Sumactic - Plonk

kitty car 🐱

Untitled.

i made a comic in google slides for some ungodly reason

anco

I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!

(save the images to zoom in on the pics)

started watching this japanese show where they take in requests and they try to help out with whatever the request is. and in this one the guy says that when he was in middle school, he always heard the girl across the street playing her piano, and although he only met her in person a few times, listening to her play her usual song was a great comfort to him growing up, especially getting to hear her slowly get better at playing.

the guy now was an adult and taking a break from college, and began to feel really lost in life, and he kept thinking back to when he was in middle school and hearing her play the piano every day. so his request was to hear her play it again. and he and the show's crew literally go back to his old place, and miraculously the girl still lives in that same house across the street, and even more miraculously the people who currently live where he used to allow him to go back to his old room where he used to listen to her play. and they all agree to recreate his middle school memory for him.

the girl comes home from her part-time job and she plays the piano, although she tells them it's been 4 years since she's ever played and is worried she won't sound good, and the guy sits by the window, and he just listens. and like. just imagining reliving that moment when you were younger, listening to a near-stranger play a song across the street every day, feeling a little less lost because of it, and returning to that as an adult when you need it most and everyone being kind enough to let you savor it again even just for a moment... i wanted to start bawling i wont lie. this is the song she played. im going to go lie down about the humanity of it all

what if ranked was competitive figure skating and playoffs was the grand prix

tbh ranked just thrives in any competitive setting AU (who would've thought, competitive game applies well to other competitive settings)

also theres so much potential for angst & hurt/comfort :3 i would add character notes but all i have is vague thoughts rattling around in my head making me go insane

on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport the first person on the moon went there by accident and promptly died. The next dozen or so people also went by accident, and also died. Number 14 figured out that people who go to the moon die and very cleverly brought a sword and six weeks of travel rations. This did not help.

No one on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport ever figured out why people die in space because they don’t need airplanes and never found it particularly interesting to climb tall mountains. Astronomers use telescopes to take pictures of the ever-growing pile of corpses on the moon.

There's this sort of anthropomorphizing that inherently happens in language that really gets me sometimes. I'm still not over the terminology of "gravity assist," the technique where we launch satellites into the orbit of other planets so that we can build momentum via the astounding and literally astronomical strength of their gravitational forces, to "slingshot" them into the direction we need with a speed that we could never, ever, ever create ourselves. I mean, some of these slingshots easily get probes hurtling through space at tens of thousands of miles per hour. Wikipedia has a handy diagram of the Voyager 1 satellite doing such a thing.

"Gravity assist." "Slingshot." Of course, on a very basic and objective level, yes, we are taking advantage of forces generated by outside objects to specifically help in our goals. We're getting help from objects in the same way a river can power a mill. And of course we call it a "slingshot," because the motion is very similar (mentally at least; I can't be sure about the exact physics).

Plus, especially compared to the other sciences, the terminology for astrophysics is like, really straightforward. "Black hole?" Damn yeah it sure is. "Big bang?" It sure was. "Galactic cluster?" Buddy you're never gonna guess what this is. I think it's an effect of the fact that language is generally developed for life on earth and all the strange variances that happen on its surface, that applying it to something as alien and vast as space, general terms tend to suffice very well in a lot more places than, like... idk, botany.

But, like. "Gravity assist." I still can't get the notion out of my head that such language implies us receiving active help from our celestial neighbors. They come to our aid. We are working together. We are assisted. Jupiter and the other planets saw our little messengers coming from its pale blue molecular cousin, and we set up the physics just right, so that they could help us send them out to far stranger places than this, to tell us all about what they find out there.

We are assisted.

And there is no better way to illustrate my feelings on the matter than to just show you guys one of my favorite paintings, this 1973 NASA art by Rick Guidice to show the Pioneer probe doing this exact thing:

"... You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. ..."

Gravity assist.