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Tonight in ‘reddit headines that made me laugh’

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A revisit of the my dolphin aliens and this time even more visual encyclopedia like. Just collecting all of my notes and putting them together into a nicer format.

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Rubber Ducky Isopod, color pencil

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A redraw of my eldritch sona I drew last year.

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I usually don't reblog stuff to this blog but this feels relevant to my project and I'd like to share. The link is broken but if found a good website with excerpt from it : https://www.urticator.net/essay/0/19.html

look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

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a cool artists gave me this prompt: biblically accurate angelfish and i was inspired

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What could’ve been. Classic speculative space art by Robert McCall

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Flora of the Vreem Home World

Flora on the vreem home world is more closely related to fauna, as the two share the same phyla. This is because, the origins of multicellular photosynthesis is fundamentally different than earth's.

Unlike on earth where eukaryotic photosynthesis evolved via symbiosis with cyanobacteria this process never occurred on their home world. Instead their version of photosynthesis developed later as a type of membrane bound protein structure in the earliest ancestor of both their flora and fauna phyla. As a result the flora across the vreem home world is more closely related to their animal life than those on earth.

Here's a collection of different flora-fauna your might come across on the vreem home world. Most flora use a red photosynthetic pigment in their foliage, but other pigments such blue-green and even gold are also found across the world and are typically more common among aquatic species. Each species is listed with an earthling name along side its Onomatopoeia derived from Khllk, a commonly spoken vreem language.

Singing Suitors "Hornfoots"

Evolved from a worm like ancestor, their leaves are modified gills filled with the red photo-sensitive pigment used in their process of photosynthesis. They get their name in khllk due to the rattle like "seed pots" which when blown in the wind produces a sound similar to a "Vreem" chirp. They are colloquially called hornfoots by humans, as their root structures are made of heavily ossified tissue baring a resemblance to horns. Water is drawn from the soil through capillary action similar to trees on earth. Hornfoots are a relatively primitive group of floral type fauna as they retain a central cavity, mouth, and two simple compound eyes. They protect their fills by pulling them inwards into their central cavity.

Sticky Vines Predatory flora are common across their homeworld. Sticky Vines, typically hang from the stocks / branches of other flora and use their two sticky oral arms to snag flying pray. While their too small to be considered a threat to the vreem, their oral arms are difficult to spot in the red jungles they grow in, and as a result they often present a collision hazard below the canopy

Barnacle Snakes Are a related species to sticky vines, whoever they retain more of their ancestral form. They typically grow rooted to a larger structure, a rock face or another large flora species. They share a similar gill structure like hornfoots, but theirs are sticky. They're predominately air filter feeders, surviving mostly on spores and small bugs. Unlike hornfoots they have a complete gut.

Land Corals Red Cups, Anemone Grass and Blood Leafs are three flora species which are from colonial clade. They individual flora which are comprised of smaller specialized clones which function together as a single organisms. This tends to give them a more "plant-like" appearance, similar to other colonial animals like corals on earth.

Pneumopods This group of animals tend to occupy the "insect / bug" niches like those of arthropods of earth They're very small organisms no larger than a human fingernail. However their biology share more in common with echinoderms (starfish / sea urchins) than insects. They have an endoskeleton comprised of plates as a row of tube feet for locomotion. These two have photosynthetic spiney membranes. The species on the right are gliders and feeds on the hemolymph of other flora.

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Just a chill lichenite lounging around. Decided to draw a full body lichenite to get an idea of what their suits look like. Underneath it all lichenites look like regular humans but have slits across their body which allows their suits to intravenously connect to their bodies.

The suit itself is grown rather than manufactured and tends to look like a nest of bandage wraps in its immature form. Young lichenites are placed within them soon after birth as they can't survive on their homeworld without it.

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Another thing the Imsee do, full body bio-sculpting.

The Imsee throughout their history have experimented a lot with genetically modifying their own species. In fact, they have some of the best gene-modding technology around. . Full body genetic reconfiguration is broadly accepted among the Imsee and there are two morphs which are the most common among their population. 

Yehenne, Shadow Wanders 

The Yehenne is an imsee modified for a purely aquatic lifestyle. They are similar in appearance to earth's whales, particularly the sperm whale and are capable of diving to incredibly deep depths. Their echolocation is much stronger than other Imsee

Yihinee, Sky Children

Sky children are imsee which modified themselves for terrestrial living and flight capability. The Imsee clade evolved from an avian ancestry and once this was discovered their species was dedicated to unlocking the power of flight ever since. Yihinee morphs are common among the map makers of the Ways of Water.

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just a thing

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Another sophont I've been working on. I've been trying to design these guys for a while. They've had a lot of iterations figured it was time to post them here.

Anyway, here are the Ah'Chikiri, reptile like aliens from a dying world.

The Ah'Chikiri home-world is a little bit like mars, it orbits a red giant and the majority of their worlds oceans evaporated a long time ago. Water still exists on the surface, but its isolated to lakes and aquifers. Rain is rare and generally unpredictable.

Their civilization is actually quite old, and predates the Imsee, by thousands of years. They used to be an FLT-capable civilization as well but at some point in their history their interstellar civilization collapsed and only the populations isolated on their home-world survived. Most of what remains of their civilization prior to contact with aliens in the modern era are a bunch of city states warring over the remains of their ancient technology, what they call "Earth-Eaters", Many millennia old autonomous machines created to terraform their dying world.

The Ah'chikri reproduction system is somewhat unique in that they have androdioecy, so their two most commonly occurring sexes are males and hermaphrodites. The hermaphrodite sex is generally larger than their counterparts.

Ah'Chikiri eggs are hatched in water and can under go two forms of metamorphosis either into a nymph and develop into a type of tadpole where they later grow into juvenile Ah'Chikiri or into a barnacle form and become filter feeders, during this state they can produce more Ah'Chikiri larva through budding. So a single egg can reproduce a ton of Ah'Chikiri.

Young Ah'Chikiri don't really need their parents to survive, and will generally form small nomadic troops among themselves. I'm still working on their social structures as it varies a lot more by culture than it does with other sophonts.

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Just some drawings I've been working on. I've got some world-building stuff i need to get around to posting on here.

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The Asari, if they weren't humanoid

an idea i had

Tried my hand at redesigning the Asari from Mass Effect if they were a little bit less humanoid. One of the things about the Asari is that they're considered relatively attractive by pretty much most other aliens in the setting, so i didn't want to deviate to much from something that was fairly humanoid-ish. So I kinda went with something that was a combination between a bird and a rat, and i interpreted their crest as a fringe of feathers sort of like what cockatoos have. Turians I think are going to be be raptor like so having some bird features in as for salarians, I think the overall slender build and large eyes would be what they'd find appealing.

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Decided to try coloring this in, I'm still learning how to use markers. Ever since my old graphics tablet died, I've been really debating whether or not i should buy a new one or just stick with doing things traditionally. (I'm not a big fan of pen tablets for drawing ) On one hand, messing around with markers and color pencils is really therapeutic for me right now, but I always feel apprehensive about doing things traditionaly, I guess I'd call it FORO (fear of running out). Its dumb i know, they're kinda meant to be used but still.

Either way, i think it came out okay.

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some stuff from my sketchbook and a my new pfp

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drew my caves of qud character and a few other critter things. Decided it was time to dust of my fine-liners and do some line art.