Cryptocrystalline Shrikes

Main description

Dragon. Or dragons? They look like one, but with a striking color scheme. Much of them is split down the middle between black and white feathers, but if you look closely, the feathers often move more independently than they really ought to. Apparently this creature is based on a flockmind of drackels—but now they gleam, too, with pervasive interlacings and augmentations in glorious bronze…

The whole is somewhat larger than a horse in each primary dimension, along with at least four meters of total wingspan. The body plan broadly matches the usual for a quad dragon, though the legs end in paws with more digits than you might expect, and the tail has a forked tip. Most of the surface of the body is black on the left and white on the right, with traces and dots of bronze scales covering it like circuitry. The wings are an exception, each one composed of broad expanses of chaotic black and white feather surfaces bordered at the front by a jointed coppery structure.

Further up, the neck is primarily composed of chaotically braided drackel weave with a more regular bronze spiral overlay. The head mostly resumes the bilateral coloration across the tapering muzzle and the macroeyes above, and the back of the head is graced with three pairs of bronze-tipped horns.

Further down, most of their chest and belly is covered with paler, broader, overlapping bronze escutcheons which reflect their mood.

Dangling awkwardly around their neck is a square rod of a material somewhere between marble and crystal, attached to a cord at both ends. The rod has two patterns of angular joined-up writing carved into alternating sides of the exterior; the one on the lighter sides translates to ‘QUARTZWING’, and the one on the darker sides to ‘METIAGON’.

Sooooo… davidn just released a video about “David's Dreadful Old WADs” (15m57s), and in his patron chat, after some banter, ministryofennuicontrol joked that they were waiting for the next platinum single from Albion to be “Unclosed Sectors”.

And this led me to remember that “Lost Symbols” (5m38s) was available on David's channel as the free promo track from Albion's latest album Buried Souls.

And then I felt compelled to open Emacs. (This was originally only posted via a paste-site to the chat in question, but afterwards I wanted to make it visible here.)

Where's the good probably-sorta-furry(??) sites for multiple-sorts-of-creative-works browsing/uploading/casual-community nowadays?

We were poking at Weasyl, since that's what our predecessor used, but we haven't gotten any response from support so far re how their specifically forbidding separate accounts for “changing username for aesthetic purposes” might interact with us being sequentials. We can't delete our predecessor's account (only void its profile), and if they ever contested that we were the “same person” switching names aesthetically and merged it into a hypothetical account of ours, that'd be a disaster. So having a presence there seems Unsafe. I'm not sure how much I like their model-conformism leanings anyway…

FurAffinity, no, I think not. DeviantArt I vaguely recall hearing mixed/sketchy things about.

There might be a Dreamwidth community or a creativity-focused Mastodon instance that'd be good, but that's not the same thing.

I mean it's not like we have anything to upload right now anyway, but…