#aioura

[eggtrolls]

do u have any poetry book recommendations, great book store grader?

okay this is very funny because it's the low-stakes callout I've had coming: I am not a (contemporary) poetry-savvy person. @bill-blake-fans-anonymous is, I suspect, trying to My Fair Lady me into having a semblance of culture and taste re: poetry but it's slow progress. here are some that would get you an approving nod from me and possibly a gay anecdote:

Obit - Victoria Chang (actual contemporary poetry I am recommending for real; as this list gets longer these will get worse)

The Book of Disquiet - Fernando Pessoa

I is a Long-Memoried Woman - Grace Nichols

Robert Bly's collection of Kabir's ecstatic poetry

Hafiz.

What the Living Do - Marie Howe (gay)

whatever Mutsuo Takahashi has published in English (GAY)

you probably can't find it outside of Greece but the Aioura bilingual edition of Cavafy was the book I was reading on the beach when I kicked my ex out of my life for good and it lives in my heart and is my friend :) [I told the abridged version of this opinion to Karen Van Dyck once via Zoom and she was like uh yeah that's certainly a........translation, so take that rec with a lot of salt.]

(if I'm gonna say Cavafy I should say Giorgos Seferis too but I don't know him as well. that being said, he beat out Neruda for the Nobel Prize so....fuck with your boy George)

I once bought a huge anthology of Zbigniew Herbert's poems but it was specifically for Report from a Besieged City and my then-girlfriend's mom was impressed by my dedication

if you somehow managed to get Hiromi Ito and her translator Jeffrey Angles to do their joint/bilingual reading of 'The Maltreatment of Meaning' at the register, that would be the most impressive poetry option on this list. you'd get a high five and a good grade at bookshop forever.

also read John Donne. read more Donne. you're not reading enough John Donne. The Flea is about gay sex. John fucking Donne.

[quettasecond]

theres no post appearing in the oreviee for the aioura tag i must run in ti save everyone

[riftclaw]

actually you know what, have a teaser. baby, adult, and shiny adult

if you’ve been following me for a while you probably saw these at some point in the past-- they’ve received a light revamp, a new name (ptarmynx) and about 150 colourways

[starbound-sovereign-blog]

This is a reuaai, a species of viridiphyte leupai that travels Aioura in crystalline spaceships, abducting members of various species for science and dinnertime.

Most Aiouran species have tales of reuaai abductions and representations of them in their popular cultures, treating them as something mysterious and perhaps legendary in nature, though the astaran elves see them as precocious siblings and talk familiarly (and fondly!) of them.

The reuaai are asexual and agender; they reproduce by periodically growing many small, white flowers on their skin, which grow into rose hip-like eggs that usually need to be implanted to develop and hatch.

[riftclaw]

it’s been a long time since anyone saw these guys i’m sure

revamped and polished up regular novai to go with Axion from the other day. gonna polish him up to match soon

[riftclaw]

tosses you a couple of ocs being revived as npcs for the project I haven't officially announced yet

[riftclaw]

btw just so we’re all on the same page my basic list of Things I Am Trying To Accomplish that aren’t just “draw more and try and get toyhouse sorted”

text for the riftclaw primer/guide

illustrations for the riftclaw primer/guide

get my neocities set up so i can HOST the primer/guide

set up a page to host the sketchdump archives

once i have these out of the way i’m hoping to get more actual writing done, esp in regards to the stories of both Amalgam and Terra/Aioura

[riftclaw]

i had a lot of fun writing the little infodump post on glory the other day so i think i might like, get into the habit of doing that more often. today i feel like talking about curie and how he came to be so:

curie actually started life in the same captain planet fanfic that spawned oph back in late 2014/early 2015. essentially the same power set, but a completely different personality. he was at that point intended to be a sun spirit kind of thing, with heat/light/radiation/gravity powers. I later filed the serial numbers off and created Cain/Ignari who is still a part of Terra/Aioura, but now a completely different character

curie’s name was always curie and was always a reference to bequerel from homestuck. i actually wrote about 7k words of a homestuck fanfic involving early curie and proto-oph where the two were in a two player session with similar parameters to the cherub session (a muse and a lord, time and space, the difference being that the two of them worked together instead of fighting)

i ended up shifting focus and building on oph and cain instead for a while so “curie” sort of fell into the background until I started getting back into sonic last year

i made v as an expy of ngaigara and decided i wanted to play with a specific dynamic so i resurrected curie in the same stage he was at in the initial captain planet fanfic.

....buuut curie had other ideas as far as characterisation went-- while the original curie had a very similar backstory to current curie, he escaped on his own and became a snappy, misanthropic asshole. current curie, on the other hand, was rescued by v and given a lot of love and support, so his personality skewed to something gentler and more affectionate. basically “everyone is bad until proven otherwise” vs “some people are bad but not everyone”. (this is about the point i folded another homestuck fanfic’s version of jadesprite into curie’s personality)

the eating radioactive waste thing was also something from his original iteration. original curie lived in a lab built under chernobyl and used high levels of radiation to keep it safe. his big thing was making safe/renewable energy sources while maintaining a steady diet of radioactive waste...

....which is basically current curie’s big thing. amalgam is rapidly approaching the point where the fossil fuels run out for good, so curie has been working to a) secure a food source with a nuclear waste disposal company and b) replace coal power plants with nuclear reactors where possible and sell the power cheaply c) find safer alternatives that can be thrown in a car or motorbike that don’t involve building mini reactors into them

another plot thread i wanna touch on at some point is the fact that’s he’s essentially hiding in plain sight and the fact that nobody has figured it out yet is sheer luck...

[riftclaw]

the riftclaws are basically like, me taking a bunch of concepts originally intended for Ngaigara (furry!V) and Terra/Aioura and folding them all into one thing

in Terra's original plot (from like, 2007-8, all i remember is that it was post high school at this point) Ngaigara survived poisoning from god ichor by willing himself into ascension, becoming a god of the rifts (anomalous holes in reality scattered across the planet, inspired by The Rift in Torchwood/Doctor Who) with the ability to rend/repair damaged reality and jump between alternate dimensions at will

in the original plotline his role was basically to stabilise the rifts so the major destructive ones would awaken more rarely, and he ended up hanging around and watching over his kids, and their kids, and their kids, etc. and later the kids would develop similar powers and become an active force in stabilising the shattered reality of Terra

...so basically you could say that the riftclaws are that past Ngaiara's distant descendants after spending generations wandering from reality to reality

[riftclaw]

OC asks: 1 and 50. :D

1. Your first OC ever?

My first ever oc was a purple porcupine named Pearl. she came into existence because of that old rumour that if you hit “start” at the right point when switching between sonic and knuckles in s&k, you’d get to play a secret purple porcupine character. here’s a rough recreation:

i think that, if i were to redesign her now, i’d emphasise the “porcupine” angle a lot more, with cute rodenty buck teeth and a different kind of tail to differentiate her from both sonic and knuckles

50. Give me the good ol’ OC talk here. Talk about anything you want

THIS ONE IS HARD BECAUSE IT’S SO OPEN-ENDED. i thought about talking about how i classpect every character, but i decided it’d take way too much explanation, so instead…

i talked about my HG/SS protag expy Gold the other day. his original story was significantly different, with him being what i can only refer to as a “weremew”, which looked a bit like this:

the idea being, basically, that when you have a half-human, half-mew were-creature, it turns out looking more or less like a more natural mewtwo. i drafted mock stats for this form, making it more physical attack based than actual mewtwo (this was in 2008/2009, long before mega mewtwo x existed), and built a comprehensive pokemon au around it. in fact, that au is the one i’m still using, because i think it had a lot of good concepts!

but eventually i ended up splitting the “weremew” off from the pokemon au, and decided i’d move the concept to an original universe (Aioura). And thus, Senn was born!

[riftclaw]

looking over my characters on my toyhouse account atm

the terra/aioura section has entirely too many foxes/canines, i have to make myself branch out with the guys who don’t have designs yet

of course once i refresh ngaiara’s kids’ designs there are going to be entirely too many vaguely similar thorny devils

[riftclaw]

Aiouran elves canonical facts!

the majority have dark skin/scales and the ones that are paler have inherited a recessive gene

they are humanoid but are descended from an avian ancestor so they have taloned feet and hands and internal beaks and hollow bones

the “females” lay eggs while the “males” incubate them in abdominal pouches (they have three “sexes”, though that’s not quite correct as we understand the term)

i love them a lot

[riftclaw]

i have been working on this all day oh my god kill me