#this is basically maw s2

[boggslover]

[nitewrighter]

Hello! I hope your week has been kind. I would like to ask, in s2 ep9, we see Lois with amnesia interacting with Clark, or rather Kal-El, who in the simulation was raised on Krypton rather than on Earth. What do you think of an AU where in a futuristic Earth, humans attempting the first interstellar travel across space, intrepid reporter Lois Lane was chosen to represent journalism amongst the space crew, only to get separated by some accident and crash landed on Krypton, which, I think would have gone full isolationist. Where she was taken into captivity and meets Kal, and bonding ensues. What do you think of that AU? And how would you write it, if you don't mind me asking? Kara would be there.

Drink water regularly, and eat your vegetables daily.

Hi! Sorry it's taken me so long to get to this ask!

An isolationist Krypton actually isn't that far off from (at least Byrne-era) comics canon! As I've mentioned before while talking about the origins of the Eradicator, there was a significant period of Krypton's history where it was isolationist and xenophobic, and this lead to the Eradicator affecting Kryptonian genetics to prevent the majority of Kryptonians from being able to leave the planet.

I love the idea of a culturally Kryptonian Kal, because like, while obviously comics canon says that Clark got his kindness and his morals from Ma and Pa Kent, I do like speculating how he would kind of... find his way to that in AU's where they don't raise him. I think to make this AU really work, you'd need to make Jor-El and Lara kind of amalgams of their Donner Movie, House of El Graphic novel series, and Superman: TAS depictions: Noble, kind, and (by Kryptonian standards) romantic and rebellious! I've always like the idea that Kal does have inklings of their personalities, even if he's culturally earthling. I do think one of the things that really hurts about MAWS is we see Jor-El as more of a disillusioned general than a doomed scientist prophet and I loooove scientist Jor-El, I love the anguish of "We're fucked but maybe we don't have to be completely fucked." But--okay, steering back to your AU.

I mean if I was going to write an AU like that, I'd be working a lot from Byrne's Krypton with a heavy dash of Bronze Age Krypton rather than MAWS Krypton. It's not that I don't like MAWS Krypton, it's just I feel there's a lot less we know about it. What we do know about it are from heavily unreliable narrators (Jor-El, Kara, Brainiac). Meanwhile, Byrne's Krypton has that all-important moral ambiguity, while Bronze Age Krypton has a lot of fun sci-fi and linguistic tidbits, so I feel like I'd be able to put together a more immersive fic experience from that. I could still keep the MAWS characterizations, mainly by making the House of El a house that fell from grace as a result of Jor-El being mistaken in his prediction of Krypton's destruction, à la "The Man Who Has Everything." Hell, I can even keep that "Kal-El as the first natural Kryptonian birth in centuries" characterization, which I talk a lot about here, but basically I can use the cultural taboo of that as a means to give Kal that all-important loneliness that informs his kindness and deep need to prove himself. So basically in this AU, Lois is seen as essentially a HORRIBLE BIOHAZARD, and the only people who are willing to deal with her are the DISGRACED WEIRDOS of the House of El. Jor-El largely sees her as a scientific curiosity, Lara is mostly concerned about her son's fixation with this alien when he's already bullied and isolated enough for being a natural birth, and Kal has just laid eyes on THE MOST BEAUTIFUL BEING IN THE UNIVERSE.

[lemonisherelol]

So I made genderbend Johnny, he kinda looks the same but you can notice the details-

I decided to make him a butch, basically it’s having features or other qualities type seen as masculine! I also have a headcanon that Rosie Levin is a butch too!!

But yeah that’s all I have to show after finishing an art I wanted to do after I saw MAW S2! Just right now I wanna try and make my other ocs’ lore incase i want to make an AU…but speaking of it, I made a monsters inc au, it’s called Monsters Fever! :] I will talk about it once I got all of my ocs done -w-

[thevindicativevordan]

My Adventures With Superman S2 trailers?

PEAK RETURNS!

Rapid fire thoughts:

Dude with the bionic arms is apparently Blockbuster not Metallo like I thought initially. Weird to see him but this is the same show that brought in Heatwave and basically only used the name, so maybe their take on Blockbuster will be similar where they use the name and nothing else. Still hoping to see Metallo, he's such a perfect fit for this show that I'm shocked they didn't use him straight away

Alex confirmed to be Lex, surprising absolutely no one. How is he going to go bald I wonder? If Superman is the cause I will cackle.

KARA CONFIRMED! Her suit looks really cool and I love that they gave her the spikey hair like Caulifla over in Dragon Ball has. Bet MAWS Kara will get a similar personality too

Atomic Skull looks siiiiiiick!

Holy cow a Parademon? They're already setting up Darkseid? Lord I hope this show gets renewed, I'd love to see their take on the Fourth World

Rich Jimmy! Really hoping he gets to be more proactive this season

Someone pointed out to me that at 0:58 you can see a man in a mech suit wielding a hammer. At first I thought it was MAWS Perry but that guy has a goatee not a beard and their hairstyles are slightly different. If that's Steel I'll be jumping for joy, love Irons and like Metallo he's a natural fit for this series

Ok look the odds of this are overwhelmingly against, but what if that red orb Supes is struggling with is Solaris? They've cited All-Star Superman as an influence!

Multiple scenes in the trailer where Clark is glowing blue, c'mon give us Superman unlocking his Electric Blue form as his version of going Super Sayian!

In short it looks great and I can't wait for S2 to begin next month. We also might have the MAWS version of Bloodsport showing up in the Josie Campbell tie-in, so I'm definitely checking that out. Man this is the kind of Superman product we sorely need more of, really hoping that Gunn will renew this show for another two seasons.

[ntshastark]

MAWS s2 liveblog: 2x06

i think some of my fears of kara seeming too childish come from the voice acting... don't know who dubs her, but i'm not sure it was the right choice, she sounds like a little kid. if it wasn't for them pairing her and jimmy up i'd think she was still in her early teens (and that's only because i can tell by her looks that she's at least gone through puberty already)

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omg he thinks he needs to breathe 😭😭 i always forget how baby he is

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wait they did give him a helmet..

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:/

idk, i wish they'd kept her having grown up on krypton, it's basically my favourite thing about kara. i'm not even a fan of when they have her be born on kandor

and idk what's her full backstory here, but i'm sure it could still be achieved, just have whatever her "father" is implant false memories or something (or even have her actual father having been an imperialistic bastard!). and honestly, by removing her connection to actual krypton you make her whole "we're bringing back the empire!" spiel a lot weaker

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oh?

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OH????

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THEY'VE CONQUERED THANAGAR??????????

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WAIT WHAT

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WAIT THAT WAS A FUCKING SPOILER OH MY GOD THE FUCKING SUBTITLES KEEP SPOILING ME FUCK OFF

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ok so. her "father" is brainiac. which might mean kandor is being incorporated in some way... or might mean everything she "knows" about krypton is actually a bunch of lies, considering that bitch isn't even kryptonian

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oh no they're baby

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OH

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ok i'm... not nearly versed enough in hawk lore to even start pondering what this might mean

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false memories theory might still have legs!!

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CALLED IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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oh no

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oh this would've been such a great reveal if i hadn't already BEEN FUCKING SPOILED BY THE GODDAMN SUBTITLES

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MAwS says Fuck AI!!!!

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oh that's actually a really smart twist on brainiac, i quite like it. might even fit better than the original lore - and i don't think his city-collecting thing is ever very relevant besides kandor

(though i also like the one from the krypton tv series where him bottling kandor was what eventually caused the planet to implode)

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[dicaprio pointing meme] HAWK!!!!

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OH SHIT LANTERN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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crítica social foda

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ah. right. they gave him a force field power.

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ok so kryptonians still get their powers from the yellow sun. i was afraid they'd changed that ever since that time the jor-el hologram said "our powers"

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he wants to be zod so bad

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he even has his own chris kent

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ugh, if they hadn't shown kara being shipped as a baby in that one flashback i'd be soo sure he had just overridden her memories and then she'd eventually remember the real krypton... see what i mean? they could've easily had this whole plot while keeping a kara who actually grew up on krypton. it's such an important part of her backstory, and means so much about what she represents as an immigrant and a survivor... idk, i'm still on the fence on how i feel about the changes to her backstory

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why do brainiac and kara talk to each other in english instead of kryptonese...... why did they go through all the trouble of developing spoken kryptonese for the jor-el hologram to talk to clark and then just not use it when it's two kryptonians talking to each other

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ok the editing choices on this scene were... questionable. when/how did she get the trinkets?? how much time has even passed?? why did brainiac leave her alone to do all that??

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WHAT

GERMAN FLOATING BRAIN AND FRENCH MONKEY!!!!!!!!!!! HAPPY PRIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (the episode came out in june, i'm the one who's late)

[lindsaynsmith]

The Milky Way's Monster, Unveiled

The Milky Way's Monster, Unveiled https://ift.tt/2Rr3MBt

Just in time for Halloween, astronomers have delivered the best-yet view of a real-life cosmic monster—Sagittarius A*, a supermassive black hole lurking at the center of the Milky Way. Or, rather, a view of hot clumps of gas that orbit it, teetering on the edge of oblivion. The results reveal new, previously unknown properties of our galaxy’s largest black hole and point the way toward a deeper understanding of gravity.

Black holes, like all truly terrifying monsters, can scarcely be comprehended, let alone seen. Even Einstein doubted they existed, despite his theory of general relativity predicting that they must. They are knots of gravitation bound so tightly that within them spacetime dissolves; spectral shadows so voracious they devour light itself. Yet they can be glimpsed indirectly, like apparitions at the corner of your eye. Most spectacularly, when they eat stars or other black holes they can give off gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of reality that scientists first directly detected in 2016. Scientists can also measure a black hole’s mass through swarms of stars orbiting around it—showing, for example, Sagittarius A* has somehow swallowed the equivalent of four million suns. (Those in other galaxies can be far larger, tipping the scales at billions of solar masses.) And, ironically, although black holes do not shine, the gas and dust that piles up in spinning accretion disks around their maws can be heated to billions of degrees, becoming hundreds of times more luminous than a star and occasionally ejecting even brighter sprays of radiation. When they come from supermassive black holes, those outbursts can shape and perhaps even sterilize a galactic host—and such black holes seem to squat at the center of every large galaxy. For more than 40 years astronomers have warily studied such circumstantial evidence like bones and ashes scattered at the threshold of a dragon’s lair.

Now, an international team of scientists has studied the Milky Way’s monster using an instrument called GRAVITY to combine the infrared light from four eight-meter telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile. Combining light from multiple telescopes is a technique called interferometry, and can dramatically boost the sensitivity and precision of astronomical observations. The results appeared October 31 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. “This is a major breakthrough,” says Reinhard Genzel, an astrophysicist at Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics and leader of the group. “We have observed the galactic center by using four telescopes as a gigantic single telescope with an effective 130-meter diameter to make interferometric images about a thousand times fainter than what has been done before.” This is not the first breakthrough from GRAVITY: In May of this year the team successfully measured the relativistic distortion of light from a star, S2, during the its closest approach to Sagittarius A* in its 16-year-orbit around the monstrous black hole.

This latest discovery unfolded during and shortly after those same observations of S2, when GRAVITY team members Oliver Pfuhl and Jason Dexter, both study co-authors at Max Planck, noticed three flares, or “hot spots,” that emanated from Sagittarius A*’s accretion disk between mid-May and late July. To appreciate the GRAVITY team’s feat, imagine looking up at the moon from the Earth and discerning on the lunar surface a quarter coin (Sagittarius A*—or at least its shadow) sitting on a beach ball decorated with Christmas lights (Sagittarius A*’s accretion disk and accompanying flares).

These hot spots are thought to be “magnetic thunderstorms” that occur when intense magnetic fields form filaments that snap apart and reconnect, releasing copious energy to heat nearby gas within a black hole’s accretion disk. Each hot spot is akin to a short-lived, 10-million-kilometer-wide lightbulb—after perhaps an hour, it cools and shears apart in the whirling, turbulent maelstrom. That would make studying them exceedingly challenging—particularly if their emissions were being warped and occluded by various extreme relativistic effects predicted to arise in the vicinity of a black hole. Those same effects, in turn, could be studied to put Einstein’s theory of gravity to increasingly stringent tests, potentially leading to new physics.

Such outbursts have been detected before, but for the first time GRAVITY allowed the astronomers to precisely measure the flares’ positions and motions before they dissipated, showing each one moved at 30 percent light-speed in a roughly 45-minute orbit around some unseen central object weighing four million suns. GRAVITY’s data also measured each flare’s polarization, which shifted in accordance with each spot’s motion through the disk’s powerful magnetic fields, further reinforcing the orbital interpretation. “When we saw the first one, we had to ask ourselves, ‘Is this real or not?’ but then we found two more,” Pfuhl says. “They all showed the same rotation, the same orientation and the same scale, which reassured us.”

When first presented with the data, Genzel initially reacted with shock. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he says. “No one believed we could do this—we didn’t really think we could do it, either—but there it was, this beautiful orbital motion.” Besides being fortunate enough to catch multiple flares in the act, the GRAVITY team also seems to have been blessed with a quirk of geometry—their best estimates of the hot spots’ orbits suggest Sagittarius A*’s accretion disk is coincidentally oriented almost face-on rather than edge-on to Earth, allowing astronomers to study its swirling hot spots much like meteorologists use satellite views to track thunderstorms in a hurricane. “This is like winning the lottery, because the a priori probability that you would see something like this face-on is very low,” Genzel says. “It almost seems that somebody has arranged this for us; I guess the galactic center is a place for lucky people.”

One person relatively unsurprised by the result is Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University who was not directly involved with GRAVITY’s studies. More than a decade ago, while working with then-postdoc Avery Broderick (now at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada), Loeb developed models of hot spots around Sagittarius A* and suggested methods for observing their orbital motion. “Seeing is believing,” he says. “This is fully consistent with what we expected…. Most everyone I talked to about this back then regarded our hot spot model as naive, but amazingly enough nature has proved kinder than many of my colleagues.”

The most important overlap between such predictions and GRAVITY’s observations is that Sagittarius A*’s hot spots seem to be perched just above a long-predicted point of no return—an “innermost stable orbit” for material at the accretion disk’s inner cusp. Beyond this boundary any object will precipitously plunge down through the black hole’s event horizon—the proverbial end of the line past which even light cannot escape—effectively passing out of the observable universe and into the unknown. Because the exact location of any black hole’s innermost orbit depends on its most basic properties, GRAVITY’s measurement is telling us something profound and new about Sagittarius A*. “By themselves, black holes are simple objects—mass, spin and [electric] charge is all you get,” says Andrea Ghez, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, who leads a team that has used the twin Keck telescopes in Hawaii to compete with Genzel’s group for more than a decade. “The innermost stable orbit is tied to the black hole’s mass and spin—and we already know [Sagittarius A*’s] mass—so if you believe the hot spot is emitting from there, you could pin this black hole’s spin and measure this fundamental property. That fundamental property is tied to how these things grow, which tells you how they form and evolve over time. Black holes are basic constituents of our universe, so when you study them, you are asking about the building blocks of the cosmos.”

Unfortunately, for now further empirical validation of GRAVITY’s result may be limited to that instrument alone. In 2012 NASA pulled the plug on an initiative to give the Keck telescopes an interferometric capability similar to that used by GRAVITY on the Very Large Telescope; without it, independent observations—and confirmation—from Ghez’s team will likely have to wait until sometime in the 2020s when two as-yet-unbuilt 30-meter-class U.S. observatories, the Giant Magellan Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, are slated to debut.

In the meantime, GRAVITY will observe the galactic center for more flares beginning next spring, and additional corroboration may come from the realm of radio astronomy. The Event Horizon Telescope, which seeks to image the enigmatic shadow of Sagittarius A* by interferometrically linking radio observatories from around the world, should soon publish early results from its first full-scale observing run performed last year. That work probes much closer to the black hole, where gravity traps light in a revolving ring just outside the event horizon. But according to the project’s director, Sheperd Doeleman, those observations might also reveal radio blips produced by the circulation of hot spots farther out.

“Whether you’re looking at them in infrared or radio or gravitational waves, black holes really are the crux, one of the universe’s deepest and most profound mysteries,” Doeleman says. “How can there be a one-way doorway out of our universe? What does that even mean? Right now we are still just seeing bones outside the dragon’s lair—we haven’t seen the dragon.”

via Scientific American Content https://ift.tt/n8vNiX October 31, 2018 at 06:45AM