>>26700322

Within the span of hardly a hundred generations, our cephalopodic friends have begun using complex and ever-changing displays to hail others, outwitting the simple camouflage mimicry of the Mummers and aiding significantly in survival. They begin communicating more than basic mating, danger and similar signals with their camouflage, now guiding others of their kind to areas of plentiful food, and coordinating opportunistic attacks on small populations of Mummers.

>Brainstormin' time now. As a jumping off point, we'll take, as the seed of their culture the same thing we did for the Winders, that being their earliest shared triumph over an existential threat. In the Winders' case it was the wind, and in the case of our new species, it is predation by Mummers and starvation by more effectively camouflaged Deep Shadows. A large part of their culture, I believe, would be a distrust of all things which match, all things which blend. Symmetry and simple patterns would stink of betrayal to them.

What will they call themselves?

>>26700339
So, wait, are you hinting that they should name themselves after the hostile trait, or after what sets them off compared to them?
Because in the case of having a similar species to define themselves by exclusion, I think the latter's more likely.
Maybe the willful control of their coat fascinates them?
How about Trueskins? Skin is true because aversion to mimicry and controlled by the mind.

I've heard that IRL squids have no hormonal "emotions" to control their responses and basically work like computers.
Are these gonna have that, too?

>>26700339
Honnêtes!

>>26702394
tldr; Yes but to nitpick, no.

Well actually I was referring more precisely to the notion that the way a species identifies itself is likely rooted directly in its first defining triumph over strife as a species.

For the Winders, it was escaping the wind.

Trueskins might do it. I think it's a bit too complex for the primitive self-definitive term, though. Might work though...

>>26702427
I don't know but i do know cephalopods have no centralized nervous system, but have a large portion of their neurons distribute throughout their limbs. Additionally, Octopi are hyper-intelligent to a frightening degree.

>>26702538
Say what?

>>26702538
Oh! Google translation lol. Nice. I like it.

>>26702690
Hm. It's just a little trickier than it is with the wind + er. Besides, I was thinking of true as a simple prefix, like ur- or whatever. That way it's no more complex.
Throw something at us to speed it up.

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>>26702814
Sticking with Honnêtes, then?

>>26702931
>>26702977
Writing. One moment, please.

>>26703020
[waiting intensifies]

>>26703020
They have taken to calling themselves the Honnêtes or "The Honest" and, with their newfound intellect, they begin to dominate their environment, driving back their cousins, the Mummers, to the furthest corners of the seas. At first, they would find isolated individual Mummers and strike in twos or threes, entangling their larger prey a few tentacles at a time and dismembering them with a sudden twist.

The Honnêtes learned the most efficient ways to dispatch their prey with terrific rapidity. Within decades, simple false flag attacks and ambushes using live bait were commonplace. Oftentimes, traps would even be laid with the remains of a slain Mummer in order to take another.

As individuals amongst the Honnêtes distinguished themselves in this brutal campaign, others emulated them. Even eccentricities of a distinguished individual's camouflage habits were copied by others. Over the course of this cultural emergence, numerous "tribes" solidified around these heroes and their offspring. Each tribe came to have a complex and difficult pattern or "tartan" all its own which members would display to differentiate friend from foe.

>>26703251
Awww yeah, rapid extinction by violence on those neanderthals!

Will we get monstrous natural predators of the Deep Shadows? Will we get to domesticate them and ride them to battle (or at least guarding the fields)?

>>26703341
Hmm animal husbandry would not be a far leap at all, considering what the Honnêtes have already learned to do to their foes. As for monstrous predators of Deep Shadows, I admit I totally forgot about that idea even though I liked it. We could imagine something now and retcon it in or I could whip it up and have them appear later when a certain event I just cooked up significantly changes the world of the Honnêtes. Your call, folks.

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Would anyone share some Deep Sea monsters while we're at it plox? Lost my collection.

>>26703407
Let's keep rolling. The latter option, that is.
Do your thing.

who do we get to domesticate?

>>26703407
With a newfound authority over their world, soon came the moment when one intrepid young Honnête idly grabbed the tail of a preying Deep Shadow, spooking the creature and provoking it to flight before it was able to consume the numerous Halofish it had drawn to its lure. The young Honnête was left with an abundance of Halofish drifting nearby. This became a habit for the individual, and was soon emulated.

>>26703407
>>26703446
The Honnetes use their tentacles to control the brains of the giant leviathans.

Using their suction cups on the end of the tentacles, they latch onto the craniums of the beasts and inject into them pheromone-like chemicals which make them subserviant to their bidding.

>>26703644
SHAI-HULUD!

>>26703545
For a few centuries, the Honnêtes were largely technologically stagnant, until some of the young in a distant region were found playing with a tough, fibrous weed. One of the young had become entangled in the fibers of the plant, which seemed to tighten upon themselves as the young one struggled. After many hours an the assistance of numerous adults, the young one was freed.

Soon thereafter, one of the rescuing adults was set to interrupt a Deep Shadow, when idle curiosity caused it to wrap a tendril of "Mummerweed" (as the other adults had taken to calling the confounded plant) around the Deep Shadow's tail. The Deep Shadow, when startled, became entangled and incapable of either feeding or fleeing. This habit spread and soon was a standard part of the Honnête way of life. Their food supply was now secured.

>>26703644
I will remember this idea. I'm not so keen on the pheromone thing but directional control by gentle negative reinforcement seems right up the Honnêtes' alley.

Now obviously the Honnêtes would come to cultivate Mummerweed and soon weave it into ropes.

I think we ought to focus on other aspects of their culture. (And also keep in mind their distrust of symmetry and clean patterns) How exactly would they use their camouflage to communicate?

My first decent thought is octopodean semaphore, a combination of camouflage pattern manipulation and tentacular gesticulation.

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>>26703952
>My first decent thought is octopodean semaphore, a combination of camouflage pattern manipulation and tentacular gesticulation.

>tentacular gesticulation

What the fuck did I just write?

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>>26703952
Gestures would interfere with movement, no?
>cephaloPOD
Maybe a secondary, emphatical thing?

>>26704043
Hmm Mayhap color banding at multiple lengths on its limbs? With 4 distinguishable sections covering obvious and intuitive lengths along each tentacle (any more and it likely becomes too hard to read from a distance or while moving) and 5 colors (green, blue, indigo, violet, ultraviolet), They'd have 5(4^3) unique symbols capable of being displayed. This assumes that no one of the 4 sections may hae the same color as one adjacent to it. A few more symbols can be added for special purposes, breaking this rule for notable purposes like punctuation.

>>26703952
>>26704336
Well instead of pheromones they use their octopus-ink. Pheromones were only the first word I thought of because I'm tired as fuck.

Also, they could flash in an array of colours. Perhaps the same "ink" is flourescent. I'm basically thinking like that scene in Close Encounters except with octopodes and not UFOs.

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>>26704336
Uhm, I kinda pictured them using their bodies more. As in, they come with natural camouflage, they can replicate imagery of other objects, that becomes more symbolic and then hieroglyph-like.
But your idea reminds me of this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol
It can really take off if "pure - silent" color is a unit. Tonal hectaves, instead of octaves, are gonna be a lot of fun.
Fired in succession - with some rules as to length and order. They can even drift left-to-right like running text.

>>26704438
Well, any array of colors they could feasibly see. Thing is, eyes that perceive colors outside the spectrum of light delivered by the sun of that world are kinda useless, so there's no way they'd evolve that way, honestly.

Home has a potent blue sun, remember? Most of its light is between blue and violet (on the human-visible spectrum) as well as a great deal of ultraviolet light.

>>26704525
>>26704336
Oh, and also: are they moving around headfirst or tentaclefirst? Might be important for conceptualizing communication.

>>26704549
Is that what star color actually refers to? It's weird since by the formula, our sun has peak wavelength in the greens.
Sorry, it's just minorly bugged me for a while.

>>26704549
Why couldnt they flash in "colours" that are visible in ultraviolet light then?

>>26704555
Tentacle first. To envision it:

First position: Tentacles gathered forward like a needle.

Second position: Tentacles are flared outward and backward, curling/scooping for propulsion

Third position: Full curl, tentacles are completely flared backward and each tentacle tip is twisted 180 degrees

Fourth position: With that 180 degree turn, the tentacles are thrust forward again, somewhat like they are each performing an Immelman turn. They meet once more as in First position.

>>26704604
I think you may be misreading that. It would make sense that Sol's peak wavelength is green as that is the highest wavelength (and thereby most energetic wavelength) of light it emits, but the -portion- of Sol's emitted light which is in that wavelength is very small.

>>26704710
Ehh I take that back, UV light is more energetic, lol derp idk what you're reading

>>26704549
Do they even get any light down there? There's so much "cloud" on top, wouldn't it shift the penetrating wavelength even lower? IR, MW, Radio?

>>26704710
But it's a blackbody, it emits everything. Lambda max is supposed to be most intense.
Sage for way off-topic, sorry again.

>>26704733
Hmm well I Imagined that since the sun was so damned energetic it would all kinda balance out and they'd receive only slightly more sunlight on the surface of the core but... Yeah I imagine the density of the sea due to gravity would have a big effect on light penetration. I figured though that the seas being quite shallow would help mitigate that, though. It would all be a wash, I was hoping.

If the light they receive down there truly is scarce, I imagine they'd have evolved large, highly sensitive eyes.

>>26704674
Ooh, they must be wide like fins. Yeah, I can see them using tentacles for flagging. They're up in the face and can be seen from any angle.

>>26704733
Off-topic: Holy fuck btw, just thinking about a creature that sees Radio waves. Some sort of spacefaring leviathan with eyes like a... well a radio telescope. I actually remember hypothesizing in my Physics II class that maybe, at some time a creature here on earth was born with a genetic mutation such that its eyes saw in the IR/MW spectrum and it failed as a subspecies immediately because it wasn't advantageous considering the sort of light Sol emits

I do very much like the idea of them developing seemingly chaotic patterns as a form of language, eventually evolving this language to be based heavily on prime numbers as they cannot be factored and are as conceptually asymmetrical as you can get.

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>>26704960
Holy shit.
Holy shit to both.
Holy fucking shit to fucking everything.

Honest little worshipers of Chaos.

>>26704960
Really ties in well with the fact that whales can detect sonar from hundreds if not thousands of miles away.

>>26705038
This also just made me realize. Part of a coming of age, as a young one adopts its clan tartan, would be to make some contribution to the pattern. A subtle alteration all its own, so that the clan pattern would be utterly uniform across all members, save for one sacred flaw per individual. This would be done, of course, as a means of warding off the evil of sameness. The number of members and, therefore, impurities in a clan's tartan, would be considered a meaure, if not source, of its strength.

>>26705137
Gotta go to sleep. Work in 7 hours then Calc III final immediately after. I'll try to bump the thread with more content before and after work but just in case it dies, can someone archive it?

Just read through all of the threads. So beautiful...

>>26705137
That would be absolutely great. Do they get to overwrite bits, or do the structured bits become smaller and smaller?

>>26705137
Boom, done.
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/26700322/
And I didn't fuck up the thread's name like the last time.

One last post before I hit the sack:

I like the idea of the structured bits becoming slightly -larger- over time and having a recursive structure. The chaos would occur between iterations of the recurring form. Great leaders would actually have their personal contribution become a lasting change on the overarching repeated structure of the clan tartan. After millenia, it starts to look a bit like this: http://thebest404pageever.com/swf/xfactor.swf

>>26705799
Beautiful. Just fucking beautiful.

Bunps.

>>26705799
Bumping with:

An individual born with a particular knack for fine control of their camouflage will likely find themselves a place as a "bard". These bards are able to dynamically display the tartan of their clan from as far back as their founding, up to current day. This display would have great cultural significance for obvious reasons.

>>26711525
And collectives of bards piling up together would be able to pull off the illusion of a giant Honnette, displaying tartans in HD quality.

>>26716219
Synchronization would be a bitch, though. Must be a lot harder than any chorus.

Nother bump:

As the richness of language possible through visual displays of camouflage manipulation is so very vast and permanent material recording of information so very inconvenient for the Honnêtes, It is unlikely they would ever develop a written language equivalent. However, whatever language they do possess which we'll fluff out soon is essentially already a written language.

The clans, on occasion, reconvene and the chief bard of each clan unites with the others and takes part in a ritualistic retelling of ancient battles and great times of strife for their species. As the stories are displayed proudly across their bodies in vividly evolving, dizzyingly complex fractal imagery, they engage in a furiously elegant dance of whirling, painted limbs recalling their bloody genocidal campaign for survival.

As the Honnête species evolves, their inherent curiosity and thirst for information drives them to indirectly garner a wealth of conceptual knowledge of physics mostly regarding tension and expansive stress by devising an intricate form of martial art based upon the techniques they used to undo the Mummers.