nature

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Flowering Cacti

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Just look at the mass of flowers on these cacti:

Tumblr mutant-distraction Flowering Cacti

I grew up essentially on a flood plain. While I have visited a few, and know that a lot of deserts are not mostly smooth sand dunes like the Tatooine and Dune stereotype would have us believe, I’ve never actually experienced deserts as a living environment. This is a fabulous glimpse—especially after the long and cold winter Finland had this year.

Image via mutant-distraction on Tumblr

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Visual Inspiration: Greater Blue-Eared Starling

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The greater blue-eared glossy-starling (Lamprotornis chalybaeus) is a common bird in parts of Africa. It’s as handsome as handsome gets—absolutely gorgeous!

iNaturalist petermcintyre Greater Blue-eared Starling

This stunning starling breeds in a band of land stretching from Senegal in the west coast all the way east to Ethiopia, and south again through eastern Africa to northeastern South Africa, northern Botswana, southern Namibia, and northern Angola. They live in subtropical forests, savanna, and shrublands.

I’ve always found the English name starling lovely—certainly lovelier than the Finnish one (kottarainen)—but the looks of the common starling haven’t, sadly, quite lived up to the name in my mind. Now, the greater blue-eared starling is quite something else! It would be so remarkable to see a turquoise-blue murmuration in a fantasy production, wouldn’t it?

Found via Herps and Birds on Tumblr.

Image by petermcintyre via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0)

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Rainbow Eucalyptus Trees

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Rainbow eucalyptus trees (Eucalyptus deglupta) shed their bark at a strip at a time, and the tree trunks look stripy as a result. That’s not all, however—the stripe colors can vary surprisingly much. A freshly revealed area will look bright pale green, which then darkens and changes to orange, red, brown, and grey or blue.

Flickr spencer9 Rainbow Eucalyptus
Flickr Jean-Francois Schmitz Rainbow Eucalyptus

Rainbow eucalyptuses are native to the Philippines, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea, but have been planted elsewhere in suitable climates.

Amazing, aren’t they? I wonder whether the Weta artists looked at rainbow eucalyptus trees as an inspiration for their saturated, weird Mirkwood trees for the Hobbit movies. (They talked about the design in the behind-the-scenes documentaries; the movies as released are too dark to see the colors properly, if memory serves.)

Images: Two eucalyptuses by spencer9 via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0). Closeup by Jean-François Schmitz via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Visual Inspiration: Whiskered Treeswifts

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Whiskered treeswifts (Hemiprocne comata) live in various subtropical or tropical forests in Southeast Asia.

Macaulay Library David Cathy Cook Whiskered Treeswift

They remind me of swallows, but are more colorful. Especially the combination of grey plus blue in the wings and back appeals to me.

Setting personal color preferences aside, wouldn’t it be so much more interesting to read a secondary world fantasy story with, say, messenger birds that look like whiskered treeswifts rather than the uninspired and unoriginal corvids?

Yes, corvids are AMAZING birds, but they’re used EVERYWHERE. Could they not be replaced by something else in a fantasy story? Or at least made vibrantly colored?

Image by David and Cathy Cook via The Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Macaulay Library

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Visual Inspiration: Frog Lives up to Its Name

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The mossy frog or Vietnamese mossy frog (Theloderma corticale) comes from Southeast Asia. (Apparently it’s known by many other names, too, like Tonkin bug-eyed frog, but that just sounds offputting, doesn’t it?)

Flickr Smithsonian National Zoo Mossy Frog

Not the only animal with camouflage to play dead when threatened, the mossy frog does it cuter than others, if you ask me. Very effectively, too, if the photo below is any indication:

Flickr mamojo Vietnamese Mossy Frog

Just think if your fantasy role-playing game had a party of player characters traveling through a clearing in a wild, overgrown forest dotted with mossy boulders, which suddenly started moving… and turned out to be huge frogs! Or a secondary world story with villagers somewhere in the boonies struggling to catch and cook these abnormally large frogs before they eat the village’s harvest.

As a total side note: while writing this post I learned that one of the synonyms for camouflage is the phrase plain brown wrapper. I’ve no idea how I’ve never come across that before, but now I know it. It’s one of the joys of language learning to me: you never really stop picking up new words and expressions. 🙂

Images: On a stick by Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Rawpixel via Flickr (CC BY 4.0). Camouflaged by mamojo via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Visual Inspiration pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Sandy Pyrenees

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Now that it’s cold again in the northern hemisphere, it doesn’t feel wrong to post about this phenomemon.

I discovered that in March 2022, storms in Sahara threw a lot of dust into the atmosphere, and winds carried it hundreds of miles away. Here’s a photo from a ski resort in the French Pyrenees, where the slopes were covered with a layer of reddish sand:

Twitter BBC Weather Saharan Dust in Pyrenees

An amazing sight, isn’t it?

Although, as someone who’s grown up using sand and gravel on snow to stop motion, I do have to wonder at one thing: how on earth are you able to ski down these slopes?

(Being the wrong kind of Master of Science, I can only guess it has to do with the skier’s weight pushing the skis below the surface of the snow, therefore escaping the sand friction and still enabling skiing, but I don’t know.)

Image by BBC Weather on Twitter

Out There highlights intriguing art, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Polar Bears Taking Over Abandoned Buildings

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In September 2021, Photographer Dmitry Kokh visited the currently unoccupied Kolyuchin Island in the Chukchi Sea between Russia and Alaska, and documented some of the wildlife there. A bunch of polar bears seem to have settled in the abandoned buildings of a former Russian weather station.

Colossal Dmitry Kokh Kolyuchin Island Three Polar Bears

You can see the bears casually stroll in between the houses, and apparently even spend time inside the buildings, often peeking out of the glassless windows. Astounding!

See more of Kokh’s photos at his site or in Colossal.

Image by Dmitry Kokh via Colossal

Out There is an occasional feature highlighting intriguing art, spaces, places, phenomena, flora, and fauna.

Scenes from Among the Trolls

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Forbidden Studios is an independent game development studio based in Turku, Finland. Their first game is in development now. Recently the studio shared a few more pictures from Among the Trolls on Twitter:

Among the Trolls Forest w Birch

All of the scenery looks absolutely lovely, very much like home, which I’m not used to seeing in a video game, and they prompted me to go look for more. Below are a few other shots that reflect a location firmly based on traditional Finland:

Among the Trolls Cabin Interior

A traditional cabin with what’s clearly a ryijy wall hanging. Nice.

Among the Trolls Sauna

It’s a sauna! Ha! 🙂

I’m now looking forward to hearing more about the story. At this writing the description only says “Among the Trolls is a first-person survival action adventure where the strange mysteries of Nordic forests are unraveled.”

On the basis of the current demo video, among other things you can pan for gold and have a sauna bath; at least two things that are highly unusual. (In fact, a sauna bath provides more sisu in game, which can save your life when all else fails. How fabulous!) On Twitter, Forbidden Studios also shared a clip of rune singing, which is clearly a reference to the Kalevalaic poetry. More unique Finnish goodness!

There might be one potential problem, unfortunately. If the Forbidden Studios gallery and Twitter stream are anything to go by—and they might not—there is only one woman in the plot. (The protag’s grandmother Elina Kantola, who has disappeared along with her husband Aarne.) It could be a stylistic choice; it’s not at all uncommon for Finnish storytellers to focus on lone men in the woods. If true, however, that’s a problem for me.

As fantastic as it is to see the kinds of environments I grew up with reflected on screen, if there aren’t female characters beyond the obligatory Smurfette / wife / girlfriend / (grand)mother type, I’m not interested. At this point in my life the lack of multiple individual, nuanced women in a story is as hard and immediate a turn-off as horror and dystopia are.

Images by Forbidden Studios: Forest via Twitter. Cabin interior via their website. Sauna scene screencapped from the video demo.

Of Dice and Dragons is an occasional feature about games and gaming.

Living Vicariously Through Social Media: Herons in Amsterdam

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Would you ever have thought large birds could live in cities? I would’ve found it a stretch on the basis of my experience, but apparently in Amsterdam in the Netherlands there is a large urban population of herons. Photographer Julie Hrudová has been documenting them, and the photos are very arresting.

Julie Hrudova Herons Amsterdam on Roofs

Some of the birds seem to be getting quite bold:

Julie Hrudova Herons Amsterdam Indoors Sm

Fascinating, isn’t it? Also, the pictures gives me all sorts of ideas for secondary worldbuilding. I could easily imagine semi-domesticated herons in a story, rather like the reindeer in Lapland.

Found via Colossal.

Images: On roofs by Julie Hrudová. Indoors by Julie Hrudová via Colossal.

The Visual Inspiration occasional feature pulls the unusual from our world to inspire design, story-telling, and worldbuilding. If stuff like this already exists, what else could we imagine?