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[Nivim]

 It was useful to me.

 When reading, I noticed one mistake, in that you both refer to evolution of a species as:
"This species is stressed *this way*, so they change *this way* or gain *this ability*."
, when it should be;
"this species mutates during # generations into *this set of # slightly different unique kinds*, then this mottled species is stressed *this way*, *this way*, and *this way*, so *# slightly different unique kinds* die, and # are left behind." Then you repeat the process for each of the slightly different unique kinds remaining.
 I guess it would be harder, but would probably get you past the "earth life rip-off" problem.

[Supermikhail]

But the fruits of this? The real fruit is that next time I will know how to do it better. If I can make it straightforward enough we could get people doing a whole lot in a short while and thus actually creating their aliens this way instead of using hallucinations as inspiration for just a single boring species. We could go from fiction having worlds that were about as much like nature as a stick and leaf in a jar to actually having something as crowded as a real world but from actual detail rather than just taking the author on their word about it being crowded.

And you intend to do a realistic alien world just using limited human brains that live on generalizations, approximations and stereotypes? Are you yourself sure it can be done? What drives me in this thread are simple amusement and frustration, also opportunity for artistic development and to learn something new, like the fact that many biologists don't want to use Linnaean taxonomy because of its limitations, or so my book on invertebrates says... and I pretty much believe that only procedural generation based on truly random numbers can save us now*, but for this thing I'm not qualified in any way.

*By "save us" I mean "accomplish what you intend".

And you know... actually, writers usually don't want just random aliens on their alien worlds. Some of them want funny aliens, some of them want scary aliens, some of them want bipeds with saxophones instead of their mouths. From your reaction to my initial suggestion at the start of the thread, this project doesn't seem to be as customizable as writers would want.

Well, I'm not actually doing this as a prolonged painful session of abandoning, I just need to ask these questions, or maybe they need to be asked. In time, I'll get back to pulling limbs out of slimy bubbles of flesh.

@Nivm: First, as Shoku's guessed already (hopefully, just guessed), I pretty much divine my evolutions in opium smoke, with the only guideline - that the next evolution should be able to eat more than the one before it. But the process may seem the way you've described because, as Shoku has said some time ago, we don't want to stress our species too much because it's a good chance we'll have to start all over. Hopefully, we're just trying to collect a big pool of genetic mutations... however unlikely our monsters seem to be to prove this.

Also, welcome to the discussion, please, feel at home, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and, please, mind the squishy things on the table. No, they don't bite.

[Shoku]

It was useful to me.

 When reading, I noticed one mistake, in that you both refer to evolution of a species as:
"This species is stressed *this way*, so they change *this way* or gain *this ability*."
, when it should be;
"this species mutates during # generations into *this set of # slightly different unique kinds*, then this mottled species is stressed *this way*, *this way*, and *this way*, so *# slightly different unique kinds* die, and # are left behind." Then you repeat the process for each of the slightly different unique kinds remaining.
 I guess it would be harder, but would probably get you past the "earth life rip-off" problem.

I'm well aware, it's more like the population changes this way or that rather than species and the response is not a matter of coming up with something new but having it spread until it dominates the local gene pool. We're not about to go through billions of generations for this thing so this has to be done on a more condensed timescale where that little detail is omitted.

Well not entirely. I've been trying to steer this away from growing this fancy system or that, to just ending up with a variety of them we'll go somewhere with in a later iteration. Sort of a compromise because I know that I'd never be able to get enough people sketching these things out to throw away 9 out of 10 things immediately.

But the fruits of this? The real fruit is that next time I will know how to do it better. If I can make it straightforward enough we could get people doing a whole lot in a short while and thus actually creating their aliens this way instead of using hallucinations as inspiration for just a single boring species. We could go from fiction having worlds that were about as much like nature as a stick and leaf in a jar to actually having something as crowded as a real world but from actual detail rather than just taking the author on their word about it being crowded.

And you intend to do a realistic alien world just using limited human brains that live on generalizations, approximations and stereotypes? Are you yourself sure it can be done?

It can sure as hell be done better than the way they do it now.

What drives me in this thread are simple amusement and frustration, also opportunity for artistic development and to learn something new, like the fact that many biologists don't want to use Linnaean taxonomy because of its limitations, or so my book on invertebrates says... and I pretty much believe that only procedural generation based on truly random numbers can save us now*, but for this thing I'm not qualified in any way.

*By "save us" I mean "accomplish what you intend".

They give everything a species name and file it into some genus as best they can. Understandably there are a lot of places where you might not have enough information to tell if the tree should go this way or that but at least somebody sorts all of those things as genetic evidence comes along. Somebody might write a whole paper on their research about this thing or that to say that a particular thing is more closely related to some other branch.

The point where you might choose to stop using the system is one of the esoteric sorts of things that has very little bearing on us.
-unless that's talking about how we threw kingdoms in front with Archaea, Bacteria, and Eukaryotes in front and then broke up protists into better categories.

And you know... actually, writers usually don't want just random aliens on their alien worlds. Some of them want funny aliens, some of them want scary aliens, some of them want bipeds with saxophones instead of their mouths. From your reaction to my initial suggestion at the start of the thread, this project doesn't seem to be as customizable as writers would want.

If you want aliens that physically grow European musical instruments out of their faces then yeah, you wouldn't turn to this. If you want something that is exotic and realistically foreign? This would be much better.

And hey, it's not like I'd stop anybody from taking some large creature and jazzing it up for cartoony use like that. If they want scary or funny but don't particularly need it to resemble Earth life I'm sure people can modify these to be more ferocious or friendly. That's not the primary use for this I had in mind but you act like these are going to be pewter figurines or something.

Well, I'm not actually doing this as a prolonged painful session of abandoning, I just need to ask these questions, or maybe they need to be asked. In time, I'll get back to pulling limbs out of slimy bubbles of flesh.

Actually about that- do you think you could come up with a third variety of flesh ball? I kind of feel like I've paved enough ground that we wouldn't have to worry about so many dead ends in dealing with it but you haven't been drawing anything for awhile now and I'm at another one of those "I need to not plan out multiple steps in a row" ordeals.

And you can like skip almost straight to it having blood. Not pumping it around in particular or anything, just a pretty much sensical placement of internal organs, ability to swim around somehow, and some detail about how it reproduces.

@Nivm: First, as Shoku's guessed already (hopefully, just guessed), I pretty much divine my evolutions in opium smoke, with the only guideline - that the next evolution should be able to eat more than the one before it. But the process may seem the way you've described because, as Shoku has said some time ago, we don't want to stress our species too much because it's a good chance we'll have to start all over. Hopefully, we're just trying to collect a big pool of genetic mutations... however unlikely our monsters seem to be to prove this.

Also, welcome to the discussion, please, feel at home, pour yourself a cup of coffee, and, please, mind the squishy things on the table. No, they don't bite.

You could go with eating a little less in exchange for safety if only we had big mobile predators...

[Supermikhail]

Hey, about blood - I came today upon a drawing of the inside of a slug, I think, in my invertebrate book. And I liked it. These animals remind me a lot of what we do in this thread.

Also about flesh balls - I've been meaning to tell you for some time that the space-ship variety of donutsaur must be very hydrodynamically unstable. Although, only evolution can tell whether its an advantage or a disadvantage... Well, I don't know, maybe by turning end over end it creates water circulation and confuses its prey.

Anyway, I'm not sure I follow what "third" variety of flesh ball you mean. Counting spaceship and steamrolled, bulbousaur's descendants have almost gone into the double-digit realm, although I haven't drawn them all yet... Do you mean another bulbousaur, or another, completely separate strand of creatures? If the latter, I'm not very keen on flesh balls, actually... something about them... Or something about me, as xwinguses and burgers haven't attained a lot of inner cavities still, so they are much more slabs of flesh, than balls. Well, I and my University have sort of arranged a holiday for me, so I'll think about them all... but wouldn't mind clarification.

[Shoku]

Yeah, I've thought about the instability but if you've noticed that there should be a problem like that can you think of any solutions? I've had a few in mind but I'm really struggling to not take control of the direction so much.

Yeah, I mean a fresh lineage. Or we could just give one of the slabs internal organs.

[Supermikhail]

Well, I didn't do anything about that, but all the world must have heard pastels scratching on paper deep into the night today. So, I present to you



Don't know about you, but I'm quite pleased with results. Pastels have turned out a pretty nice material to work with... Erm, I hope you can make out something. Or guess.

And if you can, I think there's another pressing thing for the donutsaur to worry about.

[Shoku]

A verbal description is a bit necessary. Are those eight arms I see?

[Supermikhail]

Yeah, I'd hate to make it into new octopus, but I was trying to make them look meaty, and more just didn't fit. These eight hold the prey, and between them, but you probably can't make them out, there are some shorter, thinner "tentacles", which, had my skill allowed it, would have been shown going under the skin of the prey.

[Shoku]

Ooh, I hadn't even thought of proboscis type things for sucking the fluid out of donutsaurs.
And that begs to ask who's going to adapt to eat the leftover husks that sink to the solid ground.

...unless those tentacles going in have some sort of grinding apparatus to get at the flesh too.

[Supermikhail]

I'd like to tell you a story.

Once upon a time, on the bottom of a sea, there was a blob.

It was a simple, one-layer blob of cells and slime, plastered on the sea-floor, slowly nabbing at the minerals underneath it and sucking in some food-stuff, floating above it.

But, one day the sea changed - strong currents started blowing around it. Many of its kin were gone, swept away but the merciless flow. But our blob didn't. It used the minerals it had been eating to build a mineral crust on its side facing the currents. The lower end of this crust went into the sea-floor, rooting the blob firmly in place. In addition, the crust had small openings in it, so that the cells that were far from other surfaces didn't starve and thirst.


The crust was quite sturdy, but the currents were cunning. They flew around the blobs protection, and even though they couldn't tear it from its place, they tugged at its rear part, making the blob stretch and get thinner.


The blob grew thing and long, but its strength remained the same and soon its rear part was all but in the power of the currents.


The currents pushed and tugged, and the roots of the blob's shield began cracking, when the strength of the currents themselves ended. Their fighting and plotting burned them quick, and the blob was left free in its new shape. In the calm water, it could see its brothers and sisters settle down and turn back into shapeless blobs. But the blob wasn't ready to let go of what it had won through such hardship. It observed its surroundings lifting its rear part up through the water.


Suddenly it felt an unfamiliar taste. It was an upper layer of water, rich in oxygen and light, blossoming with simple lifeforms. The blob found them delicious, and wanted to stay in the upper layer. But, of course, it had its lower, front part rooted in the ground. The front part couldn't taste the delicious inhabitants of the upper water layers. It would surely shrink and wither without the care of the rear part. Yet, without the front part, the blob would have fallen victim the currents were they ever to return. The rear part and the front part couldn't live without one another, and so they decided to set up strong communication in the form of several lines of vessels transporting food around the blob's body. And to efficiently maintain the lines, the body was divided into several compartments, and the cells of each compartment served only their part of the lines.

And so, for a time, the blob was safe and content...


Edit: I recently realized that on my Photobucket I called the folder I put my pictures for this project in, "Otherworldly Arc". I don't know how it happened, an example has always been in front of me, but... It's late to correct it now, because all the pictures would change their paths. The shame will be forever with me!

Oh. I also wanted to ask, are there really protists several centimetres in size?

[Shoku]

I don't quite like the story unless it's a description of a standard life cycle. Do all of the children from that one grow the same way regardless of currents or do they particularly seek out some spot to root down for awhile before they grow organs and such?
If it's supposed to be a bunch of steps of evolution then I'd have to go revising it for the changes to be over generations and such instead of the individual language used.

-

Well yeah. Slime molds are fairly large and have some interesting behaviors. There's the well known one where it can grow the shortest path through a maze to reach bits of food but slime molds also have this one other behavior worth noting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkVhLJLG7ug
I used to hear people saying there was no transitional form between unicellular and multicellular life quite a bit. Obviously they never bothered to look very hard.

But seeing as algae are protists rather than plants you've got the obviously huge seaweed variety of protists out there too.

While plants and animals make up the vast majority of multicellular stuff there's this whole world of things from before those two were quite so distinct. Most of it is like two or four cells large or has strange plates and things. I didn't intend to start with them because I simply don't expect people could really think of so many strangely diverse ways of beating a living out of the slime and muck- it's an even less familiar kind of world than the shallows of the ocean.

So if you want to look into protists as food sources you can assume a lot of those are present in the ocean. I only recently prompted to include some small seaweed so obviously not all of the protists are around at the current stage we're working with.

[Supermikhail]

Well, it's more a bunch of steps of evolution, and making a fairy tale about a hundred generations is really against the genre. So I condensed evolution into one protagonist... and, you know, who do we make characters when we talk about evolution - individuals, generations, or species?

I asked about protists because the guy from that invertebrate book says there are protists several centimetres in size, and I say, "Whoa, several centimetres is a lot, I mean you must be able to see them with your naked eye, and they must be icky." The video you linked to has confirmed some of my points, although it looks like it was still taken through a microscope.

Oh, and while we refuse eyes to our critters, that slime does some quite perceptive stuff. So I thought, would it be alright to put a couple of photosensitive bits on top of that blob guy from the story?

[Shoku]

That's fine, I just wanted to clarify it in the wake of a particular complaint.

You could technically see the one I linked with your eyes but the maze solver is more the sort of thing you could pick up and carry around to show people. You would probably think the thing was some kind of fungus if you didn't know any better.

As usual there's the question of what use is that? Does it shrink up and hide behind the hard little root into the ground whenever it falls in the shadow of something else maybe?

-

I'd still like to hear about some internal details about the eight armed thing. It seems like it could have good reason for eyes unless it seeks food out by smell super easily.

[Supermikhail]

Hm. I thought an "eye" at the top bit of the blob could help it find the upper layers of water, which would be better lit. And also, as it has some degree of mobility, at least the upper part, it could choose heavier populated areas, which would coincide with better lit ones. But a shrinking top is a good idea, especially if the shell grows to encase the body more...

On that note, as it's starting to turn similar to Earth animals, I don't think I should have removed currents in the end. With strong currents it can stay with a strong shield on one side, and develop strong muscles and other interesting things in the body. And supposing the predators still can't compete with the currents, its soft bits aren't in much danger if it can't shrink the body.


Well, one thing I know for sure about the eight-armed thing is that it can retract its arms and proboscises a good way to make the body more hydrodynamic. I don't know if it's common in nature to just pull such things right into the body, or they could just get smaller. The thing's way of locomotion is jet. In the centre of the body its jets come together, with a channel to the sucker in the front to hold the prey; there is a rudimentary reproductive organ which lets out either gametes or embryos into the water flow through the jets. During mating a... whoah, I don't know, male or female... grabs on its partner from behind like on a prey. The grabbed partner releases gametes through its jets, and the grabbing partner sucks them in through the sucker... Well, that sounds kind of gross, but that's what my imagination has birthed. I'm also thinking of a developed vessels system near the bases of the proboscises... I probably should try to draw that.

Edit: Hey, I know. This eight-arm critter still has the shell bits it inherited from the burger. It could hide all the extra pieces under the shell!

Edit: Also, I thought it'd simply be Octopus in Latin, but then it turns out it's not Latin at all, so Octobrachius thiriodis is fine, right?

[Shoku]

I don't see any reason it's got to be solid flesh at the way into the shell then the upper part is out and waving around. Lots of animals leave enough open space in their shell so that they can pull body parts into and this seems to work on small ocean life scales as well as large terrestrial vertebrate scales (you know, tortoises and such.)

-

I don't actually know much about how snails retract their eye stalks. if it's just perpedicular muscle layers then they squeeze the one way to lengthen it and relax that while squeezing the other muscle fibers to make it short and fat (and I would guess that "the base" where the shortening muscles extend to is inside the head rather than just the at the surface.)

Really though you don't need to suck those in to be hydrodynamic though. If the jets are pointed at the underside then the opposite side of the body is the part slicing through water and the arms just need to straighten out and touch their tips together to present very little surface area in the direction that matters.

-sex usually sounds gross. It just stops being gross and becomes erotic when it becomes a useful thing to do personally, or I guess if certain wires get crossed in our brains for all that weird stuff people are into-

What's that about shell bits? Where are they? What shape? Still two individual bits?

I'm not really ever going to argue names. I don't have any sense of when a name is good or not whether it's for a species or for a pet.