duck-in-the-universe
Sideblog for my personal projects, whether that's art, writing, oc stuff, inspo, or whatever! Yall can call me duck, i use they/them and ey/em pronouns Main blog: @duck-in-a-spaceship
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Latest Posts by duck-in-the-universe
Lineart for what will eventually be a painting of my latest DnD character, Xylem!
Xylem is a wooden robot traveling through a post-apocalyptic, mushroom filled landscape. As they go from town to town, they write down what they see, interview locals, and record the story of a world living in the shadow of what it once was. She's accompanied by a weevil friend, Phloem, who has decided she's close enough to a tree, and bores holes in her outer casing to reside inside.
DMed by the great @glacierruler :)
I feel you there. I think that's what's been keeping me from writing recently is that, what happens when there are no other directions for them to go? It feels like funneling the characters in a specific direction... even when it's the decision you're most certain the characters would have made in the moment.
It's like, you're there with the characters as decisions are made. And then you step back and suddenly you're aware that the only decision being made is your own. And idk why but it sucks the adventure out of writing for me sometimes.
Interesting! Idk how much I can relate to this specifically, but yeah that feeling of "what happens when there are no other directions for them to go" definitely stuck out to me. Writing things down is how we communicate and share ideas, obviously, but it also cements them and closes down other possibilities. Not necessarily a bad thing because that's just... the nature of things, but it is an interesting dilemma to me.
Embroidery sketching! Working on another patch project right now, and since this one is a little more complicated than the black hole I finished a while ago, I thought I'd share my process for mapping out what I want to embroider. (The people that draw straight on the fabric are too brave to be me.)
To do this, I start by drawing out the design with paper and pencil, and then I pin it to the fabric I want to transfer it to and stab a bunch of holes. (I used the sharp end of a drawing compass, but you can use a pen or pencil or whatever your heart desires.) Then, I used a white gel pen to create dots where all the holes were.
This results in a MESS of little spots against the background, so hang onto your original template so you remember what you're doing. But from there it's just an extra-confusing game of connect the dots! I started with the biggest shapes first, and slowly our boy Sprocket started to emerge. Excited to actually embroider this one :)
A problem I've been having lately is that while I'm working on a piece of writing, I absolutely love it, and then the moment I'm done it's like a switch is flipped and I can't stand the thing. I feel like it's because you suddenly lose all that potential. While you're working on something, it can be anything, it can be so many things, but the moment it's done all of those alternate routes are gone. In comparison, what you're left with feels disappointing.
Control Room, 2004 (embroidery on black velvet) & Space Station, 2006 (embroidery on canvas)
Farhad Moshiri
First Drop
On Deslotair, the storm cycle breaks every three years, clearing the skies for off-world ships to make a rare visit to the planet. But for every ship that can make the landing, another falls to the unfamiliar conditions and dust-laden atmosphere. Scavengers watch the ships as they crash, ready to strip them to the hulls for all their worth.
Taglist: @glacierruler
Jupiter on December 7, 2024 // Shun-Chia yang
Wooahh look another robot oc by yours truly. Shocking, I know.
This is 5TR1P W1R3, or just Wire for short, who is the sharpshooter and medic for @glacierruler and I's crew of space pirates!
Wire was originally made for a caretaking/nursing job, but grew to hate this role the longer they had to endure it, until they eventually ran away. To fully lean into this change, they removed most of their smooth, friendly plastic paneling to revel the mess of wiring and motors underneath, although they have kept some to protect more vital areas. Wire can only communicate through various beeps and trills, and the only person that can understand and translate for them is the engineer on board who is... just the sweetest and doesn't want to pass along half the shit they say. Trying their best to be a serious pirate amongst all the shenanigans. Big fan of getting to shoot things, not really enjoying the fixing people part.
Dr. Wade Urbanczyk
new oc, leader of some sort of prosthetics development department for a catastrophe lab. I think he stuffs the consciousnesses of his dying coworkers into digital appliances in the hopes of keeping them alive til better days come along… But maybe he should just let them die.
kinda obsessed w/ him actually
Longing for Rotkehlchen Studies in Ornithology and Borbs, after months of investigative work and research, is proud to present you with intersex mandarin duck. 🤩
Mandarinente (mandarin duck) ♀️☿ am Pfaffensee, Stuttgart-West.
BLACK HOLE
I'm a big fan of everything space and black holes. As a kid, I was definitely scared of them- those huge, invisible vortexes that no one could escape from. But as I've grown older, and learned more, they're just so damn cool. There's some kind of beauty there too, in seeing glowing matter orbit nothingness, in the strange phenomena of bending light until you can see the back of your head, of watching the universe sped up as it disappears behind you. Unfortunately, I'm not sure my little thread painting does it justice :p
oxidized copper is such a beautiful color palette. The rich reds with the cool teals. Such a vibrant combo. No one is doing it like her.
OCtober Bingo: Multilingual
“Come here,” Glass signed.
Sprocket shifted forwards, sand sliding over and into his joints, tubes bending to follow the movement. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground, hands folded in his lap. Opposite him, Glass kneeled in the sands.
The mid-morning sun fell through eir body, refracting and splitting through the glass, shining brilliantly on pieces of metal and bulbs of green liquid before falling onto Sprocket. It would be warm, if either of them had the skin to feel it.
(Natural heat was lost to Sprocket in the storm of his own whirring processors and grinding motors. He just had the vague impressions offered to him by an internal thermometer ticking up or down: 42.3°C.
He’d once asked Glass if ey could feel warmth, could feel the sun beating down on them.
Ey said it felt like life, which sounded very different from 42.3°C.)
Glass pressed eir palm against Sprocket’s chest, warping the way the light fell, and hummed three notes.
They slid together like the gradient of a sunset, each higher than the last. They sat somewhere in the middle of Glass’s vast spectrum of sound, a neutral sort of tone that shook around in Sprocket’s chest but didn’t quite stay there. He raised a hand from his lap to grab onto Glass’s forearm, fingers clinking into place. Another point of connection, without the leather of Sprocket’s vest separating them.
“Go again,” he said.
The same three notes played. Sprocket could feel the vibrations humming against his sensors, sound washing through him. It brushed over those parts of him designed only to detect pain, to alert to problems, gently passing by without alarm.
The sweeping rise in pitch felt whole in some way, complete. Someone with more musical knowledge than him, with more knowledge of the language Glass was trying to speak to him, could have had the right words to describe it. Sprocket had neither of those things, so all he had to offer was-
“It sounds nice. What does it mean?”
Glass nodded. Ey pulled eir hand away from his chest, and Sprocket followed suit, disengaging.
“It’s supposed to sound nice,” ey signed. “It means ‘to give comfort.’ We have many words like this, that represent concepts, that can be used in many different ways as long as the emotion is there.”
Those bulbs of liquid rolled around in Glass’s chest, occasionally colliding with each other to become one, other times clinging to the clear walls surrounding them. A pool of it splashed in eir head, right behind the pair of white, glowing eyes that watched Sprocket intently, making sure he understood. Glass continued.
“It means ‘it’s okay.’ It means ‘it’s alright.’ It means ‘it’s over.’ It means ‘I’m here.’ It means whatever it needs to mean.”
“And does it… work? Do you feel comforted by it?”
“Of course. That association has been well-established for me. The same will be true for you, eventually.”
Glass hummed the notes again. Ey nodded at him to do the same.
Sprocket took a moment to find the first pitch, letting it hum in his speaker before he climbed to the next, and then the next.
Glass tilted eir head at him. “You’re climbing stairs.”
“What?”
“When you move from one syllable to the next, you find in betweens and jump to them, instead of sliding up the scale. Here, try it with me.”
Ey reached out, pressing a hand against his chest, the globs of liquid in eir fingers twisting and reforming. Sprocket reached back, grabbing onto eir arm. The tubing that coiled loosely around him flexed and shifted, filled with that same blood.
Glass held the first note, leading the way for him to follow. Sprocket could hear the vibrations, could feel them thrumming in his veins of tubes, buzzing where cheers of metal met each other. The sound rattled discontentedly while he tried to find the right note, warping and grating until it fell into place.
Glass raised eir pitch, and Sprocket clumsily followed em up the scale, resting together at the three notes along their journey. When Glss nodded, Sprocket already knew what ey meant, and they starting over, and he led the charge.
They traded off like that several times, taking turns to find the right notes to play, each time getting closer to each other’s rhythm. Until the need ceased for a lead at all, and Sprocket and Glass spoke as one.
Liquid danced in Glass’s body, bulbs of it twisting in eir chest, all surrounded by singing glass.
Sprocket’s metal sang, carrying waves of sound. Gentle hands, not ones that poked or prodded, cupped his sensors, pressed against his vest.
They reached what Sprocket knew would be their final iteration and grew silent together, the last of the sound fading out of reach. Only when every last bit of it was gone, when Sprocket couldn’t possibly feel it, did Glass pull away. Sprocket’s hands fell into his lap.
“Like that,” ey signed.
“Thank you,” Sprocket responded. “I understand.”
@glacierruler
Another square down! I actually wrote this story a while back, it was one of the first things that went into my Deslotair notebook. Just some thoughts on the glass bot language and how we can communicate even when we're so different. Languages are very important to Glass (ey used to be a translator) so this was a really good prompt for em!
Little fit doodles for the Deslotair gang! We got a clothing swap for Sprocket + Alonze, Desmona in some clothes I saw in the store the other day, and Glass wearing a fit I saw someone on the bus in. Feels weird to draw em in clothes, but I think it works!
This is for @glacierruler's OC Bingo! Board below the cut
I think it's funny when robots in fiction are just,,, super old and they outlive multiple generations of humans and are kinda treated as functionally immortal but irl tech is like "Your car is 20 years old???" or "I get a new smart phone every two years!"
Lemme see old ass bots who are mocked for being all ancient and outmoded and then when someone asks "How old are you??" it turns out they're like five.
Lots of people asked for my concept dev for the Shapers in my webcomic FACING THE SUN, so here it is!
Read the Comic \ Support the Project \ Buy the Issues
I think it's funny when robots in fiction are just,,, super old and they outlive multiple generations of humans and are kinda treated as functionally immortal but irl tech is like "Your car is 20 years old???" or "I get a new smart phone every two years!"
Lemme see old ass bots who are mocked for being all ancient and outmoded and then when someone asks "How old are you??" it turns out they're like five.
Currently going down my list of people to ask about OCs because they rbed my OCtober bingo card :3
Tell me of the OCs!
Deslotair gang! Deslotair is a sci-fi western story that follows a group of scavengers through the desert as they fight to survive. If you already know the team, here are my bingo board ideas! If not, read more
For the board!!
Involved in crime is good for Sprocket and Alonze, obviously.
Sign language and multilingual are good too, most of the gang has some knowledge of sign language, and both Glass and Sprocket know several other languages as well.
They all need a Fucking Break. Probably Sprocket the most.
Ghosts could be fun!!
For outfits: i need to draw Sprocket in Alonze's jacket don't ask me WHY i just have that image in my brain.
Fucked up character dynamics for suuure. What do Sprocket and Alonze have going on? Who knows? Canon relationship??? Maybe!
Desmona has a pet! We love Tak! Weird lizard dog!
queer. obviously.
Tragic antagonist DOES fit but we're not getting into all that lol
Outer space was MADE for me <3
Inventor is interesting. Sprocket is a mechanic but he doesn't typically invent things? Him and Glass invented a 'suit' for Desmona though.
Alonze would commit murder, so would Glass! Sprocket tries not to but it's probably happened. Occupational hazard. Desmona would rather die.
Sprocket - he/him, their leader. Used to be a mining bot, where he learned mechanic skills to take care of the other robots down there. He's since made it out of there and has been scavenging the longest. Knows a lot about machines and how to strip things for the highest quality parts. He's a fairly straight-laced guy, and absolute worry-wart trying to keep everyone alive.
Glass - ey/em, primarily a navigator. A glass bot, which are a type of robot naturally created from old scrap that becomes encased in glass. Ey was raised completely around glass bots and worked as a translator between them and humans, but it was a pretty shitty environment to be in. Ey is very curious about humans and is an excellent teacher, specifically of languages.
Desmona - she/her, the outcast. Desmona is a 17 year old girl that came in contact with vitrel, the unstable energy source of Deslotair, which became a part of her. She left home after the accident and met Sprocket and Glass soon after. She's very shy and withdrawn, generally more comfortable around bots or animals than humans. Very crafty, likes sewing and embroidery.
Alonze - he/they/she, the sharpshooter. Used to work with Sprocket in a bandit group, before being caught and arrested after a train robbery gone wrong. Spent his life moving around with his dad, who was a rancher, and deeply loves Deslotair. Very opinionated and hotheaded, but deeply loyal once she's decided she's on your side.
OCtober Bingo
Okay, I don't really expect this to blow up, but here's how the game works to anyone interested. Throughout October, you ask your mutuals, people you follow, anyone really, about their OCs and then you fill out this Bingo Card for all of their OCs, you're trying to get a blackout bingo card. This card is to be used for multiple OCs!
Bonus challenge: color code filling in the bingo card so you remember what OCs of others fit which square!
Feel free to make your own bingo cards too!
@greymillieattheball since you were interested :3
if you're trying to get into the head of your story's antagonist, try writing an "Am I the Asshole" reddit post from their perspective, explaining their problems and their plans for solving them. Let the voice and logic come through.
One of two characters i will put through the wringer out if love: P.M.U or Pim is the autopilot that was originally stopping every mission they went on from going to shit. Now he’s kinda just chilling and wishing he could live on a fish farm with Mal
Siobhán Hapaska, Robot, 2001 (122x152cm, stampa lambda montata su alluminio) MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago
Normalize writing fanfiction about your own original fiction
The more I write Deslotair stuff, the more I inevitably have to figure out things like themes. Robot media is cool to me in large part because it can get into some really cool themes, and how really every story about robots is still a story about humanity, in some way. Really every story is about humanity, in some way.
And when writing robots, the most obvious question to ask is "What makes us human? When you strip so much away, is what remains a person?" Which is a GOOD question that so many people have done VERY good things with, but I think the main question I would like to answer is:
"In a world where robots exist in such a capacity, why is humanity still the deciding factor?"
Why are we asking the initial question? Who stands to gain from drawing the lines in the sand? And what does that say about society today, about who gets dehumanized and who gets to stay? What happens to them?!