The Lonely Galaxy Megathread (comments encouraged)

[lurker]

The qhrBFg, "weeping sires" or simply rBFmg "those who weep", is one of the oldest surviving examples of cynoid folklore.

Depictions and explanations vary widely, but some elements are common. They are usually depicted as the vengeful ghosts of sires who have lost their womb nests. A typical retelling goes like this:

A group of sires is killed while attempting to protect their womb nest from harm. Their vengeful ghosts wander the bank of the River, seeking to drown passers-by in revenge for their lost kits. Their presence is heralded by the strong scent of lacrimal fluid, which to humans smells like sea spray.

The story is a classic cautionary tale told by parents to their pups to keep them away from water. The earliest versions of the tale involve an act of infanticide by a rival shire, showing how ancient the story is. More recent versions censor this detail, with the loss of the kits attributed to miscarriage, disease, or predation. In these latter versions the ghosts' aggression is blamed on grief-driven madness rather than revenge.

The exact number of ghosts vary. Sometimes there's only one. Sometimes they act together in a group, and sometimes the group is scattered around the area with individuals acting alone. Sometimes the lacrimal fluid can be seen as well as smelled, usually on rocks along the shore. Sometimes the fluid actively oozes out of the rocks rather than simply being present on them.

The sires may appear as rotting corpses that lunge out and drag their victims under, or they may be ethereal specters or even unseen voices that compel the victim to enter the water like a siren song.

Not all versions are negative. Sometimes the sires kill themselves in despair and appear before people who are contemplating suicide to encourage them to reconsider. These depictions appear as normal living yinrih and tend to have black fur.

A version of the tale where the kits die of disease has been used in modern times to criticize the natural brooding movement, which eschews the use of womb nest incubators.

This story is often associated with The Dam's Lament, the first extant example of written language, which is a dam mourning the loss of her kits.

[lurker]

A slightly modified tail gesture ring design. This time done in Plasticity rather than Blender. Plasticity is more CAD-like, so it makes modeling tech a bit easier.

[Khemehekis]

Wow, my staff was just watching the horror movie about La Llorona yesterday.

[lurker]

Wow, my staff was just watching the horror movie about La Llorona yesterday.

I was only vaguely aware there was a movie, but I am familiar with the source folklore. I went through some iterations of this before posting it. it was originally going to be a group of dams, but I decided sires made more sense because they're responsible for guarding the womb nest as the kits gestate.

The positive portrayals having black fur is inspired by the depiction of depression as a black dog. As a dog lover who has depression I like to imagine such dogs as sources of consolation and encouragement to the depressed rather than as symbols of depression itself.

[lurker]

A musical instrument played by the tail.




A spacer terraboo.

[lurker]

Tales of giant sea monsters are ubiquitous throughout human culture. The same is true at Focus. Yih's nautical folklore survived the yinrih's leap to the stars and has thrived among the salty-pelted sailors that call the surface of Sweetwater home.

The most famous legend regards a giant FrkrGHg "armorback", a broad term that encompasses several arthropod-like, and particularly crab-like, benthic creatures. A typical armorback body plan looks like a cross between a crab and a centipede, with a crab's head and pincers on a long, segmented body. Real armorbacks don't get much larger than a lobster, but this legendary critter is said to be so large that it can thrust its head above the surface while its rear is planted on the seabed.

Its favorite meal is, what else, hapless seafarers. It is often blamed, with varying degrees of seriousness, for the sinking of submarines. Most legends say that its chitinous armor is completely invulnerable, but that it can be dispatched easily enough if you can manage to flip it on its back to expose a weak point on its ventral side.

[lurker]

Some sects of neoshamanists employ exorcists to expel evil spirits from places and objects. Some wayfarers also seek out the services of an exorcist, but as with everything surrounding demons, the Claravian magisterium frowns on discussing them at all, even negatively, as they see it as a Morton's fork of "they don't exist so you're wasting your time" or "they do exist and the best thing to do is to ignore them."

Exorcism in most cynoid cultures follows the logic of "If it's intimidating to a yinrih it'll be intimidating to a demon." Exorcists are therefor usually muscular gym bro types, gun nuts, or usually both at the same time. An exorcism consists of the swole and/or heavily armed exorcist showing up and screaming threats and insults at the supposed demon until it flees in fear. Minor property damage is expected because the exorcist needs to show the spirit they're not bluffing.

The more orthodox Claravian equivalent is a simple blessing by a hearthkeeper, including a sprinkling with blessed milk. It's not seen as getting rid of evil so much as inviting good, consecrating the place or object so blessed so that it proves spiritually uplifting to its users.

[HolyHandGrenade!]

“Hello, is this the exorcist’s office? Yes, my microwave turned evil again. I need a monkey-fox dressed as Rambo to come kick and scream at it.”

[lurker]

“Hello, is this the exorcist’s office? Yes, my microwave turned evil again. I need a monkey-fox dressed as Rambo to come kick and scream at it.”

Demon: "Why do I hear boss music?"

[lurker]

Hearthkeepers use dielectric chrism instead of blessed milk when performing rites of blessing on electrical equipment. Since yinrih milk is water-based and organic, it may interfere with sensitive electronic components.

The chrism can take the form of a liquid that is sprinkled on an anointed object or a paste that is smeared.

The Bright Way is a highly sacramental faith, using physical objects and actions to reflect spiritual realities. The Light does not ordain these rites for its own sake, as it depends on nothing for its own existence, but for the sake of its little ones. Ritual, especially spiritually-directed ritual, is seen as a defining characteristic of all sophonts.

[foxcatdogwolf]

As a dog lover who has depression I like to imagine such dogs as sources of consolation and encouragement to the depressed rather than as symbols of depression itself.

wholesome

[lurker]

Gross features of a single Alliance Token (AW currency).



Here's a 3D printed version the size of a US half dollar. All AW currency is made of polymerite. Because of the exotic materials and immensely intricate anti-forgery features (which I'm too lazy to depict in the print), the few tokens of pocket change carried by the missionaries are worth billions during their first year on Earth, which comes in handy when Lodestar decides to fabricate a mech and when they build the first mass router. Ironically, with the opening of the trunk between Erickson and Wayfarers' Haven, the value of the currency drops by several orders of magnitude as Sol and Focus become more economically interconnected and polymerite ceases to be rare on Earth.

All denominations are designed to be distinguished immediately both visually and tactilely.



Here's an AW military standard container like the one Tod keeps his stuff in. It's eventually going to be on casters and have more inset handles designed to be gripped by the tail, which I guess makes them "tailals".

[lurker]

The Allied Worlds is like a combination of NATO and the European Union. The individual planets within the alliance have their own militaries and legal systems, but the central government on Yih can and does oblige members to contribute to mutual defense, as with the Peacekeepers. Economically the alliance is heavily integrated, with a single currency and free trade agreements between members.

The basic divide in Allied Worlds politics concerns how much power the central government on Yih should be given. Centralists favor more concentrated authority while autonomists favor a looser alliance of more independent states. This divide trickles down to smaller divisions of power as well, between planetary governments and the administrative regions that are the remnants of past sovereign nations.

The pull for autonomy is strongest on Yih and Sweetwater. In Yih's case the provinces that were once independent countries dating back to before the space age agitate for independence. Sweetwater is better thought of as two states, with the wealthy benthic cities being the real beneficiaries of the alliance. Most of the surface, except some of the larger fixed islands, is a de facto no man's land of isolated atavist tribes and roving seafarers both piratical and peaceful. You can divide the surface dwellers into those that willfully ignore the AW government and those that don't even know what the AW is in the first place.

Besides the debate over centralized authority, the big issue dividing AW citizens is the Partisans. The AW's original raison d'etre was to protect the member planets in the event the Partisans tried taking over the system. One side favors deeper economic ties with the Partisans, while another wants to treat them as a threat. Both sides acknowledge that the Partisans are problematic, but differ on whether deepening economic ties would make them less authoritarian or just feed the status quo. There are also a pawful of tankies who insist that Partisan Territory is a paradise and Firefly did nothing wrong.

[lurker]

There are three major factions in Moonlitter politics: Pro-AW, who seek anything from closer ties to outright formal union with the Allied Worlds, Pro-Partisan, who are the same but for the Partisans, and Nationalists, who want both the AW and the Partisans off Moonlitter's tail.

The AW has mostly won the soft power game through its ubiquitous media presence. It's so pervasive that Commonthroat is starting to threaten Outlander as the most relevant language. The Partisans prefer the stick rather than the carrot, and border skirmishes are common. When Welkinstead tried graduating from soft power to hard power by signing a deal to establish a military outpost on one of Moonlitter's moons, the Partisans were less than pleased and started threatening to "retake" territory they claimed was rightfully theirs. This eventually lead to the glassing of Pilgrim's Rest.

Pilgrims' Rest was a stronghold of Nationalism. After the Partisan attack on their home, they decided that if they couldn't have an independent Moonlitter, they'd have an independent Pilgrims' Rest, which is why they founded Wayfarers' Haven as a city-state within the Spacer Confederacy.

[Khemehekis]

Political spectra are fun to create for conworlds!

Here's a general two-dimensional political spectrum for moral views among human peoples of Lehola and beyond, created by a woman from Shaleya: https://cbbforum.com/viewtopic.php?p=326552#p326552

[lurker]

Now that I'm working on Outlander, and since I want to start working on Hearthsider in the future, I decided I want to create a universal system for referring to yinrih speech sounds. Here is one candidate. Yinrih language is highly tonal. Plenty of Terran languages (Sino-Tibetan especially) like to refer to tones by number. So I've expanded this system to encompass not just tone, but all the features of a vowel. Consonants are indicated by letters (case insensative).
Vowels

Timing

1 short
2 long
3 early
4 late
5 overlong

Tone

1 low
2 high
3 rising
4 falling
5 peaking
6 dipping

Strength

1 weak
2 strong
3 strengthening
4 weakening
5 cresting
6 troughing

Phonation

1 whine
2 growl
3 grunt
4 plain hiss vowel
5 trilled hiss vowel

Consonants

h huff
c chuff
y yip
p plain hiss semivowel
t trilled hiss semivowel

The system meets my criterion of only containing ASCII characters, but it's not compact in the slightest. Just the word <rnqg> paw is <c1213h1112>.

Thoughts?

[HolyHandGrenade!]

Since there’s 5 phonations, you could represent them with vowels.

[lurker]

Since there’s 5 phonations, you could represent them with vowels.

Maybe. The original Romanization scheme for Commonthroat used vowel letters, but I changed it because I wanted it to be absolutely clear the letters didn't represent human speech sounds, and because I wanted to avoid using uppercase <i> and lowercase <L> together.

What I REALLY want is an easy way to include inline SVG files that I can generate programmatically. That way I can make up arbitrary symbols that can't be read as anything else.

[lurker]

The Unionists are a manifest destiny movement within the Allied Worlds that seeks to unite all of Focus under the AW government. Their slogan is <rdr scrg, rdr rmLg, rdr rJhg, rdr rgHHGg> One star, one species, one throat, one rule.

Their symbol is a filleted hexagon containing six circles representing the six major planets of Focus (Hearthside, Sweetwater, Yih, Newhome, Welkinstead, and Moonlitter)*.

They were always a controversial movement, and only become more controversial after First Contact and the arrival of humans to Focus. They are aggressively anti-partisan. Thanks to the horseshoe effect they don't appear much different from their enemies from an outside perspective. This essentially makes them a "fascist" counterpart to the "communist" Partisans.

*The number six is highly symbolic in most cynoid cultures, representing the yinrih species (six digits on each paw) and Focus (six major planets).

[lurker]

Since the yinrih's star has been given a Latin name (Focus), here are a few candidates for a Latin name for Yih.

Yih /jIh/ or /jI/ (like "yip" without the p) comes from the Commonthorat word <sfqg> /yip, short high strong whine, huff, short low weak growl/. The word refers to earth or soil, but also to the planet Yih itself, meaning <sfqg> is very close semantically to English Earth and Latin Terra.

Some possible candidates are:

Borrowing the English word Yih, which would look like Iĭha, Iĭhia, or even Iĭa if we want to lean into Ecclesiastical Latin's ambiguous use of H when borrowing Hebrew words (Eva/Heva, Anna/Hanna). A possible adjectival form could be Iĭhensis, Iĭhanus/a/um, or Iĭhicus/a/um.

Using a somewhat less common synonym for Earth, like Tellus or Gaea, which is meant to allude to Yih's status as the only other life-bearing planet in the galaxy.

Using the yinrih's scientific classification, yielding Vulpitheca.

More poetic options could reference Yih's ring, with Terra Anulata (ringed Earth) rolling off the tongue nicely.

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Somewhat related: The vast majority of yinrih don't think of themselves as being *from* yih, just like how most humans don't think of themselves as being *from* Africa. This makes the word "yinrih", which refers to Yih, somewhat controversial among monkey foxes. Residents of Yih may regard it as watering down their unique identity by lumping all cynoids together under a label they regard as their own. Non residents of Yih, especially those who chafe under AW hegemony, see it as further chaining them to Yih.