When I was five we went to Denmark for six months. A little hard to avoid th e Little Mermaid then, with her sitting there on a rock near shore in Copenhagen harbor, and talk of Hans Christian Andersen everywhere.
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So, kindof a wet version of furries. Can we call them “scalies”?
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Maybe it is the scales that make no sense. If they were half person half seal or whale then the orientation of the tail would be fine.
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Half ape half whale does make slightly more sense. At least they’re both mammals.
Also I think I read somewhere that manatees were sometimes mistaken for mermaids, which would also lead to the horizontal tail arrangement.
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Next you people will be demanding to see Tinkerbell’s ovipositor.
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Selkies?
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As long as NSFW tags are used.
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Both eyes on top side - checks out.
Now the question is, are they right-sided flatfish or left-sided flatfish?
Here’s a link, for the halibut:
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Hey I don’t have time to watch rn but how do they poop?
Back when the male gaze was more fascinated by the ‘Rubenesque’ body. Also, months or years at sea with only other guys, a het sailor might be a bit desperate…
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Narrated by a mermaid and they’re a bit self-obsessed but there were several scenes in the video with mermen in the background.
Nope, scalies is already taken but the dino/lizard furries. These are definitely fishies.
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Aren’t seals already half dog & half fish?
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Manassas, VA.
That’s kinda far from the ocean.
From the looks of it the Merfolk is a regular meetup.
Insert Rant about how Northern Virginia is not like the rest of Virginia.
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Give me faith
Give me joy, my boy
I will always cherish you…
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Hey, Lieutenant Hurwitz cleans up pretty good!
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It’s funny this should come up just as I’ve been toying lately with the idea of introducing the Seasteading community to the concept of ‘transhuman seasteading’. Maybe I can use this video as an intro. I’ve always had a peculiar relationship with the seasteaders. Many of their architectural concepts were lifted from my work on The Millennial Project, such as the use of spar buoys which their recent disastrous experiment in Malaysia was based on. I only ever suggested that as the basis of temporary near shore vacation cabins and, primarily, science and industrial uses like self-contained OTECs and mid-ocean down-range telemetry networks. I could never get along with them, though, as my tolerance for Libertarian snake oil is limited. But the notion of living on the sea has long been a fascination of mine.
Much like space settlement, seasteading has a fundamental problem of scale --and a chronic tendency for denial about that among proponents. The open sea is a tough environment and typically compels very large structures to withstand it. Today, if you really wanted to try some sort of self-sufficient living on the open sea, you’re looking at a bare minimum of a hectare of concrete-like structure at --very roughly-- $1000 per square meter. And this creates compounding problems. The open sea has a small spectrum of resources to work with and paying for such a big construction demands industries/farming of very large scale to generate enough export value to cover it, which means you may need a much bigger startup. This, in turn, demands inventing new intercontinental transportation to efficiently get that product to market because, all across the 20th century, the evolution of transit favored escalating operational economies of scale and reliance on fossil energy sources. So there’s little at-hand to serve the needs of mid-ocean communities under hundreds of thousands of people. This is why so many past marine colony concepts included seemingly anachronistic things like airships --truth is, there’s really no other form of intercontinental VTOL aircraft that can run on renewables. Thus marine settlement has always been stuck in the realm of ‘pharaonic’ projects for huge corporate or social ventures. There’s no hope of ‘homesteading’ there as we commonly imagine our frontier ancestors once did. High-tech/high-cost ‘glamping’ for billionaires, maybe, but not actual homesteading.
But at the root of this is our compulsion to adapt nature to suit our needs --by the brute force of megastructure engineering if necessary. What if we took the other obvious tactic? What if we could technologically adapt ourselves to live comfortably in the marine environment just as it is --like those marine mammals that made that shift millions of years earlier? If we didn’t need that big stable structure to live on top of and could just live in water, the whole economic/logistics situation would change. Seems preposterous, until you ask yourself just how long you think it might take before building a hectare-sized marine platform and a personal airship becomes something a lot of people can individually afford. If you ask me, that’s probably in roughly the same likely time frame as being able to go into some out-patient clinic and getting some marine augmentations installed. It might not even take all that much, if you think that old Aquatic Ape Theory had anything going for it. Enhancements to respiration, boosted infection resistance, and improved skin and eye resistance to seawater and sun exposure. And, of course, an implanted smartphone. Things that would hardly make you stand-out at a dinner party --though I think some things like bioluminescent body markings would be as popular on the dancefloor as useful in the sea.
The situation is similar to that of the gigantic spinning colonies of the old '77 Summer Study that are such a fixture of our space settlement fantasies. There’s another solution to ‘space wasting’; a clinical solution. What if we had augmentation that just kept us from getting sick in reduced gravity? Then space settlement could be something done in a more organic, incremental fashion and living on/in the natural bodies out there wouldn’t be as tough a prospect. This is being pursued, but we don’t commonly consider that because the prospect seems too radical and far off, and SciFi hasn’t really bothered to illustrate that possibility for us. Levittown on Orbit is easier to wrap one’s head around. But even if we had the means to build the first of those big spinning colonies at-hand today (and, frankly, space agencies are a couple of generations behind the curve on that…) it would take the combined, sharply-focused, and sustained effort of many nations over a century to pull-off. It’s just that damned big. We’re not a cathedral-building culture anymore. So, really, how more or less likely does that clinical solution seem in that context? And whenever it turns up, be it sooner or later, it will automatically become the convention by simple virtue of economy. Cheaper usually wins. So which do you want to bet on?
So I’ve been amusing myself lately imaging how lifestyle for an advanced culture of ‘sea folk’ would work (rather like today’s Digital Nomads, actually) and what sort of artifacts, production technology, and robotics they might devise to aid their free-roaming life at sea. The prospect of living like a pod of dolphins with built-in social AR seems much more interesting than Levittown on a concrete platform.
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