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A tabletop enthusiast, for better or worse.
Where to Find Me After Cohost:
Blog

Projects & Campaigns:
Clouder's RPG Spreadsheet
dungeon23: The Tree & The Tower
D&D: Old Flames
Break!!: Mossgrave
Erasure Adventure Prep


belarius
@belarius

(Adolf Schaller, 1994)

Welcome, everyone, to a new theme! I expect to see a lot more blue skies in the coming weeks, so our new theme will be Yonders Wild, with a focus on art depicting the sky and atmosphere.

The attached painting carries a lot of nostalgia for me. When I was in middle school, there were annual "book fairs" in which publishers of school-friendly books could come and present their wares. Coming from a bookish household, I made it a point to always find something to acquire, and at my last book fair before high school, I happened upon a real gem: *Extraterrestrials: A Field Guide For Earthlings (1994). Written by career science journalist Terence Dickinson (for whom an asteroid has been named) and illustrated by Adolph Schaller, the book was slim but generous in its visuals, with huge 9"x10.75" full-color pages throughout. The intended audience was clearly younger, but Dickinson took the challenge of getting the science right seriously, an all-the-more impressive feat given what a young and speculative field xenobiology was in the early 90s. As an all-ages science book, it holds up astonishingly well given that it is 30 years old. It also shows impeccable taste throughout, favoring a reference to Deep Space Nine over The Next Generation .

The painting above, which appears in cropped form on the cover and in the book, depicts the imagined ecosystem of a gas giant, in which animal life has managed to develop ways of maintaining neutral buoyancy. In the foreground, the viewer is approached by The Guide, a whale-sized intelligent alien. In the background, two enormous cities hand in the skies. The tiny specks visible around the base of the nearer city are, we are told, more members of The Guide's species, impressing upon us the vast scale of the scene.


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