating an in-joke which, you may be surprised to learn, I did not start, but am all too happy to continue

#artists on tumblr #my art #pencil drawing #sketches #body horror #horror art #character art

stitchposts

unfortunately i have free will so im about to make art that is going to appeal to basically 4 people. let us hope those 4 people follow me.

#oh good you're all still here <3

orteil42

given the current climate this pride especially i feel i must mention that i love my trans friends, i stand with trans people in the fight against transphobic legislation and those who would enforce it, and this blog is not a good place for you to be if you do not vibe with that

#I feel like I should not need to echo the sentiment because if you're transphobic why are you here who do you think you're following