#ironbeak's journal

[draconym]

Hi! I really like the version of the Galaxy Song that you posted way back in July. I was wondering if you had the chords for it anywhere? I'm learning the ukelele and I think it would be a fun one to try out :D

Thank you! I'm delighted that people still enjoy it.

I was sure I had this one in my songbook doc, but it seems I didn't, and when I tried looking it up elsewhere I was rudely reminded by my synesthesia that that my friends and I transposed it to C (from the original Monty Python recording which is in the key of B). We did that because I was a real beginner eight years ago, and admittedly the key of C is still a much easier choice for this song if you can forgive the fact that it makes the whole thing kind of orange.

Anyway, it turns out @adoubtifitbeus kept track of the chords and I've stuck em back on the lyrics under the cut below for your enjoyment.

Chords inside:

Just [C] remember that you're [Em] standing on a [Am] planet that's [C] evolving

And revolving at nine hundred miles an [G] hour

That's [G7] orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned

A [G] sun that is the source of all our [C] power

The [C] sun and you and [Em] me and all the [Am] stars that we can [C] see

Are [A7] moving at a million miles a [Dm] day

In an [F] outer spiral [Fm] arm, at forty [C] thousand miles an [Am7] hour

Of the [Dm] galaxy we [G] call the Milky [C] Way

Our [C] galaxy [Em] itself contains a [Am] hundred billion [C] stars

It's a hundred thousand light years side to [G] side

It [G7] bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick

But out by [G] us, it's just three thousand light years [C] wide

We're [C] thirty thousand [Em] light years from [Am] galactic central [C] point

We go [A7] round every two hundred million [Dm] years

And our [F] galaxy is [Fm] only one of [C] millions of [Am7] billions

In this [Dm] amazing and [G] expanding [C] universe

The [C] universe [Em] itself keeps on [Am] expanding and [C] expanding

In all of the directions it can [G] whizz

As [G7] fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know

Twelve [G] million miles a minute, and that's the [C] fastest speed there is

So [C] remember, when you're [Em] feeling very [Am] small and [C] insecure

How [A7] amazingly unlikely is your [Dm] birth

And [F] pray that there's [Fm] intelligent life [C] somewhere up in [A7] space

'Cos there's [Dm] bugger-all [G] down here on [C] Earth

[ask-ironbeak]

have you stopped updating ironbeak? or are you on a hiatus/burnout/just not focusing on it?

Anon, I’m so glad you asked! I was just thinking about Ironbeak this morning (as I often do) and about my plans for the story, and about how I’m not as artistically productive as I hoped I might be at this point in my life. My answer to this comes in two parts, but the short version is: I’m currently on hiatus. Here’s why:

1. I’m overwhelmed. In addition to working full time during a pandemic and having a second job, I volunteer with a handful of community organizations. It wasn’t until I started asking myself “why don’t I have the energy for art these days” that I made a list of my major projects and responsibilities and arranged them above my desk to help me prioritize. This is my list, with jobs in green, community orgs in pink, my Patreon in purple, and all the art projects I’m trying to work on in blue:

This is after I resigned from a board position with another community org and went on hiatus from a third parks job. It doesn’t factor in having five pets and occasionally wanting to spend time with the people I love (I use Habitica to keep track of that). So uh, there’s Ironbeak’s Journal down there on the right:

But, I hear you saying, the last update was over three years ago. Have I really been this busy the whole time? Well, mostly, yeah. There was like a five week span in which I was very unemployed during the pandemic. But MORE IMPORTANTLY, I’ve stepped back from my intended plans for it to revise them:

2. I’m thinking of ways to improve the story. When I started Ironbeak, I did so on a whim as an improvised field guide for Starbound’s procedurally generated critters, but then I Accidentally a plot. So a lot of what I had setup was spontaneous, unplanned, and just based around what I found fun to roleplay on Starbound servers.

As I love writing hapless, even clueless protagonists, and I love the Humans Through Alien Eyes trope, I originally wrote Ironbeak to be extraordinarily ignorant of not just galactic cultures, but also subcultures on his home planet. It was a fun way for me, a queer person, to normalize unexpected things and exoticize mundane things about humans (whether I was writing about that directly by writing about humans, or indirectly by writing about aliens). It gave our protagonist a lot of room to grow. It made him flawed in what I had hoped was a way readers could chuckle at.

Revisiting the story in 2020, though, Ironbeak’s cluelessness while coming from both a marginalized orientation and a marginalized allegorical racial/cultural group ... it hits differently. Some of it rings hollow and some of it is frustrating to read. This isn’t to say I want to rewrite him as a character (far from it), but the backstory I had planned for him had originally been one of self-discovery. I don’t really want readers (many of whom are queer) to have to hold his hand through all that because frankly, I think it’s kind of overdone, and not very exciting to read. And as a queer writer, I don’t find it very exciting to write. So his backstory is going to be a lot less about his inner thoughts and a lot more about the people he used to be close to.

The improvements to his backstory have, through my extreme slowness in hashing them out, also fallen into place more naturally in my head, and I think they lead well into a conclusion for his arc in the story. They also open up arcs for other characters.

It means a lot to me that people still think about Ironbeak’s Journal! I promise I still think about it, too, and that when I get my shit together more, I’ll start writing about it again.

[largestmothinnorthamerica]

If any of you have been reading my reblogs from Ironbeak’s Journal, you should know that there’s an update I didn’t post because it had a flashing gift.

So you might want to go read that one. ^^

[draconym]

About Draconym

Hey tumblr, I’m Mel. I’m an old millennial who works in public parks. In the past I’ve been a ranger and a technician. Sometimes I post pictures of the animals that I get to work with. I also post art, comics, and weird dreams. Here's some FAQ.

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art, comic, dreams, nature center, park ranger, poll, ripley parrot, snake, cockatiel, video, me, music, bug, bird, dragon

Links

Website: cyaneus.com

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Fanfiction: @ironbeaks-journal

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Featured Creatures

Ripley, 15 year old African grey parrot. Dinosaur toddler and menace to household objects.

Enyo: 20 year old cockatiel. Grumpy old man.

Cheese: ??? year old cockatiel. Weird little guy.

Mousetrap: Eastern rat snake rescued from a glue trap in 2016. Frequent animal ambassador at park programs.

Galaga: Western hognose. Less skilled at being an animal ambassador due to being kind of an asshole.

Elvira: Curly hair tarantula.

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I try to tag for common phobias such as snakes, spiders, bugs, and animal death.

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If you’d like to use my art as an icon or a blog header, I’m honored, and please do! Please credit either my blog (this one, @draconym) or my website (cyaneus.com). Please don’t edit my art except to crop or resize it for icons. I don’t mind if you share my tumblr posts to non-tumblr social media as long as you link back to me, but within tumblr please reblog instead of reposting my content. Don’t use my art for any commercial purpose.

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Askbox

Usually open. Messages welcome, though I don't usually answer them quickly. Not really available for commissions at the moment.

[ask-ironbeak]

Since Avian naming convention changed a bit with the full release... what would be Ironbeak's name if it were to be based on Aztec culture, like other in-game Avians?

I have a bunch of other asks I’d like to answer BUT I have a lot of thoughts about this one, and they go into the lore that I’ve got in my head which these days has very little to do with the actual game lore, so, um buckle up:

I’ve got a good deal of Avos backstory written at the moment, and in it I use Nahuatl sparingly and purposefully. Obviously I’m writing the journal in English, but Ironbeak would “really” be writing it in an Avian language. English is a stand-in for Raptorine, the most commonly spoken language globally and in his region. I use Nahuatl as a stand-in for the Psittacine language, which was commonly spoken by Psittacine, Passerine, and Anatine people in the not-too-distant past.

So why doesn’t Ironbeak speak, write, or have a name in his own language, you ask?

The short answer is “colonialism,” and the slightly longer answer is: after the rise of Kluex, older religious texts that were written in Psittacine were deemed unsuitable for common folk to read (a la the Latin Vulgate bible at certain points in history). Sometime after the fall of Totomitlan, Psittacine became illegal to speak, write, or read in the region. Psittacine texts were mostly destroyed, with the exception of religious texts which were only accessible to Stargazers and some of the Clipped Council. Those that were considered suitable were truncated and translated into Raptorine, the new official language of Feathertop, AKA the city-state formerly known as Totomitlan.

That was long ago enough that the general population of Feathertop and the surrounding polities view Psittacine as a language spoken primarily by Stargazers, a little bit like how Latin is a language spoken primarily by scholars, or how the American government outlawed many Native languages and then a hundred years later decided to capitalize on them for use in cryptography because they had become so ‘obscure.’

In any case, there are still some laws on the books in Feathertop prohibiting Psittacine from being taught in public colleges, but a lot of wealthy Raptorine and Passerine folks are finding that Psittacine baby names are very trendy. Psittacine families, still facing no small amount of discrimination from the groups who expect assimilation from them, tend not to give their children traditional names.

In any case, I’m viewing both English and Nahuatl as translations of Avian languages, which probably sound like bird screeches and aren’t homologous to any human tongues. The game itself uses Nahuatl as a general stand-in for all Avian words, and I’m using it for a select few based on the politics I’ve written into the story.

In another translation of this story, Fletcher Ironbeak might have been Tentepoztic Tlaminani. But one of the main reasons I’m using Nahuatl sparingly is that I don’t speak it and I’d rather not botch it!

[ask-ironbeak]

AWISE

Hey all!

After an EXTREMELY LONG HIATUS, I am back in the habit of writing an illustrating for Ironbeak’s Journal again. So where are the new entries? Well, this week, they are actually ... the old entries. I’ve been doing some editing of art and writing on the first 30 or so entries to bring them in line with the style of the more recent ones (the ones where I’ve actually planned out what I’m doing in advance and have a better handle on what Ironbeak looks and sounds like).

And I’ll be continuing to edit art and text through tomorrow.

Most of the text edits are minor, but I wanted to assure anyone who’s rereading and has a really good memory that they aren’t going crazy. The only major overhaul of an entry occurred with Log 20: The Reading Room, which is now quite a bit different to bring it in line with the lore I’ve decided on for the Glitch.

Here’s the old version for your enjoyment (or not--I always wanted to redo this one cause it bothered me, lol).

Log 20: The Reading Room

      "Mr. Vanderbuilt--" I said, rising from my seat, as he entered the Reading Room.     "Please, just Vander." He spoke in Glitch, but dropped the conversational expressives in favor of greater intonation, as I did. His voice was hoarse without the audio filters running. It sounded as though he was still smiling beneath what I now knew was a helmet.     "A pun," I said lamely.     "I took it as my pseudonym when I first arrived here. That was almost thirty  years ago." He removed his metal head and set it gently upon a desk, then turned to face me. This was my first look at an Apex in the flesh. Even in the dark, it was clear he cut his own hair.     The reading room was cozy and warm, with three couches encircling a low, round table, and several desks messily crammed with writing utensils. On the wall appeared to be the library's reserve collection of artwork. Mr. Vanderbuilt Vander lit an oil lamp on the desk beside his false head, and we both took a seat.

    "When word gets around that your beacon summoned the Penguins, there's going to be a lot of distrust coming your way," he said.     "You know?"     "Of course I know. Some of us even saw the ship as it descended. But none of the townsfolk has ever actually seen a Penguin ship. A few may have read about them, as I do have a book or two on the topic. But it won’t be until Dosskey spreads the word that most folks here will get the news. And that's when your status as the Friendly Foreigner may erode a bit.” He put his ironclad feet up on the table. "There are already a few who don't take kindly to your presence. Maybe you've noticed. They think you'll corrupt the youth, put harmful ideas about space travel in their head."     "I know nobody from this town has flown since ... well, since it was founded, that much was clear as soon as I started asking around for ship repairs. But--harmful ideas? Really?"     "This town was founded by Outcasts. As you well know, having borrowed Founding Forges last week. You did read it, didn't you?"     "Well ... yes, I did. But ... not in full. I admit, I found the book on sellomander biology to be a little more captivating."     "Having seen your illustrations, I figured you might. But I'll fill you in." Vander stood and began to pace the room, hands behind his back, like a professor giving a lecture.

    "Do you know what an Outcast is?"     "I didn’t know there would be a test," I said, and he responded with an appreciative laugh. "I know the Glitch on Avos were ejected from Glitch society for whatever reasons. But for a lot of them, it happened generations back. Space travel must have brought those to the Alpha Hamal system just as it brought those to Avos."     "Yes. There are quite a few independent colonies in the galaxy. But traditional Glitch society is a sort of feudal collectivism. In its truest form, every member of society is intimately connected via a massive neural network called a Hivemind. Serverside, thankfully, has no such thing. If it did, I would have no chance of passing as an ordinary citizen.     Serverside does, however, closely ahere to the same collectivist culture in which most Glitch are comfortable. Those that stray from traditionalist values of work ethic, family values, simple living ... let me put it this way: despite being a direct example of extremely advanced technology, the Glitch themselves are Luddites. It’s not in their nature to explore, but they will out of necessity. And more often than not, those who are cast out are most apt to survive elsewhere."     "So they excommunicate people for what, studying engineering?"     "Exactly that. Mechanical though they are, Glitch are not robots. But they didn't evolve like you or I. They were created, and they were programmed. Legend has it that they were created to enact some sort of grand social simulation. The truth is hard to uncover, because those of the original Glitch civilizations don't believe they are acting on programming at all." He sounded like he was rambling. Perhaps he’d been waiting to talk to someone about this for a long time.     "But ... they program their own children,” I said. “When they’re created, or what have you. Even if they believe the code to be as fundamental as DNA ... surely they must realize that there was a ... prime mover?"     "Ha, aptly said. But that's just it. The Kluex priesthood--would they have you believe that your existence is the result of evolutionary happenstance? That the whole Avian race is just a byproduct of its surroundings, and that a few mundane twists of environment or inheritance might have had a different race rise to sentience on Avos? Of course not. It is for the Glitch as it is for many of your people: their existence was divinely foretold. What many have tried to explain to them is hardwired by their creators, they believe to be divinely inspired."     Considering the fantastical mythology I’d grown up with, the difference between divine creators and mundane inventors seemed like semantics. Still, I asked, “And you think it's their programming that causes them to remain technologically primitive?"     "I do. But some Glitch break the mold. Like genetic mutants, they often benefit from their unique abilities. They are aware that their fellows appear to be stuck in the feudal era, and they seek to surpass it. Most Outcasts have an innate fascination with astronomy, space travel, and alien cultures. And they're almost always persecuted for it."     "Even in a town like this? So recently founded by space travelers? You don't really think Serverside would ostracize someone just for an interest in space travel, do you?"

    "I know they already have,” he answered. "Outcasts simply don't do well in traditional Glitch societies. Usually, sudden self-awareness is brought on by an injury. Occasionally, it is present from birth. Even more rarely is it inherited. The Founders of Serverside, I think, were hoping that if they brought together enough Outcasts, that they could hand it down from generation to generation.

    But many Glitch colonies suffer similar fates. Though the founders did their best to build and program their children, they could not fight nature.” As a biologist, I couldn’t help a derisive snort. Vander paused to shoot me a you know what I meant glare before continuing. “By bringing so many Glitch together in this community, the Founders have most likely doomed them to repeat history."     "Are you saying the Glitch can't ... evolve, socially?"     "I don't know. But when this town was founded just a few hundred years ago, it was by all accounts a peaceful anarchy. Not lawless, mind you ... but no formal judicial system existed for nearly a hundred years. Now Serverside is a democracy, and there have been talks for decades of holding a mayoral election. How long do you think it will be before they have a king?"     "I'm no political scientist, but it seems just as likely that this is a natural progression of government. Any sentient race could have walked down the path you're describing."     "Maybe so. But I have been living in this town and curating its history for quite some time now. To me, the pattern is clear: the townsfolk are growing more fond of a traditional lifestyle every day. Even Dosskey's interest in guns is seen as questionable."     "Can't they be ... deprogrammed, somehow?"     "Attempts have been made by the Glitch themselves to create a Better Glitch. The experimentors found that tampering with the software--even slightly--had dire consequences. I'm sure you read about that in 'Mistakes to Avoid,' eh?     "I did. It wasn't specific on the consequences, but it was fairly heavy-handed about following the instruction manual, yes. I assumed it was a matter of tradition."     "And so it is, my good fellow. But you may unravel that mystery soon enough."