This I Command!

Spider Golems

2011-03-25T07:49:00.000-07:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, golems are artificial life forms created as robot-like servants by intelligent dinosaurs.
Just as humans build anthropomorphic robots that look like people, so intelligent dinosaurs might make dinosaur-like golems. These golems are based on spider biology, but they have reptilian skin, legs that jut downward from the body like a dinosaur, and pedipalps modified into arms with grasping claws.
Of course a spider golem doesn't have to be shaped like a spider. The shaggy spider golem on the left has four legs. One of the missing legs has been replaced by a circular attachment point for modular biomechanical components.

The golem in the middle has a more conservative spider shape, and a hard mechanical-looking cuticle. The pin joints of each limb have been modified into stronger hinge joints which can support more weight. Standing next to it is a furry insect-based golem with a dinosaur-like body plan.

Dinosaur Sketches

2011-03-25T07:05:00.000-07:00

I have been scanning in some drawings, and found a few dinosaurs that I like:

The shading shows some loose skin on this sauropod.

This is some sort of lightly built therizinosaurid, perhaps Erlikosaurus. While most dinosaurs held their spines horizontally, parallel to the ground, the therizinosaurs held their backs up at an angle from the ground.

This is a speculative creature that evolved in the Squawk Role-Playing Game universe. In the millions of years since hadrosaurs and other giant dinosaurs disappeared from our world, mammals have evolved from squatty short-limbed critters into a variety of descendants, including graceful forms like deer and wolves. In the Squawk universe dinosaurs have also evolved long-limbed, graceful forms like this hadrosaur.

RPGs Separate us from the Animals

2011-03-11T07:51:00.000-08:00

Ethan Gilsdorf's Salon article starts out looking at D&D as simply generation X nostalgia, but then explores the important impact roleplaying has had on the character of that generation.

Then he wonders about generation Y:

But like so many people my age, I miss that Friday night realm of paper and pencil. That camaraderie, that connection to open-ended storytelling. D&D was an experience we made for ourselves, for each other. Was D&D then a "better" imaginative experience than "World of Warcraft" today? I like looking back on my primitive game and scoff at these younger generations of video gamers. All I needed to "immerse" myself in fantasy worlds were pencils and paper, not PlayStation consoles and pixels, I snort.

The RPG store in my hometown is filled with teenagers playing RPGs. I am the only generation X-er in my D&D group. Obviously young people have a flexible schedule and spend a lot of time hanging out with their friends, but I suspect that D&D is even more popular with generation Y than it was with generation X.

WoW - at best - is a gateway drug - like the Lord of the Rings movies (which I heard have been made into a series of books :-) WoW is essentially just a cheezily polygonned version of Mafia Wars - and it's not even integreated with Facebook. WoW borrows some tactics and thematic elements from D&D, but even the most sophisticated WoW clans don't approach the shared creative experience of a typical D&D group.

Roleplaying games teach you how to look at the world as a common experience, created by peers who embody various complementary virtues. This worldview is nearly absent from the baby boomer generation which sees the world in terms of utilitarian bottom-lines and kantian moral paradoxes.

People who lived through the austerity of the Great Depression or the generations before them know a little more about creativity and character than the baby boomers, but I think the worldview of the rising generation has more in common with the Renaissance or the ancient Greek philosophers, sharing with those thinkers an interest in how human virtues transform the world, but with a thousand times as many people participating.

The tabletop is the new studio and the new gymnasium, but without the nudity :-)

Squawk Campaign: Chapter 1

2011-02-25T07:35:00.000-08:00

I am running a campaign of the Squawk RPG with my D&D group. Each player started out with one of the example characters:

Gao Choy - a titan swordsman from Peleg
Orgraff - a behemoth butcher from Peleg
Foi Shin - an aeolyte alchemist from Peleg
992 - a skand clone mercenary from the Lower Worlds
Hammerdrum - a myrmidon mutualist from Trydeen

After a nasty gunfight with space pirates that left their mobile space habitat badly damaged, Gao Choy and Orgraff rescued Foi Shin, 992, Hammerdrum and the myrmidon's students, then commandeered a captured pirate stealth fighter.

Gao Choy maneuvered the stealth fighter into a transfer orbit that brought the stealth fighter to Midgard's L5 lagrange point, where the binary dwarf planets Radix and Monopolis orbit each other. There they met the helpful but cagey stygian Captain Gabriel, who pilots a huge vessel crewed by insectoid golem servants. After dropping dark hints about the Monopolis Trading Company, Gabriel left our heroes with the suggestion that they visit his homeworld (asteroid CMX-5 near L4.)

At Ariel University

After descending to the surface of Radix via beanstalk (space elevator) the crew found themselves stranded at a train platform in the middle of a stampede of Triceratops and Edmontosaurus. One particularly nasty male Triceratops managed to knock the platform off it's foundation, crushing 992 who was using the platform for cover. Fortunately everyone managed to recover from their injuries with the help of Foi Shin's alchemy and Orgraff's unusual tribal healing techniques.

The passengers who were rescued by the team's brave defense of the train platform included the mysterious strix scholar Skreel and his myrmidon protege Chainstorm. Chainstorm recruited the party to help them provide security during Skreel's debate with the silver tongued gremian Commander Spriley at the university amphitheater. Commander Spriley presented a popular theory that each living species was created by intelligent machines, while Skreel defended the "tree of life" tradition which claims that all living things descended from a common ancestor.

At the end of the debate things got nasty as Commander Spriley's gun thugs converged on Skreel, but our heroes helped chainstorm fight off the commander and his minions. Skreel suggested that it would be expeditious to leave Radix and Monopolis before the commander's fellow Trouble Shooters decided to investigate the incident. Using his Symbiotic Order and Tomb Keeper connections, Skreel arranged for the entire crew to travel with him to Peleg and drop to the surface of that world in a disposable vehicle.

On the way to Peleg

In transit, 992 discussed the disturbing implications of Commander Spriley's theory with Skreel. As a clone, 992 is a product of technology, but if Spriley's theory is right, then all living things are just machines created by other machines. Complicating things, in spite of archeological evidence for technology that dates back thousands of years, there is no evidence for the common descent of species in the Abaddon system.

Skreel then explained that his study of the ancient scriptures and archeology of the Middle Worlds suggest that life in the Abaddon system came from distant stars, and millions of years of fossil evidence may be scattered around the universe. Skreel also quoted an ancient cosmological text which claims that all carbon and other heavy elements that make up both machines and living things was produced by the stars themselves going through cycles of life, death and birth that last for millions of years.

Save the Frances Haddon Morgan Center

2011-02-09T13:06:00.000-08:00

http://www.kitsapsun.com/news/2011/feb/08/power-moves-at-play-in-frances-haddon-morgan/

The Frances Haddon Morgan Center (FHMC) takes care of 54 severely autistic people. The parents of those autistic people are upset because governor of Washington and DSHS are threatening the lives of their children.

Governor Christine Gregoire wants the FHMC shut down, and instead of trying to make her case to the legislature when they vote on her proposed budget, she had friends at DSHS try to scare the parents into transferring their children to other facilities. They misled the parents by presenting the threat as if the legislature had already decided to shut down the center.

The FHMC is a pioneering facility specializing in severe autism. Washington state used to have 6 residential rehabilitation centers for 4000 people with various mental health problems. Now it has 5 facilities serving only 900 people, and none of the other facilities specialize in autism. In other words the system is already lean and efficient, housing only the people who need it most, where they can be helped the best.

More information about the five facilities that are still open:

Fircrest School Shoreline, Washington
Frances Haddon Morgan Center, Bremerton, Washington
Lakeland Village, Medical Lake, Washington
Rainier School, Buckley, Washington
Yakima Valley School, Selah, Washington

The pages for Fircrest School, Lakeland Village and Rainier School show us pictures of trees. They are located on low-value properties out in the woods where growth management policies limit new development (two of these facilities were built before WWII.)

The FHMC is the newest facility. It's page tells you more information about the services it provides AND the relationship between the center and the community. It is an important source of employment for people in the city of Bremerton - especially those who are not afraid of dirty, hard work (and sometimes risk of injury.)

The FHMC is located within city limits and uses land efficiently. Unfortunately there are people who would like to use that land to build a park that will raise property values. The Frances Haddon Morgan Center is already adjacent a large park. Some people see all government property as their personal piggy bank - not to mention all the private property that is affected by these projects.

Bremerton already has empty luxury condos downtown and a massive low-income housing project that has been evacuated and scheduled for demolition even though nobody wants to develop that land. The last thing we need is to kill 54 autistic people so we can plant some trees where people used to be employed doing something useful.

The families and employees of the FHMC are holding a rally to protest this abuse will be held on Saturday from 9 AM to 3 PM at Arnold's Home Furnishings Center, 3520 Kitsap Way, Bremerton.

Squawk Role-Playing Game

2010-12-12T10:57:00.001-08:00

The Squawk Role-Playing Game that we have been working since the mid-90's is finally available as a book from CreateSpace and Amazon.com or as a PDF from RPGNow and DriveThruRPG.

See the Game Arts Guild Press Release for details.

Conversation with Spiced Ham

2010-03-19T01:15:00.000-07:00

Once in a while I just can't resist the urge to reply to one of these e-mails that grandmas like to circulate around teh internets. There is no point in replying directly to the arguments of a chain letter, but always a surfeit of subliminal content to play with. This time the subject is the US health care reform bill. While I think the critics of the bill might have some good points, they are generating more heat than light - and mostly lulz. The chain letter in question uses the abbreviation HC for health care (because your time is precious!)

Page 22 of the HC Bill: Mandates that the Govt will audit books of all employers that self-insure!!

What do these employers have to hide, that they don't want their books audited?

Page 30 Sec 123 of HC bill: THERE WILL BE A GOVT COMMITTEE that decides what treatments/benefits you get.

I am so enraged about this interference with my right to have my treatments selected by some bean counters at the HMO.

Page 29 lines 4-16 in the HC bill: YOUR HEALTH CARE IS RATIONED!!!

There goes the all-you-can-eat health care I have grown accustomed to.

Page 42 of HC Bill: The Health Choices Commissioner will choose your HC benefits for you. You have no choice!

Wait, so instead of the current system where I "choose" whether to wait in line at the clinic with my day laborer buddies in the alley behind the market in Seattle where I live on weekdays or with the meth heads across the street from Walmart in Bremerton where I live on weekends, the HC Bill will have both a Commissioner and a Committee competing for this privilege?

Page 50 Section 152 in HC bill: HC will be provided to ALL non-US citizens, illegal or otherwise.

It's just not right to treat our guest workers to that kind of abuse.

Read the Rest on Google Docs!

Views of Lagos

2010-02-15T16:49:00.000-08:00

This is a presentation I produced for an Urban Studies class at the University of Washington Tacoma. I present Lagos as a megacity of the global periphery and outline the geography of the city, showing conventional development statistics and current issues facing the city. I have embedded a preview for the documentary Nollywood Babylon which shows a different perspective on the development of Lagos, generated by the people who live in the city for their own consumption. This presentation was also influenced by Jonathan Haynes' paper Nollywood in Lagos, Lagos in Nollywood Films Africa Today 54:2 [Winter 2007] p.130-150.

Green Shoots

2009-07-27T05:55:00.000-07:00

The furniture store next to this McDonald's across the street from my parents' house burnt down last night/early this morning. I tried to convince my dad to don a suit, put a hot dog on a stick and wander around asking: "Can you spare a dime for a brother just lost a furniture store?" The economic recovery is nigh!

Tianyulong

2009-03-24T07:12:00.001-07:00

This is a picture of lagosuchus, a close relative of dinosaurs, not the newly discovered Tianyulong, an ornithschian dinosaur covered in protofeathers. (Click here for a picture of Tianyulong by Lida Xing.) I drew this picture years ago to illustrate the idea that dinosaurs are descended from fuzzy warm-blooded creatures with elevated metabolisms. 20 years ago it was a reasonable idea, but there was no evidence for (or against) fuzz on small dinosaurs. (Scaly skin was known for some large dinosaurs, but large mammals are also often naked.) Greg Paul's comments on the Dinosaur Mailing List add some important information missed by the news stories covering this new discovery.

Intelligent Designs

2009-03-17T10:30:00.000-07:00

I have uploaded some pictures of the intelligent species along with theories about their origins - specifically their own theories in their own words. One theory based on religious tradition claims that all living things share a common ancestry while the other theory - based on information available to scientists in the Squawk setting - is skeptical about this claim and suggests that complex machines like animals were probably created by simpler machines.

More pictures and controversy...

Obamanation Day

2009-01-20T12:08:00.000-08:00

Conservative megachurch pastor Rick Warren provided the invocation for the inauguration of the 44th president of the United States. In his prayer, Warren testified that the Lord is One, pleaded for forgiveness when we fight each other, and closed the name of "the One who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus [prounounced 'hay-sooss' as in Spanish], Jesus [prounounced 'jee-zuss' as in English]"

"Yeshua" is a hebrew name popularly believed to be equivalent to the name Jesus. (Actually the correct hebrew name for Jesus is probably closer to "Yehoshua" which is often translated into English as Joshua.) "Isa" is the Arabic name for Jesus. So with these names Warren specifically addresses Jews and Muslims.

By using the spanish pronunciation of Jesus (though the compound name "jesucristo" is probably more common when referring to Jesus Christ as opposed to other people named Jesus,) Warren is reaching out to latinos, perhaps especially Roman Catholics. About 70% of the US hispanic population identify themselves as Catholic.

John Williams provided a musical composition entitled "Air and Simple Gifts" performed by Yo-Yo Ma (cello), Itzhak Perlman (violin), Gabriela Montero (piano) and Anthony McGill (clarinet). This instrumental peice is based on religious themes: The main theme is easily recognized as Elder Joseph Brackett's Shaker dance song "Simple Gifts", but before this theme was introduced I'm pretty sure I also heard the tune "Old 100th" which is used in several hymns, but which I most associate with the single verse "Praise God, from Whom All Blessings Flow."

Obama, in his address explicitly mentioned the usual trinity of American religions: Christians, Muslims and Jews, adding Hindus and a slightly mumbled recognition of nonbelievers. It would be difficult to properly express the diversity of American religion in a 20 minute speech, but with so much press attention on the problems of Israel and the Muslim world, at least we can remember that people are not defined only by which side they are expected to take in each violent conflict.

Squawk Renaming

2008-12-26T08:30:00.000-08:00

Within the last year we have changed the naming conventions in the Squawk Role-Playing Game. Many creatures including the intelligent reptilian species of the Squawk setting were often named after well-known monsters from mythology. The new names are designed to be less confusing:

Aeolytes, named after Aeolus, ruler of the winds in greek mythology, used to be called rocs.
Behemoths, who get their name from the bible (Job 40, suggesting the largest and most powerful animal,) used to be called ogres.
Boreans, named after Boreas, the cold north wind from greek mythology, used to be called orcs.
Dromes, from a latin root which suggests running, used to be called basilisks.
Gafflings, whose name suggests a gaff or hook, used to be called hobgoblins.
Gremians, from an English name meaning "enrages", used to be called gremlins.
Gygeans, from the Ring of Gyges described in Plato's Republic (which made it's wearer invisible,) used to be called gargoyles.
Leviathans, who get their name from the bible (Job 41, suggesting a giant sea creature,) used to be called draconians.
Lyndwyrms, whose name suggests lindworm (a wingless bipedal dragon in British heraldry,) used to be called minotaurs.
Myrmidons, named for a tribe commanded by Achilles in greek myth and whose name meant "ant-people", used to be called manticores.
Orns, from a root word suggesting birds, used to be called gryphons, cockatrices or harpies.
Phages, from hematophagy (blood-eating), used to be called vampires.
Skand, from the root of words like "ascend" and "descend" (suggesting leaping and climbing,) used to be called kobolds.
Strix, from a bird in roman legends that fed on human flesh and blood, used to be called elves.
Stygians, from the river Styx which separated Earth from Hades in greek mythology (also used in words like stygofauna to suggest underground water,) used to be called trolls.
Titans get their name indirectly from the titans of greek mythology through the english word titanic, suggesting largeness.
Zephyrs, named after Zephyrus, the west wind in greek mythology, used to be called unicorns.

Zephyr

2008-12-26T08:06:00.001-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, zephyrs are small intelligent hadrosaurs with a single ridged horn as a crest. Originally they were conceived as furry creatures with a zebra-like mane and stripes.

However, we have extensive information about the skin of some hadrosaurs like the "trachodon mummy" discovered in 1908. The interesting skin of real-life hadrosaurs is covered in fine scales with patterns, wrinkles and variations that suggest how the creatures might have been colored in life. Hadrosaur species also had distinctive frills running down their backs.

Inspired by the skin impressions of these and other herbivorous dinosaurs, we have redesigned the zephyr to have smooth skin covered in tiny non-overlapping scales and a "mane" which is actually a frayed dorsal frill.

More pictures and information about zephyrs...

Titan

2008-12-26T07:54:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk, Role-Playing Game, titans are huge armored dinosaurs related to ankylosaurs. Titans are one of the newest intelligent species in Squawk, designed by my brother Ulrich, who also produced this image.

More pictures and information about titans...

Stygian

2008-12-26T06:47:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, stygians are flightless pterosaurs adapted for swimming. Like beavers, stygians are builders, creating dams and other structures to modify their freshwater habitats. Like platypus, stygians have and electrically sensitive snout used to navigate and find prey in dark and murky places.

More pictures and information about stygians...

Strix

2008-12-18T11:12:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, strix are intelligent primitive birds with raptorial beaks and talons.
More pictures and information about strix...

Skand

2008-12-16T14:42:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, skands are small intelligent predatory dinosaurs.

Phage

2008-12-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, phages are pterosaurs that drink blood, similar to vampire bats. Pterosaurs are flying reptiles, probably archosaurs, with leathery wings. Pterosaurs look a bit like their bird cousins and and a bit like their more distant bat relatives, but they also have unique features including wings supported by a single elongated finger instead of the four-fingered wings of bats or the fused hands of birds.

Vampire bats are not the only real-life animals that feed on blood. Many invertebrates also practice hematophagy, including mosquitoes, some worms and most leaches. So do some lampreys and even a bird called the oxpecker. Although we don't know of any actual blood eating pterosaurs, Mark Witton and Darren Naish's Azhdarchid Paleobiology research challenges the stereotype that all pterosaurs lived by fishing and scavenging like modern shorebirds.

More pictures and information about phages...

Orn

2008-12-11T07:32:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, orns are flightless primitive birds. This is the third intelligent species we designed for Squawk (after gafflings and myrmidons) and the first which was not based on a creature from one of our earlier RPGs.

(Drawing by my brother Ulrich.)

The original orn was a bird- headed humanoid called the "harpy." Next came the "gryphon" and "cockatrice" which were sometimes giant archaeopteryx- like creatures and sometimes feathered crocodiles.

Finally we settled on an idea that combines some of all those ideas, an anthropomorphic primitive climbing bird with a long flexible body (perhaps similar to the narrow-bodied, four-winged fossil bird relative Microraptor gui.)

More pictures and information about orns...

Myrmidon

2008-12-04T08:48:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Myrmidons are intelligent ceratopsian dinosaurs. They are also the second intelligent species we designed for Squawk (after gafflings.)

Lyndwyrm

2008-12-02T11:27:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Lyndwyrms are intelligent theropod dinosaurs with massive horns and shaggy manes. Lyndwyrm horns are inspired by the horns of Carnotaurus, but they are much longer and twisted like the horns of Triceratops.

(The lyndwyrm images above were modeled and rendered with Blender by my brother Ulrich.)

The feathery mane is inspired by the primitive plumage of real life dinosaurs such as Dilong paradoxus, which are thought to be close relatives of Tyrannosaurus rex. We don't know for sure whether the direct ancestors of T. rex had feathers. If some of them did, then it is likely that T. rex itself had some feathers.

More pictures and information about lyndwyrms...

Leviathan

2008-11-28T07:08:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Leviathans are intelligent crocodilians. Like crocodiles and Alligators, leviathans are armored, swimming predators, but Leviathans have longer and more powerful legs, allowing them to walk bipedally like some crocodilian ancestors.

Leviathans are closely related to gygeans, another species of intelligent crocodilians in Squawk. Leviathans are much more robust than their stealthy cousins, with stocky bodies, thick tails, compressed snouts and short but still heavily muscled arms.

More pictures and information about leviathans...

Gygean

2008-11-27T17:16:00.001-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, gygeans are intelligent crocodilians with the ability to change skin color and pattern rapidly like octopus, squid and cuttlefish. In spite of the difficulty of depicting this ability in action, Gygeans are one of our most illustrated Squawk species.

Two gygean features are coincidentally found in that other dinosaur science fiction franchise, Jurassic Park. The late author of the Jurassic Park books, Michael Crichton, hints in the original novel that the velociraptors have some active camouflage ability like a chameleon. (In real life, velociraptors were covered in feathers like a bird.) In the second book he gives the Carnotaurus an even more dramatic camouflage which makes them nearly invisible when they hunt at night.

In the movie adaptation of Jurassic Park, Steven Spielberg gives the Dilophosaurus a neck frill which can be erected. This feature is present in the real-life Frilled Dragon and some of the Squawk gygeans. The creators of the movie knew that the real life Dilophosaurus almost certainly did not have this frill (or the ability to spit poison) but including these features in their fictional dinosaurs is an homage the revelations that come as we learn more about prehistoric life.

More pictures and information about gygeans:

Left 4 Dead

2008-11-26T10:53:00.000-08:00

Left 4 Dead is the best FPS if you ignore the problems common to proprietary games with high system requirements. It is not superior because of it's beautiful graphics or physics simulation (most decidedly not because of it's graphics and physics simulation) but because of it's superior game design.

Unlike Counterstrike or Halo, the objective of the game is survival, not sacrifice for an abstract cause. You protect yourself and help others who you need in order to survive. You beat the monsters off of your fellow survivors and help them get up when they are knocked down. You work together against strong enemies. You keep going when you are wounded, and when a comrade falls you find another survivor to replace them. The theme of "help is on the way" drives the game forward.

Dominant Position

Melee combat is more effective than shooting when the bad guys are up close, and it is much safer for the other survivors. The right mouse button does a melee attack regardless of which weapon you are using. The melee attack knocks nearby monsters back and often knocks them down if it doesn't kill them. Meanwhile the monsters try to overwhelm you with numbers, pounce on you and hold you down, strangle you with tongue-tentacles or throw you off of the top of buildings.

Survivors pack light: one or two pistols for your sidearm, one primary weapon (automatic weapon, shotgun or rifle), either a molotov cocktail or a pipe bomb and either a first aid kit or pain pills. (The first aid kit or pain pills can be used on yourself or the other survivors, and first aid takes too long to be used in the middle of a fight.) Defensive positions scattered around the game are stocked with extra supplies, piles of ammo (a generic resupply point that refills any weapon), gas cans, propane tanks, oxygen tanks and other situational weapons.

Personality

Movie-influenced monsters include the fast angry infected horde from 28 days later, Resident Evil style mutations (like the tentacle-tongued smoker, the fat vomiting boomer and the giant muscular tank) and even a creepy tricky girl monster like Samara from The Ring or the Blair Witch (by far the most feared enemy in the game even though - or because - you can avoid her most of the time, and not playable in the versus mode where one team of players control infected mutants.)

The survivors are represented as four unique characters: A vietnam veteran who is appropriately old, sharp and respectable (not a greasy tragic John Rambo misfit), a white thug playing the comedy relief Jayne Cobb style, a small, athletic female college student typical of horror movie survivors, and what I call the "white collar brother": a black systems analyst who fills the nervous jumpy survivor role.

Assymetrical Conflict

Left 4 Dead is not a war of attrition where victory goes to whoever is last to run out of hit points or ammo or soldiers or minerals. The action goes through cycles of slow recovery, exploration, stealth and avoidance, hunting and stalking, ambushes, escape and big boss battles which you you must sometimes trigger intentionally to meet your long term survival goals (call an elevator, radio for help.)

See my other blog post about the Steam Cloud technology used in Left 4 Dead.

Gremian

2008-11-20T20:53:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Gremians are highly derived deinonychosaurs related to gafflings. They have completely lost most of the distinctive features of their close relatives: sickle claws, feathers and even the long tail. They have developed a relatively enormous head with a shortened snout and a more erect posture.

Some of these adaptations are examples of paedomorphosis, where adults of the species retain features from earlier stages of development. Superficially, gremians resemble avian hatchlings with their bare pinkish skin and huge heads.

More pictures and information about gremians...

Gaffling

2008-11-19T16:53:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Gafflings are intelligent deinonychosaurs whose three-fingered hands have exceptional flexibility and opposable thumbs.

Gafflings are the original Squawk species. We designed these creatures (formerly known as "raptors" or "hobgoblins") for an earlier series of RPGs called The Dark Woods or Metazoica, and the Dinosaurs with Swords idea that eventually became Squawk grew out of this idea of an intelligent feathered velociraptor.

More pictures and information about gafflings...

Drome

2008-11-13T10:48:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, dromes are intelligent theropod dinosaurs. Several drome features suggest that they are primitive theropods like Eoraptor, Herrerasaurus, Coelophysis or Dilophosaurus, and not bird-like coelurosaurs like Tyrannosaurus, Velociraptor and modern birds:

Dromes have a narrow ribcage instead of a broad, bird-like bellows. This suggest an aerobic metabolism somewhere in-between a normal "reptilian" and avian system. They have skinny legs and relatively small hips instead of thickly muscled thighs. Dromes have four fingers on each hand, and they are covered in scales instead of feathers. (So far only ceolurosaurs have been discovered with feathers.)

More pictures and information about dromes...

Borean

2008-11-11T11:36:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, boreans are intelligent avians descended from primitive flightless waterfowl. Like penguins they stand upright instead of having a more typical avian horizontal posture. As primitive birds they retain the sharp teeth and claws of their dinosaur ancestors, but their hands and feet are webbed and their teeth more needle-like for catching fish. Boreans have evolved an echolocation system which allows them to navigate by sound, similar to bats and dolphins.

Boreans are inspired by interesting prehistoric creatures from the real world:

Anthropornis, a man-sized, long-necked, long-beaked, tropical peguin
Hesperornis, a toothed diving bird with virtually no wings
Archaeopteryx and other primitive birds with claws and teeth

More pictures and information about boreans...

Behemoth

2008-11-06T08:39:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, behemoths are gigantic intelligent dinosaurs related to sauropods. Unlike most sauropod who walk on their fingertips, behemoths are knuckle-walkers and can also walk on two legs, allowing them to carry and operate tools with their hands. The behemoth on the right in our illustration is a chimera with extra skin armor, insect-like appendages and batteries of some kind of openings on it's shoulders.

In real life, sauropods were long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs and included the biggest land animals that have ever lived, like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus. In recent years we have learned a lot about the skin of sauropods. Except for the feathered dinosaurs, it appears that all dinosaurs were covered in small non-overlapping scales like the skin of a turtle or gila monster. Some sauropods had armored scales like a crocodile. Elongated dorsal scales in some sauropod skin impressions inspired the row of spikes running down the back of our fictional behemoth (only in the male of the species.)

More pictures and information about behemoths...

Aeolyte

2008-11-04T17:07:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, aeolytes are enormous flying birds. The ability to fly makes aeolytes valuable as messengers. Male aeolytes have more flamboyant coloring than the females. Aeolyte speech sounds like low, hoarse bird noises.

Lighter than most intelligent species but large enough to limit maneuverability while flying, aeolytes can weild a relatively large weapon with either of their powerful talons while flying or hopping on one leg.

More pictures and information about aeolytes...

Cheap, Green Freedom

2008-04-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

The Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947 assault rifle, better known as the AK-47, is simple, inexpensive to manufacture and easy to maintain. It can be used in arctic conditions, dragged through mud, sand and dust and still fire without jamming. A fusion of best designs adapted to mass manufacturing and close combat, the Soviet Union exported massive numbers of these weapons - at cost or even free of charge - to arm revolutionary forces around the world struggling to liberate their nations. The image of the AK-47 is featured on the flag of Mozambique and the coat of arms of Zimbabwe and East Timor.

The XO-1 is a small laptop manufactured by Quanta and distributed to schools - mostly in developing countries - by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association. The XO-1 is designed to be inexpensive, energy efficient and easy to maintain. A new display technology makes the XO-1 screen readable in direct sunlight and does away the toxic mercury backlight required by today's laptops. The XO-1 is ruggedly designed for use in hot, humid and dusty environments which would severely damage an ordinary laptop. OLPC with assistance from governments and schools distributes these machines "To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves."

Read the full article on Google Documents.

The Way We Live Now

2008-04-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, eBay seller Troy Augusto is being sued by Universal Music Group (UMG) for reselling promotional CDs which the music company gave away to create advertising "buzz". The CDs are labeled "Promotional Use Only, Not for Resale", but according to the "first sale" doctrine in copyright law, once a copyright holder sells or gives away a CD, the recipient can resell it without further permission.

At first the lawsuit seems to be a basic copyright question that could be applied to offline stores or even books. But second-hand music stores have resold promotional CDs for years without being sued. Troy Augusto was targeted because he set up his shop online. When the recording industry goes after it's own customers we are sometimes shocked into focusing on the drama and miss the ethical issues, but in this case the target is a business following widely-accepted business practice. Reselling of music copies - promotional or otherwise - does not directly profit recording companies so this case reminds us that copyright policies should also protect stakeholders other than authors and publishers.

But this case introduces a much broader issue of technology ethics: to what degree can entities that generate culture also generate law? Are shrink-wrap and click-through "end-user license agreements" (EULAs) on software and services legally binding contracts? Does writing "not for resale" on a CD change a gift into a loan? The current trend is for judges and lawmakers to support industry practices, but if courts enforce any rules publishers invent, then the publishers are writing the law and the courts are simply instruments of enforcement. Recently deployed "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) technologies go a step further and actually enforce these "laws" in ways that a typical user will not know how to circumvent, even if they have a legal right to do so. The example of the "not for resale" sticker on a few free CDs may seem trivial, but the potential to embed "rights management" rules into physical goods, electronic transactions and documents, and project them everywhere in both the physical and digital worlds raises serious questions about how power should be shared in society.

There are alternatives to a culture dominated by control-obsessed organizations which write draconian laws in their own interests. Governments could agree to a more limited (and arguably more traditional) interpretation of copyright, trademark and patent law instead of the fuzzy and ever expanding extensions to these laws now called "intellectual property". The original US copyright law, intended to encourage publication in the public interest, limited copyright to 14 years plus one optional 14 year renewal. Patent law, intended to encourage the development of new industrial applications of technology, could be interpreted to require both a more substantial physical component and more originality than patents which are primarily about software algorithms, business practices, or genes found in nature. Trademarks protect the consumer from deceptive labeling, so they should and do operate differently from copyright or patents.

Instead of lobbying for changes in international law which may take a very long time, businesses might adopt commons-based production models such as open-source software, perhaps using the power to create their own laws to establish a "free trade area" where culture can be produced and traded without excessive barriers. In the virtual economy of Second Life, for example, users are allowed to sell content which cannot be copied or which cannot be resold, but not content which can be neither copied nor resold. Such cultural commons initiated by businesses and grassroots movements are growing, but governments may be more naturally inclined to respond to the interests of the "squeaky wheels": entrenched interests clamoring for more aggressive protection of their self-written laws. A two-pronged approach may be necessary: developing open markets with flexibility and rules that protect all stakeholders while steering traditional legal systems in a direction that protects this type of innovation.

Computer Ethics Changes Everything

2008-04-03T06:42:00.000-07:00

James H. Moor, What is Computer Ethics? Metaphilosophy, October 1985, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 266-275

Moor defines computer ethics “as the analysis of the nature and social impact of computer technology and the corresponding formulation and justification of policies for the ethical use of such technology.” He argues that computer ethics should be a special field of study, involving general ethics and science as well as problems specific to the domain of computer technology.

Moor points out that computers are revolutionary in the sense that they have “logical malleability”: the data in a computer can be used to represent any symbol. This allows computers to become part of any activity, and when computers become an essential part of that activity, the ethical issues surrounding the activity itself have to be reexamined – not just the usefulness of computers in that activity. Moor also cites invisible abuse (unauthorized access and malicious software) invisible programming values (assumptions in the software that bias the system’s behavior) and invisible complex calculations (computer activity which cannot be completely observed and understood by humans) to support the need for the special study of computer ethics.

David S. Touretzky, Free Speech Rights for Programmers, Communications of the ACM, August 2001, Vol. 44 No. 8, pp. 23-25

Touretzky argues that software is free speech which should be protected, making the DMCA provisions He focuses on the DeCSS case in which the judge decided that code is speech but that compilable and executable code are more dangerous than protected speech. Touretzky is particularly concerned that the DMCA and this ruling are interfering with the publishing of computer science research.

Touretzky supports his argument with the testimony he gave in the courtroom: There is no clear distinction between discussing an algorithm and distributing software that implements the algorithm. Although Touretzky provided numerous examples blurring the distinction, the judge still ruled on the basis of a distinction between functional software and protected speech.

Response

Moor’s two lines of argument – that any activity changed by computer technology needs to be reexamined, and that invisibility creates new ethical issues – represent two different attitudes toward computer ethics that are now very common.

Invisibility concerns are more easy for the general public to understand because they involve clear bad guys: untrustworthy voting machines, biased search engines, viruses, spyware, phishing and so forth. These problems get lots of press, but the existence of botnets suggests the response has been inadequate. (Botnets are remote-controlled networks of hijacked computers owned by unsuspecting victims, often sold or rented for nefarious purposes on the black market. This represents a convergence of both invisible complexity and invisible abuse.) Techniques exist to control malicious software and to enforce accountability in computerized activities such as accounting, but they don’t get used.

Touretzky’s paper is an example of the more abstract justification for the study of computer ethics: computers force us to re-examine activities. This is difficult to communicate, but it is more likely to result in meaningful action than popular concern about invisible enemies inside the machine. The invisibility problem is a bit like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, penned when industrial technology was still a frightening power only beginning to transform human lives. The real computer revolution, however is more like the later industrial revolution of Charles Dickens where the ethical issues are not the problems of technology changing human lives but problems of human lives which have already been changed by technology.

The Meat Bull

2008-03-17T18:48:00.000-07:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game a Minotaur is a large, intelligent, carnivorous theropod dinosaur related to Tyrannosaurus. Minotaurs are covered in simple fur-like feathers, and have a pair of large curved horns sprouting from over each eye. Minotaurs have short but well-developed and relatively dextrous forearms with three-fingered hands. These hands can be used to hold weapons, but the leverage to swing the weapon comes from the Minotaur's powerful legs and body.

Minotaurs prefer long, pole-arm weapons, which they can hold in the middle allowing them to strike with both ends. The following picture shows a minotaur with an unusual short-handled sword and lamellar armor. This Minotaur is creeping along in a low crouch actually walking on it's heels, but minotaurs normally walk on their toes like other theropods.

Long horns is very unusual for a predator. The idea of a horned theropod comes from a real-life dinosaur called Carnotaurus, which has large horns over each eye (but much shorter horns than the Squawk Minotaur.) Older Minotaur drawings have straighter horns and a combination of a feathery mane with patterns of scales found in Carnotaurus skin impressions.

The Manticore Corps

2008-03-06T15:23:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Manticores are intelligent ceratopsian dinosaurs. While most ceratopsians, like Psittacosaurus and Triceratops are stocky quadrupeds, Manticores are gracile bipeds with long limbs and very long tails. Manticores lack the long horns of some of the larger ceratopsians, and they have a proportionally longer neck shield than any other ceratopsian.
Manticore legs are adapted for running, with only three toes on each foot. The hands are four-fingered manipulators with opposable inner and outer digits. The long tail is a specialized weapon with the tip partially fused into a hard, sharp weapon.
The manticore idea is based on creature ideas from RPGs we made before Squawk. Manticores weren't always dinosaurs (and they weren't always called manticores - the original name was unpronounceable by humans.) The beak is a recent addition to make manticores more like their ceratopsian cousins. As the picture above shows, we have been toying with the idea of giving manticores elongated protective scales.

Hash Functions

2008-02-29T19:08:00.001-08:00

This is my part of a short presentation I will be giving with two other students:

Kobold Bashing

2007-12-15T20:46:00.000-08:00

In the Squawk role-playing game, kobolds are intelligent theropod dinosaurs. They are roughly humanoid in shape, except for having four fingers or toes on each limb, a prehensile tail and a typical theropod snout including a mouth full of sharp teeth. Kobolds are tree-climbing predators, with similarities to cats and primates. They are acrobatic and powerfully muscled for their size (about 1.6 m tall.)

The long feathers on the head are a single solid color in males (often black, white, red or yellow, but sometimes other colors) and a more complex pattern of more earthy colors in females. Both sexes have variable patterns of spots and thinner fur-like plumage on the neck, shoulders and other parts of the body.

The picture on the right shows a compact body shape more typical of advanced theropods like allosaurus, tyrannosaurus and velociraptor than the long body and human-like pinched waist of the kobold. When I made this drawing we were working on making some of the most humanoid Squawk species more dinosaur-like. (This was shortly before the discovery of the relatively long-bodied arboreal feathered theropod Microraptor.)

Raptor Rapture

2007-10-27T08:13:00.000-07:00

Dromaeosaurs are those sickle clawed "raptor" dinosaurs which have become contenders for scariest dinosaurs in popular imagination (in spite of their modest size) thanks to Jurassic Park.

If you know your dromaeosaurs, you probably thought those "velociraptors" in Jurassic Park were a tad on the big side. That's because they are actually supposed to be Deinonychus, a man-sized dromeosaur species which Greg Paul had classified as a subspecies of Velociraptor for a while. You can see this in Paul's excellent dinosaur art/science book Predatory Dinosaurs of the World (hardcover and paperback versions available at Amazon.com.) Since writing that book, Greg Paul has concluded that Deinonychus is actually a separate species after all. (The Jurassic Park Deinonychus are still much bigger than they should be, but the dromaeosaur Utahraptor actually was that big.)

Jurassic Park's "raptors" inherited another mistake which was common for dinosaur artists and scientists at the time: the wrists are broken. The palms of predatory dinosaur hands face inward, not backward, with the "thumbs" pointing forward - like the wrists of a bird or like our hands when we climb a rope, but not when we climb a ladder. I was at the "Collossal Fossils" exhibit at the Pacific Science Center recently and all of the predatory dinosaurs had their wrists the wrong way. When you look at the bones up close you can see how this just doesn't work.

When I saw Jurassic Park for the first time, I was a bit disappointed that they didn't have any feathered dinosaurs. They used the Greg Paul's new classification scheme, and his ridiculously fast Tyrannosaurus, but left out his feathered dromaeosaurs! Paul illustrated all of his small dinosaurs with downy "protofeathers" and gave the dromaeosaurs wing feathers. We don't know if all of the small dinosaurs had feathers, but last month Alan Turner, Peter Makovicky and Mark Norell described direct physical evidence for flight feathers on the forearms of Velociraptor.

Dromaeosaurs are so closely related to birds, that they might actually be secondarily flightless descendants of the first flying dinosaurs. I recently read Greg Paul's new book on this subject: Dinosaurs of the Air. The new book is more science and less art-oriented than Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. Paul looks at dinosaur metabolism in terms of aerobic excercise (instead of "warm blooded or cold blooded") which allows us to draw conclusions from the bones themselves, and even identify which dinosaurs probably had "in-between" metabolisms.

Hobgoblin vs. The 'Roid

2007-10-25T18:24:00.001-07:00

In the Squawk RPG, a hobgoblin is an intelligent dromaeosaur. The basic body plan is like other dromaeosaurs, but the flexibility of the hand and arms is increased and a much larger brain gives the skull a bulbous, rounded shape.

(top left) street-fighter with feet and hands wrapped
(top right) armored with saber and wing-shaped sheild
(middle) soldier with helmet and revolver bayonets
(bottom left) bioarmor with rockets and arm cannons
(bottom right) wizard? on fire!?

I like this series of sketches because it gives the basic concept of the Squawk setting at a glance. The hobgoblin at the top left has his hands in the "broken wrist" orientation from Jurassic Park - which might be easier for hobgoblins than other dromaeosaurs, but isn't the most natural position.

The hobgoblin's "conservative" shape - very similar to the real-life dromaeosaurs - is in part a reaction to Dale Russel's dinosauroid. Dromaeosaurs are already big-headed bipeds with grasping hands, so the dinosauroid's human-like body shape is mostly superfluous. See my gremlin post for more information.

Freddy vs. Wolverine

2007-07-25T08:44:00.001-07:00

Gryphons are one of the first intelligent species we invented for the Squawk Role-Playing Game, but they have settled on their current form only recently. This drawing is a slightly modified version of the original and totally awesome design by my brother Ulrich.

The bird-like appearance is superficial: Gryphons and Gargoyles belong to a fictional group of archosaurs resembling crocodiles with long, flexible, otter-like bodies. (Also in this fictional family are the snake-like guivres.) While Gargoyles became stealthier with naked, color-changing skin, Gryphons became large, powerful, tiger-like predators with huge claws. At some point the Gryphon ancestors aquired insulating pseudo-feathers similar to dinosaurs and pterosaurs, and lost their teeth, so Gryphons rip at their prey with sharp beaks.Gryphons are extraordinarily flexible, moving like a cross between a cat and a snake. All of their joints have a wide range of motion. They can curl up into a ball and wrap around trees. This flexibility helps them to climb, move through tight spaces and crawl through tall ground cover when stalking prey.
At one point gryphons were becoming a less flexible dinosaur design related to archaeopteryx and sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs. In this drawing we can see a combination of archaeopteryx, feathering, anthropomorphic torso and sickle-clawed feet. (It looks like I left an extra toe on one of the feet.) This is totally unlike the current Gryphon idea.

Here is an effort to rehabilitate the same drawing as a modern gryphon with a toothless beak and four huge talons on each foot. The tail, with it's archaeopteryx-like feather pattern, will probably have to go.

Avoid the 'Roid

2007-07-16T11:19:00.000-07:00

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, a gremlin is an intelligent primitive bird or bird-like dinosaur without feathers. Gremlins have one of the proportionally largest brains of all the intelligent species, but they are one of the smaller species.

Large eyes with cat-like pupils give gremlins excellent vision in a wide range of lighting conditions. Gremlins have a limited sense of smell because of their short snouts. They have only three fingers on each hand (a thumb and two other fingers), but each touch-sensitive soft-tipped finger is both strong and dextrous. A vertical spinal column and modified shoulders give them an improved range of arm motion as well as balancing the brainy skull.

(The narrow hips of the floating gremlin above is a degenerate condition related to living in low gravity. Most gremlins have wide hips which form the round bottom half of an egg-shaped torso.)

Gremlins are plantigrade - they walk on their heels. This helps their vertical posture, but they have very long feet and run with all of their weight on a single toe. This is similar to the way humans run, but more extreme. Gremlins have one other toe which helps them balance while standing and walking. The inside toe - which is often adapted as a sickle-claw or reversed and elongated for perching in other birds and bird-like dinosaurs - is completely absent in gremlins.

Gremlins are partly inspired by paleontologist Dale Russel's speculative "Dinosauroid". Zoology blogger Darren Naish has proposed a much better candidate for super-intelligent dinosaur ancestor and surreal artist Nemo Ramjet has provided a nice illustration.

To Write a Post about Gargoyles

2007-07-02T20:42:00.000-07:00

This is one of the best re-imaginings of a Squawk race by my brother Ulrich. For our Xanadu setting he re-invented the dragon-like, chameleon-skinned Gargoyle as a long-bodied Japanese dragon anthropomorphized in the tradition of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This added more oriental flavor to the Xanadu culture and gave us a memorable look for a race that was not well represented in the artwork.
Gargoyles are able to change the color and pattern of their skin like a chameleon or cephalopod to communicate and disguise themselves. As intelligent creatures they can invent new disguises and stealth techniques. In this drawing we see how individual difference in texture can be exploited to blend in with different environments.
We tried to imagine how a long, low crocodile-like head could contain the large brain of an intelligent species. horns add a hard-edged, squared look to a domed forehead. The entire head is large relative to the body. At some point you have to look past stereotypes (relative brain size is not all-important, some fish and birds have more brain-to-body mass than humans) and accept what just looks cool.
One feature that Ulrich did not dig about gargoyles was the flappy, erectable neck frill, so these have become something of an optional feature - a display organ that is very large in some male gargoyles and absent in females and some males.

I Played Dungeons and Dragons for Three Hours. Then I was Slain by an Elf.

2007-06-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

The intelligent species of the Squawk role-playing game are named after creatures from mythology. Squawk Elves are carnivorous flightless birds with long, powerful arms. Elves can catch prey with the retractable talons of their hands and feet, and break bones with their powerful beak, but they are also intelligent hunters who employ strategy and weapons. The elves were once the masters of a multi-planet dynasty based around electrical technology, but now most elves live in small nomadic bands or minority communities among the other intelligent species.My original concept for the elves was a neckless creature with absurdly massive claws. All four feed would be equipped like the right foot in this drawing. This would make them the "Wolverine" or "Freddy Kruger" of the Squawk universe. (Most of the intelligent species seem to be competing for this position, but the current champions seem to be Gryphons.)

My brother Ulrich developed this alternate visualization of Elf anatomy. In this version, the elf stil has a powerful neck, round body, and similarly-proportioned arms and legs with sharp claws, but the length of the claws is less extreme (but more consistent than my drawings) and the neck is long enough for the head to look around.

Recipe for Disaster

2007-06-22T13:14:00.000-07:00

1 can frozen white grape juice concentrate
1 package grape Kool-Aid artificially flavored soft drink mix
water
sugar

Prepare white grape juice and Kool-Aid according to the directions on the can and package. Mix together in a large pitcher. My dad says it's the worst of all the bad combinations of juice and Kool-Aid. I think it takes like Oregon-grape berries. Oregon-grape has a subtle flavor similar to boysenberries with an earthy twist. Unless you pick Oregon-grape berries at the exact moment of peak ripeness they are puckeringly tart.

Everybody to the Limit

2007-06-21T15:32:00.001-07:00

These were all of the intelligent species of the Squawk role-playing game about a year ago. Since then we have removed a few from the list. Unicorns lacked good art. Harpies were too humanoid. Gryphons and Cockatrices were combined.

This draconian was intentionally anthropormorphized. It's a "teenage mutant ninja Draconian". A more "realistic" draconian would have shorter arms, narrower shoulders and less waist.

"Realistic" renderings emphasize the anatomy of the species and the features that make it unique. Anthropomorphic renderings create characters which are sometimes easier to relate to. (The broad chest sends a message that this draconian is physically powerful.) Squawk creatures in different styles and media and interpreted by different artists give new perspectives, and sometimes lead to improvement in creature designs.

Dragon Skin

2007-06-20T20:04:00.000-07:00

While drawing Draconians, we started discussing how crocodile skin is textured. Crocodiles are (mostly) covered in non-overlapping "scutes" like dinosaurs, turtles, bird legs, and lizard faces, but different from the overlapping diamond-shaped scales on the bodies of snakes and lizards.

Crocodile faces are actually smooth, without scales, but they do have ridges, bumps and short horns. They have no lips, so the skin of a crocodile's head is pulled tight over it's skull. The skin over the jaw-closing muscle toward the back of the mouth is wrinkled or scaly with the main creases parallel to the jaw and the bottom of the skull. The jaw is faintly scaled (you can barely see the creases) and the throat skin under the jaw has scales arranged in a neat rectangular grid.

Two prominent ridges on a crocodiles face run from the top of the skull, over the eyes and toward the nostrils. Similar ridges are found on other archosaurs, sometimes enhanced with crests like Dilophosaurus or horns like Carnotaurus. The only living dinosaurs - birds - don't have lips or scaly faces, so it's tempting to imagine how dinosaur faces might resemble crocodiles, but Carnotaurus had scales on it's face, and the jury is still out on dinosaur lips (and cheeks.)

The scales on the crocodile's neck, body and tail follow this neat rectangular pattern, as if the crocodile were divided into short segments (rows) like a worm and each segment was divided into the same number of scales lined up in neat columns running from the head to the tip of the tail. These columns are pinched above the shoulder near the top of each leg as if the columns were pushed apart to make room to insert the front and back legs. The scale pattern is also pinched at the back of the jaw. Irregular areas are filled in with smaller scales.

The scales of the back are combined into armored plates which are twice the width of a normal scale, with the creases aligned to every other row of smaller scales. Some of the columns of armor scales have a raised ridge in the middle of each scale. Two rows of ridged scales, starting just over the back legs, have higher and higher ridges, sometimes resembling a pair of fins.
The scales of the side are bumpy and there may be one or two more columns of large, ridged scales on the side, alternating with small bumpy scales. The scales of the belly are smooth.

The scales of crocodile limbs are not neatly parallel and perpendicular to the central axis of the limbs. Instead the main segments seem to run through the limbs like slices in the direction of water flowing around the limbs bent at natural zig-zag angles from the body (so the limb bones are 45 degrees one way or the other from the axis of the spine.) The scales of the hands and feet are similar to the pattern seen on birds.

(Images from the Flickr pages of liquidindian and hiyori13 shared with the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike license.)

A Good Day to Dilophosaurus

2007-06-18T15:38:00.001-07:00

In European mythology, a Lindworm is a snake-like dragon with two legs (or sometimes no legs). In Squawk a Lyndwyrm is any two-legged predator with small forelimbs and a long tail, such as this Dilophosaurus.

Dilophosaurus was one of the minor stars of the movie Jurassic Park. There's no evidence for the neck frill or poison spitting. A scary animatronic dilophosaurus from Combe Martin Wildlife and Dinosaur Park in Devon, England spits like the JP Dilophosaurus. (Sloppy science? Pandering? Guilty on both counts?) The movie says the dilophosaurus is a "juvenile". A real adult Dilophosaurus would have been twenty feet (six meters) long.

Draconian

2007-06-16T11:24:00.000-07:00

Squawk Draconians are intelligent crocodilians with short snouts, strong legs that allow them to walk bipedally, and short powerful arms with opposeable thumbs. The strange long-snouted creature in the lower right with extra arms is a genetically modified (chimaeric) draconian. Draconians are comfortable both on land and in the water. When they wear clothes, they prefer garments that minimize drag while swimming.

My intelligent crocodile is a strange idea, but there were real crocodile relatives who ran around on long legs, climbed trees, looked like ichthyosaurs or sharks, had short snouts (and ate plants) and even a giant crocodilian filter feeder who caught tiny prey like a baleen whale.

Here are some more Draconians I scanned in recently. My earlier draconian drawings were more anthropomorphic with shorter bodies and longer arms than they should have.

Enter the Dragon

2007-06-15T10:39:00.000-07:00

In the Squawk role-playing game, "dragon" is a common name for four-legged predators. Because the big predators in Squawk are archosaurs, most dragons have a classic "reptilian" shape like the crocodile above, and many of them are equally at home in the water or on land.
I like to call this critter the "catoplebas". The forelegs are probably much too long compared to the back legs. Most archosaurs have longer hind legs and higher hips than shoulders. (Obvious exceptions would include high-shouldered sauropods like Brachiosaurus, and some birds.)

Strange as it may seem, crocodiles are more closely related to birds than to lizards. Birds are dinosaurs, and some dinosaurs have toothy snouts, long tails, and scaly armor like crocodiles, but it's still hard to see the bird-crocodile connection because (modern) crocodiles are specialized for living in water (a bit like archosaurian otters.)

It's easier to see the kinship between crocodiles and dinosaurs (including birds) when we look at the different ways that crocodiles move. Like lizards, crocodiles can crawl on their bellies, but when crocodiles need to walk a long distance, lift their bodies off the ground or move quickly, they can use the "high walk" and "gallop", which are very different from the ways lizards walk and run. (This video was posted on YouTube by crocodilian.com.)

Reading between the Lines

2007-06-13T09:41:00.000-07:00

I have been introducing myself to the Ruby programming language. You can try Ruby with this interactive console that runs in your browser. Ruby is a little different from Python, but it seems to be in the same class when it comes to getting work done instead of mucking about in Java or C++.

I have been touching up more mechanical-pencil-on-lined-paper drawings. This was originally from The Dark Woods, a predecessor of the Squawk role-playing game. The character on the right was a "seuss" - a vagely dog-like humanoid race with short noses and long ears. I have removed the ears so hopefully he can pass as a Squawk gremlin. This was the most difficult line-removal project so far because I had to grab samples of blue lines from all over the picture. On some of other lined-paper drawings I may have to grab the blue with the dropper tool and draw in the blue lines manually.

This comparison of predatory dinosaurs I drew about 12 or 13 years ago is strongly influenced by Greg Paul's Predatory Dinosaurs of the World. (Perhaps I should say it was more strongly influenced by Greg Paul's book. The influence of this book overwhelms the meager power of superlatives.) This picture contrasts the long, thin bodies and flexible tails of early theropods such as Coelophysis and Dilophosaurus with the compact, barrel-chested bodies and reduced or stiffened tails of dromaeosaurs, phorusrhacids and tyrannosaurs.

This is a speculatively feathered Lagosuchus (from the Latin "rabbit-crocodile" - a great name, but the original specimen is not very good, so it may be replaced by Marasuchus.) Lagosuchus is probably a "dinosauromorph" - a very close relative of dinosaurs. If some dinosaurs and pterosaurs had feathers or fuzzy insulation, perhaps they inherited this feature from a common ancestor, and all of the big scaly dinosaurs descended from small fluffy ancestors.

The Squawk universe has some new animals that are not found on our world. Some have evolved in alien environments and others have been bred or engineered by intelligent species. These hoofed flightless birds are adapted for life on the open plains. The heavy beaks are probably not efficient for delicately plucking seeds and bugs like an ostrich, so perhaps these creatures chop grass or crunch bones.

Drawing Xanadu

2007-06-12T10:26:00.001-07:00

Xanadu is an island empire on the Squawk world Peleg. The culture of Xanadu is modeled after asian countries such as China and Japan. This drawing was a sketch for a 3D Squawk game we started to develop set in Xanadu. The linear perspective and very limited use of atmospheric depth is more in the tradition of european art than asian art and the clash is akward.

This is a quick sketch for a 2D Squawk game we are beginning to develop. Vertical exaggeration, atmospheric perspective, and orthographic perspective (parallel lines look parallel in the image) give the scene the look of a Chinese ink painting, and lend themselves naturally to a 2D game engine.

The small garden shows how the game might be different from a painting. In a painting the left and right sides of the fence would be at an angle, making it difficult to sort out whether the fence should be drawn in front of or behind each character. In this design the sides of the fence are vertical to make sorting simpler.

This sketch was drawn over and around printed text, which I removed using the GIMP's select-by-color tool, deselecting the parts I didn't want removed, growing the selection by one pixel, and clearing the selected area. If you look closely you can still see the holes where the text was.

This is another sketch for the Squawk 2D game. Four of the five intelligent species of Xanadu (Minotaur, Titan, Kobold, and Gargoyle), a theropod dinosaur ("lyndwyrm") and a sauropod ("behemoth") are shown in size comparison. The interior is shown with orthographic perspective typical of Japanese woodblock prints, and the exterior is shown in a simplified orthographic perspective like the garden above.

Here's a small wooden building with a different type of orthographic perspective, similar to the game Diablo. In a game, this image would be difficult to sort, so it would probably be broken down into parts which would be sorted seperately.

This tower was looking pretty good until I ran out of space at the top :-) The eight sides of the tower are inspired by Chinese pagodas, but also might represent the eight elements of Xanadu's alchemy tradition: water, wood, earth, metal, fire, lightning, air and shadow, or the eight legs of the giant spiders which produce bulletproof spider-silk, the empire's most important product.
I tried to create a more alien style of architecture in this drawing. It's one of my favorites.

Do U Has Basilisk?

2007-06-11T13:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes my drawings just don't come out like I plan.

This drawing shows some anatomical details, such as teeth, posture, hips, muscles, and ribs which are hidden in many other Basilisk drawings.

The addition of clothing made this Basilisk a little too anthropomorphic. Notice that the sandals only support the toes and ball of the foot. I gave this Basilisk toe-less socks but Basilisks are runners who might have blunt claws like an ostrich, so they could wear full socks and even shoes with toes.

Here's what the primitive ancestors of the Basilisk might have looked like, and a reconstruction of psittacosaurus with the newly discovered "quills" which are similar to the Basilisk's spines, but longer but have only been found on part of the tail. Notice the similar structures on an iguana (but also notice how the iguana's scales are very different. Overlapping scales like the onese on the iguana's arms - typical of snakes and lizards - have not been found on dinosaurs.) Speaking of Psittacosaurus, Mark Witton has good reasons to think ceratopsians ate more than just vegetables.

The Right to Keep and Arm Bears

2007-06-08T12:40:00.000-07:00

In the last 24 hours I've scanned in more than 300 of my old drawings. This one reminds me of a Panserbjørne from the His Dark Materials trilogy - although it was drawn before I'd heard of that series. Speaking of which, the movie is coming out in December!

This saddled ornithomimid dinosaur was drawn with mechanical pencil on lined paper, then colored with colored pencils. To remove the blue lines, I first created a new transparent layer. I used the "divide" blend mode, and copied and pasted a slice of the lines from the original image into the new layer. Then I copied and pasted that slice over and over to cover all of the lines.

Here's some of my favorite Squawk drawings from the last few days of scanning:

The Dinosaur Game

2007-06-07T21:14:00.000-07:00

The Dinosaur Game is a Squawk-related side project based on the "playing dinosaurs" games that kids play with their prehistoric animal toys or by imitating the creatures they see on TV. It's just an outline right now, but as I was scanning I discovered a couple of prehistoric scenes from the Permian period (including the image in my logo.) As well as this drawing of a six-limbed predator which I GIMPed into a Pleistocene sabretooth.

It blogs!

2007-06-07T07:58:00.000-07:00

¡Bienvenidos a mi blog nuevo! Kevin, Phillip and I started our How to Draw Squawk jam sessions yesterday. We will be working on one intelligent species from the Squawk role-playing game at a time, and this week we are doing Basilisks. I also scanned in a big stack of old drawings, including the image of Cynognathus stalking Lystrosaurus in my logo.

Basilisks are scaly carnivorous dinosaurs with short tails which stand about 7 or 8 feet tall. They have three-toed feet and four-fingered hands adapted for tool using (with opposable thumbs, reduced claws and more flexibility than most dinosaurs.) A single row of simple hollow quills runs from the top of the Basilisk's head down the back to the end of the tail, similar to the elongated quills on the back of an iguana or Psittacosaurus. Basilisks sport a unique pair of short downward-pointing, backward-curved horns (perhaps technically teeth) near the tip of the jaw, giving them a sort of "chin". The general appearance suggests that Basilisks split early on the dinosaur family tree, and may be closely related to primitive dinosaurs such as Herrerasaurus or even a dinosauromorph like Lagosuchus.

Basilisks should be drawn leaning forward and a bit hunched over compared to human posture, but more vertical than a dinosaur. The tail - although not long - helps counterbalance the body, and the Basilisk is a fast runner who should look ready to take off even when standing still. The quills look like thick stiff hairs or very thin spikes. The Basilisk torso is longer and relatively thinner than more derived, bird-like carnivorous dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor, so it is okay to give them a somewhat human-like body. Don't forget the long, deep hips to support powerful thigh muscles. Basilisks are carnivores with sharp triangular, slightly recurved teeth. Basilisks should be drawn 9 or 10 heads tall (so the whole character is 9 or 10 times as tall as the height of the character's head if they stand straight up.)