More Moiu

I love these guys. Eyes Wide to the Stars is deliberately human-centric, looking around from humanity at its self-satisfied worst while seeing what it could be if it were driven by curiosity.

But I can’t help but think about the inevitable “All Moiu” campaign would look like.

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Dream Daddies

Dreamed Earth was invaded by strange 7′ tall beings with huge gorilla-like arms supporting atrophied bodies that dangled between their shoulders, long toes acting as hands that clutched yellow protein-globes and shoved them into the grotesque facial features sunken into their torsos.

They proceeded to disarm every nation, announcing to humanity that “you have lost access to the privilege and the duty of waging war”.

—Dave Michalak
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The Crescent and its Prey

Even though they don’t occupy the “apex” niche (does anything, really?), the Crescents are still predators of small prey. Their elaborate, multispecies respiratory system gives them the ability to move faster than anything else in their ecosystem, but, like the sauropods of Earth’s past, they prefer to move their body as little as possible, preferring to reach from where they are.

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The Deep Biggos — Filter Feeders With a Plan B

The Crescent/Frond symbiote is a pretty badass predator. But there’s always a bigger fish. The Deep Biggo (I’m really hoping to come up with a better name before publication) is a filter feeder with a symbiotic trick up its sleeve for getting bigger prey.

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Almost Real Symbiote, Sketch 3

I’m starting to work out the specific physiology of the Crescent symbiont in the Crescent/Frond symbiote project that I’m doing for Almost Real.

Its gills look like eyes, its eyes look like mouths, its mouth looks like genitals, and its genitals are in its gills.

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Almost Real Symbiotes

This month, I started work on a piece for issue 3 of Almost Real, the biannual speculative biology zine. The theme through the issue is undersea creatures, so even though I’d wanted to work on previous issues and hadn’t really been able to, this one made me sweat. And then they shared the assignment list.

One of the available assignments was symbiosis. So I started falling all over myself to do it, and now I am! And I’m really happy about it. There are going to be a few developmental sketches before it comes together, with the final appearing first in the magazine, itself.

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