How Hard Is It To Be A World Builder? Do You Like... Build Them One Brick At A Time? Does It Take You

how hard is it to be a world builder? do you like... build them one brick at a time? Does it take you seven days too? Are you God? Or is it more like... like minecraft? Are you minecraft?

For me, it comes as easily as breathing. I'm a worldbuilder by nature: I love learning about how the real world works, turning the pieces of it over in my mind, and putting them together in new configurations. In that sense it's very much like building with bricks, though more the Lego kind than clay. Not only that, but I have strong escapist tendencies –what better refuge, then, than a haven I've built myself? I don't consider myself a god to these worlds –many are canonically godless– but I do have a sort of parental fondness for them. After all, I've put several years of my life into each of them.

So in that sense, it's not very hard for me! But that's just me. For some people it doesn't come as naturally, but that's okay! That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, if you want to. Worldbuilding, storytelling... these arts are an inherent facet of human expression, rooted deeply in our ancestral desire to wander and explore. Even if you struggle with it, it's worthwhile, because you are making something that is uniquely yours, and that matters. And don't forget: there's no right or wrong way to worldbuild. Your process of creation is as unique as the art that results!

And no, I'm not Minecraft, but I do adore Minecraft for all of the above reasons!!!

YEEEEAAAAHHHH SERINAAAAAAA!!!

@ my followers who don't know what Serina is, PLEASE READ THIS BLOG.

It's one of the best specbio projects out there, created by Sheather -one of the Golden Age masters. Serina is a world populated only by the descendants of the domestic canary (and a few other organisms like guppies, snails, ants, sunflowers, bamboo, algae, etc). The project digs deeply into the various unique niches of the world and the organisms that evolve to fill them. It's a journey of nearly three hundred million years thus far, and an absolute masterclass in specbio as a genre and an art form.

The vast majority of the blog is nature-documentarian in style, overviewing the physiology and evolutionary history of the various clades on the planet and the roles they fill across deep time. However, in the Ultimocene chapter, things take a turn for the profound as intelligent life evolves multiple times. I'm not kidding when I tell you that the saga of the rise and fall of intelligence on Serina is genuinely one of the most compelling and emotionally engaging stories I have read in years, and I NEED more people to experience this.

I'll wrap things up with this:

Any Serina: A Natural History of the World of Birds, fans here ?

Anyone. Hello… h

Trou noir

For those of you wondering what "tor" means and why I use it: it's a fictional oath I made for Sphaera!

Watsonian explanation: "tor," often used in conjugation as "snowing tor," derives from the name of the Temoran underworld and is grammatically used equivalent to "hell." "Snowing tor" is an emphasis modifier -it could never snow in tor, thus the phrase is used primarily to express incredulity.

Doylist explanation: "tor" is derived from "torrid," since the underworld is a hot place, but it also has a more entertaining meta origin: the Rush song By-Tor and the Snow Dog! I've been a fan of Rush for a good decade now and their music has influenced the development of Sphaera -in particular its mythos. The Prince of Hell in that song is called By-Tor, so I interpreted it as a title and took the "tor" half as the name of hell.

Lore Tuesday

So, a while ago, a community Discord server I was in had a thing called Lore Tuesday: every Tuesday in the daily questions channel you got a free pass to share a random nugget of information about your original world/story/characters. That server is effectively dead now, but I'm bringing Lore Tuesday here, because I miss it very much and it feels like a fun thing to do on the blog –especially considering I haven't actually posted much in the way of worldbuilding, historically speaking. I'm gonna try to post a random lore nugget every Tuesday, and tag it with #lore tuesday! Feel free to snag this idea yourselves if you so desire. :)

“YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.”

(152830) 1999 VD57 is a small, stony main-belt asteroid 700 meters (2,300 feet) in diameter. It was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey at Socorro, New Mexico on 4 November 1999. This asteroid was identified as a flyby target for NASA's Lucy mission in January 2023, which will approach 450 km (280 mi) from the asteroid on 1 November 2023. 1999 VD57 will be Lucy's first and smallest flyby target and it will become the smallest main-belt asteroid visited by a spacecraft yet. It was identified as a target by Raphael Marschall, mission collaborator of the Nice Observatory, only after Lucy had launched, due to the asteroid's small size.

1999 VD57 has not been named yet, but the Lucy mission team has proposed the provisional name Dinkinesh, after the Ethiopian name for the Lucy fossil after which this NASA mission is named.

Dinkinesh translates approximately to “You Are Beautiful.”