malymin

One annoying thing about the "Stardew Planner" tool is that it assumes you've cleared every bush from your farm; I like to keep them as decoration, and situate things strategically around and between them. So the only way for me to know how to plan around bushes is to build in game.

But! I found out that a fish pond can fit perfectly between a patch of bushes on the "beach farm" map:

( large image is large )

I often struggle to make fish ponds look "natural" in terms of integration with the environment, so this is quite nice.

I wonder whether or not to move my farmhouse to this nice green area. The frustrating thing is that there's no fast travel to Cindersap, so you have to walk from the top of the farm map to the bottom to get there... I hope ConcernedApe adds Cindersap totems in 1.7. u_u;

Have been advised to stop browsing Tumblr because it is "transparently bad" for my mental health. Probably good advice. Even little things can send me into a really awful spiral at this point, and its gets worse and worse every year.

Been rotating how to create an original species themed around CMYK color palettes, called the "c'myk" or something similar because it's funny to be that on-the-nose. The problem is that I have a lot of ideas for their basic color distribution, possible mutations of the "palette", etc, but not of what sort of clade the creatures actually are. I want them to have wings, but am torn between sparkle-mammalian, dino-avian, or draconic-reptilian. All four colors would be pigment-based, obviously. This is actually as much a fantasy feature as extra limbs or magic powers, if you'll believe it!

Most tetrapods get blue and green coloration from structural color - Tyndall effect, iridescence, etc. Blue organic pigments do exist in nature, though - Crustacyanin is a fun one. The Turaco family is the only bird clade known to have true green pigment - other birds overlay yellow pigment over a non-iridescent blue structural color (created from black pigment), create green iridescence from structural effects on black-pigmented feathers, etc. Here's a bit from Wikipedia on the turaco's unique pigments:

The plumage of go-away-birds and plantain-eaters is mainly grey and white. The turacos on the other hand are brightly coloured birds, usually blue, green or purple. The green colour in turacos comes from turacoverdin, the only true green pigment in birds known to date. Other "greens" in bird colors result from a yellow pigment such as some carotenoid, combined with the prismatic physical structure of the feather itself which scatters the light in a particular way and giving a blue colour.

Turaco wings contain the red pigment turacin, unlike in other birds where red colour is due to carotenoids. Both pigments are derived from porphyrins and only known from the Musophagidae into the 21st century, but especially the little-researched turacoverdin might have relatives in other birds. The incidence of turacoverdin in relation to habitat is of interest to scientists, being present in forest species but absent in savanna- and acacia-living species.

The reason you never see green or blue mammals is a combination of two factors: one, our clade's pigmentation gamut is limited to melanins. The brightest and most saturated colors in mammal fur - fox and tiger orange, lion tamarin gold, bongo chestnut - all come from phaeomelanin. It's also present in mammalian skin: in humans, outside of its contribution to certain hair color, phaeomelanin is most concentrated in our lips, nipples, and genitalia. (And, in those of us who have them, the freckles.)

Second, mammalian hair is too structurally simple to produce elaborate structural effects. Collagen structures in skin can allow skin to appear blue, and feathers can create both iridescent and non-iridescent color by manipulating their own preexisting complexity. Golden moles have structural oddities in their hairs that produce simple rainbow iridescence - but, as the entire family of animals is blind burrowers, they can't perceive their own appearance, so no sexual-selective pressures will ever make those colors more overt.

Bright blue in mammals is thus limited to skin. Mandrill and Golden snub-nosed monkey faces, for example. Literal blue-balls are amusingly also a feature in primates - the mandrill yet again, the vervet monkey. I think I'm going to copy a paywalled National Geographic article onto here, actually.

Unrelatedly: When you are art a bookstore or a library, and you see a gaggle of teenagers and one of them has a Gir hoodie or a fuzzy cat-ear headband in the year 2026, that is a blessing and you should be grateful.

made with nex3's grid generator

Blue is original; orchre is a red/blue channel swap. Red/green channel swap, GBR rotation, BRG rotation, and green/blue channel swap under cut.

( Read more... )

As Neocities is still blocked by Bing (and search engines that use Bing's indexing, like DDG), I used Google to find these sites.

The Meerkat's Burrow

Dee Dreslooh's dragons used to be all over the web. Good to be able to place a name on her. You'll also notice elsewhere on the page that (pre-brony) MLP sensibilities were part of the cyberpet scene, alongside the influences from Japanese media, and of course the giant influence of Anne Mcaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern - the novels about psychic, alien, color-coded dragons that wholesale invented the trope of the dragon-rider.

Shywell

"Jona's Weyr" has haunted me for decades - I had remembered the art close to crystal-clear (unusual for me, on account of my awful memory issues) in my mind, yet the name of the website and artist eluded me the entire time; only now, finally, can I reach catharsis, thanks to Shywell's own memory and records. While there don't seem to be any real direct records of Jona's wyverns left online, as the site had already shrunk into a shadow of its former self by the time Wayback first captured it... I remember those wyverns clearer than most things in my life: wings half-folded in front of then in midair, serpentine, small and legless. (This was before Dragonology, published in 2003, popularized amphiptere for winged, legless dragons.) The background image of the waybacked 2002 version of the page is evidence my memory failed me less than usual. The only thing I misremembered, it seems, was the heads being snakelike, instead of fully draconic.

Her "crystal wyverns" my first exposure to the concept of wyverns, and I've longed for those serpents ever since. I have no idea how old I was when I first found the site. Considering when I was born... I was probably very young. Her website, according to one of her affiliate sites, went down in 2005.

Arborwin

Don't remember these pets as much, but evidence that traditional art cyberpet agencies existed. For a scene I largely associate with the dragon/cat/wolf cluster of creature enthusiast, I forget that a lot of horse enjoyers were making pets too: pegasi and unicorns ranging from MLP-like to shockingly realistic. Naturalistic coats that display a love for the colors and patterns of the equine race, in addition to rainbow and pastel.

Unrelated to cyberpets, but related to the overarching Y2K era fascination with "virtual pets," "artificial life," and technology-based animals in general, I also found a fansite dedicated to a specific operating system of pseudo-Tamagotchi, known unofficially as the "bunnyrom" or officially as Jia Yuan.

Having such a bad memory is genuinely so painful.

It's like a never-ending feeling that I'm just stupid or don't care enough when I can't remember people I promised I'd never forget, places and things that were once important to me. I can't remember most of childhood, I can't remember most of adolescence, I can't remember most of college, I can barely remember anything a week ago. I felt the memory of what my Grandmother's face and voice were like slipping away even before she died.

When I'm the only person who can seemingly remember something, it horrifies me, because what I remember is a shadow of a shadow of a memory at best.

"If you cared, you would have remembered it."

"Why did you only just now remember it," when it's a miracle I remember anything at all.

Everything's a fog. If continuity of memory is necessary for consciousness, I barely count as a conscious being at all.

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!

EDIT:

• got a working capture of DarkCastle.
• got a working capture of TwoDoors
• got a working capture of Yarn. The alt text on the yarn image says: "I'm a magical ball of yarn! Remember these words: "tootsie roll!"  .... you may need it later!". Unfortunately, it seems like the "ghostrick" page that goes next in the sequence isn't archived.
• The Blue Draelon Cat gif is still not available.
• The skeleton page is still not available.

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!)