kirabug's idea files

Day 320:

Wheel experimentation delayed by attack from a zombie horde during mining today.

I know we’re all supposed to respect other cultures, but it can be hard to shake off our own beliefs. Like, for example, when two zombies attack you and you dispatch one (“dispatch” is a much nicer word than “murder” don’t you think?) with your sword, and then the other one picks up some of the rotting flesh from the first and tries to beat you with it.

WHO DOES THAT?

Maybe in a society where your fellow man literally turns to dust in the moment of their death, there is no sacredness to the remains of a fellow creature?

Not that I’m even sure these zombies are sentient. They’re capable of crying out in pain, yes, and they’re capable of finding and achieving a goal (at least they are when the goal is “murder me”). They all wear the same clothes (assuming those are clothes and not the strangest skin every) which indicates some kind of culture (or serious lack of imagination). And they’re clearly tool users or they wouldn’t know to beat me with the dead body in the first place.

But ugh, I get grossed out every time they do it.

Day 319:

Most of the things here have very sharp edges to them, as if they all want to grow to be squares or rhombuses instead of ovals or fractals the way they were where I grew up.

Now I sound like an old interstellar miner. “Back in my day, plants knew to grow round so they got the most sun”. But that was on a planet where the tilt of the axis meant the sun changed location in the sky regularly. Here there’s no tilt, and no seasons, so maybe it makes sense for things to grow more flat.

Anyway, that makes creating wheels harder because when you’re growing almost-perfectly round trees, you cut a slice out of the middle and you’ve got almost-perfectly round wheels.

I’ve tried to cut the corners off the plants here but the wood tends to fracture and split along the grain both lengthwise and width-wise. It makes it easier to cut playing dice but not so great for wheels.

Day 318:

After thinking way too much about the reanimated material in my water supply overnight and into the day, I think I’m going to have to experiment with my own waster filters.

I mean, yeah, as far as I know, I don’t have a ten-foot tapeworm, but since I’m not sure how to tell, I’m just going to assume I’ve probably got parasites by now.

(Then again, as previously mentioned, there don’t seem to be bugs here and things don’t seem to rot. It’s like we totally skipped those sections of the taxonomic tree. Somehow we got mushrooms the size of small apartment complexes, but no bugs. So maybe no parasites? One can only hope… and wonder how one’s own gut bacteria are doing.)

(Oh heck I bet every time I go to the bathroom I’m exposing this environment to gut bacteria, which means if there really weren’t any bacteria before I’ve just colonized the whole planet. Whee! That’s worth jail time.)

Anyway, I have pitchers I made out of clay and I have charcoal so conceivably I can figure out how to make a charcoal filter…. but I’m not sure how since I don’t have any woven cloth or cheesecloth or anything like that to use as filter material.

Also I don’t actually know how they work.

Also charcoal doesn’t taste very good and I don’t want it in my water.

I miss vending machines.

Day 317:

I really should go topside soon and see what’s up there. See, I dug through the ceiling (again) and flooded the cave I was in…. but the water wasn’t the nice clear blue color of the bay area. It was kind of a brackish green with icky bits floating in it.

I can’t tell if I’m under some kind of swamp or if someone threw some zombies into a blender.

And now it occurs to me that I’m probably drinking zombie bits in my drinking water and now I am totally squicked out. So it’s bedtime.