#set: pajiir and delphonus

[void-botanist]

What kinda technology do people use to listen to music in the locality space setting? Is it the same as irl or is there cool sci-fi technology for it, or both? Is it different for pajiir and delphonus?

This is such a good question, Kendrick, and it helped me iron out some worldbuilding thoughts about warps. I'm guessing this came from my ask answer about Pat's old stuff, which got me kind of stuck to start - the reason he has old music stuff is because in Old Canon he was the music guy, king of the radio. The canon was weird back then, with Spinder's whole family being faeries living on Earth. I believe canonically Spinder was born in 1958, so radio and record players were a big part of his childhood. But factoring in all of the locality space worldbuilding, and keeping my timeline straight, I think it's a little more complicated.

The space era that they live in, with relatively easy access to space and permawarps, came to be about 90-100 years ago, which means that's about when there started to be a major shift in music delivery, because you could then receive music via warp from just about anywhere. I think there was already essentially a galaxy-sized Napster network, because warp witches and also starships existed before the launch era, but in terms of radio/streaming formats that's when things really took off. The only problem was you needed a warp receiver, and at first the only stable mechanical warps were those generated by enchanted machine song, which meant that all of your music was delivered with extra noise, something like how CRT TVs make high-pitched whining noises. Not ideal, but extremely popular. Then someone figured out how to besmallen the technology used for warp gates, and true hi-fi warp radio was born. Which is a long-winded way of saying by the time Pat was born 40 years ago this was a solved problem. The thing is, I always imagined him having vintage stuff because it's stuff from when he grew up, not because he's a collector (though he could be that too). So what makes his music paraphernalia outdated?

Partly it's that it still relies on midsize receivers, which are still small enough to fit in a stereo, but fill a very different niche than the much smaller receivers that became available when he was a teenager and that he probably still owns instances of. I also think he's kind of a nerd about music stuff and was into amateur radio, warp and otherwise, for a while, so he has that stuff too. Also, despite the fact that magic allows most ship environments to be fairly planet-like, oh boy is it easy to market a music storage format to planetsiders based on the fact that it could work in zero g. Don't ask me how it works in zero g, but it does, somehow. Maybe not even well, because that's not the point - 99% of buyers are going to be using it in an environment with gravity. But in general formats did get hardier. I think it would be extremely funny if current music storage formats are just like. cuboids. and you put them in the player slot and its suspension-laser-refraction array can read a shit ton of data out of it, sort of like encoding things in diamonds. I'm not totally sure about that one but making the jump from "space CD" to "music cube" or something similar would make a lot of stuff outdated. So I guess to answer your second question it's kind of the same, especially for planetsiders (radio waves never became obsolete &c.) but there's some weird scifi stuff in there somewhere beyond warp receivers, which are pretty everyday.

Now for Pajiir and Delphonus I do actually have a more solid answer, which is: it's mostly the same as real life, with some 1920s-30s flavoring, though a lot of technology is circuit mycelium on the inside, and the internet has been around a whole lot longer so the concept of streaming/digital files/internet radio is even more established. That said, there is one fictional format that actually is integral to the whole plot of Icepith: the twist. (I swear I had a cooler name for it but this works.) The basic concept is that pieces of music tracks are recorded on metal wires and twisted together as essentially an industrial cable segment. A player can play them all in tandem, but importantly, you can untwist the twist and replace parts of it, which makes remixing easy and has led to a huge remixing culture among imbrath (the underground bat people, like Rolf), and by extension nswl. This is the basis of Snap and Rolf's doomed music career, and of Oruga's pirating. Rolf's friends/lovers who supply Oruga are wire producers.

[void-botanist]

Happy WBW! What does entertainment look like in your world? Are there movie/tv or sports equivalents?

Happy WB...M...! I talked about this for my settings in a long-ago post but I think it would be fun to talk about some specifics.

I'm not super interested in reinventing sports as a whole, so the people in my worlds do pretty much the same sports as we have on earth, with some occasional modifications like riding birds instead of horses. On Pajiir, Kirnus is extremely dedicated to watching televised avestrian (bird-equestrian) competitions, and also tends to listen to baseball over the radio while he works. With other media, some places, like the Confluence (which combines Tree and Mushroom Forests with an Akkanswl and a lot of humans), make big money from movie and tv studios looking to film in a highly interspecies environment. You'll also find that a lot of nonroot media that takes place in Forests is filmed in the Confluence, because it's hard to get film access to Forests elsewhere.

Since I've been talking about Elbas Island I also want to bring up a genre that's fallen out of favor in the modern day but used to be a big deal: reality tv about the so-called "dying network families" in the Confluence. With the advent of the satellite and later fiber internet (metal/glass networks), the old money uep and neriem families who had built their wealth through being involved with the mycelial internet (just "network") were feeling extremely dramatic about the whole thing and the tv studios of the time were more than happy to lend an ear and a camera. Herric didn't really want to get involved in that whole trend, despite the fact that they were big news for establishing Elbas Island, the first offshore location to be connected to the network via satellite, but their old-money wife was not going to take no for an answer (there was a good chunk of time where she thought Elbas Island was gonna be a haven for the wealthy). So there are a few different shows from a little over a century ago that feature Herric, their Southern belle of a wife, and their two kids, with whole episodes devoted to trying to convince everyone that there was something going down between Herric and the island's co-founder, Urielte. They weren't entirely wrong, but they kinda missed the warning signs of Herric and his wife's spectacular divorce, which really wasn't about Urielte at all (she discovered Herric was for real about being a communist and didn't actually care secretly about currying favor with the Forest government).

General taglist: @kk7-rbs

[void-botanist]

Here's an STS question that I just thought of: how and when did you go from old canon:tm: to the stuff you're writing now? Was it a gradual process or were you like "okay time for me to scrap these characters/concepts and write new stuff"?

This is an excellent question, thank you!! I took a minute to dig up my canons post to make sure I was remembering right, but for the most part it was a gradual process. With Pajiir especially I had a tendency to take the exact same characters and shuffle them into a completely different plot setup, but as I got better at writing they got more personality (I started Pajiir when I was 8 and what became locality space when I was 16). Old and Middle Canons for Pajiir break on what my focus was (you'll notice that Middle Canon was basically all about Zalen) and how much Delphonus stuff was involved. It's kind of the same for locality space - Old Canon ended when I abandoned the faery police stuff and tried to make better, funner, more reasonable settings for the stories (and also to be honest everything got kinkier in Middle Canon).

I got New Canon for Pajiir when I, coming off of years and years of thinking Aza had to be a princess and she had to choose between Keearo and Kirnus, decided that neither of those things needed to be true because I didn't want to write either of them even though I still really wanted to write Aza. And then I kind of realized this world could be my sandbox and I also missed the whole Dez and Delphonus shenanigans so I started rebuilding that. And from there it just snowballed. But the setting changed significantly as I moved into New Canon, and despite all the other changes I think that's still the major difference (that and I got my act together and said "no but Zalen should actually be with Silas fr").

I got New Canon for locality space when I was rereading Spinder and Georg which...is an absolute disaster of a book but it was fun to yell about to my friend who actually remembers being around when I was writing it. I was also thinking about Isabelle and Spynder and just generally how much I love the two of them as a couple, but I wanted them to be as actually cool on the page as they were in my head. Add a little Expanse and Cowboy Bebop &c. and this is when I said fuck it I want to write space nonsense and no one can stop me:

(if your characters don't canonically have a world is it an AU to put them on a spaceship under the command of Spinder's gruff nephew-in-law probably in an allied fleet with the tall action hero lesbian rebels and the whole thing is kind of Alice Isn't Dead but like...in space)

"if your story is bad, just put it in space" -me, kind of

The more I thought about it the more this actually worked, lol, though obviously the plot changed from my initial concept. Then I just sort of shifted all my other Faeryland stories over to this new world.

I guess the short answer is I rarely scrap characters, but sometimes they get very recycled/remodeled. It's usually missing writing those characters that makes me start a new version. But I cannibalize settings and plots all the time until I find something that speaks to me.

Nicea taglist: @kahvilahuhut @kk7-rbs @outpost51 @writernopal @athenswrites

[void-botanist]

Happy WBW!

I’ve got a seasonal cold, so I’m wondering if there’s an equivalent in your setting? What common/light diseases exist there?

Happy WBW, Sam!

This is kind of a boring answer for most people - in both my settings I kinda just assume that if we have a sickness exists here, there's some version of it that exists there. Of course some sicknesses are species-locked, especially on Pajiir, but still. However this did make me think about whether androids have seasonal colds, and I think the answer is kind of yes. For hand-wavey reasons, their internal computers can keep going without getting persnickety for a lot longer than your average real-world computer, but at some point the constant uptime gets to them and they start to feel a little hazy. Slowed down. Confused. Basically the way you feel when you have a cold, minus a lot of the physical symptoms. That's when they finally have to hard restart. If that happens once every six months to a year, then it's basically seasonal, right?

[void-botanist]

happy worldbuilding wednesday! does your world have any famous tourist attractions? if so, what are they??

Happy WBW, Gwen! Although I eventually want to add more to the Locality Places series (is it a series if there's only one that says #1?) I can definitely talk about this for Pajiir.

The tallest building in the world is in Hosburg, Asoqi. I don't think it's specifically where Hosburg's famous monster truck show takes place, but I do love the idea of the tallest building just being a Heavens Arena of extreme indoor sports.

The Strip in Korrlin, Mo is The amusement park, loosely modeled on Coney Island. Many visitors to the area pass through Korrlin on their way anyway, so it's easy just to drop in.

Flower festivals in Lovrem don't draw as big of crowds, but most people have heard of them and seen pictures of how pretty they are.

Elbas Island, though honestly it isn't as touristy as the tourists seem to expect (wow! look at them not using money!). But hey, tourism is limited, so there are no crowds.

The Glass Palace on Elbas's next-door neighbor, Hoscha, is really just a regular hotel on the inside, but its outer layers are crystalline grids of glass that ultimately give the impression that the whole building is glass.

Canthilifeir, Posimar is the kind of city spoken about like New York or Paris - you're supposed to go There. Not necessarily for something specific - just because the city is.

A major draw is first week celebrations in Deridis, but especially in the capital and Anni's home city, Ermotlift. They're big festivals that grew out of a mix of human and orea-nawwen culture, sometimes with a dash of whatever Anni's religion is called.

Niievosk Palace in Melisk, Navar, was a tourist destination even before the fall of the monarchy because it's just a weird shape (and the gardens are beautiful, thanks Tobi & co.). If you were to look at it from the top down, it would look like 4 C shapes all with their backs to each other, almost like a four-leaf clover, with a tower in the middle. People couldn't really get close to it, but they'd still flock to look at it.

[void-botanist]

A name joke

I did some work on swl names recently because I want to differentiate the nAkkanswl more. I already knew that in the third Akkanswl, where Derik and Wylie are from, it's common for people to have longer names in the native language and go by nicknames. So:

Dayirkitomopp -> Derik

Wanlihandomopp -> Wylie

where -mopp is a suffix that denotes their place in the sibling order. There are six vowels in Kamnswl writing, so people who have more than six kids sometimes skip the suffixes after that instead of making ones with diphthongs.

Similarly, it's tradition for the firstborn to have a particularly long name, made from some pool of significant syllables. The unspoken result of this is that the amount of syllables in a name tends to decrease with every child:

Sanistrezkimatolenandomapp (Snap) Kanakaeneleximipp (Lexie) Wanlihandomopp (Wylie) Dayirkitomopp (Derik)

Which means that in third at least there is a person who commonly shows up in idioms:

My seventh son,

[void-botanist]

How do you pronounce swl and nswl?

Good question! I forget that I'm the only one who just knows these things lol. By accident I made 'w' extremely similar to Welsh in this situation, so 'swl' is 'sool', with the same sound as in 'boo'. 'Nswl' is just that with an 'n' sound on the front, so it sounds like 'unsool' but without fully pronouncing the 'u'.

Fun fact while I'm at it: it used to be that this species had a completely different name, but then I looked at the name of their city, Akkanswl, and I said, "what if that's just 'city of the people' and therefore something like Akkas (city) + nswl (people [genitive])". So I renamed them and also got a plural marker in the process.

[void-botanist]

Happy (late) WBW!! (Blursday will follow) 🖤💜

How do people greet one another in your world? Is there a special i-am-not-armed gesture for magic users or others with dangerous abilities? Is there a way of changing a greeting gesture to make it insulting?

— @outpost51

To be honest, this is something I haven't really thought about (he says, after thinking about it in the background for like two weeks). In locality space's Old Canon, winking one eye then the other was a standard greeting upon being introduced to someone. (In Old Canon there weren't types of witches - any witch could read your mind/soul on touch if they so chose, so limiting physical contact felt obvious.) I think that's still true in some places, but there's not a standard greeting across all the systems. However, witches across the galaxy are known to greet people by holding their hands a little bit out to the sides to indicate that they are both gloved and probably unarmed. I suspect in the dome city of Speekal (name pending) in Isonus system there's a whole idiosyncratic method of greeting based around the roles and expectations of the scientists who live there, something in the vein of Belter communication while wearing space suits. But I have no idea at this point what that entails, or whether anyone on the Nicea manages to insult someone with it instead.

I also haven't gotten very far with this on Pajiir. But I will say the greetings are more limited by species physiology than in locality space. For instance, neriem don't have hug-based greetings because their heads are full mushroom caps and are literally too big for that to make sense. Orea-nawwen and some subspecies of uep tend to be very tall (in the 6.5-8 foot range) and broad, so their greetings among themselves and to other smaller species are going to be different. (This reminds me that I need to finish my mini guide to Pajiirian species…) Generally people aren't going to be insulted by an attempt at the wrong kind of greeting - they'll just be like, "uh. have you never met one of us before?"

[void-botanist]

Happy WBW! 👑 - What world leaders are most remembered? Why? Is there division in how they are viewed among people in the present day?🌪️ - What great natural disasters still linger in the history books? What impact did they have on the world, both historically and in the modern day?

Happy WBW! These are honestly better questions for Pajiir, where I know more than nothing about world leaders and important natural disasters.

👑 - What world leaders are most remembered? Why? Is there division in how they are viewed among people in the present day?

These are only a few but they were the ones I had the best idea about, roughly in chronological order.

Verussico Zivelek: Past king of Navar (and ancestor of Aza & Sheri) who reinstituted every measure of separation that his grandparents had put in place between Navar and its northern neighbor, Gurenii. Did this prevent a war? Probably. Did he do it for the power? Significantly. Generally used as a figurehead of the enemy for the surrounding countries that formed the Wall (not a literal wall, a travel and trade restriction zone). Within Navar people tend to have mixed feelings about him still.

Arsalis Sitrobeli & Ginomet Quintall: Forged the alliance between the Quintall (human) and Sitrobeli (uep) families that persists to this day. There remains a helping of intrigue and rumor about them, despite the fact that their lives and dealings were decently well documented, primarily because the power this small country wields in global politics is partly due to the Sitrobelis' influence with the Forests. They're also remembered in fiction, with the tempestuous formation of the alliance as backdrops to other stories.

Barrea Genwrntol: The first swl king to wage out and out administrative war against the magistrates of the five nAkkanswl. The kind of person you lampoon in a shanty about how docking laws are so particular because of her that you are doomed to never return home. People sometimes try to make her out as a victim or a woman of poor advisors but the more widely held view that she was an asshole who set the stage for the nAkkanswl legal system to still be kind of broken several hundred years later is arguably more correct.

HJ Elviret: Former Council Lead on Elbas Island, and child of one of its founders, Herric. Technically still living, but thoroughly excommunicated from Elbas. Though mostly an offhand mention in mainland - and especially nonrooted - history books, HJ is remembered in the Companions as a sellout piece of shit, which is funny because he actually briefly decimated the tourism economy of Elbas Island, which in turn took a chunk out of tourism on its neighbor, Hoscha. What was he selling out to? His mother's dreams of Elbas being a haven for the Pure and Unfortuate of the Forests' upper crust network investors.

🌪️ - What great natural disasters still linger in the history books? What impact did they have on the world, both historically and in the modern day?

Pajiir has generally all the same natural disasters as earth but I've thought most about hurricanes. The south Liliniek rarely experiences hurricanes/tropical storms, much like the south Atlantic. But some sixty years ago, one did form, and it destroyed segments of the archipelago rail bridge that connects two continents. There was a lot of discussion about whether this was a one off - it hadn't happened since the bridge was built, and anything resembling a tropical storm rarely appeared in the area, but no one wanted to keep perpetually rebuilding the bridge. In the end they did rebuild the bridge stronger, though no new tropical storms have yet materialized.

[void-botanist]

#per survived yayy!! #which is an extremely common thing with uep. some don't even know their second parent at all. Nid doesn't #<- I'm so curious Abt why that is

Oh boy I cannot resist an opportunity to discuss this. So, compared to all the other species, uep have weird reproduction. All of the sexual species (read: nonroots) reproduce the same way humans do. The rooted species (neriem and uep) both use this same rootstock-style reproduction, where there is no such thing as a male and female of the species. But while with neriem, having no sexes means reproduction is completely open-ended and any pair can reproduce, there are nine subspecies of uep and they can only reproduce with another member of their subspecies. Except that has nothing to do with how people form relationships, and it's extremely common for uep and neriem to be in relationships too.

Enter the central Tree Forest government.

The Forest runs the equivalent of a sperm bank for uep, but the end result is more like Tinder: they have a database of vetted uep who have applied to work as seeders, who are paid to be someone's second parent. Some people will choose a seeder parent from the database on looks or on vibes, but the preferred way to do it is to choose (or have the seeder department choose) based on their interests, because uep reproduction requires two uep to be rooted together in one place for some number of months (I haven't decided how long). So it's kinda important to not do that with someone you are likely to not like. Ultimately lots of uep have a parent they don't know, and that's normal. But there's a lot of possible permutations with this situation:

Nid doesn't know their seeder parent at all beyond the bio in the database. Casper raised them and did not keep in touch with their other parent.

Ellery knows his seeder parent, Kadelia - she lives on another continent with her husband and their sprout, who is El's half-sibling but who he considers a cousin.

Milo didn't really know Tem even though his mom kept in touch because Tem also lived on another continent. Some 40 years later, after Tem's husband died, they and Marietta ended up getting married.

It's also related to why many uep don't have siblings that they were raised with (Rae and Madge are exceptions - they had different seeder parents but were raised together by the same dad). Getting a seeder isn't the hardest process but it is a long one, along with the unavoidable requirement of being rooted in for months. Uep who are partnered are more likely to have multiple kids (like Tirias and Ari) but even then it's not that common. This is also a big reason that Nid and El keep putting off sprouting, because they have to get seeders.

Wrapped Scenelets No. 95: splits

I'm writing scenelets for (most of) my Spotify Wrapped top 100 songs. Here's number 95, Bad Moon Rising by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

━━━━━━━━ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ━━━━━━━━

The Confluence leaves seemed to intensify the sound of the wind, clattering together in a way the conifers at home never did, and throwing around the weird storm light with their shadows. It was easier to look out the window than it was to keep watching what was happening six feet away, to keep waiting and waiting. Tem stole a glance back anyway. Marietta was still making small talk with the nurses, though it was getting bigger the longer it went on. Probably Tem should be talking too, pretending that all this was real normal and they weren’t that worried. But they didn’t feel quite like they were in the room anymore. The worry and the panic surrounded their mind completely, and they were getting through it by just not thinking about it too hard. Not thinking about how their roots were still locked into Marietta’s, and would be until their sprout, Milo, finally split off their combined rootstock, however many more hours that took. Not thinking about the brace around Milo’s tiny body, covering so much that it looked like per was just a metal can with limbs and a head, the only thing standing between per and all manner of infection and injury. Not thinking about what happened if the brace wasn’t enough, and despite the doctors’ confidence, Milo died when per differentiated. Just thinking about the strange foreign leaves. The strange foreign wind, and the strange foreign shape of the window. Just how this was their first, and Marietta’s, and if per died, they would have to get out of this job. There was no way they could brave it again after that. It was honestly a wonder they hadn’t passed out from the stress yet.

They were half-rehearsing a worst-case call to their husband when they felt an odd creaking in their roots. Turning back to the room, they found the nurses all crowding around Milo, and Marietta watching them. Milo’s roots were lifting up, shrinking back from the rootstock. When Tem could feel the bizarre sensation of Milo standing on their roots rather than as part of them, per eyes opened. They felt per wobble and their heart stuck in their throat. But the machine connected to per brace said that per was breathing. Now Tem was too, coming halfway back into reality out of pure relief.

━━━━━━━━ ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ━━━━━━━━

Scenelets wrapped taglist: @kk7-rbs

[void-botanist]

WIP titles tag

I haven't done this one before so I'm borrowing @lavender-laney's open tag.

Rules: Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. Let people send you an ask with the title that most intrigues them, and then post a little snippet or tell them something about it! Then tag as many people as you have WIPs. (optional)

Okay well. My stuff is a little scattered, partly depending on whether it's a newer (not necessarily still canon) document and was done in Scrivener, or if it's an older TextEdit/Word document. I will give you the subfolders for older versions plus the Scrivener folders (though tbh looking at the documents inside the Scrivener files would be funnier and I am also happy to do that).

I will also keep this as an open tag because oof this is a lot of titles

Locality Space (previously Faeryland setting)

Christina and Kat

Drowning in the Stars

Faeryland overarching

Isabelle and Spynder

Locality Space Side Scenes

Love in Brú Nua [w transitional char notes] (<- this is all in the title)

Nicea

Spinder and Isabel

Tales of Tobar Si

Creepsters - Witcheden Phase

Creepsters 8 Test Backup

Creepsters 8 Test

Creepsters 8 Ywriter

HS, LiBN

Isabelle and Spynder

Old

Research

SNA

Spinder and Georg

Spinder and Isabel

Pajiir & Delphonus (for this one the old versions are really organized because I did a database project with them)

[Azalea] Triad

Delphonus 2

Delphonus 3

Dez backup Feb 16 2023

Dez extras (searchable) (<- lol I did not understand the Scrivener search settings when I made this)

Dez

Pajiir Reference

Pajiir Side Scenes

Pajiir Snippets

Syndy & Hoven

Triad beats

[1] Azalea the Book

[2] Azalea Sequels

[3] Azalea Dream Beginning

[4] Azalea 3

[4.5] Meldraco

[5] Hope

[6] Princess Azalea

[7] Spacefarer Stories

[8] Zalen the First (Autobio)

[9] Chykoff Stories

[10] The War Files

[11] Elbas Stories

[12] Az 2019

Extras

Research

Shares

yes

[void-botanist]

👽🌕🤖🧪for the sci-fi game!

From this ask game!

Thank you!! Let's do a lightning round of a few different settings:

👽Have humans made first contact with an alien species? How did it go? If not, is there a possibility they ever will?

Locality space: so far, no, much to Fabian's chagrin. I don't have any specific plans for this, but also, never say never.

Pajiir: no, not until later in the Delphonus Saga that TFA is the start of, but, uh. Zalen wasn't wrong when he theorized that silicon-based life could exist on Delphonus, Pajiir's Mars equivalent.

Corporate space (Derelict Corridors): yup! There are a lot of them in corporate space, including the moth/spider species that Moochia is. For most species, the first contact was decades or centuries ago, but Moochia's planet still tends to remember it as "the Corporates showed up and tried to persuade us they were right about the universe, because they're dumbasses".

🌕What planet(s) do the aliens come from? How different is it from Earth?

Pajiir: Delphonus is sort of a crossover between Mars and an asteroid planet. In general, if you imagine a brown Mars with one moon, that's it.

Corporate space: tons and tons of them. Moochia's planet is the only one I've really thought about, and it's pretty similar to Earth, aside from having a longer day-night cycle.

🤖Has synthetic life been created in your WIP? Robots/androids/etc. that can think and feel like sapient living creatures? If not, is there a possibility it ever will be?

Locality space: no. It's been theorized a lot—there are plenty of thought experiments about taking revital magic (healing) and applying it to making synthetic life forms, though as far as anyone knows revital magic can only be used through touch and not enchantment—but making robots that are like living beings is completely unnecessary and no one has actually succeeded at doing a convincing job of it.

Pajiir: yes, absolutely. Mizzat and Imjen were created for research purposes, Syndy for propping up the reputation of a dying monarchy, and Dez for funsies. Making an android still takes a whole lot of time and expertise, though—Dez took six years to build, AFTER Anni got her master's in robotics. There's really no market or need for androids in general, so they're the only ones who exist, though I've been toying with the idea of a fifth uep or neriet (tree or mushroom person) android.

Corporate space: the Companies tried to make androids and there's a persistent rumor that they were sapient, which makes the entire corporate plan to use them as low overhead biological person replacements more harrowing. The Union said "hell no", though, and the android project was axed.

🧪Was synthetic life invented on purpose or by accident? How did it happen?

Pajiir: A little bit of both. The androids were built on purpose, but no one entirely understands how they have sapience. They all have significantly different builds, so their sapience isn't a result of being biotech (Mizzat is maybe 1% biotech, if that), and it's also not a result of having the same code, because they don't, even though there was some collaboration between their builders. Everyone points to the pickling process in which they just sort of integrated a ton of information from the internet, but that's still way too broad to pinpoint what happened.

[void-botanist]

JULIE YOU'RE SO RIGHT I hadn't even thought about the terminology yet but twist jockey??? yes??? I gotta decide if they're actually called twists as like. the normal name. I'm sure people call them twists either way tho.

It's exactly like vinyl actually, with the music physically encoded. I imagine when you feed it into the player it unwinds into the separate strands, so that you can have information on multiple sides of the wire and also use the player as an untwister, but it could also totally work as one unit that doesn't untwist when it's played and just gets revolved with multiple needles instead. Actually that sounds cooler and might have more structural integrity over time. But if they both exist which one you use would vary the most with where you're from. I suspect there's a header at the beginning of the twist that tells the machine how fast it's supposed to be played based on how dense the encoding is but I haven't worked out the exact details. Fun fact too, magnetic wire recording was a thing at one point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wire_recording

I think you're on to something here. What if on Pajiir all twist music is "industrial" not because real-world industrial music doesn't exist but because it also has a different name because of its cultural relevance there? I'd have to think on that. OR maybe it's just that people do call it industrial, maybe even as a translation of an imbra word for it, and it gets confused with industrial the genre. I like that better (can you tell I'm coming up with this on the spot lol), because while yeah realistically these genres developed differently on Pajiir I don't think I actually need to get into that. Also if twists can be hot pink, and that should be an option because it's cool, that implies that there maybe is an anodizing process or something like that, which means that Mizzat, who IS anodized, probably gets called "twistbot" or something like that. Probably affectionately, right up until people start asking vim to play music.

And your tags:

#also yeah that is the answer this was inspired by #it got the gears in my brain turning #fuck i want a music cube... #rose i think it would be really funny if you got some actual metal wires #and stuck some headphones into them and walked around with them in your pocket like they're a walkman #and when ppl ask why you have it just say you're listening to music. from space. don't elaborate #idk how people even get their hands on cables like that but if there's a will there's a way...

I laughed out loud at this it would be extremely funny

What kinda technology do people use to listen to music in the locality space setting? Is it the same as irl or is there cool sci-fi technology for it, or both? Is it different for pajiir and delphonus?

This is such a good question, Kendrick, and it helped me iron out some worldbuilding thoughts about warps. I'm guessing this came from my ask answer about Pat's old stuff, which got me kind of stuck to start - the reason he has old music stuff is because in Old Canon he was the music guy, king of the radio. The canon was weird back then, with Spinder's whole family being faeries living on Earth. I believe canonically Spinder was born in 1958, so radio and record players were a big part of his childhood. But factoring in all of the locality space worldbuilding, and keeping my timeline straight, I think it's a little more complicated.

The space era that they live in, with relatively easy access to space and permawarps, came to be about 90-100 years ago, which means that's about when there started to be a major shift in music delivery, because you could then receive music via warp from just about anywhere. I think there was already essentially a galaxy-sized Napster network, because warp witches and also starships existed before the launch era, but in terms of radio/streaming formats that's when things really took off. The only problem was you needed a warp receiver, and at first the only stable mechanical warps were those generated by enchanted machine song, which meant that all of your music was delivered with extra noise, something like how CRT TVs make high-pitched whining noises. Not ideal, but extremely popular. Then someone figured out how to besmallen the technology used for warp gates, and true hi-fi warp radio was born. Which is a long-winded way of saying by the time Pat was born 40 years ago this was a solved problem. The thing is, I always imagined him having vintage stuff because it's stuff from when he grew up, not because he's a collector (though he could be that too). So what makes his music paraphernalia outdated?

Partly it's that it still relies on midsize receivers, which are still small enough to fit in a stereo, but fill a very different niche than the much smaller receivers that became available when he was a teenager and that he probably still owns instances of. I also think he's kind of a nerd about music stuff and was into amateur radio, warp and otherwise, for a while, so he has that stuff too. Also, despite the fact that magic allows most ship environments to be fairly planet-like, oh boy is it easy to market a music storage format to planetsiders based on the fact that it could work in zero g. Don't ask me how it works in zero g, but it does, somehow. Maybe not even well, because that's not the point - 99% of buyers are going to be using it in an environment with gravity. But in general formats did get hardier. I think it would be extremely funny if current music storage formats are just like. cuboids. and you put them in the player slot and its suspension-laser-refraction array can read a shit ton of data out of it, sort of like encoding things in diamonds. I'm not totally sure about that one but making the jump from "space CD" to "music cube" or something similar would make a lot of stuff outdated. So I guess to answer your second question it's kind of the same, especially for planetsiders (radio waves never became obsolete &c.) but there's some weird scifi stuff in there somewhere beyond warp receivers, which are pretty everyday.

Now for Pajiir and Delphonus I do actually have a more solid answer, which is: it's mostly the same as real life, with some 1920s-30s flavoring, though a lot of technology is circuit mycelium on the inside, and the internet has been around a whole lot longer so the concept of streaming/digital files/internet radio is even more established. That said, there is one fictional format that actually is integral to the whole plot of Icepith: the twist. (I swear I had a cooler name for it but this works.) The basic concept is that pieces of music tracks are recorded on metal wires and twisted together as essentially an industrial cable segment. A player can play them all in tandem, but importantly, you can untwist the twist and replace parts of it, which makes remixing easy and has led to a huge remixing culture among imbrath (the underground bat people, like Rolf), and by extension nswl. This is the basis of Snap and Rolf's doomed music career, and of Oruga's pirating. Rolf's friends/lovers who supply Oruga are wire producers.