One of my favorite tricks for designing alien species/cultures is to take a real animal with an interesting lifecycle and think about what that biology would translate to if they had human intelligence
Example: silk moths as a base species
Because the moths themselves don’t eat and only live long enough to mate and then starve to death, the entire culture is made up of children and adolescents. The older children raise the younger ones, with families being made up of hatchmates from different years.
Because molts and eventual transformation into a short lived adult happen on a set schedule, families have a cycle— when your oldest set of siblings cocoon to become adults, you wait at the mating grounds and try to adopt their newborns after they pass. If that fails, you take any ‘orphans’ you can find.
Because death and birth are nearly simultaneous, they have a religion based around reincarnation, and infants with markings similar to a parent are often given their name. Claiming the offspring of a beloved family member is vitally important, because you want to be able to protect their soul and keep them close.
Because it’s hard to track the offspring of your male family members, there are sometimes major fights when a family sees an infant with familiar markings in another family’s clutch.
Between mating seasons, their culture is extremely food-oriented, because everyone is growing and silkworms eat nigh constantly. They spend most of their lives outdoors but sleep and shelter from bad weather in large family dwellings made from wood and the remains of the silk cocoons of prior generations.
everyone is really vibing with the silkworm aliens I see
The fact that the TARDIS didn’t like Clara and yet still went to the effort of keeping her safe in journey/time of the doctor is proof that she cannot travel with anyone without deeming them Adopted and Under My Protection eventually
So I just moved to the United States this week right. And the most recent thing I’ve learned is that 64 ounces.. is quite a fair amount of juice. How did I learn this? By getting 7.5 litres of juice delivered to my hotel.
I didn’t think it would be THIS much juice because all of this just cost me 9 dollars at Walmart. I thought it’d be a few tiny bottles at best. Not SEVEN AND A HALF LITRES
Another thing I learned: a family sized pack of Chips Ahoy…….. is a lot of fucking cookies
I don’t know how to tell you this but I’m Brazilian
I have been called a lot of offensive things but European is something I will not stand for
whoever is writing the minecraft lore rn needs a raise. bcuz some of the lore- and even just the theories- r so good and it gets. NO recognition
minecraft: “yeah souls have power and they can suck light out of things and there’s sand in literal hell that have the screaming dead in them and when combined make a literal demon that rots everything living in sight and in the deep dark there’s plants that can detect movement and hisses when broken and there’s a warden that protects the caves and can kill you in one hit and it has souls in his chest and it makes a heartbeat sound and all the lights around it flicker off if its near”
us af: “oh okay”
don’t forget the giant fossilised remains of god knows what that used to be and also the implications of the fact that villagers turned into zombies look different to the normal ones wandering around that just so happen to look like you. also the endermen speaking thing.
yeah! you can clearly hear them say “what’s up” or “hello” when your not bothering them.
and then theres the destroyed bastions and the desert temples and the jungle temples and the ruined portals . what is up with this world we inhabit
“Lightning has transformative powers, gold has regenerative properties so strong it can save you from death, ghasts are trapped in Hell, piglins built the bastions and the zombification virus nearly wiped them out, the ancient peoples created some kind of apocalypse so fucked up it almost wiped out all life and basically severed the link between dimensions, and also none of this is real, the universe is just a story we’re telling about ourselves because we’re all stories and stardust and not ready to perceive the true nature of existence yet.”
