Table of Contents
Blog
The blog namespace is for catching stray ideas. These may be less polished than the stuff you see in the Lore namespace.
Blog
The blog namespace is for catching stray ideas. These may be less polished than the stuff you see in the Lore namespace.
Odor Colors
I'm still trying to work out vulpithecine odor vocabulary. Here's a scientific paper that I found recently that helps a bit: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6015838/
Two sets of participants were asked to describe a set of odors. One Western, primarily Dutch-speaking group, and a group of Jahai from Malaysia. The Dutch group took much longer to identify odors and used mostly concrete descriptors for those odors. the Jahai group was much quicker and used a suite of abstract odor terms (I assume what I've been calling “odor colors”).
I have yet to find a publicly accessible article that breaks down how these odor colors are arranged.
For now, yinrih odor vocabulary is heavily tied to emotion, with the arousal-valence model of emotion being my primary inspiration. Arousal means whether the odor has a calming (negative arousal) or exciting/stimulating (positive arousal) affect. Valence refers to whether the emotion is seen as positive or negative. happy is a positive valence, somewhat high arousal. sad, is negative valence, low arousal. Calm is positive valence, low arousal, etc.
Some yinrih odor words differentiate between strong and light sensations of the same odor, much like the English distinction between the colors red and pink. There is also vocabulary to describe how long an odor is perceived, whether an odor is persistent, lingering, or fleeting.
Yinrih also have many ways of describing the scent of other yinrih, mainly linked to emotional states. Universally across yinrih languages, the word for feel as in feel an emotion also means smell like. So you don't say I feel happy you say I smell happy. To a yinrih this isn't just a turn of phrase, happiness literally has an odor, as do other emotions.
In addition to smelling emotions, yinrih identify one another primarily by smell. Gender, reproductive status, and approximate age are readily apparent from a yinrih's ambient musk and ink. There are three distinct odors associated with reproductive status based on the condition of the ovary1), Immature, when the ovary isn't fully developed, mature pre-oviposition, when the ovary is mature but the yinrih has not laid their egg, and mature, post-ovipositon, when the ovary is destroyed due to egg laying.
To a human, yinrih and their ink smell “rainy”, and most humans describe a yinrih's musk as pleasant and calming.
Kingdoms of life
Aerobic respiration and photosynthesis were developed internally rather than resulting from endosymbiosis of chloroplasts and mitochondria (or rather equivalents to the same).
Invertebrates are divided into soft-bodied invertebrates, like worms and mollusks, and hard-bodied invertebrates, like the earlier mentioned yinsects. Vertebrates evolved from soft-bodied invertebrates.
Fish are six-limbed and are more similar to lobe-finned fish rather than ray-finned fish. Land vertebrates consist of a more primitive hexapod clade and a more derived tetrapod clade. Wormcows belong to the hexapod clade. Forest flyers may also be hexapods, with the middle pair of limbs evolving into leathery wings, making them look like bat-winged cats. This implies that different groups of hexapods and tetrapods convergently evolved things like fur and wet noses, perhaps more likely that tetrapods split off from hexapods after those traits were developed.
Exovoviviparans are part of the tetrapod clade, a retcon from the earlier statement that forest flyers are exovoviviaparans. I may also retcon the statement that exovoviviparans are widespread. They may in fact be rare outliers like the monotremes.
Exovoviviparity may be a highly evolved form of ovuliparity (where eggs are laid first and fertilized externally). Males may have first produced loose milt, then self-contained spermatophors, which gradually became externally indistinguishable from female eggs, including having yolk sacs.
Animal Intelligence
I found this in the original Obsidian vault I used to organize this project.
A pleasant spring rain patters at my window as I write. Thunder rolls across the sky. For me, a relaxing evening. For my dear little forest flyer, a terror beyond comprehension. As I perch here I can feel it digging its tiny claws into my back, trying to bury itself in my fur. As far as it knows, whatever horror is creating those noises could bring death upon it at any moment. I wish that I could tell it that the thunder is nothing to worry about in a way it could understand, but its animal intelligence is limited. The gulf between it and I is too vast to be bridged.
Yet am I not also an animal? What unfathomable realities lie outside my comprehension? What dwells beyond the veil of mortal understanding? What horrors? What ecstasies? As great as is the span between myself and my dear pet, how much greater is the infinite yawning gap between myself and The Light?
More on suspension
So I'm wondering if the lore around suspension, dissociation, and the simulacrum makes any sense now. If the operating system environment exists in part so that the Voice isn't so loud, why don't they just stay there the whole time? Maybe it has something to do with the alteration of time perception. Honestly this is a nut I never did crack to my satisfaction. I've still got a whole Obsidian canvas filled with questions about it.
How do people “re-associate” for lack of a better term? There was that one Reddit story about a guy who lives an entire life in a coma until he sees a weird-looking lamp. That's one possible way. They're just living their life until they see something that's not quite right. It leads them down a rabbit hole of digging around trying to reproduce what they saw or uncover more glitches until they finally “wake up”. Then the process starts over again.
Then there are Immortals. They're suspended, so logically they should eventually dissociate. Maybe they get around this because the sim is the actual sensor feed from the mech, so the reality they think is real is actually just reality.
Odor Colors
I'm still trying to work out vulpithecine odor vocabulary. Here's a scientific paper that I found recently that helps a bit: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6015838/
Two sets of participants were asked to describe a set of odors. One Western, primarily Dutch-speaking group, and a group of Jahai from Malaysia. The Dutch group took much longer to identify odors and used mostly concrete descriptors for those odors. the Jahai group was much quicker and used a suite of abstract odor terms (I assume what I've been calling “odor colors”).
I have yet to find a publicly accessible article that breaks down how these odor colors are arranged.
For now, yinrih odor vocabulary is heavily tied to emotion, with the arousal-valence model of emotion being my primary inspiration. Arousal means whether the odor has a calming (negative arousal) or exciting/stimulating (positive arousal) affect. Valence refers to whether the emotion is seen as positive or negative. happy is a positive valence, somewhat high arousal. sad, is negative valence, low arousal. Calm is positive valence, low arousal, etc.
Some yinrih odor words differentiate between strong and light sensations of the same odor, much like the English distinction between the colors red and pink. There is also vocabulary to describe how long an odor is perceived, whether an odor is persistent, lingering, or fleeting.
Yinrih also have many ways of describing the scent of other yinrih, mainly linked to emotional states. Universally across yinrih languages, the word for feel as in feel an emotion also means smell like. So you don't say I feel happy you say I smell happy. To a yinrih this isn't just a turn of phrase, happiness literally has an odor, as do other emotions.
In addition to smelling emotions, yinrih identify one another primarily by smell. Gender, reproductive status, and approximate age are readily apparent from a yinrih's ambient musk and ink. There are three distinct odors associated with reproductive status based on the condition of the ovary2), Immature, when the ovary isn't fully developed, mature pre-oviposition, when the ovary is mature but the yinrih has not laid their egg, and mature, post-ovipositon, when the ovary is destroyed due to egg laying.
To a human, yinrih and their ink smell “rainy”, and most humans describe a yinrih's musk as pleasant and calming.
Kingdoms of life
Aerobic respiration and photosynthesis were developed internally rather than resulting from endosymbiosis of chloroplasts and mitochondria (or rather equivalents to the same).
Invertebrates are divided into soft-bodied invertebrates, like worms and mollusks, and hard-bodied invertebrates, like the earlier mentioned yinsects. Vertebrates evolved from soft-bodied invertebrates.
Fish are six-limbed and are more similar to lobe-finned fish rather than ray-finned fish. Land vertebrates consist of a more primitive hexapod clade and a more derived tetrapod clade. Wormcows belong to the hexapod clade. Forest flyers may also be hexapods, with the middle pair of limbs evolving into leathery wings, making them look like bat-winged cats. This implies that different groups of hexapods and tetrapods convergently evolved things like fur and wet noses, perhaps more likely that tetrapods split off from hexapods after those traits were developed.
Exovoviviparans are part of the tetrapod clade, a retcon from the earlier statement that forest flyers are exovoviviaparans. I may also retcon the statement that exovoviviparans are widespread. They may in fact be rare outliers like the monotremes.
Exovoviviparity may be a highly evolved form of ovuliparity (where eggs are laid first and fertilized externally). Males may have first produced loose milt, then self-contained spermatophors, which gradually became externally indistinguishable from female eggs, including having yolk sacs.
Animal Intelligence
I found this in the original Obsidian vault I used to organize this project.
A pleasant spring rain patters at my window as I write. Thunder rolls across the sky. For me, a relaxing evening. For my dear little forest flyer, a terror beyond comprehension. As I perch here I can feel it digging its tiny claws into my back, trying to bury itself in my fur. As far as it knows, whatever horror is creating those noises could bring death upon it at any moment. I wish that I could tell it that the thunder is nothing to worry about in a way it could understand, but its animal intelligence is limited. The gulf between it and I is too vast to be bridged.
Yet am I not also an animal? What unfathomable realities lie outside my comprehension? What dwells beyond the veil of mortal understanding? What horrors? What ecstasies? As great as is the span between myself and my dear pet, how much greater is the infinite yawning gap between myself and The Light?
More on suspension
So I'm wondering if the lore around suspension, dissociation, and the simulacrum makes any sense now. If the operating system environment exists in part so that the Voice isn't so loud, why don't they just stay there the whole time? Maybe it has something to do with the alteration of time perception. Honestly this is a nut I never did crack to my satisfaction. I've still got a whole Obsidian canvas filled with questions about it.
How do people “re-associate” for lack of a better term? There was that one Reddit story about a guy who lives an entire life in a coma until he sees a weird-looking lamp. That's one possible way. They're just living their life until they see something that's not quite right. It leads them down a rabbit hole of digging around trying to reproduce what they saw or uncover more glitches until they finally “wake up”. Then the process starts over again.
Then there are Immortals. They're suspended, so logically they should eventually dissociate. Maybe they get around this because the sim is the actual sensor feed from the mech, so the reality they think is real is actually just reality.