The Lonely Galaxy Megathread (comments encouraged)

[Arayaz]

return to monke fops

For some reason, when I saw this, the following popped into my head:

Monke Fopson and the Holy Grail

[lurker]

return to monke fops

For some reason, when I saw this, the following popped into my head:

Monke Fopson and the Holy Grail

My brain does weird mashups like that sometimes. recently it’s been “SPUDS FOR THE SPUD GOD!”

[conlang-creature]

“SPUDS FOR THE SPUD GOD!”

For a reason I honestly can't remember "potato" is essentially my catchphrase. This seems like a beautiful version 2.0

[lurker]

An icon of sin is an artistic motif meant to serve as visual aid to examining one's conscience. It takes the form of a statue or painting of a yinrih holding an object in each paw and with a fifth object wrapped in the tail. What the objects are can very from region to region, but here are a few common ones along with what they symbolize:

• A drinking bowl: drunkenness
• A bag of coins: greed
• A mirror: pride
• A knife or a spiked tail weapon: either wrath (when used against another) or despair (when used against oneself)
• A thurible*: dissipation or drug use
• A fruit or other food: gluttony

They're placed outside of confessionals for the benefit of penitents seeking absolution.

They're also found outside of gambling establishments gel head parlors, and drug dens, lavish restaurants, or anywhere one would associate with hedonism. It's actually unknown whether they were first used in a religious context and adopted ironically by those secular establishments, or whether they started out as symbols glorifying hedonistic behavior, and hearthkeepers started putting them outside their confessionals to remind their litter of their sins.

---

* used to burn incense containing intoxicants.

[Visions1]

I really like this. What about worry? Brazenness? Hatred? Cruelty? Anger? Self-ignorance?

What would they put into thuribles? Did they use incense for other things?
For example, in the Sassanid dynasty, incense was burnt at the ends of meals simply for the pleasure of it at desert, and nowadays lots of people burn scented candles to freshen their homes or (fun fact) get rid of mosquitoes.

[lurker]

I really like this. What about worry? Brazenness? Hatred? Cruelty? Anger? Self-ignorance?

What would they put into thuribles? Did they use incense for other things?
For example, in the Sassanid dynasty, incense was burnt at the ends of meals simply for the pleasure of it at desert, and nowadays lots of people burn scented candles to freshen their homes or (fun fact) get rid of mosquitoes.

I'm debating whether the Bright Way uses incense liturgically or not, but I imagine if it's used as a symbol of hedonism that they probably don't. If thuribles are used as a recreational drug delivery mechanism, that also creates a rather amusing image of the missionaries on Earth observing a Christian liturgy for the first time and panicking when the priest starts incensing the congregation, since they think getting high is part of the liturgy.

On the other hand, it's hard for me to believe that they wouldn't use mundane incense given they use their sense of smell much more than humans do.

[Visions1]

Maybe they just use it as church air freshener? Assuming smell is already a part of things, I imagine it would play a minor role in church upkeep, but this way, they'll still be freaked out going to Rome and watching them swing censers.
Or Hong Kong, and watching old ladies burn joss sticks like it's nobody's business.
Or Jamaica. Enough said.

[lurker]

Maybe they just use it as church air freshener

Incense was actually used for exactly this purpose at shrines with lots of sweaty pilgrims, example.

Brazenness

I feel like that's covered under pride, but a mirror may not fit as well there.

Self-ignorance

This is a good one. Reminds me of the Greek maxim "know thyself". Perhaps a blindfold could represent self-ignorance.

Hatred? Cruelty?

Since emotion is communicated through scent I imagine a cloth covering the muzzle could mean a lack of consideration for others' emotions or a lack of empathy.

Some of this does deviate from the "glorification of hedonism" angle, though.

[Visions1]

I would switch ignorance with cruelty. Canids tend to be the opposite - they sense the world mainly through their noses, and intuit emotions through body language. So, cruelty would be blindness, while self-ignorance would be anosmia.
Of course though, the Yinrih aren't real dogs, so anything goes. In particular, I imagine they already rely heavily on sight, much more than a dog does.

Also, some people enjoy pain - of others or themselves. For examples, hot peppers. Or watching people try to eat them.
And self-ignorance (or maybe a lack of self control) can go a long way for hedonism.

[lurker]

I would switch ignorance with cruelty. Canids tend to be the opposite - they sense the world mainly through their noses, and intuit emotions through body language. So, cruelty would be blindness, while self-ignorance would be anosmia.
Of course though, the Yinrih aren't real dogs, so anything goes. In particular, I imagine they already rely heavily on sight, much more than a dog does.

Also, some people enjoy pain - of others or themselves. For examples, hot peppers. Or watching people try to eat them.
And self-ignorance (or maybe a lack of self control) can go a long way for hedonism.

Emotion via scent is already cemented into the language. rMP means both to smell like something and to feel an emotion. So <rMP rpMr> means both "I feel happy" and "I smell happy".

I believe humans rely 80% on vision for sensory input, but yinrih rely on all 5 senses evenly. It's common for a yinrih to nuzzle a small object they're examining in order to pick up its odors as well as gain tactile information through the whiskers and close-up visual information.

[lurker]

The two legislative houses of Hearthside are the lower weremoot and the upper wifemoot. The original distinction was not of gender but clerical status. The wifemoot is only open to clergy while the weremoot represents the laity. However, Hearthsider women who want to get into politics usually start out as hearthkeepers, so the weremoot is where the men end up.

Members of the weremoot are elected by the populace (representation is TBD, but likely resembles the US House), and the members of the wifemoot are appointed by the high hearthkeeper.

Under most circumstances, local law supersedes planetary law, and the two moots handle interactions between smaller jurisdictions and international affairs.

The wifemoot has veto power over any legislation proposed by the weremoot. The only way the weremoot can strike down legislation proposed by the upper house is by unanimous vote, with no abstentions.

The compensation of government officials is tied to the minimum wage, meaning the only way to give yourself a raise is to increase the minimum wage. Privately owned companies are similarly restricted in how their boards are compensated.

While the weremoot is home to several political parties, members of the wifemoot swear an oath to be loyal only to the Uncreated Light. Sophonts being sophonts, informal cliques and in-groups tend to form anyway.

Hearthside's economic structure makes it difficult for international businesses to set up shop. Hearthside citizens are forbidden to hold a steak in a foreign company, and home-grown companies must either be privately owned or cooperatives. Patent and copyright duration are the lowest of any state at Focus, and fair use laws are similarly broad. This favors the use of what humans would call "open source" solutions.

Residential landlords may not own "discontiguous" plots, meaning if you plan to rent homes or apartments, you may only own a single complex or subdivision. Absenteeism is also illegal, meaning you are required to live among your tenants. Individuals who purchase a home are required to live there for an extended period of time. This is in order to discourage flipping.

Social policy tends to focus on dissuading the enabling of destructive behavior rather than punishing those who engage in the behavior themselves. For example, a drug abuser would most likely have his contraband confiscated and be required to attend recovery sessions if warranted. It probably wouldn't even go on record unless it happened repeatedly. Drug dealers would serve time, but the most severe punishment would be meted out to those who produce or traffic drugs.

Most social policy making is left to local governments. The City of Eternal Noon is the strictest by far, with no non Claravian religious institutions permitted within its jurisdiction, but an exception is made for Terran faiths after First Contact.

Hearthside grants large swaths of territory to human settlers. Their communities are given much more autonomy over their own affairs compared to the rest of Hearthside, almost to the point of being separate countries. This is mostly due to the difference in lifespan.

[lurker]

The standard currency of the Allied worlds is known as <rDBqqMnPLg> which means the rather prosaic "alliance currency" or "alliance token". Humans have a range of cutesy nicknames for it, including "doggo dollars" and "floof francs".

Alliance Tokens are considered a stable reserve currency similar to the US dollar. The Spacer Confederacy uses mineral notes, which are tied to a colony's supply of mined minerals, but Alliance tokens are also widely accepted, including at Wayfarers' Haven. Moonlitter, Hearthside, and Partisan Territory have their own currencies.

Physical cash is still very prevalent, at least within the Allied Worlds. All denominations are coins of various shapes. Yinrih wear a pocketed band on the right foreleg that serves the functions of a wallet. These wallets may have spring-loaded dispensers that are bored to accept a specific denomination of coin. Single coins can be ejected by placing the left paw palm-up under the dispenser and pressing a button with the inner thumb.

While missionaries aren't supposed to bring money with them, some cash ends up hiding in nooks and crannies of the luggage carried aboard the Dewfall. It doesn't amount to much monetarily, but for the brief window between First Contact and the normalizing of relations between Sol and Focus, this pocket change is worth literal billions by dint of being alien artifacts. That's how Lodestar is able to buy the materials needed to fabricate a working mech.

[lurker]

Yet another possibly non-canon idea:

Waste reclamation is a big deal on Hearthside since most of the planet is desert.

A polymer can be extracted from yinrih excreta that can in tern be made into a durable plastic.

Hearthsider currency is made of this plastic.

---

You may have noticed that Hearthside is very anti-corporate. That's partly thanks to the legacy of the Pious Dissolutionists, and partly due to injunctions placed on the Bright Way after the war by the other winning factions. One of those injunctions is that any discoveries or inventions that come out of research monasteries must not be commercialized. Everything they do is now put under what humans would call an Open Source license.

The mass router is a product of a research monastery (Hearthfire, Morningstar et al. being research monks), and thus there is no patent restricting who can manufacture mass routers.

[lurker]

Hearthkeeper's Canticles are short poetic prayers that double as mnemonics to aid in a cleric's engineering duties. Anything from scientific formulae, such as Ohm's Law, to procedural checklists, such as the method for safely shutting down a star hearth, are rendered as canticles. Memorizing these canticles is part of a hearthkeeper's seminary formation.

Other professions that emerged from the Bright Way, such as farspeakers and healers, have similar traditions. The canticles referencing scientific laws are still widely known even in secular circles. This includes a canticle putting forward the scientific method itself, which is used by farspeakers to systematically troubleshoot networking issues.

[thethief3]

I imagine whether healers can enter childermoot is culture dependent based on emphasis on their role as previous shamans and de-emphasis of that role.

[lurker]

I imagine whether healers can enter childermoot is culture dependent based on emphasis on their role as previous shamans and de-emphasis of that role.

Think of it like IRL hospitals. Many are religiously affiliated, and (at least in the past) were staffed by nuns. There are also nurses or doctors who are actively religious but not part of an order.

So at Focus some hospitals are associated with the Bright Way, and some aren't. Some religiously affiliated hospitals may be run by an order of healers, in which case they would take vows. There are also healers who happen to participate actively in religious activities but aren't part of an order. Sunshine is an example of this latter group. She's not bound by vows (other than perhaps a Hippocratic oath equivalent), but because she's a practicing Wayfarer she does things like the healer's invocations mentioned in one of my stories.

[lurker]

Random factoid:

As you would expect from an arboreal species, monkey foxes make excellent linemen, well, linewomen. The lowly task of maintaining utility poles and transmission lines is usually the domain of acolytes and seminarians, but some ordained hearthkeepers make a point of continuing this work after attaining the clerical state in order to keep themselves humble.

Indeed, the theme of the simple laywoman who couldn't quite make it through the seminary, but who nevertheless keeps working on the lines in humble service to her community, shows up time and again in Claravian hagiographies.

In addition to the transmission lines, power poles also support inert paw cabling that runs above and/or below the live wires. Workers climb up to the paw cabling and brachiate along the line to wherever they need to go. Depending on the local gravity, they may even skip climbing the pole and jump up to grab the paw cabling directly.

Untrained laymen aren't supposed to, but especially on low gravity worlds, you'll see random people brachiating along this paw cabling just to get from A to B. This is very dangerous, since you're still in close proximity to high voltage transmission lines. Yinrih are lighter than humans, and even the high voltage lines are set up to support the weight of at least one worker just to be safe. As long as her body doesn't bridge the high voltage wiring with a lower voltage surface, she can traverse the transmission lines like a squirrel, but it's far to easy to slip up and connect the power line to ground with the body, which is why the paw cabling exists.

[lurker]

It is a matter of debate whether the earliest extant example of written language was in fact the first instance of true writing. Both yinrih ink and the steadtree leaves they wrote on are very biodegradable, lasting mere decades in all but the luckiest of circumstances.

It is also a matter of debate whether sapience was monogenic or polygenic, that is, whether a single individual was born sapient and passed the necessary traits to his or her pups, or whether the necessary precursors to self-reflection were latent in the population as a whole, and true sapience was kindled in multiple places. Polygenism is currently the most popular theory, as the traditional markers of sapience as far as monkey foxes are concerned, language and ritual, appear almost instantaneously across the yinrih's range around 100 millennia prior to First Contact.

Whatever the case may be, the earliest writings appear well before the deaths of the last nonsapient yinrih. Text accounts seem to indicate that sophonts would be born into otherwise nonsapient litters to nonsapient childermoots, and only realize their uniqueness upon meeting other sophonts after leaving their shires and joining the interstitial nomadic teenagers.

These primordial scribes used the same glyph to refer to the tree-dwellers across the river and to their nonsapient parents and litter mates. The earliest writings already speak of taboos around soponts and non sophonts forming childermoots, but it's possible this wasn't the case in the beginning.

Early monkey fox religion seems to have operated on a simple syllogism:

1. My movements are the result of an act of will.
2. Other things also move (leaves, wind, water, clouds, etc.)
3. Those things must also possess a will of their own.

And thus was born the yinrih's natural religion upon which The Bright Way draws its most ancient rites. This is not only not scandalous to the most orthodox Wayfarer, but the Bright Way regularly defends its claim to being the rightful inheritor of the shamans' legacy against neoshamanists who say otherwise. Claravian teaching holds that this animism was the necessary groundwork upon which their monotheism was built.

It is also a matter of Claravian doctrine that the Theophany occurred before the deaths of the first sapient yinrih. While this is a controversial claim among secular archaeologists, it is well established that the first surviving example of written language and the oldest accounts of the Theophany are dated to within a single yinrih lifetime, a fact recognized even by the staunchest opponents of the Bright Way.

As for the Theophany itself, the texts differ in minor details, but certain themes are ubiquitous:

1. Dispite occuring at midday, the skies were said to darken and the stars were described as unusually bright.
2. Despite the canonical text using plurals as though the whole species was being addressed collectively, the earliest texts speak as though the voice was addressing each individual directly, although context makes it clear the whole species was given the Great Commandment.
3. The voice identifies itself as the Creator of the universe, and the yinrih specifically, and links their origin to the tree dwellers.
4. The actual Commandment itself differs slightly from text to text, which results in some minor disagreement about its meaning among Wayfarers, but it boils down to this: The Light has created other sophonts among the stars, and the yinrih are to find these sophonts. Most texts include something to the effect of "let them know they aren't alone" or "offer them your friendship."

One of the strongest arguments Wayfarers have supporting the supernatural nature of the Theophany is how the Bright Way shows up nearly instantly, and is nigh ubiquitous across the yinrih's range, following the Theophany. Even those who rejected the content of the message agreed that SOMETHING happened. Modern secular scholarship, especially among the Partisans, chalks the whole thing up to mass hysteria, possibly aided by the novelty of self reflection.

Lastly, I'll touch on why neoshamanists are called NEOshamanists and not simply shamanists. As stated before, the fledgling Bright Way was ubiquitous, but not quite unanimous. Despite claims by neoshamanists of Claravian persecutions, no such evidence exists, either among surviving Shamanist writings or among early Claravian accounts. Indeed, the closest thing we have on the matter are shamanists mistrusting the rapidly developing Claravian technology. (keep in mind this was still the monkey fox stone age, so said 'technology' would be things like novel fire-tending methods and food preservation strategies.)

The reason why Wayfarers outstripped their shamanist peers is that it was basically a whole religion of ADHDers hyperfocusing on the task of getting to the stars. It didn't hurt that it helped them advance in other areas, too.

Anyway, it seems as though what few shamanist shires remained were content to remain in Newman's Dale, while the Bright Way exploded outward to the rest of the continent. Over time, it was simply an unspoken rule that you left these primitives alone and they wouldn't bother you. Archaeological evidence of shamanist activity abruptly ceases well before the yinrih leave their cradle continent. Two theories exist surrounding their demise. Both pin the blame on natural causes rather than internal strife or external antagonism, and both theories involve the tree dwellers.

A particularly severe drought struck Newman's Dale immediately prior to the last shamans vanishing. I know what you're thinking: they must have all starved from the lack of food and water brought on by the drought. Would that they were so lucky...

During the drought, the River's water level lowered to the point that a ford developed between the northern land inhabited by the tree dwellers and the southern land where the yinrih lived. Evidence of large-scale southward migration of tree dwellers exists. It is thought that the tree dwellers brought novel diseases that were communicated to their sapient cousins, and they all died as a result.

But another theory, and currently the most widely accepted, is that the two species, occupying the same niche as they did, came to blows over the limited food available, and the sophonts were killed an eaten by their nonsapient cousins.

In any case, the next time we see non Claravian groups claiming to be descended from the original shamans is a few centuries prior to the dawn of the space age, a gap of several yinrih lifetimes, and they appear geographically far removed from Newman's Dale.

[Arayaz]

Hmmm, this is interesting; did you watch Biblaridion's Alien Biospheres Episode 15? (It just came out, and it discusses sapience.)

[lurker]

Hmmm, this is interesting; did you watch Biblaridion's Alien Biospheres Episode 15? (It just came out, and it discusses sapience.)

Nope. As I told Visions1 earlier, this is mostly inspired by This weird little book.

I should hasten to add that the book was tepidly received by the author's fellow theologians and paleontologists alike, and, being neither myself, I have no cause to argue with them. But man if it isn't inspiring from a worldbuilding perspective. I admit I'm enamored by his concept of the noosphere, not as a tangible force, but as a way of looking at things, which is what I think de Chardin was going for anyway. I read the book specifically to get ideas for The Lonely Galaxy, and what made it work for this setting in my mind is where he mentions two noospheres uniting through First Contact.