early_riser

joined 4 weeks ago
[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 9 points 13 hours ago

It'll just get escaped by quotes.

 

The picture depicts the transit (motion across the sun) of the principle chapter monastery of the Knights of the Sun.

The fact the principle chapter is an orbital colony located very close to the yinrih's home star is where the Knights got their name.

In Commonthroat knights are called rGHqg, related to rGHg, meaning "mech" or "heavy armor". The organizational unit that has a local presence in a particular city is called an rGHlNg, meaning "armory" or "mech hangar". The local leader is simply "the head knight" or "head of the armory" but humans usually refer to the place as a "chapter" and to the local leader as a "chaptermaster", mostly because the Knights are warrior monks in powered armor, evoking comparisons in-universe to a certain grimdark tabletop game. The knights, for their part, find these comparisons offensive given they actually like aliens.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

Are there other mechs for sale?

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

What is a fish hook mass? A giant tangled wad of fish hooks?

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I know what it does, but “replacement” implies the original is no longer there.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I can purchase (a/the) mechagodzilla on the open market?

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago (4 children)

What prompts the market for replacement pineal glands?

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

So water is rare enough to serve as currency?

 

This got promptly deleted when I proposed it on /r/worldbuilding, but let's see how it fairs here. I'll start with one. Feel free to add others. Fill in the blanks in a way that makes sense in your setting.

[plural noun]? [plural noun]? [plural noun]? It's yours, my friend, as long as you have enough [name of currency]!

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Does it require an internet connection or can it operate locally? Does it need an app/account?

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I’m in the US.

 

A rain sensor just tells you if it's raining or not. A rain gauge will give you cumulative rainfall values. I know there are DIY projects to make HA-compatible gauges but I'd rather have something out of the box, at least in terms of hardware.

I found this on Amazon, and it appears to be be a clone of a more expensive station by Ambient Weather. It looks like it could be made to work with HA as it has a web interface, but I'm not sure if an app is required for setup. The rain gauge also doesn't seem super accurate, which is frustrating as that's the only thing I really care about.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

I haven't differentiated the various regions of Focus in terms of diet, but I have defined a few things about yinrih cuisine and a few foods or snacks.

The yinrih gustatory system is less senative then that of a human. Cooking emphasizes texture and temperature, overall mouth feel, rather than taste. They CAN taste, and dishes do incorporate flavors, but it's far less sophisticated compared to human gastronomy.

The most common livestock bred for meat is the wormcow. Male wormcows grow what are called trophic limbs while the female gestates the calf. The calf eats these trophic limbs while it grows before assuming a herbivorous diet as an adult. This process is not harmful or even painful to the father, and he can regrow the limbs the next time a calf is expected. These limbs are harvested without killing the animal. The meat is naturally spicy as it contains large amounts of capsaicin (or analogous compounds) to deter insects from eating the wormcow's technically dead legs. Humans compare the meat to beef, though it keeps better, not acquiring that rancid flavor so quickly.

Most yinrih dishes, including wormcow, are served in bowls in a state somewhere between salad and stew, always prepared such that utensils are not needed, with the food already cut into bite sized chunks. Cultures very on whether the bowl is brought up to the mouth or whether the diner lowers his head to meet the bowl on the table, but yinrih eat, as the shape of their heads suggest, like dogs, directly from the bowl.

Snacks, or "tail food", are meant to be eaten casually while standing. Since all four paws are occupied in bearing the diner's weight, he must use his tail to grasp the food and bring it to his mouth. These foods include the same sort of processed empty calorie laden junk food familiar to humans, often salty or sweet in flavor, crunchy or gummy or creamy in texture.

There is a cream cultivated from certain plants that fills a role similar to butter. The flavor is too subtle for yinrih but they do enjoy using it as a binder or a base to add other flavors to. The Commonthroat word for this cream (which I don't have to hand) is the "butter" used in the profane expression "cloaca butter" meaning nonsense or BS.

Spacers have a very different way of eating since they are in microgravity and can use all their paws to grasp now that they don't have to hold their weight. I haven't detailed much about how they eat other than that there's a hydroponically grown meat substitute called "leasemeat" (the word "lease" coming from an archaic English word for "false"). It comes from a fungus and is often gussied up to approximate the texture or flavor of other meats, but it's a poor substitute, and real meat is an expensive luxury.

On the tidally locked planet Hearthside there is a "snack" of sorts called "cooling bark" ("bark" referring to a strip of tree bark). It's like those dissolving mouth wash strips that used to be so popular. The difference is it's really, really, REALLY minty, like a reverse Carolina Reaper. It's potent enough to cause pain and even fainting in humans. It's meant to provide relief from the heat of the nightless desert rather than to freshen the breath. It effects the entire body rather than just the mouth.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Salamanders are amphibians, or do you mean the mythological salamander? If they're amphibians, that would present some interesting logistic issues. Their skin would need to stay moist and they would need to lay their eggs in water.

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

My description was rather poor in hindsight. Their parrot-ness is mostly in the colorful feathers, large beak designed for crushing, and long macaw-like tail feathers. They're not zygodactyl like parrots, and probably have longer legs like an ostrich. I'm not sure where they exist on the food chain, but they're likely social as that would make them easier to tame. They are clever and possibly tool-users in the vein of corvids (or indeed parrots).

 

Horses are boring. What critters do you use as mounts?

This is a question I haven't entertained much for my conworld, as it focuses on a time when the yinrih have achieved Kardashev II status and no longer rely on beasts of burden (except perhaps on the surface of Sweetwater where various primitivist communities can be found).

At first I thought yinrih would simply not use large riding animals, but I may change that. Yinrih are not cursorial like humans, and thus would benefit from domesticating a species that is.

One critter I've had in the back of my head for years but have yet to introduce into this setting is the Iridopter, a parrot-like animal used as a mount. I've pictured them as more dinosaur-like in the past, but I may make them more avian. Iridopters are excellent distance runners and may be able to glide for short periods thanks to Yih's lower gravity. They're also a fair bit smaller than a horse. Yinrih max out at about 80 pounds (relative to Earth gravity, even less on Yih, so they can manage with smaller mounts.

Of course this wouldn't be complete without some xenoergonomics. Yinrih have two resting postures that allow the use of their paws and tail, namely lying on the back or on the belly. My current idea is that they lie on the belly across the Iridopter's back, with the rider's tail cradled in the iridopter's own long stiff tail feathers.

 

Not sure what I'm rambling on about here, but I took the time to write it so I might as well post it.

I assume many of you, like me, are on Lemmy because you fled Reddit for one reason or another. For me the API fiasco opened the door, and me realizing I was addicted to it made me leave.

I enjoy conworlding, both my own and that of others, differently than I do more polished works. It's raw unfiltered imagination. Sometimes the ideas are stupid or cringy or poorly presented (I know mine are at least), but they have an authenticity that you don't see in published works, and I think there's a joy in the very act of pretending, or, to dignify it with Tolkien's words, sub-creation.

The size of /r/worldbuilding meant there was always something interesting to see or read about, whereas other communities are less active. There were problems though. Art posts were disproportionately favored, a consequence of humanity being an overwhelmingly visual species, in my opinion. This left those of us without artistic talent feeling ignored. The mods could be trigger-happy about posts that they felt didn't provide enough context. I posted an image that I thought was adequately explained in the title, but got a warning from the mods because I didn't write a novel's worth of backstory. More "gamey" prompts were deleted. I once posted a "worldbuilding mad-libs" game where you had to fill in the blanks in a way that made sense in your setting, but it got deleted pretty quickly.

Besides the mods, there were a glut of posts asking about characters and characterization, which isn't really worldbuilding, as well as comments complaining about stuff that is worldbuilding, like realistic map making.

In a way I signed up for this. I've been trying to de-urbanize my online activity, separating myself from the massive centralized platforms that dominate the modern web and seeking out more niche corners of the internet to fill my needs. I guess I shouldn't complain about it in that case. Of course this community is going to be less active. It's smaller than Reddit, and that's what I wanted.

 

Ubiquiti is pretty good about HA integration, so I decided to take a chance buying one of their new line of sensors. It's a door/window sensor that also senses motion, light, temperature, humidity, and (somehow) leaks.

You either need their proprietary (boo) superlink hub or a U6 series access point for the sensors to work. I have the latter. Everything gets reported to HA immediately as expected. My only complaint is that you're unlikely to need or want every single sensor in the same place. I still don't know how the leak detection is supposed to work on a door sensor. It uses an uncommon battery size, and cramming all those sensors into a single package makes it an expensive purchase compared to other brands, especially if you purchase directly from Ubiquiti.

All in all it does what it's supposed to, and I suppose it's worth the cost if you need all those sensors in one place.

 

It would seem logical to name them for where they are and what they do. "Bathroom motion sensor", "Bedroom lamp", etc. However, I've found that, if it can move, it ends up moving sooner or later. My "bathroom" motion sensor is now in the upstairs family room, for example.

 

At my insistence we bought a Canon laser all in one printer in 2022. It's turning out to be more trouble than it's worth, and it can't do some stuff that some family members need, like printing on thick card stock.

I do, however, like the fact that the Canon reports toner levels to HA. Is there a normie inkjet printer that also has this functionality and won't fleece us with BS ink subscriptions and lock us into using their ink?

I'd also like it to be JUST a printer, not an all-in-one. I'm looking at a dedicated scanner, which doesn't need an HA integration.

 

I just thought I'd put this out there for comment.

Semelparity is when a species only reproduces once in a lifetime. Usually semelparous species die soon after giving birth. Yinrih, however, are both semelparous and long-lived thanks to a high degree of parental care conferring a survival advantage.

Yinrih live on average around 724 Terran years (let's say 700 to make the math easier). A yinrih pup reaches maturity at around 53 Terran years, but let's assume because of social factors they don't reproduce until around the age of 100 on average.

The average litter size is 1.5 times the number of contributing parents. Yinrih can have between 2 to 12 biological parents. This group of parents is called a childermoot. Let's say that once you account for childhood death, infertility, conscious decision not to have pups, etc, the number of pups in a litter that go on to become parents is about 1.2 times the size of the childermoot.

Let's say at year zero there are 50000 newly hatched yinrih. They reproduce at year 100, giving a total population of 50000*1.2 + 50000 = 60000 This trend continues until year 700. The first cohort of 50000 yinrih dies, so from here out we subtract the population older than 700. The population reaches 3 billion (my threshold for achieving orbital flight) at around the year 5750.

population table

Terran Year Population Cohort Size
0 50,000.00
100 110,000.00 60,000.00
200 182,000.00 72,000.00
300 268,400.00 86,400.00
400 372,080.00 103,680.00
500 496,496.00 124,416.00
600 645,795.20 149,299.20
700 774,954.24 179,159.04
800 879,945.09 214,990.85
900 955,934.11 257,989.02
1000 997,120.93 309,586.82
1100 996,545.11 371,504.19
1200 945,854.13 445,805.02
1300 835,024.96 534,966.03
1400 702,029.95 641,959.23
1500 592,435.94 770,351.08
1600 560,923.13 924,421.29
1700 673,107.76 1,109,305.55
1800 1,007,729.31 1,331,166.66
1900 1,659,275.17 1,597,400.00
2000 2,741,130.21 1,916,880.00
2100 4,339,356.25 2,300,256.00
2200 6,507,227.50 2,760,307.19
2300 9,258,673.00 3,312,368.63
2400 12,560,407.60 3,974,842.36
2500 16,322,489.12 4,769,810.83
2600 20,386,986.95 5,723,773.00
2700 24,514,384.34 6,868,527.60
2800 28,417,261.20 8,242,233.12
2900 31,800,713.44 9,890,679.74
3000 34,410,856.13 11,868,815.69
3100 36,093,027.36 14,242,578.83
3200 36,861,632.83 17,091,094.59
3300 36,983,959.40 20,509,313.51
3400 37,080,751.28 24,611,176.21
3500 38,196,901.53 29,533,411.46
3600 41,836,281.84 35,440,093.75
3700 49,953,538.20 42,528,112.50
3800 64,894,245.84 51,033,735.00
3900 89,273,095.01 61,240,482.00
4000 125,777,714.02 73,488,578.40
4100 176,883,256.82 88,186,294.08
4200 244,509,908.18 105,823,552.89
4300 329,661,889.82 126,988,263.47
4400 432,094,267.78 152,385,916.17
4500 550,063,121.34 182,863,099.40
4600 680,225,745.61 219,435,719.28
4700 817,770,894.73 263,322,863.14
4800 956,875,073.67 315,987,435.76
4900 1,091,550,088.41 379,184,922.92
5000 1,216,910,106.09 455,021,907.50
5100 1,330,842,127.31 546,026,289.00
5200 1,436,010,552.77 655,231,546.80
5300 1,542,062,663.32 786,277,856.16
5400 1,667,825,195.99 943,533,427.39
5500 1,843,190,235.18 1,132,240,112.87
5600 2,110,328,282.22 1,358,688,135.44
5700 2,523,843,938.67 1,630,425,762.53
5800 3,149,512,726.40 1,956,510,915.04

It is likely I'm making some mistakes. I've assumed that the yinrih's exotic reproductive strategy doesn't effect the population. We can assume that a human has two parents, but this is not the case for yinrih.

Addendum:

I tried a slightly different strategy. Same starting numbers, but this time I got the present population by summing the cohorts younger than 700. The good news is I came up with a similar result, with the population reaching my 3 billion threshold around 5250.

Table for method 2

Terran Year Population Cohort size
0 50000 50,000.00
100 110,000.00 60,000.00
200 182,000.00 72,000.00
300 268,400.00 86,400.00
400 372,080.00 103,680.00
500 496,496.00 124,416.00
600 645,795.20 149,299.20
700 774,954.24 179,159.04
800 929,945.09 214,990.85
900 1,115,934.11 257,989.02
1000 1,339,120.93 309,586.82
1100 1,606,945.11 371,504.19
1200 1,928,334.13 445,805.02
1300 2,314,000.96 534,966.03
1400 2,776,801.15 641,959.23
1500 3,332,161.38 770,351.08
1600 3,998,593.66 924,421.29
1700 4,798,312.39 1,109,305.55
1800 5,757,974.87 1,331,166.66
1900 6,909,569.85 1,597,400.00
2000 8,291,483.82 1,916,880.00
2100 9,949,780.58 2,300,256.00
2200 11,939,736.69 2,760,307.19
2300 14,327,684.03 3,312,368.63
2400 17,193,220.84 3,974,842.36
2500 20,631,865.01 4,769,810.83
2600 24,758,238.01 5,723,773.00
2700 29,709,885.61 6,868,527.60
2800 35,651,862.74 8,242,233.12
2900 42,782,235.28 9,890,679.74
3000 51,338,682.34 11,868,815.69
3100 61,606,418.81 14,242,578.83
3200 73,927,702.57 17,091,094.59
3300 88,713,243.08 20,509,313.51
3400 106,455,891.70 24,611,176.21
3500 127,747,070.04 29,533,411.46
3600 153,296,484.05 35,440,093.75
3700 183,955,780.85 42,528,112.50
3800 220,746,937.03 51,033,735.00
3900 264,896,324.43 61,240,482.00
4000 317,875,589.32 73,488,578.40
4100 381,450,707.18 88,186,294.08
4200 457,740,848.62 105,823,552.89
4300 549,289,018.34 126,988,263.47
4400 659,146,822.01 152,385,916.17
4500 790,976,186.41 182,863,099.40
4600 949,171,423.69 219,435,719.28
4700 1,139,005,708.43 263,322,863.14
4800 1,366,806,850.11 315,987,435.76
4900 1,640,168,220.14 379,184,922.92
5000 1,968,201,864.17 455,021,907.50
5100 2,361,842,237.00 546,026,289.00
5200 2,834,210,684.40 655,231,546.80
5300 3,401,052,821.28 786,277,856.16
 

So the result is a camera that yells 'Doggo!' more or less at random.

 

This is a simple image made in Blender showing a ringed planet during the summer solstice. I have stats for the yinrih's homeworld of Yih, density, radius, etc. I used the equation found on the Wikipedia article for Roche limit to determine the dimensions of the ring for this image using the following numbers.

Radius of Yih: 6.44e6 m Density of Yih: 4810 kg/m^3 Density of object to be ringified: 3344 kg/m^3 (I used Earth's moon)

Plugging and chugging gives us a Roche limit of 9.16e6 meters, or 1.42 Yih radii.

I assumed the Roche limit itself represented the outer radius of the ring, and that the inner radius was more or less arbitrary, which I set to about 1.14 radii.

This gives us a ring that's a lot closer than I was imagining, which presents some lore problems. The ring in the image above would look like two glowing horns if one were on the night side in the mid-latitudes and not, as I envision, a partially eclipsed but still obvious arch shape.

It's already well established that the Bright Way uses a golden arch in lieu of a halo in religious art thanks to the ring, and the ring is popularly conceived of as a contiguous arch for at least part of the year, giving rise to phrases such as "chasing the end of the ring" meaning to go on a fool's errand.

If I wanted to keep using the assumptions listed earlier, the only way to change the outer radius of the ring is to increase the density of the doomed celestial body.

I can, of course, ignore this and just make it whatever I want. I'm already ignoring how ephemeral rings are on a geologic time scale. And I could be making mistakes even within the parameters I mentioned because I'm running on 5 hours of sleep 🤷‍♂️.

74
submitted 3 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by early_riser@lemmy.world to c/homeassistant@lemmy.world
 

We've been having trouble with ~~rodents (I assume squirrels)~~ in the crawl spaces on our second floor. I decided to stick a PIR sensor on the door to see if I could catch any movement, and sure enough, a bunch of movement around 1 AM this morning. (Correction, it was a possum, which makes sense in hindsight as they're nocturnal).

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