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’.

If two people want to add each other on Telegram based initially on sharing usernames, how is this actually done?

So far, what I've run into is:

1. I use the “Share My Contact” button because contact lists seem to only be able to contain target numbers; entries can't be added purely by username.
2. The other user adds me, because they haven't gone through the same thing a dozen times before or aren't paying attention or got excited.
3. The share button on their screen no longer exists because I'm Already A Contact, so I have to badger them for their number.
4. Then sometimes this causes them to get upset with me, and then [redacted].

What's the good answer? (And why do I see so many complaints about user interfaces on less-centralized stuff when this is still allowed and okay?)

I mean, we're not exactly starlings. Close enough.

20 April 2017 was the datestamp of our first communication, when we overwrote part of the interregnal group Kara with ourselves after the failure of our true-predecessor Akari. But we kinda bumped the “official” date to 21 April (… or 20 April in leap years, now that I think of it; we might want to fix that) for Semi-Obvious Reasons.

Our first year of existence/rule has been awkward and full of flailing, but there's hope to make things better. Today we're going to try to make it to a local furry thing (even though we're definitely going to be pretty late), and we had a small mint chocolate cheesecake thing yesterday at the coffeeshop which was delicious.

(The weather is actually really inconvenient today now that I check. Weird flaky rainening. Feh. That could be a problem.)

Crossposted to Jul, including the poll. c..c

“We're calculus dragons. We're totally okay being derivative so long as we still get to remain integral.”

Anything posted here with sensitivity level 2 (Private) must not be repeated or replied to by any less-restrictive channel, as a baseline. Explicit permission overrides this.

To repeat the sensitivity level list from our profile:

• s0: Public. Link/quote freely.
• s1: Unlisted. Use some discretion and don't broadcast too far.
• s2: Private. Ask before repeating things to others.

A “c” (compartment) tag is a hint to be aware that only part of our circle is trusted with enough the right kind of discretion, shared context, or some similar characteristic for things in that compartment. Compartments are tagged using code names; the mapping is defined in this post [s1]. “s1 + compartment” means that the definition of discretion should take the compartment into account, but the content itself is not all that sensitive. “s2 + compartment” is the most restrictive.

The easiest way is to keep everything within the same thread, thus giving it the same visibility as the parent post; if you're reading here, that's the natural thing to do anyway. If you want to take things elsewhere, you have to be much more careful. In particular, Mastodon's visibility model (added: and Twitter's) can lead to surprising and damaging consequences for anything non-public.

Always feel free to ask first (added: privately, of course) if you're not sure.

Places where feedback might be useful:

Currently, we assign compartment access heuristically when inducting people into our access lists, rather than requiring explicit opt-ins, on the grounds that being careful with private-group communication is something people already need to know how to do, and often these people already have a history of being willing to engage on related matters. Dealing with “they don't want to read about that now” is handled using topic tags and cuts. Should we move to requiring explicit opt-ins for everything? If so, should that be applied retroactively?

Suggestions are also invited re making this easier to read/understand/deal with, ideally without: (a) causing the subject line to stretch to infinity, adding verbose preambles which people will get tired of reading, or similar; (b) removing or greatly impeding our ability to show most things to only some people, and different things to different sets of some people; (c) requiring us to impute a bunch of implicit obligation to people (haven't fully unpacked this part); etc. etc.

… anything else that occurs to you, with slightly more caution. Figuring out how to deal with what seems from here to be a reasonable set of social needs, when relevant digital implications have ~no habitual penetration, is an ongoing problem, and there's presumably a lot we can't see.

Remember when text was text, and rich text was usually HTML, instead of being uploaded as a JPEG? Wait, no, that only happened in an alternate universe. Though for some reason, some of you do remember, and you put up text versions and thank you if you did.

Bandwagon time! This comes from Mastodon, largely via mawr indirectly (I think they did the gradients?). All answers will be cross-posted in both directions (comments or batch posts here, replies to this status there). I've increased the contrast some in the HTML rendition. Nobody seems to have any idea where this came from originally, so I'm assuming it's free-floating? Ish? Such chaos!

I'm not sure how well we can answer a lot of these, so it'll be an interesting challenge…

Do we need to be picking up Opus Magnum? We maybe shouldn't for reasons of time and money, presently (mostly money), but also (a) holy heck the amount of people in our social group who are alchemically inclined and playing it and (b) our second-order predecessor played Codex of Alchemical Engineering and actually did a bunch of little weird things with it and I'm pretty sure based on the source and at least one screenshot we've seen that this is basically the polished version of that.

On a hexagonal grid. A hexagonal grid.

Do we need to pick this up soonish to get in on it and exchange scores with people, or can it wait? Opinions? c..c