zenosanalytic reblogged
everyone knows that space is very very cold, and the sun is very very hot. so i assume there's a bit of space kind of near the sun which is just right. balmy space
Yes, that’s. That’s where we are.
zenosanalytic reblogged
I think we don’t give Camilla Hect enough badass credit for making the vengeful eldritch soul of the earth do physical therapy and DBT exercises. she’s like the meme of Eddie Brock asking for two bagels when Venom says they want to eat the souls of the innocent. and then she snuggled with her at night.
Nona’s tantrums made Pyrrha “I’m gonna drink a bottle of bleach to review my Getting Tortured Skills” Dve uneasy. Her tantrums made Augustine and Mercymorn want her dead. Blood of Eden was so terrified of her they wouldn’t even be in the same room as her.
And Camilla was like. Yeah I’ll help teach her how to stretch. Yeah I’ll read to her in the bath. I can talk her into holding a sword for a few hours every day even though she doesn’t want to. Yeah I’ll sleep in the same bed as her. I’ll put ice under her pillow so she’s comfortable. I’ll wrap her up in a blanket and hold her close to me while she’s having her tantrums. She could really benefit from learning how to count to five when she’s mad. She loves dogs, I have to keep her from taking them all home. She wants to stick her fingers in peoples’ ears. She thinks ass jokes are funny. She sleeps next to me at night. She looks to me when she feels vulnerable. She wants me to hold her. Yeah sure I’ll hold her.
zenosanalytic reblogged
“One of the reasons it is so hard to produce convincing explanations for extinctions is that it is so very hard to exterminate life on a grand scale. As we have seen from the Manson impact, you can receive a ferocious blow and still sustain a full, if presumably somewhat wobbly, recovery. So why, out of all the thousands of impacts Earth has endured, was the KT event so singularly devastating? Well, first it WAS positively enormous. It struck with the force of 100 million megatons. Such an outburst is not easily imagined, but as James Lawrence Powell has pointed out, if you exploded one Hiroshima-sized bomb for every person alive on Earth today you would still be about a billion bombs short of the size of the KT impact. But even that alone may not have been enough to wipe out 70% of Earth’s life, dinosaurs included. The KT meteor had the additional advantage-advantage if you are a mammal, that is- that it landed in a shallow sea just 10 meters deep, probably just at the right angle, at a time when oxygen levels were 10% higher than at present and so the world was more combustible. Above all the floor of the sea where it landed was made of rock rich in sulfur. The result was an impact that turned an area of seafloor the size of Belgium into aerosols of sulfuric acid. For months afterwards, the entire Earth was subjected to rains acid enough to burn skin.”
—
Bill Bryson (via shadowofveils)
gotta admit that thinking too much about stuff like this or the Siberian traps is enough to make you want to get off this rock before it’s too late.
(via argumate)
Actually, the fact that we need to reach back tens of millions of years to find something this bad is immensely reassuring. On the scale of human lifetimes these disasters don’t happen
zenosanalytic reblogged
my absolute favourite FAVOURITE thing about john/alecto is that they are both each other’s fucked up little science project that got Very out of hand.
they are both simultaneously victor and the creature to each other at all times. they love each other they ARE each other, they are divorced and married at the same time. they (literally) can’t live without each other and each will be the other’s end. they still love each other despite this.
zenosanalytic reblogged
the sensual world. louise glück
zenosanalytic reblogged
Anonymous asked:
I’m interested in your thoughts RE John Gaius & the gifts given to him, and how they manifested, and how the like, situation he was defined his powers to him. By this I mean, because they had been using cadavers to experiment on, and that’s what John was around all the time, he notices that he is having an effect on the dead bodies & slowly zeroes in on thanergy. But I wonder, had John’s experiments had to do with living things, say, plant matter & figuring out decarbonisation or something, whether he might have instead zeroed in on thalergy instead. Like, it feels like, because situationally with what their project already was & then the timing of the events with the trillionaires, he just never stopped to take in the full scope of the powers given to him (like his ability to heal for example—how else could that have been applied on a macro scale?) because vengeance became the name of the game. I hope we get to hear from Alecto WHY she chose John or if everyone to give these initial powers too, providing she can remember…
Yeah!! I have been thinking about this! Like, it's not even just animal tissue; he grew flowers for C— and N—'s wedding! Yes they ended up with teeth, but practice could have fixed that.
If he can grow plants, he can grow forests. If he can grow forests, he can trap excess carbon and cool the atmosphere. This works; it has been proven to work. But it was not John's area of study. What John knew was biology and human anatomy, and he is very much not a flexible thinker.
But let's leave that aside and baselessly assume for now that the flowers were made of meat (not saying anything) and he can't actually do plants. He squishes cows around like playdoh. If he hadn't been so laser focused on human bodies he could have restored the biomes of bays and rivers. There's a bacteria being engineered in India that breaks plastics down into organic compounds.
He's worried about the next climate famine? John, you can produce animal matter without so much as a nod at the law of conservation of mass. People eat animal matter.
And yeah, most of these projects he doesn't have access to, and he doesn't have a mode of distribution. He would need help, and the world governments wouldn't give him the time of day. Maybe he did try networking, and aide organizations and so on turned him away, too. Bit funny how he never mentions trying.
I say this with love, and I don't mean it as an insult: John was not a sane and rational person at any point in this process. Before any of the magical girl transformation started, he had favourite cadavers that he talked to and felt an obligation to. He was so manic after losing his project that his closest friends thought that he was taking Class A stimulants, and he never really pulled up from that spiral.
I would love to know, too: why John? Why then? Did she reach out to other people, and only John was in a state of mind to take her up on it?
#honestly I think it's because John cared the most#like: he was FREAKING THE FUCK OUT #and so SO DISTRESSED about the situation of the Earth #and I Think She FELT that #and She was hurt and sick and lashing about looking for a way to stop it too #and Latched onto the loudest voice she could hear @zenosanalytic
zenosanalytic reblogged
Reading a book about slavery in the middle-ages, and as the author sorts through different source materials from different eras, I am starting to understand why so many completely fantastical accounts of "faraway lands" went without as much as a shrug. The world is such a weird place that you can either refuse to believe any of it or just go "yeah that might as well happen" and carry on with your day.
There was this 10th century arab traveller who wrote into an account that the fine trade furs come from a land where the night only lasts one hour in the summer and the sun doesn't rise at all in the winter, people use dogs to travel, and where children have white hair. I don't think I'd believe something like that either if I didn't live here.
zenosanalytic reblogged
Imagine u are the planet earth and u have sprouted all these little hominids to give u information about yourself* (*none of my business why we exist but i assume it's something along these lines) and it was going great for a while but now every time u ask them telepathically MONKEYS WHAT AM I? WHAT IS THE PLANET EARTH RIGHT NOW? all the monkeys think of the same very good photo of u taken in 1972
i'd be like girl thank you but that is a PHOTOGRAPH. i am asking what is the PLACE IN FRONT OF YOUR EYES
zenosanalytic reblogged
Scientists proposed a novel idea on Wednesday that could solve two of the world's mysteries at once—one that passes over our heads every night, and one that sits far below our feet. The first mystery has puzzled everyone from scientists to inquisitive children for millennia: where did the moon come from? The leading theory is that the moon was created 4.5 billion years ago when a would-be planet the size of Mars smashed into the still-forming Earth. This epic collision between early Earth and the proto-planet called Theia shot an enormous amount of debris into orbit, which formed what would become the moon. Or so the theory goes. Despite decades of effort, scientists have not been able to find any evidence of Theia's existence. New US-led research, published in the journal Nature, suggests they might have been looking in the wrong direction. Around 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below Earth's surface, two massive "blobs" have baffled geologists since seismic waves revealed their existence in the 1980s.
Okay this is actually sick as hell
wikipedia 3d gif of the LLVPs!
The Giant-impact hypothesis is really fun. It's pretty much accepted at this point I think.
But it keeps getting wilder. I think there's one model of the theory that suggested that at some point, the Mars-sized impact annihilated the planet so hard that the combined object system was not planet-shaped, but was briefly a TORUS. A DONUT OF LIQUID ROCK named a Synestia.
Source: phys.org
zenosanalytic reblogged
Continuing to think about the horror of what happens to John, and the horrors of love...
When Alecto has first been created, she says to him "I picked you to change, and this is how you repay me?" and "What have you done to me?"
They're heartbreaking questions she has every right to ask, but there's something awful and ironic about them too. Because John also might have asked "what have you done to me?"
It's easy to get distracted by the cartoonish awfulness of John's own narration: "talk about police abuse", "come on, love. Guys as careful as me don't have accidents," "love a working tram system." But all of these comments come after moments where John has unwittingly come into proximity with violent death, an experience he repeatedly likens to having drugs forcibly injected into him; an omniscient, dream-like, out of body experience that seems to propel him forward through his basest impulses. The first time this happens, he's brought back from "the verge of something insane" by being shaken violently by P-. Lines like these aren't revealing John's diabolical plotting. They're a man who would rather own atrocities as premeditated than admit that he was losing his grip.
The second is when he encounters the soul of the earth. His human mind makes contact with the incoherent, furious soul of a planet. In any other context, this would be straightforwardly Lovecraftian. And everything he describes after that is full of elipses, jumbled, and detached. His friends are shot by gun-toting cultists and he says it was like a dream.
Hearing the earth screaming, feeling his friends' deaths under his skin like a drug, he might well have asked "what have you done to me?"
Alecto said to him, "I picked you to change, and this is how you repay me?" But as everything collapses, John says:
"I thought you were going to take me, somehow. Purge me. Use me as an instrument. But you didn't say anything...I was babbling, Show me. Come on. I'm ready. You kept screaming and screaming..."
John has spent months becoming something terrifying, an entity with yellow eyes and uncanny powers. He's discovered that death has an overwhelming impact on him that he cannot fully control. Everyone was relying on him to do something. And he did so many things: well-meaning things and stupid things and things that were lashing out in rage and frustration. Hundreds of people have died because of him. His friends have died because of him. Surely, surely there was a point to this. Surely there was meaning. Surely whatever did this to him, made him into this, had a greater plan.
But there is no plan. There is no great revelation. He tries to hurt the earth, to provoke some kind of answer, but the screaming continues. And when P dies, the person who snapped him out of it the last time, John lets go and the whole world dies.
John is kneeling on the grass vomiting up dirt and tearing out his own ribs, saying "there was still too much of me that was just a human being...", trying to swallow the soul of the earth. And by the end, the one shred he has to hold onto is a memory of playing with a doll as a child. That, and his anger...
The earth tried to reach out in the only way it could, amidst its incoherent suffering. And John tried to use the abilities it gave him, but he was only human. Fallible and proud and angry.
She said, "I still love you." And the horror; the horror of love, the horror of this story, is that to begin with they did this to each other.
To be clear: I don't mean to diminish the awfulness or the very specific forms that John's violence against Alecto takes, and continues to take across the story. I don't mean to excuse his own self-mythologisation. I certainly don't think he's blameless for the decisions he made and the agenda he pursued. But if there's one thing that happens over and over again in TLT, it's that the horror of love is not a one-way street.
And I wonder, in light of what we now know about the permeability of the soul, quite where John ends and Alecto begins. And when that blurring began...
#katakaluptastrophy#The Locked Tomb Series#Love#John Gaius#The Earth#Alecto the First#TLT Analysis#appreciative reblogs#that last bits an interesting idea like: Did he teach her how to hate?#is his ease with doing awful things to ppl he loves the result of 10k years of immortal godlike power#or merging with her INABILITY to NOT love?#Like: if you a human capable of Not Loving merged with a being incapable of Not Loving what would that do to your non loving emotions?#Characterization#minitagmusings
zenosanalytic reblogged
happy birthday earth!
i cant believe i share a birthday with the entire earth
zenosanalytic reblogged
zenosanalytic reblogged
I ended up on the Wikipedia page for "oldest dated rocks" and it's got me feeling all sorts of fucked up about the sheer size of geologic timescales.
Rocks from the Hadean eon — the time when Earth was first forming — are extremely rare because the majority of them have been eroded or melted, or perhaps deep in the Earth, but there are some examples:
The oldest estimated Earth rock is a zircon sample with an age of 4.404 ±0.008 billion years. A few things stand out about that. First, the age of the Earth is estimated to be about 4.54 ± 0.05 billion years old. That's less than 100 million years between Earth's genesis and the creation of that zircon sample. Second, the margin of error on the age of the zircon is 8 million years. That zircon is so old that that's the most precise guess at its age.
The Earth has changed so much, geologically speaking, that a contender for the oldest known rock made on Earth was actually found on the Moon. Lunar Sample 14321, aka Big Bertha, was collected during the Apollo 14 mission in 1971. In 2019 it was estimated at over 4 billion years old. This is a meteorite from Earth, back when our planet was still forming and was being impacted by massive asteroids. There may even be others older than Big Bertha on the Moon, possibly making it the best place to learn about the Hadean eon.
But you know what has me really fucked up? The oldest known rock on Earth isn't actually from Earth. The Murchison meteorite fell in Australia in 1969. Parts of it are estimated to be about 7 billion years old. Again, the age of the Earth is roughly 4.54 billion years old, meaning that this meteorite is 2.5 billion years older than Earth — older than the Solar System and the Sun, even. Our Solar System was just a large cloud of space dust when this meteorite was formed. It's that old.
These rocks were formed on timescales so far beyond our comprehension that I feel insane just thinking about them.
Something that didn't hit me until the end of the post-that tiny 100 million year gap between the oldest earth rocks and the Earth's formation is longer than the time since the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Deep time is quite something, isn't it?
zenosanalytic reblogged
superhelldeactivated
If there was so much discourse over continents I CAN'T WAIT for you to find out about the south-up map
superhelldeactivated
This is what the earth looks like btw
superhelldeactivated
Ok stop answering to this post with "up and down don't matter in space" cause north and south are not up and down and their orientation doesn't matter on earth either. This is legit what the earth looks like.
superhelldeactivated
Well somebody has a superiority complex. Go to a shrink or something idk
superhelldeactivated
Just in case you're feeling important, our planet also looks like this:
"there's a very good reason we humans tend to draw north up maps" yeah, colonialism and eurocentrism. anyway south up rules
mapposting time post your favorite projections mine is the pierce quincuncial!!!
My favorite map of Earth
Oh I feel like I should be able to fold up the pierce quincuncial into a sort of ball
did someone say fold up into a ball
Waterman is clearly the best except it needs the origami gold lines
@elodieunderglass You might appreciate Jarke van Wijk's "Unfolding the Earth: Myriahedral Projections" (site, pdf)
I really like these, thank you. Although my first comment was tongue-in-cheek, I like origami and seaming and folding. These are very satisfying.
zenosanalytic reblogged
Gideon the Ninth / Harrow the Ninth / Nona the Ninth
zenosanalytic reblogged
Poem for Earth Day. From Matthew Olzmann's book, Constellation Route. (Alice James Books, 2022)
zenosanalytic reblogged
I WANNA MAKE THE EARTH SMILE :-D
I WANNA MAKE THE EARTH DANCE !