#Extant Universe

[jovialturtleface]

Welcome to the cyber dance📨 !

[the-ninja-legacy-whip]

so is one of the things [REDACTED] suppose to represent stagnation something that refuses to or is just unable to grow and change which goes against the nature of living things (insert s11 sorla quote)

*gestures vaguely* Yes, that's the vibe I'm going for jhgfdsghfds

[momachan]

"Ground zero. Raw energy, expanding itself at an immesurable rate, surges out of control, this is-- the beginning. Time and the Universe are born as one. Fifteen billions years ago, there is only blinding, white light. Quarks form out of hydrogen. Minutes later, the Universe is totally opaque. Form and substance are irrelevant. In the opacity light is unable to travel-- electrons are unable to stay in orbits, and super-hot temperatures drop drastically. Hours later, though, a rift forms... and entropy floods the Universe."

Zero Hour: Crisis In Time (Zero Hour (1994).

[exercise-of-trust]

Someone Stop Me. Please (<- planning a creative project so unbearably idiotic and niche i despair of myself)

[swallowtailed]

started listening to road to partizan with very few expectations but actually it’s extremely good (a thing that should not surprise me at this point). loving all the added detail on perennial and divines generally, and particularly loving how much of progressive asterism was invented in the microscope game

[darthcontusion]

france existing in the UC is less fucked up than how mecha anime apparently exists in SEED???

that is a concorde

that is specifically an air france concorde

france exists in gundam??

[paper-mario-wiki]

YOUR MISSION:

the next time you enjoy a meal in your home, eat it viscerally and animalistically. this need not obligate eating it "viciously" or "violently", though the interpretation is left up to the agent.

if it's a sandwich, let it fall apart. if it's not a finger food, make it one. rip it apart. food sustains us. the matter you ingest becomes you, the process need not be beautiful. embrace this extant part of the universe into yourself in the way that feels most natural to you. approach the meal like you've never seen what humans eat and you werent instructed on what to do with it.

this action is worth 10 points.

[marzipanandminutiae]

here's a secret about actual Victorian gowns:

the interiors are usually messy as hell

raw edges on seams? finished with the absolute mimimum of work necessary to keep them from fraying into nonexistence. it's not going to touch the person's actual body, given the layers of corset-cover + corset + chemise/combinations in between, so it doesn't matter how it feels on bare skin. pinked and left raw? I've seen that, sure. whipstitched down to the bodice's structural flat-lining fabric? yep! I've seen VERY few bodices nicely lined so the innards don't show; that seems more common on capes, cloaks, and coats. you know, where the lining might end up being visible. because "will it be visible?" is the defining factor here

got a skirt you know will only be worn with an opaque overskirt? why bother making the whole thing out of that expensive silk? go ahead and make the covered part out of unbleached muslin- nobody will see it! (this was not universal, to be clear, but I have seen extant examples of the practice)

one of my museums has a Worth gown. couture! Parisian! guess how :) huge and gappy and messy :) the stitches holding the trim on look from the underside :)

undergarments and nightwear tend to have finished seams because they'll go next to the skin. they also tend to have visibly top-stitched machine hems, because the Hand-Sewn Hems rule only applied to garments that anyone outside the wearer's innermost circle would see. lingerie? machine-sew that hem! the poor underpaid piece-worker has a hundred more of these to make before her shift is over!

Victorians were the epitome of Work Smarter, Not Harder in their clothing, so don't feel like your recreations have to be perfectly finished unless it brings you joy to do it that way

[dogtoling]

OK. . . seems i missed the whole 'chickens are controversial in splatoon' thing. . . why?

To put it short there's evidence both for and against them existing, and this is without me actually looking anything up so i might be missing something.

cases for chickens being extant: there's been chickens present in SOME form in several splatfests, they're not mammals so they're not NECESSARILY extinct, despite being domesticated animals and thus being unlikely to survive it doesn't mean it'd be IMPOSSIBLE because pigeons and other relatively human-dependent birds still survive in Splatoon, and of course there are many instances of Eggs being a staple in inkling culinary culture. egg is everywhere

cases for chickens being extinct: we only actually See chickens (or chicken, as in food) in splatfest art and splatfest dialogue which isn't (or at least definitely wasn't until Splatoon 3) canon-compliant at all. We havent actually seen chickens in-universe to my knowledge, nor had them mentioned outside splatfest. probably the biggest nail in the coffin is that there IS a chicken statue in Splatsville, and typically when there are big animal statues in the cities those are statues depicting extinct animals. this is something from an interview that touched on the crane and tortoise statues in Inkopolis Square; which also confirms that it wasn't JUST MAMMALS that suffered and went extinct, it was also other miscellaneous land animals and even random birds which I think me and initially a lot of other people thought were just. Fine and safe. But if a random bird like a crane can be extinct now then chickens are absolutely not safe just because they're not mammals. although eggs are in like every food it's not really been confirmed in any way that those are CHICKEN eggs (although that is the most likely), they could as well be farming domesticated pigeons or something

So really it's a big case of no real confirmation they DO exist, but also no real confirmation they DON'T exist, but also the only context we see them in-universe is in a context where every other animal depicted there IS extinct and it's like a lore thing. So the existence of eggs is a big hint TOWARDS them existing but could easily mean nothing whereas the other one is more in line with proving they do not exist. it is a very uncertain situation for the chicken

HOWEVER!!!!!! there is hope for the chicken. splatfests in Splatoon 3 have had more in-universe accurate themes and dialogue so far (meaning they dont randomly make up shit like "marina's landlord is a narwhal" and "inklings eat red meat" or whatever the fuck in that sea food vs mountain food one we didnt even have that one it was regional). SO THIS MEANS! in the next splatfest we Could get a somewhat stable answer to if chickens exist or not. of course the other 2 options are extinct animals whereas the chicken is 50/50. i'm HOPING the dialogue touches upon this fact and doesn't just talk about all of those like they just Exist. basically we are very close to some kind of progress on this issue that would be Somewhat credible because while splatfest dialogue has never been a credible source in the past, it has been WAY better in S3

TL;DR we just don't know. Chickens are a mystery

[artbyblastweave]

So, one criticism of Deadpool and Wolverine, and a criticism to which I think there's some meat, is that they basically chucked the entirety of the supporting cast from the first two movies in order to shift focus onto Wade and Logan- which is especially egregious because a major part of the emotional thrust of the movie is Wade's unwillingness to abandon that supporting cast by transplanting into the MCU proper.

But what I find interesting about this, right, is that Wade getting shanghai-ed away from his normal supporting cast to go on a metatextual multiversal road-not-taken adventure would be a pretty standard 3-to-6-issue plot in an ongoing Deadpool comic. I can think of at least four times I've seen this done. And in the comics, any given member of the supporting cast not being on-panel this particular issue doesn't mean that the authors forgot about them, doesn't mean they aren't coming back at some point. That would be a ridiculous complaint. Infant-level object permanence. It's different with a film, though, because in a film franchise, the wacky multiversal excursion constitutes a third of all extant content involving the character- you're genuinely losing out on the cast from the other two-thirds, it's zero-sum, and you never know who'll be available for the fourth movie or if there'll even be a fourth one.

I once saw someone (I forget who) make the argument that one of the issues with translating the marvel universe to the MCU is that most of the movies are depicting or adapting crisis-crossover-level shitshows and status-quo shakeups without similarly porting in all of the smaller-scale status-quo-compliant adventures that serve as connective tissue between the big shakeups and give them actual weight. This leads to some ambiguity as to whether these films are depicting the only interesting things that ever happen to these heroes, or if there's a wealth of unseen smaller-scale villains being fought in the space between installments that just never come up. And here we get a film that's an adaptation of that exact kind of connective-tissue adventure, and suddenly, uh oh! It's actually kinda fighting for space with every other kind of story you could tell in the same runtime. I don't think I'm describing a real problem here, It still can handily justify itself, but that question wouldn't even come up if it were a comic. A tension inherent to adapting any character and supporting cast native to the sprawl of big-two cape comics (despite the movie in many ways being about that tension!)

[jovialturtleface]

Clynn Cleo the sea angel, she was once mortal but through strange means he'd begin to work under the same being who gave Otto life and now Clynn and Otto have a sibling like bond.

[bestanimal]

Round 1 - Phylum Onychophora

(Sources - 1, 2, 3, 4)

Onychophora is a phylum of long, soft-bodied, many-legged animals. They are commonly called Velvet Worms due to their velvety texture, and the human propensity for calling any small animal with a long body a worm. Onychophora is the only animal phylum in which every extant (non-extinct) member is fully terrestrial.

Onychophorans are predators, preying on other invertebrates which they catch by spraying an adhesive, glue-like slime. This slime can also be used to deter predators. They will target slime at the limbs of their prey, and have even been observed targeting the fangs of spiders. The slime is stretchy, with high tensile strength, and forms a net-like structure when sprayed. It takes about 24 days to replenish an exhausted slime repository, so they will eat their dried slime when they can.

Onychophoran legs are called oncopods, lobopods, or “stub feet”. They can have from 13 to as many as 43 pairs of feet, depending on species. Their legs are hollow and have no joints, instead being moved by the hydrostatic pressure of their fluid contents. Each foot has a pair of tiny chitin claws which they use to gain their footing on uneven terrain. They sense the world via a pair of antennae, the numerous papillae covering their bodies, and a pair of simple eyes, though there are some blind species. Their mouth is surrounded by sensitive lips, and their chitin jaws, used for chewing up prey, look similar to their claws. On either side of their mouth are the oral papillae, openings containing their slime glands. Unlike their relatives, the tardigrades and arthropods, they do not have a rigid exoskeleton, restricting them to habitats with high humidity. They are also nocturnal hunters, and shy away from light, leading them to be most active on rainy nights. Onychophorans have two sexes. Females are usually larger than males, and sometimes have more legs. In most species the males will secrete a pheromone from their many “armpits” to attract females. Mating procedures differ between species. Some species are live-bearing, and some are egg-laying. The oldest known fossil Onychophoran, Antennipatus, is known from the Late Carboniferous.

Propaganda under the cut:

The little orange guy in my avatar is a velvet worm!

Some species can spray their slime up to a foot away, though their accuracy gets worse with distance.

Apparently, velvet worm slime tastes "slightly bitter and at the same time somewhat astringent.” Don’t ask how biologists know that.

It is hard to evaluate all velvet worms due to their nocturnal nature and low population densities, but of the few species that have been evaluated, all are near threatened to critically endangered. Main threats come from habitat loss due to industrialisation, draining of wetlands, and slash-and-burn agriculture. Many species naturally have low population densities and small geographic ranges, so a small disturbance of ecosystem can lead to the extinction of entire species. Populations are also threatened by collection for universities or research institutes.

While most countries offer little to no protection for their velvet worms, Tasmania is unique for having its own velvet worm conservation plan and one region of forest dedicated to preserving the endangered Blind Velvet Worm, Leucopatus anophthalmus (seen in the 3rd image).

Onychophoran’s stub feet allow them to be sneaky ambush predators which hunt only at night. They move slowly and quietly, with their body raised off the ground. They only use their claws when needed for climbing, otherwise they walk softly on the pads of their feet. They are often able to get so close to their prey that they can gently touch them with their antennae to assess their size and nutritional value before the prey is alerted.

Onychophorans have small but complex brains, and are thus capable of sophisticated social interaction. Some species live and hunt in packs, acting in aggression and territoriality towards velvet worms not in their own group. After a kill, the dominant female always feeds first, followed in turn by the other females, then males, then the young. High-ranking individuals will chase and bite subordinates who climb on them, but will allow juveniles to climb on their backs without aggression.

Somft

[juney-blues]

my incredibly stupid hot take that will piss off any of my followers who work for nasa, is that if we find out for SURE there are no extant lifeforms on any of the other planets in our solar system, we should put some there for funsies, just to see where it goes in like a million years

like if we definitively prove for SURE that there AREN'T bacteriophages on titans subterranean (subtitanium?) oceans? fuck it launch some microbes over there, see how they do. give it some space tardigrades, some phytoplanktons, the works.

like yeah you could make an argument for preserving the universe in its pristine state but also i don't give a shit, we already live in the universe, we are the natural state. i know i'm fully inviting the possibility of reigniting Asteroid Mining Discourse (god what a silly thing that was) but i don't care it'll be funny

if there aren't any lifeforms there that we could potentially harm by introducing new ones that outcompete them, then as far as i'm concerned it's an inert rock, which yes, has the intrinsic value of existing as it does, as a natural curiosity, but which in most cases i don't see having any *more* intrinsic value than "that same natural curiosity but also we put some tiny little guys on there for shits and giggles to see what they do,"

[momachan]

"We're five grown men dressed in bright colors inside a clear plastic bubble set against a rainbow background, Jaime. They saw us."

Booster Gold (2007-2011): Blue And Gold. "The Secret Origin Of Booster Gold."

[dduane]

The first part of that last message got me curious -- given how long-running of a series YW is, how do you keep track of All That when writing a new entry? Copious amounts of notes? Re-reading the entire series backlog? Keeping a fully-functioning simulation of the entire YW universe running in your head with perfect accuracy? (only mostly joking with that last one)

And somewhat-relatedly, did you have any plan or idea when you started for how long YW would run? Or was it more of a "I'll keep writing about this universe until it stops churning out ideas," type of thing and that point just (very thankfully!) hasn't happened yet? I know for per-book purposes you're a proponent of outlining (I swear I'll try writing to one one day Q_Q) but do you also apply that to a series as a whole?

Let me take this backwards, as it may make more sense that way.

Particularly when doing series work, outlining is more vital than usual for me. (Which is saying a lot.) Some of the most basic reasons for this are laid out over here.

The simplest one, though, for series outlining, is logistical. Without having achieved a sense well in advance of what events (or effects of events) are going to be most formative or important (or both) for the characters in a series, you won't have allowed yourself time to think about them enough. And to fail to spend enough time on this is to cheat both yourself and the books in the series. (And your readership.)

If you're smart, you learn very early on that attempting to save time by shortchanging or omitting the planning stages is potentially profoundly destructive. You need to have a plan... and you need not to let anyone make you ashamed of needing one. Putting off your detailed character-interaction and event planning in the name of some magically occurring fit of inspiration, or theoretical bid toward creative spontaneity, will serve neither you nor your creation. You can throw "Hail Mary" passes all you like... but you'd better be damn sure there'll be someone in the end zone to receive. ...If not Herself.

...And just in case you're worried, your initial plans can be really loose! They don't have to jump out of your head full-formed like some local war goddess after somebody hits her dad in the head with an axe. The plan for the Middle Kingdoms books—after The Door Into Fire dumped me gasping by the side of the road and left me a few minutes to breathe—was nothing more than "Now that his boyfriend's finally upped the ante beyond all expectations, Freelorn finally gets off his feckless Would-Be Robin Hood shit and gets to work becoming king." I then spent the next decade thinking purposefully about how that was going to happen, and writing the second book in the series—while sufficiently working out the fine details of the climax (and beyond) to then be able to get busy executing the third book. Even though there was a change of publishers between the beginning of that series and the end of it, the basic dead-simple MK plan from a very early stage quickly became detailed and robust enough (because the series was short enough) to withstand the change. Not least because I'd been thinking about it in a general way since the early 1970s... and continue to do so, pretty much daily. The Door Into Starlight is still hanging fire...

YW has been a different story—quite literally—because the only plan extant at the start of things was, "Everybody slowly gets older (and slowly closer)." I always knew there were going to be more than the original three: there was way too much interesting ground to cover to just stop with those. (I've never yet succeeded in finding out who started the rumor that there were only going to be three books. Over time it's become one of those things you just shrug at and move on.)

(Adding a break here, because this does go on a bit. Caution: contains publishing skullduggery, plans ganging aft agley, approximate word counts, software recommendations, and value judgments.)

("Now wait just one minute. 'Feckless would-be Robin Hood shit'? Can she just say that??")

The circumstances surrounding the writing of Deep Wizardry and High Wizardry, though, made it plain to me that I was not going to be at the then-publisher (Dell) all that much longer. By the time HW came out, they were already starting to pull away from midlist books and authors in order to spend that part of the budget on best-sellers... so it became plain to me that attempting to construct a long arc with/at that publisher would have been folly. Because who could be sure what was going to happen next, and blow everything I'd built to smithereens?

Sure enough, when I finished A Wizard Abroad, Dell declined to pick it up (even though the books had been selling steadily and increasingly strongly in paperback). This annoying validation of my concerns—and my shiny new agent's—made it plain to me that further books in the series were going to need to be thematically driven, rather than mostly character-event-driven, and almost entirely capable of being taken as standalones. Any long arc was going to have to be one that could be suspended, or reworked, with little warning. Because what happens to you once, in publishing, doesn't at all mean you're immune to it after that.

It wasn't until the YW books were picked up by Harcourt in the mid-90s, with a strong editorial team behind them, that I felt confident enough to start building longer-arc material into the books, beginning with the arc that kicks off in The Wizard's Dilemma and more or less completes in Wizard's Holiday and Wizards At War. There is a secondary (and I assume, generally less obvious) arc that picks up material still unhandled in the "War Arc," and deals with it in A Wizard of Mars and Games Wizards Play. But plans for those stories' management were already nailed down in electrons as soon as 2001, because I had made some early choices about where I was going with the characters and their situations; and as new books came out, my editors agreed with me that the choices had been sound, and should remain.

I'll say this only because I've said it before: there is one piece of business planted in So You Want To Be A Wizard that has never been explicitly dealt with/followed up on in any of the books, and is at the core of YW #11. For the moment, it's safest merely to say that I do not willingly leave loose ends hanging. Beyond that, I'll leave you all to your own deductions.

...Now. How do I keep track of all this stuff? (The urge to mutter "With great difficulty" and run off into the wings is strong. But never mind.) :)

The question's fair, as there's a million-plus words' worth of it in the series at the moment. ...Mostly my guide remains the books themselves, in ebook form (in their NME versions. If I need to, I refer back to the traditionally published versions as necessary). I normally have a general memory of where a given event happens or where a given issue comes up for handling. I then pull that copy of the ebook(s) in question, and do a search on various useful target phrases until I find what I'm after, and where it leads.

For new work, or stuff not yet committed to what passes for canon, I do have lots of notes. Some of them are actually out in public, at the currently-being-revised Errantry Concordance (though they're not in any form that anyone but me will recognize). Others are tucked away in the notes sections of pertinent Scrivener files—this being one of the most valuable things about Scrivener, as far as I'm concerned: the ability to store project notes in the project itself as opposed to "all over the damn place." Others yet are in my iPad, as either typing or dictation, and get transferred to other files/formats as necessary.

But the very first thing that happens, when a new work comes into train, is an outline. Sometimes a hilariously simple one, sometimes one with more detail in the middle than at the beginning or the end. Doesn't matter what shape it starts in. All notes, scraps, prose chunks, random thoughts, and midnight cogitations, get slotted into place in this until it's ready to be organized and sent off to an editor. And this outline—no matter how fragmentary or how polished—remains ready to hand at all times until I've finished with correcting the book's ARC and am looking at the release date.

And then I zip it up and put it away where I can find it later if I need to... because some other plan, still in the building stages, may need something in that one that never happened, but now has its chance. Because in YW, as everywhere else in my work, it's so often about the things that have always almost happened... until they do.

...Anyway: HTH!

[izzyspussy]

anyway so the end of dp&w. where they "replaced this world's anchor being" by saving it. but they only managed to do it together. anybody on this side of the aisle read dc's trinity? in which batman, superman, and wonder woman have to be inextricably bonded in every universe or else the fabric of reality falls apart?

they didn't trade dead logan for tragic fuck up logan as the anchor being. neither is wade now the anchor being because he stepped up to the role. the anchor being is wade and logan, together. not only do they both have to be alive to keep the timeline extant, they also have to be Together enough to be cosmically considered "one". if they get divorced, the whole universe pops out of existence.

oh yeah, and they obviously have no idea they're married in the eyes of the laws of physics. haha uh-oh!