arsonseal asked:
I assume that walking with rhythm attracts the worms because that sort of rhythm is only really found produced by living beings, but perhaps it's the musicality of it that they appreciate and it just so happens to help them find food. So just as a precaution any sort of appreciation for jazz or any other music with complex and/or bizarre rhythms should be punishable by death on arrakis lest it spread to the worms.
glumshoe answered:
The sandworms make NO sense. Their life cycles and food webs are utterly maddening. The adults cannibalizes the juveniles, the juveniles eat the adults’ waste, and at no point is non-sandworm energy entering the food chain. They’re a completely enclosed ecosystem of a single species, somehow. “Homotrophic” isn’t even a word but they’re not fucking heterotrophs—there is only one species in the sandworm life cycle and it IS worm. (For my own sanity I must assume that the planktonic larvae are able to photosynthesize or use ambient heat from the sand to acquire outside energy.)
So if the sandworms are filter-feeders that are completely sustained by their own planktonic larvae, why the fuck do they have teeth? They’ve got jaws like ambush predators and are often “furious” and “enraged”, but why? Why are they aggressive? Other species can’t really harm them. If sandworm shit sustains sandworm food, then wouldn’t it benefit an individual to be tolerant of other worms in its territory for the additional shit they would provide that it wouldn’t have to produce itself?
Water poisons them. The only things walking around on the surface are animals that are full of water. Instinctively pursuing and swallowing them seems like it would be a huge disadvantage, since supposedly they don’t eat people/animals for sustenance and are harmed by it.
Also, they’re colonial organisms? The three stages are “plankton” and “adult” and “adult but fused with a bunch of other adults to make a completely unrecognizable composite animal that survives on cannibalism”.
WHY FRANK. WHY.
I find it kind of neat how the sand-plankton/sandtrout/sandworms are a fully self-sufficient ecosystem of one species. But yeah, I have to assume the sand plankton are doing some sort of photosynthesis equivalent, otherwise it makes no sense. I don’t think actual photosynthesis would work for them, I doubt sunlight is going to penetrate very far into the sand and there doesn’t seem to be a noticeable concentration of them in the near-surface layer. Maybe the sand plankton are capturing energy from ambient heat via some sort of biological thermoelectric generator?
Maybe the sandworms/sandtrout/sand plankton really do spread around the universe by hurling their spores into space or something (they aren’t originally native to Arrakis)? One species being able to establish an entire self-contained ecosystem would make sense for an organism like that, as it would allow them to spread to a wide variety of planets. A planet they land on doesn’t need to have pre-existing life and they wouldn’t need to be too picky about atmosphere etc., they just need a planet somewhere in a relatively broad range of temperature, air pressure, composition, etc. and then they can establish their own new ecosystem and Arrakisform it from there. Maybe there are thousands or millions of planets like Arrakis scattered through the galaxy? Even the high numbers for the size of Dune Imperium put it at only a very small fraction of the galaxy; 13,000 inhabited worlds is around one star in every 15 million in the galaxy - so totally possible there are thousands or millions of Arrakis-like worlds humans haven’t found yet.
Regarding the teeth, I think that’s kind of a fanon thing (in the sense that the Lynch movie and so on are fanon); the books mention knives carved from sandworm teeth but I think maybe those “teeth” can be interpreted as something more like more baleen.
You’re right that the sandworms seems really implausibly aggressive. I guess they’re kind of like sand kaiju hippos, but that level of extreme aggression seems kind of weird when they’re not predators and there’s basically nothing in Arrakis’s natural ecosystem that could be a threat to them except each other other. Maybe they’re paranoid-aggressive because they’re cannibals? I mean, of course they’re cannibals, the sandtrout and sand plankton they live on are their own immature forms, but I mean maybe they opportunistically supplement their filter-feeding by eating smaller sandworms? Then it might make sense for them to see anything that seems like maybe a big animal as a threat, cause they’re the only megafauna on Arrakis so in their ancestral environment anything big and loud was probably another sandworm. Still seems kind of thin though. Maybe…
One kind of meta interpretation I can think of is the sand plankton/sandtrout/sandworm ecosystem of Arrakis is a kind of superorganism that has a kind of intelligence and recognizes human civilization as a threat, and the sandworms are acting kind of like an immune system. Think about what might happen if they weren’t that aggressive; without a need for the caryall system spice mining could be much more efficient and Arrakis might be much more built up and might be basically getting strip-mined or at least mined much more intensively, damaging the ecosystem. The extreme aggression of the sandworms is protecting the natural environment of Arrakis, keeping the planet in a mostly wild and relatively undisturbed state. It also protects the Fremen culture in a similar way; the open desert being so hazardous is what allows them to be so isolated.
This superorganism might be running a lot of its intelligence on sandworm neural tissue (maybe that’s why they’re so big!), so maybe sandworm waste is basically LSD as imagined by hippies who were really into the idea of using drugs to “expand your mind” because it’s loaded with discarded sandworm neurotransmitters and the like. Taking spice gives you superpowers because you’re absorbing broken discarded bits of this planetary intelligence and some of those bits are still somewhat functional and start doing their thing inside you.
All very good and fascinating ideas!
However, consider the (likely canon incompatible) possibility that just occurred to me:
what if Kynes was just the Pliny the Elder of the Landsgraad and just made a bunch of shit up because no one was scrambling to independently test his hypotheses
Friendly reminder that GIMP does pretty much everything Photoshop does, and it’s 100% free. Fuck DRM and the license culture, we have plenty of open source options available to us as a consumer.
If Adobe is going to be greedy shitheads, then fuck ‘em. Don’t use their stuff. Freeware can be just as good, if not better, than Adobe CC.
reblog to save a digital arts major
Reblog to save an artist.
oh jEEZ
I will keep saying this: GIMP sucks butts.
- Medibang Paint and Fire Alpaca for more cartoon style illustration
- Krita for painting
- Clip Studio Paint (not free, but often on sale and cheap even at full price) is better than PS for art and I’m about to cut adobe entirely. Even does some photo editing.
- Paint Tool SAI (again, not free but cheap) old but good, there’s a ton of hacked copies around too. Not hard to get for free.
- Open Tunez for animation.
I’m currently using Affinity Photo and it’s a great Photoshop alternative. One time fee only and it’s not really expensive, plus supports PSD formats. Free trial available too!
Davinci Resolve for video editing is amazing as well! :)
Another great art program to include in the list is the completely free, no download, browser recreation of photoshop, Photopea! It has the potential/customizability to be as robust as a full copy of photoshop while also being perfectly accessible to anyone looking to just do some quick edits with no strings attached.
Also, heads up to anyone using it,
so please approach it with caution and do some research on the situation as things progress.
For photo editing, Darktable is pretty much a one-stop-shop. It’s normally described as a Lightroom replacement, but it’s quite a bit more capable than ye olde Lightroom - I only ever need to fire up something else when doing multi-image composites like mosaics or astrophoto.
Here is a basic processing workflow that should also let non-beginners figure out How Shit Works Round These Here Parts.
