How to not hurt yourself with very sharp spikes on tail
creature-design anatomy
The creature I'm designing has a tail with spikes on the end of it. The material of the spikes should be as strong as diamond, and very sharp (the edge as well as the sides). The tail has several uses where these sp...
A lot of people seem to be asking questions about what would happen if the laws of science suddenly reasserted themselves after some absurd thing happens. Three recent questions I found right off the bat are:
A Box That Scrambles Particles
If rain magically started falling over the Sahara, wha...
Why would zombies not feast on each other?
Zombies always go after the living. This is despite thereally being a ready source of food among their fellow "colleagues". What would be a reason for this? Since dead flesh is just as delicious and nutritional as living flesh, what stops zombies from a...
Guud. I was finishing something else first, but then I was planning on bouncing some ideas around in here since I'm having a hard time finding a solution on my own and these are too opinion-based for the main site
@Mithrandir24601 Agh wow @_@ I used to have such a high tolerance for stuff like that, and now I can't even look at blood that isn't my own without getting all jello-y
(to be fair, the only 'open' heart bit of it is where they cut the heart, put a tube in it and cool the blood in order to allow them to stop the heart, so they can then drain the blood to cut open the major artery...)
@Mithrandir24601 alright here. wondering if Euron Greyjoy escaped Westeros and now is the captain of some boat IRL, where he somehow managed to cause Rocket Lab to manual-hold at T-0:58 and then have to scrub the launch :/
Okay so anyway, I'll start with the easy one: I'm trying to find ways to justify a steampunk aesthetic within a desert setting, and honestly I think my main concern here is the heat and sand interacting with the moving parts in ways we in the modern world don't know how to handle, but at the same time, I don't want to just throw in steampunk and have it not make sense to the people who are actually going to care.
@Bellerophon That's what I thought. My setting is more Sonoran Desert-like than Sahara (which everyone seems to assume for some reason...), but there's still sand that can get into sensitive moving parts and damage stuff
BBC update: they've finished repairing the hole in the heart (that they put there) and have 4(?) minutes to STF (stitch like ****) the main artery and get the blood back in before the major organs start getting effected by the lack of blood
ahh, no - it took them 14 minutes, so they had loads of time :)
Alright. So this is an issue that popped up when trying to rework an older setting to make more sense. In this world, magic is innate and everyone has it, but it's partially tied to your emotions, which means younger children, who are more likely to throw tantrums and the like, can be more dangerous to be around until they start to gain control over their magic.
So, for whatever reason, the me of like 5 years ago thought that putting all the kids into basically giant prisons until they hit a certain age was a good idea, and barring the ridiculousness of that idea, it created a setting where nobody really knew their parents and there weren't any kids around, which created a lot of opportunities to explore some interesting storylines, ideas, and themes.
I don't want to keep the "evil magic school" thing anymore, but I do still want to maintain a society where people don't know their parents and there aren't small children running around. Only thing is, I have no idea how to keep this all coherent. f^-^')
@Pleiades If the kids are really dangerous till their cerebral capacity builds then I would expect that parents would have co-evolved a way to handle it. If there isn't some way to handle it then this version of humans wouldn't have made it very far.
@Pleiades How about magical stasis while the kids grow similar to a larval stage for insects? Perhaps eggs are laid in pods then after a few years they hatch.
@sphennings No, I found a recipe for baking though I have a smoker available. Maybe I'll do that next time I make it. Today is just for starting the brining process.
@Pleiades All the kids will know each other because the eggs can communicate within the pod. However, because of the large separation between the laid eggs and hatching, no kid will know their parents. Family resemblance may show through but there may be ways to mitigate that too.
Humans are dead after the Visitors execute a contingency plan to wipe us out after a bunch of friendly Visitors are spotted entering our Solar System, one final battle happens between the friendly and hostile Visitors, and I will decide on who wins later (which will determine whether Earth gets colonised or turned into a nature preserve), and 40,000 years later in the Gliese 445 star system, an Oort Cloud colony by a descendant of the Visitors picks up the Voyager 1 probe for study.
Then......this message is heard as the series ends:
As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organizations of the 147 member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet earth. I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet.
We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.
- UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, Voyager Golden Records, 1977.
And thus the series ends with one of the Golden Records being heard as our final legacy to the stars.
@sphennings Iceland. I had meat from practically every category while I was there. Fish, shark, whale, puffin, chicken, beef, horse (maybe goat, I don't remember).
The shark you have just once. I didn't throw up but the ammonia smell is so strong it made me gag.
@sphennings That's the shark ^^. It doesn't look like much till you try to put it in your mouth. Oddly, after you make it past the first big ammonia hit, it's not bad at all. Kind of spongy.
@Pleiades There's a bunch of implications with putting babies into larvae stage. If they can communicate then there's shared emotions. With shared emotions there's the change of Bad Things happening. What happens if someone has a nightmare and the rest of the pod freaks out and that latent magic gets dangerous?
Are they born like mammals then placed in the pods? Or do the females of this species lay the eggs? (If the later, what's the ratio of egg size to body weight?)
If they're mammals then put in pods, you'll need to handwave how to handle the very important developmental stages that will happen during their time in the pods.
I'm making an alchemical magic system, and have no idea how to make iron. There's a generic material called 'metal', from which mercury, iron, and gold have been made so far, but what should it combine with to get iron?
I mean, bread can be made from as few as three ingredients. It's the ratios and processing that results in different kinds of bread. Paine de ancienne is very similar to ciabatta. It just depends on the ratios of ingredients you stick in and when you add them.
....and how you process them.
Say Fire+Earth = Magma but Fire+Earth = Clay too. Just depends on the ratios of how much you put in.
Dead humans, final battle between two rival Visitor political entities, fast-forward 40,000 years later to play the Voyager Golden Record from Voyager 1 in the Oort Cloud just outside of Gliese 445?
Either that or I replace that last part with Voyager 2 passing by an Oort Cloud colony near Ross 248 and a similar situation happens.
Basically, RIP humans as part of a scorched Earth policy as friendly Visitors try and rescue us. A war breaks out and the outcome is left ambiguous, while 37,000 - 40,000 years later, one of the Voyager probes is found and the Golden Record is played.
As the series ends, the opening message of the Golden Record begins to play and once it is over.........
As the Secretary General of the United Nations, an organizations of the 147 member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of the planet earth. I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet.
We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we are called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us and it is with humility and hope that we take this step.
After all: when you think about it, with everyone dead and that message being a sign of optimism from a long gone species.......would that not be a little depressing?
How to not hurt yourself with very sharp spikes on tail
creature-design anatomy
The creature I'm designing has a tail with spikes on the end of it. The material of the spikes should be as strong as diamond, and very sharp (the edge as well as the sides). The tail has several uses where these sp...
A lot of people seem to be asking questions about what would happen if the laws of science suddenly reasserted themselves after some absurd thing happens. Three recent questions I found right off the bat are:
A Box That Scrambles Particles
If rain magically started falling over the Sahara, wha...
The Factory Floor
The Factory Floor