Spy Has Thoughts - Tumblr Posts
Agreed. I have plenty of beef with the IAU, and this is my chief grievance. Pluto is a planet. Eris is a planet. Haumea is a planet. Makemake is a planet. Ceres is a planet. Once we get proper data on Orcus, Quaoar, Gonggong, Ixion, etc. they will probably also be gravitationally rounded- ergo, planets. It's very likely that dozens more unknown planetary bodies, Pluto-sized or larger, exist in the far reaches of our solar system –even a handful of Mars-sized or Earth-sized objects could be out there, beyond the limits of our current telescopes.
Fun Forgotton Realms fact: the city of Waterdeep lies on the west coast of Faerûn, right around the 47-48° lines of latitude. It's just south/southwest of a significant glacial mountain chain and has a warm current running up its coast complemented by prominent onshore winds.
Y'all know what city has the exact same position and conditions IRL?
Seattle.
Waterdeep is Fantasy Seattle.
Fresh news from Hubble, and it's a real doozy this time: it found a runaway supermassive black hole.
Let me repeat that:
A runaway SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE.
Half the universe away, an immense object born of concentrated primordial chaos, so powerful it once bound an entire galaxy together, hurtles through the intergalactic void. Its flight through the cosmos so unfathomably violent that it leaves a stream of newborn stars two hundred thousand lightyears long whirling in its wake. Gas and dust in the space between galaxies is spread so thin a particle might never touch another for a million years, and yet this escaped galactic core has dragged the matter in its path into fusion.
What a universe we live in!
That was the first thing I thought about as well, but unfortunately I realized that's just not possible. For one thing, the oldest of these stars only formed about 40 million years ago, and it took a few hundred million years for Earth to form and cool enough to host life.
More to the point, though: none of those stars can host planets because there isn't enough planet-stuff around. See, most of intergalactic matter is hydrogen and helium. The intergalactic void simply does not have the same amount of heavier elements you find in galactic environments, because there hasn't been a long chain of prior stellar death to form them out there. However, that also means that this stellar strand is likely composed of some of the purest-fusing stars the universe has seen for eons.
Putting that all aside, if we imagine ourselves on an impossible world in this cosmic wake, the night sky would look very strange. Most of the heavens would be very dark, flecked with a handful of stars. However, there would be two opposing splotches of bright accumulated starlight, gradually fading outwards. How alien would that be to us, with our Milky Way?
Fresh news from Hubble, and it's a real doozy this time: it found a runaway supermassive black hole.
Let me repeat that:
A runaway SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE.
Half the universe away, an immense object born of concentrated primordial chaos, so powerful it once bound an entire galaxy together, hurtles through the intergalactic void. Its flight through the cosmos so unfathomably violent that it leaves a stream of newborn stars two hundred thousand lightyears long whirling in its wake. Gas and dust in the space between galaxies is spread so thin a particle might never touch another for a million years, and yet this escaped galactic core has dragged the matter in its path into fusion.
What a universe we live in!
So I've gotten a lot of new followers in the last 48 hours or so, all of which appear to be very new to the site -they're blank apart from the following tab and occasionally some likes. Spam bot red flag, right? But I've noticed two strange things. The first is that almost all of them only follow a handful of blogs instead of successively following hundreds of random blogs. That's RPB (Real Person Behaviour). Second and more curiously, they have all followed myself either immediately before or immediately after following one well-known David J @prokopetz. My only conclusion, though I have yet to actually test its veracity, is that the goddamn Glock Function post and maybe last week's Hubble post netted me enough attention from whatever algorithms drive the blog recommendation feature to qualify me as something akin to "tumblr-famous" and place me adjacent to Mr. Prokopetz as a similar blog.
Huh.
[horrible nasally french accent]
ah, ze œstreech. ze camél of bîrds.
me, an existential nihilist: it is the nature of things to change and, eventually, to end.
me:
me, also autistic as hell: oh fucking christ it's the nature of things to CHANGE and eventually to END, I'm fucking in for it aren't I—
happy pride. clarification post that I'm cis but like, I've checked. y'know?
periodically mentally prodding my gender like I'm checking for software updates. new drivers? security patches? nope, pre-loaded system is still running fine. alright, carry on, I'll check again in a few months.
Same. I'm a mobile user predominately and I haven't updated since November, just before polls were released, and I'm not planning to ever again until all of the shitty changes are reversed (so, never, basically). It's like being a reverse time traveler - everyone else is going into the future at one second per second while I've rooted myself in November 2022.
my tumblr dashboard hasn't gotten the updated UI yet so hearing more and more people I follow gradually post about the nightmare they're currently living just feels like I'm in the first fifteen minutes of a horror series where Troubling News Stories are starting to crop up on the radio and on blurry background TV sets
facing a dilemma. on the one hand, the tumblr app is storing way too much data and has taken up a sizable chunk of the storage on my phone (nearly 16gb for some reason). The only way to get rid of that is to delete the app and redownload it.
On the other hand, the current version of the tumblr app SUCKS ABSOLUTE ASS and I'd like my app to not SUCK ABSOLUTE ASS when I get it back, but I can only download the latest version from the app store (the one that SUCKS ABSOLUTE ASS).
hmm.
SEMANTICS ARE FUCKING IMPORTANT TO DESCRIBING THE SCALE OF SPACE
Dear sci-fi people:
Intergalactic means between galaxies
Interstellar means between star systems
Interplanetary means between planets
A conflict which is entirely confined to one galaxy and only fought by powers from that galaxy, over control of that galaxy, is not intergalactic
you ever think about how the planet Earth was here for four and a half billion years before anyone gave it a name? and how in another four and a half billion years, the name will be long forgotten, but the planet will still be here, silently whirling around the dying sun? and how insignificant the concept of a name is to something as grand and everlasting as the cosmos?
yeah. me too.
the universe is not uncaring. we exist in the universe, born of the universe, and so we must resolve to care.
"we live in an uncaring universe." sorry the special planet full of beauty and animals and food literally growing out of the ground isnt good enough for you. i guess
This discovery really tickles me. It's cool for a lot of reasons, but I also find something deeply, tragically funny about it. Lemme try to explain.
Our top astrobiologists are going to spend the next decade testing increasingly weird possible abiotic chemical reactions and arguing furiously about the origins of this dimethyl sulfide. If/when they eventually come to the conclusion that the most logical source is in fact alien microorganisms, that will answer one of the most fundamental questions of humankind: is there life elsewhere in the universe? And that would be great!
But then what?
Well friends, I'm sorry to say the answer is fuck-all. This planet, K2-18 b, orbits a star 120 lightyears away from us. For those of you keeping score, that's a little over a quadrillion kilometers. If it is determined there are alien microbes on that planet, then our entire civilization is going to spend the next several hundred years STARING at it through increasingly large telescopes, getting absolutely zero more actionable information because, let's be honest, this information was never actionable to begin with.
It's a quadrillion kilometers away, and the fastest we could possibly send anything in that direction is about one fifth the speed of light, maybe. It would take the proposed Project Starshot fleet about 480 years to reach K2-18 b, and another 120 for the data to reach home. And that would be a flyby mission! 600 years absolute minimum for very little information that we couldn't get from telescopes. Sending a full-on autonomous landing probe? One or two millennia, probably. Forget it.
What we should really be doing is looking very closely at the worlds around our closest stellar neighbors for spectral signatures like this one. If alien life does exist 120 ly away, there's a pretty damn good chance it also exists much closer to home.
"you can't just relate everything back to this ship" prepare to be stunned and amazed at how little control i have over my own brain
everyone's like "Starfield is just space Skyrim" "Starfield is Skyrim with guns" "damn Todd you just repackaged Skyrim huh"
you're all fools. buffoons, even. Starfield is Oblivion in space. with guns.
Allow me to also raise this point of perspective: not only was the night sky during the end Cretaceous radically different than our own today; but the night sky gazed upon by the first dinosaurs looked even more radically different from the night sky of the last dinosaurs than our modern night sky does.
The constellations under which the first sharks were born are so far back in time that they are utterly unknowable to ourselves, two galactic orbits later. We cannot trace the paths of the stars that far into the past.
Chew on that for a bit and then tell me you're still comfortable with your place in the cosmos.
Paint.NET my beloved for more than a decade
shoutout to artists who have only ever used one art program. like just stuck with it for years
as someone who has actually tried to get an unflighted adult Eurasian eagle owl back into his box while actually having a good grip on him, I can tell you with reasonable certainty there is no damn way they were ever going to catch him again.
I for one welcome our new strygine overlord. :)
Backstory: This gentleman escaped from Central Park Zoo in March after his enclosure there was vandalized, and there was a lot of concern over whether or not he could/would survive out of captivity. Unconcerned by this, Flaco settled himself in a particular area of Central Park and spent all the spring, summer, and most of the fall eating large numbers of rats, and genially allowing himself to be photographed by an ever-growing cadre of bird paparazzi.
Then a few weeks ago, possibly irked by repeated mobbing by assorted hawks and corvids, Flaco took off from his normal haunts and went on a brief tour of apartment-building courtyards on the Lower East Side. Now he's on the Upper West Side, within sight of Central Park (so food's no problem, should he feel like heading back that way to hunt), and shouting for everybody to hear that he owns the place. The image above shows him on the water tower of an apartment building at 86th and CPW.
If you look back through the Manhattan Bird Alert and Above 96th Twitter feeds, you'll see many splendid pictures of him. He's a handsome lad, and it's good to see him thriving.
What's in his future? Hard to tell. (Though some people on Twitter are suggesting he should run for mayor.) He may head upstate at some point. But he may decide he's quite happy to be a Manhattanite. As a fellow one, I wish him very well. :)
This is a side effect of setting Enhanced Tracking Protection to Strict. It's not an actual ad blocker, but the way that ads are structured on most sites results in them being blocked by the tracking protection filters. Very handy imo.
Firefix ios is currently ad blocking on all sites seemingly without any ad blocker and idk if it’s something I did but I’m saying it real quiet in case that interests anyone 👀