SwordsandShuttles

Hello everyone. I'm a writer on Archive of our Own who very much enjoys writing about Mass Effect.  

[cryptonature]

I bet octopuses think bones are horrific. I bet all their cosmic horror stories involve rigid-limbs and hinged joints.

[underthehedge]

To an octopus, a human is like a thinking being with blood-stained coral growing inside it.

[naamahdarling]

I need to sit down and breathe into a bag for a while.

[therobotmonster]

Its parts were obscenely limited in their movement. Each hinge could open or close only a small amount before reaching its limit, yet by working in concert they demonstrated unexpected dexterity, moving and manipulating the objects before it with cunning equal to my own. It was more torso than limb, as though a seal had been stretched and warped, given long grasping tentacles filled with bones like bars of coral.  It’s head was most horrid of all, flat and ovoid, jutting out too small from the trunk as though it belonged to a beast half its size.

The thing rose upon its lowermost appendages, two long trunks that ended in flat, protruding flippers that branched into stubby, grasping mockeries of a sucker. It’s triple-hinged uppermost limbs were similar, but the ends branched into five smaller tentacles, each with three hinges of their own.

I froze, as the thing’s gaze fell upon me and it opened its hideous fish-jaw, filled with thick, many-shaped teeth like white shards of stone, and spoke in a shrill, discordant babble. I felt its horrid dry grip on my flesh, as those hinged appendages closed on me like the legs of a crab.

I felt the heat of its body, tasted its noxious, oily flesh through my touch, and prepared for the end, and all went black as a swoon overtook me.

I awoke, some time later, the cold and comforting water, banished back to the comfort of the sea and the dark. I should be grateful I am alive. I should cast aside the experience like a half-remembered dream.

I shall never again go swimming in search of lights above. The last thing I recall before the darkness took me was my right eye popping free of the thing’s grasp enough to see into the distance for one brief moment.

I saw thousands of lights.

[muffinlance]

YOU. You understand the assignment!

Cosmic horror is perceiving things that were not made for you

And understanding

That there is so much more

[panelperday]

Heya, I'm Scott Higginbotham 👋

I'm an illustrator and comic artist from Western Australia. You may know me for my Dungeon Buddies, Solid State (Webtoon) or Obojima ✨

You can find my work on Twitter, Instagram and Bluesky

Also, if you'd like to draw like me, you can download my Dungeon Buddies Brush from my Ko-fi here

[strawberrykidneystone]

“i’m a top” “im a bottom” okay??? i’m commander shepard??? and this is my favorite store on the citadel????

[batri-jopa]

world_of_engineering_75 on Instagram

[oysters-aint-for-me]

i’m obsessed with this

and then, two months later....

🥺

[very-gay-alkyrion]

[artofchinara]

Valtr and Iosefka. During Soulstober I wanted to show some love to less prominent NPCs as well!

[paleoart]

I just realized that apparently I never shared this series here on Tumblr??  

I call it Living Paintings, as they are recreations of extinct animals that some artists actually saw and painted from memory, a long time ago.

Patreon • Ko-fi • Facebook  • Twitter • Prints & Merch      

[paleoart]

Recent updates to this series: Glyptodon and Thylacine!

[simon-roy]

Asking here because I get notified if you reply: why rockettes? Beside the obvious cool factor and the vague notion that euhumanists can't just do things normally and have to have an extra layer of complexity, is there like a... practical advantage to having a gun that shoots rockets vs one that shoots bullets? They don't seem guided or explosive, and without fins would they be more accurate or reach longer distances than a single-impulse munition?

My rationale for this is both aesthetic (retro-futurism) and internal world logic.

First, the internal logic of the world.

The Euhumanists have spent centuries, presumably, using beam weapons for small arms (like star trek). If they were stuck without reliable beam weapons (because of limited power sources, manufacturing capabilities, etc, like in "the grand tour"), and were developing their industrial capacities from a very limited base, circumstances would possibly force them to essentially re-invent the gun.

Given their own history as space-faring people, I was thinking that the rocket would probably be their most direct reference for a combustion-driven kinetic device - so having them develop an awkward micro-rocket, instead of first developing muskets or cartridge ammunition, felt suitably unique, clunky and weird for the world.

Also, in researching "caseless" ammunition of this type, like russian VOG launched grenades, the gyrojet, the italian 9mm AUPO round, and, the granddaddy of them all, the 1800s ROCKET BALL (see below image), it was interesting seeing all the other methods of containing projectile and gunpowder in one discrete unit.

The rocket ball came about in 1848 and was my biggest inspo for this, but the utterly magical and deranged GYROJET missile-bullet was up there too. If you search youtube for gyrojet firing footage, its completely fascinating!

This is all to say, though, that aesthetics and the idea of this colony fumbling their way into firearms came first. This style of ammo doesnt have much in the way of practical advantages over modern cartridges, but modern cartridges also just felt WAY too anachronistic to throw into this setting. But it has been a very fun research rabbit hole for me to clamber down!

[literaryvein-references]

Writing Notes & References

Alchemy ⚜ Antidote to Anxiety ⚜ Attachment ⚜ Autopsy

Art: Elements ⚜ Principles ⚜ Photographs ⚜ Watercolour

Bruises ⚜ Caffeine ⚜ Color Blindness ⚜ Cruise Ships

Children ⚜ Children's Dialogue ⚜ Childhood Bilingualism

Dangerousness ⚜ Drowning ⚜ Dystopia ⚜ Dystopian World

Culture ⚜ Culture Shock ⚜ Ethnocentrism & Cultural Relativism

Emotions: Anger ⚜ Fear ⚜ Happiness ⚜ Sadness

Emotional Intelligence ⚜ Genius (Giftedness) ⚜ Quirks

Facial Expressions ⚜ Laughter & Humour ⚜ Swearing & Taboo

Fantasy Creatures ⚜ Fantasy World Building

Generations ⚜ Literary & Character Tropes

Fight Scenes ⚜ Kill Adverbs

Food: Cooking Basics ⚜ Herbs & Spices ⚜ Sauces ⚜ Wine-tasting ⚜ Aphrodisiacs ⚜ List of Aphrodisiacs ⚜ Food History ⚜ Cocktails ⚜ Literary & Hollywood Cocktails ⚜ Liqueurs

Genre: Crime ⚜ Horror ⚜ Fantasy ⚜ Speculative Biology

Hate ⚜ Love ⚜ Kinds of Love ⚜ The Physiology of Love

How to Write: Food ⚜ Colours ⚜ Drunkenness

Jargon ⚜ Logical Fallacies ⚜ Memory ⚜ Memoir

Magic: Magic System ⚜ 10 Uncommon ⚜ How to Choose

Moon: Part 1 2 ⚜ Related Words

Mystical Items & Objects ⚜ Talisman ⚜ Relics ⚜ Poison

Pain ⚜ Pain & Violence ⚜ Poison Ivy & Poison Oak

Realistic Injuries 1 2 ⚜ Rejection ⚜ Structural Issues ⚜ Villains

Symbolism: Colors ⚜ Food ⚜ Numbers ⚜ Storms

Thinking ⚜ Thinking Styles ⚜ Thought Distortions

Terms of Endearment ⚜ Ways of Saying "No" ⚜ Yoga

Compilations: Plot ⚜ Character ⚜ Worldbuilding ⚜ For Poets ⚜ Tips & Advice

all posts are queued. will update this every few weeks/months. send questions or requests here.

[iguanodont]

The Monoculi (informally dubbed ‘peebs’) are not exactly a new species from me, but they’ve gone through a pretty drastic redesign since I last posted anything about them. These are a spacefaring species from the same universe as birgworld! Details under the cut.

The Monoculi are so-called for the large compound eye that comprises the “head”. The densely packed ommatidia allow for crisp image resolution, and a variation in the depth of the lenses give the eye a range of acuity from only a few feet along the lower half to hundreds of meters along the top. Monoculi are nocturnal creatures which evolved to navigate complex cave systems by day and tangled branches by night; they have good depth perception and low-light vision but are nearly blind in regular daylight, and cannot perceive color.

The Mono homeworld is peculiar for the presence of a ring, the remnants of two moons which collided early in the planet’s history and bombarded the surface with chunks of space rock long after the planet’s crust had cooled. The result is an unusual abundance of heavy metals in the environment. Iridium, a prohibitively rare mineral on earth, comprises orange-yellow compound which carries oxygen through a Monoculus’s veins. The ring itself also has drastic effects on seasonal surface temperatures, though as on birgworld, life there has adapted accordingly.

Monoculi molt to grow like earth arthropods, but they only do so one segment at a time. A newborn larvae, one of 2 - 5 siblings, will remain soft and aquatic for about 8 months, until it loses its gills and hardens for the first time. They do not begin growing the first proper body segment until the thorax is as large as an adult’s. Molting and mating are both intimately tied to mineral pools found deep in their ancestral cave system. Without them, a molt will invariably fail and lead to severe health complications. Monoculi are hermaphrodites, and mate by pressing the gonopores (small openings under the first pair of arms) against the soft carapace of a first - third instar body segment, fresh after molting. The spawn will bore directly into the segment and trigger its transformation into a reproductive segment, which falls off after young are produced.

These sophonts are relatively large and long lived, with 200+ year old individuals sporting nearly 20 body segments not unheard of. They are also well into their space age, with a once-thriving space tourism industry buckled by a massive recession in recent decades. Rumour has it that several of the abandoned exoplanetary retreats still harbor stranded staff… but the company that built them dissolved and nobody has scraped up to funds for a rescue mission. They avoid contact with other sophonts, with the exception of the swimslugs, with whom they maintain a friendly cultural and technological exchange.

————

Btw, I do still post almost weekly sketches and worldbuilding notes on my patreon

[damazcuz]

steam sale:

$4000.00 unfinished triple a game now on sale for $3999.95!

The most life changing indie game you've ever seen, usually $4.99, now on sale for $0.45

[simon-roy]

The idea of logging on a colonized alien planet brings my mind back to the planet Lalonde from Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn books - a world that had very hard wood as its only meaningful export, and was also stuck developing its economy from agriculturalism (due to investment shortages, though).

All this is to say - Hey! What are some foundational inspirations for your sci fi verse? You gotta have some like recommendations of classic or older sci-fi for us, right? What are some of your suggestions of books and authors to read?

OK SO - My sci-fi tastes have sort of ended up in some very specific niches. Growing up, I was a Larry Niven +Jerry Pournelle man, in part because my dad amassed a huge collection of their books - then gave 90% of them away before i was old enough to read them. So one of my teenage missions was rebuilding that library, trash and all!

Stuff like Footfall, Ringworld, Gil "The Arm" Hamilton, Protector (yes i attempted to name a comic series similarly, and paid for it) "The Mote in God's Eye"... you name it, I read fuckloads of these books. And while they tend to land on a sort of human chauvinist "mankind will win based on his inherent adaptive human-ness, and the aliens will fail because of their rigid alien-ness", this shit was very foundational to me.

Their more collaborative series, The Man-Kzin Wars and War World, also loom large in my teenage mind. The Man-Kzin wars are super fun - humans meet a race of tiger-men, and go from being NWO peaceniks to roughneck cat-skinners in a generation! PEACE AND LOVE WONT DEFEAT TIGER MEN!

Similarly, war world (like lots of that 70s/80s military sci fi) was a sort of catch-all for western military nerds to play with their favorite factions - it was a planet where all the un-ruleable ethnic groups and nationalities had been deported by the authoritarian earth government, and left to rot... until a race of genetically engineered fascist super men land on the world, and start trying to rule the place. Pretty fun shit.

As I got older, I turned hard into William Gibson, and read the absolute shit out of both the Neuromancer trilogy and the Bridge trilogy, as well as his short stories. Bruce Sterling was part of that wave for me, too, and I religiously sought his old paperbacks out too. In terms of novels, "Distraction" is my favorite coherent Sterling Novel - though the short stories in the "Schismatrix" novel/collection of his remain my absolute favorite space opera pieces.

At this age, too, I found my top-top fave Sterling Stories - "Taklaman" and "Bicycle Repairman", both gritty pseudo-cyberpunk stories of the highest degree, in this collection:

This thousand-plus page collection of short stories and novellas was basically my bible for a few years - i put sticky notes on each story i loved and meant to return to, until the book was so festooned with sticky note bookmarks i abandoned the practice altogether. If you have the chance, just buy this book and chew on it for a few years.

As i got into my 20s, Charles Stross became my lode star - his books like Accelerando and Glasshouse were total game changers for me. They come with their own peculiarities, but I loved his transhuman/posthuman musings (or at least i was obsessed with his stuff for a good few years - the venn diagram of his obvious interests and my own overlapped enough that his books were great fodder for a growing sci-fi loving brain).

But since then, my main literary squeeze has been the great man, JACK VANCE. Working on Prophet, my friend @cmkosemen made a remark about how much the early issues of the series reminded him of a book series called "Planet of Adventure" or "the Tschai Cycle", by Jack Vance. The book has a beautifully simple setup - a man from an entirely undescribed spacefaring human civilization crash-lands onto a weird planet. But on that planet, he finds four separate civilizations, each who possess a population of enslaved humans, culturally and physically molded to the needs of their masters. And each book of this series covers our generic hero's interactions with each bizarre expoitative culture. I was extremely intrigued.

Soon thereafter, I found my current absolute favorite book - "THE DRAGON MASTERS". A book about an isolated medieval world... which gets visited, once every few generations, by a black pyramid starship, flown by a reptilian race known as the Greph. The greph capture humans to (surprise surprise) breed them into hyper specific slaves... who in turn become Greph-like in their thinking and demeanours. But the last time the BLACK PYRAMID landed, a bunch of angry medieval dudes stormed the thing, blew it up, and captured a bunch of greph... who became the breeding stock for a whole new human world of slave labour. By the time we meet this planet, the two rival lords of the human-populated regions have been breeding greph slave warriors, or "dragons", for generations, for combat against one another. But soon, the black pyramid will return...

I love this book I even spent a good few months during covid talking with the Vance Estate and several publishers about developing it into a graphic novel, but nobody could quite agree on how it could get made with old Simon getting a paycheque... so sadly it fell apart. There are concept drawings floating around my patreon and other corners of the internet. But one day I'll use 'em...

My other favorite books of his, to name a couple of the MANY books of his I love:

THE BLUE WORLD: A caste system of humans, descended from a crashed prison ship, live on floating settlements on an ocean planet, paying protection to a giant long-lived intelligent crustacean. But one man is tired of giving up all his crops to this tyrannical megafauna...

THE MIRACLE WORKERS: Rival lords on a planet descended to medieval tech (surprise surprise) fight using armies... and rival SORCERORS who employ the powers of suggestion to voodoo each others' warriors... but when facing non-human intelligences, these sorceror's skills fall short.

But there are heaps more, and I love most (thought not all) of the ones i've read. They're generally short, concise, and full of all sorts of bizarre bullshit.

THere are more books i've read and enjoyed in my life, of course, but these are the core ones that I think of when I think of my career as a sci-fi reader... let me know what your top recs are!

[medievalengravings]

Sea monsters, illuminated Persian manuscript, 13th century 

[simon-roy]

So an entire organism was genetically engineered to provide draft labor to space colonists instead of... using a robot? Or some kinda technology? Why did they even bother to prepare for logging on an alien planet? Were they still building things from wood in the year forty million before the collapse of civilization or losing contact with the other colonies or whatever the grobusverse apocalypse was?

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of alien planet logging but I'm curious as to the logic behind it. Are people colonizing alien planets simply to start over from an agricultural base? Don't they bring heavy industry with them?

REDUNDANCY, brother- redundancy! Man cannot survive on vats of yeast and robot labor alone...

These planets were indeed being settled by people with vast resources and hi tech, but a large contingency of the people leaving the "civilized" world were also doing so to lead less far-future-ie urbanized lives. In this setting, there are also a lot of religious settlers who would also prefer to live outside of the intergalactic supply chain. Griz Grobus actually closes out with a little pamphlet that touches on some of these themes, which i'll attach below:

Which is to say that these planets are settled both by future space communists and back-to-the-land space mormon types, and everyone in between. After the grobus-pocalypse, the tools brought by those space mormon types just ended up doing much much more of the heavy lifting...

[swordsandshuttles]

Some of the best and most fascinating worldbuilding I've seen in sci fi. Be sure to check out Simon Roy's work!

[1five1two]

J. R. R. Tolkien, undisputedly a most fluent speaker of this language, was criticized in his day for indulging his juvenile whim of writing fantasy, which was then considered—as it still is in many quarters— an inferior form of literature and disdained as mere “escapism.” “Of course it is escapist,” he cried. “That is its glory! When a soldier is a prisoner of war it is his duty to escape—and take as many with him as he can.” He went on to explain, “The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as possible.“

Stephen R. Lawhead

[barbarian15]

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”

-J.R.R. Tolkien

“Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.” I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, “What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?” and gave the obvious answer: jailers.“

-C.S. Lewis

[comedownstairsandsayhello]

“As for the charge of escapism, what does “escape” mean? Escape from real life, responsibility, order, duty, piety, is what the charge implies. But nobody, except the most criminally irresponsible or pitifully incompetent, escapes to jail. The direction of escape is toward freedom. So what is “escapism” an accusation of?”

– Ursula K. Le Guin

[sarahreesbrennan]

I love all of these. I will add that in stories I see described as ‘escapism,’ the escape is never escape into a place of vacancy or idleness, but escape into adventure, into the possibility and power of change for yourself and the whole world. People yearn for the escape of expanded opportunity. When the very word escape implies freedom, those who sneer at escapism show their loyalty lies with locked doors.

[athena-gundampla]

Mobile Suit Gundam: Chronological Watch Order for the Universal Century Timeline

UC 0001

Laplace incident – the Universal Century is declared, and Laplace, the Prime Minister’s residence, is destroyed by terrorists (First few minutes of Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn (2010) Episode 1: Day of the Unicorn)

UC 0068

Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin (2015-2018) Episode 1

UC 0071

Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin (2015-2018) Episode 2

UC 0074

Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin (2015-2018) Episode 3 first half

UC 0076

Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin (2015-2018) Episode 3 second half

UC 0077

Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin (2015-2018) Episode 4 first half

UC 0078

Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin (2015-2018) Episode 4 third quarter

UC 0079 (the One Year War):

Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin (2015-2018) Episode 4 ending, Episode 5 (January 3rd up until January 15th 0079 UC).

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO: The Hidden One Year War (2004) Episode 1: Vanishing Serpent of Loum, runs from 4th to 17th January 0079UC.

Mobile Suit Gundam The Origin (2015-2018) Episode 6 (The Battle of Loum, January 15th-16th 0079; later events in the epilogue scattered throughout the first half of the year).

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO 2: The Gravity Front Episodes (2008) Episode 1: Take Out That Angel of Death!, runs from 26th to 27th April 0079UC.

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO: The Hidden One Year War (2004) Episode 2: Howls Stained in Dusk, runs from 29th April to 11th May 0079UC.

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO 2: The Gravity Front Episodes (2008) Episode 2: Kings of the Jungle, Roll Out!, runs from 21st to 26th July 0079UC.

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) Episodes 1-15, starts September 18th 0079UC.

Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island (a movie adaptation of Episode 15), around about late October 0079UC. This is set in the Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin timeline, and thus the White Base has already visited Jaburo and all members are officially part of the Earth Federation Forces. The Guntank is replaced by a second Guncannon, Sleggar is present, and Cucuruz Doan's Island is relocated to the Canary Islands rather than Japan, although the event still precedes Operation Odessa.

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) Episodes 16-25 (up to early November 0079UC)

Mobile Suit Gundam 08th MS Team Episodes 1-11 (October 6th 0079UC up to around 15th November 0079. Starts after 0079 Episode 10 (Garma's death), and finishes sometime after the battle of Odessa during the Zeon Asian Ground Forces retreat)

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO 2: The Gravity Front Episodes (2008) Episode 3: Odessa, Storm of Steel!, runs from 8th to 9th November 0079UC, concurrently with Operation Odessa in Episode 25 of Mobile Suit Gundam (1979). The upcoming series Requiem for Vengeance will also occur during the European front and Operation Odessa, I'll update this timeline when it releases.

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO: The Hidden One Year War (2004) Episode 3: Dance of the Orbital Ghosts, runs from 24th October to 11th November 0079UC.

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) Episodes 25-35 occur from around November of 0079UC up until the start of December, although there aren't many exact dates for when exactly in the year each episode takes place, although The Battle of Solomon in Episode 35 takes place on 24th December 0079 UC).

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO: Apocalypse 0079 (2006) Episode 1: In the Skies of Jaburo I Saw the Sea, happens from 3rd to 7th December 0079UC, sometime after 0079 Episode 30.

Gundam 0080 War in The Pocket (1989) runs from around December 9th 0079UC up until around 12th to 25th December 0079UC.

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO: Apocalypse 0079 (2006) Episode 2: Cross the Path of Light, happens from 28th to 30th December 0079UC.

Final few episodes (around 36/37 until 43) of Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) definitively happen on December 30th and 31st 0079UC, as this is when the Battle of A Bao Qu occurs in canon.

Peace treaty with Zeon signed on 1st January 0080UC.

Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO: Apocalypse 0079 (2006) Episode 3: Spirits Returning to the Cries of Thunder, happens from 31st December 0079UC until 1st January 0080UC.

UC 0080

Mobile Suit Gundam 08th MS Team Episode 12 (unspecified number of months after the end of the One Year War)

UC 0083

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory (1991-1992)

UC 0087

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985-1986)

The Gryps Conflict/Gryps War

UC 0088

Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (1986-1987)

The First Neo-Zeon war

UC 0093

Mobile Suit Gundam: Char's Counterattack (1988)

The Second Neo-Zeon war

UC 0096

Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn (2010-2014)

Laplace incident - occurs from around April 7th 0096UC til May 4th 0096UC

UC 0097

Mobile Suit Gundam Narrative (2018)

UC 0100

The Principality of Zeon is officially dissolved and reabsorbed back into the Earth Federation

UC 0105

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway (2020)

UC 120

Mobile Suit Gundam F90 (1990)

UC 0123

Mobile Suit Gundam F91 (1991)

UC 149

Zanscare Empire Declared, Zanscare War Commences

UC 0153

Mobile Suit Victory Gundam (1993-1994)

End of the Zanscare War and all key members of the imperial core

[swordsandshuttles]

Reblogging this for future reference, even if I feel like a noir detective when I look at it.

[twotheleft]

[melynnwaters]

sick as fuck if I’m being honest

[blackwolfmanx3]

Gouf Custom fight slapped fucking hard.