An Asterism

(Riss:)
Surprise, we're alive! While I try to keep discussions of nonhumanity off of Tumblr, I wrote a response to a post discussing the term "nonhuman" as applied to people with other-than-human identities, and I thought I'd crosspost it here as a keepalive. The original repost with my response is here; my response by itself is under the cut:

( Why we tend to use nonhuman as our term of choice.Collapse )

(Riss + more:)
The info collected below came from the experiences of myself (Horologos of Plague Flight), Blind Tiger (HouseOfBells of Arcane Flight), and the Dragon (TEAMKAIJU of Fire Flight) on the Flight Rising website game. The official FAQ/howto is the game Encyclopedia; this guide will only focus on the very basics and give some tips that we had to discover for ourselves.


- Feed the clan. Keeping overall energy above 80% usually only requires one feeding per 24 hours.
- Gather more food and items. Unused gathering turns are lost at the end of the day.
- Incubate all occupied nests.
- Bond with familiars.
- Visit the Trading Post at least once per day: get a free item from Pinkerton, see if Crim wants to buy anything you have, see if you can trade anything with Swipp.
- All else is optional. The "dailies" don't take very long at all unless you have very large numbers of familiars, as you have to bond with each of them individually.

( Picking a Flight.Collapse )

( Food.Collapse )

( Making Money.Collapse )

( Getting Items.Collapse )

( More About Familiars.Collapse )

( Giving/Buying Things Directly to/from Other UsersCollapse )

( Fighting in the Coliseum.Collapse )

( Exalting for Dominance and Profit.Collapse )

( Dragon Breeding & Genes & Things.Collapse )

( Advanced Flighting: Dominance Pushes + Elemental Holidays.Collapse )

That was not really very short after all. :/ If you have any questions, need clarification, or if I somehow missed a topic, just ask one of us and we'll work to fill the gap. :)

(Riss:)
Last time on the group journal, there was a rambling thing about dead turtle shells and the superworm colony and Lil Thorn the blue-tongued skink being adorable and Ensou the pied ball python also being adorable. Behold, I come bearing yet more gratuitous animal friend photos, because nobody else on the Internet ever posts pix of their critturz.

Photobucket may be different now, but all these pics are on public libraries/albums/whatever and each one has informative text, so feel free to skip the rest of the entry and just arrow forward and back if you find yourself there. :P

Beginning with another deceased animal friend: here is a bagged-up red fox being stored in the freezer. It was necessary to knock out some shelves to be sure that it would fit. (No graphic death, just a vague lump in black garbage bags.) For some reason, I hadn't ever thought that a fox would take up this much room in a freezer.

For the record, I've been waiting for a genuinely free weekend to process the body, so I won't have to stop in the middle and go do something else. This upcoming weekend may be such a one.

Unfortunately, there are no new pics of Ensou because the camera is dead or the smartphone is arcane or some other thing, so whenever he does something cute (like try to strangle us or hang from our Army-issued glasses with his one finger), I'm always without pic-taking capabilities. :/

However, the newest addition to the local Reptilian Overlord World Domination Focus Group is Teto, a baby corn snake that the Dragon named after the fox-squirrel from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. Teto is indeed conveniently cleavage-sized for long glider rides through jungles of toxic fungi. Since zie's so super tiny, I don't think that I want even the vet attempting to sex zir until zie gets a good bit bigger (Ensou-sized, maybe) because of the risk of internal damage to zir tiny snake-junk. Teto can be female too, so we don't really care either way.

(Note before the pics start: I edited all of these on a different machine that's widescreen and high-res and whatever else, so I hope the photos look okay. They kept looking very small on my comp, so possibly I over-sharpened them or something...forgive me my sins, and just focus on the adorable tiny animals. ^^;;)

( Pics of the microsnake.Collapse )
( And now more photos of Lil Thorn, because cute skink pix are always in style on the Internet. :PCollapse )

BTW, after becoming comfortable with the idea of Lil Thorn being female, we recently discovered that he was male on account of him performing a visible functions check on his twin-linked lascannons. They do, in fact, work fine. o_o;

( And now for pics of The Swarm superworm colony, arranged vaguely in order of the superworm life cycle for greater aesthetic enjoyment.Collapse )

Honestly, I'm tempted to resurrect our personal website if only to make a better page about superworm colonies (for other weird people who want to raise them as critter food :P). I got all my info from one webpage that didn't even have photos on it, so I had to backtrack a few times while learning from trial and error. If nothing else, going about it that way costs money because you have to keep buying worms from the store in the meantime. X(

(Riss + some from the others:)
Because posting random pics of your animal friends and encouraging other people to care about them is what at least 50% of the Internet is for.

(I'm using the group account because the Dragon is my co-parent for Lil Thorn and S is my co-parent for Ensou, whereas the Swarm...is me co-parenting with myself, as if I had reproduced by fission somehow...and created a box full of larvae. Anyway.)

To start, here is a quaint Outside family photo featuring our meatself with both scalykids, which was taken by a vet tech that we roped in for the purpose during the kids' checkup visits. We are 5'4" and a bit squishy, so this gives an idea of the critters' comparative size.

( Here begins the Cut of Grossness, featuring one deceased animal and all the info about and pics of the Swarm superworm colony, so that people of delicate constitution can skip over all of those things. (Really, superworms are not very offensive, compared to other bugs.)Collapse )

And now for some more wholesome pics of Ensou, the recently-arrived, 5-month-old pied ball python, and more pics of Lil Thorn being weird and adorable in her hardcore PTSD wild animal sort of way.

( Ensou first, then Lil Thorn.Collapse )

That is all the pics I have for now. I need to be around more online, as there are still a few things I need to do. This long weekend has been helping me to catch up on sleep nicely. Everyone, have a good night.

Also in other news, here's probably the best Amazon item description I've seen in a really long time. Doesn't that model look mad fucking terrifying?? It almost makes me want to buy one, but only if it had that description on the back of the shirt or something.

SOMETIMES humans don't rate damning. <3

(PS: I almost wish I were a brony, because those T-shirts are pretty cool too.)

EDIT: Okay, the description for this one is not nearly as awesome, but OH GOD WANNNNNT.

(Disclaimer: I have had a splitting headache for most of the day and may not make a whole lot of sense right now. I'm trying, though. :P)

I've been having a bad few days for assorted reasons. (I'm trying to keep myself from posting dreary details of RL that serve mostly just to spread my misery around--nobody really needs to know the day-by-day brain pain, I think.) One bit of make-work that I started on New Year's Eve to keep myself from imploding was to finally buckle down and start gutting Black Crusade to extract the useable parts for our crossover project and make it so that I can dispense with that system's overdone rulebooks.

( Cut for 40K RPG blithering.Collapse )

While I am complaining about GW through my headache fog, watching them unleash the hounds on an indie writer whose space marine character is not only female, but also a mommy makes me facepalm continually. I sort of wish that I didn't love 40K as much as I do, because the IP is owned by a cultlike and paranoid evil corporation. There is no way to support 40K and not give these people money--according to their policies, they can even slap fanfic writers (who are not even making money off the IP) with legal threats if they feel that the content of your fic misrepresents their world design. X( DAMMIT, HUMANS.

In other news, I think I forgot to mention that we also bought a pied ball python hatchling a few weeks back, but the online breeder is in another state and we're now waiting for some unknown point in the future when the Colorado lows are not below 30'F. It could be a couple months, honestly, but better to wait it out and not risk the snakebaby freezing to death in transit. :/

We set up his enclosure back when we paid for him. Because his patterning reminded me of certain breeds of koi fish, I went a little insane with his in-tank decor and he is now kitted out with Zen garden bling, including a little Buddha statue sitting under a big plastic bonsai-tree hide. ^_^;; Very swank.

(R:) This post is made possible by us being in our own house and being currently without any specific winter festival, resulting in us just sort of hanging around and doing housework and staying inside because of the surprise snow we got last night. What with most places of interest being closed today, there was really nothing to do except...spin wheels. And come out from under the rock to post for the first time since forever.

(R:) Which is all a good bit of the reason why the Dragon, BT, and I all ended up with Twitter accounts.

(D:) My Twitter totally lets me post random thoughts AS THEY HAPPEN. Shocking!! Life will never be the same!!

(R:) I swore I'd never get a Twitter. Probably I won't talk much over there because I am hideously verbose, and constraining myself to 140 characters would make me go claustrophobic and eat myself to death. But the others seem to be doing pretty well with theirs. I'm surprised BT hasn't found more porn.

(BT:) There will be time for that. Later. ^^

( Cut for obligatory 40K fan-talk and assorted banter.Collapse )
(R:) In other news, tangentially relevant to 40K discussions (in a geometric sense), we bought a blue-tongued skink about a month ago and have been adapting to skink-ownership ever since. The lizard takes after the Dragon way too much.

(D:) That's because the lizard is AWESOME and realizes that we share the kinship inherent in all reptiles or something like that. We totally need to soak in a sunbeam together. KINDREDNESS, etc.

(R:) Originally, the plan was to name the skink Ambrose, after one of the actual Thorn Astartes. However, since nobody could give us a straight answer (that was not a complete random guess) on the skink's sex, I put forth the more gender-neutral "Thorn." Even the vet said that skinks were nearly impossible to sex by probing and that there was no blood test that could determine reptile sex from DNA (WTF, veterinary science?).

(R:) In the end, I admit that we had to use the oldschool method and just watch zir poop a few times, after which I'm fairly certain that zie's female. So it was quite a good thing that we didn't name zir after any actual Thorn...

( More random lizard-centric discussion, to include BLURRY BABY PHOTOS.Collapse )

(R:) The last thing on the list is to pimp the collective writing journal again--most of the stuff in there is mine or collaborations, but not exclusively. I recommend bone_rosary @ DW because we gathered four separate LJs into one and then built a new tagging system to make searches easier, so it's more of a one-stop shop. (Links to all the separate LJs that compose it are in its profile--they're all being updated still as well.)

(R:) Recently, I've been trying to prompt myself to write something as close to every day as I can get. We started watching the Mushishi anime again (it's a local favorite, and very good, if you've never seen it), and I was stricken by this idea of using each episode as a writing prompt for what ended up being dark 40K stories involving the Exorcist Astartes Chapter. (I know, so little variety to me nowadays, but I figure that at least I'm writing...;_;)

(R:) Four of those stories are up in the fiction journals now, along with a bunch of poetry that I dumped in there months ago without telling anybody, so if you are ever constipated and need some good toilet reading, bring your smartphone or laptop in with you, camp out, and enjoy~~ ^^

(R:) Now I think we need to shower and sleep.

(BT:) Goodnight, Internet. <3

There was an infoleak yesterday that, due to the similarity between this account's old name and some usernames elsewhere, let our mom find this account. Botheration ensued. Thus, I threw some cash at the evil overlords and renamed this LJ--just an FYI to prevent confusion. The system is set to auto-redirect, so no further action should be necessary from anyone.

Hope everyone has been well; I'm hoping things will settle down shortly and we'll be able to be collectively around here (and DW) again.

(Riss + more):
This is just a quick update spurred by the realization that we have once again completely failed to keep ourselves visible even after getting out of the hospital. There is an excuse this time! Our mom just left after staying with us for two weeks.

( Cut for some of the details, including what's happening with the military, for those keen on them.Collapse )

In other news, Curious Places is still a great blog; their most recent update looks like something from the Mystworld. Earth is a cool place sometimes!

BT and the Dragon continue to back the efforts to build a Maid 40K RPG game; we call it Everwatch now because the basic rules will end up being something like Deathwatch grafted onto Everway and then given a couple of firm shakes to make room for the animu elements in Maid RPG. (I am still hoping that the world's apparent lack of any large-scale 40K/anime crossover is due to us not happening across it in the vastness of the Internet and not because it literally doesn't exist. Space Marines do shonen anime bullshit all the time.) Occasionally, the Thorns peek at the project from afar like pencilneckers eying a trainwreck, but BT remains the closest thing to an actual Astartes that we have involved. This totally bodes for any kind of 40K canon accuracy, as BT is all about playing his Loyalist characters in ways that make the Imperium look hilarious (predictably).

( Cut for more RPG-related musings.Collapse )

In other other news, I keep circling back to the topic of artwork, but have yet to actually get there. In recent months, I've become slowly more fascinated by wearable art. Drawing on clothing and wearing it around outside is an idea that remains stuck in my head, and it evolved to the point where I thought that designing things to make available through Zazzle or somesuch might be fun as well.

( And more material on TIES.Collapse )

Now I go to make hardboiled eggs and do other productive things. I hope everyone has been well.

--R&.

👁 Image
theferrett wrote this bizarre-yet-oddly compelling thing about how couching scientific discoveries in religious terms might help heal the rift between die-hard faithful and die-hard materialists. ...It's written in a tongue-in-cheek way and yet when I read it I was much like, "Hahahah--wait, that could work. O_O"

YMMV. It caused me to stare off into space and think very hard about POSSIBILITIES. *_*