#the continuum series

[will80sbyers]

So much potential… All cancelled

[solannecontinuum]

Hylictober 2023 Illustration Series.

PROMPT 3 SET. UNCANNY - RADIO TOWER - CAT. SET 1 | SET 2 | x | SET 4 | SET 5 | SET 6 | SET 7

[thirdtimed]

i love the contrast between hermitcraft & the life series like its so funny seeing ppl like scar thrust into a death game bc within context of the life series you have this supremely supremely sweet guy all of a sudden become like The Actual Worst Person Ever and it rules

[trust-and-jump]

continuum (2012) CANADIAN SCI-FI

This show is great. I watched it in 2017. And i have no idea why there are almost no people talking about it. If you didn't watch it do it.it might be a little slow in the beginning but it's still great. Just. Nice.

There is time travel (from 2077 to 2012), good-to-bad and bad-that-looks-like-good and good-that-is-actually-not, dystopia, subtle details about the future, not subtle details of future, VERY interesting change of view on what is the 'bad' side and what is the 'good' one, and then there are just no sides at all, just people. AND ALSO THE BAD GUY SENDS PEOPLE BACK IN TIME TO FIX THE MESS HE'S DONE. Very cool.

By the way the main character doubting her side. 10000/10. Just watch it.

Created by Simon Barry. Starring: Rachel Nichols, Victor Webster, Erik Knudsen, Stephen Lobo, Roger Cross, Lexa Doig, Tony Amendola, Omari Newton, Luvia Petersen, Jennifer Spence, Brian Markinson, Ryan Robbins.

[episodicnostalgia]

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 106 (February 7, 1993) - "Q-Less"

The Breakdown

Jadzia returns from a trip to the Gamma Quadrant with a human woman named Vash, who claims to have been there for a couple years.  Regularly that wouldn’t make sense (the Gamma quadrant is very far away, and the wormhole was only just discovered a few episodes ago), but fans of TNG will recognize her as Picard’s old flame who became pet-travel-buddy to Q, a guy notable for being able to do literally anything he wants. We find out that Vash has parted ways with Q because she grew tired of dealing with his narcissistic bullshit, and she’s ready to retire on the profits of all the treasures she collected with her omnipotent sponsor.  But Q is pretty choked about Vash leaving him, and so he decides to hang around DS9 and see if he can’t change her mind.

While Quark sets up an auction for Vash’s Gamma treasures, Q sets about giving Sisko grief over the station’s latest technical troubles. It turns out one of Vash’s items-for-sale (a fancy glowing orb) is actually some kind of unhatched stingray-space-baby that’s dragging the entire station towards the wormhole (and destruction) in an attempt to return home.  Thanks to a few helpful hints from Q, along with a healthy dose of technobabble, Sisko and Co. figure out what's going on in time to beam the Stingray-baby back into space.  The Station is safe, and Q agrees to leave Vash alone.

The Verdict

The problem with this episode is that it kind of expects that you to know what Q’s deal is. The writers do their best to bring the audience up to speed on Q and Vash’s backstory, but it feels like we’re getting the sloppy seconds to a TNG story arc. At the end of the day I think Q’s dynamic is just better tailored to Picard’s more rigid demeanour; besides Sisko already has his own nonlinear space-deities to contend with.

2 Stars (out of 5)

Additional Observations

(Future) Hetero-Boyfriends: It’s hard to like Julian Bashir in these early episodes. He’s fairly sexist, and trying way too hard to be a Fuck boi, but thankfully his friendship with Miles O’Brien will become a saving grace for the character. That’s still a ways off as O’Brien’s disdain over witnessing Bashir’s conduct on a date is all too apparent, and it’s fun to watch.

Q notes that Sisko is easier to provoke than Picard, but afterward the commander and his entire crew are pretty good at keeping their cool while mostly ignoring him. Maybe that’s why he never came back.

[55northorangeportlandmd55355]

1.The Simpsons

2.Superman The Animated Series

3. Spider-Man The Animated Series

4.Action Man The Greatest Hero Of Them All

5. One Piece

[starlite-writes]

Charm will get you far in life.

It is by this motto that Ezra lives his life. Charm and class, hand in hand to paint an elegant picture that has many dropping their guard without thinking twice.

Beautiful yet cruel by design, he is a brightly coloured flower, poisonous and enticing. To the average person, he is friendly, cheerful, knowledgeable. To the average person, he is merely an interesting character amidst a sea of many other people. A single bright flower in a vase of far uglier weeds.

To the unlucky, he shows his fangs. In an instant, the image of pristinely preserved elegance falls away to reveal the predator behind the mask. Ezra sinks his teeth into his victims and shreds them to pieces without mercy, thriving on bloodshed and carnage like a flower would water and well-fed soil.

Nature can only do what it was bred and raised to do, as cruel and vile as it may seem. Survival of the fittest is not just a turn of phrase. Surviving is a gift, restricted to those strong enough to fight and scratch and claw their way past the soil.

Who can hate nature’s golden child? He who has perfected the art of enticing beauty and deadly predation, is he who survives another day.

He who is caught amidst the deep waters of the pitcher plant or ensnared by the fly trap, is he who becomes just another nameless casualty in the circle of life and death.

[posttexasstressdisorder]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2023/06/28/gravitational-wave-background-nanograv

The mind-bending finding suggests that everything around us is constantly being roiled by low-frequency gravitational waves

By Joel Achenbach and 

Victoria Jaggard

June 28, 2023 at 8:00 p.m. EDT

The very fabric of the cosmos is constantly being roiled and rumpled all around us, according to multiple international teams of scientists that have independently found compelling evidence for long-theorized space-time waves.

The claim that telescopes across the planet have seen signs of a “gravitational wave background” has sent a thrill through the astrophysics community, which has been buzzing for days in anticipation of the papers that were unveiled late Wednesday. The discovery seems to affirm an astounding implication of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity that until now has been far too subtle to detect.

In Einstein’s reimagined universe, space is not serenely empty, and time does not march smoothly forward. Instead, the powerful gravitational interactions of massive objects — including supermassive black holes — regularly ripple the fabric of space and time. The picture that emerges is a universe that looks like a choppy sea, churned by violent events that happened over the course of the past 13 billion-plus years.

The gravitational wave background, as described by the astrophysicists, does not put any torque on everyday human existence. There is not a weight-loss discovery in here somewhere. A burble of gravitational waves cannot explain why some days you feel out of sorts. But it does offer potential insight into the physical reality we all inhabit.

“What we measure is the Earth kind of moving in this sea. It’s bobbing around — and it’s not just bobbing up and down, its bobbing in all directions,” said Michael Lam, an astrophysicist at the SETI Institute and a member of the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav), a team largely based in North America. The NANOGrav team released the findings in five papers that were published Wednesday in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Teams in Europe, India, Australia and China also observed the phenomenon and planned to post their studies at the same time. The simultaneous release of papers from far-flung and competitive teams using similar methodology came only after some scientific diplomacy that ensured no group tried to scoop the rest of the astrophysical community.

“We’ve been on a mission for the last 15 years to find a low-pitch hum of gravitational waves resounding throughout the universe and washing through our galaxy to warp space-time in a measurable way,” NANOGrav chair Stephen Taylor of Vanderbilt University said at a news briefing Tuesday.

“We’re very happy to announce that our hard work has paid off.��

Discovery from dead stars

The feat builds on previous discoveries of things in the universe that are invisible to the naked eye — pulsars. A pulsar is a type of neutron star, the ultradense remnant of a dead star. It is called a pulsar because it spins rapidly, hundredsof revolutions per second, and emits radio waves in a steady pulse. Pulsars were discovered only in the 1960s, not long after the invention of large radio telescopes.

NANOGrav gathered data from 68 pulsars using the Green Bank Telescope in rural West Virginia, the 27 telescopes of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in New Mexico, and the now-defunctArecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico.

The pulses from these bizarre objects reach telescopes on Earth at such predictable frequencies that they serve as cosmic timepieces, nearly as accurate as today’s most advanced atomic clocks, said Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale and a member of the NANOGrav team.

Theorists believed that low-frequency gravitational waves could throw off the arrival of pulsar signals. Such low-frequency ripples can have crests separated by years, so the search for subtle swells in the sea of space-timerequired patience. The deviation in the pulsar data is so slight that it took 15 years of observations to come up with solid evidence of these gravitational waves, Mingarelli said.

The NANOGrav team had previously published reports with preliminary suggestions that the background exists, but had said more time was necessary to boost confidence that the signal was real and not just noise.

“Even devising the experiment was a huge mental leap,” Mingarelli said.

The existence of gravitational waves is not in dispute. In 2016, scientists announced that their ambitious four-decade experiment called LIGO, for Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, had detected waves from the merger of two black holes. But the newly announced waves are not one-shot wonders, and theorists are noodling the many potential explanations for why the cosmic sea ripples in such a fashion.

Supermassive black holes are the favored explanation.

Most galaxies are home to supermassive black holes in or near their central region. These black holes certainly deserve the “supermassive” label: They typically have the equivalent mass of millions or even billions of suns. By contrast, “stellar mass” black holes are pipsqueaks, with masses akin to 10 or 20 or 30 suns.

Galaxies rarely collide, but the universe is vast, there are many billions of galaxies, and they have had plenty of time to drift into one another. During a galactic meetup, theorists say, the supermassive black holesat the cores of the two galaxiesfirst will do a gravitational dance. They can orbit each other for millions of years, Lam said. This pairing is known as a supermassive black hole binary.

The swirling dance disturbs the fabric of space-time sufficiently to generate very low-frequency gravitational waves that travel across the universe at the speed of light, scientists believe. Over time, energy leaks from the dance party, as it were, and the supermassive black holes ease closer together, their orbital period shortening to just a few decades. At that point, the wavelengths begin to reach the frequencies detectable by NANOGrav, Lam said.

“So at this point in our measurements, we cannot definitively state what sources are producing the gravitational wave background signal,” NANOGrav team member Luke Kelley, an astrophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley, said at the Tuesday news briefing. However, he said, the data is a compelling match for theoretical predictions.

Theorists are “having fun” coming up with other possible sources for the low-frequency signal, he added. But “if it’s not coming from supermassive black hole binaries, we would need to come up with some explanation of where those supermassive black holes are hiding, and why we’re not seeing their gravitational waves.”

A new astronomical era

No matter the signal’s source, the announcement of a gravitational wave background represents a milestone in the embryonic field of gravitational wave astronomy.

Just as some astronomers use different wavelengths of light to probe the cosmos, they can now look for different types of gravitational waves. The low-frequency waves announced Wednesday wouldn’t be detectable by LIGO, and the opposite is also true: NANOGrav and similar efforts using pulsars could not detect the kind ofhigh-frequency waves from the unimaginably violent stellar-mass black hole mergers seen by LIGO.

Lam said the next goal is to pair specific gravitational waves with potential supermassive black hole binaries detected through more traditional forms of astronomy. In other words, rather than just saying we’re picking up signs of lots of waves, the astronomers could say this particular wave right here came from that place over there.

The announcement carries an echo of another milestone in the history of cosmology. In 1965, two physicists at Bell Labsreported that they had detected the signal of something previously theorized: the cosmic microwave background radiation. That residual glow offered landmark evidence that the universe was created by the big bang.

Maura McLaughlin, co-director of the NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center, said at the Tuesday briefing that the next step will be for the international teams to combine their independent data into one “uber data set” that should show an even clearer signal of the gravitational wave background — and maybe even the first detection of a supermassive black hole binary.

“We’re opening up a completely new window … on the gravitational wave universe,” she said.

The work, she said,should offer deeper insight into the ways galaxies form and evolve. It might even reveal exotic new physics that would alter our fundamental understanding of the cosmos: “It should be really, really exciting.”

[mizukagami-takamagahara]

BBCSE: Relius Strategies

Uploaded by Brad Ry on YouTube, who has preserved a lot of old BlazBlue videos! He can also be found on Twitter.

[perenlop]

i was initially gonna like, undo the whole “hero travels between worlds” thing with the gti hero in my verse, not because i didnt like it but for starfall plot reasons, but ive since deleted that plot point bc it was wayyyy too restrictive and i couldn’t figure out a decent workaround for that. so world crossing hero is back baby and now im thinking about eris taking the pokemon over to the human world. btw its totally an equestria girls scenario where the funny animals get turned human and they gotta learn how to act like one

[solannecontinuum]

Hylictober 2023 Illustration Series.

PROMPT 2 SET. THRONE - AFTERLIFE - GHOST SET 1 | x | SET 3 | SET 4 | SET 5 | SET 6 | SET 7

Special thanks to @amphibizzy for giving me editing tips!

[porgthespacepenguin]

the idol of discord (a North Star story)

Fandom: Star Trek: TNG Pairing: Jean-Luc Picard/Q (implied) Summary:

In which Q breaks an ugly statue, Data is a really good friend, and Jean-Luc is most definitely not amused.

A small missing scene set in the North Star universe, focusing mainly on Q and Data's friendship.

Link to Ao3

[episodicnostalgia]

Star Trek: The Next Generation, 109 (Nov. 21, 1987) - “Hide and Q”

Written by: C.J. Holland & Gene Roddenberry Directed by: Cliff Bole

The Breakdown

Q makes his first return appearance, but this time he decides he’s going to pick on Riker, since Picard is a boring rule follower. Initially Q brings Riker (along with a few select bridge crew) to another plane-of-existence to play some kind of war simulation. After making the participants suffer grisly and painful deaths, Q decides to undo it all, and instead levels Riker up with the power of unbridled omnipotence.  Initially Riker does try to resist the temptation to do literally anything he wants, but his resolve is tested when a young child dies on a rescue mission, which leads Riker to thinking “hey technically I could actually do a lot of good with these new powers.” And in fairness, he’s kind of got a point.

So what does Riker do with his new godhood?  Of course first-things-first, he proceeds to bring the little girl back to life before reuniting her with her fami- Just kidding, lol. No, instead he offers his friends a round of good old fashioned wish fulfilment.  Riker proceeds to offer Geordie his sight back, Worf a violently horny Klingon woman, and Wesley a ripped-and-slightly-older body.  To his astonishment the entire crew turn down their gifts almost without hesitation, possibly because of their strong moral centre, but also possibly because Q is clearly playing at some kind of contrived moral lesson about humanity, and playing into his hands is generally unwise.  Realizing the error of his ways, Riker surrenders his new powers, and literally no one mentions the little dead girl ever again.  Meanwhile Q is dragged away screaming by the Q-continuum, because apparently he didn’t get the proper permits to visit the humans. I’m sure that’s the last we’ll see if that guy!

The Verdict

The concept is sound enough, as far as morality plays go, but the execution culminates in a missed opportunity to delve into some more interesting questions. Do I think Riker should possess the power of a god? No. But surely the life of an innocent child should yield greater consideration than Wesley’s desire to be a grown up. All things considered, ‘Hide and Q’ is just kind of weak, if amusing in it’s own right.

John de Lancie is starting to lean more into the trickster god vibes this time around, which I do enjoy, although still a little over-the-top, but then so is everyone else.

2 stars (out of 5)

Additional Observations

Lt. Yar has a thing for a sensitive Picard, and maybe also Worf? During Q’s games she’s sidelined and made to wait on the ship (with her life potentilally on the line).  Picard offers his moral support and she’s basically like “Wow you really are the whole package.  If ONLY you weren’t also my captain”.  And maybe it’s just me, but later when Worf is offered his potential Klingon mate, Tasha seems a bit jealous. I guess she can’t deny a strong forehead.

Wesley gets impaled, but words can’t do it justice.

Worf’s acrobatic leap over the bridge railings has got to be one of the most unintentionally hilarious pieces of acrobatics in television history. I love it with all my heart.

The bridge crew are all a little TOO impressed with adult Wesley.

[sshbpodcast]

With great power comes great Star Trek omnipotent entities

By Ames

Excuse me? I’d just like to ask a question. What does Star Trek need with so many gods? Like, so many gods. You can barely swing a dead Caitian without hitting at least three omnipotent entities anywhere you go in any quadrant. You find them at the edge of the galaxy, at the center of the galaxy, in the vacuum of space, on planets, inside wormholes, and everywhere in between. What is it about all-powerful beings that we need to see so very often?

A Star to Steer Her By is here to reveal these beings for what they really are. I mean, other than literary devices. Whether they’re the real deal or not (especially when they’re not), they’re here to pose an unbeatable threat to our captains and their crews, pushing everyone to the brink or making them think outside the box. They’re what this show really runs on. Check them all out below and listen to our chatter on this week’s podcast (discussion starts at 54:46), and remember to hug your omnipotent entity today.

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Maybe they’re born with it, maybe they’ve transcended

Our first batch of omnipotent entities are just normal joes that happened to transcend to the next level of being for various reasons. We’ve got Arretans like Sargon in “Return to Tomorrow” and Talosians in “The Cage” who’ve evolved naturally to be brainboxes, as well as the Providers from “The Gamesters of Triskelion” who’ve evolved to be literal brains in boxes! Kes gets a nice arc in Voyager in which her character unlocks her full potential and it happens to get out of control until her character topples from its own greatness. 

Characters like Gary Mitchell and Elizabeth Dehner unleash their inner ESP when they go past the galactic barrier in “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” as was parodied in Lower Decks when some random accident does something similar to Jack Ransom in “Strange Energies.” And of course the Platonians from “Plato’s Stepchildren” have gained some special powers by eating the tasty tasty food of their planet.

The best example of a character who’s transcended definitely comes in the form of John Doe in “Transfigurations,” as we get to watch him literally evolve into a yellow jumpsuit throughout the course of the show, as we pointed out in our transformations blogpost a while back.

—

When someone asks you if you’re a god…

Next up, prepare to donate away all your earthly possessions and pledge your soul to some powerful organisms that get worshiped as literal gods. Some of these beings are just plain charlatans who use their magic and tricks to take advantage of gullible souls, like Ardra does in “Devil’s Due” or like the God of Sha Ka Ree in The Final Frontier. We also see some powerful beings who guard planets of developing civilizations when we meet the Edo God in “Justice” and the Delta Theta II God in “Bem,” which I’d prefer not to have to think about again.

We also meet some of our actual figures from religious mythology in Trek, for reasons! Who ever knew that Apollo and the other Greek gods were real things, as we learned in “Who Mourns for Adonais”? They just happened to be aliens! And the literal devil just happens to be Lucien, an alien from Megas-Tu who teaches magic to the Enterprise crew in “The Magicks of Megas-Tu.” Now what does that mean to say about organized religion?

Finally, I wanted to make sure to broach the touchy subject of the Prophets and Pah-wraiths as portrayed throughout Deep Space Nine. Just not with the Bajorans, who will take all this personally. These wormhole weirdos are just a bunch of aliens who seem to just experience time differently than us. Which is no big deal really except that sometimes they go around banging Joe Sisko or making whole fleets of Dominion ships freakin’ disappear. I’ve said it before: seal that wormhole UP!

—

Unproven powers, infinite potential

Let’s turn our sights to a handful of beings who we can only assume are incredibly powerful, though we can’t really put our finger on why. Did we actually see some of these people do anything truly impressive or are we just jumping to conclusions? At the same time, I don’t want to speak ill of any of them because any of them could still kick my ass. Like Jack the Ripper from “Wolf in the Fold” who could feed off my fear or Armus from “Skin of Evil” who is literally an embodiment of evil.

We know the Cytherians from “The Nth Degree” and the Paxans from “Clues” (who seem to come up all the time in this blog) can both mess with our minds, but they’re so mysterious that we can only surmise what the ceiling of their powers is. Flint from “Requiem for Methuselah” is essentially immortal and has accomplished pretty much everything in Earth history, but what else can he actually do? And in episodes like “The City on the Edge of Forever” and “Yesteryear,” the Guardian of Forever has a harness on time itself! That’s incredibly powerful at first blush, but what does it even mean? And why does a person embody it in Discovery?

I’ve seen a bunch of other “most powerful beings in Trek (ranked!)” lists that include Guinan, which perplexes me. Like Flint, we know she’s long lived. And she’s got the whole listening thing she does so well. And you start thinking she’s just a normal alien until she pulls some mental hijinks in “Yesterday’s Enterprise” when she knows something’s wrong with the timeline. We are so teased by what her powers are, but we’ll never truly know. No wonder even Q is intimidated by her.

—

One really good trick, doctors hate them

We’re ratcheting up the abilities in this next group. All these entities have a really super power or two (or a ton), but I wouldn’t call these folks all powerful. They just have a couple really good powers that can ruin someone’s day. Let’s start off with the incredibly powerful beings who just want to put humans through incredibly deadly tests to see what they’re all about, like the Meklotians in “Spectre of the Gun” or Excalbians like Yarnek in “The Savage Curtain” or that little bastard Nagilum in “The Savage Curtain.” Seriously, guys. You could’ve just asked.

There are also beings who seem to be able to use things like mind control and matter fabrication to gain control over the crew members for, um, not really any good reason except maybe fun? Of course I’m talking about General Trelane in “The Squire of Gothos” and Sylvia and Korob in “Catspaw.” Dang, there are a lot of these hyperpowered people in The Original Series, so let’s spread things out a little with Onaya from DS9’s “The Muse,” who could activate the creative mind of her victim… while effectively sucking the life from them.

We can thank the selfish actions of the Nacene like the titular Caretaker and like Suspiria in “Cold Fire” for bringing about all of Voyager in the first place! Their powers are strong enough to drag whole ships all the way to the Delta Quadrant. Now that’s some powerful lasting effects!

—

The biggest kids on the galactic block

Finally, we’ve made it to the main event. All the beings who are so powerful as to be truly omnipotent, with such abilities that force the actions of whole episodes, story arcs, societies, and even series. Most of these are in no particular order, so let’s laud the absolutely bonkers  powers of the Thasians in “Charlie X,” the Metron in Arena, and the Organians in “Errand of Mercy” in one fell swoop. These are beings that can dangle the relations between whole species in the palms of their hands. 

There’s something mind boggling about just what beings like the Megans in “The Magicks of Megas-Tu” and the Traveler in “Where No One Has Gone Before,” “Remember Me,” and “Journey’s End” can do. They basically prove that magic is real because there’s no difference between reality and imagination, and that’s a scary scary thing. Is it scarier than the Douwd like Kevin Uxbridge in “The Survivors” who can wipe out entire species with a thought? I’ll let you decide that.

And of course it’s as easy as a snap to pick the absolute most powerful omnipotent beings in all of Star Trek. Every single other site agrees on this fact, and who would we be to say otherwise? It is obviously Q, and thank the continuum for him! Not only is his sweet style something we adore, but his episodes across all series provided our captains with unique challenges and put us humans in our place on a much lower rung than we think we belong on.

—

Well that has put things in perspective and we can all go back to being the puny little beings we always are, until we transcend, that is. Someone’s got to undo the damage the Caretaker did, so we hope you’re following along with our watch through of Voyager on SoundCloud or wherever you use mind powers to listen to podcasts. Beckon us to your planet on Facebook and Twitter, and use your powers for good, and only a little bit of evil!

[starlite-writes]

One of Angel’s most commonly seen puppets has dark red eyes like garnets hidden behind round brown frames.

Those eyes dance with the carefully restrained flames of unpredictable violence, of bloodlust and the ingrained need to destroy and wreak havoc.

Despite being young and largely inexperienced, he's already garnered a fearsome reputation. Hushed whispers and a trail of carnage follow this crimson horror across system after system, but few who have encountered him have stayed alive long enough to share his name.

Mal.

Mal is said to be blessed with beauty and rage alike. His sharp teeth are designed to pierce skin easily, and he has the unique ability to steal and replace the code of other programs. His pointed ears are reminiscent of mischievous fae. There is something distinctly fox-like about him behind his childish charm.

Though he makes no attempt to conceal his nature, it would be easy to mistake him for a friend at first. His wardrobe is casual, his posture relaxed, his mannerisms designed to put people at ease. His voice does not suit the monster behind his mask—it is cordial, polite, soothing. Rarely does it raise in anger or frustration, keeping a playful lilt to it like it's all just a silly little game.

Perhaps it is only a game in his mind. He is only a child, albeit one said to be born of chaos and malice.

Still, he is every bit a wolf in sheep’s clothing as his master. Even the apex predator must grow from a baby to a fearsome creature.

Most dangerous is the puppet who believes itself to be a real boy.

[pxl8ed]

@acro111

Part 11!

Idk what to say here. My brain is melting. Words aren’t wording

Part 1