Dont You Know That A Black Cat Under A Ladder Cancels Out? Its PEMDAS Or Something

don’t you know that a black cat under a ladder cancels out? it’s PEMDAS or something

SOMEONE laughs in the face of superstition

What do you mean by "elves are a fungus"? Gnomes as terrestrial cephalopods makes more sense (clever and dexterous), but not seeing your reasoning on the elves.

So a couple days back @mazarinedrake was helpfully infodumping about Pathfinder for me, becuase I’m 2 years into a game and know dick fuck about the Lore, and APPARENTLY the elves in pathfinder??? are literally Aliens???

So that resulted in a late-night insomniac discussion of “If you were gonna design a fantasy RPG where none of the other races are Primates, what would you make them be? and I think we came up with:

Elves are a Fungus, but specifically, Elves are the fruiting bodies of a Vast Underground Superorganism, which is why there’s that bit in LOTR where the elves sometimes find other ‘adult’ elves down by the lake.  They feel a deep connection to thier surrundings, not because of some spiritual thing, but because they’re all small organs of a body that spans continents and thusly reccive cellular signals.  At the end of an Elf’s natural lifespan, they burst into a cloud of glittering spores.  

Dwarves are chemotrophic plants, like the algae that live at the bottom of the ocean at the thermal vents or alkaline lakes.  They never see the sunlight, but don’t need to becuase their metabolic process is based on exothermic chemical reactions that power thier cells.  they mine not as a traditional industry, but as a means of agriculture- they literally crave that mineral.

Gnomes are terrestrial cephlapods that started as something much like a Mimic octopus that took it Way Too Far (out of the ocean).  they’re dextrous, clever, obsessed with color, and have a society whose values are pretty much unfathomable to a bunch of pretentious monkeys.

Halflings are tiny, really ugly Birds. Maybe they originally started like crows, with thier fondness for good foods and shiny objects, but over time, they developed a coukoo-like habit of leaving thier newly-hatched babies in human homes becuase if you can fool a human family? that’s an amazing start in life for a chick.  Over time, they began to look more and more like humans as a means of camoflacge, then retained more and more neotenic features to keep humans feeding them for longer.

Humanity’s closest relative is Orcs, because they’re also mammals!  they’re terrestrial whales! Orcish tusks are simmilar to the tusks of beaked whales, and the roving bands of orcs are very similar to dolphin Pods.

Native artwork is honestly fucking gorgeous and it infuriates me that when you think of or try to look up “Native American art”, you get fetishistic, colonizer bullshit.

I’m so fucking sick of it. We’re always defined by how other people see us.

the fact that we know so little about the ice giants and the outer solar system in general is pissing me off something awful today.

the only times anything made by humans was even close to Uranus or Neptune were the Voyager probes, and those were flybys that lasted a few days, tops. we know next to nothing about either planet’s moons, and in fact Voyager 2 discovered about 6 new Neptunian moons on its APPROACH. we have no complete maps of any ice giant moons; the best we’ve got are some blurry hemispheres from the larger ones, and the rest are tiny dots jpg’d to hell from being superzoomed. we only found out what Pluto actually looks like five years ago, and we have no fucking CLUE what Eris (or any other Kuiper Belt dwarf planet) looks like. but this is all exciting and enticing!

the part that’s making me angry is that we COULD know more, but politicians and their poisonous, twisted priorities are in the way. we have technology now that was only discussed in the pages of science fiction in the 60s and 70s! we have ion drives and miniaturized nuclear reactors and ultra-high-definition cameras and remarkably advanced AI! we can do amazing things remotely, even with the light delay, and it’s not even that fucking expensive!! I mean, LOOK AT THIS.

this is the proposed flight path of the Uranus Pathfinder mission concept. wouldn’t this be a fucking awesome mission? for only half a billion dollars you get passing data from Venus and Saturn and a fresh, in-depth look at Uranus! sure it takes 16 years but whatever, that’s how spaceflight works!

the quote of “born too late to explore the world, born too early to explore the universe” is BULLSHIT. this is the opening of a golden age of solar system exploration; or it could be, if we let it!! defund the military, start fixing the ecosphere, help the working class, and then LET’S EXPLORE THE GODDAMN UNIVERSE ALREADY!!!

“That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

— CARL SAGAN about The Pale Blue Dot, taken 30 years ago on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) away from Earth.