i replayed (rewatched? reread?) south scrimshaw part one last night to show it to @static-echo and realized i never wrote a post trying to sell it to cohost, so here's this:

south scrimshaw is a visual novel and an incredibly charming piece of speculative biology about alien whales, presented in the style of a publicly funded edutainment documentary! it absolutely nails the tone, right down to the warm and cozy analog synth title cards and dry, polite humor you'd expect from a documentary like this, made by nerds who love their job.

apart from the core alien whale concept being one of my favorite speculative biology works to ever exist, where south scrimshaw also really shines is in its general worldbuilding. throughout the experience, you're offered these little deep dives into things like "what's the folklore like on this planet?" and "what are the cartoons about the folklore like on this planet?" in ways that tell you so much about the world in very little time. absolute masterclass in both how to build a culture for your fictional world, and how to convey that culture to the audience, imo

anyway, it's a pretty short ~90min experience, i won't spoil any more of it, it's free, and it's cool for: anyone who is interested in marine biology, anyone who likes speculative alien biology, anyone who is interested in learning how to worldbuild, anyone who likes edutainment nature documentaries, anyone who likes making OCs of weird species

cw: animal death, abstract representation of blood. it's not like a horror thing but, you know. it's a nature documentary