The Lonely Galaxy Wiki - blog

Animal Intelligence

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-12T14:33:42+00:00

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 coul…

A bunch of pictures from the old wiki

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-28T00:51:16+00:00

A bunch of pictures from the old wiki I'm too lazy to label these :P meta

Burial

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-23T10:51:53+00:00

Burial In most yinrih cultures, one honors the dead by making good use of their remains. Burying the body after death is a statement that the remains aren't worth using and the person they belonged to isn't worth remembering. When willed by the deceased, burial is regarded as sacrilege in the Bright Way. It's often done by Partisans and Atheist Atavists as a rejection of Claravian teaching on the nature of the body (and the universe as a whole) as a deliberate work by an intelligent mind. Buri…

Cladogram idea

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-08T00:35:12+00:00

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.

communal whiteboard

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-04T12:39:03+00:00

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.

Comparing Outlander and Commonthroat Words

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-17T22:54:53+00:00

Comparing Outlander and Commonthroat Words Just for fun I took the lexicons for Commonthroat and Outlander, imported them into sqlite as database tables, and inner joined them on the definitions column to see what words matched. Here is the result. As you probably guess, these are mostly words from the vulpithecine Swadesh list that formed the foundation of both lexicons.

daytime hour names

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-03T14:03:13+00:00

daytime hour names Perhaps instead of dividing the day into 24 hours, it is instead divided into 12, with 6 daytime hours and 6 nighttime hours. I toyed with the idea that daytime is considered feminine and night masculine, since males hunt at night and hearthkeepers conduct their liturgies during the day. Not sure if this will be a thing, but the hours are named, and the daytime hour names come from liturgical vocabulary.

Delicious Tide Pods

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-30T23:31:05+00:00

Delicious Tide Pods Yinrih gastronomy focuses on mouth feel over flavor, so how about a candy that's like a giant fruit gusher. It has a waxy pliable outer skin with a gel or liquid center. You bite into this dry rubbery outer coating and feel the liquid center explode in your mouth. For a yinrih, there's no flavor, it's all about the texture. To a human they're bitter and unpleasant

Dogtor Octopus

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-10T15:21:28+00:00

Dogtor Octopus An idea for a mobility system when in microgravity. A set of back-mounted robotic tentacle arms used for positioning and locomotion leaving the paws and tail free to manipulate things. Could be used by healers to avoid contamination.

Elevated Housing and the Underlay

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-08T18:21:13+00:00

Elevated Housing and the Underlay Yinrih prefer to be off the ground, so houses on stilts are the norm, even when the climate or terrain doesn't require it. As population density increased, the houses clustered together and formed an “underlay”

Funny perfume

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-16T17:56:56+00:00

Funny perfume Yinrih can derive humor from particular odors. Perfumes exist to exploit this. In particular, it is possible to synthesize a reasonable approximation of a yinrih's ambient musk, though yinrih who smell it will describe it as “exaggerated

It doesn't smell like anything

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-01T00:47:11+00:00

It doesn't smell like anything It's normal for a human to comment on how dark or how quiet a place is, but I don't think I've heard anyone comment on the absence of odor. “It doesn't smell like anything in here” just doesn't sound right. I've established elsewhere that yinrih frequently comment on ambient odors. I wonder if color or brightness might be as secondary to them as to us.

Kingdoms of life

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-15T00:50:23+00:00

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.

Living container ship

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-07T20:37:04+00:00

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.

More on suspension

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-11T20:17:29+00:00

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.

More on Urban Planning

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-09T11:28:02+00:00

More on Urban Planning The greatest dogma of vulpithecine urban planning is vehicles and pedestrians must never share the same space. Vehicles use the underlay while pedestrians move around above. This, of course, doesn't stop large urban underlays from becoming a literal underworld of junkies, criminals, and the destitute.

More on UrbEx

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-21T14:31:38+00:00

More on UrbEx Yinrih lack the raging hormones seen in human teenagers, so what's an adolescent monkey fox to do with all that extra time and energy? Why poke his pointy wet nose where it doesn't belong, of course. Urban exploration is a common hobby among older pups and young adults. Cheap respirators such as one might find at a hardware store are worn to prevent mold inhalation when rummaging through abandoned buildings. The masks have become emblematic of the pastime among the general public…

More thoughts on Urban Underlays

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-10T11:07:47+00:00

More thoughts on Urban Underlays I imagine a typical underlay to be like a giant parking garage, with the ceiling being the floor of the buildings. You enter the building via a ladder leading through the ceiling into the building above. On low gravity worlds there may not even be a ladder, just an hole, and you have to jump up into it. You still have to walk from the train to the entrance to the building, and I think this is where the equivalent to dumpsters would be as well. The plumbing and e…

Multilingual Conlang Database

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-14T21:45:13+00:00

Multilingual Conlang Database It's very possible I got the connector types wrong, so I'll try to explain what the ER diagram is supposed to be. The Lexeme table has just an ID, a lemma, and a pronunciation. It represents a single word in one of your conlangs. You could remove the pronunciation if the Romanization makes it clear how to pronounce the word. You could also add things like usage notes and inflection paradigms.

Neoshamanism on the Ego

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-21T11:28:11+00:00

Neoshamanism on the Ego Neoshamanism rejects the concept of the self as a distinct entity. This stems from the Lifebringers' early research into microbiology. They discovered that all living things are not indivisible wholes but conglomerations of trillions of cells. Moreover, there were countless species of single-celled organisms.

Number Systems

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-20T21:08:38+00:00

Number Systems There are a variety of number systems used throughout Focus. The two widely used in natural language are duodcimal, used in Commonthroat, and quadravigessimal, used in Outlander. This difference exists due to the cultural divide between surface dwellers and spacers. Yinrih have six digits on each of their four paws, for a total of 24 digits. Yinrih are arboreal quadrupeds, so they have to stop and rear up on their hind feet when on level ground in order to use their forepaws, gi…

Odor Colors

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-17T15:01:36+00:00

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: 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 abstra…

Refining the multilingual database

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-18T14:30:06+00:00

Refining the multilingual database Here's a more minimalist idea for the multilingual database. The connectors are (hopefully) correct. Each entry in the lexeme and sememe tables can have zero or more entries in the senses table. language

Rethinking Body Proportions Somewhat

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-15T17:07:42+00:00

Rethinking Body Proportions Somewhat This post from the megathread lists some tentative body proportions. In there I say they're 200 cm from nose tip to tail tip. The tail is a bit longer than the rest of the body, so their body is about 100 cm from the nape of the neck to the base of the tail. The forelegs are about 76 cm from flat palm to shoulder. They may appear a bit taller when knuckle-walking.

Rock Eater

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-23T17:53:29+00:00

Rock Eater The Rock Eater formula perfected by the Lifebringers and used in terraforming looks a lot like sourdough starter. There is a gel or liquid medium that sustains the microbes during transit. The microbe mixture is stored in tanks. The microbes convert the nutrients in the medium to oxygen, just like they do during the actual process of terraforming. This oxygen has to be removed as soon as possible to avoid killing the anaerobic microbes used in the early phases of the terraforming pro…

Rough sketch of puppyhood development

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-16T12:04:56+00:00

Rough sketch of puppyhood development Human age equivelenceyinrih age (terran years)Milestone710Pups are expected to know right from wrong. Formal religious and secular education begins. Later bound for end of early childhood amnesia1014the age at which pups may begin serving as acolytes or bonekeepers

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-21T12:08:30+00:00

The blog namespace is for catching stray ideas. These may be less polished than the stuff you see in the Lore namespace. blog index

Stuff copied from the Commonthroat lexicon

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-14T13:18:51+00:00

Stuff copied from the Commonthroat lexicon Many of the entries in the Commonthroat lexicon, especially for words coined during Lexember, have overly verbose lore in the notes section. Notes are for in-universe word usage notes, not general lore, so they gotta go, but much of that lore may not be copied anywhere else, so here's me doing that.

The First Bonekeeper

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-02T00:54:00+00:00

The First Bonekeeper This fragment has been sitting in my stories folder for well over a year and I'll probably never finish it. It's about one of the first instances of funerary ritual. ---------- Sunlight winked through gaps in the canopy as a pup, not yet old enough to forage with her dams, picked through the leaf litter near their steadtree for edible seeds. She was too busy sifting through the blanket of dead leaves and twigs to feel the first gentle tug on her tail.

Thoughts on Paw Morphology

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-08T18:21:13+00:00

Thoughts on Paw Morphology While Yinrih are arboreal, the proportions of their digits and palms are closer to those of humans rather than arboreal apes like orangutans and gibbons. Those animals have long fingers and toes to wrap around large branches. While they do have thumbs, orangutans can't oppose the thumb to the other fingers because the thumb is much shorter than the fingers.

Underlay Tunnel Interface Card

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-27T17:27:15+00:00

Underlay Tunnel Interface Card Here's an Underlay tunnel interface card used in an Ansible. A tailstone wafer is visible under a layer of glass. science_and_tech

update on the database idea

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-15T11:26:30+00:00

update on the database idea I realized something while walking back from the bathroom in the middle of the night. A surprising number of solutions come to me like that. Anyway, there's a problem with the design as described earlier. If you have multiple Lexeme tables, the senses and derivatives tables have foreign keys from different tables in the same column. That's bad. The easiest way to fix this is to have a single Lexeme table and add a row indicating to which language the lexeme belongs. …

Urban Center

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-09T16:09:38+00:00

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 groun…

Urban Explorer

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-17T15:18:45+00:00

Urban Explorer A sketch of an urban explorer wearing a respirator. In Commonthroat, the brand name of the respirator, qlqlMr has become the name for members of this subculture of older pups and teens who explore areas of their urban environment not open to the public, such as abandoned buildings and utility infrastructure.

Vestibule

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-26T22:21:43+00:00

Vestibule Nearly every building, including private homes, has a vestibule to act as a buffer between the outside and inside. Where hygiene is a concern, such as medical buildings and restaurants, a washing pool is found here, as shown in Table Manners and Everybody Poops Together. Otherwise, there is a bristly floor mat for wiping the paws off before entering. Humans are expected to remove any outer footwear and leave it in the vestibule. On orbital colonies, the vestibule is an airlock separat…

weird A.I. voice thing

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-14T14:32:51+00:00

weird A.I. voice thing I was playing around with some new TTS voices on Windows. The way it goes from sales pitch to conspiratorial whisper to depressed monotone seemingly at random sounded funny, so here's A day at the market read aloud. meta

YAP Frame Format

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-25T21:48:56+00:00

YAP Frame Format The Yinrih Ansible Protocol (YAP) is used to communicate between ansibles over the Underlay. YAP addresses are 27 trits long. A YAP frame consists of an inter-frame flag, a topology trit, a destination address, a source address, a 6-trit payload info field, the payload itself whose length can vary, a checksum, and then the flag for the following frame.

Yih Calendar Yet Again

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-04T23:18:38+00:00

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.

Yinrih Visible Spectrum

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-22T15:26:21+00:00

Yinrih Visible Spectrum I really need to pin down what the yinrih's range of visible frequencies is. They have a concept of light and dark, so they shouldn't be able to see microwaves, since most things above absolute zero radiate in that range or above. They can see body heat, so infrared is visible. There are formulas for finding out the frequency range emitted by an object given its temperature. I should probably mess around with those.

Yinsects

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-04-07T20:40:20+00:00

Yinsects Yih insects, or “yinsects”, have four body segments rather than three, with each of the two thoracic segments having a pair of wings and legs. animals

YIP Address Structure

Anonymous (anonymous@undisclosed.example.com) — 2026-03-08T18:21:13+00:00

YIP Address Structure YIP addresses consist of 81 trits (27 BB27 digits). This gives YIP an address space of 3^81 or roughly 4.43*10^38. Since it's Balanced Ternary, half the space is negative and half is positive. This distinction is likely significant but I'm not yet sure how. Perhaps negative addresses cannot cross the borders between autonomous systems, making them similar to IPv6 unique local addresses or