#speculative project

[sparrowlucero]

Though their initial mutations were the result of long term nuclear war, it's actually an intense culture of propaganda and strictly enforced conformity policies that have kept the Daleks in their current state. Every Dalek undergoes surgery just after birth; not to mitigate the effects of irradiation, but to rid them of whatever is legally considered "imperfections to the Dalek form" (usually throwbacks to a humanoid body plan, such as teeth and hands) and physically ready them for their casing. Additional surgeries must occur throughout a Dalek's life to prevent them from becoming "rooted" - a painful, often fatal scenario in which the Dalek overgrows their own shell and cannot be safely removed. Not only does their homogeneity serve to reinforce their fervent belief in genetic superiority, but the resulting chronic health issues prevent insurrection; a Dalek's fear of losing access to regular healthcare colors much of their judgement, and most attempts at dissent end as soon as their painkillers run dry.

[aeriona]

HEY! Do you guys like squid biology? creature headcanons? cool art? well BOY do I have the document for you~~!

It is with great pleasure to show off this absolute chonker of an art/writing project; The Mollusc Era! BEHOLD, MY MAGNUM OPUS!

In this document I go over the intricacies of various cephalopods; Inklings, Octolings, Cuttlings and even the Nautilus! The entire study is illustrated by yours truly, so there's plenty of pretty pictures to gawk at as well as pages upon pages of my concentrated autism ramblings to pour over if that's also your thing. Enjoy!

I’ve also included a Legacy Version of the document: a much older, unfinished version complete with ancient-ass art from mid last year in all of its poorly-rendered glory. A lot of the information in there is also outdated and poorly written, so good luck with that. yuck.

I recommend viewing both of these on desktop as the formatting seems to work best on there. You're more than welcome to use any of the info in there for whatever you like, if you're gonna use my art please credit me though! cheers!

[kabutoden]

karkat is my favorite out of all the trolls. i wanted to give him lore based around rove beetles, a species of beetle that evolved to appear, act and smell like ant larva, and social isopods, one of my favorite species of bugs!! i think karkat would be really, REALLY upset about not growing wings when he finally has his second molt, instead developing a stronger, heavier shell. sorry dude, i thought wings AND cool emotional sensitivity abilities were too overpowered. bugs as metaphor perhaps...

[iguanodont]

Commissioned illustration for @xensilverquill of her original dragon design: the woodland amphithere! If you think it’s neat, I highly recommend checking out this post to learn more about its biology and see the adorable crocheted sculpture this drawing was based on :)

[kinerxy]

Feralytosis

The werewolf disease

Different specimens of the primate order can be affected by this rare sickness.

The main symptoms are a total change in the anatomy of the body, increase in size, elongation of the muzzle and a great appetite for meat, preferably of the species of the infected subject.

lýkos-protanthropos Primordial Were-man.

The Protanthropos is a cuadrupedal animal with great intelligence and are very sociable, they're often found in big groups or tribes, ruled by a dominant (Alpha) pair.

These creatures can spread the sickness throught bites and corporal fluids, altought the percentage of surviving a direct attack of any of these beasts is close to none.

lykánthropos Homo sapiens lycaon.

The illness is believed to have spread to the human world when the outcast Lycaon started his reign over Arcadia, Greece.

Starting generations of disease that stretches into modern times, despite this, werewolves are nearly extinct due to the extensive hunt made by humans.

(top to bottom) lýkoseráida & lýkosnános

These are examples of small variations of the sickness, these are rather exotic due to the spreading method of the disease.

these creatures are often formed by experimentation rather than a natural contagion.

[torchtour]

my work so far on @he-who-needs-to-be-silenced's spec bio project: project homeworld!

it's super chill and and anyone can join (me shilling)

[alfazoings]

kurokumo ishmael and kurokumo captain heath!!!!

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

I know you don't like discussing the muses but i love your takes and perspectives and i had to ask you about this. after listening to ttpd, did you have the impression that she really loved matty more than any of her exes/previous relationships?. And listening to the whole album as a whole would you call it the ''matty album'' or do you think there are more prominent themes in there than their period together?. (hope this doesn't bother you, feel free to delete if you don't feel like answering it)

hey anon! You're right, I don't really like to get into the muses as I don't really think there's anything to add to the conversation at this point, and ultimately I don't think it matters.

That being said, and with the caveat that I am not Taylor and I do not know Taylor so I cannot speak to her thoughts and can only make relatively educated guesses based on being an avid consumer of her work and a student of the human condition (lol), no I do not think Taylor loved Matty more than anyone else. I think there was maybe a brief period in the thick of things where she *thought* she did because she was not thinking clearly and was in full-on denial, but to me the message that is loud and clear in the album (and more or less explicitly stated in the epilogue) is that it was not any kind of real love affair. It was certainly infatuation and lust and the promise of something more, and there may have been some love as well, but he was in no way the love of her life by any measure.

I would call it a "Matty album" insofar as they're about events in which he was present, sure. But I feel it much more as a Taylor album, if that makes sense, even though I know that's a cop out because every album is to a degree. I can't explain it well, but I don't see TTPD as a Matty (or Joe) album in the way that I would maybe say Red is a "Jake" album or 1989 may be a "Harry" album or even Lover being a "Joe" album whatever, because even if they don't figure in all the songs, that kind of heartbreak permeates so much of the material.

The thing about TTPD and the Matty situation is that the Matty situation is really a Joe situation (which in some ways is actually partially a Jake situation). I always say I hate treating Taylor like a character so I hate speaking about her and her work in this way, but you don't get the Matty situation without the Joe situation precipitating it. It's @taylortruther's now-infamous donut vs. hole analogy. The reason Taylor makes the choices she does with Matty is directly tied to what happened with Joe that made her feel she needed to. Which is not to say Taylor isn't responsible for her own actions or doesn't have agency in her own life, but I mean it in that the situation in which she found herself with Joe, and the pain it caused, is what made the alternative so comforting and perhaps even necessary in her mind. It's why it makes it so hard to "paternity test" the album, because the stories are inherently intertwined and you don't get the former without the latter.

The major "theme" of the album to me is the loss of a very specific, very personal dream, and the way in which she lost it, and the way in which grieving that loss drove her to make the choices she did. We're all talking very delicately about it because it's a sensitive topic, but it's late on Friday and few people are going to see this, so I'm going to say it: it's the give you my wild, give you a child of it all. The yearning she expresses both overtly and sub-textually for having a family in the album is palpable in a very iykyk kind of way, and it's the realization that those plans are not going to come to fruition in the way she had once imagined that drives a lot of the pain she experiences, and makes her jump at the chance to find that again with someone else.

I started a draft post about the theme of womanhood and motherhood on TTPD three months ago that I never finished because I ran out of time and ran out of steam, but it was the most striking thing to me on the album, not because I didn't know that she wanted those things because that's been obvious for years (definitely since Lover, and again, peace put it all on the table), but because the vulnerability she expressed about it on the album is incredibly moving, and it's so generous of her to trust listeners with those feelings and experiences.

Again, it's the thirtysomething of it all.

She is in relationship A which she at one point believes is forever, one which she at one point believes is going to lead to marriage and children. She is so committed to that dream that she either ignores or tries to fix serious issues that may otherwise lead others to think the two people in the relationship are incompatible, both because she loves the person deeply and because she feels that this is meant to be the way she achieves that dream. She gives it her everything, and it still dies a slow, painful, onerous death, and she feels like it may take her along with it. The dream of getting married and presumably having a family gets taken off the table: how we don't know and will likely never know because that is private between the parties involved. All that matters in the context of the album is that those plans never come to fruition and never would.

Then you have relationship B, an old flame who knows just enough buttons to push both to trigger and to flatter. A person who she presumably trusts with very sensitive, personal information as her life slowly crumbles, and this person is telling her all the things she wants to hear because he knows about what is happening in relationship A because she's told him. Person in relationship B doesn't get an "in" with her and sell her this dream unless what happens in relationship A precedes it. It's not a grand love affair for the ages, it's not a mutual decision on building their own dream together. It's Person B learning about what is happening with Person A and saying "I can do that!" even if he can't or doesn't. The dream he sells her is a rental car; it's not his own, he's just borrowing it from someone else and selling it back to her.

And the reason she falls for it is because it is what she aches for the most in her personal life, and she is grappling with it disintegrating, so she (unfortunately for her) falls for the easy way out, and in turn sells herself a story about how this must be fated, and this must be meant to be, because this person wants all the same things she does and she didn't even have to bargain for it! Well, yes, because she fed him the dream in the first place. (Like a mark falling for a sleeper cell spy.) It's too good to be true because it isn't true. IMO Person B doesn't come running out of the gate with the marriage/baby/dream life promises unless he knows that is what she most desires. But what's left unsaid out of all of it is that: those dreams were her dreams because they were her dreams with Person A. It was a whole life they had together, and a whole life they had planned for in some fashion, and a whole life that has to be dismantled in the aftermath.

So all this to say, yes, on the surface, Matty is a "main character" on the album, but truly he's a side character to Taylor as the narrator and person experiencing it and Joe as the ghost bit-player-who-haunts-every-scene. (Again, I hate referring to real people as characters, it gives me the absolute ick, but in this case it's the only way to answer the question.) I jokingly call it the Matty album for shorthand or when I want to say something out of pocket, but really, it's a disservice to the album to say that because it's not a muse album as in it's about the romance (like, say, Red often is), it's about a soul-crushing heartbreak that goes beyond it. The romance is the symptom, not the cause.

The loss of youth is tied in with all this: she's not 22 anymore. She isn't even 32 anymore. She had a very specific idea of what her life was going to look like at this point and had planned for that life, and it goes up in smoke. But again, to bring the womanhood into it all: there is, unfortunately, a deadline for these things. You're with someone for over half a decade you think is going to be your life partner and father of your children and and then he's not. You spent half a decade building this relationship for it to crumble, but now you're in your mid-30s and you don't necessarily have another half-decade to build that trust and faith in someone else before being ready to start a family. And maybe you're scared that anyone else who may become your partner will need that much time to build that trust and faith, because that's kind of all you've ever know in relationships. But lo and behold, someone comes into your life you once had feelings for and maybe now do again and is offering you everything you want and thought you'd have by this point in your life right now. It feels like an elixir that as we find out is actually poison.

That youth is not just the chance for motherhood, but it's also the hopes and idealism and belief in the future that often gradually erodes as we age. But for Taylor as well, it's also tied into the trauma of what she went through particularly in 2016, which kicks off a lot of things on the album as well (her retreat, her relationship with Joe, the pivoting in her career, etc.). That event caused a pretty clear before/after in her life (like a few other events, I suspect), and another major theme in the album is her finally grappling with the full weight of that. They're all different branches of the same tree of the story of TTPD and her life.

I could talk about this stuff forever, but I'm going to stop here because it's long enough and I should save stuff for one of the dozens of drafts I have half-baked lol. But this is just something I needed to get off my chest perhaps.

[bonefall]

Hi! How would you draw a tool-evolved cat paw?

Aeons ago I wrote some speculative biology thoughts on what a tool-focused cat would begin to look like, and mentioned the way that a caw's paw might evolve. I can try to draw it out as a sketch; but fair warning that I put my art style points into cartoony anime stuff SO you're not gonna get a realistic drawing lmao

Evolution doesn't "think." It's many changes over generations that snowball into bigger ones. So I tried to look at WHAT exactly is happening between an animal with less sophisticated tool use (chimp) and one that COMPLETELY relies on tools (human) to predict where the cat's paw would end up in a few thousand generations.

Please note! My paw would still be a "link" between the ancestor, and something even more reliant on tool use. This proposed species would still be 100% capable of doing what the cats in-canon do, like hunt alone. It's for a feline species that is tool-ADAPTED, not tool-RELIANT.

(In that way, it's more comparable to, say, a lemur and a chimp. But lemur palm refs were hard to find and I did this quick because I've already thought about it.)

This paw would exist in-tandem with a "tool tooth;" A V-shaped gap in the jawline that a single fang would nestle into. Early tool-using felines would likely use their mouth to "break" or "shear" their crafts, leading to broken teeth that would make them less successful. So there would be a lot of evolutionary pressure to have better, stronger teeth.

Evolution doesn't do "one thing at a time," so if you happened to port yourself into a group of these cats and watch them craft stuff, you'd see them using their mouths as well as their paws!

Finger Size + Tool Claw

When you see real cats batting stuff around and manipulating things, and when you look at canon where they like to "hook things on a claw," it's usually the index "finger" they favor. In fact, they do a LOT of "poking," even when a cat bats at something they seem to mostly explore with the tip of their paw.

So I figure that would actually be a big difference between this species and humans.

Unlike us, who usually have our middle finger as the longest (though there are exceptions) so we can "stabilize" the things we grab, I'd give these guys a "Tool Claw" which is not involved in grappling at all. It's longer, more deeply grooved, but also more fragile than the "hunting" claws.

When at rest, the Tool Claw would stick out from the rest of the foot, straight upwards. The fur is able to "sheathe" the other three, but the index's would be too long to be fully hidden.

Because one of those fingers is now mostly taken out of combat, the pinkie would probably thicken up to compensate. Another difference from the human hand. I can imagine that if the trend continues, they might end up supporting their full frontal weight on the pinkie pad to free up the other fingers for tool use.

(But evolution's not always predictable! They might end up becoming more "back heavy" like raccoons, or rely on the invention of shoe/gloves, or just abandon silent hunting all together to become tool-reliant.)

Paw Pad Changes

Cats use the pads on their paws to move silently. As long as the species is relying on silently stalking prey, they will need to have these pads in contact with the ground to be good hunters.

So instead of the digital pads sliding down to create the "top" of the palm, I figured the metacarpal pad would split in two. So now there's a snug, dipped "shape" with which they could nestle an object into as they work with it, but also there is ALWAYS still pad in contact with the ground.

The amount of fur in-between the bottom (metacarpal) and top (supercarpal) pads probably just depends on culture and genetics. It wouldn't really have enough of an impact on the paw to be selected for to be furry or hairless.

I can imagine some groups being weird about it and thinking it should be shaved or braided or something, lmao. Or cats who live in muddy environments clipping it for hygiene reasons.

[juicyolpickle]

Day

Night

A new development for my new speculative biology project that will be centred around an extreme humid planet. This concept art is of a little dude who is part of a family of creatures that has evolved to its humid environment. ( do not have a name yet :P ) they do not have eyes as the need for vision is nothing when you cannot see what’s 2 feet in-front of you. Instead they rely on their highly developed sense of smell and echolocation to track down their food source, this being native vegetation in their wet damp environment.

Similarly to fish on earth, they rely on their gill like organs for respiratory function, as the amount of small water particles in the air would make it feel like you’re drowning to the average human being. (If anyone is down for this little dudes name suggestions go wild)

[offshore-brinicle]

Little personal Limbus theory that I've been working on for some time is that the Limbus Sinners' inciting indicents that led them down the path of joining the company, being the moment when their wish was born, all happened at the same time 3 years before the current story.

Thanks to some old leaks where people managed to dig up three of the Sinners' unobstructed profiles, we know Yi Sang and Sinclair's official ages are 29 and 20 respectively. Remove 3 years from that:

Yi Sang would have been 26, which is the age the narrator of The Wings claims to be, after leaving his wife behind once and for all and pressumably commiting suicide by jumping off the rooftop of a department store. 26 is the real Yi Sang's age at the time of his death as well, after his tuberculosis worsened imprisioned by the Japanese forces, so this means most likely he's left N Corp behind 3 years prior, avoiding such a fate, be it either death by his own hands in despair or torment at the hands of Hermann since she seems to threaten him with torture.

Sinclair on the other hand would have been 17 which aligns with him still being in high school when the incident with Kromer happened and also mentions in his observation log for Kromer that she has grown slightly taller since the last time they met, however what was of him and how he had survived for so long taking in count he woke up in the Backstreets after his family's murder is still a mystery.

Now recently, not only the Pequod crew speculate that they have been trapped inside The Whale for 3 years, but we get direct confirmation that Limbus!Heathcliff is from the Wuthering Heights timeskip thanks to his Queequeg ID.

The first one is pretty self-explenatory, they say it themselves, though it's dubious how true this is since they have no way of tell the passage of time inside the whale and even the woman who says this sounds somewhat unsure, and Pip who was a young child in Ishmael's memory still looks the same when we see him again in the present and it's difficult to say if this is a side effect of the Pallidfication. (on the other hand I am impressed at the growth rate of Ishmael's hair for being only 3 years)

On the other hand, Heathcliff's Queequeg ID mentions the event that led him to run away from Wuthering Heights in the original novel; he overhears Catherine saying to Nelly that marrying him would be "a disgrace to her", so driven by his anger and heartbreak he ran away, making his own fortune elsewhere so that he would return to the state seeking vengeance and to become someone who Catherine would be willing to marry. This had been implied before through his general behavior and his mugshot showing him still shabby and bruised as well as his N Corp story, but this leaves no room for questioning.

All of this means that if we go by the book, at least 3 years have passed since he left Wuthering Heights and Canto VI which is next and dedicated to him would correspond with Heathcliff's return to Wuthering Heights both in Limbus' story and in the book, meaning Catherine is most likely still alive, yet Heathcliff as a Sinner in Limbus Company is a far cry from the newly powerful version of Heatchliff that returns to the state in the book, so it's likely things will play out not quite the same.

Faust's line in the Walpurgisnacht cutscene says that the standard extraction timeline range is limited to 3 years between the past and future.

In this cutscene she also says that the extractions are powered by possibility itself, and the IDs that become available are also influenced by the Sinners' experiences at the company and how they come to reconsider themselves and each other, that's how for example we get N Corp. Sinclair and Spicebush Yi Sang after being faced with Kromer digging at Sinclair and telling him about the world where they work together, and then Yi Sang being so strongly affected internally by Dongbaek's death and ultimate fate, which would be the most intense story-focused examples so far, and if we eventually get a Captain Ahab ID for Ishmael, they had already established she was down the path of becoming another Ahab, and she herself did not realize this until they met again.

If all of the Sinners' great choices that led them down the path they are currently all happened 3 years ago and the initial extraction range is 3 years, it would make sense, since these would be the moments that weight on their mind most strongly, though there's also the case of Outis who has been on her own journey for at least 10 years going by the original Odyssey and how long ago The Smoke War was, same case for Gregor who's specific motives for joining are still unknown.

[octodruid]

oh sorry, did you think that last post I made was a final design? I've been working on these assholes for over 2 years straight and there are versions of them that will never see the light of day; I'm not about to *stop* just because I posted one online 🙃 I spent a few hours writing up a lore dump for these guys before deciding it should wait until I have a lineup with more variants

[youshouldseemeinadeerstalker]

Chronological Reconstruction of the OFMD S2 Trailers

So yeah. I tried to put every single clip we got so far into chronological order of season 2.

Let me know what y'all think. Feel free to discuss and argue on the basis of this. Let's create theories together!

Thank you for the rough cut feedback @snake-snack-stede & @dickfuckk 💜

[henrysglock]

holy trinity

[torchtour]

can artfight end faster so i can go back to whatever i was doing before? i can smell the smoke of burnout on the wind, threatening to overtake the glossy meadow in which i lay :'[

[gargoylegeckooo]

The reason the idea of George and Oscar works so well is because they’re complete opposites on the neurodivergent spectrum.

Oscar shows no emotion whatsoever while George shows a bit too much emotion.