#intelligent species

[cathchicken]

Returning to Stilts, I love them! I want to Linda get a skeletal reference down eventually

[the-way-astray]

it is so funny to me that the elves, gnomes, dwarves, and ogres have supernatural/paranormal powers, but the trolls and goblins are just. good fighters.

[disappointedcreeper]

CBD worldbuilding: Dwarves

Dwarves as a species are one of the oldest humanoids still around today. They are shorter, rounder, humanoids. They have adapted to live in cold areas. They tend to have more body hair, and are known for their long beards.

Culturally they tend to live in large cities, mostly found in tundras or taigas, but some have been known to live on mountains. Dwarves are especially proud of their exquisite stonework, which is highly sought after.

Dwarves tend to be better at using fire magic, especially spells that create heat, using it to help survive in such harsh climates. Some dwarves have used this to melt metals and create weapons or armor, but those who do that are not very common, meaning typically humans and maybe elves do metalwork (saying maybe elves because currently I don't have much to think about for elves.)

Back to masterpost

Some notes about where I got the ideas for dwarves:

-Taking inspiration from dwarves and hobbits/halflings from typical high fantasy

-since they are shorter and rounder than humans logically according to the square-cube law (higher volume to surface area ratio) they would logically not live near forges, and more likely live in colder areas, due to them loosing heat slower.

-them being good at stonework is inspired by dwarf fortress, but also I thought it would be cool to have them live in large stone cities, and potentially having a cliffside city in the game.

[cherryblossomshadow]

You Are Not Evil

hankschannel

TL;DW

Humans are not evil.

We solve problems.

And when we do, we create new problems

.

Transcript excerpts below the cut:

I would like to talk really quick about this image. It's a sad Earth, covered in storm clouds … covered in cut-down trees and standing in a puddle of refuse … the Earth is sad. It is crying, and it says, “No intelligent species would destroy their own environment.”

…

Hannah Ritchie’s very excellent book, “Not the End of the World,” has a subtitle … “how can we be the first generation to build a sustainable planet”

.

The argument she makes is that sustainability in her definition includes things like “children not dying in infancy.” And when I look at images like this, what I see is a complete disregard for the accomplishments of humans

…

In the United States in 1895, a quarter of people born could expect to not live to five. And that was lower than it used to be. And I have to emphasize this as much as I can: The biggest problem that our planet faces is that there are so many humans, and that the humans in question want to provide a very high standard of living for themselves and their children

So the reason why the environment is fucked … and I know that there's a group of people who will not believe me when I say this. And they will say, “No, it's the fossil fuel companies.”

And look, the fossil fuel companies have made this much worse and have slowed down our transition. They are not the only problem, but they are a huge problem

But the biggest reason why we have a problem is love. It's that we want to have children, and we want them to survive.

And so now there are 8 billion of us … and we want all 8 billion of those people to have pretty good lives

And I, sitting here in my heated office in short sleeves in December, I cannot tell a bunch of people in China or India or Ghana that they can't have what I have

.

Here's my point: our intelligence for the vast majority of history of life on Earth has been oriented toward survival. And that has resulted in a huge amount of survival. And now we are in a situation where there can be a good life that has a great deal of survival and thriving in it, that does not require the amount of impact on the environment that we are having

But an unintelligent species that did what we have done … this has happened before. Trees, for example, caused a mass extinction when they arrived on land. They absorbed so much carbon dioxide that there was no longer very much carbon dioxide in the air, the water became less acidic, and many things died on the planet because of trees. And they didn't know that they were doing it. but also you can't blame them because they're trees. And so of course, they couldn't see it coming

But here's a story that I think we miss: When we as a species encounter local environmental problems, we tend to fix them. It was not long ago that London could be so clogged with coal smoke that you had to clean it off the windows every day, and that is no longer the case. You now never think of London as a place that has like got a coal smoke problem. In fact, the United Kingdom recently stopped burning coal entirely, which is very weird historically, considering they were where the coal started

But it was also very recently … that Beijing had this problem, and now Beijing has this problem much less. It still has an air pollution problem, just like Los Angeles does, but much less. When rivers catch on fire, we actually change our policies. When the rain becomes acidic, we change our policies

.

The problem with global warming is twofold

It's invisible. There are cold days and hot days, like there always were. There will always be  cold days and hot days. You can't see the river catch on fire, you can't see the trees on the hilltop dying, because the soil has become so acidic, because the coal-fired power plants have been putting sulfur into the atmosphere. You can't see it

We only know about global warming because we are an intelligent species. If we were not smart, we would be trundling down this path completely oblivious, sometimes wondering why it got so hot.

Which, I have to point out was a thing that happened in the past. There were times when it just got cold or hot, and we didn't know why. And then the crops would fail, and a bunch of people would starve, and it was because there was a freaking volcano halfway across the world. We only know the problem exists, because we're smart. We only have the tools to deal with it, because we're smart. We are only implementing those tools, because we are smart

2. And the other problem with global warming is, another reason why we are too slow at this is because carbon dioxide is the goal gas. I feel like this is not understood by people but with acid rain, we didn't want the sulfur or the nitrogen to get released into the atmosphere. That was just a side effect of burning coal. With the hole in the ozone layer, we didn't want those molecules being released into the atmosphere. That was just a side effect of how it worked

Like what we wanted was cooling. And cooling, by the way, has saved so many lives. And we are going to have to have more of it to continue to save those lives. And that's going to be energetically expensive. (But it won't be expensive when it comes to the hole in the ozone layer, because we have we have better solutions now)

But energy is what so much of our thriving is based on, and we do not want to give up that thriving. And the way that we have created that energy for the most part has been burning fossil fuels. And the goal gas, the gas that you inevitably get out of burning fossil fuels if you burn them as cleanly as possible, all you get is carbon dioxide and water vapor

We built our society on it, we built our thriving on it. Because we are smart, and because we want to provide a good life for ourselves and our children. This is a Smart Species Activity

.

My son has stared to come home from school with ideas like this in his head, where he's like, “We need to stop cutting down all the trees, Dad.” And I'm like, “Yeah absolutely, like what we need is for there to be lots of forests that are left to their own. But also remember that the house that we live in is built out of wood.”

And like the gears crank in his head, where he starts to ask himself if he's part of the problem. Which is why we need to have the definition of sustainability include the opportunity for human freedom and agency

I'm not saying that I shouldn't be responsible for more carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere, absolutely I shouldn’t … I should be wearing a hoodie right now, I should not have had the heater on all night in here

.

But I think if we have this simplistic idea of humans or certain humans … a lot of the responses I saw to this [meme] were like, “No one ever said a Republican was an intelligent species.” And I'm like, “Oh my God, you people are so caught up in a current discourse and the current moment that you can't see how hard our all of our ancestors worked to provide us with a world that has plenty of food.” That's the biggest thing, plenty of food, but also climate-controlled shelter and pretty easy transportation to anywhere within what 400 miles? And then expensive, but still accessible transportation to the whole world. And also bananas which I love, and we're not going to grow in Montana. And if we did, it would be more energy expensive than shipping them from South America, where they're supposed to grow

Humans are remarkable. We are very powerful. Give any species this level of power, and they will provide opportunities for thriving for themselves and their children. They will try and prevent their children from dying. They will … walk through fire to make sure that their children don't die. They will destroy the Earth to make sure their children won't die. But I'm glad that we have enough intelligence both to provide those opportunities for our children to not die but also to start to uncover the impacts that we have, hopefully some time to self-correct some amount. We're at this point going to experience significant negative impacts from the warming of the planet. We did not move fast enough. I think that there's all kinds of like … not valid, but like understandable reasons, why we haven't moved fast enough

This is hard. People are greedy. People suck. People will tell stories to make themselves believe that the things that they want to do are in fact the right things to do. We all do that

But I don't want my son growing up, thinking that the species he is a part of is in some way evil. And I feel like that's like the root of a lot of sort of armchair environmentalism. I want him thinking humans are problem solvers, and solving problems creates new problems. And that's a little bit more of a complicated idea, but it is so true. I have solved so many problems, and never have I solved a problem that didn't create a new problem. I think we're absolutely at a place where increasing the amount of access to energy that I have as an individual will not make my life any better. But that is not the case for the majority of people on Earth. More access to medicine, refrigerators, ways to cook food that don't involve fires … (which we honestly in the US could also do a better job of, for Christ's sake. We have to stop having natural gas stoves. This is so stupid. I made a video about that once. I'll put that video at the end of this video)

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But when we solve the global warming problem, we will have created new problems. And we're doing it right now. In the background, there's like a land use fight. Renewable Technologies use way more land. Solar panels take up a lot of space, wind turbines take up a lot of space, you have to make a road between each win turbine, and those roads take up a lot of space. They impact the environment by being there

I think in the future, we will uninstall a bunch of those things, because we'll have other technologies that are better. We'll have maybe like advanced geothermal or we'll have more fission or we'll have fusion or whatever it is. But we're going to need energy

And the people of the future will be mad at us for the work that we did, and that's fine. Just like we're kind of mad at all the people who made the world a better place by burning a bunch of coal, so that we could all have refrigerators, which nobody thinks about as a perk anymore! They just think that's normal! A 100 years ago, more than half of Americans didn't have a refrigerator. It wasn't that long ago

And that's the situation in India now. Less than half of households in India have a refrigerator, and in the next 100 years, that number had better be 100% or we’re going to be pissed off at us

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I know this video could have been a lot shorter it could have just been one sentence it could have been:

Humans are not evil. We solve problems. And when we do, we create new problems

And I think that is like universally probably going to be a pretty normal story of intelligent species. Like if we found another, I bet they'd have a lot of stories about how they created Problems by solving problems

.

And the speed at which we solve the problems … I think there's absolutely some shame we should experience here. I admit it's a hard one, but oh my God, the extent to which we will not accept any inconvenience in exchange for making the world more livable for people in other places in the world and also our own children in the future is stupid

I will say, this is an amount of foresight that is unusual and requires a great deal of intelligence. There aren't a lot of other species out there trying to figure out how to make the world work for the next generation. Like that's not how they think. Because most species don't think about the future. They don't have a conception of the future. Like dogs don't have a conception of the future. So like, it's remarkable that we're able to do it at all. I do think we could have been better at this, and I am frustrated the extent to which we have spent a lot of time arguing instead of acting, and we could have acted faster, and that would have mattered

…

18:20

I'm going to stick the video about stoves and why we shouldn't use for both health reasons and environmental reasons why we should no longer use gas stoves okay enjoy that goodbye

(link to gas stove)

[animalpayback]

[wild-wow-facts]

The Clever Crows of New Caledonia

Discover the remarkable world of New Caledonian crows! Known for their extraordinary tool-making skills, these birds redefine intelligence in nature.

Check out my other videos here: Animal Kingdom Animal Facts Animal Education

[cathchicken]

Using this based post as an excuse to show my uh funny dragon designs!! I’ve always been somewhat bored of the scary lizard beast dragon type and while it doesn’t really have any problems it’s really just a me thing. So I do what o do and make a design so different I still hope it counts as a dragon haha

I know there’s more sketches of them somewhere, this was just sort of old and I don’t feel like scrolling through my camera roll for an hour ;-,

Western style dragons are profoundly mid to me, but i try to keep my trap shut about that because i don't want to be the no fun allowed guy for a very popular creature design. But i cannot contain my rage about spoon wings. I hate them so much. Nothing with a patagium looks like that or flies like that. It doesnt matter how many polygons your beast has, my immersion has been shattered by half of its flight surface being straight up gone

[penofwildfire]

It's actually insane how much Ninjago can get away with tormenting dragons because they're not humanoid and people don't think about their pain as much. The OG 4 became Ultra and then got killed and eaten. Other dragons were also victims of the Hunters. Zanth was tortured and experimented on for years. Heatwave got kidnapped and has watched several of his tribe members die of a terminal disease, an illness that Egalt also has and is apparently very painful. Riyu watched his tribe mother die violently in front of him. Multiple other Arch Dragons were murdered off screen. If this shit was happening to humanoid characters there'd be hundreds of fics and fanart about it. We talk a lot about how characters don't really die permanently in Ninjago but this isn't a rule that's ever applied to the dragons and that makes me crazy.

[shroomiethefrogwhisperer]

It’s a pretty average day aboard the ship. Karen is high off her ass, Moss is trying to make friends with the feral ratbirds that live in the pipes, and Steve is trying to teach Bastier (the newest crew member) how to juggle.

Zzgnaru walks through the ship with a deep sense of satisfaction. None of the humans have said anything weird lately, nothing’s caught on fire for weeks, and Karen’s almost out of drugs. That won’t be a problem at all in a few days!

As xey pass the common room, xey hear Steve talking to his boyfriend, Josh, and Bastier. “Yeah, I think I’m gonna buy a few new skins. My current one feels kinda lame.”

Zzgnaru immediately feels like xey’ve heard something xey weren’t supposed to. Xey retreat to the bridge, where Moss and Karen sit with Amethyst (a Penaconian), Douri (an Aaki), and Banana, Moss’ current situationship, braiding each other’s hair. Karen takes one look at xir face, and excuses herself.

“Zzgnaru, hon, what’s up?” She asks, walking with xem through the corridors. “I heard Steve tell Josh and Bastier that he was going to purchase some flesh,” xey explain. Karen gives him a confused look, and asks, “Do you remember exactly what they said? Because Steve doesn’t strike me as a serial killer or a dude who’d like human taxidermy.”

Zzgnaru thinks for a moment, and then says, “I believe that he said he was going to ‘buy some new skins.’ Josh and Bastier seemed to think this was completely normal.” Karen stops, and just stares at him for a second. Then she bursts into laughter. “Oh, Zzgnaru, bae, they were talking about video games. ‘Skin’ is slang for the outfit your character is wearing. It’s not actual flesh,” she crows. Zzgnaru sighs in relief. “Thank the universe. I thought I was going to have to call in the authorities.”

Karen just laughs harder. “You know you wouldn’t. I mean, I’m literally in possession of highly illegal drugs all the time, Moss is a stalker, and Amethyst and Banana have blackmailed almost everyone on our ship- and others- at least once.”

Zzgnaru sighs in resignation. She’s right, though. Xey’re not about to sell out xir crewmates.

[sk-yay-sk]

I've gotta say I'm not a huge fan of putting Dragonese into the HTTYD movie franchise. The concept of a full-on dragon language they all share, that can just easily be translated into English, just really doesn't fit imo

I imagine they're a lot more like Orcas

There are universal ways to communicate with strangers of different species, like it's pretty easy to signal things like "i want to fight you" "i want you to leave" "it's dangerous here" "i'm in pain" etc. by just body language and vocalizations- but ways to communicate more complex ideas have to be developed and learned as unique dialects by different groups, especially flocks of dragons consisting of different species.

I imagine a terrible terror flock or a group of Speed Stingers have a lot of an easier time communicating with each other than a Thunderdrum and a whispering death do.

Dragons with their own dialects, cultures, and habits depending on location and group is really cool- I just don't think it should be a direct translation of how humans do these things, such as straight up language or mythologies or such.

[cathchicken]

Fancy Stilt

[informationatlas]

Scientists believe that the remarkable intelligence of beluga whales is demonstrated by their ability to learn and communicate using the complex language of whistles and clicks. This has been observed in a specific case where a beluga whale, living in captivity alongside a pod of bottlenose dolphins, has successfully acquired and adopted their unique language.

(via Beluga whale learns to 'talk' to pod of bottlenose dolphins )

[disappointedcreeper]

CBD worldbuilding: Dragons

Dragons are a species of (very) large birds, and are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs. They like collecting shiny objects to decorate their homes with. Their wings double as front legs to stand on for stability. Physically the adults are about 7 feet tall standing upright, and about 5 feet when on all fours. Their feathers are a wide range of colors, but are always very vibrant. (also baby dragons are very fluffy like other baby birds)

Since dragons are not related to humanoids they do not have mana. Their magic instead is used mostly to help them fly, and makes their feathers fire retardant, but can be used defencively to cause nearby air to superheat, causing fire.

Back to masterpost

[rinzay]

*Stomps my foot* That's it! I'm makin my own Bracken lore!!

hehe lil 'guy,

ooo look! He's gonna have company!

as long as the company ain't letha-

ah

[bonefall]

Something like this?

Yeah! Very close to that!

From the top view, the toes would still be pretty indistinguishable because the fur would still obscure where one ends and another begins, but that's about right.

At this point in their evolution, you'd be able to tell right away from the tool claw that they're not Felis Catus Domesticus anymore. I had a specbio project I worked on for a while where I called them something like Felis Narrans I think.