Alexis, whomst 💽 @alexis@tilde.zone

Semiotic Standard: the icons from Alien

Following on from our Solar System transit map, we settled on this as our next vector art project: recreating the "Semiotic Standard" icons used to decorate the Nostromo spaceship sets in the 1979 film Alien.

We also thought it'd be fun to make them usable as fediverse emoji, so we did that.

Find the full set in emojo form here: https://lexie.space/post/blogstuff/2019/12/16/semiotic-standard.html

See the attached image, or https://noisy.lexie.space/@alexis/103322172832060183, for examples.

We'll be publishing large SVG files of these, too - as soon as we get the source file sorted out so we can export them easily. (we still suck at illustrator lol) In the meantime, we hope you enjoy these, and watch this space for more!

The Solar System: A Transit Map

Ever wanted to take a bus from Earth to another planet entirely? Us too! If we could, this is the map we’d use to get from here to there. Now you can use it to do that, too!

Physical things that have this on them: https://www.redbubble.com/shop/p/43181011.C3TL5.strewn-joey?ref=artist_shop_grid

Different sizes, transparent backgrounds: https://lexie.space/assets/posts/2019-12-12-the-solar-system/The%20Solar%20System-%20A%20Transit%20Map.zip

We want to make this into a depiction of a solarpunk future, designed by consensus, that we'd all love to see! If you have ideas or thoughts on that, please add them to this thread: https://tilde.zone/@alexis/103294731882121379

More at our website: https://lexie.space/post/blogstuff/2019/12/12/the-solar-system.html

Special thanks and 💜 : @anarchiv @RedFuture @velexiraptor

We hope you enjoy it, and please feel free to boost and share with anyone you think might like it!

legitimately horrifying to think that the adorable upstart nerd pile of our early adulthood has become so vast and potent by our early middle age that the next challenge it's chosen for itself is that of reshaping a city in its own image

what will it have become by the time we've grown old? we call ourself a monster but honestly we're a joke, everybody thinks the future is cyberpunk but look at yog-sothoth aborning over here and tell us lovecraft wasn't writing cautionary tales after all

a new disney ceo realizes how much influence the company's products has had on people developing furry interests, moves to establish ownership of the cultural commons via the courts in order to license and monetize

It's probably about time for an #introduction, isn't it?

So, hi, I'm Alexis. At my day job, I'm a fullstack engineer for a company you've heard of. If that interests you, it shouldn't, and I won't, and that's really best.

When I'm doing what I choose to, I'm an sf/weirdtales writer, a wildlife photographer, and a doer of helpful stuff for people.

I've never said this out loud before: I'm intersex and genderqueer. I don't know how I feel about saying it now, but I guess I know how to find out.

what the hell it hurts to stretch this is bullshit

side bonus to putting cinnamon and clove in your coffee is that it makes your kitchen always smell a little like clove and cinnamon, which is a good kitchen smell

ok we're gonna go make coffee and then probably do some bullshit idk

might decorate that toilet tank

definitely make some 13x19 prints to ship to our mom like we promised we'd do a week ago aaaaa x.x

ache more

@cdmnky sorry this took so long! we were gonna do it last night but baking happened

so, you asked for feedback on your "mana store" story, which we liked! you also mentioned it was more or less the first thing you'd written, which makes it even more impressive as a work, and also checks out for the couple of little things we noticed and wanted to mention in terms of like, editing type stuff

first is, there were a few spots where verb tenses don't agree; the story is written in the past tense, but every now and again a verb in present tense pops up, which is a little jarring from the reader's perspective, but is also 100% just a matter of getting a little more practice to fix

(a full re-read before posting is the method we use to catch stuff like this - it's definitely not something to break flow while writing over)

the other thing we wanted to mention was, there's a point early in the story where a lot of description gets front loaded: "The light blue blacktip reef shark scanned..." - hello fellow RPer! :D prose fiction makes us work harder to get this kind of info across about our characters because as a reader it feels weird to hit a spot like that and have to kinda pause and parse it and build up a whole image all at once; as a writer, it's more elegant (also more difficult) to spread that kind of info out, so it doesn't hit the reader all at once. in this case it might fit better once the TF starts happening, since that's where physical characteristics start to come into play, but that's just an offhand guess

in any case it's maybe not something to worry very hard about right away? short stories make this especially tricky because there's less space in which to spread out that kind of descriptive stuff, and like we said before, this is a little thing! these both are, in machining terms it'd be like deburring the edges of a part - little finish type work that gives a better feel to the result but whose absence doesn't materially impair it

anyway sorry to go on so long and we hope this is useful? and congrats again on an awesome first story! writing can be a ton of fun and we hope you go on enjoying it!

flu mask:
DONT
BREATHE

good to awaken very late with aches in all our major joints, including the ones that never usually ache

explains why we've been feeling so off for the last day or so, anyway, and having weird ideas; mild fever makes our brains lively

oh well, it's an excuse to write THE END IS NIGH on a face mask and wear it to the grocery store at least, like we were thinking about yesterday

that's definitely a fever idea and we're not sure if it's a great one or a terrible one or both

why are baby jails all about jailing babies. if i operated a system of baby jails, i would simply

baking sure is magic, and it's magic that we...aren't very good at yet

our milk buns came out as perfectly edible, albeit definitely in need of butter, biscuits! and "perfectly edible" isn't a bad go, considering we identified at least two ingredient errors and one likely process error. granted we were hoping for more, but we'll take "tasted ok and hasn't yet made us sick" for a first try, tbh

the silver lining was that our boss at the time, totally unprompted, paid for all the costs involved because we'd only been there on his business

he was a good man in a lot of ways and as hard as those years were, we still miss them sometimes

we rarely think well of xkcd, but today's is a mood that's been in the datacenter for twelve straight hours

we once spent so long in a DC dealing with a succession of bizarre networking problems that by the time we finally left our car had been towed because we forgot to move it off a restricted street because we forgot it existed