early_riser

My retired service dog died Tuesday at the age of 13. Her physical and metal health hadn't declined to the point that she wasn't moving on her own or engaging in her favorite activities (read: vacuuming up crumbs and hitting me when I stop petting her). She also passed naturally, unburdening me from heart-wrenching end of life decisions.

Below is my recollection of her final days. I apologize if this is needlessly graphic, but writing it out helps me process things.

Here she is lying next to her successor. She's the lighter-furred one on the right.

Bought Aseprite during the Steam sale and decided to do some Lonely Galaxy pixel "art". I'm by no means an artist though.

This picture shows a yinrih using a pair of HUD specs, which serve as a visual output device for a portable computer. Being quadrupeds, they can't dedicate a limb to operating a device. The input is handled by a paw keyer that's held in one of the forepaws while knuckle walking. Yinrih usually walk on the palms like a baboon or lemur, but can knuckle walk for short periods while holding a small object.

HUD specs are designed to friction fit snugly but comfortably on the muzzle without touching the whiskers.

The bandpass membranes shown in the image serve to narrow the bandwidth of incoming light. There are four pairs of these membranes, usually colored silver, gold (both shown in the image), blue, and red. They appear specular, like mirrored sunglasses. Yinrih who want to affect "puppy dog eyes" around humans will close their gold bandpass membranes and open their primary eyelids wide. Their real eyes are actually pitch black, which many humans find unnerving.

Here's the planet Hearthside. It's tidally locked. The arid day side is called the Nightless Desert. There's a green belt around the terminator and a night side which I haven't really developed.

This doesn't have any in-universe relevance, but it is very relevant to the project as a whole. My elderly dog passed a few days ago. She was the inspiration for a lot of the yinrih's characteristics, including their longevity. This project was partially a way to work through my sadness as she aged and the knowledge that she had much less time ahead of her than behind.

I wrote this story about a relatively young 150 year old yinrih fretting over his aging human friend. It's by far my weakest attempt at a story, but was very therapeutic for me to write.

I'm especially curious in the case of fantasy settings. I'm admittedly not super well read in the genre, I know about the Ways from the Wheel of Time series[^1] , and I'm sure D&D has its fair share of fast travel mechanics.

Anyway, in my case I use mass routers. Rather than a dry lore dump here's a slightly less dry lore dump in story form!

[^1]: fun fact: the Ways inspired the Nether from Minecraft insofar as one step in one dimension is multiplied in the overworld

Got any interesting funerary rites in your setting?

Yinrih do not bury their dead. They usually dissolve the soft tissue and put the bones on display, usually in a lighthouse (house of worship) or other publicly important location such as a school, government building, library, etc.

Some professions or religious communities have unique traditions on top of this. Research monks use their dead in impact and ballistic testing. Claravian orders of healers use their bodies for teaching medicine to novice healers.

Since healers traditionally shed their fur for hygiene purposes, they are unique among yinrih in that they wear clothes when not working in order to retain heat and block sun exposure. Old and venerable healers who have retired, regrown their fur, and died, will have their pelts made into a hame, a ceremonial cloak given to other healers as a badge of honor.

The practice of displaying the bones of the dead causes a cross-cultural misunderstanding after the yinrih are given a bunch of human cadavers to study. The yinrih healers want to do right by their new human friends by showing their remains proper respect, which they do by building a library to hold all the new medical knowledge gained by studying those cadavers, and encrust the facade with the skulls of said cadavers. Needless to say, a tower of human skulls is not what most humans expect to see when they visit the house of friendship.

Incidentally, I based this practice on ossuary chapels such as the Capuchin crypt, and only much later realized that the yinrih are space doggos what build stuff outta bones.

I want to create, sort, filter, query, update, etc. hierarchical data like JSON or XML or YAML with the same ease as a spreadsheet. Does such a thing exist?

Yinrih don't use nukes, as they never bothered to weaponize them before discovering how to yeet things at significant fractions of the speed of light.

I've mentioned retribution fields before, which are force fields that absorb the kinetic energy of projectiles and then fire that energy back at the attacker. They were invented to counter...

...Quasiluminal munitions (Commonthroat gkg rDFrlmqrLPq or more often known by the military slang term gkrdfg, a clipped and reduced form of the above) are projectiles that travel at relativistic speeds and whose destructive power comes solely from their kinetic energy rather than a incendiary or nuclear payload.

Force projectors are used at shorter ranges. As the name implies they project force at a distance. As weapons you mostly see them on paw gauntlets as part of powered armor. By thrusting the palm forward a force extends outward beyond the reach of the attacker's foreleg, sort of a long-distance punch. They have scalong issues though. they convert surrounding oxygen to ozone, and can't be operated in atmosphere beyond a certain size for reasons I have yet to figure out.

Since yinrih are quadrupeds they can't practically use human guns. Modern soldiers use back mounted drone capsules that hover nearby and fire at enemies, similar to the Option power-up from Gradius. Older firearms are saddle-mounted and sit on the back and have a tail-actuated trigger.

This is a steadtree fruit along with a drinking bowl filled with steadtree fruit juice. The fruit has a bluish-purple skin with a vivid violet sheen, and its flesh is an extremely saturated shade of blue.

Steadtrees were the yinrih's primary shelter when they achieved sapience, and the fruit formed a significant part of their diet. It's highly symbolic across most yinrih cultures, especially within the Bright Way. The fruit is offered to guests after liturgies, regardless of creed, and the juice, usually fermented, is drunk during fasts, when Wayfarers are expected to abstain from solid foods.

Humans find it to be extremely sour, comparing a single bite to eating an entire bag of warhead candies.

This is a wind fruit. It is green with four fleshy lobes. It contains a sugar that is rapidly fermented by the yinrih's gut flora into alcohol. A single fruit is enough to get a yinrih drunk. Gas is a byproduct of the fermentation process, lending the fruit its name.

The fruits appearance and effects on the vulpithecine body have made it a frequent source of analogy. Politicians are frequent targets for such analogies due to duplicity (compared to the fruits many facets) lack of awareness or intelligence (alluding to the fruit's intoxicating effect) and tendency to make longwinded boring speeches (referring to the fruit's gassy byproduct).

This is a red fruit (Commonthroat qfBqg /huff, early falling weakening whine, huff, short low weak growl/). Like many words for fruits, the word qfBqg also doubles as the word for the corresponding color.

There are two species of tree that bear nearly identical fruits. One is a harmless treat designed to lure seed dispersers including yinrih and their tree dweller cousins. The other is fatally poisonous and mimics the appearance of the first species. The toxin is potent enough to kill even larger animals like yinrih in mere minutes. The animal dies before it can leave the vicinity of the tree, dropping to the ground so the tree can be nourished by its decomposing corpse.

Over time, the color red became associated with risk. Risk then morphed into bad luck, and that's why yinrih with red fur are considered unlucky.

According to the Bright Way, there is a symmetry between epistemology and cosmology. The realm of the Known is the set of all things that are known. This epistemological concept corresponds to the noosphere (AKA the mind sea), which is the sum total of a sapient species' thoughts, experiences, ideas, and communications, as well as their effect on the world.

The Realm of the Knowable corresponds to the physical universe. Things and events in this realm can (at least theoretically) be grasped by mortal minds, though certain things may be beyond the ken of a particular species on account of its neurology and sensory system, in the same way you probably couldn't explain nuclear physics to a chimp. The Bright Way seeks out other sophonts in part to fill hitherto unnoticed gaps in the yinrih's knowledge, and for the yinrih to offer the same in kind.

However, there are things that lay outside the Realm of the Knowable, beyond the grasp of any mortal mind, regardless of how it is organized. This is the Realm of the Unknowable, or the Empyrean. This is where the souls of the blessed dwell in the beatific vision of the Uncreated Light. Faith, to trust in the unseen, bridges the Realm of the Knowable and the Realm of the Unknowable. Heaven is thus conceived of as being "outside" and the physical universe as "inside".

Wayfarers refer to the Empyrean as cBqDFp the Great Outside, and to the physical universe as rjGJfdMr sMlr This dear little Creation.

Here is what First Contact looks like from an epistemological perspective, the noospheres of humanity and vulpithecinity uniting as one.

What precisely this union consists in is a matter of debate in Claravian circles. It could be as simple as forming friendships between individuals of either species, or it could be as concrete and straightforward as physically uniting the two species' respective Internets, as is held by the Farspeakers.

Since I don't want to double post, here's a bonus lore dump:

The stargazer's prayer is a simple prayer taught to pups. It is, as you probably guess, said at night while gazing up into the stars. Below is an English translation.

I see the stars in dark of night
shining down with holy light.

keeping sophonts safe and warm
whatever be their shape and form.

When their eyes look to the sky
Do they see my star and I?

Do they chant this little verse,
O Maker of the universe?

One day soon before too long,
may we hear their joyful song.

May all our minds and all our might
reflect the Uncreated Light.

The Bright Way is not considered to have a single founder. The faith is said to have been revealed to the entire newly sapient yinrih species in an event called the Theophany. It is here, while the yinrih were still hunting with crudely knapped flint paw axes and storing edible seeds in nothing more than holes in the ground, where they received the Great Commandment to seek out other sophonts among the stars. And it is thanks to their monomaniacal pursuit of this Great Commandment that the yinrih went from the paleolithic to orbital flight in a mere 5 millennia.

Pictured above is a depiction of what was seen during the Theophany. It is an orb of light with a fringe of shifting hues, hanging in a part of the sky where the sun did not travel. Despite occurring at midday, the rest of the sky was dark as night and the stars shone unusually bright.

Over time, depictions of this vision evolved into the star and gear used as the Bright Way's usual symbol. The gear evolving from the chromatic fringe around the orb. There is considerable debate inside and outside the Bright Way as to what this glowing orb was. The majority view in Claravian circles is that it was a breach between the realm of the knowable (the physical universe) and the realm of the unknowable (the Empyrean). While not explicitly endorsed by the magisterium, a common assumption is that the light was in fact the Uncreated Light itself, or more accurately, the closest a mortal mind could get to perceiving the Light's inapproachable glory.

If you ask secular historians, especially within Partisan Territory, it was an instance of mass hysteria, possibly having to do with the yinrih's newly sapient brains. But there are multiple accounts of the Theophany that are reasonably congruent with one another that were penned (clawed?) far away from one another, with no time for one group to have been influenced by another.

Others think it was a hallucination brought on by tainted water or a gas seep that collected along the river valley. A disaster of this magnitude would surely have resulted in other negative effects, like dead animals or sick pups, or at least lingering issues with adults that would have been documented. The fact that this is not the case, especially given the strong taboo against intoxication, makes this idea hard to square with what is known.

Perhaps it was something akin to an aurora, but at that time of year? at that time of day? on that part of Yih? localized entirely within a single discreet orb? Highly unlikely. It also doesn't explain the darkened sky.

In another post I mentioned the Mindseekers, which was a sect that sought to create artificial sophonts rather than seek other minds among the stars. As they began experimenting with electronic computers, they settled on balanced ternary as the number system of choice rather than binary. This choice was based on some vagaries of yinrih neurology they sought to emulate.

Balanced ternary has three digits, -1, 0, and +1. You can represent any signed integer with these three digits alone. The sign of the number is the sign of the highest-order digit. Here are a few examples using T as -1:

TT = -1*3^1-1*3^0 = -3-1 = -4
1T = 1*3^1-1*3^0 = 3-1 = 2
10 = 1*3^1 + 0*3^0 = 3

You can reverse the sign of the number just by flipping +1's to -1's and vice versa.

11 = 1*3^1+1*3^0 = 3+1 = 4
T1 = -1*3^1+1*3^0 = -3+1 = -2
T0 = -1*3^1+0*3^0 = -3

For reasons unknown, perhaps aesthetics, perhaps for some deeper spiritual reason, the Mindseekers often represented balanced ternary numbers using two-dimensional paths. The rules for drawing such a path are simple.

1. Pick a starting point
2. Draw a line in any of the four cardinal directions.
3. You may turn 90 degrees clockwise or counterclockwise, drawing a dot at each turn.
4. You may also go straight ahead, drawing a dot dividing a line segment.
5. You may not make a 180 degree turn, you must make two consecutive 90 degree turns.

"But how does this represent balanced ternary numbers?" I hear you cry. Well, a counterclockwise turn represents a +1, a clockwise turn -1, and a straight is 0. The number is big endian, meaning the first turn is the highest-order digit, the second is the second-highest, etc. Neither initial starting direction nor line length are significant, so those choices can be left to aesthetics or other constraints.

This method has the pleasantly symmetrical property that mirroring the path horizontally results in an integer of the opposite sign.

Mindseekers would often hide such paths in odd places, like the brickwork on the sides of buildings, embedded in the abstract pattern of a tapestry, and so on. It's thought that certain numbers held symbolic value.

These paths became popular as a way to hide messages in plain sight even long after the Mindseekers faded into obscurity.

This is a sketch of a typical vulpithecine public restroom.

1. The doorway is blocked by a curtain. Yinrih enter by pushing the cloth aside with the muzzle. Most rooms that don't need strict access control or environmental protection use such curtains.
2. A washing pool is accessible near the entrance. It's a shallow basin a few inches deep. The water is vigorously circulated and filtered. Yinrih wash all four paws as well as the tail after using the restroom. There is a coarse bristly floor mat used to scrape dirt from under the claws and from between the paw pads.
3. The washing pool sits in the "clean" area of the restroom. The "dirty" area where the toilets are is usually set off by a lip in the floor or a change in tile texture. Hygiene dictates that you enter the washing pool directly from the dirty area before setting paw in the clean area again.
4. The floor is often tiled. How something feels under paw is just as important to a room's style as how it looks. Tiles often alternate between different textures or even different thermal conductivities to achieve a particular tactile aesthetic.
5. There are almost always perches in the clean area of the restroom. Yinrih tend to be chatty while doing their business, and in some cultures it's considered polite to accompany a friend or coworker to the restroom even if you don't have to go yourself.
6. The toilets proper are flush with the surrounding floor. The user backs into the stall. There is a ring of rough tile around the rim to help people from stepping in the toilet[^1]. Both male and female yinrih eliminate via a cloaca and stand with the rear paws on either side of the bowl with the tail resting across the back. Toilet paper, usually soaked in a mild disinfectant like wet wipes, is available in dispensers above the toilet. The paper is manipulated by the tail.
7. There are still partitions affording a modicum of privacy. Just because bathrooms are more social than on Earth doesn't mean people appreciate watching others doing their business, just like many human cultures regard yawning or chewing with the mouth open to be rude or gross. So you can't drop a deuce in the middle of the street and not expect to get a citation. The partitions are low enough to reveal a yinrih's head.
8. The entire stall is flushed after use. The stall floor slopes into the latrine. There is a grate across the entrance that releases a mild mix of water and bleach to both flush the toilet and sanitize the floor.

Needless to say, this is not conducive to human use. If human-specific facilities are not available, the polite thing to do is yield the entire bathroom to a human in need to use privately.

[^1]: The Commonthroat expression P rlpqN sMp, to step in the toilet means to make a stupid mistake, especially despite being warned beforehand. The more vulgar expression bc g rnqg rp qcf to piss on one's own [rear] paws carries a similar meaning.

Posting this here since the conlanging comms seem pretty inactive. I FINALLY solved a problem with my Commonthroat lexicon. I was using a verbose pronunciation scheme describing consonants and vowels one by one with whole words. This caused false positives in search results when searching for terms containing the words used in this verbose pronunciation scheme like "weak" or "low".

In the old system, the vowel b would be given a pronunciation of "short low weak whine". This made it impossible to find words meaning "short" or "low" etc, since they appeared in so many entries.

When I started working on Outlander, another yinrih language, I came up with a universal phonetic notation that would cover the whole gamut of vulpithecine speech sounds that I call the YPA (Yinrih Phonetic Alphabet). It's a bit of a misnomer since it's not really an alphabet, just a more compact way of describing pronunciations.

In YPA, b is rendered "1111", which won't conflict with any definitions.

While the Outlander lexicon has used YPA from the outset, I wasn't sure whether I could update the pronunciations in my Commonthroat lexicon to the new system. But I unexpectedly had a large amount of free time today, so I spent 5 hours straight cobbling together a Python script to replace the old pronunciations with new ones.

So here is the fruit of my labor: https://lonelygalaxy.neocities.org/commonthroat