A Tree Thing And Some Robot Drawings, Not Sure What Direction I Was Going For The Last Robo But It Was

A Gargoyle

Just a little bit of shading practice 

Finally finished this, some constructs

I refer to sapient/sentient machines in my setting as constructs partially because the term AI is really broad and can apply to a lot of different type of synthetic forms of life/existences. So to keep it simple all constructs are AI but not all AIs are constructs.

These two are some typical designs among CSG/Human (left) and Brakken (right) constructs. The first is a mobile assistant, a type of specialist construct that is meant to go places where an AI network can't while the other is a Brakken mother unit. The majority of human civilization is governed by the CSG, central service grid a vast AI network that manages all aspects of human civilization. They've governed earth and its many colonies for a very long time and most people under their care life relatively safe, post-scarcity lives. All the CSG has historically had problems with control and governing overreach.

The brakken are eusocial aliens who have a queen. The queens primary role is to produce new members for the colony, provide generation knowledge, and support colony cohesion via the psychoactive pheromones she produces. When the queen dies, a whole is left in the colony and in some instances another queen is unable to take her place. Sometimes colonies can reject the queen. Mother units are essentially bio computers which take on the role of a queen of a colony when needed.

Old 3D model I made in zbrush years ago, unfortunately I lost the original file, but i managed to find an old screenshot, of this guy, my cursed D&D character Clarence Petch-Wayne-Smith III, a disgustingly rich eladrin (the highest of the high elves).

Sketches of constructs made by the Imsee, alien squid whales. Their design is modeled after their creators and as such they are excellent swimmers

Learning to draw mechanical things, decided to make some cyborgs. They have literal face masks, its more of a stylistic choice on their part

A slight update from my old sketch, I wasn't particularly happy about the head. A little too mammalian but i wanted to maintain a a few recognizable bits from the old design. Out of all of my alien designs they've changed the most from their initial concept sketches.

I usually don't reblog stuff to this blog but this feels relevant to my project and I'd like to share. The link is broken but if found a good website with excerpt from it : https://www.urticator.net/essay/0/19.html

look, I know I've talked about this essay (?) before but like,

If you ever needed a good demonstration of the quote "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", have I got an exercise for you.

Somebody made a small article explaining the basics of atomic theory but it's written in Anglish. Anglish is basically a made-up version of English where they remove any elements (words, prefixes, etc) that were originally borrowed from romance languages like french and latin, as well as greek and other foreign loanwords, keeping only those of germanic origin.

What happens is an english which is for the most part intelligible, but since a lot everyday english, and especially the scientific vocabulary, has has heavy latin and greek influence, they have to make up new words from the existing germanic-english vocabulary. For me it kind of reads super viking-ey.

Anyway when you read this article on atomic theory, in Anglish called Uncleftish Beholding, you get this text which kind of reads like a fantasy novel. Like in my mind it feels like it recontextualizes advanced scientific concepts to explain it to a viking audience from ancient times.

Even though you're familiar with the scientific ideas, because it bypasses the normal language we use for these concepts, you get a chance to examine these ideas as if you were a visitor from another civilization - and guess what, it does feel like it's about magic. It has a mythical quality to it, like it feels like a book about magic written during viking times. For me this has the same vibe as reading deep magic lore from a Robert Jordan book.

The Seers

When the Wandering God came they saw a canvas of possibilities and so they began to cast upon the void, an array of light from which the stars grew. When the Wandering one saw patterns amongst the newly made celestial sky they gave them names and then forms, and these forms became the Seers constellation given life. In that early era before time, the Seers and the Wandering God created the heavens, but eventually the god grew restless for it was in their nature to move and never be still. So prior to their departure they created an empty world and gave it to the Seers and said,

"Fill this place with wonder, and equal parts dread. Have this be a place of many tales and most all let it be well. "

With that they left, leaving only a promise that they'd return one day when the stars were right.

I decided to color this really old piece of lineart, from like years ago. Might work on it a bit more in the future, or maybe not but either way, I'm done messing with it for now.

Mercurions, aka cyborgs

In my setting Union Station, humans have been in space for more than a millennium and as such have culturally diverged a lot from their terran ancestors. The history of the mercurions is kinda complex. For one, they aren't actually from mercury despite the name, they instead originate from the colony-ship Mercurion which was created as part of the New Horizon Initiative by the governing bodies of the sol system. The goal was to set humanity among the stars, but the Mercurion never arrived at its intended destination, and instead ended up 100 light-years off course in an unknown and hostile star system. Early, FTL at the time, was very risky.

Multiple catastrophe's aboard the mercurion caused the handful of survivors to turn to reproductive cloning and later cybernetics to survive.

As a culture, their society is highly stratified as a result of the Merilink system, a state-enforced caste system managed by a super computer (to be clear not a sentient AI). The initial idea behind Merilink, was to create a meritocracy, were all mercurions were born at the same level of citizenship / rights and could elevate their status based on merit, which usually ended up meaning either wealth or "labor productivity". As expected, it resulted in a deeply rooted system of inequality.

A long history of warfare, imperialism, and xenophobia has essentially left mercurion society fairly isolated from the rest of the interstellar community until fairly recently. There's a movement amoung them to reduce or even remove the merilink system although whether or not it'll actually happen is still up up in their air.

I still have a lot more to put out for these guy's I'm just really bad at getting it out of my head and onto paper