Data Sparrow @datasparrow - Tumblr Blog

Posts

Greetings from Mankind's Reach

(We know, we know, we're late.)

#data sparrow #science fiction #scifi #hard scifi #mecha #tabletop games #indie tabletop #indie gamedev #no ai allowed

oneheadtoanother

frowny-clowny

Isn’t this lancer or something

oneheadtoanother

frowny-clowny

Isn’t this lancer or something

depsidase

cecilias-cool-stuff

Never stop hating

charlesoberonn

It's very clear that Andrew Tate and other "redpill" influencers of his ilk didn't understand The Matrix (or maybe didn't even watch it) it they think that escaping the Matrix means living a life of luxury and fame. They got it exactly backwards.

Escaping the Matrix in the movie means living a life of hardship and discomfort. But it's a life that is full of genuine experiences and connections that aren't designed to exploit you.

To hammer the point even more, the motivation of the traitor character is to live a life of luxury and fame inside the Matrix, not caring that it's fake.

lookinggoodinplaid

I think a lot of those people see escaping the Matrix as "you get to warp reality as you see fit and have superpowers." They see privilege as the reward for their efforts of understanding the systems in control of our world.

They forget that it means knowing your body is still in the real world, fighting against the cold and metal that want you dead for as long as you live outside of their jurisdiction.

They don't want to escape the Matrix. They just want to rule the Matrix. They want to be Agent Smith and think they're Neo.

yokolate

Motoko Kusanagi The Ghost in the Shell PV3 (July 7, 2026)

userfinalgirls

Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley

ALIEN (1979) dir. Ridley Scott

the-watcher-in-the-sky

Bruce Pennington

charnel-grounds

“For her — All seven deadly sins!”

Metropolis | 1927 | dir. Fritz Lang

yokolate

THE GHOST IN THE SHELL (TV Promo) - July 2026

⠀

mearchy

disney may have inadvertently created the single funniest reverse advertisement scheme of all time. EVERY SINGLE ad break for The Beauty FX started with an advertisement for botox and was followed shortly by one of those ubiquitous advertisements for GLP-1s. my father and i were in hysterics. poob is forcing you to watch advertisements for the torment nexus in between segments of their new live action adaptation of classic sci fi comic Do Not Create the Torment Nexus. literally on my television a shot of someone who had just taken a fictional miracle drug to become beautiful screaming and writhing on the floor with their organs and teeth and blood spilling out, cutting directly to a real life advertisement for a drug that makes you beautiful. don’t worry body is per fect place for beautiful miracle drug. miracle drug has no problems ever in body. what the fuck is a metaphor. oh god i can’t breathe

cassettefuturism

astragifs

probablyasocialecologist

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

wire-smith

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

syzygystardust13

Honestly i think it's because fixing the Earth requires

1. Grappling with responsibility

2. (and this one is more crucial to me) what to do with all the people who will be killed by the solution.

What I mean by that is if scientists showed up at another star system and found "Not-Earth choked by climate change" they'd be ecstatic because it is, (usually in these stories) uninhabited. And they can crash an ice-asteroid into the planet or change the atmosphere and it doesn't matter if it becomes horribly uninhabitable for a bit because they are in a epaceship/dome/whatever that can support a small team.

But if you do that on EARTH you have to grapple with all the people who are going to DIE because of the solution or while waiting for it. Or you have the separate problem of creating life support systems not for a small team of scientists but for a global population. So the problem isn't just "fix earth" but "fix Earth while keeping it habitable enough to not commit mass murder" and that's trickier and could be seen as less "fun" (Idk I think that would be a cool story but I've been told my tastes are unusual and unpopular so?)

I will say I'm all for "Fix Earth" as a real life position because...we aren't living in a scifi novel and we DO need to care about this planet and it WILL be easier to fix Earth than to terraform Mars. (And let's be real, Musk only cares about what looks cool and expensive, not what's a functional solution).

But I can see why in apocalypse scenario sci fi they don't take that route very often.