Within The Megatonne Marble

I'm putting together a new single-topic sub-blog, Within The Megatonne Marble. You'll find it here: http://worldswithin.blogspot.com/.

To put it simply, Within The Megatonne Marble is all about the awesome untapped potential of the mind, and one man's ambling quest (my own) to explore that potential. Nothing but truth will be recorded there; I'll continue to deposit fiction and the usual old ranting bollocks here.

If you've known me personally for any length of time, then you'll know that for a good few years there, I could often be seen to be laying flat-out on my bed in the middle of the day with an old t-shirt wrapped around my face as a rudimentary blindfold.

This was not laziness. I was, believe it or not, on a bit of a wild inner journey. It was all drug-free, don't worry, fuelled only by a sort of natural, overwhelming need to explore further some of the mental states which I had, through happy accident, glimpsed.

I have years of archived notes. I've realised now, after a sort of two-year hiatus from that semi-secret second life, that those notes -- and my interpretation of the things I've seen and felt -- might be of interest to some.

What am I banging on about?

Go to the new blog and find out.

Smoothie-Mania

It is a little-known fact that, amongst other things, I am a cutting-edge experimental chef.

The dead chunk of swine in the fridge hasn't quite matured enough yet, or I'd show you how to cook 'Reindeer Balls'. If you have some leftovers, hold on to them, and I'll give you the appropriate instructions tomorrow. But not now! No! Now I'm talking about something else altogether.

I have a Smoothie Maker. Santa bought it to me for Christmas. Hoho! May the Gods bless you and the sleigh you slid in on, Santa! You've added a whole new degree of freedom to my kitchen!

Santa also bought me a great book full of fairly rational, reasonable smoothie recipies, which look lovely. Though I will use it as an ingredient reference, I will be coming up with some recipies of my own. I eschew you and your buttoned-down notions regarding blended foods and the vast potential therin, authors of the smoothie-book!

Smoothie Recipie #1 : The Blueberry Buggerface

Rum (Vat-19 was used in this case). Blueberry Sorbet! Ice cubes! Milk!

Smoothie Recipie #2: Undrinkable Green Sludge

As it is Christmas, I have no fresh fruit or vegetables in the fridge, so I had an idea: mince up the frozen veg! I used garden peas and spinach. As a fluid base, I used milk. To add a bit of flavour, I added a handful of 0f dry-roasted peanuts. Now! It looked delicious, it really did! What a vibrant green! But it tasted like the cooled stomach contents of a lamb at a petting zoo where the patrons were ignoring the 'do not feed random things the lambs' signs. I poured it all out.

More smoothie recipies to come, with pictures.

Christmas Eve

From myself and all the team here at Megatonne Marble Media, Merry Christmas.

Thank The Great Spacetrout that Christmas Eve has come, and we have all the decorations in place (finally), and I've done all the shopping I'm going to do, and all the walls (an obvious prerequisite to Christmas happening at all) have been painted, and the new reed blinds are up in the bathroom, and I have pretty much no set task for tomorrow apart from the enjoyment of this singular phenomonon you humans call 'self'.

With regards to the reed blinds...

Our bathroom window has had no blinds now for a while, as the old ones were attached to the unsound, talcum-like plaster in the upper part of the window frame, and soon succumbed to our late-night heavy-handedness. When I say 'a while', I mean about six months.

So, for the last six months or so, anybody using the toilet has been aware of the likelihood that any passers-by in the street below, or residents of the flat opposite ours, can see their bathroom antics silhouetted against the window, at least in part. One tries to be cool in such a situation, passing the occasional kinky nod towards the window as if to say "oh, I know you're watching down there, and I kinda like it" but here's something I've realised:

There is no 'cool' way to wipe your arse.

Dark Promise #1

Readers, throughout the course of the next little while, you are going to witness the evolution of something quite cool.

Ugly undulating flat-shaded surface wins Award For General Brilliance. "The start of something very cool," says author.

It's called the Dark Promise scene/actor engine, and believe it or not, that ugly undulating flat-shaded surface is the start of something very cool altogether.

I've taken all of the useful math out of my old project, the DAVE engine, and brought it into a fresh, superior, more object-oriented environment. The DAVE engine, dazzlingly beautiful as it was, turned into something of a maintenance nightmare, as the bulk of it was written in flat, old-school C. It was flawed enough anyway; DAVE ran like a pansy. The way he ran, though, that was the cool part; I just told his legs to twitch until they looked right.

After months of work, encompassing my first proper foray into OpenGL and 3D graphics, DAVE ran like a girl.

DAVE is a couple of years old now, and looking back at the code, I see that I was more interested in visual impact than building a useful animation library. I did learn quite a bit, though. I have a head-full of useful know-how that I didn't have before; I know, now, how to do it right.

The Dark Promise engine will be me 'doing it right'. My primary focus will be on producing something useable and extensible; and beautiful, hopefully, too. The engine will handle 'scenes' - environment objects and physical laws, objects, collision detection, visual representation, et cetera - and 'actors', the characters who interact with each other and the scenery around them. My motivation: I want a fast development environment where myself and my rag-tag band of cronies (optional) can put a kick-arse RPG together.

It's all about dynamic content generation. For instance, let's say I have a scene where a troop of, say, sixty mercenary knights are marching along a country road. I sure as hell am not about to design and animate every single one of them. No. I will define how a human body moves in general (using knowledge gleaned from DAVE) and add a library of small idiosyncrasies which the engine can draw upon, optionally, when moving my characters. A stumble. A glance to another character. A heavy breath. The same will go for the uniforms, facial features, et al; I'll teach the engine how to come up with them on the fly, and trust it to do the rest. I'll be able to tweak the results and feed that back into the engine.

By limiting repetition at the modelling stage, I can put so much more variety into Dark Promise. The art will still be my own, of course, but multiplied by itself so many times over - I want a game engine that can take what I give it and surprise me. Town/crowd scenes - where every NPC is unique - will be especially cool, but dynamic generation of unique enemies will be a big plus. With Dark Promise, I'll have an RPG world where the members of the enemy classes don't all look like clones of each other, but cousins.

It probably won't look very cutting-edge at first. But remember that the visuals are only a very thin veneer on the engine underneath - they can always be polished up later. In terms of smoothness and polygon count, I'm going for something that will probably feel a lot like what Squaresoft were producing about...oh...five or six years ago on the PS1. Which will be no mean feat.

Anyway, starting out fairly small, I'll have a dynamic NPC generator running in the Dark Promise environment pretty soon, where you will be able to select and vary a set of 'contributing factors' until you come up with something that you like. Believe it or not, the undulating curve thing will be a perky set of boobies pretty soon.

Oh yes.

The next big step after that will be the dynamic generation of scenes. I'll keep those simple at first (mazes of one form or another, probably, rather than crooked little villages). Teaching the NPCs how to walk around them and interact automatically (going about their daily business) will be the next step.

I probably won't have anything worth talking about by the time I get back to work after the Christmas break, but I'll post regular screenshots. When the NPC tester is ready, I'll produce a demo for your tweaking pleasure.

The Orange-Spicy Scent of Fear

Well folks, it's Christmas time again. I've had a week off work, and during that week I:

• Painted the bathroom, cream.
• Painted the living room, mostly cream, painting one of the walls a darker 'cookie dough' colour. I still haven't taken off the masking tape as I am afraid, and I don't want to tear big chunks out of the lovely smooth finish have to re-do any of it. I might just try and leave it there until after Christmas, or until The Girl notices.
• Went out and got drunk, horribly horribly drunk, and incidentally discovered hidden resources of pool-playing skill after the third pint which diminished significantly after the eighth. Upon arriving home, I found the biggest pot I could find in the kitchen and took it to bed with me. Apparently I was vomiting what The Girl describes as 'tarry shit'. I was quite sure, at the time, that I was going to die. I remember the taxi driver, having taken me home, looking at me with a certain nervousness in his eyes and telling me that I didn't have to pay, it was alllll sorted. I have no idea why. The Girl was not well pleased with me the next day -- what an angel, though! Apparently at one point I had clearly embarked on some sort of internal 'vision quest' during which my arms flailed wildly and I spoke glassy-eyed to the ceiling in one of those ancient Middle-Eastern dialects I could not possibly know. She put up with it all, and even gave me a wee kiss the next morning before going off to work! I paid for it all the next day though, when I had to paint that whoring big wall, and I was still so awfully drunk and unwell.
• Most of my presents are bought! I still have to grab a few things tomorrow.
• I've rekindled my 'tight graphical skills'; I'm putting together a very nice RPG graphics engine at the moment, trying to keep things simple but very easily extendible and computationally-assisted where possible. By that, I mean, I'm developing an engine where I can say (through a compiled script of my own design) "give me a non-player character! I don't care what type! Make him walk from HERE to THERE! Make him scratch his arse for three seconds, and then walk back to HERE!". That is the dream. At the moment I have something which generates and subdivides curved surfaces on-the-fly. Screenshots to follow.
• I'm sure I've done other things.

If You Like Strategy RPGs...

Then you'd love 'Disgaea: Hour of Darkness'.

Talk about going under the radar - this has to have been the least-hyped game for the PS2, ever. A big hit in Japan back in 2003 - Disgaea came to our shores in 2004, with all of the pomp and ceremony of an invisible tumbleweed, rolling in the middle of uncharted nowhere, and seen by nobody. Which is why I hadn't heard of it until I stumbled across it in GAME, in the dark corner where all the unpopular geek-friendly games go to die. The look of it intrigued me. 2d characters on 3d maps...honestly, it looked like it could have been done on the PS1. So it had to have something going for it...

I didn't buy it there and then - I went home and checked it out on the 'net. And I was pleased to see that everybody who ever played it raved about it (quietly, though). And so, knowing what sort of thing I was in for, I went and bought it the very next day.

If you've played (or seen) Final Fantasy Tactics, then you'll know what sort of game I'm talking about. I loved FFT. I played FFT for a solid year - it breathed a spark of new life into my battered old PS1. You develop character classes, battle enemies on a grid-like 3D map...it's all about levelling up, improving your statistics until you become El Grande Kickasso. Disgaea is an unabashed FFT clone - and then some. AND THEN SOME!

Disgaea has been written, clearly, for people who are a bit maladjusted.

The storyline is fantastically light. There's no grand arching plot. You are the demon-child, Laharl, and you've awoken after a two-year slumber to find that your father, the Lord of the Underworld, has died. The demon horde are all clamouring to become the new top dog, and so you have to go out there and reinstate a bit of order...

That's it, essentially. It's all done animé-style - and is, as you might expect, full of Japanese humour and culture references. Again, this is a Good Thing.

So you have Laharl, and Laharl needs some vassals to help him out - so you create characters, capture monsters - the normal sort of thing. This time, though, there are no level caps...and one of the many requests you can make of the 'Dark Assembly' to make the enemies more powerful...

I'm not really doing it justice. It's the most fun I've had out of an RPG for a while now (Final Fantasies aside).

If you can get a hold of it for a quick twenty bob, do. It's good for about five years of play time.

What In The Name Of SANITY...

...did I drink?

It couldn't have been anything natural!

I am A WRECK!

I am fantastically glad that I am not required at work tomorrow.

Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus...Jesus...and, finally, to top it ALL OFF, Jesus.

I defiled the Millenium Forum, for God's sake, while a troop of confused teenagers looked on.

Oh, oh, oh, no.

So many memories.

So little time.

Fuppin' Ay

Five working days 'til I'm off work for Christmas, folks. Not bad at all. I'll be off Thursday and Friday this week, Monday and Tuesday next week, and then after Friday next week I'll be off until...the third of January. Fantastic!

That's a 6-day break followed by a 17-day break. All the big sticks and big-stick-swingers in the world couldn't whack that.

Let me display the sheer majesty of that for you in a neat visual format:

Thus I will get a chance to do some proper writing, between painting a few walls of the house and eating gravy-claggered platefuls of The Girl's home-made stuffing. Oh, she can fairly make stuffing. Last year we were making stuffing well into mid-January. Check back now and then for stuffing recipies, and instructions on how to make "Reindeer Balls", a very special culinary creation of my own, based mostly on refried stuffing and threads of dessicated, shredded fridge-meat, lovingly smothered in a cheesy sauce.

Once Upon A Time I Thought I Was Into Movies...

...but I was wrong, so wrong. Richard Brown is into movies. Go to his new blog and take a gander at his DVD list; it dwarfs mine like a titanic titan dwarfing a...dwarf.

The crazy freak.

Redemption Songs #2

Won't you smell with me
This noxious fumage?
All I ate today,
Chinese food.

Redemption Songs #1

(Sung to the tune of, quite obviously, Redemption Song by Bob Marley)

Won't you try this grill?

It's by George Foreman.

All it ever makes...

...dry bacon.

Spoons

If you happen to be in the 'Thyme Out' canteen at Magee anytime soon, do yourself a favour and avoid the disposable blue spoons, unless you happen to have an upper lip like a camel (or a tapir). You'd think it would be hard to foul up something as simple as a spoon...but somebody has, somewhere.

I bought myself a yoghurt there yesterday morning during my break. Peach melba. I took a nice heaped spoonful of the delicious peachy goo (with one of the semi-transparent blue spoons mentioned previously) and put the end of the spoon in my mouth, closing my lips around it, in the normal sort of way. Immediately I knew that something was wrong. Something was out of place. The spoon was too deep. Upon withdrawl, it still bore a little well of slabbery yoghurt. There was no getting to it with anything but my tongue, which is no way to eat in a civilised gathering, where other people are trying their best to eat too.

Useless.

So, if you happen to be in the 'Thyme Out' canteen, avoid the showy glitz of the blue spoons, and go for spoons of the proper, shallower, metal variety.

Freddaaay

Whaddya know? Friday has rolled around again. But have the endorphin-ducts of my brain become engorged with natural Friday-joy-juice? No. The Girl has decided that this weekend will be dedicated mostly to painting the walls of the flat. My endorphin levels are fairly low, to be honest.

I see her point, however. The walls: at the moment, they are still the colour of the cheapest, powderiest, grubbiest 'magnolia' that the original building contractor could find. You can rub the weak yellow talcum off the wall with a damp cloth. Our intention is to paint just a few of the key walls to spruce the place up a bit, leaving others blank.

As this is 2005, we will mostly be painting the walls some shade of beige (but these days we have to call it 'mocha', as the sickening march 0f coffee-culture across the surface of Earth has left its indelible mark on our decorating tastes as well as our language). It will look well, I think, but I only think that because this is 2005. In twenty years I will be sitting in my e-paper-panelled dwelling-cube in my white one-piece jumpsuit, older, greyer, fatter, and I will look back at pictures of the old flat and think "oh, Jesus christ, will you look at all that brown!" Then a face will appear on the wall, and ask what visual theme I want for the evening. "Arabian Dusk," I will say, and the face will nod.

"Very good sir," it will say, and then the ceiling, walls and floor will be replaced by a rolling landscape of dunes and orange sunlight, perfectly rendered below a breathtaking purple sky. A breeze will come from somewhere, and the understated murmur of a gently-whispering wind. "Arabian Dusk, version one point six three, Microsoft Corporation. You have been charged thirty-six pounds for a three-day license to use this theme. This is day one of three. Would you like me to recite the EULA?"

"No," I will say.

"The Corporation thanks you for your patronage."

I will sigh and remember the good old days, when you could render whatever you wanted on the e-paper using a laptop and a bit of ingenuity. Of course there was no profit in that, and profit to be made in the banning of it, and so, inevitably, the Department of Digital Rights Management at GovernCorp^tm (the company to which all the functions of government were outsourced in 2021) set to work.

Official history would omit the fate which awaited those who did not roll over and take it doggie-style from the DRM Agents, but I will remember Mark, who refused to install the appropriate patches...and paid the price. You see, twenty years from now will be the age of the QuickLaws^tm, laws which appear suddenly from nowhere, are protected from public scrutiny by the banner of National Security, and apply to whatever set of conditions they can use to uniquely identify you, and which were rumoured to have clauses in them like 'thou shalt not breathe'.

Mark's punishment was a grim one: he was driven out of the trans-metal sanctuary of the Derry Archology, out into the dusty murder-plains, where the sand-pirates awaited him, with their ribby shire-horses and their baseball bats and their sharpened teeth and their Donegal accents, sir, and their thirst for fresh city-boy blood.

But anyway, mocha, yes. I think it will become known as coffee-kitsch.

Tumbling Wildly Through The Twilight Zone

For life on this green planet we call Earth, bilateral symmetry became the way of things. I do not pretend to know the reasons why, but at some glorious evolutionary crossroads, nature decided that bilateral symmetry was the way to go. Off it went. In its quiet wisdom, Nature gave us the dorsal and the ventral, the anterior and the posterior, making each the mirror image of the other; we have a left eye and a right eye, a left hand and a right hand, a left bollock and, slightly higher up, a right one.

To the tricuspid aliens of a trilateral world we would look odd. How miserly it would seem, the hand that made us, to those fantastic beings of three sides! They would have an aggh tentacle, a higg and a kfudduck. It might be more common to be kfudduck-tentacled; the higg-tentacled write so oddly, and the aggh-tentacled - don't get me started on those freaks! With three swipes of their kfudduck-claw they would divide the sphere of their world into three; their navigators and cartographers would criss-cross their maps with equalateral triangles. Tri-state computation would drive the great computers of their world, the great calculating mahines which pore over the triplicate images coming back from their Great Trinocular Telescope Array, triplicate images of a bright, neon world with a big grey half-moon, strange and distant.

We would have to be destroyed, of course. It would be obvious to their harsh, tri-pointed logic - their laws of the not-quite-true, the almost-false and the thing-in-between. The only question would be how.

...

From his nine-walled chamber of governance, their Emperor sat, studying us. In each of his three tentacles he held an animated image-plate, each with a separate view of Earth; to each plate he had dedicated a single wet, peering eye. Somewhere in his brain-lobes those moving images were recombined into one; he saw the entirety of sphere as it turned. To his eyes, our world was a glistening ball of neon white and red and green, which ran along the shores of our great black oceans. The continents were speckled here and there, too, with white spindle-webs running between great inland colour-bunches - our cities. Some 4600 triglars above the surface of our unusual sphere, along an invisible plane which cut the world into two halves, was a great cloud of red and blue specks; great white flashes reached up to them from the cities, and they flashed back, illuminating the land for seconds at a time, faintly, faintly. A strange way to chase the night, thought the Emperor, hanging lanterns in space.

The Emperor's attention was drawn away from the strange jewel-world by a rhythmic click-clacking in the long corridor which led to his chamber. He knew it immediately to be the chitinous pinion-legs of his Minister of Xenology, the esteemed scientist-politick, Richird. His unsteady, hobbling stride - an artefact of his cliff-dwelling heritage - was unmistakeable. One of his legs had grown shorter than the other two, which was a fine thing in the sheer mountains of Frid; but in the flatlands of the Imperial Core, where all was laid with flat and slippery marble-glass, Richird's hard-won family trait had become a marked impediment. Unable to walk comfortably on three legs, he had mastered a means of locomotion with just two, using the shorter one as a balancing tail. Richird lumbered into the chamber and the Emperor sat the image-plates down, drawing himself up until he was standing on the pointed tips of his legs with his tentacles outstretched. He turned each of his eyes to the Minister - the higg first, to welcome him; then the aggh, the eye of boundless brotherhood; and finally he put the red gleam of the kfudduck upon him, the talking-eye.

"Minister," flashed the Emperor, all cool-red and pink, "you bring news?"

The Minister quickly returned the Imperial greeting; higg, aggh, kfudduck, bringing himself awkwardly up on to the tips of his two good legs, the third one left to dangle uselessly in the air. He could not hold the poise for long, and soon faltered, sinking back clumsily to lean on his stub.

"Steady yourself, old man," gleamed the Emperor, his front-face betraying no anger. The attempt at the greeting, for an ill-equipped outsider such as Richird, was enough.

"Thank you, sire," replied the Minister, yellow-green. "I have rushed here at some pace; I am deathly tired. The acrobatic pleasantries of the big city are not for me, I'm afraid. Yes, my news; it regards the glitter-world, Earth, and the manner of life there."

"Go on," burned the Emperor.

"The dominant form of life there relies on two-stranded gretemphorishphin! The strands are wound around each other like the spiral-worms of home. Where our gretemphorishphon is coded in base-triads of molecules, theirs is coded in pairs. This, I have derived."

The Emperor shook his head thrice. "Astonishing. But how? Our best images hardly resolve the features of their land masses; how did you peer into their cells?"

The bundles of muscle and nerve at each corner of the Minister's three-pointed mouth pulled back into a smile, revealing rows of dark, inward-pointing teeth, polished, glistening red in the light of the Emperor's words.

"Are you familiar, sire, with kfudduck-snoopers? Bugging devices, remote amplification?"

"I am plagued by them. My best men sweep for them daily. My rooms are shielded against them. Yes, I am familiar with snoopers."

"And have you seen how their world gleams in the high-deprekk spectrum? So brightly."

"It is their primary means of illumination, Minister."

"No, sire, it is not. Our best minds now believe that the Earth-beings are blind to the majesty of the deprekk. By another quirk of their world's biology, their eyes are adapted to the low-frequency yallog, and the sub-yallog, a range in which their star burns brightly. If we tune the telescopes to the yallog, we see emission too; it is steadier, and brighter on the night-side of their planet, suggesting that it is used to stay the dark, and the deprekk is used for...something else."

"What then, if not light?"

"Communication."

The Emperor closed his higg and aggh eyes tightly; his kfudduck burned white. "That is simply not the case, Minister. We might have been forgiven for thinking that ten hoks ago, before the Great Telescope was complete, and Earth twinkled tiny in our skies, and we marvelled at a world brighter, and so much more full of life, than our own. But our position in the galaxy is unique; we are the light-whisperers, and the deprekk is our medium alone. Look at Earth! It burns wild. There is no subtlety in those billion strobes, no grace."

The minister shook his upper head. "It is not so. They communicate by mechanical means, sire; they produce the deprekk energy artificially, and modulate it, encoding their thoughts and words as souless numbers. We have cracked their codes - binary, sire, they use two states and not three, swapping greb, tuk and fot for the heretic's true and false. We have had our own machines listening for days, now. We have turned our most powerful snoopers upon their planet. We filtered, filtered, filtered, untangling one thread from another, until we had a few clear deprekk-streams, odd as they were. The combanitron rejected the first stream we fed it, calling it nonsense - and the second, and the third. It was not until the fourth stream was fed to it, and it had a whole thog to chew upon it, that the machine confirmed what we had come to believe: here was information, encased in layers of codes within codes within codes. We found ways, though, we found ways! And we stripped away each layer of encoding until we were faced with repeating numbers, sequences, an arrangement, a grid, brightnesses, hues..."

Richird had become wistful. "...on," flashed the Emperor. "Go on."

"I have an image-plate for you, sire, built from those numbers." The Minister held the small grey tablet outstretched. "This is the fruit of extraordinary labours. You can see...we were lucky. Now that we know what to look for - they transmit many millions of images of this kind, every moment of every day. These are clearly the leaders of their world; notice how this one stands over the other, a universal sign of domination. The broadcast of these images must be a means of solidifying power. They have propoganda too!"

"How alike we are," marvelled the Emperor, "and how different!"

"Notice the bilateral symmetry - the mirroring of one side to another. From this we can make various suppositions as to the underlying life-processes, the astonishing forces of chemistry."

"Only two arms," commented the Emperor. "Whatever it is, it is strange to look upon. What are these, on its...front? Between the arms?"

"I surmise that they are something akin to the feeding-tendrils of a mother-blob, sire. The dominating class on Earth must be female, a mother-caste."

"They are awfully full. Painfully full, by the looks of them; so round! And this, Minister, protruding below, what is this?"

"A vestigial leg," replied the Xenologist in a matter-of-fact manner. "Shrivelled and useless. Perhaps this specimen's ancestors were hill-dwellers, like my own, who lost the need for a third limb, and so it simply withered away."

"Astonishing," the Emperor dimmed, turning inward. "Were you able to decipher the text?"

"Text, sire?" The Minister reached for the image-plate, scanning it quickly.

The Emperor pointed to a faint line of characters running along the upper edge of the image. "There. It's faint, mind, but it looks like text to me. Have your men pick it out for analysis; perhaps we might use it in opening up a dialog with these creatures."

The Minister, both annoyed and elated, spun on his legs. "I will do so immediately, sire! Hidden text! What a bounty! What a bounty! What a keen eye you have, sire!"

With that, he clattered away down the hall, leaving the Emperor to gaze at his new image-plate. The creature looked back at him from the grey tablet, with eyes hidden behind half-closed lids, and a strange horizontal mouth slightly open, bright-rimmed. Its arms ended in five sub-tentacles, each with a deep-hued tip; one held one of the bulbous outcroppings on its front, clasping it by the small dark point in its middle, and the other fondled its diminutive, wrinkled, vestigial leg.

What wonders lie there, thought the Emperor, on the glitter-planet, Earth?

...

It came as a shock to humanity, who had for a long time believed that they were the sole inheritors of the galaxy, that they suddenly were not. The Bollaxians had been out there all along, the light-whisperers, readying their translation machines to make our aquaintance. It came as a greater shock, however, when the first Bollaxian ever to set foot on Earth click-clacked clumsily down the steps of his gigantic landing-craft, looked around himself with his three wet eyes, raised himself up on two legs, directed a stumpy third leg out from under himself and towards the gathering crowd, and requested, in a booming mechanical voice, to be taken directly to our Ladyboys.

This

Look at this

It's a pistachio nut with trilateral symmetry.

You can scream now.