So This Bizarre Drow Source Material Is A Grand Example Of How Not To Write Your Fantasy Races 😭 It's

Day 24 of Old Art

We all like illithids now, right?

We all love our ghouls here but I think we need to remember that being really close to them all the time would be causing low level radiation damage so you’d always need to keep rad-away on you. But you’d also just kinda need to get use to the smell of rotting flesh? Like ghouls are rotting. I can bring evidence to prove this,people in canon don’t like the smell of ghouls. Also when you kiss them your nose would go in their nose hole and I still don’t know how to feel about that.

old warg sketch

The Queen is Dead!

There is this tiresome old trope in any science fiction that deals with ants, (or aliens that are stand-ins for ants or termites or bees or any other eusocial insect,) where the queen dies and then, suddenly none of the workers can function anymore. The workers in this theory of what a "hive mind" is are all just automata that extend the body of the queen. This is, of course, totally backwards. It's the death of human queens that leaves their subjects disoriented. We misperceive the order and smooth functioning of eusocial colonies for authoritarianism. No society could function so well without a tyrant, a single central mind, we assume. A great man or woman who drives their history must exist. This is all human mythology applied to the alien world of ants. What happens when the queen dies? Well let me tell you, because I've seen it happen... sadly. Queens are the longest lived members of ant colonies. So, naturally if you keep ants, you grow attached to the queen. And it's true that without her the colony has no future in the long run for most species of ants (there are exceptions, who can gain new queens, or who have multiple queens... but most ant colony have but one) So, when the queen dies it's sad. But, when she dies the workers ... keep going. You see the advantage of a "hive mind" isn't that there is one central node doing all the thinking, no, the colony is a distributed organism. And when the queen dies it's like menopause for a human body. There will be no new children. (though all eggs and larvae alive when the queen dies will be raised fully.) The ants without a queen continue to care for each other, continue to grow their fungus gardens, or heard aphids, they keep storing seeds and feeding the young. With time, the last of the eggs and brood are raised to be adults. The nest is cleaned and tidy, everyone is fed, with all these tasks done the ants huddle together to conserve energy. They will keep tending the nest and eating when they need to... possibly for years. Menopause isn't the end of an individual life, it's just the closing of a particular door.

I do think ant colonies like this, like my own queen-less colony can seem a little sad. Eggs and larvae and pupae are such joys for ants. They lavish food and attention on their little sisters. No more little sisters means a less active colony, it's like winter has set in permanently. But ants live through winters. Sometimes many winters. If you give a colony in this state brood from another queen they will raise them with great excitement. But there is no peaceful way to move the workers to a colony with a living queen.

This situation happens rarely in the wild. There are so many other things that can kill a colony long before a queen lives so long that she dies of old age. In the wild there are also parasitic species of ants that look for colonies without a queen, or with a queen that is weak and easy to kill. These sneaky queen ants will "steal" a colony. Though, from the perspective of ants without a queen, this is almost a mercy. But, there is none of this... everyone falling over and dying or everyone going crazy you see in stories about hives. The queen is just one part of the colony... a critical part... but still only a part. And each individual ant still has her own life to live.

dont look at me

Visual analysis and critique of the aliens in Mass Effect: Andromeda

A comparison between the current in-game models and the originals from the trilogy.

Introduction

Just a warning, this will be an extended read. If you’re going to invest in reading this longwinded analysis, I suggest you go get a nice beverage and come back with a cozy chair. This will be relatively spoiler free (unless you aren’t aware of any of the new races I guess?) so if you’re still at the beginning of the game like I am, no worries there! This analysis will have some pictures for comparison, and some edits that I’ve made myself.

Link to the EA ask board version [x]

Keep reading

Thank you, /r/ProgrammerHumor, I love you endlessly.

Redditors competing to make the worst volume sliders possible...

I low-key love the fact that sci-fi has so conditioned us to expect to be hanging out with a bunch of cool space aliens, that legitimate, actual scientists keep proposing the most bizarre, three-blunts-into-the-rotation "theories" to explain the fact we're not.

Some of my favourites include:

Zoo Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they're not talking to us because of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? (Or because they're doing experiments on us???)

Dark Forest Theory: What if there are loads of aliens out there, but they all hate us and each other so they're all just waiting with a shotgun pointed at the door, ready to open fire on anything that moves?

Planetarium Theory: What if there's at least one alien with mastery over light and matter that's just making it seem to us that the universe is empty to us as, like, a joke?

Berserker Theory: What if there were loads of aliens, but one of them made infinite killer robots that murdered everyone and are coming for us next?!!

Like, the universe is at least 13,700,000,000 years old and 46,000,000,000 light years big. We have had the ability to transmit and receive signals for, what, 100 years, and our signals have so far travelled 200 light years?

The fact is biological life almost certainly has, does, or will develop elsewhere in the universe, and it's not impossible that a tiny amount of it has, does, or will develop in a way that we would understand as "intelligent". But, like, we're realistically never going to know because of the scale of the things involved.

So I'm proposing my own hypothesis. I call it the "Fool in a Field" hypothesis. It goes like this:

Humanity is a guy standing in the middle of a field at midnight. It's pitch black, he can't move, and he's been standing there for ages. He's just had the thought to swing his arms. He swings one of his arms, once, and does not hit another person. "Oh no!" He says. "Robots have killed them all!"

someone has to make the first move, why not right after a fight when your blood’s still pumping?

yeah...that's what happens when you send a person on a journey with 2 units of intelligence and maximum luck