hii

WELCOME! this is my official OC storage thingie…
I started hallucinating prokaryote lore when i was, like, just shy of 11. Most of it is 1/2 of what I garnered from phylogenetics and other stuff about the bacterium, and 1/2 of me being self-indulgent.

If something’s not done on my side yet, or is a WIP, i might live a note such as this!

Note

or as this!

Also, please assume everyone here is a gay man using he/him only.

If you’re really feeling it, let me explain some more thing to better understand the pages first.

About the wiki

Why the wiki format?

Because, like many autistic people, wikis were what dragged me into microbiology and made it possible for it to mature as my special interest! In my case Wikipedia, but also and Microbewiki, played a huge part in familiarising myself with prokaryotes when I was younger. So I wanted to recreate that experience when people would read about my OCs.
In the past, I already tried to put my OCs online using toyhou.se, but I’m not a fan of its interface I think? even though it is otherwise quite convenient. I wanted to make something I had complete control over. So, a few years ago, when I put this site online, I already tried making OC pages from scratch… but here I ran into a problem. Because my OCs are not 100% the product of my imagination, and that I am making claims strongly anchored to the real world as I talk about them, even as I explain the pieces of lore I wrote in middle school. What I needed, and that was also handled by using a “wiki”-kind of site, was citation and reference-handling. My Zotero was ready, but what next?
I thought about using Mediawiki, as Microbewiki is based on that… But Mediawiki has collaborative editing in mind, which is not what I’m trying to achieve here (even though you are very welcome to contact me about the references I use and/or send me some yourself). Again, this is something I wanted complete control over, just like the rest of the site. Then I explored other static site generators – mostly Pelican, because I’m more comfortable with python, but it was too much of a hassle to tweak it into the wiki-like layout I needed.

Why use Quartz?

Quartz is a static site generator, and the one that looks the most “like a wiki” out of the box that I could find. I liked that it has a light and dark mode functionnality, and that (like other static site generators) it uses markdown files to generate content, because I like writing in Obsidian. And, of course, it handles citations out of the box. It’s made with Typescript though, which I am a complete noob at. But the Quartz documentation is pretty comprehensive (although some of it is not 100% up to date, in my experience?). So if you have some light programming experience, it won’t necessarily be “easy” to get into, but it’s definitely feasible with some effort/dedication. I was pretty happy with it using TypeScript in the end, because I really wanted to generate infoboxes for each OC page, and it allowed me to do that pretty easily using frontmatter properties. So that’s neat! I’d also like to implement OC galleries for each page in the future; not sure how I’ll do that yet, but who knows.

Some OC things to consider

Naming

• The proper written way to refer to a species is to write its genus and species names in italics (or underlined if writing by hand). But you’ll sometimes see me referring to a character using the capitalised species name only; for instance, “Pestis” instead of “Yersinia pestis”. This is done intentionally on my part, as to highlight the difference between the character and the real life species/strain. And yes, I’m aware, some species from different genera share the same species name. But then I’ll usually name the species in its entirety once, like Pseudomonas aeruginosa and Microcystis aeruginosa…
  

What makes a bacterium his own self (to me)

I am NOT trying to be A 100% scientifically accurate here… this is just how I’ve envisoned things in my head for years OK????

• Each depiction of a character is meant to represent a single cell. So, a character can exist at different points in space at the same time, as clones sharing a single conscience. And that makes them a single person in my book!!! Or, a single entity, I guess? Each clone technically has its own agency as a cell, and can do whatever. But clones from a single species know what the others are doing/thinking/feeling in real time, even if they are far away from each other, and though they only act on what’s going on in their immediate surroundings. Also, IRL, there are Many instances of cells cooperating at large scales, be it for a single species (as a population), or for cells of more than one species (as a community).

  
  

• When I make a character, what I look at in order to determine the limit of a character being a single person are taxonomic consensus (of course), chromosomic identity percentages, and phylogenetic history.

  • If two strains are considered very close chromosome-wise, but clearly described as different taxonomy-wise, I usually just describe the characters as something like twins. Twins can share memories exclusive to one another, have gut feelings about one another like IRL twins… but they remain different persons, so they can’t always tell what the other one is doing, thinking, etc.
    • An example of this is V. harveyi and V. campbellii, or M. leprae and M. lepromatosis.
  • But if the taxonomic or phylogenetic relationships are also somewhat messy (especially in the case of complexed species), I may describe the characters as a single entity existing under different types of incarnations. In that case, they share most memories and thoughts, and have a clearer idea of what the other strains are doing or feeling in real time.
    • Examples of this include E. coli strains and the Shigella, complexes such as the M. tuberculosis, M. avium, and Y. pestis complexes, and arguably the Wolbachia.
      
      

• Even in a single species… they keep evolving! They keep mutating! So their character designs technically aren’t really fixed, either. It’s OK to draw them with character designs that vary more or less. Though, technically, that would be more representative of their active transcriptome.

Miscellaneous

• If they have weapons, or other objects that they hold sometimes, that’s probably a secretion system.

  
  

• No, after all these years, I’m still not set on what fimbriae and pili should be drawn as.

  • And no, I’m not set on what a conjugative pilus is drawn as, either. Guess I should keep studying…