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.
Urban Center
This is a quick sketch in Plasticity of a stereotypical dense urban center. Buildings sit on pylons above the ground, and there are pedestrian walkways between buildings on the level of the real first floor of the building.
There are a few factors that lead to this design choice. First, yinrih are arboreal animals and prefer to be high up if they can help it, so most buildings from houses to skyscrapers are constructed on stilts or pylons making the “first floor” above the ground and leaving an open space called an underlay underneath.
Second, The greatest rule of yinrih urban planning is that vehicles and pedestrians do not occupy the same space. The vast connected underlays of densely populated areas are used for vehicle traffic, with foot traffic accommodated above. The subspace used by ansibles and mass routers for FTL communication and travel is named after this feature of the urban landscape.
Underlays are also home to electrical and plumbing infrastructure as well as bums and junkies.
Cladogram idea
Here's a very early sketch of Yih's tree of life. The yinrih conceive of a “trunk” directly connecting the last universal common ancestor (LUCA) to Vulpithecus fidelis (the yinrih themselves), with branches coming off the trunk to form different clades of organisms.
Some may argue this is cynoidocentric, which it is, but the counterargument is that the yinrih are the ones doing the studying and classifying, so it makes sense to use themselves as a familiar point of reference.
Living container ship
Probably not canon, but if you're familiar with the Docker logo (a blue whale carrying shipping containers on its back) it made me think of a kind of living cargo ship. It would be like a combo of a whale and a turtle, or rather a fish and a turtle. It wouldn't be closely related to land animals and would have gills rather than lungs.
In the wild it lives in schools/pods. Individuals take turns floating at the water's surface, letting algae and such grow on the shell on their back, then dive down and let the other pod members eat whatever grew on the shell.
Yinrih tame/domesticate them, breed them to have flat shells that can act like a ship's deck, and use them to haul cargo. Maybe these guys would be part of the hexapod clade, or a related clade.
I just recreated Lapras didn't I…
Yih Calendar Yet Again
We're all talking about calendars, so let's revisit Yih's.
Yih has 528 days per year, a yih day being a bit longer than an Earth day. While yinrih do not sleep, and only go into torpor for 24 hours every 12 days instead of 8 hours every 1 day, the sun still dictates a daily rhythm, so days are still counted. However, because yinrih don't sleep, there may be no time zones.
The 12 day torpor cycle has inspired an analog to the week, which governs many activities as on Earth, such as religious observances and business availability. There is a three-day “weekend” set aside for torpor. This weekend is set by law, but may be different across different regions, and there may be occasional moves by the local government or citizens to change when the weekend occurs.
Adults have off from work and pups have off from school. Members of a household, whether a Childermoot and its litter or a moot composed of adults, each go into torpor across this three day period.
The 528 day year is divided into four quarters of 132 days. The near year begins on the vernal equinox of the Southern Hemisphere, so the quarters line up with the seasons, and are often simply named after those seasons in temperate climates. Each quarter is in turn divided into eleven 12-day weeks.
Hearthside has a calendar that uses a local year as the only natural indicator of the passage of time. Being tidally locked, there are no days, and seasonality, such as it is, results from perihelion and aphelion rather than axial tilt.
Hearthside is far more relaxed about scheduling than the Allied Worlds, and there are no fixed periods when everyone is expected to go into torpor. “Torpor days” are usually negotiated individually between employer and employee or between parents and school. Business hours are also a free-for-all, with one's choice of grocery store or doctor coming as much from when they're open as anything else. Jokes about “Hearthsider time” abound, especially on Yih.
Once you get far enough out, local years become so long that they stop being a convenient measure of time. The Spacer Confederacy and beyond either use the Yih calendar thanks to the sheer economic gravitational pull of the Allied Worlds, or the Spacer Epoch, which works more like a computer timestamp, a single number counting up from a fixed time rather than a nested set of cycles.
communal whiteboard
Yinrih are innately literate in the same way that humans are innately verbal. In order for this to work, kits have to be exposed to writing in the same way a human baby has to be exposed to language in order to acquire it.
For this to work, yinrih have to write a lot, and in a way that others can see. Perhaps there's a surface in every home and office that acts like a bulletin board or refrigerator door, where people leave messages for others to see.