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strange_aeonsI feel much better now.
I've been having some problems with my appetite lately, i.e., it didn't exist. So I'd go for twenty-four hours — or on one memorable occasion, more like sixty — without eating, and then when I started to feel queasy I would eat something, whereupon I would become ill. If I was lucky I might at least enjoy eating it, but more often no. Anyway, yesterday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lilairen pointed out to me that this is fairly standard starvation-response, which I suspected, and that one deals with starvation-response much the same way one deals with flu, which I didn't. Clear liquids, then solids when the stomach agrees to play nice. So I had some chicken soup.
In the last two weeks or so that's the only meal I've had that didn't make me sick.
And eating gave me the fortitude to delete the 879 words I had written day before yesterday, because they were all absolute crap and they didn't get any better when I reread them. The 861 words I wrote yesterday are far superior, and they fixed some problems I was having at the end of chapter three, so it's all good.
I ran across M.C.A. Hogarth's site a few years ago, bookmarked it, and forgot about it untilshaddragon started building Hogarth's creatures in fabric. Then yesterday I spent a perfectly unseemly quantity of time wandering around her site looking at the pretty pictures — I must have found it longer ago than I think, because I recall the art being a lot cruder then — and got to thinking.
Yeah, I know. Shut up.
Hogarth has a race called the Jokka (see more of them here and here), and they're tri-sexed. She calls the sexes 'male', 'female' and 'neuter', so I assume that they aren't triploid — that when they reproduce the genetic material comes from two sources, not three.
No one ever seems to do triploid. The only such creatures I can recall encountering are those glowy things in that art book, and, somewhat more notably, Vonda McIntyre's dreamsnakes. That's what got me thinking, and now I have a species in my head.
What appears to happen is, there are — for want of a better term — males, who drop their genetic information off with members of the third sex, who juggle this information for a bit, add some of their own, and then pass the result on to — also for want — females, who carry the offspring to term. There's some culture right there: if in the Natural Order of Things, males never bump uglies with females, doing so is bound to be taboo in at least some places, if not physically complicated/nominally impossible.
I'm assuming vaguely human sexual practices here, in the sense that sex is used as social glue as well as for purposes of procreation. Which suggests that these creatures are intelligent, social and slippery (see also: dolphins). That, coupled with how they make babies, is all I know about them with any certainty; at the moment I'm, obviously, working on something else, and I'm too close to Hogarth's Jokka, which I find aesthetically pleasing, and never let it be said that my sense of aesthetics doesn't get totally in the way, so I'm trying to back off from the idea a bit for the time being.
Well, mostly. I have indulged in some vague speculation as to their genders (as distinguished from their sexes). Ordinarily one sees, basically, males and females, and then the third sex is sort of neuter and, well, de-sexed (I can't speak for Hogarth's Jokka, as I know nothing about their culture except that there are dresses and pretty fans in it). In this case I think it makes more sense for them to be regarded as sort of, you know, whores, in much the way bisexuals sometimes are in human culture — of course that's a stereotype and probably has fairly little to do with the actual reality. Looking at my list of gender stereotypes I want to inflict upon these people, I guess that would make them the emotional, artistic types, rather than the physically strong, brutish ones or, as I had initially thought they would be, the intellectuals (geek-gendered). It also raises questions of systematic oppression and Controlling the Third-Sex Sex Drive.
Hmm.
I've been having some problems with my appetite lately, i.e., it didn't exist. So I'd go for twenty-four hours — or on one memorable occasion, more like sixty — without eating, and then when I started to feel queasy I would eat something, whereupon I would become ill. If I was lucky I might at least enjoy eating it, but more often no. Anyway, yesterday
lilairen pointed out to me that this is fairly standard starvation-response, which I suspected, and that one deals with starvation-response much the same way one deals with flu, which I didn't. Clear liquids, then solids when the stomach agrees to play nice. So I had some chicken soup.In the last two weeks or so that's the only meal I've had that didn't make me sick.
And eating gave me the fortitude to delete the 879 words I had written day before yesterday, because they were all absolute crap and they didn't get any better when I reread them. The 861 words I wrote yesterday are far superior, and they fixed some problems I was having at the end of chapter three, so it's all good.
I ran across M.C.A. Hogarth's site a few years ago, bookmarked it, and forgot about it until
shaddragon started building Hogarth's creatures in fabric. Then yesterday I spent a perfectly unseemly quantity of time wandering around her site looking at the pretty pictures — I must have found it longer ago than I think, because I recall the art being a lot cruder then — and got to thinking.Yeah, I know. Shut up.
Hogarth has a race called the Jokka (see more of them here and here), and they're tri-sexed. She calls the sexes 'male', 'female' and 'neuter', so I assume that they aren't triploid — that when they reproduce the genetic material comes from two sources, not three.
No one ever seems to do triploid. The only such creatures I can recall encountering are those glowy things in that art book, and, somewhat more notably, Vonda McIntyre's dreamsnakes. That's what got me thinking, and now I have a species in my head.
What appears to happen is, there are — for want of a better term — males, who drop their genetic information off with members of the third sex, who juggle this information for a bit, add some of their own, and then pass the result on to — also for want — females, who carry the offspring to term. There's some culture right there: if in the Natural Order of Things, males never bump uglies with females, doing so is bound to be taboo in at least some places, if not physically complicated/nominally impossible.
I'm assuming vaguely human sexual practices here, in the sense that sex is used as social glue as well as for purposes of procreation. Which suggests that these creatures are intelligent, social and slippery (see also: dolphins). That, coupled with how they make babies, is all I know about them with any certainty; at the moment I'm, obviously, working on something else, and I'm too close to Hogarth's Jokka, which I find aesthetically pleasing, and never let it be said that my sense of aesthetics doesn't get totally in the way, so I'm trying to back off from the idea a bit for the time being.
Well, mostly. I have indulged in some vague speculation as to their genders (as distinguished from their sexes). Ordinarily one sees, basically, males and females, and then the third sex is sort of neuter and, well, de-sexed (I can't speak for Hogarth's Jokka, as I know nothing about their culture except that there are dresses and pretty fans in it). In this case I think it makes more sense for them to be regarded as sort of, you know, whores, in much the way bisexuals sometimes are in human culture — of course that's a stereotype and probably has fairly little to do with the actual reality. Looking at my list of gender stereotypes I want to inflict upon these people, I guess that would make them the emotional, artistic types, rather than the physically strong, brutish ones or, as I had initially thought they would be, the intellectuals (geek-gendered). It also raises questions of systematic oppression and Controlling the Third-Sex Sex Drive.
Hmm.
no subject
Date: 2002-08-01 09:17 pm (UTC)In ways feeling . . . sad that these people have lost their own opportunity to be kids . . . it's really sad.
I need to find that poem. . . .
no subject
Date: 2002-08-01 10:40 pm (UTC)In the cases I've met, it's split half-and-half between growing a clue and losing what little mind they had left. I like your way better, I'd probably have retained more faith in humanity afterwards.