early_riser @ early_riser @lemmy.radio

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2 yr. ago

Hopefully that's a bit better

Just noticed the entire OP was quoting you. I share your bemusement.

My previous conworld was very similar to yours, an inner surface of a sphere surrounded by rock {plus a visceral embodiment of entropy}. There was a light source at the center that was holy in some way (a god of order or an entity serving the same). The light even provided a negative gravitational field. I was inspired by hollow earth conspiracy theories.

I think they would probably be in awe of human music theory.

They are in fact in awe of human music, but it's more because we can put words to a melody and they can't. Yinrih phonetics relies much less on different qualities of sound and more on timing pitch contours and volume envelopes. They can't sing words because the rhythm and melody would obscure the meaning far more than a human singing Mandarin or Vietnamese, for example. Most of their modes of speaking are also very quiet compared to humans. Imagine this but modulating the pitch and volume of the growls.

This is a messy period admittedly. I've tried to make it a bit more realistic by being vague about when exactly written language emerged, only that sapient yinrih were still being born to nonsapient tree dwellers[^1] when the first extant writings were made. There may have been many generations between the dawn of sapience and the Theophany. The yinrih got really really lucky that they already had presapient behaviors that primed them to discover agriculture (shared food caching) and written language (scent marking). There was also no ice age to impede technological progress.

I'm also being deliberately coy on whether the Theophany was real, as it's important that several historical figures struggle with crises of faith, which would be hard if you had irrefutable evidence of divine intervention.

While never stated explicitly, you are correct that the yinrih lagged in some areas at the expense of others. I should clarify that the dawn of sapience occurred 100 thousand years prior to First Contact, so they've had plenty of time between then and now to figure things out. At first, medicine may have been largely ignored until after the Shakeoff (the schism that formed the Neoshamanists and Atavists). The growing number of martyrs coupled with a lack of progress toward spaceflight is what led to the schism, and the controversy caused the Bright Way to take health and safety more seriously. They had a very "take chances, make mistakes, get messy" approach to engineering.

[^1]: "Tree Dweller" is used to refer to both nonsapient yinrih and the yinrih's extant congeners who live on the northern side of the River. Yinrih traditionally consider themselves to be literally sapient tree dwellers, though the phylogenetic nitpickers will tell you they're technically different species.

In the picture at least, the start is indicated by a dovetail (not sure if that's the right word), and the endpoint with an X. I suppose in practice it could be anything, or be left deliberately ambiguous.

Starting point does matter. If the intended number has no trailing zeros, traversing the path backwards also produces a number with the same magnitude but opposite sign. If there are trailing zeros they become insignificant leading zeros when parsed in reverse. Rotating the path does not affect the number, but flipping either horizontally or vertically will flip the sign of the number.

Yes, they also wash the tail. I'm not sure how they'd handle other conversations going on at the same time. Their chattiness stems from my own profound dislike for bathroom talkers, as well as the tendency of dogs to seek you out while you're pooping, or more specifically the theory that they do this because they know you're vulnerable and want to watch out for you.

That said I think it depends on the circumstances. This social dynamic is most relevant in places such as offices or schools, where the people are familiar with each other. It serves the function of water cooler talk. In very public places like stores I'm not sure they'd be any chattier than they would while waiting in line.

They use the sense of touch more than humans. Commonthroat has words like Fc thermally conductive and cF thermally insulating that describe the sensation of touching materials like metal and glass or wood and plastic. Lmc, the word for equal in the political or moral sense comes from a word denoting the tactile sensation of two surfaces being flush with one another. They even use tactile writing for short labels on containers and controls since they don't always look at what they're handling. They often nuzzle small objects, rubbing their whiskers against them and sniffing them to gain tactile and olfactory info about it.

Xenoergonomics goes way beyond their paws. Yinrih are less dependent on vision than humans are, so aesthetics engages the paws and nose and ears just as much as the eyes. They identify one another and read emotional cues primarily by odor, and supplement their natural musk with perfumes that serve the same communicative function as human clothing.

Their hearing is very keen, but that has made their voices less powerful as a result. They've had to spend a lot of effort making their machines quieter so they can hear one another talking.

They have a weaker sense of taste than humans, so cooking emphasizes mouth feel, aroma, and visual presentation.

Yes on both counts.

Commonthroat lexicon

Commonthroat grammar

Commonthroat isn't the only yinrih dialect with an army and a navy. There's also Outlander and Hearthsider, but I haven't developed them as much.

Yinrih head in profile wearing HUD specs and an earpiece:

Yinrih musician wearing a stringed instrument meant to be plucked with the tail.

Yinrih are arboreal quadrupeds, not cursorial bipeds like humans are. The FrathWiki article linked above links to a fairly comprehensive article on the yinrih as a species.

True sapient AI is impossible in my current conworld. That hasn't stopped people from trying for it though. The Mindseekers were a sect of Neoshamanists who sought to create sapient life anew artificially rather than seek other sophonts among the stars like the Bright Way. In the early days they were regarded like alchemists, seekers of forbidden knowledge. And just like Terran alchemy blossomed into chemistry, the Mindseekers found themselves at the forefront of the digital revolution when electronics became economically feasible. While they never achieved their goal of creating conscious AI, they founded the field of computer science in the process, which in tern eventually allowed the Bright Way to advance rocketry to the point they could breach the atmosphere.

I know this is obnoxiously pedantic but the link you provide says the 666 meats come from the same animal.

When you say it like that, it sounds really mundane.

Ignoring the how of it all, here's how I imagine it working subjectively. They have a much wider visible spectrum compared to humans, but they can't perceive the whole thing all at once. They have four pairs of nictitating membranes that act like bandpass filters. Between the bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain, they "tune" to different spectra, and can even narrow the bandwidth of the received signal. They can sense light polarization by aligning or misaligning their eyes to the direction of polarization, and because their eyes don't rely on focusing a light to a point, they can stare at the sun without harm or discomfort.

Subjectively, they have no fixed concept of color, as objects appear different depending on how their eyes are tuned. Their languages lack simple color words, and must rely on analogies to objects that are similarly colored, much like most (Western) languages have no simple terms to describe odors beyond relating them to their sources ("earthy", "fruity", "floral", etc).

The low-end of their eyes' frequency range isn't set, but they can at least see thermal radiation emitted by living bodies, and the high end is set at the threshold of ionizing radiation. Because their eyes work equally well during the day and at night, they and other species in their clade that share the same eye structure are neither nocturnal nor diurnal, and have active and rest periods that do not sync with the day-night cycle. Upon achieving sapience and developing a structured society with the concept of timekeeping, they do not use different time zones.

The cannonball tree reminds me of a similar tree on Yih, or rather two kinds of tree. Both are referred to as "redfruit trees". One grows harmless bright red fruit to lure seed dispersers, including presapient yinrih. The second mimics the first tree, but its fruit contains potent neurotoxin that kills anything that eats it. The body drops to the ground and decomposes, allowing the tree to absorb the body's nutrients.

This would be a receive-only biological system evolved by a species of alien critters to serve as eyes, so not for any IRL project.

There are only two sapient species in the Lonely Galaxy, humans and yinrih. There is a closely related non sapient species to the yinrih, closer even than chimps are to humans, and the question of why the yinrih are sapient and the tree dwellers are not drives a lot of philosophizing on the yinrih’s part. The Atavists in particular resent the burdens of existential dread and moral guilt that come with having a rational soul and wish to return to being irrational animals.

Pre-space age yinrih history is somewhat messy right now, but current lore has them achieving spaceflight 5 millennia after achieving sapience. Given their much longer lifespans (~723 Earth years) this would be like humans going from crudely knapped flint hand axes to orbital flight in 500 years. So they're in space before humans leave Africa. My (admittedly weak) justification for this is that they start the game with writing unlocked, there's no ice age to impede the invention of agriculture, and religious zeal is one powerful motivator.

I don't have any specific dates for hot air balloons, although it is the first thing they mess around with. I do have them playing with Jules-Verne-esque manned projectiles around the year 1406 AK (about 2000 Earth years after the first evidence of written language). This begins a period marked by high casualty rates among research monks and their lay assistants. These brave souls are known as the Cannonized [sic] Martyrs.

Thus said the Uncreated Light:

Consider, little ones, the Tree-dwellers[^{1], the very clay from which I sculpted your form. They move about, seek refuge, nourish themselves, and beget young according to the passions which I have kindled within them. Yet do they gain any merit thereby? By no means! For they do so without understanding. They paint the leaves, yet they cannot write a single glyph[}2]. They call out to one another, yet they cannot chant a single syllable. But to you, little ones, to you alone among the myriads of creatures walking upon the land and swimming beneath the waves and soaring upon the wind of this earth, I have granted the light of understanding[^{3]. Now gaze, little ones, upon the countless stars bedewing the heavens. Think ye that I have wrought them for no purpose? Nay, each one shines forth my love. Know ye that there are others like yourselves, in whom I have kindled the fire of understanding. Their bone is not of your bone, their flesh is not of your flesh, yet their souls are like unto your own. search among these stars for other minds, that together ye might meditate upon the mysteries of this dear little creation[}4]. Listen to them for other voices, that they might join you in song. Seek among them other hearts, and offer to them your friendship. Go, dearest little ones, spread your light to the stars, and ye shall become brighter yourselves.

[^{1]: A nonsapient species of vulpithecin closely related to the yinrih [}2]: Refers to the yinrih's primordial written language, developed from a scent-marking behavior simultaneously with a spoken language. As such, the yinrih have a written history that stretches back to the dawn of sapience in their species, roughly contemporaneous with the advent of behavioral modernity in humans on Earth. [^{3]: "The fire of understanding", or the faculties of language and symbolic thought [}4]: to meditate on the mysteries of Creation, or to undertake scientific research, is regarded as an act of worship, and the accrual of knowledge plays an important role in Claravian eschatology.

If a species is arboreal (like my yinrih) many may choose to live permanently in microgravity to allow them to use all of those prehensile extremities for prehending instead of walking.

Also consider the reasons why a species pursued spaceflight in the first place. Humans were using it as a show of power. Rockets are just fancy missiles, after all. The yinrih pursued it for religious reasons, meaning that people who died while furthering that goal are venerated as literal martyrs.

OK things seem to be back to normal for the time being. Nobody's password got changed this time. The admins updated to the latest version of phpBB after Monday's incident, so it's possible whatever vulnerability was used Monday was patched out.

The forum seems to be holding up better this time, but it's still getting flooded.