#dyson shell world

[this is a story that originates along the equator]

Many mothers ago, the world was new.

The mountains had not yet risen up above the metal plates that shift, the islands were not yet floating out by the poles, and the ocean did not pool between the land and the metal. 

Once, the world was dark. A serpent uncoiled herself from the machine and she spun her light into the sun, which she placed in the center of the sky. Her sisters used the light from the sun as they worked to create the water and the land, which they built upon the firmament so that there might be life there.

The sun thought their creation beautiful, and moved to see it better. As it approached, the grass and trees upon the ground wilted, and the waters receded. The serpent and her sisters begged the sun to move back into the sky, and the sun did so, reluctantly.

The serpent and her sisters then made the little animals, and the larger animals, and put them in their places on the land and in the trees and the water, and the sun thought that these, too, were beautiful, so the sun again moved to better see the serpents' creations, and again the plants upon the ground wilted and the waters receded and this time the little animals were burned, and the sun wept.

As the serpents escorted the sun back into the sky, the sun begged the serpents to tie the sun to its post, so that it could not hurt the earth it loved in pursuit of seeing its beauty, and the serpents agreed that this was the best way to protect the earth, so they planted their tails into the firmament and held the sun in their outstretched hands so that it could not move from the center of the sky.

[theres another version of this story where the sun is not sentient and she realizes that what she has made it also dangerous and does not stay where it belongs so she and her sisters sacrifice herself to hold the sun in place. there is a third version where the sun is evil or cruel and does these things on purpose.]

***

Once we lived on the ring that rotates slowly in the distance. Our land was threatened [by some ancient conflict idk] and our mother rose from the ocean and lifted our land up. She carried us across the ocean, through the floating rivers and she holds us up by poles where we are protected.

"All of them?"

"All of them."

"That's a shame."

The two of them drew the string around a clutch containing 4 of 5 eggs, each egg nearly as big as the men lugging them away to be buried with next season's soil.

Its slow goin but I’m still working on World Building June stuff!

Here’s some wip inks for, in order, History, Language, and Religion!

Fun facts: that guy probably works in the shell- he’s a technician or smth probably. I’m gonna call him Kyle. Those are his kids! He got the ok from his boss to give them a tour and it was totally worth it because they got some adorable vests to wear so that they’re easier to see and don’t get trampled. (Most of the shell is considered public property but there’s a few places that are off-limits because there’s a lot of work being done there and they don’t want it getting too crowded. You can request a pass and it’ll probably be approved but it takes awhile to clear.)

I still haven’t developed THEIR alphabet yet but stuff like road signs are usually done in smth not UNLIKE ogham so what I did was I used their version of the setup (which mimics a sun tether and reads bottom up) and just applied regular ogham but with english. The left one says something to the effect of “camping space six miles in” and the one on the right says “bingham tunnel,” just because.

I don’t have, like, a BUNCH of history done up but here’s some of the stuff that I DO know that might sort of be in that category. I’m sorta loosely using the dungeon master tips for this one because i’ve literally given it like no thought :s

Current Events:

the largest and best funded area of academic study is actually astronomy!!!! 

my understanding of the place where the shell hangs in space means that there aren’t really any planetary bodies that are very close- which also means that a bunch of stuff we figured out just by looking .. uh, they won’t be able to do that. 

a lot of the information about physics that they might need (largely in case of emergency, but also because the builders understood that the residents’ Innate Feelings about physics would probably be warped and the lack of local bodies might sort of stunt their ability to develop more advanced astrophysical theories,) has been included in the shell’s archives! along with a history of the shell and blueprints and things you might need to know in case a repair needs to be made.

one of the first things you learn when going into the fields of Astronomy OR what i am currently calling Shell Engineering is the written version of the shell’s interface language.

there’s currently a project in the works to translate it into the 3 most common written languages so that the info will be more accessible to the general public, but that’s really slow going. the builders included an interface to allow this to happen but the project is only a few years old and the OS and its contents are expansive as hell. (i’m gonna stop because i have a bunch of this kind of info saved up for a different day!!)

Middle History:

I actually havent decided if this belongs a little big in the past or if it’s going to happen over the course of a story i want to tell or if it will happen in THE FUTURE but here it is anyway:

there was uh, sort of a big shake-up when the Shell’s archives were being released. they were published more or less as they were translated (some time was taken to, like, double and triple check, and of course not only are the archives STILL being released, but the stuff that’s been out for awhile is constantly being updated with better translations etc) and it uh. there was sort of a planet-wide existential crisis when they found out- i mean it wasn’t EXACTLY a surprise that the place had been built, but there was sort of this thing that happened- and sort of keeps happening- where you find out that it was built by people who really put a lot of thought into it being the best possible place, but also it reads very strongly like they did it just to see if they could, and your gods are real but they’re not powerful, or omniscient, or omnipotent, and they’re probably all dead now and they’re actually very mortal and not too different than you are, and, fuck, why? literally why, someone had an option to do or not do this. 

and i mean any given individual will have had a different reaction to it but i mean, even if it’s not surprising exactly, that kind of information DOES something to you, you know?

World Building June - Day 4 - Cultures

Goodness, Okay, so, this is a very, very, very, very big planet.

And I probably won’t be developing all of it in-depth

but here’s some general stuff:

Because of the way that gravity/the continents are, there are three primary culture groups- one for the equator, and one each for both of the poles.

I’ve mostly, in the past, focused on the equator.

Because travel is easier there, there’s a BUNCH of cultural exchange that happens as a result of the F’ migrations- and as a result there’s sort of this … slow gradient, around the equator. Opposite sides might have completely different cultures, but in between any given 2 towns will operate in mostly the same way.

there are SOME things that are more or less universal- like for instance it’s generally considered rude not to keep in a sort of christmas-card contact with your wife’s other families/ Some extended families will be closer than others, of course, both in physical space and emotionally, but just in general you send a card off to all the other families when your shared wife arrives, so that they know she’s safe, and then again when she leaves so they know when to expect her. That kind of thing.

And it’s SORT OF a little bit rude to deny a male a ride, especially when he’s clearly in a hurry, and you’re going the same way as him. they can scurry pretty well but man the men are just so small. they’re so small just let them ride. (but also it’s SUPER SUPER SUPER rude to just hop on somebody’s back wHY WOULD YOU DO THAT.)

Out on the poles it’s pretty common to decorate houses with, like, basically christmas lights. there’s a little bit of this on the equator, too, because travelling is a thing, but it’s on pretty much every house on the poles.

Okay so there’s just the one developed sentient + sapient species at this time/ever, probably. Like we do, they probably have some weird/mostly arbitrary “race” system that they use to talk about ethnicities, but I’m not gonna get into that too much because that’s the kind of thing that I probably won’t develop until I actually get down in the world and start writing stories.

Likewise, there’s a bunch of distinct regional differences. These are MOST apparent in the males- with their bright colors and little fancy nubbins- but as of this week I decided that the buckets/females still have pretty apparent colors/markings, though they are definitely less saturated. There’s other differences too though! 

I managed to remember to include facial differences in these examples, but by the time it occurred to me that I had meant to incorporate body differences, It was too late and I didn’t wanna do all that work again, but they have the same kinds of variations we do- limb/body ratio, ear shape/sizes, height, tail thickness/length, etc.

The biggest Overall Racial Differences are the 2 poles and the equator- I can say with quite a lot of confidence that the Bright Purple Variation probably belongs to one of the poles, and it’s likely that everybody on the equator thinks they (the lil guy especially) look VERY exotic.

The other thing I can say with some confidence is that a lot of people living along the equator probably have a blue/yellow or blue/yellow/white kind of color patterning. sometimes blue/yellow/black but i SUSPECT that will be more of a biracial thing. for right now, I’m just sort of googling “nudibranch” and “deer” and picking ones I like for reference when I’m putting together a picture, and until further notice it’s safe to assume that if a nudibranch exists, there’s one of these creatures with a similar color pattern, and if a deer exists, it’s reasonable to suspect that there’s one of these creatures with a similar face.

ummm.. otherwise, let’s see: on the chart, the human reference is 5′6″ (it’s me!) and each square is 1ft by 1ft. 

which is terrifying because that makes the females like............. 9.3 feet tall and a little over 20ft long.

World Building June - Day 1 - Introduction

OKAY so this is the Dyson Shell World I’ve been working on on and off for a couple years. It doesnt have a name yet- neither an English Name nor one in the conlang that I’mma eventually develop for the people who live in it.

It started out, initially, as sort of a thought experiment. I thought that maybe it would be fun to develop a culture from the ground up, with a sort of end goal of being that I would maybe make a bunch of books or w/e that had been produced “in” that culture. Translations would exist, of course, for those (perfectly goddamn reasonable) people who weren’t interested in learning a Made Up Language just to explore the world/read the stories, but the basic idea was just sort of to push the limits of my own little brain and how it perceives things.

Like - ok- originally, the primary sentient creatures were meant to be kind of unnerving- and i mean they probably still would be, except that’s not really how I draw, so now they’re mostly just kind of adorable.

And, like, the “challenging perceptions” thing has sort of morphed and now it’s less about directly endeavoring to create something “alien” and more about trying to get a handle on things like social structures/norms, and psychologies and how intricate language can be.

Like - ok- for instance a little while ago a post crossed my tumblr dashboard about numbers systems!! And what things can influence them and what sort of effect that can have on your thinking, and how, for instance, the numbers system a society develops isn’t necessarily going to be based on the number of fingers they have (!!!!) and like, i had designed my creatures with a different number of fingers BECAUSE i wanted them to have a different number system BUT now instead of using base 8 (like i had intended) or base 6 (like i would intuitively assumed based on their current number of digits) they use BASE 14 because it’s COOL and you CAN’T STOP ME!!!

So i mean at this point this world is BASICALLY a giant excuse for me to research a bunch of stuff that i personally thing is really interesting, like linguistics and sociology and shit.

It’s also ABSOLUTELY an excuse to explore the Very Important topics of Giant, Strong Lesbians and VERY SMALL FATHERS.

ANYWAY SO, for those of you who might be NEW HERE (hello!!!!!!!!!!!!) the illustration for today is a Typical Triad: the big one is what we would normally think of as a Female and the small, cheeky looking fellow is what we would normally think of as a Male, and the sleeping one is what I have been calling a “Bucket,” because i have been known to be homestuck trash, but honestly humans would probably think of them as female, also, because that’s just How We Are.

One of the things that I am most looking forward to teasing out about these guys and their culture is the way that their gender + sexuality politics developed and what traits will tend to qualify as “queer” in the context of a 3-parent family.

New Post has been published on http://www.arthopping.com/archives/1717

Just trying to keep up, this week!

Most of the progress being made right now is less visual and more life-events-y, so there’s not really actually anything NEW-new this week… but I do have a couple things that have not been seen yet or have previously enjoyed only limited release, so!

First are these album-y covers I did! These are both a few months old- from before I moved back in with Mom- and I was originally going to wait until both these things were completed (one is a cover, and the other is an EP) but- My friend has a lot of the same problems that I do when it comes to finishing stuff, so- heck, let’s see’em now.

There’s not really too much to say about Labyrinth- I’m still pretty happy with it- but I might make some changes for the Prologue design, especially since I may end up designing a whole booklet to go along with it.

Several months ago, I started a blog where I keep my worldbuilding stuff for a Dyson Shell World– and thanks to a friend frequently misreading the URL, (and then telling me about it,) I’ve been calling it Dyson’s Hell World and I honestly think that that name might stick. (which would be fine and true, probably.)

I don’t update too often and, at the moment, there’s really not a lot on there that’s worth bringing over here- except for this, because honestly I just love it a lot? I mean there’s nothing special about it but LOOK at this CUTE and POUTY SLUG.

Every single creature in that image is a full-grown adult. The fellow on the right is made about something and his brother is just like “Dang it, Dave, just hop on already we’re gonna be late”

And then uh- kind of in the middle of August- after I moved but before I started school- I got this wild hair up my butt to try to make a video game (that happens to me occasionally and I have learnt that it is best to just ride it out. I usually learn something useful, even if basically nothing gets done for the week or so that I spend flailing around in some engine or other.)

So this year, I made! Like a third of a tileset! I was using Stencyl- which is actually a pretty lovely program, all things considered- and everything was going pretty swimmingly until I put my tiles in and? then? I’m not sure what happened but definitely a bunch of stuff went super wrong. So I abandoned Stencyl and started doing some tutorials in Unity (because I figured that that would be a more useful program to know my way around, in the long run-) and then school started and now this is all I have to show for those couple weeks.

And this is way old! Still from this year but gosh it might be from………. January or February. I have a trial for (and desperately wish to own) this program called Mischief that is- literally the best. It is not possible for me to love this program enough and it is ALSO not possible for me to love this program MORE. It’s a vector thing and – the best to sketch in. THE BEST.

So- anyway. This is actually more or less a direct trace of this photo of Mt. Hood and- I mean I’m pretty proud of it, even if it was just a learning exercise.

And then- one last thing, because APPARENTLY I ? Never posted it? wow! I am a little bit surprised because- I mean I’m pretty proud of this, just in general, but:

So either late 2014 or early 2015 (maybe both?) Lifehouse had an Album Cover Design Contest on Creative Allies and- I mean this is pretty old news by now, but I did not win (not too big of a deal) but I wanted to show you my entry!

The prompt was kind of more or less “The album is going to be called Seven (a fact which is no longer true), and maybe incorporate some grit and themes about time” and also “this is in fact our seventh album!”

So- I mean for starters, the only reasonable thing to do with a prompt like that is to make a s/heptagon, right?

So I did THAT, and then I filled each triangle with colors from the previous six albums- and then I overlaid everything with a scan of- it’s actually the same scan of toned paper that I use for the background on the Sir Fattingston website- and then I think I set that layer to Multiply or Overlay or somesuch and fiddles with the opacity a little but.