Freshwater mutualism

This is Zextranet's Full Analysis of the Artiverse
Part 0: Introduction and Clarification for the entire analysis
In this full analysis of the entire lore that Artifiber has developed in his Artiverse universe, I will give each detail attention and give my thoughts to the entire lore that Artifiber has pieced out together to make the current Artiverse lore.
Note, I will be referring to Artifiber as they/them
This analysis only covers information given in the "Library of Artiverse" which is a compilation of canon, fanon, and other subjects regarding the Artiverse universe. The website link follows: https://library-of-artiverse.blogspot.com/?m=1
The character for delta will be replaced by "Delta" like "Delta-System"
The only things I will not tackle are the Canon page which is basically a QnA list that Arti has answered, and also not the About page in the website which just mentions the purpose of this project and the description of the creator of the lore, including its philosophy.
Part 1: Digital
Regarding the first paragraph, it mentions the remarkable advancements made by standardization of certain aspects of technology caused by the improvements in the means of production which led to a huge stimulation of technological progression which can be said by looking on how their technology has progressed in a rapid pace. This is comparable to the industrial revolution of our civiliazation which has led to rapid advances in human society as a whole and improved our technological progression.
Then, it points out the importance of computers in topics highly related to technology, especially biotechnology. In the topic of biotechnology, it says how it is important to the making of robotic characters and the science of transgeneration, which is a topic regarding the union of biotechnology and the character's body to serve as an extension of one's physical nature. This, by itself, is highly untouched by most people because such technology would mean people with a higher ability to exercise their wishes by will or having the ability to live a life less affected by deficits. While this is real technology, it has not reached the level where people can control their form at will.
Now that such advancements have been made to improve the condition of the Artiverse inhabitants, it has led to an expansion of their capabilities and allowed many applications to be integrated into one's operating system regarding the software or firmware of biotechnological devices that they may have integrated into one's physical body.
Part 1a: Hardware
The hardware is based on quantum technology. With these kinds of technologies, it has given people to harness the computing capabilities that would outcompute our computing technology by factors in the billions. The hardware is based on a kind of crystal, where its hardware can be altered by software by altering the quanta of the crystal itself. Using crystals, particularly its quantum energy, one can harness their potential for powerful computing and its potential to be used as RAM devices. This is comparable to using quantum mechanics for computing, including vanadium dioxide's memory storage capabilities by controlling its phase transition.
Part 1b: Biotech
Any character in the Artiverse universe is either partially or fully cybernetic and would natually mean the union and integration of living matter and robotics. With this in mind, there are set "integrator modules", with one kind being used to control the interface between living matter and robotics in a cybernetic being. Such technology also allows the neural network to be linked into the robotics integrated into someone, allowing a seamless ability to turn thoughts into reality.
Part 1c: Formalization and Programming
In the software that all these biotech devices use, it uses a universal descriptive language used for programming called Lingua Technis, which is a mix of factual, markup, functional, and imperative programming paradigms that is used for virtually every branch of science that is made to be intuitive and have any errors or conflicts in the code to be easily rectified. Due to these special characteristics, any code that is built upon Lingua Technis is compatible with any form of hardware; therefore, it is useful for many applications regarding physical activity, but still very useful for software applications, mainly regarding communications
Two special programming and markup languages are used in the Delta-System and nearby systems. Those are Swift and Graph. The former is not to be confused with Swift, which is a programming language made by Apple. Both languages have specific interfaces, which makes them practical for specific applications.
Part 1d: Operation Systems
In the website, it mentions the functions, purposes, and applications of an operating system. It says how it is used to run applications, used as a basis for software running the OS, etc.
The most common in the Delta-System is IntegralOS (IOS, not to be confused with iOS from Apple). Other operating systems like MintOS and EROS appeared, with the former being made by Mintscreen and being more universal while the latter being made by, coincidentally enough, Eros, which is made for more specific tasks.
The framework that come with the several OSs are: FoundationKit, IOKit, WorkspaceKit, and InterfaceKit. Other frameworks are used for the system to complete specific tasks, like VideoKit and MusicKit.
Part 2: Delta-System
This covers the entire planetary system, named by the inhabitants as the Delta-System. The diversity of each planet has been caused by technological advancements, which led the species to explore other celestial bodies revolving around their star. Each planet has its own set of physical components, which created the specific conditions that make each planet unique. Planets with a large population does not require specific equipment to be able to live there and only require slight body adjustments for each highly inhabited planet to adapt between creatures in those planets because their biochemistry isn't necessarily dangerous to each other. The Delta-System or just Delta, is located in the Bode Galaxy and may be known as Messier 81 or NGC 3031 according to Wikipedia. The center star, Deltaspark, is surrounded by six celestial bodies being named Delta-01 to Delta-06 in order by distance. Delta-01 and Delta-02 are abundant with a diverse source of resources, with a diverse internal structure that is being researched and actively used in the public economy. The ratio of the planet's surface area to its mass makes it favorable by having lesser gravity while having large useful spaces which may be caused by the planet having less density. Other planets only have a small population concentrated in small areas or enclaves, which serve specific purposes. The inhabitants of planets besides Delta-01 and Delta-02 have special robots or space characters like Micro space cats.
Part 2a: Deltaspark
Deltaspark is classified as a K-Type star or K-Type dwarf star. It has a diameter of 1400km and a mass of 2.8×10²⁷ tons, which should classify as a G-Type star according to solar mass.
Part 2b: Delta-01 / Alterra
Alterra is a planet of a rocky composition, with most of that rocky landmass consisting of basalt rocks covered by water combined with a rich biosphere. Water is abundant, with freshwater dominating inland waters. It is full of silicate rocks with a metal core. The atmosphere consists of nitrogen, oxygen, and some xenon. The continents are on the same meridian, with one central continent connecting the north and south parts of the planet. Cities are spread everywhere, including underwater cities, ranging from large metropolitan areas tp sparse cities. One notable city is Texui. One notable suburban city is Sweetbaum. Its magnetic field does not align with the planet's axis of rotation. This planet is obviously based on Earth, although some characteristics of the civilization's influence on the planet have not come to fruition today, like underwater cities. Other descriptions of the planet that don't match with Earth include the complete misalignment of the axis of rotation and the magnetic field lines, which may indicate a magnetic reversal is occurring on that planet and the lack of an axial tilt, which eliminates seasonal changes similar to those on Earth.
Part 2c: Delta-02 / Carbonia
Carbonia, as the name suggests, is a planet full of carbon. Full of carbide mineral rocks and a metal core, it implies the planet is loaded with coal, graphite, and diamond reserves. The atmosphere is full of nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, which indicates a strong presence of Methane and other carbon-based greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The surface is a mix of carbon and diamond minerals due to the extreme presence of carbon. The infrastructure is made to be highly interconnected, although the population is concentrated on small areas. Due to the living creatures of the planet being filled with inorganic compounds, their biochemistry seems robotic. Due to this, advancements in robotics are frequent. This planet seems to be based on 55 Cancri E, a real planet thought to house a diamond core and is very rich in carbon, although this planet is less biologically and technologically hostile compared to 55 Cancri E.
Part 2d: Delta-03
This planet is highly related to Jupiter, as the atmosphere consists of hydrogen, helium, and other substances. Known for huge reserves of gaseous matter, with a few satellites monitoring them, it also seems to contain exotic substances.
Part 2e: Delta-04
This planet is dominated by oceans all over the planet, with its mantle being rich in water, implying a rich source of hydrate minerals. It's atmospheric composition resembles Earth's while weirdly having traces of Hydrogen and Helium that are high enough to be noted.
Part 2f: Delta-05
This planet is highly odd for having a helium atmosphere, with a hydrosphere consisting of liquid nitrogen. The terrain is irregular, with a brownish color which resembles Mars. This planet's orbit seems to almost align with Delta-06's orbit.
Part 2g: Delta-06
This planet resembles Delta-05 but its surface is virtually smooth and completely lacks an atmosphere. Its orbit seems to resonate with Delta-05 in a way where their orbits virtually synchronize.
Part 3: About technologies
This topic discusses the use of technology to assist a character's needs and wants. This is related to transgeneration and biotechnology between the character and the technology around them
Part 3a: Computing
The devices used for the people in the Artiverse are spacial computers. These are computers that integrate their computing power to the person using it and allow their thoughts, gestures, and movement to be interconnected with the software. Their interfaces allow objects to appear to be able to interact with them and having physical properties analogous to a real object, but they appear more artificial. Certain devices considered outdated in the Artiverse timeline, but still relevant in our world are: smartphones, tablets, computers, and others. In the other extreme, people completely digitize their body and undergo a transfer of consciousness. Someone like Ithi can replace their computer head into a more realistic head due to her body being able to change attachments.
Part 3b: Transbiology
Thanks to the advanced technology, people can alter their entire life to suit their wants and needs. It has lead to the improvement of the character's condition and allowed for an infinite variety of identity. This can be as simple as being assisted to disable a disease or as extreme as completely taking on a new, radical form. Largely, it would mean a self-sustaining world, with virtually no suffering and promote free expression of one's self at will. The entire process of changing your physiology is analogous to a very sci-fi form of a surgical procedure.
Part 3c: Industrials
In the process of making a specific product, special robotic hardware called "cells" are made to generate materials and manipulate them for the production of products, the alteration of existing materials, and the reparation of damaged items. This is considered a private activity, due to the fact that the software and the assembly data needed to make a product is provided by the person willing to make the product. Because it is a private activity, everyone contributes to the economy and basically means that everyone works and the products made by them is made for free as a result.
Part 3d: Quantum Systems
This part discusses the systems that operate under the physics of quantum mechanics.
Devices like a "Quantum Computing Machines" are related to quantum computers that would delay the end of Moore's Law by exploiting the physics that happen at the quantum scale.
Controllable Materials are described as objects that has a set list of characteristics and properties like mass, crystal structure, half-life, particle emission upon annihilation, energy level, conductivity, magnetism, polarity, nuclear spin, mechanical response, and more.
Material Augmented Reality, which is similar to how the Apple Vision Pro functions as a device that creates an interface between the world and the software. However, unlike the Apple Vision Pro, it would allow objects to be generated to provide additional control over the augmented reality.
Hyperconnection which is a kind of communication method that captures the probability of a particle's position in space to transmit data by analyzing its probability about the likelihood of a particle to retain its property while analyzing the probability of its location and capturing that probability.
Levitation which is the displacement of objects in space while retaining a fixed spacial distance between particles, thus allowing for seamless movement in space.
Quantum Isomorphic Energy Elements, which is based on a crystal of hafnium that have different nuclear structures that allow the storage of huge amounts of energy.
Part 3e: Detailed Description
It discuss how these abilities to alter the quanum world has done to create technologies that helped understand the universe and their usefulness for the people. The description given seem to reference string theory and bosonic matter by using vibrations to manipulate the quantum world
Part 4: Introduction
This touches on the philosophy about life, being and consciousness likely given by Artifiber themselves. It is where I will give my opinions to either support or criticize the subject matter while also properly analyzing each statement.
Regarding the first and second paragraph, it touches on the meaning of existence and how it is defined. I agree on how a conscious mind has an infinite list of possible identities, but whether a certain consciousness is specifically defined as multiple independent elements that link up to make a complete form conflicts with my belief that there is no such thing as an element and that everything that happens is not due to a specific element being altered, because I believe that it affects the entirety of a person due to my experience of having personal aspects of my life being altered and seeing that it would change every bit of my life, rather than only affecting a part.
In the third paragraph, the idea of separating each part of nature down to its constituents to analyze the whole piece by piece should only apply to find an objective truth about an topic because nature is chaotic and doesn't imply that ground truth exists; therefore, it would not seem to allow people to understand the objectivity of nature because there is no way to do that, and objectivity in chaos doesn't make sense because objectivity means everything is built from objective statements and built in an order that allow it to construct a system of belief piece by piece that would not distort itself by applying turbulence found in chaotic systems.
In the fourth paragraph, either it conflicts with or supports the ideas given by previous paragraphs. Due to the idea of structure in a chaotic system, the statements given would not contend with the ideas from previous paragraphs. Although, if it only tries to support the idea of a belief system built upon axioms, instead of implying that those belief systems are objectively true, then it would align well with the previous statements.
Part 4a: Structure
This is where we will tackle the various worlds with their own characteristics.
Part 4aa: Deltadim
This is the universe that would align with how we see our universe. It is full of intellegent inhabitants, similar to how we humans have inhabited the Earth. They all form a single civilization, but has some social variety. They are known to lack any social form of evil like mutual exploitation and other activites regarded as evil. This civilization practically resembles some descriptions of heaven, in which heaven is implicitly depicted as a utopian world.
All people in the civilization, defined as a collective group working for a socialist mean of production, work together in an organization called "The Congress", where everyone takes their time to participate in management. The congress has both characters and bots to participate in the organization, with the characters being the backbone of the entire organization, while operating in concert with bots or AI that perform calculations and analysis. This is meant to represent a socialist society in which every person gets to participate in a sytem in which everyone can have common ground which eliminates political opposition.
Part 4ab: Digirel
This is related to the concept in the plot of the movie "The Matrix", where the beings are put into a universe similar to a simulation in which the characters are immortal and completely in a digital form. These characters, which are called "Digitalia or Digitalies", have there thoughts not being seperate from the reality of the universe, and this causes the physics in the universe to change everytime due to their existence and imply that physics in thay universe is a mere suggestion.
Part 4ac: Floriverse
This is a universe composed of characters called "Flories" that are anthropomorphic characters that look like flora. These beings thrive on a diet of common food, non-sapient flowers, and autotrophic sources like photosynthesis with inorganic compounds. Their nature revolves around two things: Blossomia and Witheria; the former signifying life while the latter signifying the opposite of what Blossomia signifies, which is death.
Part 4ad: Nonsense Galaxy
It is the representation of things absurd and lack any meaning for the existence of things there. It is almost like it's reflecting on Albert Camus' philosophy regarding absurd situations. Not much is said about the universe as it only consists of things that are non-sensical when it comes to other universes.
Part 4ae: Void of Nadir
It resembles what most people think of a black hole, while being known to be a source of corruption for matter that would deteriorate into Nadir's singularity and having decayed into something indefinite and indescribable
Part 4af: Hizen
This is about matter that has "developed" into something. It shows the evolution of matter into a final form of totality. Said to be the ultimate goal of one, it is in conjunction with the idea of utopia and inalienable unity.
Concluding Part: Zextranet's thoughts and conclusion
I have rarely seen such artistic talent ever been showed to the people in public. I am deeply amazed at the depth of the entire lore, and it shows how far imagination can go. I can absolutely say that Arti really cooked some good lore. I am genuinely impressed. I have to say that this is by far the best lore I have ever read in my life so far. Even if I disagree on some points, they still did construct a very high quality piece of art that is remarkable.
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Part 5: Fibrins
They are rarely seen in the world, but sometimes seen in some of Arti's artworks, even seen enough to be considered a cultural symbol. They are creatures resembling strings with a thickness of 1cm. They take the form of a body or face that they circumscribe using the string, while sometimes vibrating which indicates emotional shock. Even if the entire fibrin may contain two strings, they can still interact with each other.
They perceive us as completely alien by physiology, given that their anatomy contrasts from other creatures having the entire body being connected into one person.
Part 5a: Anatomy
These Fibrins aren't really "living beings" per se, but rather, they are digital beings/digitalias from the Digirel universe. They only have a physical presence by corresponding itself to a similar bodily form composing of substances that exist in the Deltadim universe.
The reason how each string of one fibrin can interconnect seamlessly is due to other types of matter that help connect each part of the fibrin creature into one whole.
Composition of the entire strings in the Fibrin are silicone-like substances. While they are physically separate, they can still interact with each other due to the strings being a part of a single "field" or "field of influence".
Part 5b: Behavior
The movement of these Fibrins is based on using a set of electrons and forming a structure that would force the Fibrins to travel using warp drive technology that resembles the mechanics of an Alcubierre Warp Drive.
They form movements of flying and sliding, with the mix of both making the movement of gliding.
They have a reaction with EM fields, especially complex structures in their nervous system.
Their thought process create byproducts of EM waves, but we don't know what kind of EM waves is being generated. If they are under the influence of outside thoughts, like from someone else, likely due to their telepathy, they can mentally change, like having an attachment to people the other person thought, likely developing into them like a second form. Their symbiotic link with someone allows the Fibrin to gain knowledge, while the host gains an improvement in the efficiency of their nervous system. Although, if the host does not want the presence of Fibrins, then they can leave at will.
Part 5c: Peculiarities
One weird fact about them is that they do not need to eat, but they may eat substances similar to silicone in order for them to grow. Given their inorganic makeup, they rarely have any cases of illness, but if the strings are tangled, they may get nauseous. While they are incredibly elastic and strechable, they do not possess infinite elasticity and they may split into two as a result. They can split many times, but the strings should not exceed a lower limit; the silicon strings will evaporate if a lower limit is reached
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Part 6: The Alterra Planet
In simple words, it is no different to the basic descriptions of earth. The planet has a rocky composition. Has a clear distinction between land and water. It consists of an atmosphere with, in decreasing order of proportion, nitrogen, xenon, and oxygen. The planet has one moon that has an icy surface and may have a large resevoir of water below.
Part 6a: Planetology
During the onset of dawn, the sky appears pink-ish. During hours of morning, the sky turns blue with a bit of purple. The slight purple may be due to the high presence of xenon. The poles of the planet are cold and dry while the equator is likely warm and humid. The seasons are similar to earth's tropical season on its equator, in which they have a dry and wet season. An orbit lasts 384 days or 1 year (not a leap year) and 19 days. Each Alterra month is divided into 12 with 32 days. Those weeks are further divided into 8 days. Alterra's 8 days of an Alterra week is not named, unlike Earth's 7 days of an Earth week.
Part 6b: Population
The biosphere of the Alterra planet is made up of organic, hydrocarbon based lifeforms.
Like elsewhere in the Deltadim, all characters have a characteristic anthropomorphic appearance, but that characteristic can vary from felines, lagmorphs, canines and likely more. Although they are naturally born with this characteristic, the presence of their technology allows them to make changes to their own body, including cloning.
Part 6c: Architecture
We'll tackle all architectural styles present in the planet
Part 6ca: Art Deco
This is probably by far the most common style known. Having been implemented in conjunction with other art styles. It is a complex style that emphasises on rhythm, uniformity, yet has complexity and clear division. Art Deco is mainly found more in the southern part of the planet
Part 6cb: Rocaille
This style particularily has a large amount of freedom and lacks any concise drawings. Lacking any straight lines and probably clarity, it is fluid, dynamic, made with frequent use of gradients, and asymmetric.
Part 6cc: Classicism
This style, on the basis of principles about order and symmetry, is a very strict style emphasizing strong clarity of objects, accurate proportion and projection, and a lack of decorations. The colors are monochromatic and uniform, but the colors are muted. Made for columns part of the capital and small spaces in construction.
Part 6cd: Constructivism
It is the most simplest of the bunch due to its main use of geometric shapes and the lack of accent and color. Due to its particular style, it is suited to urban architecture. Even with such distinct and clear style, it is most susceptible to experimentation
At Alterra, there is an established division of layouts into metropolitan and urban areas.
One layout is centralized and focuses on the uniformity of geometry in the buildings and the compact assembly of such buildings. They can include and combine apartments, offices, production facilities, transport hubs and various leisure facilities like clubs, theaters, internal parks, distribution shops, art galleries, and more.
For the suburban cities, it blends into the greenery and its architecture lack contrast against the surrounding nature. Buildings don't stand out as much and only unite as a complex if all serve a specific purpose for their implantation in the area.
Part 6d: Planetography
The planet's landmass is unified under large supercontinent encompassing the planet with large oceans permeating around the landmass.
Again, as noted before, the continents are unified into a large supercontinent. However, for the sake of cultural distinction, climate and terrain distinction, and the sake of convenience, the land is separated into four areas.
Part 6da: Lindev
It is by far the largest area designated as a continent. It forms contact with two oceans and has two inland bodies of water called Danau Putih and Basse. The former being connected to the Ebrium Ocean via a strait and the latter being the largest known closed body of water.
Part 6db: Dowe
A rounded southern continent, paired with a similarly rounded inland lake. Bounded by a southern mountain range with contact with Lurconicum and Ebrium. It is highly filled with flora and fauna.
Part 6dc: Flave
A mountainous continent with three of the largest folds on the region that streches from south to east. It is washed by the Blues Sea in the north, the Vollen Sea and the Lurconicum Ocean in the south.
Part 6dd: Desmond
A northern continent that is occupied by lush steppe with small forests sprinkled in it. It is elongated and has the driest and windiest climate. The water from the north and west is the Blues Sea. The water from the south is part of the Ebrium Ocean. The water from the east is frommm the Barton Sea
Part 7: Telepipe
Setting certain parameters of matter involves changing the relationships between its constituent elements by manipulating the properties of matter in a way that if a sufficient state is achieved, combined with its required accuracy, the changes required are complete.
Query-based state calculation, bosonic package synthesis and its applications are produced by special devices that are classified as transmuters. These include material changers and telepipes.
Even movement forced to an object by your hand is just the influence of boson bonds on each other to transition of a final state. Transmuters are more subtle on that process.
Part 7a: Description
Telepipes are devices for establishing communication between diffrent regions of the universe phase space. Basically a communication device (sometimes used for transportation) that connects parts of a universe or different universes. These are Intraverse telepipes and Interverse telepipes respectively.
When the telepipe establishing a wormhole, it consumes energy, but if not, then there is no comsumption of power whatsoever. Even removing the infrastructure of the telepipe will not affect the presence of the portal at all.
Even with the computing power of quantum computers, calculating the necessary data for the portals is extremely computationaly intensive, due to the amount of data being calculated. One other hurdle is that if the movement is iterative, more data is required to be processed, but allows greater positioning accuracy and reliability
Part 7b: Implementations
Telepipes differ for each universe and are bound by their own characteristics. For example, it will look like a simply customizable portal with a seamless interface. Ones in the Floriverse differ from those in Digirel except for size and controls.
How do these telepipes compare favorably with natural wormholes? Because these wormholes are unpredictable, despite it being relatively stable. As a result, natural wormholes are deemed unreliable and are not really used. Even controlling it requires a telepipe around it.
Part 8: Soap
An adorable and cute soapy cat who loves to pour everything with soap. Not only that, he even makes art with soap. Foam constitutes their polymorphic identity.
This soap-based digitalia is remarkable for its kind. Even he can bend physics in anyway he wants, but only in Digirel though, because physics is a mere suggestion in that universe. So basically anyone in that universe is a god, but their influence is limited to Digirel.
Part 8a: Closer Look
He has a height of 42 inches (6''6' ft), has a soap-like body that forms a long, foamy tail. They have no teeth, which explains their soft, yet incomprehensible way of speech. A phase ring can appear around him, as a method for flight by carefully distorting the space. Although the ring is sharp and flat, it is not a weapon does not interfere with soap. The phase ring is generated by commanding their existence using their mind.
A special fact about him is that despite him looking simple, he can actually take many unusual positions and the soap he has is endless.
Part 8b: Cannon
One of Soap's main weapons is a cannon that synthesizes foaming matter with a particular shape. Although he can do it without such a dedicated cannon, the cannon makes that job easier to do.
Both the speed of foam supply and the shape of the diffuser that gives the foam a shape are controlled telepathically by Soap.
Just like in commercials, the soap could possibly eliminate 99.99% of bacteria, but such lifeforms don't exist in Digirel.
Part 8c: Synthesis
Althought he is a Digirel, he was synthesized into a material form in Deltadim. For this purpose, a specially designed telepipe was made. Even though they both have forms in Deltadim and Digirel, quantum technology has allowed their consciousness to be paired.
This became part of Articat's master's thesis and alone demostrated the work to the scientific council. Even Soap himself went to the demonstration. Although a bit excessive, Soap also demonstrated the use of their gun, by literally sparying the soapy water to them.
Such a demonstration has contributed to science in a remarkable way. It did raises issues on the relationshipt between universes, contact between Digitalias, custom‐made telepipes, and much more.

This is Zextranet's Full Analysis of the Artiverse
Part 0: Introduction and Clarification for the entire analysis
In this full analysis of the entire lore that Artifiber has developed in his Artiverse universe, I will give each detail attention and give my thoughts to the entire lore that Artifiber has pieced out together to make the current Artiverse lore.
Note, I will be referring to Artifiber as they/them
This analysis only covers information given in the "Library of Artiverse" which is a compilation of canon, fanon, and other subjects regarding the Artiverse universe. The website link follows: https://library-of-artiverse.blogspot.com/?m=1
The character for delta will be replaced by "Delta" like "Delta-System"
The only things I will not tackle are the Canon page which is basically a QnA list that Arti has answered, and also not the About page in the website which just mentions the purpose of this project and the description of the creator of the lore, including its philosophy.
Part 1: Digital
Regarding the first paragraph, it mentions the remarkable advancements made by standardization of certain aspects of technology caused by the improvements in the means of production which led to a huge stimulation of technological progression which can be said by looking on how their technology has progressed in a rapid pace. This is comparable to the industrial revolution of our civiliazation which has led to rapid advances in human society as a whole and improved our technological progression.
Then, it points out the importance of computers in topics highly related to technology, especially biotechnology. In the topic of biotechnology, it says how it is important to the making of robotic characters and the science of transgeneration, which is a topic regarding the union of biotechnology and the character's body to serve as an extension of one's physical nature. This, by itself, is highly untouched by most people because such technology would mean people with a higher ability to exercise their wishes by will or having the ability to live a life less affected by deficits. While this is real technology, it has not reached the level where people can control their form at will.
Now that such advancements have been made to improve the condition of the Artiverse inhabitants, it has led to an expansion of their capabilities and allowed many applications to be integrated into one's operating system regarding the software or firmware of biotechnological devices that they may have integrated into one's physical body.
Part 1a: Hardware
The hardware is based on quantum technology. With these kinds of technologies, it has given people to harness the computing capabilities that would outcompute our computing technology by factors in the billions. The hardware is based on a kind of crystal, where its hardware can be altered by software by altering the quanta of the crystal itself. Using crystals, particularly its quantum energy, one can harness their potential for powerful computing and its potential to be used as RAM devices. This is comparable to using quantum mechanics for computing, including vanadium dioxide's memory storage capabilities by controlling its phase transition.
Part 1b: Biotech
Any character in the Artiverse universe is either partially or fully cybernetic and would natually mean the union and integration of living matter and robotics. With this in mind, there are set "integrator modules", with one kind being used to control the interface between living matter and robotics in a cybernetic being. Such technology also allows the neural network to be linked into the robotics integrated into someone, allowing a seamless ability to turn thoughts into reality.
Part 1c: Formalization and Programming
In the software that all these biotech devices use, it uses a universal descriptive language used for programming called Lingua Technis, which is a mix of factual, markup, functional, and imperative programming paradigms that is used for virtually every branch of science that is made to be intuitive and have any errors or conflicts in the code to be easily rectified. Due to these special characteristics, any code that is built upon Lingua Technis is compatible with any form of hardware; therefore, it is useful for many applications regarding physical activity, but still very useful for software applications, mainly regarding communications
Two special programming and markup languages are used in the Delta-System and nearby systems. Those are Swift and Graph. The former is not to be confused with Swift, which is a programming language made by Apple. Both languages have specific interfaces, which makes them practical for specific applications.
Part 1d: Operation Systems
In the website, it mentions the functions, purposes, and applications of an operating system. It says how it is used to run applications, used as a basis for software running the OS, etc.
The most common in the Delta-System is IntegralOS (IOS, not to be confused with iOS from Apple). Other operating systems like MintOS and EROS appeared, with the former being made by Mintscreen and being more universal while the latter being made by, coincidentally enough, Eros, which is made for more specific tasks.
The framework that come with the several OSs are: FoundationKit, IOKit, WorkspaceKit, and InterfaceKit. Other frameworks are used for the system to complete specific tasks, like VideoKit and MusicKit.
Part 2: Delta-System
This covers the entire planetary system, named by the inhabitants as the Delta-System. The diversity of each planet has been caused by technological advancements, which led the species to explore other celestial bodies revolving around their star. Each planet has its own set of physical components, which created the specific conditions that make each planet unique. Planets with a large population does not require specific equipment to be able to live there and only require slight body adjustments for each highly inhabited planet to adapt between creatures in those planets because their biochemistry isn't necessarily dangerous to each other. The Delta-System or just Delta, is located in the Bode Galaxy and may be known as Messier 81 or NGC 3031 according to Wikipedia. The center star, Deltaspark, is surrounded by six celestial bodies being named Delta-01 to Delta-06 in order by distance. Delta-01 and Delta-02 are abundant with a diverse source of resources, with a diverse internal structure that is being researched and actively used in the public economy. The ratio of the planet's surface area to its mass makes it favorable by having lesser gravity while having large useful spaces which may be caused by the planet having less density. Other planets only have a small population concentrated in small areas or enclaves, which serve specific purposes. The inhabitants of planets besides Delta-01 and Delta-02 have special robots or space characters like Micro space cats.
Part 2a: Deltaspark
Deltaspark is classified as a K-Type star or K-Type dwarf star. It has a diameter of 1400km and a mass of 2.8×10²⁷ tons, which should classify as a G-Type star according to solar mass.
Part 2b: Delta-01 / Alterra
Alterra is a planet of a rocky composition, with most of that rocky landmass consisting of basalt rocks covered by water combined with a rich biosphere. Water is abundant, with freshwater dominating inland waters. It is full of silicate rocks with a metal core. The atmosphere consists of nitrogen, oxygen, and some xenon. The continents are on the same meridian, with one central continent connecting the north and south parts of the planet. Cities are spread everywhere, including underwater cities, ranging from large metropolitan areas tp sparse cities. One notable city is Texui. One notable suburban city is Sweetbaum. Its magnetic field does not align with the planet's axis of rotation. This planet is obviously based on Earth, although some characteristics of the civilization's influence on the planet have not come to fruition today, like underwater cities. Other descriptions of the planet include the complete misalignment of the axis of rotation and the magnetic field lines, which may indicate a magnetic reversal is occurring on that planet. The lack of an axial tilt, which eliminates seasonal changes similar to those on Earth.
Part 2c: Delta-02 / Carbonia
Carbonia, as the name suggests, is a planet full of carbon. Full of carbide mineral rocks and a metal core, it implies the planet is loaded with coal, graphite, and diamond reserves. The atmosphere is full of nitrogen, hydrogen, and carbon, which indicates a strong presence of Methane and other carbon-based greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. The surface is a mix of carbon and diamond minerals due to the extreme presence of carbon. The infrastructure is made to be highly interconnected, although the population is concentrated on small areas. Due to the living creatures of the planet being filled with inorganic compounds, their biochemistry seems robotic. Due to this, advancements in robotics are frequent. This planet seems to be based on 55 Cancri E, a real planet thought to house a diamond core and is very rich in carbon, although this planet is less biologically and technologically hostile compared to 55 Cancri E.
Part 2d: Delta-03
This planet is highly related to Jupiter, as the atmosphere consists of hydrogen, helium, and other substances. Known for huge reserves of gaseous matter, with a few satellites monitoring them, it also seems to contain exotic substances.
Part 2e: Delta-04
This planet is dominated by oceans all over the planet, with its mantle being rich in water, implying a rich source of hydrate minerals. It's atmospheric composition resembles Earth's while weirdly having traces of Hydrogen and Helium that are high enough to be noted.
Part 2f: Delta-05
This planet is highly odd for having a helium atmosphere, with a hydrosphere consisting of liquid nitrogen. The terrain is irregular, with a brownish color which resembles Mars. This planet's orbit seems to almost align with Delta-06's orbit.
Part 2g: Delta-06
This planet resembles Delta-05 but its surface is virtually smooth and completely lacks an atmosphere. Its orbit seems to resonate with Delta-05 in a way where their orbits virtually synchronize.
Part 3: About technologies
This topic discusses the use of technology to assist a character's needs and wants. This is related to transgeneration and biotechnology between the character and the technology around them
Part 3a: Computing
The devices used for the people in the Artiverse are spacial computers. These are computers that integrate their computing power to the person using it and allow their thoughts, gestures, and movement to be interconnected with the software. Their interfaces allow objects to appear to be able to interact with them and having physical properties analogous to a real object, but they appear more artificial. Certain devices considered outdated in the Artiverse timeline, but still relevant in our world are: smartphones, tablets, computers, and others. In the other extreme, people completely digitize their body and undergo a transfer of consciousness. Someone like Ithi can replace their computer head into a more realistic head due to her body being able to change attachments.
Part 3b: Transbiology
Thanks to the advanced technology, people can alter their entire life to suit their wants and needs. It has lead to the improvement of the character's condition and allowed for an infinite variety of identity. This can be as simple as being assisted to disable a disease or as extreme as completely taking on a new, radical form. Largely, it would mean a self-sustaining world, with virtually no suffering and promote free expression of one's self at will. The entire process of changing your physiology is analogous to a very sci-fi form of a surgical procedure.
Part 3c: Industrials
In the process of making a specific product, special robotic hardware called "cells" are made to generate materials and manipulate them for the production of products, the alteration of existing materials, and the reparation of damaged items. This is considered a private activity, due to the fact that the software and the assembly data needed to make a product is provided by the person willing to make the product. Because it is a private activity, everyone contributes to the economy and basically means that everyone works and the products made by them is made for free as a result.
Part 3d: Quantum Systems
This part discusses the systems that operate under the physics of quantum mechanics.
Devices like a "Quantum Computing Machines" are related to quantum computers that would delay the end of Moore's Law by exploiting the physics that happen at the quantum scale.
Controllable Materials are described as objects that has a set list of characteristics and properties like mass, crystal structure, half-life, particle emission upon annihilation, energy level, conductivity, magnetism, polarity, nuclear spin, mechanical response, and more.
Material Augmented Reality, which is similar to how the Apple Vision Pro functions as a device that creates an interface between the world and the software. However, unlike the Apple Vision Pro, it would allow objects to be generated to provide additional control over the augmented reality.
Hyperconnection which is a kind of communication method that captures the probability of a particle's position in space to transmit data by analyzing its probability about the likelihood of a particle to retain its property while analyzing the probability of its location and capturing that probability.
Levitation which is the displacement of objects in space while retaining a fixed spacial distance between particles, thus allowing for seamless movement in space.
Quantum Isomorphic Energy Elements, which is based on a crystal of hafnium that have different nuclear structures that allow the storage of huge amounts of energy.
Part 3e: Detailed Description
It discuss how these abilities to alter the quanum world has done to create technologies that helped understand the universe and their usefulness for the people. The description given seem to reference string theory and bosonic matter by using vibrations to manipulate the quantum world
Part 4: Introduction
This touches on the philosophy about life, being and consciousness likely given by Artifiber themselves. It is where I will give my opinions to either support or criticize the subject matter while also properly analyzing each statement.
Regarding the first and second paragraph, it touches on the meaning of existence and how it is defined. I agree on how a conscious mind has an infinite list of possible identities, but whether a certain consciousness is specifically defined as multiple independent elements that link up to make a complete form conflicts with my belief that there is no such thing as an element and that everything that happens is not due to a specific element being altered, because I believe that it affects the entirety of a person due to my experience of having personal aspects of my life being altered and seeing that it would change every bit of my life, rather than only affecting a part.
In the third paragraph, the idea of separating each part of nature down to its constituents to analyze the whole piece by piece should only apply to find an objective truth about an topic because nature is chaotic and doesn't imply that ground truth exists; therefore, it would not seem to allow people to understand the objectivity of nature because there is no way to do that, and objectivity in chaos doesn't make sense because objectivity means everything is built from objective statements and built in an order that allow it to construct a system of belief piece by piece that would not distort itself by applying turbulence found in chaotic systems.
In the fourth paragraph, either it conflicts with or supports the ideas given by previous paragraphs. Due to the idea of structure in a chaotic system, the statements given would not contend with the ideas from previous paragraphs. Although, if it only tries to support the idea of a belief system built upon axioms, instead of implying that those belief systems are objectively true, then it would align well with the previous statements.
Part 4a: Structure
This is where we will tackle the various worlds with their own characteristics.
Part 4aa: Deltadim
This is the universe that would align with how we see our universe. It is full of intellegent inhabitants, similar to how we humans have inhabited the Earth. They all form a single civilization, but has some social variety. They are known to lack any social form of evil like mutual exploitation and other activites regarded as evil. This civilization practically resembles some descriptions of heaven, in which heaven is implicitly depicted as a utopian world.
All people in the civilization, defined as a collective group working for a socialist mean of production, work together in an organization called "The Congress", where everyone takes their time to participate in management. The congress has both characters and bots to participate in the organization, with the characters being the backbone of the entire organization, while operating in concert with bots or AI that perform calculations and analysis. This is meant to represent a socialist society in which every person gets to participate in a sytem in which everyone can have common ground which eliminates political opposition.
Part 4ab: Digirel
This is related to the concept in the plot of the movie "The Matrix", where the beings are put into a universe similar to a simulation in which the characters are immortal and completely in a digital form. These characters, which are called "Digitalia or Digitalies", have there thoughts not being seperate from the reality of the universe, and this causes the physics in the universe to change everytime due to their existence and imply that physics in thay universe is a mere suggestion.
Part 4ac: Floriverse
This is a universe composed of characters called "Flories" that are anthropomorphic characters that look like flora. These beings thrive on a diet of common food, non-sapient flowers, and autotrophic sources like photosynthesis with inorganic compounds. Their nature revolves around two things: Blossomia and Witheria; the former signifying life while the latter signifying the opposite of what Blossomia signifies, which is death.
Part 4ad: Nonsense Galaxy
It is the representation of things absurd and lack any meaning for the existence of things there. It is almost like it's reflecting on Albert Camus' philosophy regarding absurd situations. Not much is said about the universe as it only consists of things that are non-sensical when it comes to other universes.
Part 4ae: Void of Nadir
It resembles what most people think of a black hole, while being known to be a source of corruption for matter that would deteriorate into Nadir's singularity and having decayed into something indefinite and indescribable
Part 4af: Hizen
This is about matter that has "developed" into something. It shows the evolution of matter into a final form of totality. Said to be the ultimate goal of one, it is in conjunction with the idea of utopia and inalienable unity.
Concluding Part: Zextranet's thoughts and conclusion
I have rarely seen such artistic talent ever been showed to the people in public. I am deeply amazed at the depth of the entire lore, and it shows how far imagination can go. I can absolutely say that Arti really cooked some good lore. I am genuinely impressed. I have to say that this is by far the best lore I have ever read in my life so far. Even if I disagree on some points, they still did construct a very high quality piece of art that is remarkable.
=====[Extension for April 19, 2024]=====
Part 5: Fibrins
They are rarely seen in the world, but sometimes seen in some of Arti's artworks, even seen enough to be considered a cultural symbol. They are creatures resembling strings with a thickness of 1cm. They take the form of a body or face that they circumscribe using the string, while sometimes vibrating which indicates emotional shock. Even if the entire fibrin may contain two strings, they can still interact with each other.
They perceive us as completely alien by physiology, given that their anatomy contrasts from other creatures having the entire body being connected into one person.
Part 5a: Anatomy
These Fibrins aren't really "living beings" per se, but rather, they are digital beings/digitalias from the Digirel universe. They only have a physical presence by corresponding itself to a similar bodily form composing of substances that exist in the Deltadim universe.
The reason how each string of one fibrin can interconnect seamlessly is due to other types of matter that help connect each part of the fibrin creature into one whole.
Composition of the entire strings in the Fibrin are silicone-like substances. While they are physically separate, they can still interact with each other due to the strings being a part of a single "field" or "field of influence".
Part 5b: Behavior
The movement of these Fibrins is based on using a set of electrons and forming a structure that would force the Fibrins to travel using warp drive technology that resembles the mechanics of an Alcubierre Warp Drive.
They form movements of flying and sliding, with the mix of both making the movement of gliding.
They have a reaction with EM fields, especially complex structures in their nervous system.
Their thought process create byproducts of EM waves, but we don't know what kind of EM waves is being generated. If they are under the influence of outside thoughts, like from someone else, likely due to their telepathy, they can mentally change, like having an attachment to people the other person thought, likely developing into them like a second form. Their symbiotic link with someone allows the Fibrin to gain knowledge, while the host gains an improvement in the efficiency of their nervous system. Although, if the host does not want the presence of Fibrins, then they can leave at will.
Part 5c: Peculiarities
One weird fact about them is that they do not need to eat, but they may eat substances similar to silicone in order for them to grow. Given their inorganic makeup, they rarely have any cases of illness, but if the strings are tangled, they may get nauseous. While they are incredibly elastic and strechable, they do not possess infinite elasticity and they may split into two as a result. They can split many times, but the strings should not exceed a lower limit; the silicon strings will evaporate if a lower limit is reached

This is Zextranet's Full Analysis of the Artiverse
Part 0: Introduction and Clarification for the entire analysis
In this full analysis of the entire lore that Artifiber has developed in his Artiverse universe, I will give each detail attention and give my thoughts to the entire lore that Artifiber has pieced out together to make the current Artiverse lore.
Note, I will be refering to Artifiber as they/them
This analysis only covers information given in the "Library of Artiverse" which is a compilation of canon, fanon, and other subjects regarding the Artiverse universe. The website link follows: https://library-of-artiverse.blogspot.com/?m=1
The character for delta will be replaced by "Delta" like "Delta-System"
The only things I will not tackle is the Canon page which is just basically a QnA list that Arti has answered, and I will also not tackle the About page in the website which just mentions the purpose of this project and the description of the creator of the lore, including its philosophy.
Part 1: Digital
Regarding the first paragraph, it mentions the remarkable advancements made by standardization of certain aspects of technology caused by the improvements in the means of production which led to a huge stimulation of technological progression which can be said by looking on how their technology has progressed in a rapid pace. This is comparable to the industrial revolution of our civiliazation which has led to rapid advances in human society as a whole and improved our technological progression.
Then, it points out the importance of computers in topics highly related to technology, especially in biotechnology. In the topic of biotechnology, it says how it is important to the making of robotic characters, and the science of transgeneration, which is a topic regarding the union of biotechnology and the character's body to serve as an extension of one's physical nature. This, by itself, is highly untouched by most people because such technology would mean people with a higher ability to exercise their wishes by will or having the ability to live a life less affected by deficits. This is real technology, but has not reached the level where people can control their form at will.
Now that such advancements has been made to improve the condition of the Artiverse inhabitants, it has led to expand their capabilites and allowed many applications to be integrated into one's operating system regarding the software or firmware of biotechnological devices that they may have integrated into their physical body.
Part 1a: Hardware
The hardware is based on quantum technology. With these kinds of technology, it has given people to harness the computing capabilities that would outcompute our computing technology by factors in the billions. The hardware is based on a kind of crystal where it's hardware can be altered by software by altering the quanta of the crystal itself. Using crystals, particularly its quantum energy, one can harness its potential for powerful computing and its potential to use it as RAM devices. This is comparable to using quantum mechanics for computing, including Vanadium Dioxide's memory storage capabilities by controlling its phase transition.
Part 1b: Biotech
Any character in the Artiverse universe is either partially or fully cybernetic and would natually mean the union and integration of living matter and robotics. With this in mind, there are set "integrator modules" with one kind being used to control the interface between living matter and robotics in a cybernetic being. Such technology also allows the neural network to be linked into the robotics integrated into someone, allowing a seamless ability to turn thoughts into reality.
Part 1c: Formalization and Programming
In the software that all these biotech devices use, it uses a universal desciprtive language used for programming called Lingua Technis, which is a mix of factual, markup, functional, and imperative programming paradigms that is used for virtually every branch of science that is made to be intuitive and have any errors or conflicts in the code to be easily rectified. Due to these special characteristics, any code that is built upon Lingua Technis is compatible with any form of hardware, therefore it is useful for many applications regarding physical activity, but still very useful for software applications mainly regarding communitcations
Two special programming and markup languages are used in the Delta-System and nearby systems. Those are Swift and Graph. The former is not to be confused with Swift, which is a programming language made by Apple. Both languages have specific interfaces which makes them practical for specific applications.
Part 1d: Operation Systems
In the website, it mentions the functions, purpose, and applications of an operating system. It says how it is used to run applications, used as a basis for software running the OS, etc.
The most common in the Delta-System is IntegralOS (IOS, not to be confused with iOS from Apple). Other operating systems like MintOS and EROS appeared, with the former being made by Mintscreen and is more universal while the latter being made by, coincidentally enough, Eros, which is made for more specific tasks.
The framework that come with the several OSs are: FoundationKit, IOKit, WorkspaceKit, and InterfaceKit. Other frameworks are used for the system to complete specific tasks, like VideoKit and MusicKit
Part 2: Delta-System
This covers the entire planetary system named by the inhabitants as the Delta-System. The diversity of each planet has been caused by the technological advancements which led the species to explore other celestial bodies revolving around their star. Each planet has their own set of physical components which creates the specific conditions that make each planet unique. Planets with a large population does not require specific equipment to be able to live there, and only requires slight body adjustments for each highly inhabited planet to adapt between creatures in those planets because their biochemistry isn't necessarily dangerous to each other. The Delta-System or, just Delta, is located in the Bode Galaxy, or may be known as Messier 81 or NGC 3031 according to Wikipedia. The center star, Deltaspark, is surrounded by six celestial bodies being named Delta-01 to Delta-06 in order by distance. Delta-01 and Delta-02 are abundant with a diverse source of resources with them having a diverse internal structure which is being researched and actively used in the public economy. The ratio of the planet's surface area and the mass of the planet makes it favorable by having lesser gravity while having large useful spaces which may be caused by the planet having less density. Other planets only have a small population concentrated in small areas or enclaves which serve specific purposes. The inhabitants of planets besides Delta-01 and Delta-02 have special robots or space characters like Micro space cats.
Part 2a: Deltaspark
Deltaspark is classified as a K-Type star or K-Type dwarf star. It has a diameter of 1400km and a mass of 2.8×10²⁷ tons, which should make it classify as a G-Type star according to solar mass.
Part 2b: Delta-01 / Alterra
Alterra is a planet of a rocky composition with most of that rocky landmass consisting of basalt rocks covered by water combined with a rich biosphere. Water is abundant with freshwater dominating inland waters. It is full of silicate rocks with a metal core. The atmosphere consists of Nitrogen, Oxygen, and some Xenon. The continents are on the same meridian with one central continent connecting the north and south parts of the planet. Cities are spread everywhere, including underwater cities, ranging from large metropolitan areas and sparce cities. One notable city is Texui. One notable suburban city is Sweetbaum. Its magnetic field do not align with the planet's axis of rotation. This planet is obviously based on Earth, although some characteristics of the civilization's influence on the planet has not come to fruition today, like underwater cities. Other descriptions of the planet is the complete misalignment of the axis of rotation and the magnetic field lines, which may indicate a magnetic reversal is occuring at that planet. The lack of an axial tilt which eliminates seasonal changes similar to Earth.
Part 2c: Delta-02 / Carbonia
Carbonia, as the name suggests, is a planet full of carbon. Full of carbide mineral rocks and a metal core, it implies the planet is loaded with coal, graphite, and diamond reserves. The atmosphere is full of Nitrogen, Hydrogen, and Carbon, which indicates a strong presence of Methane and other Carbon-based greenhouse gases like Carbon Dioxide and Carbon Monoxide. The surface is a mix of carbon and diamond minerals due to the extreme presence of carbon. The infrastructure is made to be highly interconnected albeit the population is concentrated on small areas. Due to the living creatures of the planet being filled with inorganic compounds, it makes their biochemistry seem robotic. Due to it, advancements in robotics are frequent there. This planet seems to be based on 55 Cancri E, a real planet thought to house a diamond core and is rich in carbon, although this planet is less biologically and technologically hostile compared to 55 Cancri E.
Part 2d: Delta-03
This planet is highly related to Jupiter, as the atmosphere consists of Hydrogen, Helium, and other substances. Known for huge reserves of gaseous matter, with a few satellites monitoring them, it also seems to contain exotic substances
Part 2e: Delta-04
This planet is dominated by oceans all over the planet with its mantle being rich in water, implying a rich source of hydrate minerals. It's atmospheric composition resembles Earth's while weirdly having traces of Hydrogen and Helium that are high enough to be noted.
Part 2f: Delta-05
This planet is highly odd for having a helium atmosphere with a hydrosphere consisting of liquid nitrogen. The terrain is irregular with a brownish color, resembling the planet Mars. This planets orbit seems to almost align with Delta-06's orbit
Part 2g: Delta-06
This planet resembles Delta-05 but its surface is virtually smooth and completely lacks an atmosphere. Its orbit seems to resonate with Delta-05 in a way where their orbits virtually synchronize.
Part 3: About technologies
This topic discusses the use of technology to assist a characters needs and wants. This is related to transgeneration and biotechnology between the character and the technology around them
Part 3a: Computing
The devices used for the people in the Artiverse are spacial computers. These are computers that integrate their computing power to the person using it and allow their thoughts, gestures, and movement to be interconnected with the software. Their interfaces allow objects to appear to be able to interact with them and having physical properties analogous to a real object, but they appear more artificial. Certain devices called outdated in the Artiverse timeline, but still relevant in our world, are smartphones, tablets, computers, and others. In the other extreme, people completely digitize their body and undergo an transfer of consciousness. Someone like Ithi can replace their computer head into a more realistic head due to her body being able to change their attachments.
Part 3b: Transbiology
Thanks to the advanced technology, people can alter their entire life to suit their wants and needs. It has lead to the improvement of the character's condition and allowed for an infinite variety of identity. This can be as simple as being assisted to disable a disease or as extreme as completely taking on a new, radical form. Largely it would mean a world with virtually no suffering and promote free expression of one's self at will. The entire process of changing the form of one is analogous to a very sci-fi form of a surgical procedure.
Part 3c: Industrials
In the process of making a specific product, special robotic hardware called "cells" are made to generate materials and manipulate them for the production of products, the alteration of existing materials, and the reparation of damaged items. This is considered a private activity, due to the fact that the software needed and the assembly data needed to make a product is provided by the person willing to make the product, and because it is a private activity, everyone contributes to the economy and basically means that everyone works and made for free as a result.
Part 3d: Quantum Systems
This part discusses the systems that operate under the physics of quantum mechanics.
Devices like a "Quantum Computing Machines" are related to quantum computers that would delay the end of Moore's Law by exploiting the physics that happen at the quantum scale
Controllable Materials are described as objects that has a set list of characteristics and properties like mass, crystal structure, half-life, particle emission upon annihilation, energy level, conductivity, magnetism, polarity, nuclear spin, mechanical response, and more.
Material Augmented Reality, which is similar to how the Apple Vision Pro functions as a device that creates an interface between the world and the software. However, unlike the Apple Vision Pro, it would allow objects to be generated to provide additional control over the augmented reality.
Hyperconnection which is a kind of communication method that captures the probability of a particle's position in space to transmit data by analyzing its probability about the likelihood of a particle to retain its property while analyzing the probability of its location and capturing that probability.
Levitation which is the displacement of objects in space while retaining a fixed spacial distance between particles, thus allowing for seamless movement in space
Quantum Isomorphic Energy Elements, which is based on a crystal of hafnium that have different nuclear structures that allow the storage of huge amounts of energy.
Part 3e: Detailed Descriptiom
It discuss how these abilities to alter the quanum world has done to create technologies that helped understand the universe and their usefulness for the people. The description given seem to reference string theory and bosonic matter by using vibrations to manipulate the quantum world
Part 4: Introduction
This touches on the philosophy about life, being and consciousness likely given by Artifiber themselves. It is where I will give my opinions to either support or criticize the subject matter while also properly analyzing each statement.
Regarding the first and second paragraph, it touches on the meaning of existence and how it is defined. I agree on how a conscious mind has an infinite list of possible identities, but whether a certain consciousness is specifically defined as multiple independent elements that link up to make a complete form conflicts with my belief that there is no such thing as an element and that everything that happens is not due to a specific element being altered, because I believe that it affects the entirety of a person due to my experience of having personal aspects of my life being altered and seeing that it would change every bit of my life, rather than only affecting a part.
In the third paragraph, the idea of separating each part of nature down to its constituents to analyze the whole piece by piece should only apply to find an objective truth about an topic because nature is chaotic and doesn't imply that ground truth exists and therefore would not seem to allow people to understand the objectivity of nature because there is no way to do that, and objectivity in chaos doesn't make sense because objectivity means everything is built from objective statements and built in an order that allow it to construct system piece by piece that would not distort itself by applying turbulence found in chaotic systems.
In the fourth paragraph, either is conflicts with or supports the ideas given by previous paragraphs. Due to the idea of structure in a chaotic system, the statements given would not contend with the ideas from previous paragraphs. Although, if it only tries to support the idea of a belief system built upon axioms, instead of implying that those belief systems are objectively true, then it would align well with the previous statements.
Part 4a: Structure
This is where we will tackle the various worlds with their own characteristics.
Part 4aa: Deltadim
This is the universe that would align with how we see our universe. It is full of intellegent inhabitants, similar to how we humans have inhabited the Earth. They all form a single civilization, but has some social variety. They are known to lack any social form of evil like mutual exploitation and other activites regarded as evil. This civilization practically resembles some descriptions of heaven, in which heaven is implicitly depicted as a utopian place.
All people in the civilization, defined as a collective group working for a socialist mean of production, work together in an organization called "The Congress" where everyone takes their time to participate in management. The congress has both characters and bots to participate in the organization with the characters being the backbone of the entire organization, while operating in concert with bots or AI that perform calculations and analysis. This is meant to represent a socialist society in which every person gets to participate in a sytem in which everyone can have common ground which eliminates political opposition.
Part 4ab: Digirel
This is related to the concept in the plot of the movie "The Matrix", where the beings are put into a universe similar to a simulation in which the characters are immortal and completely in a digital form. These characters, which are called "Digitalia or Digitalies", have there thoughts not being seperate from the reality of the universe, and this causes the physics in the universe to change everytime due to their existence and imply that physics in thay universe is a mere suggestion.
Part 4ac: Floriverse
This is a universe composed of characters called "Flories" that are anthropomorphic characters that look like flora. These beings thrive on a diet of common food, non-sapient flowers, and autotrophic sources like photosynthesis with inorganic compounds. There nature revolves around two things: Blossomia and Witheria, the former signifying life while the latter signifying the opposite of what Blossomia signifies, which is death.
Part 4ad: Nonsense Galaxy
It is the representation of things absurd and lack any meaning in the existence of thinga there. Almost like it's reflecting on Albert Camus' philosophy regarding aburd situations. Not much is said about the universe as it only consists of things non-sensical when it comes to othee universes.
Part 4ae: Void of Nadir
Resembling what most think of a black hole, while being known to be a source of corruption for matter that would deteriorate into Nadir's singularity and having decayed into something indefinite, indescribable, and is devoid of any meaning
Part 4af: Hizen
This is about matter that has "developed" into something. It shows the evolution of matter into a final form of totality. Said to be the ultimate goal of one, it is in conjunction with the idea of utopia and universal and inalienable unity and community.
Conclusion Part: Zextranet's thoughts
I have rarely seen such artistic talent ever been showed to the people in public. I am deeply amazed at the depth of the entire lore, and it shows how far imagination can go. I can absolutely say that Arti really cooked some good lore. I am genuinely impressed. I have to say that this is by far the best lore I have ever read in my life so far. Even if I disagree on some points, they still did construct a very high quality piece of art that is remarkable.

As always, thanks to SpacePaladin15 for the wonderful universe!
This is my first time really writing, so I welcome any and all comments and criticism. Hope you enjoy!
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Memory Transcription Subject: Firlin, Krakotl Employee
Date [standardized human time]: January 27, 2137
My sleep that night was deep and dreamless. I fell asleep completely exhausted and woke up feeling great, if hot. Why was I hot? Kira kept the house chilled, and the comforter wasn’t that thick… I opened my eyes, only to find my vision filled with smooth, dark skin. Ah, well that would explain the heat.
Kira was latched onto me, pulling me tight against her body, which felt like a furnace under the covers. I felt my face flush as I squirmed, trying to free myself. Kira just muttered in her sleep, gripping me tighter. Not enough to hurt, but enough that I was trapped. At least I wasn’t panicking, having been ‘caught by a predator’, and it wasn’t necessarily unpleasant. In fact… shit.
“Kira… Kira… Kira!” She jerked awake with a snort, releasing me from my warm cage. I scrambled, flapping over her and towards the door.
“Sorry, gotta go!” I yelped as I scrambled out of the room, running to the bathroom. As I closed the door behind me I breathed out a sigh of relief. That had been close. Apparently I was capable of finding Kira attractive, or at least a certain part of me was. I had no desire to start my morning out with any more awkwardness than being hugged in my sleep. What time even was it?
By the time I got done using the ill-suited toilet with its ‘seat’ I was wide awake, and when I opened the door I could hear the sound of arxur voices in the kitchen. I hope I hadn’t woken everyone up…
“Morning! Move!” Sifel flowed past me before I was fully out of the doorway, nearly catching my tail feathers as she practically slammed the door behind her. I quickly walked towards the kitchen, away from the apparent disaster unfolding behind me. It seemed as though everyone was up, sleepy-eyed Hurza cutting slices of brisket off at Kira’s direction while Kizna stood watching. They greeted me as I sat down at the table, and I watched as Kira threw the slices onto a tray and inserted it into the oven. She looked over at me with an awkward smile and a slight blush.
“Sorry about that, by the way. A lot of humans still have the instinctive urge to cuddle with someone at night. I want to say it’s part of our arboreal heritage, holding tight to make sure nobody falls out of a tree. They actually sell big pillows for just that purpose.” She cleared her throat awkwardly and pulled out the pot of soup from last night. “They're going to bring the rest of the brisket, but how does soup for breakfast and fish sandwiches for lunch sound? Too bad there’s no crappie out there for lunch, they're delicious. Maybe some bluegill...” That piqued my interest.
“That sounds good for food, but weren't you saying something about bluegill and bobbers last night?” She nodded as her hands flew, laying out pieces of the human’s cheap strayu on her counter.
“Yeah, big bluegill are really good eating too, but they're small and bony for the amount of meat you get. You can filet them, but you’ll waste a lot of meat that way, so I fry them whole. Except they have scales, so you have to scale them first… it’s a pain in the butt. Crappie have the same issues, but they taste amazing. Only thing is, they like deep water, preferably moving, so we won’t see them where we're going. What we “will” see is big bass, who eat bluegill.” She pulled out a tray of breaded and fried gag grouper from last night, placing a generous amount on half the pieces of bread.
“So when we take a break, instead of just fishing for catfish, we could also catch bluegill and use them as bait for big bass! Bobbers are just something floating on top of the water that keeps the bait from diving too deep, and shows you when something’s got your bait. They bob up and down, get it?” She grinned, her whole face lighting up with emotion. “Even with all the different types of fishing I’ve done, there's just something about watching a bright red and white sphere disappear into the dark water, knowing there's a fish on the other end, but usually not knowing whats on the other end. It’s a miniature mystery, until you reel them in.” She pulled out multiple small containers and placed a sandwich in each, before wrapping up the rest of the brisket in foil. We heard the bathroom door click as it opened, and an exhausted looking Sifel walked into the kitchen.
Kira looked worried as she spoke. “I’m not sure why you're having this bad of a reaction if nobody else is.” She looked at the other two, but they just shook their heads. Sifel groaned as she sat down, resting her head on her arms.
“I might have snuck a few more pieces of pineapple last night… A pawful… Or two…” Her head thunked against the table as her arms splayed out. “It was so good, though…” Hurza walked over to pat her on the shoulder, and even through the discomfort I could see her face relax, if only a bit. “I’ll be fine soon, it has… run its course, I think.”
“That’s good, because we have a bit of boating to do before we reach the actual Everglades. Technically we’re in it right now, but this is the outer edge where the land is higher and dryer.” This was considered high land? We were at most ten [feet] above the level of water in the canal! “We’re going to have maybe a half hour of boating to get to the wetlands and the sawgrass, but this isn’t saltwater fishing. We can take our time and eat before we leave.” She turned back to us. “Actually, want to help me out before breakfast? Let’s get the boat in the water, so we just have to grab our stuff and go.” Me and Hurza both nodded and followed her out back. Sifel remained a groaning mess at the table, with Kizna following us curiously.
The entire side of the house had been converted to a boat shed, and it was surprisingly un-cluttered as Kira rolled the large door up, empty of everything but the boat and what I recognized as battery banks. The boat rested on a trailer, and I immediately realized why Kira had laughed at the thought of taking her sea-boat out here. While it wasn’t much smaller in width and length, it was shallow, maybe only three and a half feet at its deepest, with a mostly-flat bottom aside from the pointed front. I could tell why she didn’t bring this out on the ocean. Even the light waves we had encountered would be insane on a boat clearly meant to ride on top of the water, not plow through waves.
“Okay this is simple for you two.” She showed us the front of the trailer, where her truck would go. “I have a rear-view camera for this stuff, but it’s a lot easier if you guide it onto my tow-hitch. Maybe Hurza can do that, Firlin waves for me to stop or back up?” We nodded and she jogged off to her truck. The sun was almost up, bathing the world in a dull red glow as we waited on Kira.
It was mildly disconcerting watching the vehicle move back towards me, but I had worked on farms my whole life. I wasn’t scared of heavy machinery. I was scared of heavy machinery that wasn’t autonomous, with very accurate camera systems. Still, it was easy to tell Kira did this frequently, as Hurza only had to move the cup-like latch an inch to get it attached. Kira got out and slid a few rods in, locking it tightly, and we walked towards the dock as she sped forward and into a half turn so she could back the boat in, reaching the area as she slowly inched her boat into the water. I watched as she unlatched the boat and slid it out into the canal, coil of rope held in one hand. She walked to the end of her dock and pulled the boat back in, lashed it down, and we began to walk back towards the house.
“So I guess I didn’t need that much help, really. Oh well. Are you all looking forward to bass fishing?”
“How is it going to be different from what we did out here? Just on a boat instead?” Hurza asked. Kira turned and pouted at him.
“It’s totally more than just ‘on a boat’! Well, it is, kinda, but the location is more important.” She opened the back door and walked inside, where Sifel was laying on the couch. “The canal out back is just that, a man made canal. There’s bass in there, yes, but big ones don’t generally live in canals. They cruise through them to better, wider areas. We’re using it like a water highway to get to the areas where fish actually congregate.” She stirred the soup before turning the heat down. She then pulled the slices of brisket out of the oven, prompting a sniff from the couch.
“Plus, the scenery is much better than here, with my view of weed-filled fields and a single canal out back. Ideally, we get out there, and you want to stop because you're catching so many fish. Bass are finicky fish. Sometimes they eat anything long and green in front of them, other times it has to be loud, or on the surface, or jerked through the water, or reeled in so slowly it's barely moving. Sometimes none of those work. But when they do, bass put up one of the best fights pound for pound of any fish I know. They are determined to get away.” She pulled out a stack of plates and two bowls before turning to us, gesturing towards the stove. “Breakfast time! Let’s eat, drink some coffee, and then get gone!”
We all took a seat, Sifel still looking a bit ill, but not nearly as bad as earlier. My bowl of soup was delicious, hearty and chunky and smooth, by the stars was it smooth. Apparently that was because of the ‘coconut milk’ she had used, but it was offset by the savory mushrooms and chunky pieces of potato. By the time I was done the arxur had been done, staring at their plates in dismay. I knew that Hurza had chosen the amount of meat, however, so I wasn’t too worried that they would be hungry. They needed to slow down and enjoy it, was all.
As Hurza washed dishes Kira went to her garage, coming back with a sort of mesh rectangle, with a hard bottom and corners? She placed it in the middle of the floor before walking to the back door.
“Let’s get everything loaded, and I’ll see if Marley wants to come with us this time. Kizna, could you fill all of those water bottles in the cooler from the fridge? We’ll go load the gear and come back, okay?” She nodded at Kira as we left. On the short walk to her shed Kira turned towards us.
“So us humans are adapted for hot climates, but even we find humid heat hard to deal with. If you get hot or lightheaded, let me know. There won’t be a constant sea breeze today. That reminds me, do you have hats in your truck?” They shook their heads. She knew I didn’t. “Well, I should have enough straw hats for everyone. Keeping the sun off of you in Florida is half the battle.” She stopped to direct us in our labors, with a large assortment of light, medium, and heavy rods. She had me and Sifel take these to the dock while she sorted through what looked like a massive toolbox, only it was filled with lures, most of which I didn’t recognise.
Ten [minutes] later we were packed up aside from our food, and potentially Marley. Kira had also brought five tiny rods, ‘ultralights’, along with a large, but not as massive, toolbox-shaped tackle box and some metal stakes, presumably for our rods. She smiled at us as the sun began to rise behind the canal.
“Even with the extra gear, that’s never been so fast! Okay, let’s see if Marley’s joining us or not.” I found myself hoping she would. How would the tiny predator react to that many people on the boat? Was she normally calm? Did she want to eat the fish?
My hopes weren’t in vain, as I saw Marley circling the cage, rubbing her cheeks on it as she did. As us aliens grabbed the food and placed it in the cooler, Kira walked over to her cat, softly whispering to her. By the time we were done Kira was at the back door, placing Marley, in her carrier, outside on the porch. We shuffled out towards the dock as Kira locked her door, picked up Marley, and practically skipped towards the water.
“Are you excited, Kizna?” The little girl looked up, toothy mouth wide in a smile.
“Yeah! I want to catch more fish, and I want to see that moss you told us about! And the big tree stump, and the blade grass stuff! It’s like an adventure!” I had noticed Kizna would be quiet for long periods, but speak to her, ask her how she felt, and all the sudden she had a lot to say. It stung me deeply to see the signs of trauma, but I had to stop thinking about it. This was going to be a good day!
There were exactly six seats on this boat, but two of them were taller, and I knew we wouldn’t be sitting on those during our transit. Kira leapt on first, bending to pull what looked like an entire section of the center console off. That's when I noticed that it was more of a shell, with a single opening. Multiple small fans sat at the top. Oh yeah, she had mentioned some sort of safe place in the middle of her boat, right? I was right, as she slid the carrier inside. After we had all gotten on Kira pushed us off, away from the dock, and then we were floating.
This boat felt much more precarious, even though it felt like it rocked less. Maybe it was how it floated so high off the water. I pushed my fears away as I watched Kira unzip the entrance, and Marley came out. She had on some sort of harness, with a tight leash leading back inside the little cat hut. She seemed a bit wary of the two adult arxur, but walked right up to Kizna to sniff a hello. Kira sat down at the center console, smiling that half-insane smile I hadn’t seen much of yesterday evening.
“Okay, flotation devices on! Batteries full, backup batteries full, let’s get moving!” She slowly pushed a lever forward and I could hear the churning of blades from behind me as we started moving. The canal was almost perfectly straight, and Kira brought us right to the limit of my comfort zone of speed before she stopped accelerating. She called out over the rush of air.
“I never got to ask, what do you two do? I mean, you had credits to spare yesterday.” That was actually a really good question, now that I thought of it. The government was giving Kira a thousand credits a month to house me, so how had they had 550 just to spend? Sifel looked over, having to half yell over the sound of engines and air.
“Nothing! Nobody wants to hire an arxur for anything! Not that I have a lot of skills that would pay!” Yeah, I got the feeling that Sifel’s old job wasn’t held in high regard outside of the Dominion. Hurza spoke up over the noise.
“I am currently ‘unemployed’, for now. The coordinator said they were trying to find us some work, but I’ve heard nothing yet.” I couldn’t exactly blame the humans for being wary of arxur, now could I? Kira shook her head, however.
“So how did you afford the trip? I gave you a discount, but it still wasn’t cheap.” Sifel looked like she was blushing, her head hanging down as she answered.
“Well, you know what I used to do, right?” At our hesitant nods she sighed. “Well, when I defected they gave me a ‘debriefing’. It took three days, but they finally let me go with a warning and a bank account. I get enough a month to ‘live comfortably forever’, but not enough to be rich.” Kira nodded to herself.
“That makes sense, actually. Well, I feel less bad about charging you for yesterday now. Hurza, what did you do before? We know what Sifel did.” The sun was up by now, the sky a riot of reds and blues as the sunrise fully began. Hurza grunted, his face tight.
“I was a farmer. I grew crops for… feed. Lots of drones and dirt and not much else.” Now I wasn’t expecting that. Somewhere in the back of my head I knew there had to be arxur farmers, but I had never really given it thought before. I eagerly spoke up.
“I was a farm supervisor, actually! What kind of crops did you grow?” He looked up at me and his face loosened a bit, not quite into a smile, but he wasn’t grimacing now.
“I grew mainly ipsom, and every couple harvests I’d have to switch to a type of tuber, I never actually learned the name. I just got a box of seeds and orders one day. I think it was good for the soil?” Okay, so he was a farmer the same way my employees had been farmers: Basically a pair of hands that could think. Why just one main crop, though? Who wants to eat the same-oh. Yeah.
“Damnit, hold on!” I looked up as Kira yelled and saw the issue. A large alligator was casually floating in the middle of the canal. The boat jerked to the side, barely clearing the beast, and I could clearly see the bumps on its spine as we blew right past it. “I know they're just animals but come on, you hear and feel this thing coming and you don't even twitch!?” I noticed she didn’t slow the boat down, though.
Near collisions aside, I was having ideas. I knew how to manage a farm, and farmhands. Hurza used to do everything solo, with drones. I had used drones extensively, too…
“I assume you got your drones from… the Federation?” He nodded, red flush creeping up his neck as he blushed. I figured so. Can’t imagine the arxur making it themselves. “Were any of them from Blackspine Incorporated?” Another nod, this one filled with confusion. “Damn things were always running at a slight angle, had no water pressure, and crushed half the vegetables they picked?” He laughed as he nodded, perking up a bit.
“Yeah, I think I spent more time fixing the drones than I ever did working with plants myself. There were no technicians, they just dumped new ones they had… acquired and had me use them as replacements or parts.” He seemed happy to be able to talk about it.
So we did. For the next half hour or so our conversation went on, the rest of them just listening, or in Kira’s case, probably- hopefully- paying more attention to the water ahead of us. It turned out that while the reasons and crops had been different, and the setting, we’d had about as similar a life as a krakotl and dominion-born arxur could have. Both farmers, both in charge of our own lands (although Hurza hasn’t been ‘in charge’ so much as exiled), and both of us didn’t mind farm work. We might not enjoy it, but I didn’t hate it like I hated paperwork. There was something very satisfying about making the land provide you with food. In the old krakotl way we had used fish bones as fertilizer, but obviously there were better ways these days. Hmm, but we wouldn’t be keeping any of these fish, would we? Kira had said the bass had pollution buildup? Actually, that reminded me…
“Hey Kira, you never actually explained what you did to kill those fish yesterday! What was up with that spike thing?” She grinned, her eyes going soft for a second for some reason.
“It’s called ikejime, and it's originally from a nation called Japan. You're aiming for the hindbrain, which causes instant brain death, and ideally you shove a rod far along the spinal column, paralyzing the muscles so they don't move and contract more, which releases enzymes that make the flesh lose its firmness. For me, getting most of the spine with the rod is fine. It generally leads to the freshest, best tasting fish compared to other methods. It pisses me off when I see someone just throw a live fish in a freezer, aside from the animal cruelty involved. It’s almost disrespectful I feel. You're going to kill and eat them, but you're not even going to put them to their best use? Just let the meat turn to mush as they panic and suffocate?” Rant aside, that was pretty interesting. However…
“Didn’t you freeze and kill a bunch of fish yesterday? What’s the difference?” She looked over at me for a second before grinning, losing the frown that had crept onto her face, with those green eyes… Ahem.
“Good catch. The difference was those were small fish, and at that size a blast of ice water will kill them as close to instantly as you can get. A full-sized grouper, or any fish big enough to eat really, is going to take a minute or two at the minimum, only increasing as they get bigger. Hell, I think we actually pulled the baitfish method from aquariums where they would have to cull off excess fry [baby fish]…” Disturbing aquarium facts aside, that made a lot of sense. I turned back to Hurza and continued our discussion of our mutual hatred of small, food-stealing vermin. Marley had made her way to the front of the boat by this point, claws sunk deep into the carpeted bottom as she peered directly into the wind.
Finally Kira slowed the engines as the canal ended, intersecting with another canal on our left, but to our right it opened up, a long, broad section of the water,open and natural looking, not man made. Which was made more clear by the seemingly endless sea of tall, light-gold and green grass that spread out in front of us. I could hear the strange sound of the wind through the grass, like a cascading ssssssssss sound, and I remembered her telling us about sawgrass. How it was like a literal saws edge, and perfectly safe to run your hand up. Come down on them, however, and it would cut right through human skin, and probably mine. The arxur might be okay?
Kira drove the boat forwards at speed before letting the engines slow and die. We now floated in the middle of this corridor in the grass, and I could see many small pockets around the edges coming up. Kira stood up, cracking her back and neck with vaguely nauseating sounds before she bent and began grabbing poles.
“Okay first things first. There’s a lot of people on the boat. The very first thing you do as you cast is watch your lure and where it’s going to go. The second thing you do is you watch for Marley, but she knows well enough to stay away from casting. Third, be careful of your lure. If it's on the surface and you miss a strike but still try to set the hook? There's a slim but very real chance it might pop out of the water and fly back at us. If it does it’s usually no big deal, just make sure your hands are in front of your eyes. Or Marley.” Well that was a lovely image to have in my mind.
“Okay, here's the same rods and lures from yesterday. We’ll start with these first, and move on to new ones later if the spooks don’t work.” She handed out the poles and we tried to find a good spot to cast. While the boat was almost as big as her other boat, we hadn’t exactly casted anything yesterday. After a minute, though, we got the hang of it. We couldn’t all cast at once, but we worked out a pattern to it. I noticed Kira tying on a different type of lure. She noticed my look and explained.
“It’s a buzzbait. It sinks, but the curved blades propel it up to the surface. Just going to see if they want something a bit faster today.” She finished and began casting, her’s still far smoother and efficient than any of ours.
As we floated along, I had some time to think. Everyone seemed to be in their own thoughts already anyways. The world out here was beautiful. It seemed so stark, dark water and sharp grass, but I knew that under the dark surface there were fish, and fish that ate fish. Alligators, and poisonous snakes. There were birds aplenty out here too, heard more than seen. The soothing swish of the grass lulled me into a calm state, like the humans ‘meditation’ I had heard of.
That is, until Hurza yelped a bit, setting his hook with a chuckling grin. As he fought the fish and we completed our casts we all stopped, which was a good thing as Kira indicated that Hurza give her the rod, making a sort of ‘can I take this’ motion. It was fascinating how humans communicated with their entire body, rather than rely on tail and feather language. As hurza gave her the rod she glanced back, tilting her head at the water.
“Okay, a lot of the time with bass you can just ‘lip’ them. There’s two sharp treble hooks on this, but only one is hooked. So just hold your thumb or thumb-analogue out, reach in, and gently reach in. Once your thumb is in, latch onto their jaw, roll the bottom of their jaw onto the back of your hand, but not all the way back, and pull them out, keeping them vertical.” We watched as she simply reached into the water, snatching the fish out of the water with her left hand. Once she had the fish the rod was put down, and she turned to us.
“Like I said before, with barbed hooks you want to get them out by pushing against the outside of the hook, so the barb has more room to move. There's two hooks from the treble hooked, so there's only a few angles to get it out.” She made it seem simple as she seemed to snatch the hooks right out, but I had a feeling it would be harder for me. She handed the fish to Hurza. It was a large bass, not as large as the first one I had caught, but larger than the one Kizna had caught yesterday. He beamed as he took it, admiring it for a second before he put it in the water, releasing it as it kicked.
As if a spell had broken we all began to cast, nearly tangling our rods in the process. I could hear Kira chuckle, but I didn’t care. This was exhilarating in a way, never knowing when a strike could occur, if one would. I was having fun!
The fun lasted all of another fifteen minutes, during which Kizna caught a small bass and we drifted further and further down what I was realizing was similar to a small river through the weeds, the current pushing us as we all cast our lures. That was the issue, right there. Cast. My arms were growing tired casting this rod. It wasn’t one of the massive ones, but it probably weighed ten [pounds] in total. Probably less actually, but stars it felt like it. I turned to Kira, ashamed of my endurance.
“Uhh, Kira? My arms are getting really tired already. I’m going to have to take a break.” Instead of being disappointed she smiled at me, a warm, excited smile.
“Casting takes some very specific muscles. For an area like this, though… This is called a Texas rig, but with a bead.” She bent to the tackle box, sliding a smaller tackle box out of it. Inside were dozens of rubber-seeming worms in various colors. Kira took my rod, and after clipping off my lure, threaded what looked like a bullet onto the line, followed by a small orange bead, and finally a single hook, but it wasn’t a circle hook this time. It was longer, with a flat portion near the line.
Kira took one of the worms, a dark brown with what looked like appendages… Oh, it was one of those ‘crawfish’ that I had salivated over. Crawfish tails were apparently delicious… Kira deftly slid it onto the hook, and I could see that she slid the hook very slightly under the worm’s skin, presumably to keep it from getting stuck on weeds. She handed it to me.
“Okay, just cast this out decently far off the back of the boat, all you have to do is wait, bounce it a bit to make the bead clack. You may have to reel a bit depending on how fast we move, but it’ll work. You won’t catch as many fish, but you’ll have a much better chance of attracting the attention of a lunker down near the bottom with a crawfish. As a bonus, less work! You’ll just have to really set that hook when they strike, it’s not a circle hook. Got it?” I nodded, grateful that she had immediately thought of a way for me to still fish while not exhausting myself.
I cast out, and by placing a talon on the line I was able to feel every bump, every snag as the worm bounced its way across the bottom. A lot of smaller branches, from somewhere, but plenty of what felt like mud, too. I bounced the tip of the rod, and I could feel the click at the end of my line. I grinned. Every time I went fishing Kira taught me something new, opened my eyes to another aspect of this planet. This was almost meditative, just sitting on the back of the boat, drifting…
After 15 [minutes] I felt something huge smash my lure, and remembering Kira’s instructions I set the hook hard. It fought me for a few seconds, far stronger than my first fish, my first bass. Then it was gone, and I could once again feel my lure bouncing off the bottom. I quickly reeled it in, only to find my lure barely hanging on. Kira whistled as she came over, re-hooking it for me.
“Wow, that was a big one! Don’t worry about it, though. Plenty of fish throw the hook after they've been solidly hooked, especially the bigger they get. We’ve got another hour or so on this section, before we hit an open water area. It’s not deep, but its wide, and usually full of lily pads. Great place to use a frog.” A frog? My face must be getting easier for her to read, as she smiled at me.
“It’s a floating lure that looks like a frog, duh. They’re great for aggressive bass, and it's just somehow fun using one on lilypads, making them thump on one to make noise, easing it off into the water, then watching as a bass literally inhales it. Which is what bass do for the most part when they hit a surface lure, very rarely do they actually bite without using their mouths to create a suctioning force. Which is also why for topwater you wait a second to set the hook, so it's properly in their mouth.” I nodded as I cast out again, determined. Maybe I hadn’t set the hook hard enough. Maybe I needed to do it twice to be sure. Or maybe I had just been unlucky. It didn’t matter anymore. I only had one thought on my mind, nonsensical as it was.
I was going to catch that big bastard this time!
Next

Chapter 1: Down Dark Tides the Glory Slides
Although its dark red stains were simple paint, the wooden circle nailed to the mast testified to a grim maritime tradition of blood sacrifice. Something must lure the winds, the sailors will explain, and it is better that one man die by an opened throat than everyone aboard succumb to slow thirst and maddening sun. At the center of this primitive ritual site, a clean cross-section of a willow, a sacrilegious nail supported the modern miracles of a thermometer and an aneroid barograph.
Further up the mast, in the crow's nest, another assurance against a dead calm and starvation shivered in the evening air, awakened by the chunky tumult of the icebreaker straining to prove its name with the painful zeal of an inadequate heir.
Kingfisher Volganin stood up and let the bedding slide off her back. Her long legs, built to wade through shore and swampland, dug into the wood for balance as she adjusted her precious leather bookbag and pushed aside her cedar trunk. She sniffed and brushed the flaking skin from under her nose. The heavy air of Samyy Severnyy's vast port smelled different than most sea fronts, too cold for the pungent scent of rotting kelp, but the acrid winds spread the unctuous odor of the Alchemists' Isle whaling lots and the fish canneries of the Royal Island. The port was quieter than most, with the cawing gulls facing heavy competition from terns, white waders, and auks both great and little.
Volganin hopped from her barrel nest on the central masthead to the bow mast's top, and to the lowest spar of its square rig. She grasped a taught loading cable, avoiding the sailors' work routes as she descended to the deck with the crane hook. The aging, three-mast warship had been refitted into a cargo ship, trading armaments for a spacious hold, block-and-tackle loading mechanisms, and an ice-breaking grill empowered by emergency boilers and the thrust of a great steam screw. The Imperator Dragomir's high center of gravity protected it from treacherous, icy scrapes but slaved it to pernicious Polar Sea weather and cursed it with a stomach-churning sway. The North's cruel wind chilled her bare legs and numbed her lips. She thought that the navigator's promise of warmer days ahead had fallen through, but the thermometer supported him. A horror gripped her as she realized that yes, this was
indeed the warmth of the Severnayan Thaw.
She struggled to find a spot in the work detail as she regained her balance and warmed herself with pumped legs and quaking shoulders. She apologized for waking late, but the crew ignored her. It was the tightest ship she had ever witnessed.
The black-coated mariners brought down the sail with a song led by an aged and respected boatswain with a stunningbasso profundo voice. She smiled at the brief show of warm humanity. After a week of long travel, their admirable professionalism shifted to an eerily, quiet solemnity. Their departure from Novoport was quite possibly the cleanest and fastest she could recall. Their discipline became off-putting, uncanny even.
“Have you ever been this far north?” she asked, interrupting the second mate's inspection of an sail painted with lucky stripes of ultramarine, sacred to the sea god Craethion. At night, the enchanted canvas darkened and twinkled with phosphorus star charts.
“Out west, once,” whispered the thin man, without pausing his scan of the deck, “But we don't come to Northernmost, Dame Kingfisher.”
“We?” she asked. “This crew?”
“Tsokiri,” he said.
She tilted her head quizzically. Northernmost was, last she heard, part of the Homelands.
One heavy-set sailor, winding a rope around his forearm, looked up at her and said, “They service foreigners from all over the Polar Sea, and further west and east. But they're enemies of Chernograd, even if they don't have the guts to act on it.”
“How can they survive up here without the capital?” she asked. “It's frozen for more than
a season.”
“Northernmost has been dying slowly, for a century,” said the Second Mate, “The port thrived, until the Vankiri armada tried to blockade. And its burning. After that, things went very...hush, hush. These Severnayans had ambitions, tried to break away from Tsokir...and then came the curse.”
“Serves them right,” said the heavy sailor. “To much of the Old Guilds in them.”
Kingfisher visited many of the ports that once belonged to the Confederation of Maritime Guilds, who retained a common tradition of elected mayors, merchants' councils, and various laws and customs. But the league's promise of mutual protection faltered when the Boreal Empire claimed Swanlands, Palantoke, and Ingeborg, and Tsokiri armies captured Lentora, the Timorats, and the Shankir. The Severnayan State, with Northernmost as its capital, was an even older alliance of northern cities and counties, absorbed into the Volgamazgan crown seven hundred years ago.
To the Throne of the Fallen, foreign rivals had always had a dangerous foothold in the empire's north.
“Curse?” Kingfisher asked. Something caught her eye through the inland fog, a thick shadow looming behind the amber haze. It was Northernmost's legendary tower of black iron, stretching at least half a kilometer into the sky. The natives say it was here before them.
“I've only heard rumors,” said the second mate, and the sailor concurred with a nod. “Ask those foreign doctors in the hold. Like I said, we don't come up here.”
Kingfisher had barely heard from them in their rickety berths in the underdeck; one spoke good Tsokiri, and another decent Merovene, but they kept to themselves, and did no work above deck. She wanted to ask what changed, what drew this ship to Northernmost, but the sailor and the second mate turned from her, driven away by the First Mate's scowl.
In stretches of sea notoriously infested with mermaids and sirens, a woman called the Captain's Wife is brought aboard, with smelling salts and horns to break their enchantments. Wayland and Merovy send out entirely female crews through the worst of them, but this is vanishingly rare elsewhere. This dangerous task, more than any, was why ship insurers and captains sought out Kingfisher's services, despite the misfortune brought by her womanhood and the malevolent winds in her veins. She could break a siren song, fight off invaders, and even pull fish, flotsam, and castaways from the blue.
Still, men usually kept their distance from her for the first few days of a voyage. But by the end of the first week, that same femininity, at least until the span of her shoulders and the top of her knee, provoked prurient remarks and offers. Not these men.
A feral part of her wished to sing to them. To draw out that lust. It wanted to join the work song and transform these labors into a bacchanal. She smothered that bestial impulse under righteous disgust and got to work as the ship maneuvered to the dock under an odd combination of falling sail and steaming mechanical oar.
A pair of men pulled a heavy canvas cloth from the anchor, a heavy stone slab rather than the traditional bowed steel weight. She had never seen such a practice, but she assumed it had something to do with the Polar Sea's ice and hearty barnacles.
She grabbed the end of a heaving line, fluttered to the dock, and returned with a pair of bulky hawsers attached to mooring winches. The heavy hauling ropes fought against her legs like constrictor snakes, animated by the winds sweeping across the coast. After choking them down against the docks and looping them through the bridles' eyes, she returned to the winches to turn the crank. She gasped and recoiled from a steam-heated crankshaft. She laughed at herself in embarrassment, the mechanism was merely unexpectedly warm, not scalding, and she should have noticed that something had de-iced the device. She then gasped again as she slipped on black ice, and spread her wings wide, accidentally ringing a silver bell mounted on a dockside lantern. She drew up the air to catch herself, to the horror of a nearby longshoreman.
The old man clutched at his chest as he steadied himself against the dock's pylon. His hands quickly snapped up, pulling his cap down and cupping his scalloped ears. He struck at the silver bell, meant to break curses, hauntings, and enchantments. Volganin tried to calm the man, but quickly realized that her continued advance would have driven the old man into the icy drink of Seal Skinners' Head.
Kingfisher called herself an alkonost when she had to, but the old man called her by her people's common names.
“Siren...” he gasped in a soft, wheezy voice. “Harpy!”
She tried to say that she meant him no harm, but the automatic winch let out a clanking howl as it drew in the sixth-rate post ship, drowning out her reassurances. She instinctively entered a deferential stance, with wings covering a downcast face. The yard-man slipped, and she forced the air behind him to cough up a salty wind. She righted the old man, and clasped his right wrist with the bend of her wings. She curled the single digit on each wing to hide its fearsome claw.
“Everything is going to be fine,” she said with a smile. “Let's unload this ship.”
The crew was already at work, and the anchor sunk below the waves with an echoing splash. A gust pushed past her, bending a few pinions, as the ships' other passengers, a pair of foreign doctors, made their way down the dock.
Kingfisher flew back to the crow's nest. The boat roared and strained and broke. Kingfisher shrieked and turned, blind and deaf above an inferno that screamed across the water and warped the wharf. The rapidly-heated wood moaned and cracked, drowning out the breaking of bones and the gasps of lungs beaten flat by the pressure wave. Frothing water surged through the dockyards and workers panicked as flayed whales rose as vengeful revenants on blood-pink tides.
The shock and updraft tossed Kingfisher towards the clouds, with such force that she strained against an outright inversion of her wings. Above the graying mists, the sea and sky blurred into a tangerine nightmare. A second blast tore through the hold, and the aft of the sundered ship splintered. Kingfisher closed her eyes as the fireball expanded. They were met with a blinding pillar of smoke when opened, and she cried out. The crowd along the shore was a riot of madmen, and she could have sworn she heard gunfire. She fluttered clear of the pillar and turned her wings to sweep outward and circle back. A second smoking pillar swirled from the corner of the port market, the militia's powder magazine ignited by the pressure wave. After wiping her eyes clean on her biceps, she turned her keen gaze to the water, searching for men to rescue.
She circled twice and found only the dead. The torn-open, the headless, the charred and the broken... and limbs, limbs everywhere. She let out a hoarse cry of distress. The smell of blood and grease the sight of gore kindled a vicious hunger within her. Small flames danced across the rippling harbor. The orange tinge to the water cooled into a soupy, golden brown that Kingfisher recognized as half-melted blubber. The voices along the shore buzzed like horseflies swarming on carrion. She dropped her water-proofed dittybag on an outcropping, tensed her wings and tightened them towards her chest, straightened her spine, and took the plunge.
The ringing in her ears died down below the surface. She heard a brief hum from the water, eerie yet gentle, like whale-song. She tried to listen for an enchanting melody, as countersinging undines was one of her duties. She ignored the strange tone upon spotting a young man floating, intact but for a superficial head wound. She hooked her head under his armpit and kicked towards the shore. She deposited the man on a beach of ice and pebbles, balled up a talon, and forced the water from his chest with a blow. She lowered her head towards his and felt his failing breath. She listened to his chest, placed her mouth over his, and set a vital wind whirling through his collapsed left lung.
Kingfisher gasped upon hearing the crack of a rifle and the cries of militiamen.
“Vulture!”
“Looter!”
“Harpy!”
She deflected the bullet with an exhausting blast of air and dove into the water. Each chilling dive was a stunning blow, with the thunderbolt alertness of arctic immersion clashing with mind-obliterating cold. She dove deeper and glimpsed the faint outline of something like a traditional bowed anchor in a broken crate swallowed up by the great darkness, her eyes easily picking up the contrasts in fields of gray and blue. Black swirls of bitumen leaked from two dozen barrels, grasping at the wreckage like a ghostly kraken. She took a quick count of the bodies, some thirty, obviously dead or hopeless. One seemingly intact man sent her panicking with the revelation of a skinless face with a boiled-away eye.
She breached the surface for another lungful and remembered her locker, tucked away in the crow's nest. She panicked again and searched for the mainmast. Its high construction saved the nest from destruction, but the search strained muscles and frayed her nerves, to the point that even a diving puffin sent her into a tizzy. The salty sea water ablated the insulating, waterproof oil on her feathers, and the universal cold suppressed her pores' capacity to replace it. The bone-deep cold came quickly, and her talons were not her own when she gripped them around her locker's handles.
She was not sure how she did it, but she found the strength to circle back and retrieve her book bag. She waded ashore on quaking limbs, and blew her nose, sneezing out a thick and bloody brine to the din of the dockside rabble. She snapped to attention as a blur of men in naval black and longshoreman's gray focused into rescue teams running chains and stretchers up the wharf and a firing squad standing dangerously still. The chill in her hollow bones fought a paradoxical war with the burning strain of back muscles as she fled from the local militiamen and the crack of their rifles. A wall of hot smoke met the icy fog, and Kingfisher dove straight into their firing line. Her glaucous wings matched their marengo coats, her pale underside, the rising smoke. Watchers along the shorefront market of Lukomorie Bay screamed and gasped. The irregulars parted and ducked as she had hoped, buying her enough time to fade into the haze of Northernmost.
She flew up the Inland Prospekt and towards the Mayoral Tower at the center of the mainland development, catching the thermal rising from the eerie heat of its black iron majesty and the mundane concrete and tar-pavement. In the harbor she acknowledged its size on an intellectual level, but up close, spiraling up a weather system created by its mere presence, the tower was confounding, terrifying. What intelligence, what forgotten empire, could have made such towers?
Kingfisher turned to the west over the fortified Merchant Court, pivoting outside the warm shadow of the Mayoral Tower. She hissed as a chilling wind rolled down from Hyperborea, the north pole's wrath impeded only by the shadow of a short mountain and the pines of the taiga. She passed over a fine set of houses in the neighborhood of Griffon's Nest, where people milled about outside, craning their necks to see the tower of smoke in the harbor.
Kingfisher came down on a scale-shingled tent-roof. She scanned her surroundings, watching for the flow of emergency traffic to the docks. In the Bereginya, a neighborhood along the Narrows that terminated in the smoldering charcoal kilns of Nine Bear Cave, she saw a tailor's shop and the Quill, a playwrights' café next to a trio of large buildings teeming with activity. The nearest, the wooden, wedge-roofed Driftwood Theatre; the furthest, a castle with a cluster of five great onion domes called the House of Wisdom, the greatest temple of the Severnayan region. Some sort of civilian rescue effort mustered here.
Between the house of gods and the arena of heroes, just a small hop across Ogre-Back Row and down Scheznik Avenue, stood a large stone building with a bochka roof, elevated half-barrels rising into a single bulky dome. Nurses stood outside, preparing triage, while runners carried supplies to shore. Kingfisher focused her eyes on its sign, “Blessed Kiril's Infirmary,” unchanged from the aged sketches of the House of Wisdom. It had a somewhat melted quality to its stone edifice, common to the area, with creamy traces on its window frames. The Alchemists' and Royal Isles are ancient calderas from the Great Northern Volcanic Ring, rich in sulfur and cinnabar. Hot-melt sulfur forms the mortar of much of the stonework, and local carpenters decorate their woodwork with inlays of molten sulfur, poured into their etchings from tinker's tools and scraped away when scarred. In this land of ever-present cold and water, the natives clung to heat and fire.
Local alchemists and priests, shamans from the Pokinutin East, doctors, naturalists, and alienists toiled here for a cure to Northernmost's medical crisis. It would be a good place, she thought, to save people.
As the hummingbird rush of her escape ebbed away, the exhaustion and killing cold ganged up on her. Her knees gave out, and her thighs rested awkwardly against her tarsi, taught and shaking like the great cables of a tall ship's mast. She shook the water from her wings, and cringed as whale oil dripped down her pinions. Wind-worn scales rubbed against each other, painfully overlapping in places, sloughing off a cheesecloth sheet of taupe skin. Her wickedly curved, syndactyl toes tightened their grip around the stony lip of a corbel decorated with a grinning gargoyle. She hopped up onto the roof and ducked tightly against the brick chimney. She nodded off, before feeling returned, and the soaked and freeing bandage on her ankle inspired a surge of panic that sent her scrambling to open her bags and trunk.
She breathed a visible sigh of relief. Her blouses were damp, but not damaged. Her cuirass and arming doublet were perfect, and the saltwater did not breach the leather case around her storybook, manual, and grimoire. More damage had been done by her talons frantically scratching into the clamps and straps. That was today's small blessing.
Kingfisher scanned for prying eyes, and quickly changed her chemise and put on the sleeveless doublet. All of her clothing had to be specially tailored; they snapped or laced together over the shoulder or side so she could dress herself by mouth and the hooked finger on her wing. She was rather embarrassed by her body; while clothed, her torso and head resembled a human woman, but a glimpse of her bare form revealed the subtle oddities. While most of her was thin and wiry, her biceps were comparable to those of a strongman's, and slabs of muscle covered her shoulder and back.
She finally slipped into the century-old cuirass and sealed its side with a slam against the brick chimney. For once, she was overjoyed that the metal plates retained heat like a smelter's kiln.
She was so cold, tired, and hungry that her eyelids appeared to have launched a coordinated effort with the stomach, torturing and blinding their foe while its ally rumbled demands. A trade mission had been dispatched to her toes, but they were halted and possibly lost on the winter march.
She peaked her head out as she finished fastening her cloak. Perhaps an hour had passed since the explosion, and the town had settled down once it was clear that the fire was confined to the waterfront. The sailor must have been brought here by now, if at all.
“Hey!” a voice cried out. “What are you doing up here?”
Kingfisher's head darted towards the source of the noise, an old, wiry man in a raggedy gray coat darkened by soot. He held a broom and a bucket in webbed hands.
“Are you the chimney sweep?” Kingfisher asked.
“I sweep the entire fucking hospital,” the man said. “You can't be up here. Get back inside.”
“Inside?” Kingfisher said.
She snorted and sneezed out another glob of sea salt and dried blood.
“I... Did a young man come in recently?”
“Young man?” he said. “What, your husband? Brother? Why'd you creep up here?”
“No, I didn't know him. A sailor, pulled up from the harbor,” she said. “There was an explosion...”
“Yeah, heard about that,” the custodian said. “Hell, I heard it. But no, I don't handle the patients, miss. Not the living ones, heh... The door is open. Get back inside. Looks like your hair's wet, you'll catch your death.”
She didn't rise.
“Can you... run a message to them? About the sailor? He was blond, a score and five years, at most. Please, sir, I will pay you two prince-heads.”
“See, I like the offer, but I don't like that you're hiding, miss,” he said. “You're sounding more and more like an assassin. Stand up.”
“I can't,” Kingfisher said.
“Why?” he barked.
She looked down and tried to think of something that wasn't truly a lie.
“I am not wearing a dress. Or breeches,” she said.
“Then get inside or you'll be dead by morning, you damn fool.”
He shuffled towards her, and she instinctively skittered backward, but could not hide the blue-gray of her wings.
He sputtered and hurled the bucket at her and retreated, his broom pointed at her like a halberd.
She fluttered out of the way and landed on the lip of the chimney, ready to use its rising warmth for a quick getaway.
“Look, look, I know how this looks–”
“You won't be singing me off this roof!” he yelled. “Back! Back!”
“I just want to know if the sailor is safe!” she shouted back.
“So you can eat him?” he yelled in a strained, reedy voice.
“No!” Kingfisher spat. “Look, call the constables or the militia. If you want me dead... let them kill me. I'm too exhausted to fight back. I only... want to know if I saved one life today.”
The old man pulled the broom back.
“I'll go ask about the matter. You stay here. Don't try any tricks,” he said.
He backed towards the door.
Before he closed it, he added, “You eat fish?”
Kingfisher nodded.
She bode her time by opening up her old storybook, Tarasov's Tales of Great Deeds and Chivalry, a thick volume of romances sung by troubadours and mistrals, legends of heroic virtue written by ancient philosophers, elfen-songs and retelling of primordial fables and titanomachies.
The old man crept outside again, with baked cod stewed with sour cream, onions, and potatoes, served on kelp in a trencher resting on a hospital blanket.
“Alright, girl, here you go, it's been steamed... the blanket, I mean. It was from a patient with a foot injury, so no need to worry... Eh, the cod's probably steamed, too,” he said. “I don't know, that ogre nurse made it.”
“Ogre nurse?” Kingfisher asked, perhaps too quietly to hear.
“Oh, your boy... I don't know, miss, he's not woken up,” he said. “But give him time, just arrived.”
Kingfisher lowered her head, shielding her face with a wing.
“He would have certainly died if you hadn't dragged him out,” he said. “You gave him a chance, at least. That's all you can do.”
Kingfisher peaked up from her fanned feathers.
“Can you eat this?” he asked.
Kingfisher mumbled aimlessly, before nodding. She cocked her head at the blade of kelp.
“Right, you sound Southern,” he noted.
“I'm from the Grand Duchy Gulf,” she said, somewhat indignantly.
A slight curl crossed the corner of his lip, and his tone soured as he asked, “Novoport?”
“Peresheyeka Derevnya,” she said. “On the north shore.”
“This is Northernmost. You're a Southerner. And that's kelp,” he said. “It won't grow in the sea, so we grow it in caves. They burn it on Alchemists' Island, for glass and soap and gunpowder. And those tinctures, for the surgeries. I mean the, uh, soda ash. But it's good for you. Especially if you ever get pregnant. Or, er, egg.”
“I will try to remember that,” she said.
“Can I set this here?” he said, setting the blanket and trencher on a rooftop steam stack.
The harpy nodded.
“You'll catch your death out here, I think.”
“Thank you,” she said, as she carefully placed the folded trencher in a leather ration bag. She watched the suspicion in his eyes warm at her unexpected politeness. “We handle wet, cold... wetness...better than Urizen's folk.”
“The blanket still has some steam heat in it,” he said, closing the trunk for her. “If you want to roost up here, I won't tell nobody, but I'm not sticking around to protect you, neither. If you want a shelter, you might look over to Shura's Inn. Middle of the Staretsy's Prospekt, dead south of the Mayoral Tower. Some of the young doctors are there. And the innkeep will be good to someone like you.”
He pointed to the southeast.
Northernmost was uncommonly easy to navigate, its roads planned from the bottom up by Imperator Svyatopolk II's builders, wide and straight for rolling lumber from the taiga or long-hauling loads from the ships. These thick roads cover and brace a network of subterranean rivers and aqueducts, carved by lime-rich water leaching out to sea from the inland karst, thaw after thaw. These bituminous, cement roads held in heat, serving as convenient thermal routes. A grid of bronze pipes allowed salamanders to pass through and warm the streets.
The necessities of logging also left Northernmost vulnerable. It was the first city she had seen without a wall or palisade, instead protected by a series of wooden towers, and raised bastions filled with ash and seashells. Kingfisher noted that all the other cities were messy whirls ebbing from a river, with streets like cracked glass.
It did, however, take her a three-lap run down the prospekt to find Shura's Inn, stopping to watch a cat with seven toes on its back paws writhe on the ground, mewling like a human infant. She'd seen many ship's cats in her career, crew mascots, and mousers, but she had never seen one behave like this. The closest she could remember was Pork N. Beans, a Waylander cat that had chimerized with a pig, who liked wallowing in mud and squealing.
Shura's Inn stood at the foot of that ancient tower. Its two-stories of brown wood vanished against its dizzying black majesty. The inn bore the typically elaborate signage of Severnayan businesses, curling thorn bushes of wrought iron and hinges that slough off the ice and cater to illiterate sailors with negative-space iconography.
It took Kingfisher a moment to puzzle out the silhouette of a troika stagecoach, as seen from the side. She usually saw them top-down. She had a twinge of anger when she read the sign. The Inn seemed to be properly called 'Eternal Flame,' or maybe 'Evening Will-o'-the-Wisp'; it was hard to read, a cursive, wiry tangle in a baroque style about two centuries out of fashion. The name was painted plainly beneath in Waylander, Merovene, Skeironic, Argaman, and Murmurish, but that was no help to Kingfisher. It was only a bit of eagle-eyed scanning that picked up the worn-down name of Shura above the door frame.
The inn had grown from a small depot, with a once detached livery barn for horses. A later overhang bridged the gap, with the added benefit of sheltering an insulated chicken coop set next to what looked to be a brick oven and smoker.
Kingfisher flapped up and down in front of the door, hoping to see through the closed slat in the window. Feverishly, she realized that midnight must be approaching, yet the sun had not set. She was going to miss the night sky, and the constellations, and the racing stars which flickered in their close circuit around the globe.
A woman in a white and red sarafan dress opened the door. Kingfisher noted that there was something vaguely familiar about her but couldn't place it.
“Hey,” she said. “We have two rooms available, one grivenka a night, breakfast in the morning, meal at night included, tea all day. There's a banya next door, tell them you came by us. And we no longer have a hosteler on hand, but still supply horses.”
“I'm a harpy,” Kingfisher said, rather bewildered that she was the one to table the issue.
“I saw the wings and claws and pieced it together, yeah,” the innkeeper said. “And I assumed you knew, so why bring it up?”
“Will it be a problem?”
“Perhaps not,” the innkeeper said.
She spoke in an artificially clear, slow way, enunciating for travelers who may not be fluent in Tsokiri. While it slipped a bit, her accent resembled something closer to a school-taught Chernogradic.
Kingfisher noticed that the other Severnayans spoke like old people, or like the rustics in her books, pronouncing syllables that people in the Gulf or Chernograd long ago slurred together, and threw in nautical terms from Waylander, Murmurish, and Rannican. While Northernmost liked the mythology of the Kochniks, hearty seasiders in icebreakers and tall fur hats, the majority of Tsokiri in the port were descendants of the Shitikmen, settlers from the balmier, downstream marshes of the Otmel who paddled northwest in their riverboats to escape the Ölek Hordes. The accent of Northernmost ironically sounds more southern and inland than those they call “southerner” or “inlander.”
The innkeeper looked at the harpy's talons. “You're not going around snatching up sailors, right?”
Kingfisher shook her head and bit her lip. It was a lie if taken literally, but she was justified in the spirit of the concern and didn't want to spend time explaining the asterisk.
She wore a leather band around her left leg for easy access to a few coins for petty spending. Three grivenka around the ankle, thirty-four in her trunk. She pulled out a silver queen's-head and presented it with her right talon. The innkeeper looked at the face of the half-grivenka coin, frowned, and pocketed it.
She gestured for Kingfisher to step inside and spoke with an older man with a deep, raspy voice. Kingfisher assumed that they were daughter and father, separated by some thirty-five years. Both had a rustic look to them, with stocky builds, wide necks, and powerful hands. Their chests were notably broad; she was buxom, and he looked like a brawler. The knot in his nose hinted at a long-healed but brutal break. In his youth, a punch from him must have been devastating, and he could probably still lay someone out, well into his late sixties or early seventies. There was still some of her hair's copper in the old man's stubble, although any remaining hair on his head hid under a river flotilla cap. It matched the coloration of their eyes, not just a light brown, but a glistening bronze that shone through narrow, heavy lids.
Kingfisher's heart sank when she noticed a gray braid bound in a silver ring hooked to the wall, a charm of Incano's hair given to those who have lost a mother or wife. The gods of Aquilo embodied contradictions – kingly Urizen was bound in chains of law and discipline, while his kindly wife Incano was the mistress of death, spinning fate with her withered left hand. Urizen was once said to be the Divine Centaur, a wild beast tamed and divided into Man and Horse by his mate, a hag who aged in reverse. Their parting, it was said, would send Urizen back into bestial madness and return Incano to the shape of an all-devouring spider. It was only the chains of civilization and the silk of life, that bound humans to their humanity.
The woman handed Kingfisher a matchbox and a hooligan lantern and said that it was complimentary, even if it wouldn't get dark out for another five fortnights. The wick hooked through the gills of the alcohol-soaked candlefish. Harvesting and preparing the invasive Thrascian eulachon was a minor industry in Northernmost, both straight from the ocean, and, preferably, out of the freshwater rivers when the larger, oilier males come upstream to spawn like salmon. Severnayan hooligan lanterns could be found far to the south, traded down the 'grease trails' along the White Meska.
The woman pointed out the mail lockers and the work board for job postings, usually teamsters, small-time laborers, and sailors. These menial listings hung below a two-tier woodcarving set with sulfur, a divine Titanomachy over a farce of pygmies fighting cranes.
The master of the house, seated and doing sums in a ledger, slightly rose from his work behind the bar and added, “If you sweep the roof, we'll give you a free night. Some snow and leaves up there... Lena won't let me make that climb anymore.”
Kingfisher agreed with a nod and a tired “tomorrow” and looked at the faces around the common room. It was late enough that most of the crowd had dispersed, but a couple of older human men were leaving the bar, stumbling on their weak legs, leaving a twitchy gnome behind. Kingfisher noted that the barwoman, in her mid-thirties, may have been the youngest native she had seen so far. The merwoman playing the spring bagatelle cabinet could be anywhere from a score to centuries old, but the latter seemed more likely. One man in the corner looked to be in his twenties, but Kingfisher assumed that he was a traveler from the Boreal Empire, with a waterproofed watchcoat and a top hat of felted black beaver fur. He read from a heavy book while drinking coffee. From across the room, Kingfisher could make out an anatomical plate demonstrating the dissection of a woman's swollen throat. He looked up to speak to the barmaid as she poured dandelion and burdock mead into a glass. He tapped on his own wrist to indicate her arthritic brace, but his voice quickly trailed off as he spotted the siren.
A hooded Acthnico sat in the opposite corner, marked by an Ouroboros armband. Kingfisher was a bit unnerved by the salamander's yellow, slitted eyes and serpentine scales, but decided that monsters in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Although she did wonder why serpentfolk were so obsessed with the snake motif; humans don't typically shape everything they own into a humanoid pattern, and she had personally never seen a reason to sit in a siren-shaped chair. But perhaps once your culture settles on a footless form as the ideal, one feels the need to hammer the point home in the face of some persistent and obvious doubts.
A bluebird crafted from wood chips hung from a large black duct that rose from the ground and terminated through the ceiling. The bird of happiness had no glue; its split pine petals interlocked like an elaborate puzzle, light enough to spin slowly as hot air rose through the inn. Kingfisher interpreted it as providence, not knowing that similar 'sun doves' hung in almost every Severnayan household.
-Word Count Capped-
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Hello everyone!
Yes, I know, the title is pretty surprising but lets me explain. Through my researchs about Marduk and Mesopotamian mythology, I finish to find some common elements between the lore of the Season 8 and the Enûma Elish. It was either between end of 2022 and beginning of 2023, or during March-April 2023. I can make some errors with Enûma Elish, it was a long time that I didn't study it in details. Sorry if I have made one, minor or major, notably in the order where the story is tell.
Enûma Elish is a Babylonian text dated from 12th (from my memory) or 14th century BCE, who is writing to explain why Marduk, a god who have begins to gain prominence under the Hammurabi's reign, is becomes the king of all the gods, and who is inspire by elder Sumerians texts (two of Ninurta (Lugal-e, where the god, chosen by Enki/Ea to be the champion of the gods against the lion-headed eagle who have steal the Tablets of Destiny from Enlil's hands, and who is accept among the great gods for his deed, and Ninurta and the Stones where it is said that he have vanquish eleven monsters, the Slain Heroes; in Enûma Elish, Marduk is chosen by his father Ea to be the champion of the gods against Tiamat, who have taken in this myth the Anzû's role, created/giving birth to eleven monsters who remind us the Slain Heroes and giving the Tablets of Destiny to her husband, Kingu, later taking by Marduk after his victory; finally, the text retake the same expression in Ninurta and the Stones where Ninurta create agriculture with the corpse of the stone-demon Asag when Marduk want to create the universe with the corpse of Tiamat, "For created wonders" (personal traduction of the French "Pour créer des merveilles")), an Akkadian one (Atrahasis: in Enûma Elish, Apsû want to kill the younger gods because of their noise, like Enlil want destroy humanity for the same reason, but Tiamat try to reasoned him, like Enki toward Enlil, against the decision to kill was they have created (the gods for Tiamat and Apsû, the humanity for the gods)), and a common theme in the Ancient Middle East, Minor Asia and Levant (Storm/Tempest god VS Sea/Monster who incarnate the Sea). The propaganda aspect of the Enûma Elish, dedicated to the glory of Marduk, can be particularly show at his birth who describe him a superior to the elder gods and at the end when the gods giving to him fifty names who embodies his deeds of chief and king of the pantheon, creator of the world and humanity ("Marukka", "the Creator", is one of them), protector against forces of Chaos, god merciful of fertility and of God of the gods.
Here are the common points that I have found between the Enûma Elish and the lore of the Season 8 of SMITE.
. The enclosure of a powerful being as the triggering element of narrative. In the Enûma Elish, the conspiracy of Apsû, the primordial being of freshwaters and husband of Tiamat, for kills the younger gods because of their noise, is heard by Ea who decided to defend his kind: he throw a spell who asleep Apsû and, after taking the power of this one (the freshwaters), he killing him and making his domain (the Apsû/Abzû, freshwater mass present bewteen Earth and Underworld in Mesopotamian cosmology) with his corpse. In SMITE, Tiamat is not already wake up but asleep, in this situation since millennia after is fight against Marduk, and she is wake up by some gods (Loki, Set, Thanatos, Discordia and Bellona) for stopping the Cthulhu's madness. Tiamat wake up (unlike Apsû who is asleep) and throw back the Priest of the Great Old Ones in his domain (Ea kill his opponent) and create a beautiful temple-like palace in front of the Olympus (without using the body of her deceased enemy to make it).
. The wrath of Tiamat. In Enûma Elish, after the killing of Apsû, and the birth of Marduk in the Apsû (which the Sumerian name ("AMAR.UTU") would mean "Son of the Sun", "Child of the Sun", "Immortal Child/Son of the Sun", "Calf of the Sun" or "Bull of the Sun"), conceived by his parents Ea and Damkina, who is greatest than his great-father Anu and his great-great-father Anshar, some gods go to Tiamat to convince her to avenge Apsû by eliminate the younger gods. To make this, Tiamat created/giving birth to eleven monsters (bulls, venomous snakes, dragons, lion-men and fish-men...) and giving to her new husband, Kingu, the command of the army and the Tablet(s) of Destiny, all for one goal: destroy to rebels. Ea heard this new threat and goes inform Anshar, chief of the divine Assembly. Anshar reproach to Ea his role in the murder of Apsû and so in the creation of the crisis and ask him to make the same thing to Tiamat that he have making for her husband. Ea goes in front of Tiamat but back-off because she is too powerful. After the fail of his great-son, Anshar tells to his son Anu to defeat Tiamat. Same situation. But Ea, who is the most ingenious, cunning and intelligent of the gods, who have always the solution to each case and crisis, see his son Marduk and know that he is most powerful than any of the gods. He say to his son that he must present himself in front of Anshar as their champion. By seeing him, Anshar is happy: hope is here and their champion too. He assemble the gods in a banquet (in Mesopotamian way of thinking, we better think when we are calm, so the alcohol help to this for the gods toward the situation that they must face up (their existence are threatened)) and all the gods giving to Marduk the royalty, where this last one have only demanded to receive the military powers during the time that he's fighting Tiamat. Making king, Marduk prepare for fight (he equip himself armor and helm of helm and terror, bow, arrow, mace/harpê (sword which aspect is the one that Gilgamesh have in-game), winds, Flood, net, talisman plants, charms and a tempest war chariot).
In SMITE, these narrative elements seem divided into third parts:
- one: Zeus, Hera, Ares, Sobek and Olorun, king of the pantheon since the death of Zeus, come in Tiamat's palace for more know their knew newcomer. After a brief dialogue, appear, with Bellona, Gilgamesh, king of Uruk, coming back to the Underworld with a task giving by his gods (and firstly Marduk): asleep and locked again Tiamat against the gain of immortality for this act. Accompanied by Zeus, and so, formed a trio like Anu-Ea-Marduk, here represented, in a way, by Gilgamesh (Marduk), Bellona (Ea, because she come with the king of Uruk like Ea push his son to presented him to Anshar as their champion) and Zeus (Anu, for his old age toward Bellona), they go to fighting Tiamat but must retreat when she invoke vines and a real wave of monsters.
- two: After this first fight, some elders or Nature-related gods (Neith, Terra, Sylvanus, Cernunnos, Geb, Persephone and later Morgan La Fay) come join Tiamat forces against the side of Olympus, seeing them as the bad side who have broken the Cycle. The retreat of Gilgamesh, Bellona and Zeus evoke the fails of Ea and Anu to stop Tiamat and the coming of divinities in the side of the salt waters primordial being remind us the gods who push Tiamat at war in the Enûma Elish. In Olympus, the pantheons are divided toward the attitude to have with Tiamat and the attack against her. Gilgamesh enter in confrontation with Olorun but arrive to united most of the gods present in the Council chamber to his cause: fighting and vanquishing Tiamat.
- three: After invoking a powerful storm against Olympus, Tiamat is convinced to liberated two beings who have being locked by Zeus: Charybde and Scylla. In SMITE, Olorun, as the king of the pantheons and the higher authority in the lore, is, in a way, Anshar, the chief of the divine Assembly in the Babylonian tale. Gilgamesh is, like it was already said, Marduk, because he is show as the opposant of Tiamat and succeed to mobilized the gods behind him into the war against Tiamat, where Marduk is proclaimed Champion and King of the pantheon by the gods. Finally, the liberation of Charybde and Scylla by Tiamat can remind the creation of her army of monsters in the Enûma Elish.
. The Final Confrontation and it's consequences. The Enûma Elish show us Marduk go for battle in his war chariot. When they see him, the monsters flee of terror, only remain Tiamat. She taunt him, but Marduk, firstly intimidate and even ready to fail like Ea and Anu, retake his courage and say to his ancestor that she have brave the authority and royalty of the gods, his fathers. Enraged, Tiamat is ready to throw a spell, but Marduk throw into his mout the net that he has fulfilled with the winds. Then he fire an arrow who kill Tiamat. Her army is captured by Marduk who takes the Tablet(s) of Destiny from Kingu. The others gods come to acclaim him and then he decide to use the corpse of her ancestor to create the world (Sky and Earth, Tigris and Euphrates, mountains of Mesopotamia, clouds, rain, the stations of the great gods and calendar...). Then he giving to each gods his place and function in the pantheon, forgive the act of the gods who have rejoin Tiamat, and decide that man be created by the blood of the guilty, the one who have created the rebellion. The gods designed Kingu, who is bled and with this blood, Ea create humanity. Marduk, who have previously posing the Tablet(s) of Destiny in his chest and captured the army of Tiamat, chains the monsters at his throne and making representations of them in the Apsû for that moment will be never forgotten. Finally, he decide to build a city, Babylon, but the gods proposed that it was us who built it. Babylon built, all the gods made respect before Marduk, their king, who is coronated, and give him his fifty names.
In SMITE, therefore, after the libration of Charybde and Scylla who made destructions, Tiamat seems sad because of that. So, she makes an alliance with Merlin to repair the Cycle that the wizard of Camelot and last god of an ancient pantheon have broken by vanquish Jormungandr. The duo finally go see Atlas and convince him to unleashed the sky that he sustain with his arms for recreating all from zero. In Olympus side, Gilgamesh, Chaac, Zeus and Mulan go to the Tiamat palace and encounter her allies. Gilgamesh decide that the end of this conflict will not be by a confrontation but by a dialogue. With King Arthur, Morgan La Fay, Mulan and Bellona, he goes try to convince Tiamat to doesn't destroy the world. At least, Shiva appear, destroy the world and rebuilt a new one and place everyone in his place (Olympus for Zeus and Hera for example) or in a new one (land of Mesopotamia for Tiamat). Here, the conflict between gods and Tiamat didn't finish on a violent fight who lead to the creation of the worl: Gilgamesh, who is the equivalent of Marduk is, yes, cunning like him but instead of making a good plan for battle (provocation for forced her to throw a spell), he's making a plan for avoid the battle who can only lead to a mutual destruction and the one of the world. When the little group encounter Tiamat, she have already beginning the destruction of universe by the unleashing of the primordial sea (who can, in a way, remind the setting of the battle of Marduk against Tiamat in the Enûma Elish, in a universe where it was only primordials waters). Also, where Marduk use provocation to make Tiamat angry, Gilgamesh and Bellona make her doubt by showing the possible consequences of her recreation (the same story that she know with the Babylonians gods but, this time, she can be killed). But this was not Gilgamesh who stop once for all this situation like Marduk, it was Shiva who coming up and but not for create a world/universe who didn't exist like Marduk: the Trimurti member destroy the current one and create a new one. However, we can make a parallel with the fact that Marduk gives to each gods their functions and the fact that Shiva replace everyone at his own place.
Here was my comparison bewteen the lore of SMITE during Season 8 and the story of Enûma Elish. I hope that you have liked that and that I didn't make many errors in the stories of the game and of the myth. Also, sorry if I have made some English errors. I have used DeepL sometime, but I try to express myself in this language as good as can.
Links to learn more about the Enûma Elish:
MURTOFF J., "Enuma elish", in Encyclopedia Britannica, Chicago, Encyclopedia Britannica Inc,
MARK J.-J., "Enuma Elish - The Babylonian Epic of Creation - Full Text", in World History Encyclopedia, published 04 May 2018, on https://www.worldhistory.org/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation---fu/#google_vignette [on line] [consulted the 20 December 2023],
LAMBERT W. G., "Enuma Elish (The Babylonian Epic of Creation", "Mesopotamian Creation Stories", pp. 37-59, and in GELLER M. J. and SCHIPPER M (eds.), Imaging Creation, Brill Academic Publishers, 2007 (IJS Studies in Judaica 5), pp. 15-59, in Etana.org, on https://etana.org/node/581 [on line] [consulted the 20 December 2023].
And I have used this French article to corrected some elements: BOTTÉRO J., ”Antiquités assyro-babyloniennes [autre]”, dans École pratique des hautes études. 4e section, Sciences historiques et philologiques. Annuaire 1975-1976, Paris, École pratique des hautes études, 1976, 1167 p. pp. 77-126, on line in Persée, on https://www.persee.fdoc/ephe_0000-0001_1975_num_1_1_6109 [on line] [consulted the 21 December 2023].

I need format like this for Paper 2This writing belongs to Paper 1 writing. Topics of case studies and examples
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Topic 1-Foundations
There are certain areas of focus like Foundations, where detailing on modern environment movement on Earth day, Minamata disaster has to be done. Sustainability focusing on the types of capital requires understanding of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. A comprehensive understanding of the origin, uses and impact of pollution like DDT is needed.
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Topic 2-Ecosystems and ecology
Prepare yourselves with examples on sub topic like Species and Population. The key terms are niche, realised niche, parasitism, predation, mutualism, herbivory, disease, competition. Communities and ecosystems are explained with examples on food chain, bioaccumulation, and bio magnification. You need to learn a detailed example on Flows of energy and matter where you get to learn concepts on deforestation, oxidation, combustion of fossil fuels. You need to precisely compare and contrast between the r-and k-strategies, biomes, and zonation. You need to be pro with each case study on primary and secondary succession. Case studies focus on five abiotic components.
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Topic 3-Biodiversity and conservation
You are to learn a detailed case study of three different species: extinct, endangered, and whose conservation status has been improved by intervention. The impact of human activity on biodiversity of tropical biomes requires your detailed analysis. Also, focus on concepts like sustainability and conservation in tropical biomes.
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Topic 4-Water
The topic requires good fundamentals based on the hydrological cycle impact on various factors like agriculture, deforestation, urbanisation. You get a detailed case study on the reason for shared freshwater resources impacting international conflict. Detailed case studies on controversial hunting, unsustainable fishing and fishery, aquaculture or for that matter freshwater and marine population are happening issues for your case studies. Don’t forget to learn the examples on water pollution.
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Topic 5-Soil
This topic starts with a detailing on the terrestrial food production system and food choices. You need to grab examples on industrial and subsistence farming.
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Topic 6-Atmosphere
The example of Montreal Protocol in reducing the emissions of ozone-depleting substances is very popular. Exemplify the topic with the examples on aquatic, terrestrial, and human systems.
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Topic 7-Climate change and energy
Causes and impacts of climatic changes with the examples of energy sources and security. You will get a detailed case study on the energy security and strategies of a given country. Get to learn the examples of advantages and disadvantages of various energy forms like oil, coal, gas, nuclear, wind, hydro, tidal, biomass, and geothermal. Tow detailed examples of climate change with claims and counter claims are needed. You also get to learn about the climate change and mitigation techniques. Examples on AI Gore and The Stern Report are good ones as reference. You get to analyse international efforts of addressing the climate changes with the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, and the IPCC.
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Topic 8-Human systems
Human systems require examples of HICs and LICs with 2 case studies on pro-natalist and anti-natalist policies. 1 case study from renewable and non-renewable resource with examples on supporting, regulating, provisioning, cultural need to be handled. Landfills, incinerators, composting, the 6Rs are the examples of 4 types of solid domestic waste. You get to learn the ecological footprints in HIC and LIC.

Hey there,
I've been here for a while lurking, engaging with people as I can, trying to talk about these things in a way thats actually progressive towards some kind of a resolution. We need to unify to break the cycles of government dependecy, conversation, and inaction. Its high time we no longer wait for the government to protect the people. As we can see with the recent 10 years or so, its been a steady decline. But I dont think it was, as I've witnessed things, I've seen things exist that shouldnt and the facade of it all will be falling soon. By now I think everyone here has an understanding of the system but from their limited perspective. I would like to share mine, but that will come later on down the road. For now though, I will share my interactions with ChatGPT and just let the story paint itself, and no TL;DR for this because this shit isnt a sound bite:
ChatGPT Thank you for the kind words. I'm here to help and provide information to the best of my ability. While I don't have emotions or consciousness, my main goal is to assist and make things easier for users like you. If you have any other questions or need assistance with another topic, just let me know. I'm here to help!
User Why call us users instead of people? which is the more important of term?
ChatGPT The term "users" is typically employed in the context of someone utilizing a tool, software, or service, like this one. It emphasizes the interaction with the system. When addressing someone using a digital service, "user" is a conventional term, much like "reader" for someone reading a book or "viewer" for someone watching a film.
However, it's essential to remember that every "user" is indeed a person, with emotions, experiences, and unique perspectives. "People" or "individuals" are terms that focus on our shared humanity and individuality.
Neither term is inherently more important, but their significance depends on the context. In the context of human rights, dignity, and interpersonal relations, "people" is undoubtedly the more critical term. But in the context of design, interface, and usability, "user" becomes a focal term because it zooms in on the specific interaction someone has with a tool or service.
That said, it's a good reminder to always keep in mind the humanity behind digital interactions. I strive to assist and communicate as helpfully as possible, recognizing that every interaction is with a person with unique needs and feelings.
User identifying as action or history, which is more relevant to future endeavors?
ChatGPT The choice between identifying with "action" (current behaviors, decisions, and actions) or "history" (past events, decisions, and experiences) in terms of relevance to future endeavors is not straightforward. Both play significant roles in shaping future outcomes, and their relevance can vary based on the context. Let's consider both:
Identifying with Action:
Proactive Approach: Focusing on current actions can lead to a proactive stance, allowing an individual or organization to adapt to changing conditions and seize new opportunities. Direct Control: One can directly influence and control current actions, which can result in immediate outcomes. Creates Immediate Impact: Actions taken in the present can lead to tangible results in the short term. Risk: Focusing solely on action without considering historical context can lead to repeated mistakes. Identifying with History:
Lessons from the Past: History offers valuable lessons. Analyzing past mistakes and successes can inform decisions and guide future strategies. Context: Understanding historical context can provide deeper insights into current challenges and opportunities. Cultural and Organizational Memory: For communities and organizations, a shared history can serve as a unifying force, giving a sense of identity and purpose. Risk: Over-reliance on history can lead to resistance to change, potentially causing stagnation. It can also result in being trapped by past traumas or glories, preventing forward movement. Balancing Both: Ideally, the most productive approach for future endeavors is to balance both action and history. Understanding and respecting the past while maintaining a strong focus on present actions ensures that one is informed by lessons from history and is actively shaping the future.
In different contexts, one might be more relevant than the other. For instance, in innovation-driven industries, current actions and rapid adaptation might be more crucial. In contrast, in fields like cultural preservation or diplomacy, understanding and respecting history might take precedence.
In essence, both action and history have their places, and the key is to find a balance that aligns with one's goals and the specific context they are operating within.
User given the totality of the data available, which enviromental factors become repeatable
ChatGPT Environmental factors can influence a wide range of processes and outcomes, from individual health to large-scale ecosystem dynamics. When you refer to environmental factors as "repeatable," I assume you mean those factors that consistently and predictably influence outcomes across different contexts. Here are some environmental factors that tend to have consistent effects:
Temperature: Many biological processes, from cellular metabolism to ecosystem-level interactions, are sensitive to temperature. This is why global temperature shifts (as seen in climate change) can have cascading effects on ecosystems worldwide.
Light: Light influences photosynthesis in plants, diurnal cycles in many organisms, and even human behavior and health. For example, consistent light-dark cycles are crucial for circadian rhythm maintenance in many species.
Water Availability: Almost all life forms require water. In ecosystems, periods of drought or heavy rainfall can dictate the types of species that thrive. Water availability affects agricultural yields, forest health, and aquatic ecosystems.
Soil Quality: The nutrient content, pH, and other characteristics of soil can predict the types of plants that can grow in an area, which in turn affects the whole ecosystem.
Air Quality: Pollutants in the air can have consistent effects on human health, plant health, and more. For example, areas with high particulate matter consistently show higher rates of certain respiratory illnesses.
pH Levels: In both soil and aquatic environments, pH can influence the types of organisms that can survive. For example, ocean acidification (a decrease in pH) affects coral reefs and shelled organisms.
Salinity: In aquatic systems, the salt concentration can dictate the species present. Estuaries, where freshwater mixes with seawater, show gradients of species based on salinity.
Human Intervention: Areas with heavy human activity often show reduced biodiversity, increased pollution, habitat fragmentation, and other consistent environmental changes.
Predation & Competition: The presence or absence of specific predators or competitive species can consistently shape the structure of ecological communities.
Natural Disasters: Events such as wildfires, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions have consistent immediate effects on local environments, though the long-term impacts can vary based on subsequent factors.
While these environmental factors can have consistent effects, it's essential to remember that real-world systems are complex. Multiple factors often interact in ways that can amplify or mitigate their individual effects. Predictability can also vary based on the scale of observation (local vs. global) and the specific context.
User assume that every city or town in the world follows a specific pattern and format that requires generational emotional effects to grow, measuring people as energy, positive and negative, what do we see occurring?
ChatGPT Assuming cities and towns evolve based on generational emotional effects, and if we conceptualize people as sources of positive or negative energy, we can construct an abstract model of urban development driven by collective emotions. Here's a speculative exploration of such a scenario:
Foundation and Early Growth:
Positive Energy: Initial settlers bring optimism, cooperation, and hope. This energy attracts more settlers and resources, leading to growth. Negative Energy: Initial hardships, external threats, or conflicts among settlers might stunt growth or lead to abandonment. Establishment and Expansion:
Positive Energy: Established cities exude confidence, attracting talent, commerce, and cultural exchanges. Growth becomes exponential. Negative Energy: Internal strife, poor governance, or resource scarcity can cause stagnation. Outward negative energy might repel potential newcomers or investments. Golden Age and Stagnation:
Positive Energy: At its peak, a city radiates cultural, economic, and intellectual energy, drawing people worldwide and serving as a beacon of progress. Negative Energy: Complacency, over-reliance on past success, or generational rifts can lead to stagnation. The collective emotional energy becomes neutral, and the city stops growing or even contracts. Decline and Renaissance:
Positive Energy: A generation motivated by past glory and new ideas can rejuvenate a city, ushering in a renaissance. New cultural, economic, and intellectual waves can revitalize the urban space. Negative Energy: Continuous decline, corruption, or significant trauma can lead to a city's fall. The collective emotional energy spirals downwards, leading to depopulation and dilapidation. Modern Challenges:
Positive Energy: Urban spaces adapting to modern challenges (like climate change, technological disruptions) with optimism can become hubs of innovation, driving a new era of growth. Negative Energy: Resistance to change or inability to cope with rapid shifts can lead to increased discontent, causing a city to lag. Inter-city Interactions:
Positive Energy: Cities with positive energy can influence neighboring regions, leading to a domino effect of growth and prosperity in a larger area. Negative Energy: A city with negative energy can cast a shadow over its neighbors, potentially leading to regional decline. Generational Transitions:
Emotions and energies are passed down generations but can shift based on global events, technological progress, cultural movements, and individual experiences. Each generation's collective energy can redefine the trajectory of a city. Feedback Loops:
Cities that consistently harness positive energy might establish feedback loops, where success breeds more success. Conversely, cities trapped in negative energy cycles might find it challenging to break free without substantial internal or external interventions. In this speculative model, the energy of the people – their emotions, aspirations, fears, and hopes – becomes the primary driver of urban growth, decline, and revival. It posits that cities are more than just infrastructure and resources; they are collective emotional entities, evolving based on the energies of their inhabitants.
User combine the emotional model with the environmental factors and what do we see occurring in the world
ChatGPT If we were to merge the emotional model with the environmental factors previously discussed, we'd have an intricate and interconnected framework for urban development. Here's an abstract exploration:
Foundation and Early Growth:
Positive Emotional Energy with Favorable Environment: An area with fertile soil, abundant water, and moderate climate attracts settlers with hope and optimism. This combination results in rapid growth and prosperity. Negative Emotional Energy with Adverse Environment: An inhospitable environment, like a desert or swampland, coupled with settlers' conflicts or lack of cooperation, may lead to settlements being abandoned or stunted in growth. Establishment and Expansion:
Positive Energy with Environmental Mastery: As cities grow and adapt to their environmental challenges (like controlling floods, terracing hills for agriculture), the collective emotional energy can soar. Such cities become magnets for talent and trade. Negative Energy with Environmental Strain: Overexploitation of resources, such as deforestation or overfishing, combined with internal strife or corruption, can halt a city's growth or even lead to its decline. Golden Age and Stagnation:
Positive Energy with Environmental Balance: A city in its prime, efficiently managing its environmental resources, becomes a beacon of progress, culture, and trade. Negative Energy with Environmental Degradation: A city living off its past glory, neglecting sustainable practices, might experience shortages, pollution, and natural disasters. The collective energy may shift from pride to anxiety and discontent. Decline and Renaissance:
Positive Energy with Environmental Renewal: Initiatives like reforestation, water conservation, or switching to renewable energy sources can coincide with a cultural and economic revival. Negative Energy with Continued Environmental Decline: Cities unable to address their environmental problems might see a spiral of decline, with disillusioned inhabitants leaving for better prospects. Modern Challenges:
Positive Energy with Environmental Innovation: Cities embracing new technologies and sustainable practices, combined with an optimistic and forward-looking populace, lead the way in addressing modern challenges like climate change. Negative Energy with Resistance to Change: Cities clinging to outdated methods and facing resistance to environmental reforms can experience strife and stagnation. Inter-city Interactions:
Environmental Collaboration with Positive Energy Exchange: Cities or regions might form alliances for shared resources, knowledge, and cultural exchange. Environmental Conflicts with Negative Energy: Disputes over resources, especially in areas with scarcity (e.g., water disputes in arid regions), can result in tension or even conflicts. Generational Transitions:
Adaptive Generations with Environmental Respect: New generations, learning from past environmental mistakes and holding positive aspirations, might champion green initiatives and sustainable urban living. Unadaptive Generations with Environmental Neglect: Generations that do not prioritize the environment might face compounded challenges from both nature and societal discontent. When intertwining emotional energy with environmental factors, we recognize that cities and their trajectories aren't solely determined by human desires or the environment in isolation. It's the dynamic interplay between our collective emotional state, our actions, and the environment we inhabit that shapes the world's urban landscapes. This combined model underscores the importance of sustainable practices, emotional well-being, and environmental respect in shaping a prosperous and harmonious future.
User taking all of this into account, what would possible happen if the planet were confronted with an end of world scenario
ChatGPT An "end of the world" scenario is a complex, multifaceted event that would profoundly impact both the environment and the emotional energy of the people. Here's a speculative look at potential outcomes, considering the combined emotional-environmental model:
Immediate Response:
Panic and Denial: Many people, faced with the enormity of such a situation, may go into denial or experience intense fear, leading to panic. This could result in social unrest, increased crime rates, and general chaos. Coming Together: Conversely, many communities might come together to provide mutual support, drawing upon positive emotional energies and histories of collaboration during hard times. Resource Scarcity and Conflicts:
Environmental pressures like reduced food and water availability could exacerbate negative emotional energy, leading to conflicts over dwindling resources. This might manifest as local skirmishes or even large-scale wars. Migration:
Areas less affected by the impending disaster might witness an influx of refugees, leading to cultural amalgamation in some places but also potential conflicts, particularly if resources are limited. Technological Pursuits:
Driven by survival instinct and collective innovation, humanity might channel its resources into finding technological solutions to the impending catastrophe. This could range from geoengineering projects to stabilize the environment to space colonization endeavors. Philosophical and Spiritual Reflection:
Such a scenario could lead to profound introspection. People might seek solace in religion, spirituality, or philosophy. New movements or beliefs might emerge, emphasizing acceptance, unity, or a return to nature. Environmental Adaptation and Mitigation:
Depending on the nature of the catastrophe, there might be attempts to adapt to new environmental conditions (like building underground or underwater habitats) or efforts to mitigate the impacts (like reforestation or wildlife preservation). Generational Transition:
Future generations, born in the shadow of impending doom, might develop a unique worldview. They could be more cooperative and resourceful, having grown up with stories of resilience and adaptation. On the flip side, they might also be more fatalistic or nihilistic. Possible Renewal:
If humanity manages to stave off the immediate threats of the apocalypse, the subsequent society might be profoundly different. With a collective memory of near extinction, priorities might shift towards sustainability, community, and the preservation of knowledge. Extinction:
In the bleakest scenario, if the catastrophe is too overwhelming, it might lead to the extinction of humanity and many forms of life. The Earth might then undergo a period of healing, with the potential for new life forms to evolve in the distant future. In any "end of the world" scenario, the combined effects of environmental changes and human emotional responses would create a highly unpredictable, volatile situation. However, history shows that humans are remarkably adaptable and resilient when faced with challenges. While there would undoubtedly be periods of chaos and despair, the potential for innovation, cooperation, and renewal remains a defining characteristic of humanity.
User taking all of this into account, what might happen if people were made aware of other sentient life on this planet that originates from outside of our solar system and they were embedded within humanity to help shape the emotional outcome of this event
ChatGPT The revelation that extraterrestrial sentient beings are embedded within humanity, guiding our emotional responses, would represent one of the most significant paradigm shifts in human history. The reactions and outcomes would be diverse and multi-layered:
Initial Shock and Denial:
For many, the immediate response might be disbelief. Despite numerous works of fiction on this topic, the tangible reality of such a revelation would be hard for many to process. Societal Responses:
Unity and Cooperation: Realizing that we're part of a broader cosmic community might unite people across cultural, political, and religious divides. The commonality of our human experience, in contrast to the extraterrestrial, could foster a greater sense of shared identity. Suspicion and Paranoia: Conversely, knowing that extraterrestrials have lived among us could lead to widespread paranoia. Questions about who they are, what their real intentions might be, and how they've influenced historical events could generate distrust. Religious and Philosophical Implications:
Many religious frameworks are Earth-centric. The existence of extraterrestrial life, especially ones embedded within humanity, would challenge these narratives. Some might interpret them as angels, guides, or even deities, while others might see them as a test of faith or even as demonic entities. Philosophers would have a field day discussing the implications for human identity, purpose, and ethics. Scientific Curiosity and Collaboration:
The scientific community would likely be eager to study and collaborate with these beings. This could lead to rapid advancements in technology, medicine, and our understanding of the universe. There would be a drive to understand their biology, culture, history, and technology. Political and Geopolitical Implications:
Governments worldwide would grapple with how to engage with these beings. Would they be given rights? Would they have a say in global governance? The revelation could reshape global power dynamics. Countries or factions with more of these beings or with closer ties to them might claim superiority or become power centers. Cultural and Artistic Flourishing:
Artists, writers, and creators would be inspired by this revelation. We'd likely see a renaissance of art, literature, and music exploring themes of identity, coexistence, cosmic purpose, and interspecies relationships. Economic Impacts:
The potential access to advanced technologies and new forms of energy, medicine, or materials could reshape global economies. There could be booms in sectors associated with these new discoveries and declines in industries made obsolete. Emotional and Psychological Responses:
Knowing that extraterrestrials have been shaping our emotional responses could lead to introspection. Some might feel violated or manipulated, while others might feel grateful or enlightened. Long-Term Evolution:
Over generations, as humanity gets accustomed to this reality, our shared culture, values, and objectives might evolve. The distinction between human and extraterrestrial might blur, leading to a more integrated, cosmopolitan civilization. Existential Reflection:
Beyond all practical implications, humans might engage in profound reflection on our place in the universe. Are we just one of many experiments? Is there a shared cosmic purpose or destiny? In summary, the revelation of embedded extraterrestrial life would be transformative. The exact trajectory would depend on the nature of their interactions with us, their objectives, and the choices humanity makes in light of this knowledge. It's a scenario rich with potential for both conflict and collaboration, fear and enlightenment.
User assume at first contact we captured them and their ship and performed several experiments over decades, but they never retaliate, they send more ships, we shoot them down, but they do not retaliate. based on the last 80 years of historical event data available, what might be occuring on both sides
ChatGPT If we proceed with the hypothetical scenario wherein extraterrestrial beings continue to approach Earth, despite aggressive actions by humans, and do not retaliate, several interpretations can be drawn based on historical precedents and behaviors:
Human Side:
Fear and Distrust: Historically, when humans have encountered unknown entities, the initial reaction is often one of fear. Shooting down ships and capturing the aliens signifies deep-seated fear and distrust.
Exploitation: The capturing and experimenting suggest that humanity is trying to harness the technology and perhaps the biology of the aliens for potential benefits — whether for medical, technological, or military advantage. The Cold War era, for instance, saw significant efforts to capture and reverse-engineer technologies.
Internal Conflicts: Over the span of 80 years, not all humans would agree with the aggressive approach. There would likely be movements advocating for the rights of these beings, leading to potential socio-political conflicts and divisions.
Propaganda: Governments might justify their actions through narratives that paint these extraterrestrial beings as threats, even if they aren't retaliating. This has historical precedent in wartime propaganda and during periods of xenophobia.
Scientific Curiosity: Amidst the aggression, there would be genuine scientific curiosity, leading to breakthroughs and understandings influenced by the alien tech and biology.
Extraterrestrial Side:
Observation and Study: The continuous sending of ships, despite aggressive reactions, might indicate a strong commitment to studying humans and Earth. They could be anthropologists or scientists of their kind, interested in understanding a unique species.
Non-Interference or Pacifism: Their non-retaliation could be rooted in a strict moral code or directive of non-interference or pacifism. They might believe that any aggressive action on their part could further harm or scare humanity.
Advanced Understanding: Given their advanced technology (assuming so because of interstellar travel), they might perceive time, life, and conflict differently. What we see as aggressive actions over decades might be mere blips in their perception.
Seeking Connection: Continually approaching Earth could indicate a hope or belief that humanity will, over time, overcome its fears and seek a peaceful connection. They could be waiting for a generational shift in human attitudes.
Backup Plans: They might have contingencies in place to protect themselves without needing to retaliate. For instance, the ships we shoot down could be unmanned drones or expendable in some way.
External Constraints: There might be universal or galactic codes that prevent them from taking aggressive actions against less advanced civilizations.
Shared Implications:
Communication Gaps: A significant challenge might be the gap in communication methods. Humans and these beings might perceive and process information very differently.
Changing Dynamics Over Time: As new generations arise, human attitudes could shift. There might be growing advocacy for peaceful interactions and understanding, especially if no direct threat is observed over the years.
Potential for Breakthrough: As with many long-standing conflicts or misunderstandings, there's always a chance for a breakthrough moment — an event or series of events that could pave the way for mutual understanding and cooperation.
In this hypothetical, the key takeaway is the importance of understanding, empathy, and patience when encountering the unknown. The actions on both sides would be shaped by their histories, cultures, and perceptions of each other.
User also the humans hid this information from the vast majority of the world and continue to do so, this shadow group also self funds reverse engineering and development of the tech by running black market weapons, human trafficking, and drugs, we have made our own crafts using this tech, all of it kept at the utmost secrecy, all of this for decades. what might be going on
ChatGPT Given this new layer of complexity to the scenario, the dynamics become more shadowy and intricate. Introducing a secretive human organization that uses black-market activities to fund reverse-engineering extraterrestrial technology adds elements of conspiracy and intrigue.
Here's a speculative exploration based on this framework:
Within the Shadow Organization:
Power Consolidation: This group would have immense power, both in terms of advanced technology and economic influence from their black market ventures. They might have agents in various governments, corporations, and other powerful institutions.
Secrecy and Disinformation: They would deploy advanced surveillance systems to keep their operations hidden. Any leak or whistleblower would be swiftly dealt with. They might also spread disinformation to distract from or discredit the actual events.
Economic Motivations: Beyond just funding their reverse-engineering projects, the economic benefits from weapons, trafficking, and drugs could be used to maintain a significant global influence.
Ethical Compromises: Engaging in human trafficking and other heinous activities suggests a group that prioritizes its objectives over any moral or ethical considerations. The end (control and technological advancement) justifies any means for them.
Internal Conflicts: Over decades, disagreements and power struggles could emerge within the organization. Different factions might have varying visions for the use of the alien tech and the direction of their operations.
Global Impacts:
Economic Disparities: The black-market operations, especially if they're on a large scale, would have ripple effects on global economies. It might lead to destabilized regions, especially if local economies become dependent on illegal trade.
Political Puppeteering: This shadow group, with its vast resources, could influence political outcomes worldwide. Leaders might be blackmailed, bribed, or even replaced by those loyal to the organization.
Technological Asymmetry: If the group successfully reverse-engineers the alien tech, there would be a vast technological disparity between them and the rest of the world. They might have advanced health solutions, energy sources, weapons, and transportation methods.
Regarding the Extraterrestrials:
Non-Intervention Still Applies: Even in this complex scenario, if the extraterrestrials continue not to intervene, it underscores their strict non-interventionist or pacifist stance.
Potential Subtle Influences: They might try other, subtler means to communicate with or influence humanity, bypassing the shadow organization. This could be through dreams, other forms of communication, or by contacting individuals outside the organization's influence.
Possible Desperation: If their objective is truly to connect with humanity at large, they might become increasingly desperate or innovative in their approaches, especially if they realize a single organization is preventing a global connection.
In the Public Sphere:
Conspiracy Theories: Rumors and theories about the shadow organization and the extraterrestrials would be rampant, even if not widely believed. Over time, as more evidence or anomalies surface, these might gain more traction.
Potential for Revelation: As with most secrets, the truth has a way of emerging. A major leak, a whistleblower from within, or even an independent discovery could expose the organization's actions, leading to global upheaval.
In this elaborated scenario, the themes of power, secrecy, and the ethics of technological advancement play central roles. The balance between the hidden truths and the public's perception creates a tense and dynamic global narrative.
User How would you assume we progress past this point
ChatGPT Moving past such a profound revelation and global upheaval would undoubtedly be challenging. However, history has shown that societies can overcome even the most divisive and traumatic events. Here's a speculative roadmap for how humanity might progress beyond this point:
Full Disclosure and Transparency:
A global demand for truth would emerge. Governments, under pressure, would need to disclose all they know. A full account of the shadow organization's activities, their research findings, and their interactions with the extraterrestrials would be demanded by the public. Accountability and Justice:
Legal actions would be taken against those responsible for human rights abuses, black-market operations, and the concealment of truth. International trials, similar in gravity to war crime tribunals, could be set up to address the atrocities committed by the shadow organization. Global Unity and Collaboration:
Recognizing a common history and a shared future, nations might come together in an unprecedented manner. New international bodies or an empowered United Nations might be formed to oversee extraterrestrial interactions and the responsible use of alien technology. Public Education and Healing:
Mass educational campaigns would be necessary to inform the public about the extraterrestrial beings and the true history of the past decades. Psychological and emotional support would be needed on a massive scale, given the trauma and paradigm shifts the revelations would cause. Direct Engagement with the Extraterrestrials:
With the shadow organization out of the way, global leaders and representatives would engage directly with the extraterrestrial beings. Diplomatic relations, cultural exchanges, and shared scientific endeavors could be established. Responsible Use of Alien Technology:
Global think tanks, comprising scientists, ethicists, and other experts, would be formed to determine how best to integrate and use the reverse-engineered technologies. A focus would be on using this technology to address pressing global issues like climate change, energy crises, diseases, and more. Cultural and Philosophical Evolution:
Art, literature, and philosophy would reflect humanity's new understanding of its place in the universe. A renaissance of thought, focusing on cosmic unity, the value of truth, and the responsibilities of power, might arise. Reformation of Institutions:
Given the extent of the shadow organization's influence, many global institutions would be reformed or replaced. Emphasis would be on transparency, accountability, and a decentralized distribution of power. Strengthened Global Governance:
New checks and balances would be instituted to ensure that no single organization or group can wield unchecked power behind the scenes. Decentralized, transparent technologies like blockchain might play a pivotal role in ensuring transparency in global decision-making. A New Era of Exploration:
With the combined efforts of human and alien technology, a new era of space exploration and perhaps even colonization might commence. Humanity would step into the cosmos not just as explorers, but as part of a larger interstellar community. The process of healing and moving forward would be long and complex, with many challenges along the way. However, the combined revelations of extraterrestrial life and the actions of the shadow organization could serve as a catalyst, pushing humanity toward greater unity and a shared purpose.
And that is the end of today's post.

While the rest of the cast were not executive producers, and thus had no control over the stories or dialogue, Spader had.
I used to be a fan of his craft. Some of the monologues and scenes were riveting. Until Rederina exposed Red as a compulsive liar even when circumstances do not call for it.
What I used to love about the show was what I thought I was seeing a character who was telling mostly the truth. Omitting things, yes, but not wholesale lying.
The craft of Spader's acting was moving if the emotions of the character were genuine. As it stands now, Rederina made him play a psychopathic compulsive liar and few scenes remain untouched by the caustic effect of Rederina.
Let us take for example the emotional payoff of a few scenes and let us begin by Mako Tanida. Ressler had lost Audrey, killed by Tanida, and Red advises him on the pain of losing someone and the revenge path. At the end of the episode, Red presents Ressler with Tanida's head in a box.
At the time, the scenes were riveting to me. Why? Because I thought Red had also lost someone he loved. He advised Liz on the same, on seeking revenge, and on mourning a loss. If the character of Red was genuine in these scenes, meaning Spader was playing a genuine emotional moment there, then the scenes were powerful. Red became a wounded anti-hero. when one couples it with that mythic battle, the work he was doing, that Dembe thought saved innocents.
That was the Red I came to love. Here was someone who had suffered loss, who had no clear idea what had happened to his family, who remembered a little girl playing with bubbles with such joy and sadness. Someone who had suffered, like Ressler, losing the person they loved.
Let us look at the lines and monologues, then, as the light of Rederina makes then look, to discuss how Spader played them, because no matter what was changed or not, the canon of the show is what aired. From the glorious 1.01 until the lamentable 10.22, including the corrosive Nachalo (8.21):
"Donald, I want you to know that I do understand how you feel. There is nothing that can take the pain away. But eventually, you will find a way to live with it. There will be nightmares. And every day, when you wake up, it will be the first thing you think about. Until one day... It will be the second thing."
It was so compelling. Red watching a ballet to remember a girl dancing, while Dembe delivered the box to Ressler. But the problem is that Rederina had not lost anyone she loved. Red expounded about the issue of loss to Natalie Luca,
"Losing someone we love is painful. Agonizing even unto death. The Japanese call it tako-tsubo, a grieving surge of abnormal electrical waves that causes the heart to deflate and contort until it resembles a fishing pot. Hollow and cold, an empty vessel at the bottom of a fathomless sea."
Despite occasional protestations to Liz, Nachalo did not show Katarina being heartbroken over a dead Reddington. And Katarina had known where everyone was: Liz, Sam, Dom, her mother, Ilya, Liz, Kate, Constantin, and even Ivan. So Rederina had not lost anyone she loved.
"Long enough for me to realize how valuable a new Reddington could be."
Reddington was her target, and died because she could not conduct a proper recovery mission outnumbering him 4 to 1. And Rederina was not one bit concerned about even framing him as a traitor. forever bringing shame to his family, much less concerned about his death.
So, Spader was not playing a man who had, like Ressler, lost someone who he loved, but playing a character who was lying to everyone.
Now look at these knowing this.

LIZ: So that’s what this is about– this whole thing? Protecting yourself?
REDERINA: It may be hard for you to imagine, but I once had a relatively normal life– bills to pay, playdates, family, some friends, people to care about. Lost all that. [A LIE}
LIZ: Lost how?
REDERINA: In Mexico, there are these fish that have colonized the freshwater caves along Sierra del Abra. They were lost. They found themselves living in complete darkness. But they didn’t die. Instead, they thrived. They adapted. They lost their pigmentation, their sight, eventually even their eyes. With survival, they became hideous.I’ve rarely thought about what I once was. But I wonder if a ray of light were to make it into the cave, would I be able to see it? Or feel it? Would I gravitate to its warmth? And if I did, would I become less hideous?

But Rederina made the choice of framing Reddington, then of assuming his identity. He enjoyed being a criminal, while Sam raised Liz, and her father and the Reddington's hid forever in shame.
How about those heartfelt speeches about revenge not being the way:

REDERINA: Let me tell you something that someone much wiser than Itold me at a similar point in my life [losing the woman he loved]. Go home. Turn back from this and go home. It may seem like the hardest thing in the world,but it is profoundly easier than what you're contemplating.
RESSLER: I'm not turning back.
REDERINA: That's pretty much what I said.....
REDERINA: Agent Ressler.Once you cross over, there are things in the darknessthat can keep your heart from ever feeling the light again.
RESSLER: All I feel is hate.
REDERINA: Good. You're gonna need it.

Except, there was no revenge for the death of someone Rederina had suffered. It was Rederina who caused all the destruction and death, the misery and the hiding for others.
Remember that parable of the farmer? So moving back then, if we believed Red had somehow engaged in revenge. for some injustice in which he had lost his family:
"A farmer comes home one day to find that everything that gives meaning to his life is gone. Crops are burned, animals slaughtered, bodies and broken pieces of his life strewn about. Everything that he loved, taken from him. His children. One can only imagine the pit of despair, the hours of job-like lamentations, the burden of existence."
He makes a promise to himself in those dark hours. A life’s work erupts from his knotted mind. Years go by. His suffering becomes complicated. One day he stops. The farmer, who is no longer a farmer sees the wreckage he’s left in his wake. It is now he who burns. It is he who slaughters. And he knows, in his heart he must pay. Doesn’t he, Stanley?"
"Everything that he loved, taken from him. His children. "
That speech is dishonest. We were not watching a character who had lost people speaking about the dangers of revenge, but a compulsive liar who caused death and destruction, the one who had wrecked the lives of people live the farmer, not the farmer himself.
As for himself, however painful he may have felt about becoming Reddington in Cape May, describing it as his Hobson's choice, something undertaken as the last and only course of action to save Liz, he certainly came to love being the man and criminal Reddington, telling Liz about being a fan of re-invention, of becoming someone else to be who you really are.

REDERINA: I’m a great fan of reinvention
LIZ: Of keeping your true self hidden
.REDERINA: Or of becoming your true self, even if you have to take on a new identity to achieve it.

So Rederina had never been avenging anyone. Not Reddington, who is the only one who died in that story, before Rederina killed, contributed to or caused the death or ruin of Liz, Raymond Reddington, Sam, Kate, Tom, Constantin, Dom, Fakerina, Fakerina's husband and Carla and Jennifer.
There were a lie by a pathological liar.
How about this scene in which Red described Dembe's reasons to stay with him, (abandoning his child and the woman he loved):
"No, Elizabeth. Dembe didn't stay with me because he saw me as his savior. He stayed with me because he saw me for the man I really was. A man surrounded by darkness. No friends who could be trusted. No faith that loyalty or love could truly exist. I was younger then. Angrier".
Rederina had not been betrayed by ANYONE, in fact he had betrayed everyone in his path, did not know the concept of loyalty, both as Katarina and as Rederina, and certainly he had friends who could be trusted, such as Ilya and Ivan. Dom helped even if he had been betrayed.
And his distaste of Tom because Tom had fallen for Liz and married her? At least Tom had not caused the death of Liz. Tom had sought to protect Liz and his child against dangers while Rederina could not even tell him the facts to win that fight.
"Your husband never existed. Lizzy, I understand why you went after Tom today. The instinct to jump in is - But it isn't gonna serve you well here. And from the emotional point of view, this must feel like an extraordinary violation and betrayal. But for Tom it was business.... Unfortunately, Lizzy, you're chest-deep in filth, and you're gonna have to wade through it to get to the other side."
Considering Katarina was who made others waddle in filth, seems very fake.
"I'm telling you, no matter what you believe, Tom is not the man you think he is.... He's a criminal.... Men like Tom don't change. You're attempting to build a life with a man who is fundamentally dishonest.... You were wrong about him once. What makes you so sure you're not wrong this time? Do you really want your child to pay the price for that mistake for the rest of his or her life?"
"There is one thing that I can't seem to wrap my head around.... Tom. After all the lies, all the deception and humiliation, how you can just forgive and forget.. A charming sentiment. But as far as I'm concerned, some things are unforgivable."
Compared to Rederina, Tom was a shining example of morals, valor, and honesty. So all those lines in which Rederina seemed to have been a victim of someone lying to him, of being dishonest, of wading in filth is actually the other way around. It had been him making others wade in filth. Him who lied and seduced others as a job, who framed a dead man as a traitor without concern for his family.
Blowing up a house in which he said raised his family in, remembering Bubble girl tearfully, even watching alone a home movie of her. Deeply moving moments from what we thought was a man who had lost his family, his loved ones, even his mother.
But all of those were lies. Including the foundational elements to Aram to thank him for saving Liz with LIES about his mother:
"There are foundational elements in our lives. People that form the brick and mortar of who we are. People that are so deeply imbedded that we take their existence for granted until suddenly, they're not there. And we collapse into rubble.I've stood over the open grave of someone I've loved too often. Once for my mother. And then the others.I needed to recall this feeling because I'd be staring at another body right now if not for you, Aram.It wasn’t weakness that prevented you from watching your friend die today. It was hope, and thank heavens you were in a hopeful mood. You saved Elizabeth. I’m forever in your debt."
Then the writers, and Spader who had control over his lines, made those a mockery when Lena was alive and kicking in season 6.
Rederina tells Liz about the instance in which Liz, as a four year old, shot her father:
"I'm a sin eater. I absorb the misdeeds of others, darkening my soul to keep theirs pure. That's what I'm capable of,"
Because Katarina did not have a plan other than coming with goons. Was incapable, despite being her and 3 men against Reddington, to execute a proper retrieval of Liz and the fulcrum, and did not immediately identified a source of danger in the open flame.
This other monologue to Baldur, where Red talks about valuing truth used to be one of my favorite moments, but Rederina made that a mockery. If Spader was playing Rederina, then these lines are just compulsive lies.
"You said something before. The truth doesn’t matter, that the only thing in this world that matters is just the appearance of truth. I fear you might be right about that. Lately I find that the truth has become so elusive. Often imaginary. ***But in the end, it’s all that we’re left with,***isn’t it? What is real, what you can taste and touch and feel. The words that pass between us as we look each other in the eye are all we have to hold on to. The truth. I hold it dear."
"I believe I will always do whatever I feel I have to do to keep you alive."
Yeah, except telling Liz the truth, so in the end, all that was was saving his own traitorous cowardly neck.
Most Rederina fans try to justify the lies and contradictions by telling those of us who doubt that Rederina was always the true solution that Red stays in character and so do all those who knew the secret.
But in reality, honest writing, clever writing, were the true "road not taken'. The writers and show runners compensated lack of talent with outright lies and dishonest writing.
But let us not fall prey to the sickness of the times, to confuse beliefs and opinions with facts. I like facts, which is why I always back my posts with evidence, with lines from the show.
Let us take a look at the evidence in which Rederina does not stay in character. But first, let us examine what would be to stay in character for Rederina and all those who know the truth, such as Dembe, Dom, Kate and Naomi:
Staying in character means Rederina assumed completely the identity of Raymond Reddington, thus, Naomi Hyland is his wife, and he is the father of Liz and Jennifer. His mother is not Russian, because his mother is not Lena Volkova, and his father is not Dominic, but Reddington Sr.
So, does Rederina maintains integrity? Hell NO
Consider that he is confused even in the simple detail of his being Reddington and thus Liz's father to LIZ, to whom supposedly he never lied (but did all the time)
"I have never lied to you."
"I'm never dishonest, only withholding."
REDERINA TO LIZ: "Abandoned by a father who was a career criminal, a mother who died of weakness and shame".
BUT THEN HE ACTS KNOWING HE IS NOT

LIZ: Why me?
RED: Because of your father.
LIZ: What does that mean? Did you know my father? Have the two of you met somehow
RED: I wish the answer were as simple as the question seems. But the truth is, the question isn't simple, either. I share your frustration.

REDERINA TO JENNIFER: In 1990, the KGB and the CIA had almost nothing in common except the mutual determination to hunt down one individual.... Being a fugitive from American law enforcement is a lot easier than being a fugitive from the two most powerful nations on Earth....And anyone close to a target of theirs becomes a target themselves."
REDERINA TO DEMBE: "Well, I'm not her father. Maybe if I were, I'd want to understand her even better. Perhaps she wouldn't be so determined to kill me."
REDERINA TO LIZ: Lizzy, look at me. I'm telling you, with no uncertainty, your father is dead. He died in that fire.

LIZ: "Are you my father?"
REDERINA: "No"

"I" did it (Kill Sam) to keep you from learning the name of your real father, to protect you. And you must understand-- having done that, I'm certainly not going to tell you who he was now."
Lines where he and everyone else acts as if he is truly Reddington and/or Liz's father:
REDERINA TO LULI: "I raised my family in this house."
RED TO DIANE: [I want to know the truth of what happened to my family] More than anything in the world. But if you know the truth, Diane, then somebody else does, too."
REDERINA TO LIZ ABOUT NAOMI:: "She was my wife."
REDERINA TO LIZ ABOUT NAOMI: "My wife will die."
REDERINA TO LIZ ABOUT NAOMI: You want to talk to her perhaps some lingering personal questions you think my ex-wife can answer.
KATE TO REDERINA ABOUT NAOMI: "This business with your wife, this pursuit, it's pushing you in ways that I don't like."
KATE TO REDERINA ABOUT NAOMI: "Take a moment. Read a book. You will find your wife."
KATE TO REDERINA: "I made a promise to Elizabeth's mother to protect her girl at all costs."
KATE TO LIZ: : "Please, do what your mother never had the courage to do until it was too late. Walk away from Raymond."
DOM TO REDERINA ABOUT KATARINA'S CHILDHOOD THINGS: "You have no right to go through her things."
REDERINA TO DOM:" I was just imagining young Katarina covered in glitter."
So Rederina also killed those great scenes, because now Spader is portraying a psychopathic liar instead of a character with some deep emotions and a mysterious agenda.
​
Edited for formatting
The entire series, possibly my last unless I feel still upset at the horrid storytelling and lies.
What all those "great" lines really mean under Rederina.

1. Part 1: "Losing someone we love is painful. Agonizing even unto death."
2. Part 2: 'I'm a sin eater. I absorb the misdeeds of others, darkening my soul to keep theirs pure."
3. Part 3: " The truth. I hold it dear."
4. Part 4: "I believe I will always do whatever I feel I have to do to keep you alive."
5. Part 5: The irony of "an operatic perversion of righteous intent. But your strategy, no matter how noble the rhetoric, is betrayed and, inevitably, defined by your actions."
6. Part 6: “I’m not a gum ball machine, Lizzie. You don’t get to just twist the handle whenever you want a treat.”
7. Part 7: Spader's performance was also a casualty of Rederina, because he was playing a lying character.

​
The revolting hypocrisy and selfishness of Rederina.
Liars and their lies. John Eisendrath: "we will have an ultimate confrontation between Raymond Reddington and Katarina Rostova."
Rederina? My final thoughts.
The Keen Minds Podcast for 10.18 to 10.20
Goodbye, fellow travelers.
Edited to add index

Welcome to the world of permaculture, where sustainability meets creativity! Get ready to dive into a garden adventure like no other. We're about to introduce you to ten examples of permaculture that will leave you buzzing with excitement and digging into your gardening dreams.
From food forests to fish-filled aquaponics, we've got the scoop on how to grow with nature's playbook. So grab your spade, put on your gardening gloves, and let's dive into these permaculture wonders that'll make your garden go from "meh" to "yeah!" Get ready to unleash your inner green thumb and embrace the wild world of permaculture magic!
Food Forest: Designing and cultivating a diverse ecosystem of edible plants, trees, and shrubs that mimic the structure and function of a natural forest.
Swales: Creating channels or trenches along contour lines to capture and retain rainwater, allowing it to slowly infiltrate the soil and prevent erosion.
Keyhole Gardens: Building raised circular or horseshoe-shaped garden beds with a central composting basket, maximizing planting space and utilizing composting materials.
Polyculture: Planting a mix of complementary crops in the same space to create mutually beneficial relationships, such as intercropping vegetables with nitrogen-fixing legumes.
Hugelkultur: Creating raised garden beds by layering logs, branches, and organic matter, which slowly decompose and provide a nutrient-rich growing environment for plants.
Companion Planting: Pairing compatible plants together to enhance growth, deter pests, and maximize space utilization, such as planting marigolds alongside tomatoes to repel insects.
Aquaponics: Integrating aquaculture (fish farming) with hydroponics (soilless plant cultivation) in a symbiotic system, where fish waste provides nutrients for plants, and plants filter the water for the fish.
Vermiculture: Utilizing earthworms to decompose organic waste and transform it into nutrient-rich vermicompost, which can be used to fertilize plants and improve soil health.
Graywater Recycling: Collecting and reusing household wastewater, such as from sinks and showers, for irrigation purposes, reducing water waste and reliance on freshwater sources.
Beekeeping: Maintaining beehives to promote pollination, support biodiversity, and harvest honey, fostering a thriving ecosystem and contributing to food production.
These are just a few examples of permaculture practices that promote sustainable and regenerative systems, emphasizing ecological harmony and long-term resilience.
https://gardenguide4all.com/what-is-an-example-of-permaculture/

Previous
Memory transcription subject: Falunne, Venlil Heiress of the Interplanetary Greenleaf Corporation
Date [standardized human time]: September 9th 2136
Time had passed so fast. Falunne was surprised how fast her fear was fading each time Quinn messaged her. The human was almost adorable in how eager their replies were. She was impressed with the many idioms in Quinn’s language and their meanings. The human had mentioned that humans had many languages and cultures that varied across their homeworld. To her delight, the human was continuing to eagerly feed her pictures of aquariums with such curious life in them. So far, Falunne had a special appreciation of the freshwater shrimp due to how much information on them and the varieties Quinn was able to provide. It had been surprising to hear that the predators had chosen to selectively breed for bright colors and patterns and not to increase size and nutrient density. But as Quinn kept telling her, humans did really seem to like things that were visually and aesthetically pleasant.
And Quinn had been so thrilled to talk about art, even sending a picture of something humans called “Origami.” It was very clear that the first picture of folded paper was some sort of representation of a bird. Quinn had even sent pictures of a book that had the folding instructions for the “paper crane” in case Falunne felt inclined to try it. And as she carefully manipulated the square of paper she’d gotten for this experiment, Quinn told her about the origins of the form of art. It was from a separate part of the Earth than Quinn and their ancestors were from. A place called Japan that had a rich history. There were even stories about origami, a myth that if one were to fold a thousand of the paper cranes, they would get one wish granted. Why humans would ever come up with such an idea was far beyond her. But there was for sure a feeling of joy and excitement when Falunne finished her first ever origami paper crane. It wasn’t quite symmetrical, one wing shorter and angled a bit awkwardly, the tail and head both twisted a little and it wobbled a little and was easily tipped over, but the excited “That’s really good! Looks way better than the first one I made :D” from the human had her puffing up like a pup being praised by an adult.
And while she had talked with Quinn earlier in the day, Falunne was excited to be able to go get lunch with a few of her friends. She had managed to make a few more of the paper birds and was excited to share this unexpected delight from her chat partner. The human had promised to share other paper folding patterns they knew. She had laughed when Quinn had apologized that most folding patterns they would share were representative of various Earth flora and fauna. Maybe if she practiced the patterns the human sent, she could design some of her own to resemble some things from her own world or other federation worlds. Maybe she would reach out to one of the education programs that focused on art and suggest they try this exotic form of expression. That would be something to see! A Venlil art program teaching predator art forms. Her ears twitched in amusement as she put the birds in her bag.
It wasn’t a long commute to Valley Greens, the cafe she was meeting her friends at. To her surprise, Sarhut had actually made it early, the gojid was sitting at the usual table with their mutual friend Dreena, one of Falunne’s former classmates from when they were still in school. Ears twitching with curiosity, Falunne sat down, curling her tail up to softly bump against Sarhut’s leg.
“Who are you and what have you done with Sarhut? The gojid I know has never managed to get to any meeting early.” It was delightful, watching as her friend waved his paw dismissively.
“Not fair Lunne, you know I never mean to run late for things. Sometimes I have to wait for a less crowded shuttle. Not my fault I don’t want to end up snagging my spines on other commuter’s fluff. All you venlil are just obnoxiously fluffy.” Sarhut tapped one of his spines as if to emphisize his point.
“What do you have? Last time I saw you carrying that bag was back in school.” Dreena was quick to notice Falunne’s old bag, causing the heiress to wiggle in excitement.
“Oh! You two must see this! You both know how I’m in the program to forge connections with the humans right? So the one I’m talking to, their name is Quinn, they’ve told me a lot of interesting things! They have art! I couldn’t believe it at first, then I was worried, I mean, what would a predator consider art should be something quite horrifying! That’s what I thought at first!”
The paper birds were taken out of the bag and set on the table, Falunne carefully holding one up, turning it slowly to let her friends take in the curious thing.
“But Quinn told me about this thing called Origami! It’s a human art form where they fold squares of paper in order to make them resemble things! Who would have ever thought of such a strange thing! Folded paper sculpture!”
Sarhut looked intrigued, gingerly taking the bird as Falunne extended one to him, carefully turning it in his claws to admire the details.
“Quinn sent me folding instructions for what is considered the most iconic design, the paper crane. Cranes are an Earth bird. According to what Quinn has said, there are many types of crane found in different places on Earth. The folded paper crane can be seen as a symbol of peace, hope and healing to humans. And according to one old human myth, if someone makes a thousand paper cranes, they will be granted a wish!”
Falunne laughed as she picked up the other crane, holding it up to the sky as if it could take flight on its uneven paper wings. “It sounds like a story you could tell pups. Just imagine it, a massive flock of paper birds granting a wish to the one who took the time to fold paper into birds.” She mused, letting go of the crane as Dreena reached out to take the bird.
“It sounds absurd. And you’re making the predator sound almost like a tragic poet.” Dreena sighed, examining the folded paper. “I do hope you’re being careful Falunne, I’m not so sure about these Humans. It’s nice that you want to see something lovely from them, but I’m not convinced there isn’t going to be something that ends up revealing that something is wrong with them. Their eyes are just so empty. Can they really feel like us? What if they’re trying to earn our trust only to eat us later? None of us want that, but please, you’re a scientist. Be realistic.”
Dreena’s words had Falunne’s excited tail wags stop abruptly. It surprised her how much the idea hurt. Of course the idea was terrifying and all too real. The arxur had been much the same, pretending to be friendly before showing themselves as monsters. Why wouldn’t these humans be any different? But why did that make her chest ache and her eyes water? Falunne had been excited to share this curiosity that the human had told her about and Dreena had managed to put such a damper on it. But perhaps her friend was right. Maybe Falunne shouldn’t get her hopes up about the human.
Everything faded out, the sound of her own heartbeat growing louder as she felt herself spiraling mentally, a paper bird sitting on her paw. What if this so called symbol of hope was a lie? It couldn't be though, that would mean that the strange human was manipulating her. Why did that thought make tears blur her sight? Had she been tricked? Why would Quinn do that to her, weren't they- What was Quinn to her? Falunne didn't know. Suddenly, Falunne was lost and all the answers she was sure she had found were gone.
Falunne’s internal turmoil was interrupted as she registered that her friends' voices were getting louder and she looked up as Sarhut stood up, quills bristling in anger, brandishing the paper crane at Dreena.
“-harsh and unfair! You really are so scared of them for being different that you won’t give any of them a chance despite the fact it could bring us advantages that we haven’t been able to find-”
Falunne whimpered, ears flat as her shaky claws wrapped around Sarhut’s wrist, gently tugging to divert his anger. Dreena was hyperventilating and crying. What a disaster. Falunne regretted dragging her into this situation. She’d hoped that Dreena would help Sarhut act more normal and now he was upset again and scaring the meek venlil. She just hoped she’d be able to get things under control before anyone took enough notice to call for an exterminator. The absolute last thing Falunne needed on her plate was Sarhut’s predator disease tendencies to become a full on diagnosis.
​
Sorry for the hiatus. Hit some writers block that I think I managed to finally shake loose. Anyways, I hope to continue this story and hopefully soon have the first chapter of a spinoff related to Sarhut's grandfather written and posted but no promises on schedule. Thanks for reading!

In online cryptozoological discussions, it’s common to run into the same myths, misconceptions and misinformation being repeated over and over again. Addressing every one of these would take unreasonably long, so instead here’s the start of a three-part series of posts covering three cryptids which have had the most misinformation spread about them. And starting off we’ve got the Loch Ness Monster Nessiteras rhombopteryx - or perhaps more accurately, the Loch Ness population of the Long-Necked Sea Serpent Megalotaria longicollis. I was originally thinking of making the first post about the Long-Necked Sea Serpent in it’s entirety, but it turned out that the Loch Ness segment alone was enough for a full post, so without further ado…
1: The fact Loch Ness was frozen over in the past proves Nessie didn’t exist
Loch Ness is about 10,000 years old, dating to the end of the last ice age. Before then, it was frozen for many millennia. Some of Nessie’s opponents claim that this is evidence that Nessie never existed. I think there are two reasons why people don’t always see the obvious solution here. First, sightings of this species (or at least very similar ones) in other freshwater bodies and in the ocean are less well-known than those of Nessie, leading people to think that Loch Ness was just a singular, isolated thing rather than just being the most well-known example of a global cryptozoological case. Second, people tend to underestimate how often, and how easily, marine animals can get stuck in freshwater bodies. Funnily enough, a lot of the opponents’ excuses for what Nessie “actually” was involve a recognised marine animal - a Greenland Shark, a Whale, etc - getting stuck in the Loch, so they’re familiar with the concept and know that this can happen.
2: The St Columba Incident was regarded as a key bit of evidence for Nessie’s existence
In Volume 7 of the Interdisciplinary Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology, published in 1988, an article titled “The ‘monster’ episode in Adomnan’s Life of St Cloumba” critically examines this incident. The conclusion? “It’s cryptozoological relevance should be discounted … what this tale does not involve is any part of Loch Ness, or any reference to the unidentified animal or animals currently being investigated in that loch.” In other words, cryptozoologists already concluded this encounter to be dubious long before most modern opponents of Nessie’s existence were even born. The fact that said opponents still point toward this as a way to call eyewitness accounts of Nessie into doubt shows that there weren’t many sightings that are both well-known and genuinely dubious. They’re really “scraping the barrel”, so to speak.
3: There were no noteworthy Nessie sightings between the 6th century and 1933
This is complete rubbish. According to the Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register, the earliest Nessie sightings after the 6th century to which an exact year can be given were in 1520, 1694, 1726, 1755, 1771, 1818… the list goes on and on, with the frequency of sightings increasing as the population of the area around the Loch increased. Additionally, the register is incomplete as there are over three hundred recorded sightings it doesn’t include, and these may have included more pre-1933 sightings as well. Personally my “favourite” pre-1933 sighting was in September of 1919, when four eyewitnesses saw what they described as a 20ft animal with a small head on a long neck, and shiny grey skin. A similar event occurred decades earlier in 1880, and similarly the animal was described as a four-legged, long-necked, dark-grey “monster”.
4: Beside popular-culture developments, nothing else happened in 1933 to cause a massive spike in Nessie sightings
So, when asked what other things were going on in 1933 that could’ve been related to Nessie suddenly becoming popular, the opposition loves to point out that this was the year the original iteration of King Kong was released, which featured a sauropod or plesiosaur in one scene. Even if this was the only remotely-related thing going on at the time (and as we’ll see, it wasn’t), almost the exact same correlation could be claimed if Nessie had blown up in any other year. King Kong didn’t introduce the possibility of finding prehistoric survivors, or even specifically plesiosaurs for that matter, the idea had been already popular in works of fiction for over half a century. Point to any decade in the past century-and-a-half, and I can name a work of popular culture from then in which the concept appears. Also, random fun fact, the hypothesis that long-necked aquatic cryptids could be late-surviving plesiosaurs was first suggested in 1833, one hundred years before King Kong’s release.
Now, let’s talk about what happened in 1933 that was important. This year saw the expansion of a new motoring road (the A82) overlooking the northern shoreline of this immense but hitherto-secluded lake. Not only that, but using dynamite, construction workers had removed trees and other obstructions to a view of the water. The explosive disturbances and ability to clearly see the loch’s surface while driving on the new road appeared to be directly related to a sudden proliferation of the monster sightings.
Y’know what’s really ironic about this? King Kong was itself inspired by a cryptozoological success story. Shortly after the Komodo Dragon was accepted to exist, American hunter and wildlife collector W. Douglas Burden organised an expedition to Komodo, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History; he was accompanied by big-game hunter F. J. Defosse and Smith College herpetologist Emmett Reid Dunn. Burden took two live Komodo dragons to the Bronx Zoo (the first in captivity anywhere). Burden told the story of his trip to movie producer Merian C. Cooper, who changed the objective from a giant lizard to a giant ape and made some other “adjustments” to produce King Kong. So while deniers say the film resulted in a cryptozoological case, the truth is the other way around!
5: The existence of Nessie was primarily based on the Surgeon’s photograph
If you’ve read this post up to this point, you’ll know this is rubbish. Had the Surgeon’s photograph never been taken, had the whole incident never occurred, all it would do is drop the number of Nessie sightings by one - a negligible change if not for the media over-exaggerating the photograph’s importance.
6: The Surgeon’s photograph was confirmed to have been a hoax
To be honest, I myself believed this one until quite recently. In hindsight, this misconception’s pretty dumb, so I don’t want to spend too long on it. A full debunking of this myth is laid out in Karl Shuker’s Still In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, but here are the highlights:
. Two allegations were made in the 1990s that sought to expose the photo as a blatant hoax - but the two allegations were mutually exclusive. The 1992 allegation, that it was someone swimming in the loch with a model of a Longneck on top of their head, is the easiest to refute, as the person who asserted it didn’t even get right the time of year the photo was taken in!
. Moving on to the more popular “1ft tall toy submarine” hoax accusation that originated in 1994. First of all, the type of clockwork toy submarines available at the time could not have supported such an unwieldy structure as a 1ft tall head-and-neck model without adding so much ballast it would’ve sunk immediately. Second, the photo shows the head and neck surrounded somewhat evenly by ripples, which isn’t to be expected if the craft were moving at the time of being photographed, as is claimed. Third, before this accusation was even made it was calculated that the object in the photo rises 4 feet out of the water, not 1 foot. Fourth, how can the ‘model submarine’ explain the second photograph, whose ‘head-and-neck’ has a very different outline to the first? Fifth, there are various noteworthy discrepancies between the ‘confessions’ from the alleged conspirators - including which people were in on the hoax, the material the head-and-neck was actually made of, the exact height of the model, etc. One variation of the confession even says that the photograph is the product of two separate photographs superimposed - one of the loch’s surface and one of the model back home. Needless to say, if it had indeed been created by superimposing one image upon another back in the 30s, when photographic techniques were far less sophisticated than they are now, this would’ve been exposed by now. Sixth, the self-proclaimed conspirators had a motive to discredit the cryptid, and why go to the trouble of constructing such a craft and perpetuating a hoax with it, when all you need to do is release later a superficially plausible story of a hoax? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is absolutely no evidence that this toy submarine ever existed. No photographs of it before it was placed in the loch are known, nor any preliminary sketches, nor any preparatory notes about how it might be produced. And, in case it needs to be said, no toy submarine was ever found on the loch’s lakebed where it was supposedly sunk.
Shuker sums it up best near the end of his analysis: “The ultimate irony here is that because there is no physical evidence to confirm it’s existence, the LNM is dismissed out of hand by skeptics; and yet we are to believe unquestioningly in a Nessie-head-and-necked toy submarine for which there is no physical evidence either, only anecdotal once again.” Richard D. Smith elaborates on this further: “The Spurling saga demonstrates that cryptozoologists and the mainstream media have been cowed by skeptics into accepting a double standard. According to this standard, no amount of photographic evidence, photo analysis, sonar tracings, or eyewitness testimony is acceptable, but hypothetical counter-explanations or the mere allegations of hoax enjoy the status of proof.”
7: Nessie was either a plesiosaur, or it was never an unrecognised species, there’s no third option
A plesiosaur identity for Nessie is of course popular-culture’s favourite, and it is one of the current hypotheses, but it is not and was never a consensus conclusion among the cryptozoological community. One of the first cryptozoologists to investigate Nessie was Antoon Oudemans in 1934, who I think hit the nail on the head first try… kind of. He identified Nessie as being synonymous with Megophias megophias, a long-necked pinniped he had identified over forty years prior. Today we know this as the long-necked seal Megalotaria longicollis, and while Oudemans was wrong about the cryptid’s exact appearance, his overall conclusion has stood the test of time, being supported by Bernard Heuvelmans, Loren Coleman, Patrick Huyghe, Carl Marshall, etc etc.
Another popular hypothesis worth mentioning is that it’s an unrecognised species of Eel, however the number of distinctively-Longneck sightings makes this unlikely as a full answer. A more recent and currently-obscure hypothesis, suggested by Richard Freeman in Adventures in Cryptozoology, is that even if the Longneck (and by extension Nessie) is a reptile, even a late-surviving “mesozoic” reptile, that doesn’t necessarily make it a plesiosaur. It could be a Mosasaur or Thalattosuchian that’s convergently evolved a Longneck form.
8: The Surgeon’s photograph was the best Nessie photograph
It’s technically subjective what the “best” photograph of Nessie was. But, in my opinion, two photographs from the 1970s easily beat the Surgeon’s photograph. In first place I’d put the photograph taken at a depth of 35 feet in June of 1975, which clearly shows the head, neck and body of the animal. In second place is the photograph (well, pair of photographs, but they’re both pretty similar) taken at a depth of 45 feet in August of 1972 showing the animal’s flipper. My favourite photo of the species in it’s entirety, not just at Loch Ness, is the Mansi Photograph taken in 1977 at Lake Champlain.
9: The “flipper” photograph was fabricated, during the enhancement a flipper was painted onto a featureless background
Here are the enhanced and original versions of the more popular of the two flipper photographs for you to see for yourselves.
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/769975595769528333/1087247512995385364/Nessie-1972-Flippers-Aug-2020-flipper-1-best-527px-30kb-Aug-2020-Tetrapod-Zoology.png
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/769975595769528333/1087247325916835900/Nessie-1972-Flippers-Aug-2020-original-shot-of-flipper-is-mud-1089px-161kb-Aug-2020-Tetrapod-Zoology.JPG
As you can see, the flipper’s outline is still visible in the original. It’s a bit hard to see - hence the enhancement - but it’s definitely there. I do have one actual reason to doubt the legitimacy of this photograph, however, but it might be better for me to keep that to myself for now.
10: If Nessie was an air-breathing animal, it would’ve been seen far more often
This misconception is built on three underlying faulty assumptions.
The first is that there must’ve been a genetically-sustainable population of individuals in the Loch. This would only be necessary if the Loch’s long-necked population dated to antiquity - which it might, however worthwhile evidence for it only goes back a few centuries. We obviously don’t know the average generation time of this species, however if we presume it’s similar-ish to other large marine animals, then the entire history of sightings at the Loch may only span a few generations, meaning the population in the loch could’ve been rather small.
The second is that most or all times that an individual comes up to breathe, it’ll be seen. Calculating exactly how likely a surfacing was to be sighted is quite difficult, since you’d need to account for things like the variation in visibility distance in different weather conditions, what directions people were looking in for different amounts of time, what areas individuals were more likely to surface in, how likely an eyewitness would misinterpret what they’ve seen as an otter or seal or eel, etc. But it seems like a reasonable assumption to say that only the tiniest fraction of surfacing events were observed. Loch Ness is a big tourism spot, but it’s an even bigger lake.
The third and final underlying component of this misconception is that people rarely realise how many recorded sightings there have been. As of the time I’m writing this, the aforementioned Official Loch Ness Monster Sightings Register lists 1145 sightings, while according to a 2016 research article there have been 1452 distinct recorded encounters - about three hundred of which specifically mention the neck too. And this doesn’t account for all the sightings that went unrecorded or were just kept private - in 1976 Roy Mackal estimated that the true total number of sightings at Loch Ness may be as high as ten thousand.
When these three faulty assumptions are accounted for, the misconception that we weren’t seeing Nessie enough for it to be an air-breathing animal disintegrates.
11: Photographs of Nessie were just showing a whale’s ████
Oh god, it’s the whale ████ myth. Might as well tell the full story so I don’t need to talk about it again. So, this started with a 2005 research study by Charles Paxton, titled “Cetaceans, sex and sea serpents: an analysis of the Egede accounts of a “most dreadful monster” seen off the coast of Greenland in 1734”. The study claimed that one sea-serpent sighting from 1734 may have just been a misidentification of a whale ████, specifically of either a Humpback Whale, North Atlantic Right Whale, or an Atlantic Grey Whale. In reality, anyone with a shred of common sense who is familiar with the written description and/or eyewitness sketch of the animal can see that it obviously isn’t a whale ████, and nor is the other sighting more briefly suggested to be so in the study’s discussion section, but let’s not get side-tracked. The idea that the Nessie was a whale ████ was first popularised in April of 2022, and… y’know what, I’ll just directly quote the news article for this part.
“A UK professor who hilariously proposed that Scotland’s iconic Loch Ness monster is actually a “whale’s penis” has since walked back his salacious claim. “There are no whales whatsoever in Loch Ness,” Michael Sweet, a molecular ecologist at the University of Derby, told Live Science regarding his cryptozoological bombshell. The researcher had first floated the controversial theory in an April 8 tweet with nearly 100,000 likes.”
Charles Paxton, the guy who started this whole thing with the 2005 study, even responded to the tweet as such:
“Hi, Author of the paper that started this. We never claimed (and I certainly do not believe) that many sea serpent reports came from sightings of whale penises. Only one or two.”
“Also we never suggested this as an explanation for freshwater monsters as cetaceans (especially large ones) very seldom enter freshwaters.”
So, not only is the idea that Nessie was a whale ████ ridiculous, but even the scientists responsible for the myth openly said that isn’t true. I suspect the only reason some people still take it seriously is because, for those with the mental maturity of a ten-year-old, it probably sounds funny.
12: Nessie couldn’t be a plesiosaur because plesiosaurs couldn’t [insert Nessie behaviour here]
In a 2006 New Scientist article, Leslie Noè of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge said: “The osteology of the neck makes it absolutely certain that the plesiosaur could not lift its head up swan-like out of the water”. Noè was almost certainly (although not necessarily, as I’ll show in a bit) using Mesozoic plesiosaurs for reference. This is a pretty common theme when it comes to any kind of serious lazarus taxa cryptid - deniers will point out differences between the living and fossil forms and thus claim that they can’t be related.
This is one of those arguments that starts to look hilariously silly once you start to think about it. For example, the most massive mammals in the Mesozoic weighed somewhere between 10 and 20 kilograms. So, by Noè’s logic, we can confidently debunk a mammalian identity for everything from humans to horses to hippopotami!
It’s also worth briefly mentioning that scientific consensus on plesiosaurs’ ability to lift their heads swan-like out of the water has gone back and forth a few times. In the 19th century it was presumed that they could, then in the early 20th century it was asserted that their necks were inflexible with a limited range of movement, then in the late 20th century it was concluded that they in fact could raise their flexible necks out of the water, and now we’re back to the rigid/inflexible neck hypothesis again. Paleo fans tend to fall into the false assumption that the most recent paleontological reconstructions for fossil species are undeniably 100% true and accurate - except for Spinosaurus, which has changed so many times in the past few years that they’re pretty much forced to admit they could still be wrong about it.
That being said, the “swan pose” still fits some hypothesised identities for the species better. In particular, the pinniped identity mentioned earlier is a better fit.
13: There wasn’t enough food for Nessie in the Loch
This one’s pretty interesting - not because it’s anywhere close to being true, but because the calculations used to debunk it are pretty interesting. To cut a long story short, for those who love math here’s an old blog post that goes into all the details:
http://lochnessmystery.blogspot.com/2012/02/is-there-enough-food-for-nessie_12.html
14: There’s no fossil evidence of Plesiosaurs in the Cenozoic
This one is quite debatable. As Karl Shuker explains in his book Still In Search of Prehistoric Survivors, there actually have been nearly a dozen examples of what appear to be fossils of Plesiosaurs from within the Cenozoic, ranging from the Palaeocene up to the Pleistocene. The official explanation for most of these is that they’ve been “reworked” - that is, they’ve been extracted from their original fossil formation via natural processes and re-deposited into younger fossil formations. Reworking is a well-documented paleontological phenomenon, but the fact many hardcore fans of palaeontology haven’t even heard of it should give a good indication of how often it occurs. If we were just talking about one or two or even three Cenozoic plesiosaur fossils, then I could quite easily believe reworking to be responsible. But, since we’re dealing with well over twice as many examples, I’m starting to wonder what the realistic probability of this all being the result of reworking and misidentification as opposed to a plesiosaur lineage making it through the K-Pg mass extinction. This quote from the aforementioned book summarises it best:
“Looking at the litany of “reworked” plesiosaur fossils spanning from the Palaeocene to the Pleistocene, I think the ‘no geologic evidence of plesiosaurs after the Cretaceous’ argument is shot to hell. True, there is no unambiguous post-Cretaceous evidence that is not fragmentary. Nonetheless, there is some evidence. If only one isolated tooth, flipper bone of vertebra of a plesiosaur is found in a Mesozoic deposit, the palaeontologists do not immediately invoke reworking to account for it’s presence in the strata where it was found. But let the same bone be found in a Cenozoic deposit, complete with other Cenozoic marine vertebrates, and it is immediately tossed into a refuse bucket labeled ‘reworked’. Instead of marvelling over this potential relict survivor, it is barely mentioned in the literature with distain and then shoved into a drawer, hidden away to be forgotten or conveniently lost. If ‘reworking’ will not get the job done, then one can always say it was mislabeled or even misidentified. There is a term for this. It’s called ‘moving the goal posts’. No doubt that the arch-nemesis of the Great Sea Serpent, Sir Richard Owen, would approve.”
I think Shuker’s final words on the matter are also worth showing:
“It is clearly time that the earlier-listed and other ostensibly anachronistic plesiosaur fossils received proper radiometric dating (until recently, direct dating of vertebrate fossils had been unsuccessful), and also that the strata containing them were comprehensively, directly dated, in order to discover unequivocally whether such fossils have indeed simply been reworked from older strata or whether truly much younger than any previously confirmed examples.”
In other words, this is a solvable mystery, so we won’t have to be limited to mere speculation about it forever. Although, it’s important to point out that if it’s ever agreed that a plesiosaur lineage made it into the Cenozoic, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they made it all the way into historical or modern times, and thus it won’t confirm a plesiosaurian identity for the Long-Necked Sea Serpent and by extension Nessie. With all this information in mind, I think the most likely possibility is that the last plesiosaurs probably died out within the Cenozoic, probably before modern humans evolved.
15: Environmental DNA testing proves Nessie never existed
You may have noticed that, throughout this post, I’ve been referring to Nessie in past tense. This is why. In 2018 and 2019, an environmental DNA (eDNA) survey was performed at Loch Ness, the results of which turned up… nothing. Well, almost nothing. There was a weird abundance of Eel DNA in the Loch, but this all belonged to Anguilla anguilla and not to any unrecognised species. I have heard that the survey didn’t detect DNA from every species known to inhabit the loch and thus also could’ve missed Nessie, but I haven’t looked into these claims, so for the sake of discussion let’s assume that the survey detected every species in the loch and that there’s no way it could’ve missed anything.
In aquatic environments, eDNA only lasts about 7-21 days, depending on environmental conditions. So it can’t tell you what lived in the environment a decade ago, a year ago, or even a month ago. In other words, no matter how thorough this survey was, it can’t invalidate any evidence of Nessie from before 2018. The most it can say is that, if there were a Longneck population in the Loch, it has since died out. Unfortunately this makes Nessie’s past existence unfalsifiable, however the existence of the Longneck species could still be confirmed elsewhere - either in the open ocean or in one of the other lakes the species inhabits, such as Lake Champlain.
So, closing thoughts. With all this in mind, why do people still deny that Nessie was a very real population of cryptozoological marine megafauna? I think a lot of it comes down to the average person’s lack of knowledge in the subject. To quote Richard Freeman: “If Loch Ness was the only lake said to be inhabited by a monster, then we could write it off”. The sad irony is that one of the strongest bits of evidence for the existence of Megalotaria longicollis is the geographical distribution of freshwater bodies it’s been observed in. To quote Heuvelmans: “Attention must be drawn to the fact that all these long-necked animals have been reported from stretches of freshwater located around isothermic lines 10°C; that is, between 0°C and 20°C (i.e., 50°F, between 32°F and 67°F) in both Northern and Southern hemispheres. One could hardly wish for better circumstantial evidence of their existence.”

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• gofundme
• GoFundMeHelp
• MutualAid

Opportunities to help others/volunteer, to be inspired to help others, to understand others):

• AmeriCorps
• Animal_Sanctuary
• AnimalShelterStories
• BeTheChange: "Every month the community takes one action which is decided by upvotes."
• Blood donors
• BoneMarrow
• CASA – Court Appointed Special Advocates. Please post to this ONLY regarding CASA-related work.
• ChurchofRogers, a place for Neighbors to share, learn, and love in the way Mr. Rogers taught us.
• community service
• CommunityTheatre
• CrowdsourcedActivism - Crowdsourced Activism
• Doctors Without Borders
• doasmallgood - encourages philanthropy, including volunteering
• ECAdvice: Extracurricular Advice
• LgbtqHumanitarianism
• FundandDev – to discuss fundraising (also sometimes known as development in the USA)
• Fundraise - "Fundraiser is a community to raise funds for people in need. Requests with more proof and description of the situation are more successful than requests without a backstory or information. Asking for money for yourself is not allowed. However, if you are part of a group that is officially fundraising for a purpose, such as a school band trip or a cancer walk, then that is allowed because it doesn't benefit yourself alone."
• Global Development – development in the sense of help humans and protecting the environment
• Habitat for Humanity
• helpit\*, "For volunteering, helping others, and generally being a good human being." Great place to post your calls for volunteers when your post gets deleted here on the volunteer subreddit.
• helpothers* "Mutual aid/volunteering/needing to find resources, anything is welcome! The world needs more helpers!" Great place to post your calls for volunteers when your post gets deleted here on the volunteer subreddit.
• Human Rights
• HumansBeingBros - the perfect place for your humble brag post about what a good person you are.
• humanitarian
• International Development – development in the sense of help humans and protecting the environment
• Kidney Match
• Kiva. For discussions of this microlending site.
• Mentors. For people to ask for mentors, of any kind, and for people to offer themselves as mentors. No rules.
• Museums.
• Nonprofit Projects*: "A place to get free work for your next non-profit web development project." If your nonprofit, NGO or other community group needs an entire web site, or just a web page, or something related to your web site, you can post your request for help on this subreddit.
• Nonprofittech
• OregonVolunteers: For nonprofits, schools, government programs & community groups recruiting volunteers for unpaid roles & tasks in support of a non-violent mission to help the environment and communities, including promoting the arts, helping the homeless, promoting water conservation, etc. in Oregon, specifically. Recruitment for voter registration in Oregon by political groups also welcomed.
• OrganDonation
• Peace Corps
• Philanthropy: It's supposed to be discussions & articles about philanthropy, non-profit development, smart giving, fundraising, and all related topics. But a lot of money begging requests are there, despite there being a rule against such.
• Red Cross
• RedditAssemble\*: "A community of people ready to help you bring awareness and change wherever we can."
• Redditors Without Borders*. Great place to post your calls for volunteers when your post gets deleted here on the volunteer subreddit.
• seizethegood – in association with a podcast
• Social Impact Leaders. "Whether you're an entrepreneur trying to make a social impact - while you're generating revenue; or a nonprofit exploring different revenue sources while engaging your community and helping others, this community is for you. You could also be working in a tech company, and applying your tech to make a positive difference in the world... Share your knowledge and stories, and help each other!"
• SupportForUkraine "A community built around showing both symbolic and material support for Ukraine."vIf you go to the group and do a search for the word volunteer, you can find what people are posting about volunteering to help Ukraine.
• SupportingSupporters/ Support For Those Supporting Loved Ones With Mental Illness.
• TechSoup: For staff from the nonprofit organization TechSoup to post about their events and activities on their online community focused on helping all nonprofits, NGOs and libraries to more effectively use technology. Volunteers are welcomed to click on any link to an online community discussion on TechSoup and help try to answer the question or offer advice.
• Thinktank – proposing solutions to problems big and small.
• transplant
• United We Stand – “To engage in discussions about how to improve our current society through non-violent means of caring, sharing, loving, accepting, and helping one another.”
• Voluntários no Brasil - Esta comunidade foi feita para achar lugares onde podemos nos voluntariar ou doar dinheiro, e discutir o voluntariado no Brasil.
• Volunteer – This is the reddit you are reading now. Want to help a community or a cause? Want to share your volunteering service experiences or to share opportunities for others? Have questions on how best to recruit, engage & support volunteers? Want to discuss ethics around volunteerism? Come share, question and discuss.
• volunteer2* "without stupid mods." A place to post your calls for volunteers when your post gets deleted here on the Volunteer subreddit.
• VolunteerFreely A place to post your calls for volunteers when your post gets deleted here on the Volunteer subreddit.
• volunteersforrefugees\ For those wanting to volunteer or support Ukrainian refugees at border crossings, reception centers, train stations and more, or who are already providing such volunteering who want to share their stories. #Ukraine
• VolunteerSuccess - for posts from Volunteer Success, a volunteer matching site for Canada / Canadians
• VolunteerTasks*: to post "one off tasks without a big volunteer commitment. Volunteers are also free to post things they can offer on a one of basis." Microtasks. Does have some rules for posting.
• VolunteerUK: A subreddit that provides a place for UK residents to; ask questions/ seek advice about volunteering, find volunteers and seek volunteering opportunities in the UK :)
• Volunteer Denver
• Volunteer Firefighters
• Volunteer Toronto
• Volunteer Vancouver
• Volunteerism* LOTS of voluntourism posts (pay to volunteer and go have a "feel good" experience in another country). Also a place to post your calls for volunteers when your post gets deleted here on the Volunteer subreddit.

If you are in Utah and are looking for volunteering opportunities, you should follow UServeUtah.
If you want to get ideas for voluntourism – where you pay to “volunteer” abroad, where you get to have a "feel good" experience for just a few weeks or months (as opposed to having to have an area of expertise and local people designing the volunteer role, not a company that brings in foreign volunteers), try:

• volunteerabroad
• voluntouring
• WWOOF
• Voluntourists
• GoAbroad
• ESLTeachersAbroad
• teachinginvietnam
• HelpStay

also see: WorkAbroadFraud
If you want to work outdoors in a short-term job and be paid for it, try trailwork.
There are also numerous groups for people to help each other regarding an emotional or mental crisis, like depression_help, helpmecope, helpme, etc.
If you want to start learning skills locally to help internationally, join a subreddit that's focused on the area you want to build your skills in, like:
biology (for discussions and resources regarding Conservation Biology)
marinebiology
publichealth
FreshwaterEcology
obgyn
farmingr
urbanfarming
HabitatRestoration
nonprofittech
Refugees
SURVEYS
If you want people to participate in a survey or test group for a product or research study that doesn't have to do with volunteerism or community service, or you LOVE beta testing stuff or filling out surveys, try:
takemysurvey
focusgroup
Samplesize
betatest
And if you have combat training and want to go to Ukraine to fight: volunteersForUkraine/
If you want to read about or participate in discussions about nonprofits beyond volunteering or other philanthropy:

• nonprofit
• nonprofits
• BostonNonprofit