It looks so dated now, but I loved Prisoner of Ice.

*While carrying 64 1m x 1m x 1m cubic blocks of stone in your hand.

I want to invent, like, the opposite of a water balloon. A cheap container that will hold a vacuum, or at least very low pressure air. I could sell them on eBay as your own personal void to scream into.

Man, I haven't been to a sci-fi con since before Covid. I know there's no 2025 committee - I hope someone volunteers to run one in 2026.

(I know all about being the change you want to see in the world, but we're talking about organising an event space for a hundred people and I failed to organise dinner for two last night.)

There's a theory that we were able to evolve our big problem-solving brains because we got access to higher-quality protein after teaming up with dogs as hunting partners. So did we breed them to be pets or did they breed us to be caretakers?

We've already got goats with spider silk proteins in their milk.

Schrödinger was responsible for so much good work in science, but all we remember him for is his cruelty to animals. :(

Just a few minutes ago. It was a thread about someone losing a beloved pet rat to old age. I want to say something comforting, but can't think of anything that doesn't seem trite or cliched.

Not to be confused with philatelist, a stamp collector. The word means to enjoy receiving something without the necessity of payment.

Staple gun

Band-aids

I charge a husband tax too. 10% of her snacks are mine.

Pretty much every day I get an update or two about how the James Webb telescope has kicked the legs out from under another one of cosmology's sacred cows.

Great to know how wrong we've been, but now I'm waiting for updates saying we've figured out why.

So who held a gun to your head and forced you to open this thread?

Here's an interesting related factoid - your eyes are constantly making tiny micromovements called saccades. During these movements, you don't receive any visual information. Your actual view of the world comes in stuttering fits and starts. You don't notice this because your brain literally invents what you think you're seeing during saccades. It's good enough not to get you weeded out of the gene pool.

Since you asked...

::: :::

Reminds me a little bit of Minecraft updates.

With Minecraft you have the Herobrine story - a player claimed in a video that another player named Herobrine was showing up in his offline game and causing chaos. He was trying to create a creepypasta rumour that Minecraft was haunted by the creator's dead brother, and probably only failed because he was careless and let himself be caught on audio saying that's what he was doing.

Ever since, the developers occasionally release update notes that include the line 'removed Herobrine'.

The issue with pretending to be stupid on the internet to make a point is that there are so many people doing the same thing with no point in mind.

That's going to depend a lot on context. Did he travel the world for five years, working a different temporary job at each stop? Or did he repeatedly get fired for pissing in the boss' in-tray?

I've read a comment by someone who put a staircase in their memory palace with a step for each entry on the periodic table of elements. Anecdotal, I know.

A cursed object! Those circles obviously represent the disc of the sun and the animal is a demon stamping it into the sea. I recommend anointing your eyes with the blood of a sacrificial bull so they don't get possessed by ghosts. We all remember what happened last time.