#we're the weird aliens

[skrytch]

[marlynnofmany]

I finally got my copies! Delighted to report that the title page I designed myself looks much better than the one by the Fancypants Professionals who made the first one (and who wanted to charge me an absurd amount to renew it with them). (Suck it, price-gougers.)

Ahem. Hooray, the revised edition looks good!

[erose-this-name]

humans are not the default race

In every scifi and fantasy setting with """races""", humans are the default.

If you're lucky, we're the short-lived, fast-reproducing pests that are all white Europeans for some mysterious reason, and also have disproportionate rates of being raised as undead because we can't be bothered to make zombie dwarf minis or animate a vampire gnome that has to jump up to bite a tall person's neck.

(We've got BOTH human AND elf skeleton warriors! Oh, hey, I just changed the scale, now it's a hobbit skeleton OR a giant skeleton! Such skeleton diversity! No, Khajiits can't be bone boys, a skeleton with a tail and a cat skull is just TOO SPOOKY)

I feel like a lot of people don't realize that we (Homo sapiens) have the longest running endurance of any land animal. Being able to run a marathon is not normal.

(It's because we evolved the very unusual hunting strategy of Slowly Chasing Gazelles While Throwing Sticks At Them Until The Gazelle Collapses From Exhaustion Then Casually Walking Up And Bashing Their Head In With A Rock™).

Even Neanderthals probably couldn't match our tenacity (they were considerably stronger and tougher though, but by no means dumber judging from the size of their brain cavities{which was bigger than ours actually})

(the evolutionary Neanderthal hunting strategy was probably something like Jumping Out And Stabbing A Wooly Rhinoceros With A Pointed Stick, Then Getting Punted 12 Feet Into a Tree But Getting Right Back Up And Doing It Again Until It Dies Because You Have Superhuman Bone And Muscle Density. And If You Do Break One Of Your Unbreakable Bones Your Homies Will Take Care Of You Until It Heals™

[Neanderthal skeletons are found with healed fractures surprisingly often despite said bones being much stronger and denser than ours, they just kept evolving denser bones until they couldn't even swim without sinking like a rock, but they still got broken all the time])

So given that we, Homo sapiens, actually literally used to be the "species that specializes in sheer endurance, determination, and unbreakable fucking will", I want more fantasy and scifi settings where we are that way! I think the only setting where that's even remotely the case is Undertale. We're not just the "default" intelligent species!

The only reason we're good at everything is because we can make complex tools and can learn and aren't bound by instinct. Which, by definition, all fantasy races would also be able to do. Otherwise, they'd just be considered animals. Like trolls or Redditers.

The "default" species should just be really good at making tools and quickly adapting, but kinda suck in every other category. So I guess gnomes or goblins are the default d&d race.

And Humans are certainly not the Tolkien "that one race that lives short lives and reproduces faster than everyone else and is good at farming" because:

A) we actually do already live relatively long lives for mammals of our size and also GIVING BIRTH CAN KILL US, AND IF OUR PARENTS DON'T RAISE US JUST RIGHT THAT CAN ALSO KILL US, WE ARE SPECIFICALLY VERY BAD AT REPRODUCING

B) we are in no way adapted to farming, and most of our modern health and societal issues stem from the fact that we aren't meant to farm or be civilized, but do it anyways.

We only farm because it helped us survive the ecological collapse at the end of the ice age, now we're in too deep to go back.

When the ice age ended (quite abruptly) the ecosystem couldn't provide for hunters and gathers anymore, a bunch of things were getting heat stroke, sea levels rose, hibernation and bloom cycles and reptile gender ratios were out of wack, predators died out because herbivores died out because plants weren't doing well. Decomposers like vultures and worms had a field day (Until they didn't [RIP condor population]). It would take a while for a new ecological equilibrium to emerge and for evolution to fix things.

But farming doesn't need any healthy ecosystems except for the soil and pollinators, mostly, so that still works. And farming makes more food meaning you can have more people. So now there's more people.

But that also means you can't ever go back to foraging without all those extra people dying of starvation. So, anarcho-primitivism would technically be the most deadly ideology if implemented, and therefore is not based, unfortunately. Here's hoping for an apocalypse to do that for us! (I would not survive it)

Fun Fact: those isolated tribal societies like the Sentinelese that still do hunting and gathering only spend 15-20 hours a week doing that and another 20 doing camp chores, and the rest of their time forming meaningful relationships and not being depressed.

Notice how most of what they do as "work" (hunting, fighting, hiking, berry/mushroom/etc picking, cooking, camping, arts and crafts, oral history/story telling) are things that we need to do during our limited free time as "hobbies" just so that our "work" doesn't drive us insane. Thus leaving less time for relationships, etc.

If we were actually good at farming or industry or civilization, then things like math and repetitive manual labor wouldn't be work. They'd be the most fun activities.

Sure, these foragers die young, but so did medieval peasant farmers who were even less healthy since they had much less diverse diets (a lot of carbs) and got plague more often thanks to cities and their close proximity to livestock. Our modern sedentary lifestyle is bad too.

Hobbits are suited to farming (also Entwives I guess). Hobbits are quite good at it, at the cost of not being as good at much else (besides going unnoticed and throwing for some reason), they inherently enjoy farming life quite a bit and most* aren't haunted by the sense they should be anything else, like we are. *(The Took family got that Call To Adventure 'tism)

We only think that we're not special or can't be anything other than what we currently are because we no longer have anything else to compare ourselves to. The Neanderthals and Denisovans died out tens of thousands of years ago and the fucking aliens are somewhere, presumably

We are special, only we survived.

But at the cost of becoming the species equivalent of an abandoned child raised by wolves. We fantasize about these things because we all know that we shouldn't be alone. But our perceptions of ourselves are twisted by our trauma and lack of socialization.

Personally, the realization that having lost our family was probably our fault makes that hurt so much worse.

[raytoroapologist]

putting Conclave on a fucking shelf until you all learn to be normal about intersex people.

[leadendeath]

using squared, angular faces like ¬_¬ and :] to deliberately yet subtly allude to my computerness

this post is always popular so instead of turning off rbs for like the third time *posts my links* also i have a plan for my assessment now :]

you’ll reblog this version if you’re not a coward >:]

ok reblogs staying on, even if i did get self conch shus 🐚

[wrinkleintime]

enterprise text posts: featuring trip (and friends) in Situations

[autism-swagger]

Every so often I remember that my Inhuman design is technically kind of supported by canon a bit, solely because of baby Daisy's weird little ears.

[batsplat]

ur regular reminder that uccio groups casey (retired well over three years ago by this point) in the same category as marc and vinales of 'guys who had valentino's poster on their wall'

[paynomindtotheinsanity]

Now that the spice is finally happening, engagement on here has gone waaay up - which is amazing!!

HOWEVER, some people have been getting kinda weird with the asks, so I've got a few rules moving forward:

1. I'm not going to answer messages about smut unless it's either plot-related or funny.

2. Drawing requests are okay to make, just know that I probably won't get around to them.

3. If I haven't answered a message, sending it 3-5 more times is not going to magically prompt me to answer. Please don't spam my inbox.

Okay, back to the shenanigans!

[kepler-twentytwo-bee]

hey what's up i'm

kepler/kep, benny, gordus, ect.

(if curious abt full list of names, just ask! ^_^)

pronouns are he/him it/its ze/zir star/stars bone/bones they/them and again a few others

this is my half-life/hlvrai/any related blog :]

I'll post and reblog awesome and funny things whenever I remember to,,

half-life gameplay status !!

me and my brother are playing the half life series together, me on the left side of the keyboard (I control walking, most moving, interacting, and spray paint), him on the right side (controlling weapons and, looking around some. it's a big job)

we've beaten hl1, currently playing through blue shift

(more info under read more)

anyway we've written a story around our way of playing, saying Gordon Freeman is like this because he's being controlled by two aliens that got in his brain, we call this guy Gordus Freemen, it's very cool, I'll probably post abt all that here at some point, but please if you have any questions or are interested in this ask away !

in blue shift we do a similar thing, but the story is that Barney Calhoun, and all "Barney" security guards, are security robots, but the one we play as was maybe programmed wrong, and as an experiment has two processors (so it's like he's being controlled by two people at the same time), we call this version of him BARN-E CAL-2

I also have some otherwise ocs I'll probably post abt them too later

✩--tags--✩

who knows if I'll even remember to use these, but they'r cool to have!

the bog - reblogs

kep yaps - me talking

alien (species) - posts abt aliens,,

robots (species) - posts abt robot,

kep art - my art

my brother - posts including my brother

gordus - posts abt our version of hl Gordon

BARN-E - posts abt our version of Barney

devil on our right shoulder - my brother talking

kepler (species) - pending oc tag

okay that's it byebye

[one-of-us-must-be-crazy]

Bad news lads, the Alien verse did in fact introduce Amanda's husband finally in a 2022 novel and I'm about to go fucking insane because his name is "chad" and hes the big damn protagonist of his own fucking canon novel and put davis in a robot dog (?) to rescue him (?).

Meanwhile it's been retconned that Amanda died, she's in cryo until a cure for her disease is found.

[skrytch]

[sandy-shocks]

Every time a new female character in star rail gets the 'she's so evil and morally bad I hate her' accusation it's always people who are just mad a woman was mean to the main character. If yall cared about characters being bad people you would hate Kafka and Firefly. The literal terrorists.

[maeamian]

tbqh it's weird as hell to me that there's this given understanding about fictional aliens that they'd be surprised or confused by adaptability, but like, as far as we know and understand that is a fundamental quality of life itself not life on earth. In order to become a spacefaring species any spacefaring alien would've had to survive whatever space threw at them for billions of years as well as whatever their planet in specific threw at them, even the 'good' planet we know about is pretty fucking hostile to life. It's just implausible to me that like, among all the possible sapient species we'd be unique or interesting for the level to which we have the ability to adapt to situations, something that any biological creature of any origin would also need to survive long enough as a species to figure out how space works.

[swag-system]

So funny how literally all of us love to be asked questions. Like I don't think there's a single one of us that isn't happy and joyous when we get questions. Coming into front to see an ask about me is like wow! Yay! This is so awesome! Ask me more things!!

[dance-magic-dance]

I can't tell why but its so important to me that Rok-Tahk is a girl.