There was an astrophysicist on the reddit thread who said this is definitely a hyperdense object orbiting a star very close, like with a 12 day orbital period. A neutron star or even a stellar mass black hole. He said one of the most interesting possibilities is that it’s a magnetar.
This makes me want to implement a programming language as an alternate tabletop magic system. Maybe give my players runes to experiment with and let them figure out it’s a programming language.
It’s all the flat earthers who lurk in this community.
Many of my self hosted solutions are just DIY cludges. I was talking to a friend of a friend on Saturday about media streaming and he told me all about his Jellyfin setup and then asked about mine and I was just like “I just store MP4s on an SSHFS drive and play them in VLC on my TV (which runs Linux Mint).” When the survey asked about the various types of software I was like “No… I don’t use anything like that… wait… yes I do! I just don’t use a prebuilt solution!”
tail -f of vim
Capitalism has entered the chat.
The article doesn’t say it (it actually doesn’t explain anything very well), but the implication to me seems to be that Jupiter was much hotter in the past, shrinking (and becoming less magnetically active) as it cooled?
I imagine this has implications for aging gas giants. What will Jupiter be like in a billion years?
They are aimed at like 10-12 year olds. But they also take 10-12 year olds seriously and assume they want to read good stories with interesting characters. They’re in a similar subgenre with Treasure Planet. I would absolutely devour an animated or CGI adaptation. Spacebread is fun and beautiful, but Born of Flame is amazingly good. The world building for the books is unique and deep.
Well, yeah, when white dudes do it, it’s just healthy sexual domination, helping the poor, traumatized white women heal from the experience of being assaulted by orcs / killer whales (happened!) / brown people. Also, wanting to have sex with 14 year old girls is just, you know, a dude being a dude right? It’s just natural! (Also discussed in the same book with the killer whales)
Yeah, they decisively defeated the Mohdri in book three. Then he wrote like 4 more books.
The Mohdri is a good guy now. It turns out he was just lonely and misunderstood. Not kidding, kindly ignore and forget about all the mass murder and enslavement. All along, he just needed people to like him and give him a chance and teach him how to be decent and compassionate and how to act more like a Trill and less like a Goa’uld.
The new bad guys are Nazi horse furries. He literally describes them neighing and whinnying as they monologue about galactic domination. I just picture a My Little Pony with a Hitler mustache and a swastika cutie mark. Don’t even mention their species name, it’s like a popsicle stick level horse pun.
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Ooo, I loved those when I was 12, probably read them 6 times. I should read them again.
Spacebread and Born of Flame also stood the test of time.
I was reading some Heinlein a little while ago
Oh yes, the guy who gave us the line " A father and his daughter got onto a starship, a husband and his wife got off." I
Zahn has no defense as a modern author.
I mean, he has been writing sci-fi since the '80s. But if you go back and read some of his earlier stuff, he really hasn’t grown much as a writer. In fact, I think he kind of peaked in the '90s with the original Thrawn cycle (and the Icarus Hunt and the Conquerors trilogy). Most of what he’s written since then has been formulaic rehashes of his glory days (sequels to the Cobra books, sequels to the Icarus Hunt, prequels to the Thrawn books).
If an author constantly talked positively about the rape in the book
Cough JohnRingo cough cough
That’s exactly how I’m feeling right now.
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Something very similar happens to me in some Windows games on Mint with Cinnamon, especially older games running using Proton. I’ve had it happen recently with Age of Mythology and Fallout New Vegas.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the answer for you, but I can tell you you’re not alone.
I’m surprised, because there’s some obvious answers to this I don’t see here.
Blindsight A bunch of zombies, led by a vampire fly into deep interstellar space to rendezvous with an alien object that doesn’t understand or care about them.
The God Engines by John Scalzi. VERY different from Scalzi’s other work. FTL works because of psionic aliens who are horrifically tortured by priests to force them to warp space.
The Outside by Ada Hoffman. AI gods rule the universe and are horrific.
The Sollan Empire books by Christopher Ruocchio have MANY elements of this (and other SciFi tropes). The alien race at war with humans worship dark gods from outside the galaxy who want to destroy reality. They also consider humans to be an edible slave race and you’ll encounter the horrific things they do to humans right in book 1, but they really get into that in the most recent book.
Hyperion If the Shrike isn’t a form of cosmic horror, IDK what is.
Sphere by Michael Crichton. Ok, technically a submarine base, but there IS a space ship…
I’ve read exactly one time travel story where that was taken into account. They were trying to communicate with the past using tachyon beams, and they had to beam them into space aimed at where Earth WAS at the time they were trying to communicate with it.