Sunday, October 17, 2010

A Bit of a Funk...

Well, the demands of college, work, and life in general are combining with a general lack of muse, and I'm having difficulty generating energy or ideas to put together my next batch of nereids. As usual, this will likely pass before too long, but I just thought I'd take advantage of the creative downtime to post here and just air out my Nereus-related thoughts...

First thing I should probably mention is that my ambitious goal of 100 nereozoans has expanded to a somewhat more ambitious 150. This was done mostly to better reflect the biodiversity of the different biomes (the savanna in particular, which currently has only five representative species), but it gives me an opportunity to round out the different phyla and classes. Factoring landmass percentage with an arbitrary but relatively informed biodiversity factor, I determined how many nereids should be in each biome. I discovered at this point that in some biomes I have more nereids than should proportionally be present, but I'm not about to get rid of any of them, so I had to just subtract those slots from other biomes. As usual, I pored over these numbers to a point that is probably beyond the interest of anyone else, so I'll just conclude with saying that the Lantern Forest will be getting 11 more nereids in it, the Sog Basin a whopping 19, the oceans will be increased by 15, and the savanna (the biome which clinched my decision to add more nereids to the list) will be getting five more. New representatives from most if not all nereozoan classes will be present.

I'm currently working on the "tide pool" biome, which may be given a more unique name as it develops. You can expect to see life that's similar to what's found in the terrestrial equivalent, but I hope I can at least present some ideas that are unique to nereid life. I also hope, as always, that they will be plausible enough to pass the scrutiny of those who view it...

...which I guess leads me to the other topic on my mind. Whenever I go through these perennial funks my mind often focuses on the negative, and the smallest things can fan the flames, as it were. The folks over at SE, bless their hearts, aren't completely responsible for my dissatisfaction with the site, but so often I feel like people are wasting time on irrelevant material, arguing for the sake of argument, and practicing internet behavior that I have a hard time condoning. Not for the first time, and perhaps not the last, I have inclinations to part company. Of course, every time I say that something keeps me around, so I doubt I'll be leaving any time soon, but there may come a day in the reasonable future when I move on from that site.

2 comments:

  1. A project like Nereus... you don't really want to finish it anyway, do you? More nereozoans is great as long as you have more ideas. Look forward especially to the tide pool.

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  2. No, I don't think I'll ever consider it finished, but once I finish with the list I plan on going back and polishing things up. While there may not be many more species created, those that exist would improve.

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