I quite like Kledge’s face design. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with infinitely more alien designs, but I enjoy it, and it is always so satisfying when something comes out so pleasingly.
———————-Alt Text———————
Thoos, Rodrigo, Knox and Picknar arrived at the Markeron Art Museum and walked up the stairs and entered. The alien at the from desk, named Kledge, scanned them and said, “Scan cleared, you don’t have any weapons. You can go in.” Rodrigo smiled and asked, “What kinds of weapons do people bring to museums?” Kledge said, “Anything really. Maces, spears, ballistic missiles. Even laser guns. Just because they’re illegal doesn’t mean they’re not out there.” Knox said, “On our planet, we call guards without guns ‘bouncers.'” Kledge said, “‘bouncers.’ I like it. I liiike it.” Then addressing an enormous alien standing just behind our crew, Kledge said, “Gnoxx, do you think you could bounce people?” Gnoxx said, “I don’t know, kledge. I could slam them repeatedly to the floor, but I can’t promise they’ll bounce.”
———————-/Alt Text———————-
That’s how you tell them apart from basketballs.
A gal threw her drink in my face. All I had done was walk by her. I guess she had caused trouble before in that casino. A huge Gnoxx grabbed her up and her feet never touched the floor as he literaly threw her out the door, to land face first ten feet out in the parking lot! Eh, thats one way to get a free drink! 😉 (she didn’t bounce)
A guy punched me at a Front 242 concert and he was ejected so quickly that he was gone by the time I picked myself up from the floor. That’s some serious bouncing.
I like the design but I don’t want to watch him eat.
I think a way to go about designing alien aliens is to read about evolution and why we look like we do. So that one may think of alternate paths that could have been taken instead.
For example, speech doesn’t have to be done with a mouth. Look at how cicadas sing by contracting muscles on their thorax to make a chitin plate “click” several hundred times per second. Likewise crickets sing by rubbing their legs. For vertebrates, breathing appeared as an evolution of eating (some fish started to go to the surface to swallow bubbles of air to get oxygen to absorb through their guts as they went to low-oxygen waters; then lungs eventually appeared as specialized zones of their guts), and speaking appeared as an evolution of breathing, so all these functions are tied to the same organs; but it doesn’t have to be so for an alien.
I really like Christopher’s alien designs. Some of the most varied there is.
I see the Monsanto House of the Future (from original Disneyland) embedded in the museum structure.
I immediately had the same thought when I saw it.
https://www.iconichouses.org/icons-at-risk/monsanto-house-of-the-future
Me, three. 🙂
Somehow you draw human emotions into Kledge… with that face. That’s an amazing accomplishment.
Dangerous to introduce new phrases into a new language. If you’re hearing someone saying something nonsensical or incomprehensible, the Germans say, “Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof.” — “I only understand the train station.” Try it in English and watch them stare at you. Or better yet, when somebody doesn’t see an object in the room, tell them “Tomaten auf den Augen haben.” Or, “You have tomatoes in your eyes.” Given the American propensity for violence, I fear that one taking root here. Show me no tomatoes, I’ll figure it out on my own.
My first thought was that Gnoxx would be something like a “splatter”, then…
And this is a prime example of why the GOB’s ban on lasers is about the stupidest thing they have ever done.
There is such a wide disparity in the ability of different species to dish out natural violence that the only way to maintain any semblance of balance of power is with weapons.
Lasers, at least, *have* a stun setting. And a perfectly-reliable one that never kills anyone regardless of size or health conditions. Some people might choose not to use it, but it’s an option.
By banning them, now everybody who wants to follow the law either finds themselves at the mercy of those who do not, or chooses to use non-banned weapons that are strictly inferior in their non-lethal capability.
So, the ban on lasers is going to result in *more* death.
If they were going to try to do anything to reduce the amount of death, they probably should have tried to mandate that all lasers have *only* stun available. I’m sure there’d be issues with that too, but it at least wouldn’t be forcing people to resort to lethal weapons in situations where they might have preferred a non-lethal one.