malymin

Visit by clicking this link.

This website was an absolute BITCH to hunt down evidence of it having ever existed, let me tell you. But I was able, at the very least, to eventually find record of its url to plug into the Wayback machine.

You navigate through a simple little text adventure to find pets to adopt onto your website! Click areas on the map (....on the homepage, not on this dreamwidth post) to navigate. :)

A one or two pages seem to not be archived on Wayback, though... so far most seem fine. Sometimes, though, Wayback will take you to a capture from after the website went down even if it has better captures to show you; if you can, see if there's an earlier capture on Wayback's timeline that's actually preserved. (The tiger cub page has this issue.)

In addition, you can get some "pet supplies" from the town on this page. These are purely for decorative and roleplay purposes - you can see them being used by a website that adopted from the island of Twiluu here. The objects aren't edited directly onto the pets themselves on that page, but overlaid behind or in front of the pet image.

You'll find even more pets if you brave the wilderness, of course... do you want to play in this place, with me? Dive into the bay for sea dragons. Watch a fairy.

The "forest stream" page, though, seems to be permanently lost, as its only capture is from 2023... long after Geocities as a whole shut down. In addition, there appears to have been a "castle" area that was never properly saved to wayback. The link to it, when it was functional, was the little island near the peninsula.

• "Castle Main" is archived, but the page before and after it are permanently lost.
• "Corridor 2" is archived, but the pages behind and ahead of it in sequence are permanently lost.
• "Curtain" is archived, but the page that leads to it is permanently lost. The pet that was available to adopt from it, the blue Draelon Cat, is also not archived, although you can see an adopted one (as well as yellow and pink ones, which I don't remember how to get) here.

And if you adopt, read the rules. It's just nice to respect people's wishes, even if (regardless of how the former siterunner may be IRL) it feels like they're stone-etched the wishes of the long dead.

Let me know what you discover!

It's hard to find good, free-to-use dragon art sometimes, but here's a cute feathered dragon.

Source is this Deviantart submission by a user named BasiliskZero. Published February 18, 2012.

Artist commentary:

I just stumbled upon this buried in some old folders.

I had plans for these lines, grand plans, but honestly I'm NEVER going to get around to using them for their intended purpose(mostly cuz I apparently can't draw this species more than once...).

So here they are for your use as char references, adoptables, whatever.

Free lineart rules:

• You may color and/or edit this
• You may make adoptables with this
• You may attempt to sell what you color for "points" or "gold" on any site
• You may not sell or redistribute this lineart
• You may not sell adoptables made with this lineart for real money
• Credit(a simple link is preferred) is nice, but not necessary.

In addition, the artist has more free lineart here.

I consider a "vanilla+" mod to be a mod wherein sharable assets made using it (such as a a spore creature, or a sim or lot in The Sims) are completely sharable with people who have no mods whatsoever installed in their game.

The Petz Community has a long history of hexed (modded) adoptable pets designed to be sharable to people without the installation of entire new breedfiles (which also have a long history in the PC). This is in part possible through a quirk of how Petz handles character model rendering, but Petz being one of the first computer games I ever played influenced my tastes in mods for other games.

• Full Cell Parts Mod: allows cell parts in the "main" creature editor, and unlocks the disabled morph handles for those parts. A successor to the older "Cell Parts Xtended" mod. Is a package file and therefore can be installed manually (unlike all the other mods on this list, which are sporemod files), but can be easily installed and uninstalled with Spore ModAPI Launcher Kit.
• Advanced CE: Free movement of creature parts, detached from spine or limbs. Requires Universal Property Enhancer, and by extension, the Spore ModAPI Launcher Kit.
• Togglestacker: A successor to SporeStacker. Allows parts that normally cannot be stacked on each other to be stacked - for example, placing wings on the tips of a creature's horns.
• Enchanced Color Picker: Allows a full color wheel (like you'd use in an art program), as well as entering hexidecimal color codes, when coloring in any creator or outfitter. A successor to Raptor's Colors.
• Delimbiter: more ways to morph the size and shape of both fleshy and exoskeletal limbs. A sucessor to "Sneky Leg Day." Requires Universal Property Enhancer, and by extension, the Spore ModAPI Launcher Kit.
• Share-safe Music: Allows the adventure editor to access more music tracks already present in SPORE's files; adventures will still play the selected music even when pollinated to unmodded games. In a sense, this is an Adventure Creator equivalent to how Full Cell Parts increases your palette of options in the Creature Creator.
• Advanced Creature Paint: Allows the player to apply building/vehicle paints to individual creature and outfitter parts, on top of the standard body/coat/detail color channels of the creature. Creatures made with the mod can safely pollinate to other games, but will not display their building/vehicle paints without the mod installed. As far as I know, this is the only vanilla-safe mod that functions like this.

BONUS: Jiggly Part-chain Tutorial!

Like, ok, part of chilling out as a "book-smart" autistic person is learning to accept that the same word can have different meanings in different contexts, right? Instead of being insistent that "a tomato is a fruit and not a vegetable," one internalizes that "fruit (culinary)" and "fruit (botanical)" are overlapping but separate categories. (The key, imo, is that "vegetable" is a word that has no meaning whatsoever in modern botanical science, but clearly has a meaning in culinary contexts.) Also, understanding the importance of folk taxonomies in categorizing things by similarity in taste, or habit, or convergent anatomy. If evolutionary clades are the only categorization that matters, then yes, "fish aren't real", because a lungfish and a carp and a shark are less related to each other than a lungfish is to an antelope. But "fish" is nonetheless useful in day-to-day life to describe the common shared features of finned water-dwelling vertebrates, and it's not helpful to throw the entire tetrapod clade into the category even if it makes the "fish" category genetically coherent.

And then sometimes I halfway want to revert to the "UM acktually tomatoes are fruit" person because I'm fed up with the pendulum swing in the other direction of "words don't have to mean anything consistent or coherent at all."

One often runs into people on Tumblr who show complete disinterest, even hostility, to understanding anime/manga trope and genre terminology that don't fit into blorbo-incorrect-quotes shitpost boxes wherein all het romance is shoujo, seinen is "shounen but grittier," yaoi is a funny meme name for "gay male subtext and romance" and yuri is a funny meme name for "lesbians subtext and romance." (and not, say, manga genres that contain doujin but were formed on a bedrock of published original fiction, and formed independently of Spirk-descended anglophone shipping culture). People get mad when you point out that Skip and Loafer is seinen and not shoujo because it's het romance and doesn't hate women. People on Tumblr have called both Fullmetal Alchemist and Dungeon Meshi shoujo because A Woman Wrote Them. God forbid you try to have a real conversation about mahou shoujo or mecha, that isn't based on telephone game distortions of one-to-three of the most popular (in anglo spaces) franchises. It's like... imagine you're trying to make an educational blog post about shark biology, and people won't stop "correcting you" about the fascinating anatomy of shark's rough skin, because "lol sharks are smooth, they're so smooth, don't you know?" They laugh at you being so pedantic as to try to actually communicate information about the world, and they won't take in anything you're actually saying or engage with it in good faith. Except it feels like about half of the people in Tumblr anime discussions do believe, figuratively, that Sharks Are Smooth In Real Life.

...honestly, the "I don't need to learn anything about the media history of other countries and cultures, I can just call things [japanese genre name] based on vibes" take feels kind of racist. Though I also see this attitude in areas where you can't really say it's racist or otherwise bigoted, just... kind of obnoxiously anti-intellectual? Anti-learning? A sense that vibes and shitposts are the only form of communication that matters, and caring about details and communicating those details makes you a wet blanket redditor who hates fun.

Like how stubbornly the fanfic writers on Tumblr refuse to take being corrected about the meaning of "favoring a leg" in veterinary contexts, and how frustrating it is for people for whom the clarity of its meaning is actually important in their real lives to be told that they're wrong because words mean whatever the majority wants them to.

Okay normally I'm on the side of "words mean whatever we need them to mean".

but guys, I don’t like the suggestion that it’s what is happening here. Being unfamiliar with the term, and guessing its meaning based on vibes, doesn’t mean you have equal authority on whether it’s “correct” with the community who actively use this word in a technical sense.

please do consider that if you haven't been exposed to the word in the context it's used in, "both are correct" and "you can interpret it differently" and “there is no right or wrong answer” and “it feels like it SHOULD be X” cannot be a fully realised take. Sure, linguistics recognises there are rules in which meaning changes - but “laypeople being unfamiliar with the word, and liking vibes better” isn’t one of them.

Quite frankly, "words mean whatever Vibes they convey to me personally" is probably also why fandom-culture SJ has gone so fucking disastrous in the long run: words and phrases that were initially given very specific definitions to talk about complex nuanced sociological contexts get simplified, or even warped into the exact opposite of what they originally meant, based entirely on the Vibes they convey in snappy, viral, bite-sized tweets and Tumblr posts and TikTok videos. You cannot have a coherent conversation about "intersectionality" or other theory-jargon in such an enviroment, but instead have to explain their original meanings over and over to an ever-growing unlistening cloud of rebloggers and repliers... the exact problem coining terminology was meant to alleviate in their original contexts.

Also it just makes your life hell if you love learning and don't like the idea that a True Enlightened Progressive rejects the yucky boy world of fact-checking and information curation/preservation for getting your understanding of reality from Unconscious Innate Feminine Wisdom. Vibes can help you with understanding some things (like folk taxonomy, mythological symbolism, etc), but to treat them as the only thing that matters is... not for me. And I'd rather talk fandom with people who know when to put the vibe-reading on the shelf and talk about something a little more... concrete, or at least historically established.

Original post by titleknown. This was crossposted with permission, original post is here.

...God, I will say, I wish people would put their Open Species under a proper Creative Commons license for broader use

Because, not enough people know about it but, you kinda need it to have one of those to have them legally above board.

Cause, Creative Commons licenses aren't really just "for show," they were created because the people behind it realized there was basically no real legal infrastructure for artists to enable people to do stuff with their work.

So, they made some really solid legalese to make it easy to do that, which is important because making it an unstated agreement can be a headache in the long-term.

Hell, even with pre-CC attempts at open licenses for art, those still had some huge holes, see also the clusterfuck with D&D's OGL.

The basic categories are:

• CC0: Basically public domain, people can do what they want with it.
• CC-BY: Basically public domain but you gotta give creator credit and link back if you can. This is the kind I use for most of my work, and I wish more creators would use.
• CC-BY-SA: Same as CC-BY, but with the extra caveat that people have to apply the license to all other extra content in the derivative work, which makes it a bit harder to make money off of derivative works of but not impossible. This is what the SCP Foundation uses, as one of the most successful CC-based works of art ever IMO.
• CC-BY-NC: Same as CC-BY, but you can't make money off of it. This is what Hatsune Miku is under, as are some of the other original Vocaloids.
• CC-BY-NC-SA: Combo of -SA and -NC, you have to apply the license to derivative works and can't make money off of it.

Note these are irrevocable and also don't include caveats for morality. The former is because it'd be legally meaningless if they weren't, the latter is because it's basically a nightmare to define those clauses in legal terms, hell even something seemingly simple as "can only be used by individuals and worker-owned organizations" hasn't been worked out yet!

But, those aside, I think with those worries it's worth it, because the public good of anyone being able to use it outweighs a few bad actors. Because if it belongs to everyone, nobody can take it away from you.

And bringing it full circle, I just wish people would use it for their Open Species more, because the use-cases are otherwise a confusing nightmare and the only one I've seen that does use it are the Synths and their luscious meaty thighs.

And, as much as I like the Synths, I would like more under that license...

Synths look pretty cool - I like how they're leaning into the more scaly end of furry, on top of being robots. Not exactly my thing (imo part of the classic/wolfaboo furry divide is whether you think it's sexy or blasphemy for dragons to have boobs), but it's neat that you have permission to use them for literally anything, even in a published for-profit work of fiction if you want. The available "stable" of public domain robots (whether individuals or "types") is pretty limited compared to dragons, vampires, and other creatures with roots in mythology and folklore. It's going to be a long time before a lot of the most influential and iconic robots of fiction become free for everyone to use...

(And if you didn't know that the six classic Crypton Vocaloids were under a Creative Common license... hey, now you know!)

kalium talking about creature roleplay made me think about some stray ideas I had for original species as a kid and teen. I don't remember most of what I was thinking of back then, but I did remember a focus on making magical properties of gemstones correlate to their chemical structure, nature of formation, and physical properties.

Hydrate Class

Gemstone creatures that incorporate hydrate minerals and mineraloids. Hydrates are minerals that incorporate H20 mollecules into their structure, and are dependent on the presence of these water mollecules to display their signature properties. Examples of hydrate gemstones include opal and turquoise. 

Associated with desert oases.

Jupiter Class

Gemstone creatures that incorporate amber and jet.

Amber and jet have many curious similarities. They're both ancient, fossilized plant matter: amber being formed from tree resin of various evergreen species, while jet is a variety of coal formed from the wood of monkey puzzle trees and their relatives. They're both often, historically, found washed up on shores. They both form static electricity when rubbed, too. The modern word "electricity" is derived from the ancient Greek word for amber, elektron.

"Jupiter class" is a cheeky little reference to Sailor Jupiter, a character simultaneously associated with electricity (via her associated planet being named after the thunder god Jupiter in English) and plant life (via the Japanese name of the planet Jupiter is Mokusei (木星), or "wood star").

I didn't watch Sailor Moon until I was an adult, though, so I know this is a name I retroactively applied to the concept later. I just don't remember what name I used to tie together the "wood magic" and "electric magic" aspect of these creatures together elegantly.

Sometimes I think about how audience responses can say as much about ableist attitudes as works themselves do.

The music video for the song "Monitoring" by Deco*27 initially reads as "Miku is a scary stalker", but the narrative woven by the whole seems to be more "the pov character is having paranoid delusions and hallucinations, Miku is a concerned friend trying to check up on them, pov character eventually works up the courage to open the door and speak to their friend". Much more nuanced that how I've usually seen popular Vocaloid songs handle mental illness. There's a lot of bad edgy "look at this crazy sicko murderer, who kills people because they're insane" in Vocaloid music. The song is kind of leaning into those ideas, but ultimately I think subverts the expectations of them.

When I was reading the first few comments on it, I saw a Japanese comment that (auto-translated) was like "at first it seemed Miku was a dangerous person, but then actually it was the classmate who was a dangerous person!" And. Like. There are no signs the pov character is going to harm anyone. Dangerous... why? Just because they're having a break with reality that makes them scared to leave their apartment? I'd also seen English language bad takes, but that specific comment kind of stuck with me.

More recently, the producer published a miku pov version, it's genuinely sweet:

(Miku switching to the "hallucinatory" version at the end of the song seems to mainly be to mirror the original version. I've seen a few youtube comments argue that it means Miku really was a yandere all along, which I don't think... is narratively compatible with the rest of this song, or with the original song. When people aren't treating the POV character as "crazy dangerous" in comments and posts, they're sometimes instead putting that on Miku's shoulders, even when talking about the Best Friend remix.)

Unfortunately, when I looked on Tumblr for analysis of the best friend remix, I saw someone basically imply the pov character's delusions (of their friend being a "yandere" stalker-with-a-crush) would lead them to... sexually assault... their friend:

At the end of the song when Listener finally opens the door to let Miku in, Miku is unaware she's confronting someone who has convinced themselves that Miku "wants" the same kind of contact Listener is about to carry out.

Which feels deeply unwarranted to me from what the original song implies about the POV character's mental state, and falling into that same "people with delusions are dangerous monsters" thing that the Japanese commenter was doing.

I also find it irritating that sympathetic reading of POV character I've found always just call them "depressed" and treat the distortions of dialog and visuals as purely metaphors for the negative worldview that accompanies depression, and like... That's possible. That's a valid reading of the music video. But why is it apparently so hard to imagine that the distortions are literally being experienced by the POV character because they're having a psychotic episode. and that they're sympathetic in how their mental illness harms and isolates them, at the same time?

This is the most sympathetic I've seen a Vocaloid song(s) be to someone having symptoms of really demonized mental illnesses, and people can't even... I guess you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make them drink.

This is a screenshot of Episode 17 (Timestamp 12:35 out of 20:41) of the cult classic metafictional fairy-tale anime Princess Tutu (2002).

Long ago, I saw a post that identified the exact source of the text in this image. The source, according to the post, was a German book or literary journal of some sort, discussing a landmark piece of German metafiction aimed at children. That novel, Die unendliche Geschichte (1972) by Michael Ende, was published in English-speaking countries as The Neverending Story. Does that name ring a bell? According to a survey from 2006, the original novel was most popular and successful in Germany and Japan; most Americans, meanwhile, were more familiar with the 1984 film adaptation.

My memory, I may have mentioned in previous posts, is not very good. The original post was witnessed so long ago that I do not even remember if it was late 2000's or early 2010's, late-Livejournal or early-Tumblr. I have tried searching both sites. I have never been able to find the original post. There is a post about German in Princess Tutu on the old LJ community; it does not cover this episode.

While lamenting my struggle with stepnix, he hunted down a lead: a German-language PDF of "books you need to know."

Let's go down to page 27!

Er, not what the PDF says is page 27. What the PDF says is page 29. We can actually identify some exact lines from the screenshot in this page!

• und Fantasie. In Die unendliche
• Poesie als Medien der Selbst- und
• als wirksame Möglichkeit, Realität zu
• wechselseitigen Einflusses von Vorstellung-
• allem an der altersgerechten
• Ziele orientierten Jugendliteratur

Now, here's the issue: this PDF, according to the information on the sixth page of the PDF, appears to be a digitized copy of a booklet (or excerpt of a larger book?) published by Duden in 2011. Princess Tutu, meanwhile, aired on Japanese television in 2002.

I sincerely doubt Ikuko Itoh, Junichi Sato, or anyone else who was working on the anime are secret time travelers. Which means that there must be an older source for this writeup on Die unendliche Geschichte.

In the meantime, here's a Google Translate version of the quoted passage:

The central theme of the young adult novel, which has become a cult classic for adults, is the relationship between reality and fantasy. In The Neverending Story, art and poetry assert themselves as media for self-discovery and understanding the world, and fantasy proves to be an effective way to change reality. The exploration of the reciprocal influence of worlds of imagination and ideas opened up new perspectives for young adult literature, which until then had primarily focused on adapting social themes and educational goals to suit the age group.

Finally, though! Now when I say "there's a link between this anime and The Neverending Story", I have something to point to!

All are copied from this web page, then adapted to Dreamwidth with my rusty HTML knowledge.

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This is a version of Duck/Ahiru I made in Spore in 2023.

• Instructions for how to install Spore creatures via PNG here
• Download Creature Stage version (no pendant) here; view Sporepedia page here
• Download Civ Stage version (has pendant) here; view Sporepedia page here

Additional information under the cut.

She is 100% compatible with unmodded games with 0 expansions.

( Quack quack quack? QUACK! )