Viridian's to do list

Have Courage, and Be Kind

[pardalote]

The AI typing thing was the last straw. Yesterday, I installed Fedora. I am now microsoft-free.

[origamiaround]

Recent foldings compilation. The lily tutorial: https://youtu.be/31yOS9uCQnQ  🍯🌻🍋💛🪀🍇💜🎶🔮 origamiaround@ youtube instagram facebook pinterest deviantart patreon ko-fi tiktok

[origamiaround]

Origami forget-me-not flowers 💙💙💙💙💙💙 origamiaround @ youtube instagram facebook pinterest deviantart patreon ko-fi tiktok

[diorods]

Sunstone Sands! My take on a Desert Village! 🌴

I wanted to make a super detailed village with mostly sand blocks in the middle of a desert, and lowkey, I feel like I nailed it ngl! I made several unique builds like Bazaar, Pottery, Camel Stables 🐪, etc and as many details as possible! Thoughts? I hope it looks cool :)) If u want u can find the world download (java and bedrock) and tutorials for most of the builds here!

✨ Shaders: BSL Shaders 🕹 Game version: 1.21.10

[foxes-in-love]

[hacvek]

reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics

[olyia-stories]

@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this

[dragonpyre]

I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset

[serinos-kitt]

What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know

[dragonpyre]

Mordor.

Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.

And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!

[serinos-kitt]

So what is a rain shadow?

[lethalbutterfly]

Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.

[roach-works]

this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.

my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.

so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.

the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.

also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:

it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.

[beatrice-otter]

#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass

On a Watsonian level, sure.

On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.

I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."

[whetstonefires]

I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.

LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)

Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.

[beatrice-otter]

#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains

[cannibalcharon]

Western Washington vs Eastern Washington is a good example of a rain shadows effects for fellow writers.

Western Washington:

Eastern Washington:

For fantasy writers, Washington is a really cool state to study because we have nearly every biome from alpine forests, desert, alpine desert, rainforest, riparian forests, wetlands, coastal, and so on. We have two main mountain ranges, the Olympics and the Cascades. We sit on three tectonic plates which give us said mountains (and earthquakes). Our ecology is really neat here.

[merrypaws]

Allow me to go back to the discussion on Mordor.

Tolkien famously drew from many real world things when building his Middle-Earth, and Mordor actually has a very obvious real world inspiration. Look up a topographic map and you notice that there indeed IS a very square mountain range surrounding the valley of lower Danube on the border of Romania and Bulgaria.

I'm guessing that Tolkien noticed this on a map and thought "Oh, that's neat", without getting too much into why or how it had formed, because for all his obsessive worldbuilding, his attention was more on history and language than on realistic geography.

So, yeah, sometimes even the real world just is weird.

[viridianhorizon]

My goal in worldbuilding is not to make a realistic world, but a fantasy world.

My mountains don't have realistic plate techtonics or rain shadows, because it doesn't function under earth physics.

It rains here because the element Wet has a particularly strong energy path through here.

There is a desert here because the head of Dry has a stronghold in the centre.

Do whatever you want. Who cares. It's fantasy.

[inbabylontheywept]

do australians really say "out woop woop" to refer to out in the sticks?

[akashicrecord]

the lesbian computer from portal was right. given the circumstances ive been shockingly nice

[buried-in-stardust]

OP: Another year has passed, time to make another natural freezer

[eng by me]

[alexaloraetheris]

This is brilliant but the energy sticker at the end KILLED me.🤣

[goldensunset]

the nearest depiction of an animal or other sentient fantasy creature to you at this moment comes to life right where it is (i.e. cat photograph, shark plushie, dragon painting, etc)

what happens to you

i am so dead

i need to go to the hospital

maybe a few things to be looked at but i’m fine in the end

i’m totally fine

i’m totally fine and i’m happy

my situation is really really really specific lemme tell you about it

n/a

Voting ended onJan 11

assume it doesn’t know you (unless it’s actually a specific animal you’ve met) and that it’s normal for its species and would do whatever was natural for it. including being too giant for and destroying the room it’s in. as well as dying immediately if its environment can’t support its life

[viridianhorizon]

I have a tiny needlefelted Operator on my desk. I feel like I'm not gonna die outright, but man I will not be okay. I'll be ... fine.

[curioscurio]

when I tell you I had to do a double take because I thought these were 2 parts of the same whole joke

[onblondes]

okay LOOK - we MUST halt ALL Christmas music by January 1st. Don't even hum jingle bells where I can hear it once the new year starts I'm not messing around

[viridianhorizon]

Okay I hear you, but I will be singing "Fall on your knees, O hear the angel voices" from O Holy Night in february and still in september.

Carols are trancendant. well, to me at least.

[pukicho]

There is literally nothing more powerful on this planet than taking a 15 minute walk twice every day.

[pukicho]

If you have ADHD like me, walk 15 minutes twice a day like your life depends on it.

[opossumofdoom]

should we not be on our phones during 15 minute walk, boss?

[pukicho]

That phone is better off dead than in your hands.

[pukicho]

Take a musician's advice: without.

[austinthewise]

But... but it's cold...

[pukicho]

Jacket

[pukicho]

The purpose of The Walk is to factory-reset your brain from the effects of overstimulation. The fewer things hindering your ability to think is best. Music is an external influence on your brain. As great as it is, it still hinders self-motivated thought and blocks you from attuning to the outdoors as easily. Everyone's different, but that's me.

[hoolyelina]

swingset that came to me in a vision

[frenchwitchdiary]

Meme templates X tarot

[smurrrky]

a secret santa gift i made for @gummybird just Tim below

[headspace-hotel]

the idea of protists is really funny. Ah yes, the kingdoms of life: Animals, Plants, Fungi, and Don't worry about it:)

[man-cave-chronicles-stan]

i just started taking my first botany course and politely op what the fuck is this supposed to mean

[headspace-hotel]

Well

Um

...

All creatures with cells that have the fancy stuff like nucleus and mitochondria are Eukaryotes. That picture is from the Wikipedia page for Eukaryotes.

Long ago there was just the Bacteria and Archaea. Then something weird happened and an Archaean ate a bacterium but the bacterium was not consumed, instead they became friends. By "friends" I mean "permanently merged together into an entirely new kind of life form that can do all kinds of fancy stuff with its cells." This life form is your ancestor and the ancestor of all Eukaryotes.

One of those new, fancy life forms ate a cyanobacteria and made it into chloroplasts. This created the plants.

A few others decided to go multicellular and form tubes out of cells that could wriggle around, and they became animals.

A few decided to also go multicellular and team up into big networks of interconnected thread-like tendrils, and they became fungi.

But most of them just kind of went off and did their own thing, going about their single-celled business, evolving into all kinds of weird stuff without doing anything multicellular. And all of those guys got called protists. Every eukaryote that didn't become multicellular is a protist.

The guys that went multicellular are just a few weirdos in these random corners of the tree of life, but they get all the attention cause we multicellular organisms are kind of self-absorbed (and we had to do some strange things to sand to turn it into lenses to see the single-celled organisms).

If each of those multicellular clades counts as a "kingdom," how many kingdoms do the single-celled guys make? Good luck with that one. We keep finding more of them.

Every time we look at some more pond water, the taxonomists collapse into sobbing again. There are too many ways to be a little guy. Every time there's a cilium or a flagellum somewhere it's not supposed to be, or there's something suspicious going on with microtubules or zoospores or helical structures something, or god forbid two guys get freaky and do another endosymbiosis again, they have to rewrite everything and there's at least two fistfights and one brawl.

Protists: Just don't worry about it.

[headspace-hotel]

Also I lied and there are plenty of eukaryotes that are multicellular and not animals, plants, or fungi, such as giant kelp

However those get called protists half the time too because with kelp, it's easier than trying to explain what the fuck it is if it isn't a plant, and with everything else, talking about it just starts an argument about what counts as a "cell" and what counts as "multi" for that matter and nothing good comes of it.

[drafty-castle]

Wait wait wait. Hope do you argue what counts as multi. Anything larger than one, right? Anything larger than one?

[headspace-hotel]

Well

Xenophyopores found a cool hack to be unicellular but still get 20 centimeters long—they just have lots and lots of nuclei in their single cell.

They look like this. Of course it is in the ocean where all kinds of freaks are.

Behold, a single celled organism

Maybe it is cheating though.

[headspace-hotel]

Don't worry, though, the squiggly thing isn't really its body, it's more of a shell they secrete. Yes, you see they take in minerals from their surroundings, like for example, uh...

...Okay, maybe worry a little bit.

[headspace-hotel]

wikipedia article btw

They really like radioactive isotopes and collect radioactive materials in their bodies at high concentrations.

But this is exactly what i'm talking about, these guys are totally different from plants, animals, or fungi, just like they're totally different from kelp and amoebas, they are Their Own Thing.

[headspace-hotel]

@ayoungparent Well apparently slime molds are a polyphyletic group (a bunch of unrelated organisms that happened to look similar).

The Myxomycetes are the ones known as plasmodial slime molds and basically they form spores which hatch into single-celled haploid guys (basically like sperm or egg in humans) and when the spores meet each other they become a diploid cell with more and more and more nuclei until they can be one cell several meters in area and several kilograms in weight. Despite being one cell technically and having no brain, they can learn and have some form of intelligence. They are good at designing the most efficient railroad system.

The big green ball I assume you refer to is Valonia ventricosa. It has some complicated structures inside and lots of nuclei to make it work, but it is just one really big cell.

Yeah. It does mitosis and everything like a regular cell.

This guy is actually much closer related to regular plants than kelp or anything else we've discussed.

[siberiantrap]

ah yes, Parakaryon myojinensis

we, uh....we don't like to talk about that one

they're the definition of Doing Their Own Thing