That rollercoaster of emotions when you have to pick an important dialogue choice in a game! I really like games with a good story. Do you have any that you enjoy and could recommend? Witcher 3 is one of my favourites.
i learned a while ago that the whole "most of the stars we see in the sky are actually already dead because they're so far away that we're seeing them as they were thousands of years ago" thing is a myth because stars live so long that it's unlikely many, if any, of them have burned out yet, but i'm still glad that myth exists because there's just something about the thought of the sky as a graveyard of stars that gets to me
It’s interesting because one day that will be true for some people in some planet out there, but we are so young, the universe is so young, that we live in a time when we get to see more stars born than we ever will see die. There’s poetry in looking up and seeing a star graveyard, but I think there’s also poetry in looking up and seeing a star nursery.
Random thing for people to consider is that since Laika is the saint of one way trips should Felicette be known as the saint of safe landings since she did make it back to the ground safely
tu LANCES félicette ? tu lances son corps comme la fusée ? oh ! oh ! prison pour les scientifiques ! prison pour les scientifiques pendant Un Mille Ans !
I’ve said “I hate this” so many times on this website, and never actually meant it, because “I hate this” is just shorthand for ‘this is an example of a meme given a twist I wasn’t expecting with intent to surprise’. Which is, in of itself, a meme on this site. God damn it.
But this… This is something else.
The rapidity of a meme’s introduction to its zenith to its decline is so rapid that in ten years, you’ll need a damn twenty-page manual to explain this. It’ll be as unfunny and hard to explain as jokes in Shakespeare plays, except even more inexplicable because fuck, at least Shakespeare’s jokes are usually about anal or fucking your mother, good wholesome sex jokes we can all get behind.
For the love of fuck, how do you explain loss.jpg? How do you explain gun?
it is a YMCA reference - that’s one of the 6 memes being represented here
ok let me see if i can break this down easily. YMCA is the easiest place to start - the song itself has become a meme over time with people changing the lyrics to reference other pop cultural events. so YMCA is meme one (1)
this first lyric replacement (”take the breadsticks and run”) is a reference to the tumblr meme ‘stuffing breadsticks into my purse’. i think everyone remembers that one so i wont bother to explain it. that’s meme two (2)
“man door hand hook car door” is a meme of its own, a creepypasta from i dont remember when. it was a terrible stupid retelling of the generic ‘stuck in a car while hook handed man tries to kill us’ story so the stupid title caught on for memorability. that in and of itself is meme three (3)
‘gun’ is… yeah i dont know how to explain gun. long story short you add gun to the end of a phrase instead of what you expect the last word to be. its shock funny. its everywhere but its popular to add to “man door hand hook car door” for.. some reason? gun is meme four (4)
and the thing is, this four meme combo is something thats gone around before. meme combos are, itself, a meme. which means taking this meme combo and mixing in another meme actually becomes meme five (5)
which leaves us at loss.jpg. loss.jpg was a terrible bad comic supposed to be about some tragic event, but it was presented so poorly literally no one takes it seriously, and for some reason recreating the four-panel setup has become popular. so thats meme six (6)
(but i need to add that this is the greatest version of loss.jpg i think i’ve ever seen. the initial ‘young man’ lines up with the guy bursting through the door, and the shock meme ‘gun’ matches the shock scene of the woman in the hospital and idk if OP even thought about that but it makes this just so much better)
it might also just be a coincidence due to loss.jpg’s format but the whole white minimalist four-panel setup is also suspiciously reminiscent of those early 2000’s rage comics
ok but DID I come back wrong, or did you build up an idealized version of me in your head that was easy to love while I was dead? but now that I'm real and alive and complicated again, you resent me for not being as simple and compliant as a mere memory?
do you resent me for coming back "wrong," or for coming back at all?
i see we are all feeling completely normal about my tags:
#did i come back wrong or were you just bad at loving me from the start? #did i come back wrong or is my crime that i came back the same #did i come back wrong or did you decide on your own that there was always something wrong with me? #and now you're frustrated I survived the traumatic death that was somehow supposed to fix me
And God said, "Behold! I have created the fourth primordial force: the weak interaction!"
And the angels all clapped and nodded politely, and there was a long silence; and finally Verchiel, the Angel of Grace, spoke up and asked, "Er, what exactly does it do, O Fashioner?"
And God said, "What do you mean, 'what does it do?' It's the fourth fundamental force of the universe."
And Verchiel said, "You mentioned that. Um. But it's just that the other three sort of have a brand, you know? Gravity helps build large-scale structures, acts over vast cosmic distances, shapes time and space. The strong force is secret, hidden, binding together quarks and all that. Electromagnetism, very cool stuff, somewhere in between. We're all big fans of the whole magnetic monopole double bluff, very clever. But, er. What does this 'weak interaction' do?"
And God said, "It mediates radioactive decay. Sort of."
And Verchiel said, "Radioactive decay? All radioactive decay?"
And God said, "No. Just some kinds."
And Zephaniel, the Chief of the Ishim spoke, and he said, "A whole independent force just to mediate some kinds of radioactive decay?"
And God said, "Well. Not totally independent. Technically it's related to electromagnetism."
And Zephaniel said, "Wait, it's not even a real force?"
And God said, "It's totally a real force. It's just that it's one aspect of a combined electromagnetic and weak force. An electro-weak force, if you will."
And Metatron, the Celestial Scribe, scratched his head at this, but said nothing.
And Cambiel, the Angel of Transformation, said, "Maybe you can walk us through it from the top."
And God Sighed an immense Sigh, and said, "All right, fine.
"So the way it works is that all of space and time is permeated by a field that has imaginary mass."
And Cambiel said, "Imaginary mass, O Generous Provider?"
And God said, "Yes, imaginary mass. It's tachyonic, d'you see?"
And Sarathiel, the Angel of Discipline, said, "Wait a minute, I thought we agreed nothing was going to travel faster than light? All that 'c' business and the whole Lorentz transformation thing. What's happening with that?"
And God said, "Let me finish. The field is tachyonic. The particles in the field all move slower than light."
And Sarathiel had to think about this for a second.
And God said, "The point is, a field with imaginary mass has a non-zero vacuum expectation value."
And this really gave Sarathiel trouble, since he had never been very good at math.
And God, seeing this, went back to explain. "Most fields, like the electromagnetic field, have no effect when they are at their lowest energy state. It's like they're not there at all. If you give a field imaginary mass, then it vanishes only when it's at a very high energy state, and at a low energy state, it has a nonzero value everywhere."
And Sarathiel nodded, but he was confused, because he didn't understand why God would create such a thing.
But Verchiel thought he saw where God was going with this, and he was amazed.
"Truly, you are cunning beyond measure, O Only One Certainly Sound and Genuine in Truth! Only now do I understand your design! For in order to make the universe homogenous and isotropic, it is necessary that all large-scale fluctuations in temperature and mass must be evened out early in the history of the cosmos; and therefore, you have designed a field which will rapidly expand space after the Big Bang, many orders of magnitude in brief moments, and then swiftly and spontaneously decay as it gives up the energy it began with, giving rise to radiation and particles of all kinds as it does, which will condense into the material universe! It is a wonder to behold."
And God said, "What? No. I mean I did, but this isn't the inflaton field I'm talking about. This is something else."
And Verchiel said, "Wait, it's not?"
And God said, "No, I'm going to use a different field to drive cosmic inflation. The properties of this field are totally different."
And now Verchiel was also confused, and lapsed into silence.
And God said, "Like I was saying, this field is a scalar field with imaginary mass, and it does spontaneously decay to a ground state with a non-zero value. But it's not the inflaton field. Instead it combines with the W1, W2, W3, and B bosons."
And Metatron began to flip back through the pages of the Heavenly Record trying to figure out where he'd lost the thread.
And Zephaniel said, "The what bosons?"
And God said, "The W1, W2, W3, and B bosons. I'm sure I mentioned them. You know, the massless bosons?"
And Zephaniel said, "I'm pretty sure we only talked about the W+, W-, and Z0 bosons. All of which you said were going to have mass, O Owner of All Sovereignty."
And God said, "Yes, but this is how they get them, you see. Once this field acquires a nonzero value everywhere, the massless bosons interact with it and get mass. Well, some of them do. They turn into the W+, W-, and Z0 boson. And the photon."
And Zephaniel said, "…and the photon, O Accepter of Invocation?"
And God said, "Well, I did say I was going to unify the electromagnetic force and the weak interaction, didn't I? This is how. Above the critical temperature--right now I'm thinking 10^15 K, but I'm open to feedback on that one--electromagnetism and the weak force act as a single unifying force. Below that temperature, the field gets a nonzero value, you get three massive bosons to mediate the weak interaction, and the photon pops out seperately."
And Zephaniel said, "That seems… a bit overly complicated, doesn't it, O Reinstater Who Brings Back All?"
And God said, "No, it's exactly what we need. Look, that way the W and Z bosons have something to do, but the weak interaction still only travels short distances. Gravity is still the star of the show on cosmic scales, as it were. But now quarks and leptons can swap their flavor!"
And Zephaniel said, rather weakly, "Their… flavor, O Source of Good?"
And God said, "It's this new quantum number I'm trying out, to give the three generations of matter more unique identities."
And Cambiel said, "Three generations of matter? Now I'm really confused."
And God said, "I'm sure I mentioned this. You've got the lightest quarks and leptons, and then two heavier versions of each that can decay into the lighter versions."
And Cambiel said, "What do they do? New kinds of chemistry, is it?"
And God said, "Well, no. Mostly they just decay in a couple microseconds. Or even faster."
And Zephaniel began to rub his temples, and Cambiel sniffed.
And Cambiel said, "This all seems a bit ad hoc to me. Not really the stuff of an elegant and obviously ordered Creation. Why not have four generations of matter? Why not a trillion?"
And God began to grow irritable, and said, "Well, that's not really up to you, now is it? We're going to have three generations of matter, and the electroweak force, and that's that!"
And Zephaniel said, "As long as we are unifying fundamental forces, perhaps we could somehow also unify the electroweak interaction with the strong interaction, or even gravity."
And God hesitated saying, "Well, I haven't decided about that yet. I'm not sure I want gravity to be quantized, you know? Seems to take some of the geometric elegance out of general relativity."
And now it was Zephaniel's turn to sigh, and he bowed his head. "As you wish, O Possessor of Authority of Decisions and Judgement."
Uriel, the Angel of Judgement, looked at the blueprints for the cosmos again, and squinted. And he said, "Why are we doing this inflation business again?"
And Verchiel, the Angel of Grace, said, "Because the Eternal Spirit, Worshipped by All, With Absolute Power over All Matters, Natures, and Events wants the cosmos to be flat."
And Uriel said, "Flat? It's got three dimensions--no, four. I hate to say it, but I think the Ever-Adept has goofed on this one."
And Verchiel said, "No, not flat flat, flat in a geometric sense. Parallel lines and all that. Triangles whose corners add up to 180 degrees. Wossname. Euclidean."
And Uriel said, "We really have to stop naming things after mortals that won't be born for billions of years. It gets confusing."
And Verchiel said, "The point is, the universe has got to be flat. If it's too dense, triangles will be able to have more than 180 degrees in their angles, and spacetime'll be curved up like a four-dimensional sphere, and it'll collapse back in on itself. If it's not dense enough, it'll be curved out the other way, triangles will go all pointy, and spacetime'll be infinite and the expansion will accelerate. He Who Is Able To Do Everything would like it to be flat so that the expansion of the universe settles down to a constant rate."
And Uriel said, "I see. Well, that's easy. We just need to get rid of all this clutter. This energy and mass and other nonsense, that's what's causing all this spacetime curvature."
And Verchiel shook his head, and said, "No, no, that stuff's the whole point of Creation in the first place. It just needs to be spread out evenly enough and it all needs to balance out, so that on the whole, the universe is mostly flat."
And Uriel huffed, and said, "Well, it sounds like The Giver of Life doesn't know exactly what he wants in the first place. If matter and energy are going to curve spacetime, including matter and energy is going to make spacetime all lumpy, and it's going to be very tricky to make it all flat."
And Verchiel nodded, and said, "That's what inflation is for. Look here. We start out with a hot, dense universe, right? Matter and energy and stuff. And an inflaton field with lots of energy. Big vacuum energy, makes space expand by about 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times in 10^-32 seconds. Cools it off a bit, too. Temperature goes down by about 100,000 times. Smooths out all the lumps from initial quantum fluctuations and all that. Flat spacetime. Neat, hey?"
And Uriel frowned, and said, "I thought you said this universe was supposed to have stuff in it."
Verchiel nodded. "It is," he said. "That's why it starts out all hot and dense and whatnot."
And Uriel said, "Well. It won't be after all that. Your spacetime will be flat, because it will be empty."
And Verchiel said, "Ah, but that's the beauty. Inflation stops, and when it does, the inflaton field loses all that energy. It turns into stuff again. Nice, hot, thick stuff!"
And Uriel examined the plans closely, and tapped his chin with a pencil. "So you're saying the universe is going to start out hot and dense. Then you're going to make it almost completely empty. Then make it hot and dense again. Just to make it flat?"
And Verchiel said, "Well, flat and all the same temperature."
And Uriel, exasperated, said, "Well, why can't it all just start at the same temperature?"
And Verchiel said, "Well, to be honest, we haven't worked that far back yet. We're still working out the details of the first 10^-43 seconds or so. But this way we can also hide all the magnetic monopoles and cosmic strings and things."
And Uriel said, "Are you telling me you designed this god-awful kluge and you haven't even worked out how the universe starts yet?"
And Verchiel got a bit defensive, and said, "Look, you try designing a universe with sentient apes in it! God's got this whole Plan, you see? The Great Saga of Creation, all mapped out. There's going to be ups and downs and Morality and Suffering and Redemption, and kings and tyrants and evolution and, er, economics and things…"
And Uriel said, "Economics?"
And Verchiel said, "And other things! Important things!"
And Uriel said, "If you say so."
And Verchiel said, "Anyway, it's our job to help The Guide to the Right Path realize His vision. And He has decreed it must be flat."
And Uriel said, "Right. Flat. Somehow. Not too flat. There's got to be lumps. That's very important for some reason."
And Verchiel said, "They are interesting lumps."
And Uriel said, "Interesting lumps. If you say so. And this was the best you could come up with?"
And Verchiel said, "It works, doesn't it?"
And Uriel said, "No, it doesn't work. See this number you've added here? This little cosmological constant? Expansion is going to start accelerating again after a few billion years. Your universe isn't so flat after all."
And Verchiel said, "Oh, don't worry about that. That's just a placeholder for dark energy."
And Uriel set down his pencil on his heavenly drafting table, and took off his glasses, and neatly folded them up and set them down, too. Then he looked at Verchiel very seriously and said, "What, in the name of The Timeless, The Patient, the Ever-Returning, the Illustrious, and the Most Supreme, is dark energy?"
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the Earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters.
And the Spirit of God looked around and said, "It's a bit muggy, isn't it?"
And the Spirit of God, who was also one of the angels whose job it was to do the actual grunt work, was not in a terrific mood. Because the Spirit of God--whose name was Raguel, and whose official title was Angel of Justice--would really have preferred at that moment to be up in Heaven, in the spheres of eternity beyond time, space, and reality, enjoying a nice, cold glass of something with bubbles. Instead, however, he was hovering over the waters, which were murky and dim, and trying to see if anything interesting was happening like it was supposed to. But the atmospehre was choked by volcanic ash and meteoric dust, and the Sun was still pretty dim--ergo all that darkness--and Raguel was pretty sure he was wasting his time. In his right hand he held a great rod of iron, which he was using to poke at the shallow bits in kind of a desultory way.
And as Raguel was poking, there was a loud crack and a burst of lightning, and Azazel, the Angel of Death, appeared in the air beside Raguel.
"Sorry I'm late!" he said. "Gosh, I completely lost track of time. Been out whacking neutron stars together for fun, you know. Lovely watching all those heavy elements go whoosh! all over the place."
"You're not late," Raguel said with some displeasure. "Nothing's happened yet."
"What, nothing?" Azazel looked down at the surface of the deep. "How can you tell?"
"You just can," Raguel said. "It's still all just amino acids and nucleobases. Not so much as an enzyme yet."
Azazel looked at his watch. "Huh. The All-Subtle isn't usually late."
"Pah," Raguel said. "The Ever-Adept's got nothing to do with it. This is all down to Adriel's boys in the astronomy department. They were five hundred million years late delivering the first Population I stars, and it's all been chaos since. This whole place is a rush job. Look!"
He waved one shimmering arm out over the endless expanse of sea.
"They forgot the continents! Not so much as a granite boulder peeking above the waves!"
Azazel looked around. He did seem to remember something about how Earth was going to have dry land, divided from the sea.
"Maybe the mortals will be… aquatic?" Azazel suggested.
Raguel shook his head. "They have their excuses. 'Oh, we'll fix it with plate tectonics, we'll build the cratons up over time. We'll have the first super-continent ready in just a few hundred million years!' I've seen the drawings. Their 'super-continent' is barely the size of Australia."
"Oh dear," Azazel said. Then, "What's an Australia?"
"Doesn't matter," Raguel said. "If the biology department fucked this up, there won't be an Australia, or much of anything else for that matter. It'll be HD 49674 all over again. Did you know this is the fifty-third planet in this galaxy that's supposed to have had life on it that's failed? At this rate if intelligent life ever does evolve, it's going to wonder why the universe is so damn empty."
"I imagine that the Giver of Life is, er… displeased?"
"He's not thrilled," Raguel said. "But you know how it is with Him. Soon enough he's off on his next idea. I think this might really upset him, though. He's been talking about these damn monkeys nonstop. He's got big plans for them. Language. Religion. Art. Science. Something called 'pickleball.' I'm not looking forward to breaking the news to Him."
"Oh, yes," Azazel said. "I suppose it gives me more time for supernova billiards. But… I don't know. I was kind of looking forward to the whole Angel of Death gig."
"Were you?" Raguel said. "Seems like a pretty grim task."
"Oh, I don't know," Azazel said. "There should be lots of travel. Lots of meeting new people."
"Briefly," Raguel said.
"Your problem," Azazel said, drawing himself up, "is that you don't appreciate the grand scope of things. The Plan as a whole. The elegance of a really good Divine Mystery."
"That's because I've seen how the sausage gets made," Raguel said. "You don't spend ten billion years trying to wrangle Powers and Dominions and subcontractors without developing a certain cynicism about all that. Without noticing that the Plan, such as it is, seems rather improvisational."
"I'm pretty sure that's blasphemy," Azazel said.
"Go report it to a priest," Raguel said. "Oh, wait, you can't, because they're never going to evolve in the first place."
"Someone's got a case of the Mondays," Azazel muttered. And Raguel was annoyed by this bit of snark, not least because Mondays had not been invented yet. So he poked Azazel with his iron rod.
Now Azazel became wrathful; and he yanked Raguel's iron rod from his hands. And Raguel said, "Hey! Give that back!" And Azazel held it away from him at arm's length and said, "Bite me." And the two angels scuffled for a bit, and Raguel tripped, and fell into the waters.
Azazel was embarrassed by his behavior, which did not befit the Left Hand of the Creator, and helped Raguel up. And they apologized to one another. And then Raguel looked down to wring some of the waters out of his shining white robes, and saw something stirring in the shallow end of the deep.
"Look!" he said.
Azazel gasped. Raguel's tumble had caused a ripple, which had perturbed a small clump of organic goo clinging to a rock. There, in a small pore in the rock, the first primitive cell was forming. The first life on Earth.
"Finally!" Azazel said. He raised his hands, and there was a thunderclap, and there appeared in them a scythe of black steel, whose blade was dark as night, whose edge was ruin.
"Not yet!" Raguel hissed. "It's just getting started!" For an agonizing few minutes, they watched this primitive proto-cell congeal, tremble, absorb some interesting molecules that were floating by in the primordial seas, and then--hestiantly, as if it was an actor not quite sure of its lines--begin to divide. Just as it pinched itself off in the middle, Azazel let the scythe fall. There was a whisper in the air that spoke of extinction, of grief, of the long silence at the end of time. Then two cells were sitting where once one had stood. And Azazel was holding something in his hand that sparkled with a faint blue light.
"Is that…?" Raguel began.
"A soul!" Azazel said. "They told me about these. I had no idea they would be so beautiful."
Raguel looked over Azazel's shoulder at it.
"Hello, soul!" Azazel said. "What is your name?"
The soul, whose earthly existence had been somewhat less than a quick cigarette break, sat in Azazel's palm and quivered. It said nothing.
"What do you do with them, anyway?" Raguel asked.
"Um. You know, I'm not sure," Azazel said. "Maybe I'll start a collection. We've got all that unused space up where we were going to put the true forms of reality, before we dropped the whole Platonism angle. Could probably fit a couple TREE(3) of souls up there."
"Shouldn't you check with somebody? Maybe these soul things are important."
"I'm sure it's fine," Azazel said. He manifested a small jar, and tipped the soul into it. He held it out to Raguel. "Souvenir?" he asked.
Raguel shook his head. "No," he said. "You're the Angel of Death, I think souls should be your department. But thanks. I guess this wasn't a total waste of an afternoon."
He was about to unmanifest, to return to the endless empyrean beyond, when he paused, and looked down at Azazel's scythe.
The last episode of the Mario 3 cartoon was taken place in France and they were in jail for some fucking reason (I was not paying attention) and they had "le slammer" over the jail and I laughed for 5 minutes straight like it was the funniest shit I've heard of. Its been days and I keep thinking about le slammer and I die laughing
I mean look, all I'm saying is the way all of you joined my party feels pretty submissive is all.
I didn't think too much of it at first, but we're 5 strong now and literally all of you just let me make all the decisions.
You're all 4 following directly behind me in a straight line wherever we go.
I'm the one who talks to everyone we ever meet in every town.
I buy the equipment.
I equip you which I thought was a strange perk of the position.
I even change your classes whenever I want and you all just kind of excitedly approve of whatever I decide for you.
I even tell you all what to do in combat like?? I get I'm the party leader but at this point I think I could tell you all to do whatever I possibly want and you'd just... obediently follow my word?
There's a new UN report that finds israel systemically sexually assaults Palestinians, and now israelis are calling it blood libel because the report mentions how hospitals were targeted, which prevent care for pregnant women.
theartofmadeline
stormborns
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