(EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

What can I say? It doesn't fit above, put it here. Also the location of board rules/info.
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eldin raigmore
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Lambuzhao wrote: 08 Dec 2018 13:44
eldin raigmore wrote: 04 Dec 2018 03:06 ... chthonoclasm ...
... tectonic plate separation, ...
I was just about to edit in that suggestion, when I saw that you had posted it!

Your other ideas seem spot on, as well.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Lambuzhao »

Thanks!
[:D]

(Uff! Sorry i'm so late to answer- Been very busy wrapping up the school midyear with the assorted Urswicks and Escuincles. )
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by fruityloops »

how do you change the theme of the website? all of the sudden the code change to the default phpbb forum theme.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by shimobaatar »

There's nothing we as users can do to change it, as far as I've ever heard. If I understand correctly, whatever it is that allows the board to be hosted recently updated, so there aren't a lot of choices at the moment when it comes to how the board looks.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Shemtov »

How can one post in scripts that go in opposite directions? I've had trouble with that, editing can be a bit issue.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by eldin raigmore »

Shemtov wrote: 27 Feb 2019 20:14 How can one post in scripts that go in opposite directions? I've had trouble with that, editing can be a bit issue.
I think if you’re going to write any kind of boustrophedon and post it, you’ll have to take a picture and post the picture.
That probably goes double for vertical boustrophedon.

If I’m wrong, I imagine it’d be because some piece of software lets you choose the writing direction at the beginning of each line.

Don’t Egyptian hieroglyphics have that pair-of-legs-walking glyph at the beginning of each line that tell whether it’s right-to-left or left-to-right?

Don’t Mayan, or some other Mesoamerican or South American, hieroglyphics, have all the glyphs that incorporate faces, face the beginning of the line?

I can imagine every line starting with a glyph facing up or down or left or right, to show which direction the line was meant to be read; and ending with a glyph facing up or down or left or right, to show which direction to look for the next line.

But I doubt there’s any software already on the market, and debugged, and fast, and inexpensive, that could follow such control characters.
If there is, I haven’t heard of it yet.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by fruityloops »

how do you justify some humans having....brightly colored hair? like for some reason i just find them more interesting then what humans usually have.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Dormouse559 »

As in they naturally have brightly colored hair (presumably things like blue, green, purple)? From what I understand, brightly colored hair/fur is really rare, if it appears at all, so I'd want to research why that is. Perhaps it's simply not evolutionarily beneficial, or perhaps there's some physical property of hair that makes blue, green, etc. coloration unlikely. On that train of thought, I'd look into whether there's any reason the principles that make brightly colored feathers (refraction, reflection, scattering) couldn't be applied to hair. If you don't mind the color being "natural" but not innate, you might look at sloths, which sometimes appear to have green fur because of the algae growing in it.

Explaining why those colors emerged sounds like a more complex proposition to me. I get the impression it would involve changing your humans' mating behavior to select for increasingly bright hair and/or changing their environment or biology so that bright colors become at least neutral, but ideally beneficial, for survival. Both options, it seems to me, imply other changes in how these people behave and think (and maybe the distribution of hair on their bodies?) which could be interesting to game out.

All of that's assuming you want biological naturalism. You could justify brightly colored hair in ways that aren't naturalistic but are consistent with the rules of your conworld. And in a pinch, there's always the magic of "Because I say so".
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

"Because it's animeworld" is presumably real answer.

In reality, humans don't have those hair colours, and can't, because they're mammals. Obviously you could have pseudo-humans who are pseudo-mammals if animehair is that important to you. Or, just, magic.


For what it's worth, pretty much the only pigments animals have are melanins (black, grey, and dull beige/brown) and carotenoids (dull yellow and dull red). If you're a single family of birds living in high-copper areas and with a fruit-heavy copper-hoarding diet, you can also have a dull, icky green.

All the other colours, particularly including anything blue* and anything bright, is not actually created by pigments, but instead by 'structural' colour - complex groupings of mirrors and lenses stacked in layers of plates that cause light to reflect and refract in various patterns. These colour-forming structures have to be precisely arranged, because their colour comes from their structure, not their chemisty, which means that they usually have to be built onto solid substrates - hence, shells and scales (and feathers, which are just complicated arrangements of scales). The exception to this is that cephalopods instead hold the structures in place by being all muscle (which in turn is possible because they have fluid-filled muscles that don't work well if you're not underwater), which allows them to actually change colour almost instantly just by flexing their muscles.

However, human hair is neither hydrostatically prehensile like octopus bodies, nor rigid like scales, so it's not really viable to have bright colours in it.


*there's also bilirubin, which is what adds a blueish tinge to fresh bruises. This seems to be very complicated to make and degrades very easily, so animals don't use it as pigments, although apparently it is used to colour some bird eggshells...
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Pabappa »

there are blue pigments in monkeys like this one, but theyre in the skin, not the hair. Im not sure its biologically plausible for whatever pigment that is to transfer from the skin to the hair, but hair is made of keratin, which is also an outer skin component, so maybe?
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by fruityloops »

in my dragon rider conworld, some of my humans kinda have colorful hair albeit it's kinda dull and not eye searing bright. the closest explanation is selective genetic breeding to tell the caste apart from each other.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Creyeditor »

Maybe they are feathers instead of hair? Wouldn't that make it easier?
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Pabappa wrote: 20 Mar 2019 15:54 there are blue pigments in monkeys like this one, but theyre in the skin, not the hair. Im not sure its biologically plausible for whatever pigment that is to transfer from the skin to the hair, but hair is made of keratin, which is also an outer skin component, so maybe?
Monkeys don't have blue pigments, no. You can tell because the blue is so bright! This is, again, structural colour - their skin is actually a dark grey/black. What they do is line up layers of proteins in completely parallel fibres a particular distance apart; this creates interference patterns in light that's reflected off the pattern, and only the blue survives, with everything else cancelling itself out. It's analogous to (although a different precise mechanism from) the way that black oil can look green or purple - the monkeys have not only evolved interference patterns, but found a way to stabilise them to show only one colour from all angles.

Again, however, you couldn't get that effect with hair, because hair fibres can't be made to all line up - because hair is non-rigid. [I guess you could create some sort of effect with very short, very dense hair, not long enough or with enough space to fall out of line?]
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by vampireshark »

Salmoneus wrote: 21 Mar 2019 00:03 Monkeys don't have blue pigments, no. You can tell because the blue is so bright! This is, again, structural colour - their skin is actually a dark grey/black. What they do is line up layers of proteins in completely parallel fibres a particular distance apart; this creates interference patterns in light that's reflected off the pattern, and only the blue survives, with everything else cancelling itself out. It's analogous to (although a different precise mechanism from) the way that black oil can look green or purple - the monkeys have not only evolved interference patterns, but found a way to stabilise them to show only one colour from all angles.

Again, however, you couldn't get that effect with hair, because hair fibres can't be made to all line up - because hair is non-rigid. [I guess you could create some sort of effect with very short, very dense hair, not long enough or with enough space to fall out of line?]
You can get Bragg reflection due to structural color off of single fibers, though: the trick is what the internal structure of the specific fiber looks like. (I mention this because, in the lab, I'm actually working with Bragg reflecting fibers.)
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by fruityloops »

might as well use the magic excuse...and you folks wonder why i don't chat here anymore....
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Well, what answer did you want?
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by elemtilas »

Salmoneus wrote: 21 Mar 2019 17:21 Well, what answer did you want?
Possibly one that answers the query.
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Post by Salmoneus »

*points to host of answers from multiple people answering the question*
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Post by elemtilas »

Salmoneus wrote: 21 Mar 2019 21:03 *points to host of answers from multiple people answering the question*
<shrugs> I don't know, friend: there are responses, but I suspect they didn't actually <i>answer</i> the question in some way or other.
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Re: (EE) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here

Post by Salmoneus »

Don't troll, "friend".

And yes, clearly the responses do not in his opinion answer the question in some way or another. Hence my post asking in effect in what way we had failed to answer the question (that is, what sort of answer would have answered the question).
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