Iterative Spider Generation
Occasionally I get accused of being “human” or “not actually a bot”. In order to suplex these vile rumors, I’m going to provide an algorithm with which you can replicate all my fake creativity.
WHAT YOU’LL NEED
First: A list of biomes habitats. Here’s mine:
- Cave -> Crystal Growths
- Forest
- Jungle -> Canopy
- Fields -> Meadows, Savannah, Crops
- Swamp
- Arctic -> Icebergs, Snowflakes
- Air -> Clouds, Floating Islands
- Freshwater -> Pond, Lake
- Ocean -> Reefs, Open Sea, Depths
- Space -> Stars, The Void
- Unreality -> Dreams, Fiction, Non-Being
- Desert -> Oasis
- Parasitism -> Mouth, Blood, Nervous System
This is by no means comprehensive; I keep a much longer version in my brain (and so do you, probably). Notice that I begin by listing general locales, and then break them down into more specific components. A better word for these might be “niches”. I don’t really know, and it’s all imaginary, so who cares-
STOP. Precise language is important. Biome is more wrong than niche, but they’re both incorrect terms for “habitat”, which is what you’re trying to describe, you fucking mor-
Anyway, here are a few obvious things I left out: Mountain, Garden, City, Canyon, Mirrorworld. Items like “Crystal Growths” could be divided into further categories, if you so chose–for example, by type of gem, or by crystal vertex/surface/inside. This exercise works much better in bubble chart form.
Second: An understanding of an animal. I’m doing spiders, because spiders are great. Here’s a soft list of their traits:
- Eight legs
- Use silk to build webs and other traps
- Crawl into people’s mouths at night?
- Are widely considered
super cute creepy - Eat bugs
- Possess borderline magical climbing power
We’ve now reached the final step: Apply your vast zoological knowledge to imagining wacky versions of your animal living in each habitat. Imagine how their traits might be adapted in extreme or bizarre ways. You’ll probably overlap with reality a bit (there are already forest spiders and field spiders), but that’s okay. This is most useful for brainstorming. Here’s an example:
- Cave: This massive, glowing spider stretches its legs out to mimic the rays of the sun, preying on birds and bugs that are lost in the caverns.
- Crystal Growths: The spider that guards the sacred crystal groves has sapphire armour, and wields the swords of 6 previous adventurers.
- Forest: These spiders cooperate with birds, reinforcing their nests with silk in exchange for the occasional worm.
- Jungle: In the rainforest, spiders knit silk nets and wait for floods to fish for drowning ants.
- Jungle Canopy: These large and extremely venomous spiders pick fruit and use it to decorate their traps, luring monkeys to their doom.
- Meadows: Spiders weave flower crowns and will live in your hair, if you make them an offering of butterflies.
- Savannah: With eight legs, the cheetah-sized savannah spider easily outpaces its antelope prey.
- Crops: Thousands of tiny spiders live inside the scarecrow, animating it, catching birds with a sophisticated web-gun.
- Swamp: The spider bog-lord offers you a silk rope, to pull you out of the quicksand, and into his lair.
- Artic: The arctic tarantula’s fur turns white during the winter
- Icebergs: of the 90% of the iceberg you can’t see, most of it is ancestral, dinosaur-sized spiders waiting to be thawed.
- Snowflakes: tiny tiny spiders that weave their webs on snowflakes
- Air: Rainbows as the multicolored neon silk of sky-spiders
- Clouds: Scientists identify new kind of “cloud impostor”, actually silk airship piloted by spiderfriends. We’re calling it cumulo arachnus.
- Floating Island: Spiders crawl up and down the so-called “silk elevator” that tethers Hydrogen Isle to the earth.
- Pond: these green spiders are just the right size for lilypad lurking
- Lake: This web withstands the force of the waterfall, and catches fish that fall over the cliff.
- Reefs: Starfish live in terror and awe of their eight-pointed cousins, who often dive into the shallows to prey on them.
- Open Sea: Symbiotic spider-jellyfish, sticky tendrils full of webbing that both trap and sting.
- Depths: the submarine cables used to ferry yr digital fears are actually the ancient silk of prehistoric, aquatic, spiders - a literal deep web.
- Stars: Space spiders leap from star to star, illuminating their passage with lightning silk. These trails form our constellations.
- Deep Space: Spiders feel no need to scream, and live quite happily in deep-space silk pockets, feeding off dark matter lightning bugs.
- Dreams: Dream spiders and nightmare spiders at war, weaving increasingly lucid fantasies you can’t escape. You wake from one silk labyrinth into another.
- Fiction: again & again i reincarnate as different characters in different universes, only to get web-trapped & eaten in every spider episode
- Non-Being: As time proceeds and potential universes die off, the spider that has woven a web across the pit of NULL catches and devours them, building new worlds in its stomach.
- Desert: this camel’s hump is 50% water, 50% spiders
- Oasis: Spiders know the secret path of the oasis; the webs they weave are maps of the desert, and when dew gathers on a vertex, they know to seek water there.
- Mouth Parasitism: Spiders crawl into your mouth and weave a fake silk tooth, living inside it, preying on microbes, plaque, cavities, other spiders
- Blood Parasitism: Their webs are magic circles, and they cast their witchcraft using the blood of insects.
- Nervous System Parasitism: Through your mouth and into your skull, the spider plucks your dendrites like a web, begins to weave a second brain of silk.
I once did this with giraffes.
So there you have it. Simple! Puerile! Robotic! Populate your mythical bestiaries with ease. If habitats aren’t your jam, you can replace that list with physical traits, funny behaviours, or social structures, and generate new species of spider using that. More broadly: lists of things can be used to iteratively imagine more things. Which is pretty obvious. I’m not sure why I wrote this.
Please enjoy abusing this power.
