#Cosmic Quest

[makaramon]

original character

[allianceuniversityeducation]

How can we inspire young minds to engage with the active developments in Indian space technology?

On August 23, 2023, India became the fourth country to land on the moon and the first to reach its southern polar region. In recognition of this historic achievement, the Government of India and the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) will observe August 23, 2024, as its maiden “National Space Day.”

Honoring this, Alliance University will be hosting a series of competitions — space art, debate, model making, robotics, and more — for school students between grades VIII and XII across India.

As the Chief Guest, Ms. Pallavi Mohapatra, retired Helicopter Pilot from the Indian Air Force and the first woman in India to live fire a missile — Akash — will inspire the next generation of space enthusiasts as India advances towards self-reliance and innovation in space technology, in line with ‘Atmanirbhar Bharat.’

To register: https://www.alliance.edu.in/au-events/national-space-day-cosmic-quest/

[teachersource]

Heather Couper was born on June 2, 1949. A British astronomer, broadcaster and science populariser, Couper was senior planetarium lecturer at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. She subsequently hosted two series on Channel 4 television – The Planets and The Stars – as well as making many TV guest appearances. On radio, Couper presented the award-winning program Britain’s Space Race as well as the 30-part series Cosmic Quest for BBC Radio 4. Couper served as president of the British Astronomical Association from 1984 to 1986 and was Astronomy Professor in perpetuity at Gresham College, London.

[prokopetz]

On the origin of oozes:

When googling it seems that ooze type enemies came about with dnd.

Are you aware of earlier origins? It does not seem farfetched to assume that some fantasy book had them before that.

(also, best ooze in your opinion?)

It's broadly correct that the ooze monster in its modern form comes to us via Dungeons & Dragons (with considerable influence from D&D-inspired Japanese console RPGs like Dragon Quest). However, like many other classic D&D tropes, its antecedents were present in the sword and sorcery literature of the 20th Century – ooze monsters just seem like they sprung into existence fully formed in D&D's monster manuals because nobody reads sword and sorcery lit anymore.

While there are no doubt earlier precedents, I'd be inclined to point to early 20th Century cosmic horror fiction as the point where the modern giant-amoeba-like notion of the ooze monster really became a standard trope. We can see a clear prototype of the modern ooze monster in Lovecraft's shoggoths, first described in detail in At the Mountains of Madness (1931), for example; from there, the line to the sword and sorcery literature that would go on to form the basis of Dungeons & Dragons is a short one. This certainly isn't the first example of the type – I just don't have an earlier one at my fingertips.

As for my favourite ooze monster, I've gotta give it to the gelatinous cube, one of the few examples of the type which truly is original to Dungeons & Dragons – in fact, it could only have come from D&D, owing to the peculiarities of its creation. It started out as a sort of dungeon hazard, an "invisible" ooze which concealed itself by being completely transparent and conforming perfectly to the shape of any passage that it occupied; however, since old-school D&D expected players to produce their own dungeon maps as they went, and made their job easier by abstracting dungeon floorplans onto a grid of ten-foot squares, the idea of the gelatinous cube quickly shifted from "ooze which perfectly fills any passage it occupies" to "ooze which evolved to be a perfect ten-foot cube in order to block a standard ten-foot-by-ten-foot dungeon hallway". It's incredibly dumb, and I love it.

[glitchgloop]

I want to go to space, but in the cartoony way where I don't have to worry about stuff like oxygen levels or radiation.

like this:

Is there a name for this genre or aesthetic of unrealistic science fiction/fantasy space travel?

[queer-ragnelle]

it’s spooky season and i am once again appalled at the lack of arthurian horror.

all those incomprehensible creatures and sisyphean quests and horrific deaths yet not a single novel or film or show to satiate me? violence alone is not enough. i need our hero in steel to curl up into a ball and sob about the situation or it’s not scary. honorable mention to excalibur (1981). kissing it on the forehead and tucking into bed. not you sweetie i mean something else.

[questintheskies]

[dgorringeart]

The black galleys from the moon of the dreamlands; these come to trade rubies for gold and the enslaved; their rowers are never seen, and the merchants with too-wide mouths and curious shoes have an evil mien. A terrible stench arises from those awful timbers, but men yet tolerate them for the jewels they bring. For this, I mixed together features of classical and Renaissance galleys, along with sails based on the forms of jellyfish (Jordan Peele's Nope really got into my head there!);-I think they twist and raise and lower and fill of their accord. The onion-dome towers along the deck are based on ones used on warships of the classical world; archers and slingers can sweep the decks of boarders from these vantage points, although the hideous denizens of the moon have not had to fight in a long time.

[dynamitekansai]

wwr_stardom: 『STARDOM CINDERELLA TOURNAMENT 2024 優勝決定戦』 3月20日（水・祝)名古屋国際会議場イベントホール

[venacoeurva]

Some sleuthing that is 2 scary 4 him

-Please do not reupload, edit, or use.-

[jei-rifni]

Some doodles and goofy painting (Screenshots from Hoovy’s Cosmic Sandvich Quest part 2)!!

[e-nishka-aosh]

Without taking new screenshots, post photos of your OC as:

A Romanceable NPC

A Quest-Giving NPC

Final Boss

[kalitera-stin-erimia]

Lovecraft and Cosmic Wonder

"But the thing is, for Lovecraft, cosmic-existential horror wasn’t the whole story. Not by a cyclopean margin. In fact, a look at his overall body of fiction, and also his personal development as an author, and his various essays about life and writing, and the teeming ocean of thousands of letters that he wrote to a vast network of correspondents, shows that his focus on the cosmic horrific theme of existence-as-nightmare was balanced and complemented by a deep craving for liberation into transcendent realms of beauty and bliss. As I observed just a few days ago in my latest column for SF Signal, “Fantasy, Horror, and Infinite Longing,” this pairing of horror or terror with sehnsucht, the emotion C.S. Lewis identified as the “inconsolable longing” for “that unnamable something, desire for which pierces us like a rapier at the smell of a bonfire, the sound of wild ducks flying overhead, the title of The Well at the World’s End, the opening lines of Kubla Khan, the morning cobwebs in late summer, or the noise of falling waves,” is quite common among authors and artists, especially those working in the field of the fantastic. <...>

So Dream-Quest is fully as much about an exquisite experience of cosmic longing as it is about a wrenching experience of cosmic horror. The novel shows Carter yearning for an escape into a dreamworld and to a dream city of eternal solace and beauty, and being opposed by all of those nightmarish figures Tyson mentions. And it’s the recognition of this fact, not just in this particular novel but as it’s threaded throughout the rest of Lovecraft’s life and work, that’s missing from so much contemporary scholarship. It’s not that Lovecraft wasn’t about cosmic horror, but that he wasn’t all about it. Cosmic horror was wedded to cosmic wonder in his psyche. The one bled into the other. They were inextricably united as flipsides or complements in his affective makeup. Their paradoxical pairing was in fact the engine that drove him, since he was perpetually poised on the razor’s edge between perceiving the cosmic perspective as nightmarish and perceiving it as beautiful and liberating. This tension channeled itself into a burning desire to capture and convey both intimations in imaginative form, and the fact that the darker aspect has gotten more press than the lighter one in the popular and even the critical imagination, and has in fact become rote, is vaguely reminiscent of the smear-job perpetrated by Rufus Griswold on the memory of Edgar Allan Poe.  But in Lovecraft’s case it appears to have happened by accident, with, perhaps, some help from unsympathetic critics such as Edmund Wilson."

From Cosmic Horror and Cosmic Wonder: Revisioning Our Vision of H.P. Lovecraft by Matt Cardin.

[aromanticasterisms]

ah. so elynas and durin really are siblings huh

[animationfanboy2k4]

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL ANIMATION DAY, EVERYBODY!

[jevdev-art]

The silver key 🗝

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