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I actually watched this one. There's a possessed shark indeed, but it only appears in two or three scenes. Most of the movie is spent on some killer nun and a vampire blonde.

And the Shark Attack genre has plenty of similar "goldmines"

(Attack of)
the 2 Headed Shark
the 3 Headed Shark
the 5 Headed Shark
the 6 Headed Shark

It stops there, however. No 7 heads for now.

This might get really pretentious, pardon me. I've got no real scientific knowledge of any of this, I'm working mostly on a writer's sense of 'this seems kinda cool and also somewhat logical enough to convince a reading audience.' Soft science fiction, let's say.

Right. So, something with a totally different perception of time and space might not even consider mortality in the same way we do, right? It's a given, in a linear timeframe that sort of, marches forwards ahead that pretty much every system we see has the basis of taking energy --> using energy for movement --> running out of energy. You use energy in order to travel onwards until you run out of energy and die.

Assuming this sort of energy consumption is only a construct of a very specific and linear perception of time--our own perception of it, which we can't really do anything to diverge from (again, no science at all, here,)--maybe other 'sapients' with different presences in spacetime would respond totally differently.

The Tralfamadorians do play with this a little bit: they seem to be just as mortal as anyone else is and take their own impending deaths (and the fact that they destroy the whole universe accidentally) for granted. However, they don't really care, because they can just freely hop from their own death to their own birth however they please. I suppose from our own perspective, they might just look as mortal as we do, but with a really, really strange attitude towards it. A Tralfamadorian in a fight wouldn't even be all too concerned about dying--if they do, they can just hop back and enjoy that nice spa they were in a few days ago.

It's also just as likely that this sort of being wouldn't really be able to interact with us at all and just be like a sort of plant or a rock or a very smelly, electric wind. This is more realistic but it's a bit boring isn't it?
It's inherent, I suppose, for these aliens to have some degree of humanness, so that we can at least interact with them, have some kind of logical plot with them that isn't just an astronaut observing some interesting phenomena. It's more about what bits of humanness you want to remove and where.

Anyway, it's an interesting thing to consider: assuming there were sapient things out there that, for whatever reasons, didn't really respond to that survive/breed impulse, and they were close enough in intelligence to us so as to not be like a plant or something, how would that kinda, manifest? What other instincts would they have?

This is assuming a whole lot of things, I suppose. Like I said, awfully soft science. I'm looking at it more, I suppose, from a philosophical viewpoint? Could be fun, anyhow.

These are pretty much all regarding my characters, and there's some dark humor in here, so consider yourself warned.

*I will not tamper with Allanya's brooch.
**Having a severely traumatized assassin swearing eternal vengeance on you is not pleasant.
**I will not tamper with Aelis's necklace.
***I will not tamper with any agent's keepsakes.

*No matter how funny her reaction is, or how much I like Owl City, I will not harass Allanya with Thunderstruck.
**I will not harass Feloriel with it either.

*Harassing Falloren with Ghost of a Rose is a qvpx move if ever there was one. It wasn't funny the first time, and it certainly won't be funny the millionth.
**Same goes for I May Not Awaken.
***Or any song that could even remotely be interpreted as having those sorts of themes. She's already been dragged into FicPsych once, it doesn't need to happen again.

*Sneaking into Feloriel's RC while she's out and cutting the sleeves off all of her dresses is not remotely funny and will probably end in me hiding from the vengeance of a ticked-off Death Domain cleric.

*No matter what Ava says, Aelis does not need to get laid.

*The Floating Hyacinth does not need to be reminded about how Nowhere and Faylise showed up at HQ.

*I will refrain from continuously gifting Ailienas temporary kid's tattoos. She's quite happy with her current tattoos.

*If I manage to figure out that it's currently Father's Day, I will not point this fact out to Alantha.
**As a rule of thumb, pointing out that it's any relative's day to someone who has lost that relative is unkind.

*I will not arrange for Iria to be sent on a mission to the Lovecraft-verse.

*Yes, "Shiznee" is a slightly ridiculous-sounding name for a god. No, I will not point this out to Matteo or Nievelle.

-I will never perform any experiment that has the potential to cause a Grey Goo Scenario.

-I will not utter the phrase "it's laundryverse" with regards to a random piece of tech Makes-Things is fixing unless it's true.

-...The same applies to technicians who are not makes-things.

-I will not paint the mark of Slaanesh on Thoth's Door.

-...or any other 40k agent's door.

-I will not try and convince others to do this either.

-I will not paste the words "GET ON WITH IT AND SHPX ALREADY" to Gall and Derik's door.

-I will especially not paste the same to Nume and Ilraen's door.

-SCP-294 replicas are not acceptable gifts.

-Putting a replica Weeping Angel outside the Aviator's door is not funny.

-stop laughing.

-No, this is not the work of an "enemy stand."

-I will no longer burst into Interal Affairs committees and shout "OBJECTION!" while playing dramatic music whenever the opportunity arises.

-In fact, shouting "OBJECTION" and playing dramatic music in any court-like environment is generally not permitted (exceptions granted to Phoenix Wright Verse agents, because DoSAT hasn't worked out how to stop the music from playing yet)

-Literally nothing is "just as planned."

-It definitely not "just according to keikaku"

-I will not use unconcious and/or dead bodies to recreate "Loss."

-If a giant ball is rolling through the hallways, I will help my fellow agents, not don a hat and start whistling the "Indiana Jones" theme.

-This is definitely your final form.

-I will not bribe DoI to send "Cory in the House" missions to agents specializing in anime.

-I will no longer quote "Dirty Harry" at Sues.

-Nuking Ghandi expies as a "pre-emptive strike" is no longer acceptable.

-The phrase "It'd not that I like you or anything, b-b-baka" is never acceptable for use.

Have some double-deep-fried B emojis!

Have a transmogrifier gun and a Real Knife!

--I will not mention the name, "Jaycacia."
--I will not think about the name, "Jaycacia."
--I will not know about the name, "Jaycacia."
----If I do, I will promptly erase my memory before I bring it up by accident with veteran agents in the cafeteria.
----If I fail to do so, I will not complain when I am painfully disguised as a bloody stain on the cafeteria floor, nor will I complain about being so near J*y**c*a's remains.
--On a similar note, I will not mention or think about or even know about "Fanfic Land" or "Fanfic World."
----If I do, I will not bring it up with agents who have been terrorized by those websites.
--I will not attempt to introduce the Badfic Games or Shipfest into the PPC. Just because my author does something doesn't mean I have to do it too. Yes, even if I am a self-insert.
--I will not attempt to exploit naïve or gullible or emotionally vulnerable agents' vulnerabilities. The odds that someone really cares about them and will be Not Amused are far too high.

...but I have to vote for Fortune Cookie Prophecies.

Sammy:
--I will not challenge enemies to a Gunpla battle.
--I will not challenge anyone and anything that inconveniences me to a Gunpla battle even if I'm joking because it gets old.
--I will not attempt to build a functioning full-size version of any mobile suit I come up with. DoSAT is not a spare parts bin and constructing a functioning mobile weapon is not kitbashing.
--I will not break my home canon, should I be assigned to a mission there, by letting canons know that they are cameos from other canons. It'd be mean anyway.
--I will not attempt to synthesize urple spraypaint for any reason.
--I will not build Gunpla based off of other agents unless they want me to. Also, superiority in Gunpla battle doesn't mean one Agent is stronger than another if they fight for real; I will not have "agent-deathmatches-by-proxy" using PPC-themed Gunpla.
--I will not ask Leonidas if I'm in range for his to-hit re-roll aura ability whenever I drop something.

Leonidas:
--I will not execute unsuspecting magic-using canons (in a canon where such beings exist) for being unsanctioned psykers, even if magic is heresy. I also will not attempt to capture and interrogate Sues in the nearest available dungeon rather than killing them outright
--I will not keep my partner awake by reciting litanies until dawn as there are no Chaplains here to chastise me for failing to do so.
--I will not eat Sue brains even if doing so would give me a tactical advantage by gaining their memories.
--I will not fire overcharged plasma cannons if it is dark out.*
--My partner Samuel is not an Initiate, he is equal in rank to myself as far as the PPC is concerned. I should not train him like a Space Marine Scout by sending him on covert ops missions into "enemy territory" including Thoth's RC.
--I will not attempt to commit manslaughter against Agent Thoth by "accidentally" leaving my sword's power field engaged while sparring. Or by doing so intentionally.
--I will not react with aggression or violence to anyone who mispronounces the term "Space Marines" or implies anything but unflinching loyalty in regards to my Chapter's history in my presence. Even if I really want to.
Space Wolves in missions do not count as actual Space Wolves for the purposes of ritual honor duels being required.
I will not attempt to duel a Sue or any other foe in melee if there is a more pragmatic alternative, even if I don't often get to use my sword
I am not allowed to shout "BLAM! HERESY" every time I use my sidearm to eliminate a target, no matter how strongly Samuel encourages me to do so.

*A reference to an oddity in the 8th Edition Warhammer 40,000 mechanics, where rolling 1's to hit on an overcharged plasma shot will kill the user--not just natural 1's, but any result of 1. Meaning that if the user is debuffed by, say, lack of visibility in the target area, causing them to subtract 1 from their hit rolls, they are more likely to accidentally blow themselves to the Emperor's embrace.

I will not play Benny Hill music in the hallway, even if there are no chase scenes currently happening, for fear of tempting the Ironic Overpower.

Welcome to the community! Here is: a donut that multiplies itself in a doubling manner!

I came across some true gems while browsing streaming services last night. I hope these make you laugh as hard as I did.

* The Sand (The... scariest thing I can imagine?)
* Sharkansas Women's Prison Massacre
* Paranormal Sex Tape (One can only ponder the logistics.)
* Piranhaconda
* Fortune Cookie Prophecies (I'm quaking in my boots.)
* Sharktopus vs. Whalewolf
* Killersaurus
* The Invoking (This is only funny if you know it's ripping off The Conjuring, but... c'mon. Really?)
* Evil Bong
* House of Bad (Very, um, specific.)
* Raiders of the Lost Shark
* Sharkenstein (Guys, I love these shark movie titles so. Much.)
* Easter Bunny Bloodbath
* Microwave Massacre (Again, I'm trying to work out the logistics here.)
* The Gingerdead Man (This is something of a cult classic, but I just love the concept so much.)
* Clowntergeist
* Shark Exorcist
* Bad vs. Worse (I have no jokes to make. I love this.)
* Serial Kaller (I love puns, but... GAD. *groans*)
* Don't F*** In The Woods (Actual title of an actual movie, guys.)
* Blood Is Blood (That is, in fact, true.)
* Decampitated
* Thankskilling
* Accidental Exorcist
* Flowerman (Again, sounds terrifying.)

Which one is your favorite? I think mine is Decampitated - this might, in fact, be the worst pun I have ever read with mine two eyes.

*If I'm going to be using Bleeprin and alcohol as makeshift grenades, I had better know what I'm doing.

*Yes, Nurse Falloren's jacket is eye-straining as all get-out. No, that does not mean stealing it and embroidering over each stripe in a corresponding Sue color is an acceptable prank.

*Sarah has a nest in the courtyard for a reason. Messing with it will probably end with me having an angry phoenix hot on my heels.

*I will not teach the Normal-Sized Temmies to swear.
**Even if I'm not intentionally teaching them anything, I will watch my language around the Normal-Sized Temmies.
***PPC agents have enough sanity-breaking fuvg to deal with already. Lolspeak swearwords are unnecessary.

*I will not paint any minis urple.
**I will not paint any minis wilver.
***I will not paint any minis any Sue color.

*Locking Lux and Ava in a room may get them out of everyone else's hair for a while, but it's probably not a good idea anyway. The IO would make sure at least one of them gets called for a mission.
**Starting a betting pool on who'll wear the other one out first is right out.
**Same goes for any two infamously ubeal agents.

*I will not purposefully create minis.
**No matter how much I want a pet.

*No matter how desperate I am for a break, if I don't actually need to get hauled off to FicPsych, I will not arrange for it to happen. The nurses are busy enough already.

**With anything.
***Even if it isn't an aphrodisiac.
**Ethics aside, Lux is enough if a handful already without getting her high.

***Allanya doesn't drink, anyway.

More specifically, a book series called 'The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier' (which is itself a sequel to a series called 'The Lost Fleet') by Jack Campbell. In it, first of all, all space battles are 4D, so not only do you have to figure out where the fleets are in space relative to each other, and the system they're fighting in, but also *when* which makes those battles both truly complicated and truly awesome and even now when I read through some of the more complex battles for the umpteenth time I have to put the book down and try to imagine the battle in my mind before continuing on. Could you pull that kind of experience through to the big screen? I don't know. But in book form it is pure awesome for any sci-fi fan.

Secondly the aliens in 'The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier', if after reading my first point you think you might want to try the series' then I warn you, spoilers ahead. None of the three alien species that we encounter in the TFL:BTF series can be described as thinking like humans. One of the main characters introduces a riddle when they are first talking about one of the alien species they encounter that exemplifies how alien the aliens are to humans. The riddle is this. "Feathers or Lead." (to give context, the story told is that you have to pick one of the two, however it is a devil giving you the choice and the devil is constantly changing his mind as to which answer is the right one). The point made is that, without being the thing giving you the choice you have no way of thinking like the thing that is giving you the choice. And that even if you can approximate it using human ideas and emotions it is still unlikely that you will ever be able to fully understand the thing and the things context behind the things choice.

...I don't know how well I've explained that.

Novastorme.

-Giving a Flower plant food as a holiday present is only funny once.
-DoSAT is trained to fix consoles, CADs, and other PPC tech. Agent Evie, despite her intelligence and occasional technopathy, is not.
--Also, do you really want a GLaDOS expy toying with your machines?
-No matter how poetic it would be, I am not to give a RWBY Sue to Cinder, Salem, or Adam Taurus for assassination.
-There is no such thing as workman's comp in the PPC, and attempting to bring it up to the Flowers will only get me punishment.
--Even if I am a lawyer, not allowed to ask Legal for help creating a workman's comp fund.

I guess the easiest(?) way is to write (this one's more writing than visual) from the alien's viewpoint, but that requires rendering it down into a human-readable thought process. The other way is to have a human as your viewpoint, watching the alien act - but then you're likely to just end up with the alien as a random number generator. "Why yes, I respond to attack by reading a book, because that is the way of my people."

I guess, drawing on Larfen's comments, you could approach it as 'they respond predictably, but to different stimuli'. So where your human sees the odds in a battle as depending on things like weapons and tactics, the alien looks instead at... but what, though? Everything I can think of is either something a human should also consider, or something that just plain wouldn't be useful (yes, Mr Space Elf, it's very nice that you've calculated the horoscopes of the battle, but astrology is nonsense).

I think I'm winding up on 'different goals'. Humans' goals are, broadly, to survive and breed; a battle will play out very differently if both parties see (say) not disturbing the local radiation environment as more important than actually surviving. But... survive/breed is an evolutionary response to a hostile environment. You have to come up with some way to force a different response, because so far, most of life on Earth has followed that same path.

hS

Which is to say that, physiologically, you don't have to make the alien that different for it to feel alien. But if they have alien psychology... that's alien. Even if they look human. Especially because so often we end up with humans in rubber suits. Even if they're renderered in a more impressive way, that's all they really are, because they're still psychologically human. See: most fantasy races, most sci-fi races, etc.

The race I've seen that feels most alien to me, to this day, is probably the Soft Ones in Asimov's The Gods Themselves. For one thing, this is a race with three sexes. And Homestuck fans, put your hands down, Trolls are monosex, and have four relationship roles. The Soft Ones actually have three biological sexes. Not only that, but they're soft... or rather, immaterial. They can pass through things. Reproduction occurs by passing inside of each other.

And of course the society is also alien. Not as alien as it could be (partly because this was the 70s and partly because writing truly alien aliens wasn't the point of the story). And then there's The Big Twist, which really turns everything we know about the Soft Ones inside out. But I don't want to spoil it.

Honestly, they're still not that alien. Big parts of the human psyche remain. But I think that just shows how close to human models we stick: that I can see something still kinda human as waay more alien then most things.

I'm a big bloody fan of that story concept honestly! I think it might make for better short story territory--it could be told in the exact kind of condensed chunk short stories are good for to get the meaning across, and I'm not really sure sort of, uh, how the filming would work. Sort of, cutting between the POVs but not explaining it, kinda hiding it? Iunno. I'm a writerman and know nothing of moving images. I also just really like short stories.
Although, those are also some pretty powerful images to see actually filmed in action.

My own personal writing project and worldbuilding is centred around this stuff. I think it's somewhat understandable that most fiction is pretty anthropocentric, what with being written by humans, for humans, but I've always been interested in--at least trying to--shatter that human-centric feeling. It makes complete logical sense, though, still, I always do feel a bit disappointed when every RPG puts humans as the default and boring 'choose +2 points where you want' race. What other species would be the default, after all?

I think a couple of great examples I'm personally very fond of are in Slaughterhouse-Five, though it is played a lot more farcical and satirical than in a real sense of worldbuilding. The Tralfamadorian perception of a human is actually kind of similar to the way your fella sees a human--as a long centipede kind of form, with a baby at one end and a dead old man at the other. The reason being that they of course perceive all moments of time at once.

The webcomic-ey sorta thing (It's in that Homestuck tradition of being a bit of a multimedia mess) Awful Hospital also looked brilliantly at this.
A big part of its worldbuilding is the sentience of everything, and how the universe is composed of the opposing perspectives of all things. It's described as like: on earth, we have a world where humans are born and make cars and drive them. At the exact same time, in the same space, there is a world where sentient cars are born in factories and are gifted central nervous system-creatures to help pilot them around until their death. Neither of these perspectives are wrong: they both coexist and are brought into being by being perceived.
So on.
It makes a point, even, that when a group of humans form into a crowd--that crowd is, for a brief moment, a singular, sentient creature, that dies immediately when that crowd disperses.

I've been working on the legal, encyclopedic definition of a human being from the context of this worldbuilding. This is what I've figured so far:
3 Compressional Involuntarily Drifting Oxygen-Respiring Tubiformous Carbonoform

'3 Compressional Involuntary Drifting' refers to the human experience of linear time--involuntarily moving through three 'compressions' (a sort of combined measurement of space-time, which are essentially the same thing) at a time. As opposed to Compressional Sweeping where something simultaneously exists in all these compressions at once, or Compressional Hopping, where something just sort of pops between them.
Oxygen-respiring is obvious, tubiformous refers to the fact that a human is basically a big tube, morphologically not really distinct from a worm other than a bunch of added floppy bits, and carbonoform refers to, uh, us being carbon.

I think it's a bit clunky, I don't know. I'd be interested in seeing everyone else's thoughts on a sort of, bored bureaucratic alien definition of a human.

So I don't think we'll be able to make it. Alas. :(

hS

We, the fans of space-year 2019, are spoiled.

Back in the proverbial Day, you could wow your audiences with very minor deviations from the real world. "Begads!" your Victorian reader might say. "A Machine which can travel through Time? What manner of mind could conceive such a thing?!"

Nowadays? A movie like, let's say Guardians of the Galaxy, has shapeshifting spaceships, weird hexagonal jump-gate travel, a talking tree, and a glowy rock that lets four people blow up a dude with a hammer. Do we go "inconceivable!"? No - we go 'oh, cool, they reskinned a wormhole and got a shiny macguffin of power'. Spoiled.

What would it take to give today's SFX-hardened audiences a truly alien experience - something that's so outside our frame of reference that we can't fully comprehend it (and not just because it's badly-written, I'm looking at you, every time travel plot ever)? Ideas on a postcard, please.

For myself, I'm thinking of a proper 4-dimensional entity - one which doesn't simply move freely through time, but exists through time. Much like how a 2D plane scanning across, say, me, would see some pretty weird cross-sections, your human viewpoint character would see an ever-changing temporal cross-section of the entity.

To make a story out of this: present the film from both viewpoints, alienating them from each other to such an extent that the viewer doesn't easily clock that they're actually observing the same events. To the entity, a human walking down a corridor would be a continuous blur, like a long-exposure photograph, but in sound as well as vision; it's only when it focusses in temporally that it can see any real features.

What would it feel like for a nanosecond of your life to be subjected to a temporal microscope? How could such an entity possibly come to understand that some of the air movement around our human is significant communication, when it can barely understand the idea that the air is moving at all?

To make the surprise really work: make the entity human, or at least human-shaped. Actual Human lives through almost a psychological horror film, haunted by something incomprehensible; meanwhile, Entity Human is a scientist studying the strange phenomenon of a temporally-constrained being. For bonus points, 'human walking forward while time passes' would look the same from a non-temporal perspective as 'entity walking forward without moving through time' from ours - so they're both seeing similar effects, to add to the viewer's confusion.

I'm definitely envisaging this as something you'd need to watch at least twice, to figure out what (and which) you were seeing at any given time. Hopefully more than that.

Any thoughts/actual examples of this (I doubt it's been done on film, but as a book maybe)? And, as said, any other 'properly alien' ideas bouncing around your heads that you want to share?

hS

I will not try to flirt with Agent Kat in front of her brother.

I will not try to talk to Agent Edward when he is in a bad mood.
~Or even in an acceptable mood.

I will not make any uncomplimentary remarks about birds in the hearing of Agent Kat.