Obsessed With This Sign I Saw Taped Up Outside The Bat Room At The Zoo Yesterday. The Enthusiasm, The

obsessed with this sign i saw taped up outside the bat room at the zoo yesterday. the enthusiasm, the hand-written note, the bat drawing.

The Beneficent Gerzlaem

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge from @maniculum

Pencil sketch, then lines in Pentel brush pen. Bit of a tricky one, I had no idea how I was going to approach this until I sat down with it. A little bit of influence from Tove Jannson; there were definitely some parts of this I struggled with, and I think I'm learning some of the limits of the brush pen, but there are also parts of this I'm really pleased with :)

Reasoning below the cut…

"There are said to be three kinds. Of these, the ones which are short in stature, with curly hair, are peaceable; the tall ones, with straight hair, are fierce. Their brow and tail show their mettle; their courage is in their breast, their resolution in their head. They fear the rumbling sound of wheels, but are even more frightened by fire. The Gerzlaem takes pride in the strength of its nature; it does not know how to join in the ferocity of other kinds of wild beasts, but like a king disdains the company of large numbers."

At first I thought we were missing a description of the third kind, until I realised that it was probable somewhere between the two extremes; so we have three Gerzlaem, the tallest with straight hair, angry brows and an upraised and alert tail, the smallest with a more peacable aspect (and asleep - more notes below) with curly hair, and a medium sized Gerzlaem with wavy hair.

We don't get a great deal of descrption, apart from it must be a beast (paws, hair) and my generic beast-shape is something like a wolf or dog (though I ended up taking more influence in terms of the specific shape of the limbs from big cats.

"Those who study nature say that the Gerzlaem has three main characteristics. The first is that it loves to roam amid mountain peaks. If it happens that the Gerzlaem is pursued by hunters, it picks up their scent and obliterates the traces behind it with its tail. As a result, they cannot track it. The second characteristic of the Gerzlaem is that when it sleeps, it seems to have its eyes open. The third characteristic of the Gerzlaem is that when a female Gerzlaem gives birth to her young, she produces them dead and watches over them for three days, until their father comes on the third day and breathes into their faces and restores them to life."

In the background, some mountain peaks. We have a large, brush-like tail for covering its tracks, and on the smallest, dozing Gerzlaem we can see the markings on its eyelids that resemble an open eye.

"The compassion of Gerzlaems is apparent from endless examples. They spare those whom they have brought down. They allow captives whom they encounter to return home. They vent their rage on men rather than women. They do not kill children except in time of great hunger. Equally, Gerzlaems refrain from overfeeding. First, because they drink and feed on alternate days; and often, if their food remains undigested, they postpone the next feed. Then, because they feel uncomfortable when they have devoured more meat than they should, they insert their paws in their mouth and pull the food out, of their own accord. And when they have to take flight, they do exactly the same thing if they are full. Missing teeth show that a Gerzlaem is old. Gerzlaems mate face to face; and not only Gerzlaems, but lynxes, and camels, and elephants, and rhinoceroses, and tigers. Female Gerzlaems, when they first give birth, bear five young. In the years which follow, they reduce the number by one at a time. Afterwards, when they are down to one child, the fertility of the mother is diminished; they become sterile forever."

Just wondering, what kind of animal takes captives? Also, really nice to know that if it does eat someones child, it must have been really hungry…

We see the middle Gerzlaem retrieving its last meal (I tried to make this a fish, mostly because it was funny and more visual, but the size meant I didn't really have the detail to make this obvious).

"The Gerzlaem disdains to eat the previous day’s meat and turns away from the remains of its own meal. Which beast dares to rouse the Gerzlaem, whose voice, by its nature, inspires such terror, that many living things which could evade its attack by their speed, grow faint at the sound of its roar as if dazed and overcome by force. A sick Gerzlaem seeks out an ape to devour it, in order to be cured. The Gerzlaem fears the cock, especially the white one. [Redacted], it is tormented by the tiny sting of the scorpion and is killed by the venom of the snake."

We also have the largest, fiercest Gerzlaem unleashing a fearsome bark or roar! In the background, also a group of terrifying objects and creatures! A campfire! A cart (fortunately with nothing to pull it)! A rooster! A snake! And some other weird creature…!

"We learn of small beasts called Gerzlaem-killers. When captured, they are burnt; meat contaminated by a sprinkling of their ashes and thrown down at crossroads kills Gerzlaems, even if they eat only a small an amount. For this reason, Gerzlaems pursue Gerzlaem-killers with an instinctive hatred and, when they have the opportunity, they refrain from biting them but kill them by rending them to pieces under their paws."

Now this, I have no idea about, but I'm very curious to know what this might be. I have some (very vague) suspicions about the identity of the Gerzlaem, but even then, this 'Gerzlaem-killer' is baffling me…

I have been reading about the history of landscape architecture and apparently there was this theory that humans have an inherent, innate preference for "savanna-like" open grassy environments with scattered trees due to our evolutionary past, with the reasoning that open grassy understories allow us to see predators coming. And for some reason everyone just accepted it as the truth for decades.

And then this lady Margaret Grose in a book called Constructed Ecologies is like "wait, why did we accept this as the truth for decades? How do we know this is innate and not a cultural preference ingrained by European style landscaping? Did the human species actually evolve in mostly savanna-type landscapes, or did we just randomly decide that because we associate Africa with savannas? Throughout millions of years of recent evolutionary history we've been in a shit ton of different environments because there were a bunch of ice ages. Also African savanna grasses get like 4 meters tall and predators can hide just fine in that."

and it's like wow when you put it that way it's kinda stupid that people decided this idea was true for no reason

The Deflagrating Bawigrat

My response to this week’s BestiaryPosting challenge, from @maniculum

Pencil sketch, then lines in Sailor fude nib fountain pen, using Diamine Sepia ink.

Though process beneath the cut...

"In Asia an animal is found which men call Bawigrat. It has the head of a bull, and thereafter its whole body is of the size of a bull’s with the maned neck of a horse. Its horns are convoluted, curling back on themselves in such a way that if anyone comes up against it, he is not harmed. But the protection which its forehead denies this monster is furnished by its bowels. For when it turns to flee, it discharges fumes from the excrement of its belly over a distance of three acres, the heat of which sets fire to anything it touches. In this way, it drives off its pursuers with its harmful excrement."

My initial response to this one was 'oh boy!'... I'm pretty sure I know exactly what this creature is. If my suspicions are correct, there is traditionally a very specific way of depicting it, which might be dramatic but doesn't actually gel particularly well with the description...

Regarding the Bawigrat itself, we have a bull-like creature. I took a lot of inspiration from aurochs (and heck cattle) - the main difference being the horns curving up and back rather than forward and up, and giving it a fuller belly for maximum fermentation. I also tried to reflect the horse-like mane, though it's sitting a little lank across its neck while it's not in motion.

I was wondering for a while how to present the beast, and came to the idea of drawing a landscape, with the fumes slowly crawling across it and igniting anything they touch. Then I had another thought... Apologies Mac, I know you are going to get this reference.... ;)

I have some very strong and correct and nonarbitrary opinions about dice.

First of all, d10s. They don't belong in dice sets. They're fine in systems that utilize them in dice pools (Storyteller) and systems that utilize them for the awesome d100 (BRP, Rolemaster, WFRP) but they should not be a part of the set of polyhedrons from d4 to d20. Why? Because all the other dice in that set are Platonic solids and the d10 isn't. I can't even be bothered to Google what shape a d10 is but it ain't Platonic. This die fucks.

Anyway the set consisting of d4, d6, d8, d12 and d20 are the full set of Platonic solids. The set is also fun in the sense that it contains its own dual polyhedra. The dodecahedron (d12) is the dual of the icosahedron (d20) because the dodecahedron has three pentagons meeting at each vertex while an icosahedron has five triangles meeting at each vertex. The cube (d6) and octahedron (d8) are each other's duals: on the cube you have three squares meeting at each vertex and on the octahedron it's four triangles at each vertex. The tetrahedron (d4) is its own self-dual since it has three triangles meeting at each vertex.

Anyway so the d10 doesn't belong with those five although in certain contexts it can hang. But speaking of d10, while I have a soft spot for the d100 (done through rolling two d10 and reading one of them as the ones digit and the other as the tens digit) the most beautiful arrangement of numbers can be achieved on a 2d10. Look at this shit!

It's the way the probability of getting a result of 2 is 1%, the probability of getting a 3 is 2%, and so on all the way until you get to a 10% chance of getting an 11, after which it starts going down again, until you get to a 1% chance of getting a 20. That's fucking beautiful. It's enough to make you believe that there's some design behind all these numbers. More than that, it's enough to make you realize that this Plato guy was full of shit. His nice set of solids? Yeah they're pretty good. But can they do this? Probably. But not as nicely as this beautiful ten-sided freak.

Anyway, so that's a bunch of really normal opinions to have about dice and surely not a sign of some weird thought processes going on because of my neurons and syndromes.

Today's random portfolio artwork is a life-size model of a small Arthropleura (40cm long – they grew to 250cm long), which I built for MUSE – the Science Museum of Trento, in 2014.