As part of my recent binge to refamiliarize myself with the series, I was taking a look at the infamous LBT Youtube channel which has all of the TV show's episodes uploaded onto it in full. I had heard that some kids were getting into LBT from the channel's uploaded clips but I did not expect the insane view counts some of the episodes got.

The record belongs to "The Hidden Canyon," which has a whopping 25 million views. Other episodes with massive view counts are "The Brave Longneck Scheme," with 12.1 million views, and "The Meadow of Jumping Waters," with 7.1 million views. Of course, most episodes have significantly lower view counts than this, with many numbering below 1 million views.

I'm still baffled that a supposedly dead franchise is getting so many views on Youtube. Is it just the Youtube Kids algorithm feeding it to bored kids who want to watch hatchlings running around? Or is it coming from older people who remember the franchise? If it's the former, then it actually is encouraging because it suggests that a new generation of children are getting introduce to LBT through these Youtube clips, years after the series' heyday on DVD. Perhaps that would lay the groundwork for new entries to be produced?

We may enjoy hating on the channel, but it may have accidentally done something good after all.

This thread is for any fanart drawn from my LBT/Outer Wilds crossover quest, The Lands Beyond, currently ongoing on Sufficient Velocity and coming to FF.net as a pure fanfiction in the future.

First up is a preliminary cover by the GoF's very own The Mr E!



Artstation Link

An idea I've had for a while is "spicing up" the world of LBT by escaping the boundaries of the Mesozoic and adding creatures from the preceding geological era - the Paleozoic, specifically the Permian period that immediately preceded the Triassic. It was a strange and fascinating period of Earth's history that has been overlooked by pop culture. What is most unique is that it was dominated by synapsids, which split off from a shared ancestor with reptiles around 318 million years ago and are the ancestors of mammals. Early synapsids such as, most famously, Dimetrodon were quite reptilian in appearance (though they still possessed the enlarged canine teeth that reptiles lack), but by the end of the Permian, advanced synapsids had evolved a more warm-blooded metabolism and fur.



The world of the late Permian was one where wolf-like furry predators called Gorgonopsids preyed on their scalier synapsid cousins while the trees were occupied by creatures like Suminia that greatly resembled primates - including prehensile tails and opposable thumbs!



Now, what if these creatures managed to persist past the end-Permian extinction in some corner of LBT's world, even if they preferred to hide from its Saurian inhabitants? Suminia in particular is interesting because in a world where non-human animals are anthropomorphized, these creatures could easily become adept tool-users and even become somewhat "civilized," though at a tribal level of development. Just some food for thought.

I took a look around the Hobbies board and noticed there was no thread dedicated to ongoing space exploration. As a lifelong follower of it, this obviously must be corrected!

To start, I wanted to discuss the launch of Artemis I, risen like a phoenix from the ashes of the Shuttle and Constellation. I remember following the latter program when I was a kid, only to be hit with disappointment when Constellation was cancelled and the new presidential administration made no concrete plans for manned deep space exploration. However, the renewed interest in the Moon that resulted in the beginning of the Artemis program has granted NASA much-needed direction that it lacked for decades, and I see a bright future ahead. Unless Elon Musk's antics screw it all up, of course, but I'd rather not think about that.


https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1592772202289430528

Last week, NASA took its first concrete step towards returning humans to the Moon with the launch of Artemis I, an unmanned test flight of the superheavy-lift Space Launch System and deep space Orion capsule that has launched the latter towards the Moon. I had the privilege of witnessing the launch in person at Kennedy Space Center, and I can say that it was a childhood dream come true for me.


https://twitter.com/NASA_Orion/status/1594852542097154048

Presently, Orion has just completed a powered flyby of the Moon and is about to enter a distant retrograde orbit, where it will stay for about two weeks before flying by the lunar surface a second time and returning back to Earth. So far, all systems have performed at or exceeding expectations - a remarkable accomplishment given the surprisingly troubled history of both Apollo and SLS' development. Artemis II, a manned flight to lunar orbit, is scheduled to launch in early 2024, depending on the results of Artemis I. TCombined with the activation of the James Webb Space Telescope last July, 2022 has shaped up to be a big year for space exploration.

Hello, all. I am gutza1, someone who has been in touch with one of the GoF's members, The Mr E, on Reddit for more than a year while serving as the "science advisor" for his ongoing fanfic, The War Before Time. I figured that, as he has many plans for the series, it might be good to establish a presence here so I can support him if needed. I also have a "fanfic" of my own cooking up that I'll be sharing relatively soon.

As for my background, I am 21 years old and currently an undergraduate student in my senior year studying materials science and engineering. Dare I say it, my childhood passion was not dinosaurs but space travel, as I grew up within driving distance of NASA's Kennedy Space Center and the possibility of exploring the cosmos captured my heart. I even wanted to study aerospace engineering in college, but eventually decided against it as I wanted a degree that was more broadly applicable.

My relationship with The Land Before Time is complicated to say the least. Even though I wasn't usually much of a dinosaur person as a kid, I watched a few of the sequels and fell in love with the characters and the strange, alien world they inhabited. Of course, my usual proclivities manifested as I would often daydream about the dinosaurs developing a technological civilization and scientific knowledge (little did I know that scientists had seriously considered this possibility - look up the "dinosauroid" or the Silurian Hypothesis to learn more). Thus, my childhood memories of LBT are fundamentally tied to exploration and scientific inquiry - something that I realized is a very different interpretation than many others here. When I saw VII and witnessed aliens make their presence in LBT, I was elated, as this was exactly something my space and science-obsessed child self had wanted all along. However, as time went on, I realized that the producers had a fundamentally different vision for the franchise than I wanted, and the TV show finally made me give up on it and move to other pastures.

I began to rediscover this part of my childhood after stumbling upon, of all things, a Hearts of Iron IV mod called "Equestria at War" that recast the world of My Little Pony as a fantasy dieselpunk setting. Playing it made me remember how I used to do something vaguely similar to the LBT world, and the memories started flooding back, helped in part by Jenny Nicholson's video. I also began to seriously do research into dinosaurs after having discovered the Silurian Hypothesis, and fell in love with the radical vision of the Mesozoic world put forth by modern science and works such as All Yesterdays. However, I didn't act much on it until I stumbled upon a drawing of Dagara, one of War Before Time's OCs, that The Mr E had posted on the r/dinosaurs subreddit. I nitpicked it a bit on its accuracy, but The Mr E instead asked me to give him feedback on Mentors of Yesteryear, WBT's prequel. I started reading and got hooked, and now I have remained in conversation with him for over a year. I can't say much about his future plans, but I think WBT has a bright future ahead of it.

In addition to my professed love of space travel, I am also an aspiring science fiction writer who has currently developed two settings: a hard sci-fi space opera, and an elaboration on my "civilized dinosaurs" ideas called Paravian, which is explores a species of dromaeosaur called Paravisapiens evolving sapience in the end-Cretaceous and developing industrial civilizations. Think of it as Mesozoic dieselpunk. I hope to develop it into an animated series at some point in the future.

As for my other interests, I have to admit that my first "fandom" experience was with Homestuck, which I discovered at 13. Despite its bad reputation it did make me interested in the power of 2D animation to tell more "adult" stories than is usually associated with the style. Currently, I am a major fan of BioWare RPGs such as Mass Effect and Dragon Age, as well as grand strategy games made by Paradox Interactive. I am currently the team leader on The Final Front, which is the space race patch of The New Order: Last Days of Europe: a narrative-driven alternate-history Cold War mod set in a dystopian timeline where the Axis powers won WW2 and the US is engaged in a three-way Cold War with them. I can talk more about my work on TNO somewhere else.

In the past few months, I have fallen in love with Outer Wilds, a space exploration adventure game set in a miniature solar system where you play as an astronaut stuck in an endless time loop who must solve the mystery of an ancient precursor civilization called the Nomai. This game has a unique style that blends the aesthetic of camping with physics-based gameplay and space travel. It was exactly the kind of experience I was desperately looking for when I watched LBT as a kid, and I regret that there was nothing like it when I was young. The LBT "fanfic" I mentioned I am working on previously is related to it - you'll see more in the future.

Anyway, feel free to ask me questions. I probably will be more of a lurker than anything, but I'm happy to connect with fellow fans of something that meant a lot to me as a kid.