#orb reaction

[theromanticscrooge]

Episode 22 of Orb: On the Movements of the Earth broke me. It's been several hours but goddamn, it's hitting. It's hitting really, really hard. My heart's broken. I'm bawling my eyes out right now.

...and this is probably my favorite anime ever.

[iicaru2]

gale is just like me in the sense that he’s a chronic yapper who loves deeply and has a somewhat unreliable moral compass and some kind of poorly concealed god complex but also because at the first minor inconvenience he can and will threaten to kill himself

[gummi-ships]

Kingdom Hearts 2 - Bulky Vendor

[saturdaysky]

a little morning pick-me-up

-

A morning on the way to Baldur's Gate. The party booked themselves into an inn and enjoyed real beds, hot baths, and privacy for the first time since the Nautiloid.

Gale and Mayhew shared a room, of course. They were filled with the relief of surviving the shadows and the glow of finally getting together, so their private room was probably a blessing for the whole party, honestly.

-

This was some ascended anatomy practice! Referenced some great stock from @null-entity.

[berryberrytaeberry]

Nicky to Neil: take your contacts out

Neil: wHaT cOnTaCts

Nicky: the obvious brown circles on your blue eyes you absolute dumbass

Neil: I like brown

Nicky: ????? girl, you look BAD

[the-valiant-valkyrie]

siffrin and isa instinctively helping odile with her fear of heights on the upper floor(/roof???) of the House implies that there was some point during their adventure where being incredibly high up- probably to go fetch an orb- was somehow incredibly relevant. and now i'm wondering what and when that was

[isuggestwishcraft]

he completely skipped the part when he walks around in odiles quest. the tape recording sound despite me not pressing any button on the keyboard....

[theroguescientist]

Polish scientist watches Orb: Episode 6

So in this episode we're introduced to Badeni, a somewhat unusual monk. Like, I kept wondering why he chose to be a monk, when he clearly does not have the humility for it. I guess it's a way for a sufficiently intellectual troublemaker to get some education and maybe gain access to some information that is off limits to other people.

"Will these documents dramatically change my life" Yeah, probably. And to most people this would be a threat, but to this guy it's a promise.

So that "abbey" he used to be at was some kind of research institution… which didn't want him to so so much research? Okay, that's weird and I fully understand his frustration with it.

But, yeah, I also understand his superiors' frustration with his arrogance. He doesn't want to just do what he's told. He thinks he's better than others and in some ways he might actually be. A guy like this doesn't belong in a monastery, but they don't wanna risk letting him out either.

And he wants to discover something great. A relatable motivation, tbh :P And he's arrogant and reckless about it. Seems like the right man for the job.

Oooh! The church has a library of forbidden writings! Makes sense that they would read a text first before banning it, but still it's interesting that such a library exists. Right here, at this abbey, huh?

Why is that book just lying there? Someone could easily break in and steal it!

Aaand he broke in and tried to steal it.

Wait, it this that guy's office? It's a trap, isn't it?

Yep. Of course it's a trap.

Great. We've got another genius who is also kinda dumb. Looking forward to watching him work with the overly cautious uneducated peasant :)

Observe Mars. It's easy. The instructions are in the diary. And poor Oczy can't read much and is afraid to look at the sky. Not that this would occur to someone like Badeni.

This is a very real phenomenon. People who know a lot about a certain topic tend to expect others to know something about it even when there's no reason to expect that. I actually know a math professor who used to be really annoyed at the fact that his students didn't even know calculus. What was he supposed to be teaching them, you ask? Calculus! They don't know it because you haven't taught them yet, dummy!

Anyway, Oczy did it! He looked at the sky! And it stared back at him, but he did it. Because if he doesn't, what did they die for? The only people he's ever met whose deaths seemed meaningful?

Badeni gives a whole lecture about Aristotle and Ptolemy… to a guy who's never heard of them. It's okay, Oczy. This is exactly how I felt at my first quantum physics conference. At my second, I presented some new research. Being utterly confused might actually be a necessary step towards understanding something new.

Anyway, yeah, this is going to be a fun dynamic.

Heaven and Earth are one. Yeah, isn't that a beautiful thought? This show can really make things we take for granted today seem amazing. Heaven and Earth are one. That means the Earth is not special. But it also means it's a part of that beautiful universe. A planet in another world's sky.

And these medieval peasants will never see it. And I will only ever see it in pictures where it's just another little dot in the sky and you need some astronomical knowledge to even recognize it without someone pointing it out. Really, the thought of it is more beautiful than the image itself. There are worlds in the sky, and you live in their skies.

Also, Oczy looking up at the sky just like that without freaking out. You're doing great, buddy. Keep going.

[orbdotexe]

my two favorite kinds of characters/pairings (not strictly relationship pairing) have shaken out to be,

local guy terrified of Thing (typically designed to kill) and that Thing

local guy COMPLETELY unmoved by Thing (typically through experience and formally being Type 1) (also typically completely trusting of Thing)

[homestuckreplay]

radiation poisoning from my libertarian grandpa :(

(page 779-791)

A few days of updates here! I was kinda mad about the Fruit Update on the 18th. I like captchalogue mechanics, it’s fun to see how all the different modi work and the different situations characters can get into when the modi go wrong. But a five page update of just picking up fruit was too much for me. I simply could not find an interesting thing to say about that.

But now we’ve seen more of Jade’s house, and it’s… a lot. Her atrium having four wings might be relevant later, but doesn’t mean much yet – same with the beautiful pink and yellow clouds outside. Her real instrument looks like a bass guitar (due to its four strings). A trend I noticed before of the kids’ rooms getting messier and houses and lives getting weirder with each successive introduction definitely peaks here. Jade’s room is littered with plushies, plants, guns and uranium, and her grandfather might be the strangest of the four guardians, stranger than a business clown, a ventriloquist rapper, or a woman who builds a cat mausoleum with a secret passage.

Jade’s grandfather is a ‘WORLD RENOWNED EXPLORER-NATURALIST-TREASURE HUNTER-ARCHEOLOGIST-SCIENTIST-ADVENTURER-BIG GAME HUNTER-BILLIONAIRE EXTRAORDINAIRE’ (p.790) which doesn’t paint a great picture to me. That description suggests a man whose quest for personal glory eclipses any regard for other cultures, the environment, health and safety guidelines, or anyone ‘weaker’ than he is. He probably ‘discovered’ the frog statue island we see in WV: Ascend and took it as a trophy, raising his family there even if that’s not the best thing for the island ecosystem or his granddaughter’s life and health.

Jade’s bed and her two closets (below and inside her room) are all topped with strange reddish orbs on spires. It could be coincidence – there’s only so many shapes – but they remind me of the orb spires the kernelsprites land in after hatching (p.424), and as such, could have some connection to her strange powers. Jade’s other contraptions, gadgets and gizmos are a mystery to me – I know the window is a Problem Sleuth reference, but for the photoshopped in devices, I can barely begin to speculate. I do think that given the sciences of appearification, transportalization, alchemy, sylladices and strife specibi, these probably don’t have the same in-universe applications as their real world references. Physics simply works differently in the world of Homestuck, and I’m trying to make fewer assumptions about the world’s fundamentals (beyond gravity, which we’ve witnessed often).

Jade has been so associated with prognostication and esoteric knowledge that finding out she is also a nuclear physicist, a very different type of knowledge, was such a moment of characterization whiplash that puts her at both extremes of the science-religion dichotomy.

The uranium nuggets in Jade’s room, and recurring atomic symbol on her contraptions matching the bunker’s fuel gauge, are more connections between her and WV. But her room contains nods to all her friends, too. Her Slimer poster and magic chest are obvious John references. Her Squiddles poster and plushes are something Rose likes enough to put on a shirt, really hurting her dark eldritch aesthetic, and the anthropomorphic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff art is signed TO: GG FROM: TG (he even drew his stupid record symbol). Worse, the Manthro Chaps Jade collects are definitely part of the Smuppets line of products; their design is so similar.

A becquerel is the standard unit of radioactive decay per second, and luckily for Jade, one becquerel is not harmful to human health – in fact, human bodies are constantly undergoing several thousand Bq of radioactive decay (even the skeleton has its own radioactive isotopes). I wonder if this is Jade’s cute name for her pet because she loves science, or if this creature has been mutated by Jade or her grandfather’s experimentation, and got the name that way. It could explain why Dave calls Bec a ‘devilbeast’ (p.382) and thinks he should be shot. (Seeing Jade’s gun collection also makes this line feel way too real).

JADE SHIRT DESIGNS TALLY: Atom, Leaf, Pumpkin, Slimer, Spirograph, Squiddle, Creature

> Jade: Engineer a glass case for your URANIUM and store it outside.

[robotpanties]

have had this tweet sc saved in my drafts for a while

[letsplaythermalnuclearwar]

living in Australia is fun because I see a golden orb spider between some trees and I'm like "oh! so pretty! gonna take an alternate route, have fun lil guy!" or I'm on a walk and there's a snake and I'm like "better back up a little. give that snake plenty of room. good snake, enjoy your day" and then I see a cassowary in a zoo and I am instantly filled with this bone deep dread and the overwhelming certainty that it would take a sadistic glee in ripping me open and leaving me to die of blood loss

[dragonagecompanions]

In DAI, was it ever explained how Cory got the orb back after the conclave exploded? Did he had a backup warden to possess nearby to pick it up or did it fall to the fade and the Nightmare went "this looks like it belongs to my boss tee hee"?

As far as I understand it, though I could be wrong, the Inquisitor touched the Orb and so had its power stitched into their hand but did not necessarily keep it on their person. It is very possible that during the explosion the orb was....well...

out somewhere into the wilderness, and Corypheus or someone in his employ could retrieve it.

But no, as far as canon goes we get no explanation of how that occured.

-Mod Fereldone

[gothyanki]

cat behaviour

[sieglinde-freud]

every time this banner rolls around i remember how this is the single greatest thing intsys has ever done for me

[theroguescientist]

Polish scientist watches Orb: Episode 2

Okay, so this time I just made notes while watching the episode, pausing occasionally to ramble about something semi-relevant. I will not be deleting those tangents. You have been warned.

"A wrong answer is not a meaningless one"

I like that. Just because the answer isn't what you expected doesn't mean the question wasn't worth asking. In fact, there's not much science left to do with questions we already know the answers to.

"I don't want to come here tomorrow!" "Is that so? I'll see you tomorrow, then."

Of course.

And then Rafał falls on his ass. Yep. You see how all the stars seemed to move together, when it was, in fact you that was moving? Yeah.

This is a good moment to point out how we now know that there is no one true center of the universe. The center is everywhere and nowhere, and every frame of reference is equally valid, actually. Early proponents of heliocentrism (both in the times of Copernicus and Aristarchus) cautiously talked about it not as a question of what everything truly revolves around, but as a mathematical model that simplifies various calculations. And it turns out they weren't quite wrong.

Technically, if you spin around, the whole world revolves around you for a moment (and if I thought about it for a while, I could probably come up with a good metaphor about how this makes you dizzy). From a certain point of view, which is not inherently better or worse than any other.

That being said, the calculations for a your-ass-centric model of the universe would be needlessly complicated. Even more so if you were to become an astronaut.

Also, while I'm going off on a history-of-science tangent, I kinda want to mention Tycho Brache's stealth-heliocentric model of the solar system. He'd hate me for calling it that, but look at it!

Gotta wonder what that guy would think of relativity.

In conclusion, rip Rafał, you'd have loved relativity.

And potato chips. Seriously, I haven't seen anyone scribble this dramatically since Death Note.

Ah, staying up all night working on an interesting problem! I've been too busy with teaching to do that lately. I needed to be fully awake in the mornings. But I miss that, so much that I think not doing it is making me feel tired. When I have time I need to find a good unsolved conjecture and let it take over my brain. Thank you, Orb, for reminding me what that's all about.

And after the intro, it seems like a few days have passed and they're still meeting on that hill to look at the stars, because of course they are. The kid said he didn't want to, and yet here we are. I like how the show does this. All that "I shouldn't be doing this! But I want to! But it's dangerous! But…!" happens entirely offscreen. Because we already know what he's gonna do!

"A life that isn't frightening is missing its essence"

Damn, Hubert spitting memorable lines in this episode!

Also his views on science and religion are really neat. Today a lot of people (both religious and atheists) treat them as opposites (even though I know a few deeply religious scientists, so clearly it's not impossible), but no, dammit, my science isn't an attack on your religion! Because even if God created the world, why wouldn't he want us figuring out how it works? He gave you a brain! Wouldn't it be rude to reject such a gift?

Anyway, I'm glad this is more nuanced than "science good, church bad".

Damn, Hubert! Just like that? Of course, Nowak will suspect something. Because you just turned yourself in like that. Who would do something like that just to protect a kid they barely know? In these people's minds - not a heretic!

And then he just lets his life's work burn - but he doesn't let it be captured and burned along with him. He entrusts that to his student. And there's no way Rafał didn't look at some of those notes before burning them, right?

And I was right: Nowak is a fascinating bastard. A former mercenary, huh? And this, too, seems like just another job to him. Hard to tell exactly what he really thinks or feels. Is all that talk about loving his daughter just a facade, or is he really like that? He reminds me of a quote from Small Gods by Terry Pratchett. It's too long to quote the whole thing, but it's the part about the mugs and postcards and such at the inquisition HQ.

"There are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot be easily duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes to work every day and has a job to do."

This guy owns a "Number 1 Dad" mug. Or he would, if it was a thing in this era. But we've already established that we're not overly concerned with historical accuracy here, so he does.

(Should I reread Small Gods while watching this show and let the crossovers take over my brain? Hm...)

"How could such bloody hands do the Lord's work?" My brother in Christ (ha!), he tortures people for a living. You can't do that without getting some blood on your hands.

Aw, now Rafał says he's not gonna study astronomy. That might make doing it anyway a little harder, although he seems to think switching later will be easy. I would have picked math as a compromise, but then again, I know things he doesn't because I'm from the future.

Also, the way he talks about lying. Like he thinks he invented the whole concept of saying something he doesn't really believe. Cocky little shit. He's very smart for a twelve-year-old. But he is twelve years old. You gotta be more careful, now that you know some people can see through your bullshit.

Oooh, good question! Why does Potocki have so many books on astronomy (including at least one in Polish, which would be rare at the time)? And how does he know Hubert, and why did he just casually introduce him to this dangerously clever kid? Is there something he's not telling us?

Also, it's funny hearing all these Polish names in an anime. And, in case you're wondering, the pronounciations are actually pretty decent. Much better than I expected from people whose language hardly ever puts two consonants next to each other. Good job coming up with plausible Polish names that aren't too hard on the Japanese voice actors. The only thing bothering me is how all characters are referred to either only by first name (okay, maybe they don't have a last name; in that era not everyone did) or only by last name, with no mention of them even having a first name. What's up with that?