photos – Co-Geeking

Visual Inspiration: Indian Black Narrowmouth Frog

March 20, 2024February 19, 2024Eppu1 Comment

The Indian black narrowmouth frog (Melanobatrachus indicus) is a vulnerable species endemic to wet evergreen forests in southern India.

Wikimedia Davidvraju Melanobatrachus indicus

Not much is known about them outside of academia and/or research circles (and I’m currently too sick to start combing through more in-depth sources). They seem to be quite small, though. And how cute are those tiny blue polka dots! And its face, too! At least this individual looks so smart it could easily be the model for a dungeon boss for a computer game.

Image by Davidvraju via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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: Ringneck Snakes

February 7, 2024January 28, 2024Eppu

I’m not a great friend of cold-blooded critters in general. The ringneck snake (Diadophis punctatus), however, does fall close enough to my sense of cute to bring up. Especially the juveniles—soooo small!

Flickr Tony Iwane Pacific Ringneck Snake

Even the adult ringnecks are quite small and slender, about 21-36 cm (8″-14″) long. The belly and underside are bright yellow, orange, or red, and there often is a ring of the same color around the neck. The 14 non-poisonous subspecies are found in much of the United States, central Mexico, and south-eastern Canada in a wide variety of habitats.

Apparently, the coloring can also shift along the length of the body, like on the prairie ringneck snake in the photo below.

Flickr Peter Paplanus Prairie Ringneck Snake

This type would be especially handsome as a ginormous fantasy version, perhaps even as a rideable creature, a little like the sandworms on Dune or oliphaunts in The Lord of the Rings with war-towers on their backs.

Images: Pacific ringneck snake by Tony Iwane on Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0). Prairie ringneck snake by Peter Paplanus on Flickr (CC BY 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?

Visual Inspiration: Greater Blue-Eared Starling

November 8, 2023November 2, 2023Eppu3 Comments

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?

Greenhouses Fill the Almería Peninsula in Southern Spain

September 27, 2023May 7, 2023Eppu

Aerial photographer Tom Hegen documents the extensive impact of human presence on earth and the traces we leave behind. His Greenhouse Series II deals with the Almería peninsula in southern Spain, where most of the available land—both flatland and ridges—is covered with greenhouses.

The stunning scenery reminds me of a tightly-built agricultural area or East Asia’s terraced rice fields, if the crops were all white, or perhaps snowy fields separated by hedges.

While I have some admiration for the productivity (30 times higher than average European farmland, apparently) and efficient land use, the accompanying plastic waste and pollution are unacceptable and unsustainable.

However, I could easily imagine seeing something like this on a not-quite-terraformed world in the Alien movies, for example, or one of the more dystopic locations in the Star Wars franchise.

Found via Colossal.

Images by Tom Hegen

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?

James Webb Telescope’s Breathtaking Protostar Image

March 29, 2023December 11, 2022Eppu1 Comment

The James Webb Space Telescope has taken near-infrared images of the protostar within the dark cloud L1527, providing insight into the beginnings of a new star. Below is the most spectacular of the images that NASA released.

Here’s NASA’s description of the image:

“The protostar itself is hidden from view within the ‘neck’ of this hourglass shape. An edge-on protoplanetary disk is seen as a dark line across the middle of the neck. Light from the protostar leaks above and below this disk, illuminating cavities within the surrounding gas and dust.
“The region’s most prevalent features, the clouds colored blue and orange in this representative-color infrared image, outline cavities created as material shoots away from the protostar and collides with surrounding matter. The colors themselves are due to layers of dust between Webb and the clouds. The blue areas are where the dust is thinnest. The thicker the layer of dust, the less blue light is able to escape, creating pockets of orange.”

Wow. It’s really stunning, isn’t it?

Considering how much incredible data the James Webb has already gotten in its first year (and I’m not even properly following its work), I cannot conceive how much more it’ll provide in its decade-long planned mission.

Image by NASA and the Space Telescope Science Institute

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

Visual Inspiration: Bohemian Waxwing in White

February 8, 2023October 15, 2022Eppu1 Comment

Leucism or pigmentation loss results in partial coloring in individuals, like this amazing Bohemian waxwing:

Tumblr Make Rantala Leucistic Bohemian Waxwing

Very striking, isn’t it! A white waxwing would catch your eye anyway, but the red and yellow wing and tail tips are the truly arresting parts. Wow.

I just can’t but wonder how well one would do in nature. In northern Fennoscandia it would be okay in the winter, because even with the climate change the northern Nordic areas get snow, but summer might be tough.

Image by Make Rantala on Instagram, found via Beauty in All Things on Tumblr.

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

Visual Inspiration: Frog Lives up to Its Name

January 18, 2023October 15, 2022Eppu

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:

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: Eagle-Winged Northern Lights

December 28, 2022October 15, 2022Eppu

The Astronomy Photographer of the Year contest is hosted by National Maritime Museum, part of the Royal Museums Greenwich in Britain. In 2022, the competition was run for the 14th time. This shortlisted photo by Alexander Stepanenko didn’t win the award for auroae, as astounding as it is:

Colossal Alexander Stepanenko Winged Aurora orig Sm

Stepanenko’s shot was taken in Murmansk, Murmansk Oblast, Russia, and was highly commended by the jury.

Spectacular, isn’t it? As a Finn who grew up two hours south of the Arctic Circle, I’ve seen my share of northern lights, but never this, hm, I guess curvy is the right word. I know they undulate and can therefore make fancier shapes; I’ve only managed to see them fairly linear, though, or curving over quite a large swath of the sky, just like I haven’t seen any purple or yellow ones myself.

Come to think of it, there is a thin lining of white and purple at the right edge of this aurora. Wow! Is it any wonder that natural scenes like these have lead the earlier hominids and humans to think of magic and gods?

Image by Alexander Stepanenko, found via Colossal.

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

Visual Inspiration: Ruins Don’t Need to Be Grey and Dull

July 13, 2022October 15, 2022Eppu

Ruins and abandoned places are often seen as plain and boring. Granted, the color of untreated, inexpensive rock (which the majority of surviving buildings tend to be made from) often isn’t anything to write home about. But in our fiction, ruined areas don’t need to be austere and grim. You can even find real-life ruins in a variety of styles for inspiration.

For example, houses in Herculaneum famously featured colorful mosaics and painted murals. In addition, paint was generously applied elsewhere, like these pillars and external wall from House of the Relief of Telephus show:

In Sanzhi, Taipei County, Taiwan, clusters of colorful pod houses or UFO houses once stood:

It’s not always humans who have applied the color onto the ruins either. At the ancient Maya site called Bonampak or Ak’e, in the Chiapas area, Mexico, strikingly orange lichen is taking over building facades:

(Check out the Bonampak Wikipedia article for a stunning relief carving and a painted mural!)

In Dutch photographer Roman Robroek’s shots we can see that a ruin definitely need not be grey, blocky, and boring. Partly overrun by nature could mean an almost orderly takeover, like in the photo of a Gothic-style former chapel built at the end of 19th century, below:

Beautiful, brightly colored arches among rubble from the childhood house of Lebanese singer Fairuz (who was born in 1934) in Beirut form a striking contrast to the greenery outside:

Finally, a still strikingly turquoise—if peeling—underside of a round staircase:

It vaguely reminds me of peacock feathers! I wish the photographer gave us a little more information about the history of this place. Browse more via Colossal or at Robroek’s website.

Since they exist in real life, I would be delighted to read about vibrantly colored and visually striking abandoned places in my genre fiction, too.

Images: Herculaneum by Andy Hay via Flickr (CC BY2.0). Sanzhi Pod Houses by mingshah via Flickr. Bonampak by Carsten ten Brink via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0). Images by Roman Robroek: Former chapel. Arches at the house of Fairuz. Blue staircase.

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

Living in the Science-Fictional Now: Photos from Another Planet Are Trivial

June 1, 2022April 24, 2022Eppu

One of the astounding things about living right now is the sheer amount of scientific knowledge and technical skills humanity has gained in the past 100 years or so alone.

These days it’s trivial, for example, to get high-quality photos from a neighboring planet brought to your personal device.

(Ok, it’s not truly trivial in the strictest sense since so many steps and technologies are involved, but at the same time: Photos. From another planet. Automatically delivered. Via the Internet. Which many (if not most) of us in the West have casual access to. Pretty much daily! So yes. Trivial.)

Specifically, I’m talking about the Persevererance Imgage Bot on Twitter. It’s a project by computer engineer Niraj Sanghvi. He has automated image tweeting mostly from NASA/JPL-Caltech sources for an impressive, ever-growing collection.

The photos are purely functional, of course, helping the rover to operate, but some are also quite interesting as photographs. Below are some recent favorite shots.

Twitter PersevereImgBot SkyCam and Stars

(Click on the image source links below to find more about each photo.)

As a bonus, here’s a short video of a Martian solar eclipse by the moon Phobos taken by Perseverance:

NASA’s Perseverance Rover Sees Solar Eclipse on Mars by NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory on YouTube

Cool. Cool, cool, cool. 🙂

Images by NASA/JPL-Caltech/ASU via PersevereImgBot on Twitter: Rock and sand. Hilly landscape. SkyCam with stars. Smooth sand.

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