#startalk

[stariteart]

got tagged in this ask game by @possessedpasm and thought it’d be fun to answer in comic format (it was!)

choosing individual people to tag overwhelms me so i’ll open this up to anyone who wants to do it :)

text version below 👇

last book read? - the house of my mother by shari franke, already a pretty harrowing look into life as a child youtube star and i’m not even halfway through yet. next on the list is in the heart of the sea, nathaniel philbrick’s chronicle of the 1820 wreck of the whaling ship essex! big nonfiction fan

last series watched? - nirvana the band the show, but specifically the web series. me and some friends just finished watching it over discord and we’re moving onto the tv show and movie after that

last movie watched? - invasion of astro-monster (1965). not necessarily an amazing movie quality-wise and certainly not a serious one but that just made me love it more. it’s the one where godzilla does his goofy victory dance!

last song listened to? - araik babajanyan - “ashkhen”. really like the instrumentation and what i can only describe as a synthesizer jumpscare around the 33 second mark

what are you working on? - job hunting! and also getting back in the groove of making art regularly… i think it’s working

sweet or salty? - both! i like them even better together though, like with salted caramel… yum

coffee or tea? - i enjoy tea from time to time but i drink coffee way more often. with a good amount of cream and sugar because when it comes to this specifically i am mentally 13 years old

[a-typical]

“The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

[frxggie-baguette]

i'm compiling my tadc theory (which is currently a reblog chain) into one post for the sake of simplicity

tl;dr the beginning of each episode sets up a main theme/function that is called back to in the climax to the episode, and this same idea is how the show as a whole functions. this is also how they're going to leave the circus--taking everything they learned in a very full circle way.

[feb 27, 2025]

ok so i was thinking

the main goal of tadc is for everyone to escape the circus right

but thus far we're pretty much halfway thru the show and not much progress has been made on that

one thing the show does pretty well tho is setting stuff up in the first minute or two of the episode and then using that again later in the episode, around the climax

ep1 did it with pomni arriving in the circus and being told she can't leave, then at the end with all the exit doors and being shown she can't leave

ep2 did it with pomni clipping into the cubes after falling off her bed, then at the end it was called back by the truck clipping into the cubes and ricocheting her and gummigoo out to escape

ep3 did it with pomni holding her breath at the beginning and being told what happens with everyone else, then at the end when she and kinger walk thru that hallway and hold their breaths

ep4 did it with gangle's mask breaking immediately and then zooble giving her the plastic one, then at the end with her throwing the mask away bc it didn't break and that made gangle feel almost trapped

so then what if in the last episode, they use everything they learned about the digital world to escape - set up the same way they're informed of stuff in the beginning of the episode and then call back to it later in the ep?

[dec 13, 2025]

HEY BITCHES GUESS WHO WAS KIND OF RIGHT???

episode 7– they bring back the key gag from episode 1 and the cube collisions in episode 2

[march 20, 2026]

I AM SO RIGHT. I AM SO RIGHT AND I FEEL SO FUCKING AWESOME.

episode 8– essentially the entire episode calls back to the pilot, with pomni bringing back that monitor and the music being very much reused from the pilot as well. the beginning scene also explains the whole plot of the episode in about two minutes: the red dot is caine, representing how he has everyone's memories as well as the knowledge about c&a (he's red because in episode 7 it represents wanting to stay in the circus). the red dot spits out shapes that get progressively more irregular, just like how caine creates worse and worse adventures. the red dot is trapped--caine sees himself as the one who is trapped in the circus as opposed to everyone else being trapped. the blue dot represents every human who has ever been in the circus--blue because they want to leave the circus. the shapes the blue dot spits out are perfect; there isn't a singular irregularity between them. the red dot consumes the blue one, they fight it out, but the red one wins in the end--but is glitchy. just like nearly all of this episode. and in the end, the red dot--caine--is the only one left trapped in the circus.

i HAVE seen the scene with the dots interpreted in a different way, where the blue dot is the other AI that caine consumed. this interpretation still proves my theory--it's brought up later in the episode by bubble. it's also a sort of history repeating itself moment, where caine consumed the other AI and now he's moving on to do the same with the humans in the circus, like i said before.

[muppet-facts]

Muppet Fact #1411

Elmo has said that he would love to go on a mission to Mars.

Source:

Arnold, Ricky and Elmo. "StarTalk Spotlight: Astronaut Ricky Arnold and Elmo." Interview by Stacey Severn. StarTalk, YouTube (December 7, 2014). https://youtu.be/L5XxjoDjIkI.

[m00nnewt9]

PROJECT HAIL MARY - MAY 4, 2026 - YOU TUBE VIDEO: STAR TALK: NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON CONFRONTS ANDY WEIR ON THE SCIENCE

From April 14, 2026.

What if a microscopic alien life form was slowly eating our sun? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice sit down with Andy Weir, the bestselling author of Project Hail Mary, for a deep dive into designing aliens, science fiction, and science behind the book (and the movie).

Andy traces his journey from self-publishing The Martian to watching Ridley Scott bring it to the big screen, before turning to his latest novel, Project Hail Mary, now a major film starring Ryan Gosling.

What if the sun started to dim due to an alien microorganism? Neil and Andy dig into just how scientifically feasible that actually is. We unpack Rocky, the film's alien co-lead, and Andy reveals how he built Rocky's entire biology around a real exoplanet in the 40 Eridani star system, a planet that was later found not to exist. How would the planet’s environment impact alien life’s morphology, technology, and culture? Could an alien species achieve interstellar travel with just Newtonian physics? Plus, why does Andy always seem to write stories where the protagonist is so isolated in space?

They also explore the storytelling mechanics that make the reluctant, unqualified, genuinely scared hero so compelling, why Andy cut a scene where humanity nukes Antarctica to trigger controlled global warming, and what it means that neither species in the story is more technologically advanced across the board. Andy closes with hard-won advice for aspiring writers.

[cosmonautistic]

"In terms of the perception of time, many physicists would argue that the perception of time, the flow of time—that the past is no longer real, the present is real, and the future is not yet real—is an illusion, or a mental construct, or something imposed by the brain. And this is the debate between what we call eternalism, or the block universe, and presentism. So under eternalism, the past, present, and future are equally real. And under presentism, only the present is real. And that's how we perceive. And this is the fundamental debate about what's the nature of time. And there's this ongoing debate where the physicists say, "Hey, you neuroscientists figure this out, because obviously time is not flowing. Why does it feel like it's flowing?" And then the neuroscientists say, "Well, you physicists figure this out, because, you know, time is flowing." But the physics is really mostly the interpretation in which, because of relativity, the physics doesn't have a specific point—"you are here" doesn't say there's anything special over here. The equations of physics are time-symmetric, or time-reversible. So that leads to one interpretation: that the past, present, and future are equally real, much like space. You can be anywhere in space; you can be any moment in time.

But I've argued that I think the brain is telling us something true about the physical universe—that it is because we've evolved to survive in a universe governed by the laws of physics, in a mesoscopic part of that universe, not at the micro, not at the cosmo, but at the mesoscopic level, to survive in this world governed by the laws of physics. So I think, and have argued this point, that it is really flowing, and our brain creates this conscious perception of the flow because it's a real part of what we experience, and of the universe."

[razorroy]

Neil deGrasse Tyson: What It Means When We Talk About Climate Change

And Genius Inc.: donald j. trump thinks it is all a hoax. The same idiot that thinks YOU won't pay the increases brought on by HIS tariffs!

Midterms: Tuesday, November 3rd, 2026

[lenbryant]

NASA always thinks of everything.