Another little batch of scifi au doodles
Featuring a couple redesigns! The species itself got a redesign but also I changed Scar’s species
If you’re confused about why Scar’s all red here’s a little worldbuilding dump for you:
This species (Sunseekers) is kind of like a reverse carnivorous plant. Carnivorous plants started as phototrophs and evolved to be carnivorous later. Sunseekers were carnivorous first, then evolved phototropism to supplement their energy intake.
However, camouflage was very important for their hunting methods (originally they were pretty much pure white with occasional light grey markings, it’s only since their lifestyle changed due to technological advancement that their skin/scale colors diversified), so being covered in bright red chloroplasts is not ideal. So - and take this with a grain of salt because I haven’t figured out the exact mechanism yet - their chloroplasts are underneath the pigment layer, which makes them invisible. The pigments move out of the way to reveal the chloroplasts when photosynthesizing, hence why the skin appears red! This is called “blooming” - at least for now. I may find a better word to describe it, but I do like the term “bloom” currently.
I made an animation of this process a while back, if you want to see it in motion:
I made it 6 months ago though so it’s pretty out of date lol. Here are the corrections I’d make now:
The wing and scale designs are completely outdated.
The red bloom should go all the way to the edge of the scales, but probably wouldn’t cover the entire wing at once.
It would happen MUCH slower than this. A single scale wouldn’t fully bloom this fast, let alone the whole wing.
I do like how it’s stylized though! The spots are more realistic than the sorta scratchy texture in the drawing I did of Scar (tbh I was just being lazy when I rendered it because I completely forgot to add the blooming until the end).
In modern times blooming isn’t as common of a behavior because food is easier to come by, and migration is very rare (other similar lifestyles where energy expenditure is consistently rather high do exist, but aren’t as common anyway). So, it’s just not as useful to be doing it all the time. Modern Sunseekers pretty much only bloom as a response to high exposure to sunlight, or when dealing with persistent physical and/or mental stress.
So basically when the body is like: put this bitch back in survival mode we need the ENERGY NOW
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OP deactivated, and some of the links were broken/marked unsafe by Firefox, so here's a new compilation post of Leslie Feinburg's (She/her, ze/hir) novels and essays on being transgender:
Stone Butch Blues official free source directly from Author's website:
Stone Butch Blues, backup on the webarchive:
Transgender Liberation: A movement whose time has come, on the web archive:
Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman, on the web archive:
Lavender and Red, PDF essay collection:
Drag King Dreams, on the web archive:
(Also, if anyone ever tells you that the protagonist of Stone Butch Blues ""ends up with a man""........ they're transmisogynistic jackass TERFs who are straight up lying)
Please also check out your local public libraries for these books and see if they carry them, to help support public libraries! If you have a library card already you can checkout Libby and Overdrive to see if your public library carries it as an ebook that you can checkout :)
EDIT: another not included on the orignal masterpost-- Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or blue !
annnnnd in light of the web archive losing it's court case, here's a backup of both PDFs and generated epubs a friend made:
5/26/2023: hello! I am adding on yet another book of queer history, this time the autobiography of Karl Baer, a Jewish, intersex trans man who was born in 1884! Please signal boost this version, and remember to check the notes whenever this crosses your dash for any new updates :)
6/24/2023:
Two links to share!
Someone made an Epub version of Memoirs of a Man's Maiden Years, which you can find Here , as a more accessible version than a pdf of a scanned book if you're like me and need larger text size for reading--
And from another post I reblogged earlier today, I discovered the existence of "TransSisters: the Journal of Transsexual Feminism", which has 10 issues from 1993-1995, and includes multiple interviews with Leslie Feinburg and other queer feminists / activists of the 90s!
Here's a link to all 10 issues of TransSisters, plus a 1996 "look back at" by one of the writers after the journal ended, you can find all 10 issues on the Internet Archive Here !
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8/28/2023:
"Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out", can be found on the web archive Here, for the 25th Anniversary Edition from 2015,
and also Here, for the original 1991 version.
Each of the above can be borrowed for one hour at a time as long as a copy is available :D
This is a living post that receives sporadic updates on the original, if you are seeing this on your dash, click Here to see the latest version of the post to make sure you're reblogging the most up to date one :)
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October, 25th 2023:
"I began to dawdle over breakfast during shift changes, asking both waitresses questions. After weeks of inquiries, they invited me to a demonstration, outside Kleinhan's Music Hall, protesting the Israeli war against Egypt and Syria. I was particularly interested in that protest. The state of Israel had been declared shortly before my birth. In Hebrew school I was taught "Palestine was a land without peo-ple, for a people without a land." That phrase haunted me as a child. I pictured ears with no one in them, and movies projected on screens in empty theaters. When I checked a map of that region of the Middle East in my school geography textbook, it was labeled Palestine, not Israel. Yet when I asked my grandmother who the Palestinians were, she told me there were no such people.
The puzzle had been solved for me in my adolescence. I developed a strong friendship with a Lebanese teenager, who explained to me that the Palestinian people had been driven off their land by Zionist settlers, like the Native peoples in the United States. I studied and thought a great deal about all she told me. From that point on I staunchly opposed Zionist ideology and the occupation of Palestine.
So I wanted to go to the protest. However, I feared the demonstration, no matter how justified, would be tainted by anti-Semitism. But I was so angered by the actions of the Israeli government and military, that I went to the event to check it out for myself. That evening, I arrived at Kleinhan's before the protest began. Cops in uniforms and plainclothes surrounded the music hall. I waited impatiently for the protesters to arrive. Suddenly, all the media swarmed down the street. I ran after them. Coming over the hill was a long column of people moving toward Kleinhan's.
The woman who led the march and spoke to reporters proudly told them she was Jewish! Others held signs and banners aloft that read: "Arab Land for Arab People!" and "Smash Anti-Semitism!" Now those were two slogans I could get behind! I wanted to know who these people were and where they had been all my life!
Hours later I followed the group back to their headquarters. Orange banners tacked up on the walls expressed solidarity with the Attica prisoners and the Vietnamese. One banner particularly haunted me. It read: Stop the War Against Black America, which made me realize that it wasn't just distant wars that needed opposing. Yet although I worked with two members of this organization, I felt nervous that night. These people were communists, Marxists! Yet I found it easy to get into discussions with them. I met waitresses, factory workers, secretaries, and truck drivers. And I decided they were some of the most principled people I had ever met. For example, I was impressed that many of the men I spoke with talked to me about the importance of fighting the oppression of gays and lesbians, and of all women. Yet I knew they thought they were talking to a straight man"
Transgender Warriors (1996) Leslie Feinberg
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