Cohost backup: Making up a critter

Preface: I am assured at this point that, in fact, a rocky planet or moon within the habitable range of a flare star is probably impossible. Granted the sheer number of red dwarfs out there means improbable things have more opportunities to occur, but it's somewhat liberating knowing this creature is impossible. It means I can just fuck around.

I have been tasked with making up an alien species for a sf/fantasy campaign. This is what I have so far.
Variously called twelfors, flarians, or often called "reefers" due to the creches their youngest and oldest live in. These are all exonyms; most flarians use their state or nation as a demonym, so when speaking of themselves as a species, when necessary they refer to themselves using an exonym.[1]

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Their homeworld orbits a small, k-class red dwarf star catalogued by humans as 124 Zhou, though the majority of flarians live elsewhere, having colonized multiple other worlds some time ago. 124 "Twelve-Four" Zhou is a flare star, prone to solar storms that bathe the planet in what would nominally be very deadly radiation in not-infrequent bursts. Much of the planet's surface lifeforms have adapted with a strategy not unlike banksia, using the energy and chaos of the flares to flourish at the expense of most of them dying off in the flare and leaving seeds. Life underwater, such as in the seas, is more varied in this regard, depending on the depth it's adapted to.
Flarians generally have two arms and four legs; they are primarily bipedal, using the other two legs only as occasional support or for long periods of standing.
People who have never met flarians, but know of them, almost certainly are aware of their life cycle. The terms "infant," "child," "adult," and "senior" don't apply very well to flarians. If an outsider meets a flarian, they're almost certainly meeting a "youth," somewhat equivalent to adulthood. Infant or larval stage flarians live in creches, and are very much an r-strategy matter; like in sea turtles, most die. Infants who grow to the child/teenage stage and grow limbs for walking on land are cared for to a far, far more significant degree. Most disabilities have their origins either in genetics or from the conditions of the creche. There are differing cultural notions of how to approach this, including augmentation toward a mean level of ability, or simply having an unusually wide cultural expectation of what constitutes able. In the latter case, such societies tend to be very accessible, and not only physically. Such societies are also more easily able to incorporate members of other species, as differences of abilities are already normalized and accounted for as best they can.
The most common cause of disability is various forms of water pollution. The politics of such matters should be familiar to the reader. This is part of why many creches are moved out of the ocean and into other, smaller environments. The quality of these artificial waters and their conditions varies somewhat, depending on means, needs, and motives.
The child stage is a time when they learn the basics of their cultures and is generally when schooling takes place. During that time, flarian hind legs grow bigger and stronger, and the hips and back develop to make them nearly obligate bipeds. Once they have reached full physical maturity, growing in size and usually in lower body strength and endurance, they become what could reasonably be called adults, which is the "youth" stage.
Flarians have a final life stage where they go into a chrysalis, and most of their body turns into a creature that resembles a tunicate. They have a whole set of concepts around the "soul," which is the English word that is closest to how they refer to their blood. ("Internal sea" is pretty clunky, and misses some spiritual nuances.) The final stage is mindless; while flarians may talk to them, and there are beliefs about what happens to the mind, the body has changed shape and hollowed out, and its "soul" has joined the wider seasoul, mingling generally with the souls of other sessiles in the creche. (There is no scientific basis for believing the blood of a flarian carries thoughts and minds, and how a given flarian belief system talks about blood varies as well.)
This sessile stage is also sexual maturity; while younger motile "youths" may engage in play with others, especially with other species, and are functionally what one might call adults in another species, there is no sexual maturity without becoming what amounts to a sea sponge, so the equivalent to teenage years, adulthood, physical maturity and senescence of a sort, and decades-long careers all come before the age when mating and having children occurs.
One result is that flarians are also known for frequently having a rather odd bimboification kink. It's far from universal, but becoming a mindless breeding creature with sufficient intelligence and mindfulness to enjoy it is an appealing fantasy for some.
Youths sometimes put off becoming sessile, perhaps because of their career, the caretaking of a child, or sometimes personal preference. Understandably, some youths also have a fear of sessility, which is also the end of mindfulness in flarians. Most do not fear sessility, and the fear can be symptomatic of mental illness. Illness or not, that fear has driven some social movements toward actions and policies intended to eliminate the death of the mind. A sessile body is too simple to support a nervous system, much less a mind. One such social movement, Consciousers, intends to utterly remove the brain from infant-aged flarians and replace it with a growing, adaptive artificial intelligence, which might be joined with the sessile form in the creche. The research is not far along in this regard, and it is not a commonly high priority, and many flarians are horrified by the idea, and the movement is sometimes allied with technocratic conservative movements in other, extraspecies cultures.
In terms of general beliefs, the mingling of the internal sea with that of all the other flarians of the creche and of history, or at least with an immediate local sea of an artificial environment, is identified with the dissolution of the mind. Making a mind that has no part in that sea is not an entirely popular idea.
Choosing where to go once sessile is not exactly treated like end of life care; it is an advance directive, but is seldom treated as funerary. Sessile flarians in fact may live thousands and thousands of years. Talking to them may be akin to talking to a house plant, and certain things might be mourned, but by many flarian standards they aren't dead.
Some bodily alterations remain a part of sessile flarians. While augments usually cease to even be attached as the body becomes simple and hollow, tattoos and similar body modifications generally remain discernible, and part of flarian body art is planning for the sessile stage.
Flarian marriages vary in number, but if married flarians become sessile, they usually wish to go to the same local creche or family creche. Marriages into other places, moving to other cities or planets or countries, can complicate these plans. Likewise, the sessility chrysalis can have mishaps or strangeness, including (rarely) bifurcation. In some cases, the actual death of a flarian is handled by simply taking some portion of their blood and releasing it into the creche that seems most appropriate, or even multiple creches. In the dominant culture the main character was born into, intermarriage between states or nations was encouraged; theoretically, it was thought to make it harder to go to war or create conflict. In practice, the main effect of this is that damaging a creche in an act of violence is considered a very heinous war crime. It also helps avoid the equivalents of Hapsburg jaws.
Sessile flarians have numerous sexes, not dissimilar to Earthly mushrooms. What a youth's eventual sex will be is often unknown, as it is not as simple a thing to define as simply a set of chromosomes. (Flarians do have genetic material, but it is not DNA per se, and their genes are not encoded on chromosomes quite like Earth creatures' are. The molecules and structure differ meaningfully. I will not explain further, but those genes are only part of what defines a sessile flarian's sex and sexual characteristics.)
One sessile sex translates to "simply extant," and produces no nutrients for others nor takes part in mating. Some sessile sexes only produce nutrients for infants; some only mate; most strike some balance; and some have morphology that's advantageous in some environmental conditions, such as defensibility.
Some cultures like to keep trinkets made from the bodily fluids of ancestors. Some think that's a terrible idea and complicates the soul's transition and metamorphosis. It is common for those who keep trinkets to speak to them when troubled, and to ask for help with specific known strengths the flarians whose material is encapsulated were good at. Often these ancestors are alive as sessiles somewhere. In some cases, sessiles are kept in large tanks in small numbers, to keep a family close with their sessile members, or to facilitate travel, whether on a planet's surface or in space or to other planets.
On the subject of blood, flarians have two vascular systems, one for carrying oxygen and the other for carrying most nutrients. (Some nutrients are in both systems, and some are in the same system as is used for oxygenation.) They have a single, complex heart. Blood transfusions are a thing, and while there are some subcultures that get a little finicky about the idea, and some social movements which believe the internal sea should remain Pure, mostly blood banks exist, are helpful and necessary, and people in that sense mingle souls without hesitation. Bleeding to death is the soul leaving the body improperly and tragically, with a long journey before it has any chance of joining the greater sea.
Pilgrimages are common, both on a planet and to other planets, and are often not religious at all. They're treated a bit like visiting grandparents, even if the grandparents (that is, the community of sessile elders) is long gone. In spiritual peoples, this often accompanies a belief that the memories and mind of the motile stages lives on in some manner on a non-physical plane.

[1] Usually, if they aren't talking about the immediate culture they're from, and are referring to a mixed group of individuals, they just call them "people," which can be ambiguous when referring to matters such as medical needs; while generally one's home state or nationality is used in place of that term, it can be necessary to be more specific. (This can vary, and is all true only of the dominant languages spoken by most spacefaring flarians; some languages do have species-level endonyms, but as the languages they study to speak with others all do not have native endonyms for flarians as a whole, flarian has become the commonly accepted term.)

Cohost backup: Tam Elbrun and Dr. Miranda Jones, Star Trek gripe

 

 

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation screenshot from the episode Tin Man. Tam Elbrun, a humanoid betazoid telepath with red hair and a green tunic, speaks with Data, an android in Star Fleet command uniform, in Data's quarters.

 

 

 

 

 

Star Trek Original Series screenshot. A brunette in a blue and green dress stands on the transporter pad holding a rose as she gives the Vulcan salute: Live long and prosper. Dr. Miranda Jones, episode title Is There In Truth No Beauty?

 

 

 

Tam Elbrun of the episode Tin Man should have studied on Vulcan. He wouldn't have had to be institutionalized. It worked for Dr. Miranda Jones. Their day to day experiences do not greatly differ, but she copes better than he does.

(I still want her sensor web. That's the coolest accessory in science fiction, I swear to god.)

For that matter, while the more obvious choice would be someone who's blind, Tam is otherwise unusually qualified to be an ambassador to the Medusans.
He did seem to find the Chandrans pretty easy to get along with, so the Medusan job could easily go to someone else, but I'd think he'd be okay there.

And all's well that ends well, but I don't think Tam needed to feel like shit most of the time in order for him to reach out to Gomtuu or vice-versa.

 

 

(no subject)

 

 

 

ID: Scene from the 2022 horror film Nope. Angel Torres and the Haywoods sit in a fast food place eating. Angel tells OJ, "Like, read the room."

 

Thinking about how OJ Haywood and Laios Thorden have a few things in common, and how the Jean Jacket operation had a lot in common with a Dungeon Meshi plan (albeit, one of the ones that went somewhat awry.) Laios was more knowledgeable of his foes than OJ was, but both relied on their ability to understand a specific menace in order to neutralize it, to get what they needed. There's even moments in Dungeon Meshi where Laios makes quick and important observations which then become part of a plan, even in the middle of the action, just like OJ does with regards to eye contact. (I did say there's spoilers.)
The above scene could easily have been Laios getting told off for something he said; likewise, OJ may in Laios' circumstances have said something others found uncomfortable, for its timing or for its content. He's more circumspect than Laios, so it happens less often, but it does happen at least once.
Thinking about how the autistic-coded (as in prolly very much so) character in Nope is the one who realized eye contact is bad. Thinking about how he cannot play the social game, gets overrun and ignored (as opposed to Laios, whose resting bitchface, genuine frustration with people, and almost total earnestness earn him an unfairly spooky reputation.)
(Actually, OJ's got a nearly flat affect, so manga!Laios and OJ actually do have similar vibes, just Laios is harder for others to ignore.)
The rest of their respective parties don't map to each other. Angel, Em and Antlers are not Chilchuk, Marcille or Senshi. The stories these works tell are different in most every way other than OJ and Laios being probably autistic, and everyone relying on their knowledge to win the day and survive.
I don't really have a thesis here. I just think they're neat.

Cohost backup: Falloutposting - I've been playing this game since 2000 and I keep finding new stuff.

 

 

 

[ID: Fallout 1 message box text reads, "Radscorpion was critically hit for 4 hit points. The Radscorpion cannot cope with a new sensation, like missing internal organs." /end ID]

 

 

Cohost backup: complainy, even a little mean, rant about the adults I knew in childhood

When I was a child, folks called me many things. Gifted, mature, intelligent, an old soul, an indigo child. Romanticizing on a spectrum from IQ-fetishizing to bullshit magic (but I repeat myself), to avoid facing how traumatized and alienated I was, instead of doing something to improve my shitty, dangerous life.
An indigo child, for crap sakes. Folks wanted to believe the Next Generation, "homo superior" as the song said, would fix everything by virtue of superpowers from the stars.
I still haven't really internalized that attempted murder is not a normal childhood experience.
Do you suppose they thought that, by believing in such things, they were being activists? That by reading books about magical alien incarnations they were making the world a better place? That wouldn't be true no matter what you're reading. There's no media consumption that can make the world a better place. If creating media makes the world a better place, it is not because its consumption is itself anything valuable; it is the actions it inspires that matter, and nothing more. (And my sympathies to anyone who tries to inspire folks to stand up for us, and instead only inspires folks to pass laws to keep lineworkers from becoming part of the sausages. One can try.)
And lemme tell ya, I did not grow up to be anything that special. I'm one more unemployed, disabled trans woman who has panic attacks in grocery stores. If testing at 99.9 percentile in several fields of childhood development yields someone who barely graduates high school and on rare occasion writes angry rants on social media, I don't think testing does what it's intended to do. And perhaps intelligence, whatever that's supposed to be, is of little use if it was supposed to be something I had a lot of, and now I can't remember advanced algebra and have forgotten how to spell "desperate."
And no, I don't think this little shitty piece of media I'm writing is important either, nor is consuming it going to make anybody a better person. They have to choose that for themselves. By fucking doing something. Find some kid who has that faraway stare, whether they take tests well or not, and fight off the terrors that plague them. Listen to what they say, try to learn what is happening in their heads, in their lives, be there for them, but don't... don't just fucking build them up and tell them what amazing things they'll be. Don't hold parades for us and tell us how great we are and how the whole world will be our oyster and how we'll save lives and invent things and win at life for everyone. Don't tell us we'll overthrow the old regime and install a new, kinder and better world. Don't tell us we can't, but if you really want something like that to happen, do it yourself.
Bertholdt Brecht said, "Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon." A weapon does no good if you don't use it.

When the Catholic priest offers exorcism but the demon is part of your polycule now

 

 

 

[ID: Legend Of The Galactic Heroes screenshot. Frederica Greenhill Yang sits in the driver's seat of a vehicle, dressed in her naval uniform, and playfully tells those present, "Thank you all very much, but I prefer to be possessed." /end ID]