Lucid

Nope, I'm very open for ALL the weirdness.

Look at them, how could I choose?

THE LEADING HAND

Just like humans, beacons (I'm not good at naming so I'll keep the name my friend suggested. I hope nobody has taken it..) can be divided into "right-handed" and "left-handed".

Though with their radial symmetry beacons look mostly the same from all sides and prefer to describe objects' position in space using other objects (usually big and unmovable) as reference points, they can distinguish perfectly well between left and right, but do not have concepts of back and front. At least, not in the same way as we do.

A beacon is considered "right-handed" if their leading hand is the one between two antennae which serve not only as manipulating organs, but also as organs of smell and taste. This side can be marked as "front", though in beacons' mind there's no front and back, but there's "leading hand side" and "opposite of leading hand side".

When talking to another beacon, a beacon should turn, their leading hand side facing the interlocutor. This way two other hands can be easily seen from above and that they do not hold a knife or anything else sharp enough to stab you as soon as you lower your guard. Greeting someone with the leading hand is considered very polite.

There're "left-handed" beacons, but their life is much harder than a left-handed human's. Language is not adapted well for them, and those kinds of work which should be done with both the hand and manipulating antennae can be very exhausting of completely impossible if they decide to use their actual leading hand.

Obviously, such a socially important distinction in difference between hands' motor skills has its place in beacons' language and culture. Just like in humans' languages, "right" is a synonym to truth, justice and government and is also related to concepts of loyalty, honesty and reliability. "Left-handedness" is related not only to concepts of dishonesty, secretiveness, deception, betrayal and anything illegal, but also to cunningness and wit, mysteriousness and having magical abilities. In ancient times, characters and gods portrayed with always showing viewers the "back" side could be chaotic and extremely clever tricksters, being able to outsmart any enemy, as well as just regular antagonists. Sometimes their concealed leading hand would hold an item, often magical, which they would reveal at the right moment of the story, finally turning around.

The guys are going out on the town!

Paintings and Drawings by Wayne Barlowe for an unrealized project called "Cryptozoo." Barlowe hasn't revealed much about it other than that he's written a screenplay for it and has been shopping it around for years now. Personally I can't imagine how this would work as a movie, but it seems ideal for the Barlowe's Guide format...

Griffin

Phoenix

Manticore

The endless mouth...

I posted them here before, but here is a more cohesive set

Hellraiser Exploration: Cenobites Part 1

I explored some classic cenobites along with some new ones. Lots of ground to cover when you explore the rim of sensation.

Typhloesus wellsi has been a mystery for a long time.

First discovered in the early 1970s, in the mid-Carboniferous Bear Gulch Limestone deposits (~324 million years ago) of Montana, USA, it was initially mistaken for the long-sought-after "conodont animal" due to the presence of numerous conodont teeth inside its body. But just a few years later well-preserved eel-like conodont animals were found elsewhere, and it became apparent that the conodont teeth inside Typhloesus had actually just been part of its last meal.

But if it wasn't a conodont… then what was it?

Up to about 10cm long (4"), Typhloesus had a streamlined body with a vertical tail fin and paired "keels" along its sides. It had a mouth and a gut cavity, but no apparent anus, and it also didn't seem to have any eyes or other sensory structures. And in the middle of its body there was something very weird – a pair of "ferrodiscus" organs, disc-shaped structures which contained high concentrations of iron but whose function was completely unknown.

This anatomy just didn't match any other known animals, so much so that it gained the nickname of "alien goldfish".

For the next few decades it remained a bizarre enigma, at best tentatively considered to represent an unknown lineage of some sort of metazoan that left almost no other fossil record due to being entirely soft-bodied.

But now, 50 years after its initial discovery, we might just finally have a clue about Typhloesus' true identity.

Recently something new was discovered in some Typhloesus specimens – a radula-like feeding structure that was probably part of an eversible proboscis. This would mean that Typhloesus was a mollusc, possibly a gastropod that convergently evolved a swimming predatory lifestyle similar to modern pterotracheoids.

It's not a definite identification yet, and even if it was a mollusc it was an incredibly strange one, with features like the ferrodiscus still lacking any explanation. But this discovery at least shows that there are still new details waiting to be found in the "alien goldfish" fossils, and gives us a start towards bringing its classification back down to earth.

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