#thought experiment

[thoughtfan45]

First poop after getting fingered be like

[matsaysyes]

I thought that it would be fun to see how Mimikyu would mimic the rest of the Pikachu evolution line!

Mimikyu is my favorite pokemon and while I know that lore wise this wouldn’t make sense, I still thought it would be a fun thought experiment (and a good excuse to draw mimikyu).

[misanthropemom]

Hey nerds, vampire focused especially, I have a thought puzzle.

Are vampires affected by nuclear radiation? I mean if they don't die in the giant fireball, are they fine?

We know they're susceptible to solar radiation what with bursting into fire in direct sunlight. But as anyone who paid attention in physics class knows, radiation of different sorts is each its own beast. That's why we can use radiation to cook our food in the microwave.

So if they are not, what does that do or mean for them in the modern age? Because I have visions of teams of vampires just rolling into like Chernobyl and helping with the cleanup while everybody watches them with no protective gear on. "We felt bad for the sunflowers." Vampire strength hauling up that elephant's foot. Just by hand.

[a-confusion-of-doctors]

thought experiment:

- imagine a raccoon gets into your house

- ⁠it completely trashes the place. it makes a mess, goes through the bins, etc

- ⁠it also makes a cake. the cake is perfectly presented. it's on a cake stand on the table. it looks fine, and smells fine, and when you cut into it the textures all seem normal. there is nothing suspicious about the cake other than that a raccoon made it. if you have specific dietary requirements, these are completely catered for.

- the raccoon is still there, but just kind of sitting and looking at you. the raccoon definitely made the cake, and you know this somehow. you have no doubt about this. you don't have to eat the whole cake; this question is about whether you would try it.

put reasoning in the tags! i'm interested to see what people come up with!

[fireangel]

"What if several executives were shot every few weeks instead of kids?"

What do you think the practical applications of learning from a thought experiment may be?

[justhereforsomethingnice]

Eldritch Danny thoughts

I want to delve deeper into the eldritch Danny because I fricking love the concept and you will never be able to change my mind.

What is the most eldritch our human minds can make up? How would people conceptualize an eldritch Danny and how would Danny’s mind evolve (I’m sure jazz has a field day with that one) to deal with the changes of his incomprehensible powers? I love to throw in space obsession and that the powers of ghosts evolve along with their obsession to suit their needs.

So will Danny take over the entire sky, with the entire world just looking into a biblically accurate angel, with teeth that could also be hands, or maybe eyes? You don’t know. Or will it be like a void with your brain tricking you into thinking that that should not be possible. There is a hole, a black hole, or maybe just a void, or is it just a black sheet of paper? You don’t know, your brain does not have the processing capacity needed nor the senses to truly conclude that.

Does reality shatter when he appears? Or does it just move out of the way when Danny appears? Does he just seem to have always been a part of that reality even though you’re also sure he wasn’t here a second ago?

Will the people get eldritch madness from looking at him by glimpsing into the mind and inner workings of a being that should never be available to the human mind? Do they forever leave a part of themselves behind or is Danny kind enough (naturally) to limit himself into the limits of human comprehension?

There is so much fun to be had with eldritch creatures and I absolutely love them! Just the thought of us being this insignificant part of the universe while others watch dispassionately like ecologists do to great tits and mice. Just like billionaires do to their underpaid workers. Watching, able to help, but to them, you’re nothing. They have the power to traverse universes where you are just one of many, a fun puzzle piece to hang up on the wall to maybe glance at once a year. Are you really real to them? Will Danny keep this humanity because of his past and upbringing? Will he just become dispassionate because well, he basically ascended?

[springsketches]

So recently I saw a post from Adrienne saying making fan merch is now on the table. You all liked this Loop pin for a hard enamel design.

Unfortunately there are several barriers that are keeping me from even being able to consider doing this. So I wanted to let fans know and ask. All the barriers will be listed under the poll and I’d REALLY appreciate it if you read them :)

1. I’m a minimum wage worker and a student. I found hard enamel pins are expensive. A typical batch of 100 is about $145-250 at cheapest with the bare minimum options. I currently cannot afford getting them from a manufacturer between school, medical stuff, passport stuff, and tariffs because I live in America.

2. Why choose hard enamel pins if they’re pricey? Well, soft isn’t that much cheaper, but mostly because I really want to get those to fully solidify the general vibe that (while it is fan merch and I’m not claiming it’s anything else) they can fit in with the yetee pins without standing out too much.

3. As a result I would need help from my audience to either kickstart or show interest on some other site to even consider selling something like this, and I would likely only be able to make like, 99 pins. Also, I’d need to mail them via letter so there’s not much insurance guaranteed unless you want to pay out of pocket because of tariffs. I’m going to be saying this up front THIS POLL DOES NOT GUARANTEE ANYTHING REGARDING MAKING THIS A REALITY. This is mostly just a fun thought experiment. The only way that I’d humor this idea is if 100+ of you vote yes on this poll and if you genuinely mean you can afford it and would be willing to take the risks.

[puppygirltreats]

If a pot boils in the forest and no one is around to watch it, does it really boil?

[hendrik-ten-napel]

Is every rpg mechanic a prompt?

Probably not, but it's an interesting way to look at your favorite mechanics in a new way. Think about it. If roleplaying games are a conversation, that conversation need stuff to talk about, right? In this newsletter I take a look at kickstarter hit Eat the Reich and OSR classic Mausritter to see what their mechanics prompt players to say.

Subscribe to get Hendrik Biweekly delivered biweekly to your inbox.

[omegabenaeart]

Not gonna be canon for my rewrite, just a thought experiment...

Alastor in a lavender marriage???

(this is based off of my redesign and rewrite)

Okay, so the first big question is why would he ever enter a lavender marriage?

The simple answer is public image!

This would probably be some odd reasoning, considering that Alastor very much gives the vibe of someone who doesn't care what others think, but that's only true to an extent.

Plus, his public persona is very different from his private life. He's a successful radio host, goes to speakeasies at night, is known to charm the ladies, and he's always smiling! And since he's a public figure, rumors tend to spread about what he gets up to away from the public eye.

Some rumors are harmless enough, but why would a man like him hang around so many women all the time? Is he secretly a womanizer?

Or is he a homosexual?

Now, Alastor knows for a fact that's not what it is, and he'd normally let such rumors slide. But if such a rumor gains enough traction, then he'll have more and more people wanting to find out about his personal life, digging up dirt to take him down a peg.

And he already has a few secrets that could ruin his life, like the fact that he's biracial and he's a murderer. So, to give the people something else to talk about, he gets one of his lady friends to marry him.

Now, he'd be very selective about the woman he chooses to marry, it has to be one who isn't already attracted to him. He knows he's a charming lad, but he's not looking to lead anyone on. If anything, this is a business deal to him.

And the lady friend he ends up marrying? She's a lesbian, who's looking for a man to get her family off her back. And Alastor, needing a wife, strikes up a deal with her.

So what does this marriage look like? All in all, it's fine. They were already friends to begin with, so nothing much has changed in how they treat each other. For public appearances though, they might try to behave more "romantically."

In private, they kinda just mind their business. Alastor still does the occasional murder, but he never does it at the house (not that he was doing it at the house in the first place), so it's questionable whether his wife knows about them or not.

But at the same time, Alastor allowed her to have affairs with other women in his home, he just asked her not to do anything in the common areas like the living room and kitchen. And really, as long as she's entertaining other women in the house, the less she's asking for his attention, and that's ultimately what he prefers.

[markwateneymemorialcrater]

So one of my favourite sci-fi weapons is simply just extremely overpowered kinetic weaponry.

Think rail guns and that sort of thing that simply accelerate a projectile to incredible velocities. Of course the velocities of non-existent fictional weaponry are up to the author writing them. But for the sake of analogy, let’s say you have a weapon that can accelerate a 1kg projectile to 2997925m/s. This is 1% the speed of light in a vacuum.

Now to help put this insane speed into perspective. Let’s imagine we have our cannon at earth at are firing it at the moon. It would take this projectile just over 2 minutes to get to the moon. That is 384,400km traveled in 2 mins and 8 seconds.

For added context, the largest artillery cannon ever made, The Paris gun, could fire a projectile over 130km with a muzzle velocity of 1640m/s. It still took the projectile over 3 minutes to reach its target.

Now back to our 1kg projectile traveling at 1% the speed of light. When it impacts the moon. It will deliver 0.45x10^13 Joules of kinetic energy.

The Hiroshima nuclear bomb delivered approximately 1.8x10^13 joules of energy

This means that our 1kg projectile hits with the punch of 1/4 of a city destroying nuclear bomb.

It’s truly incredible how much energy you can store in something just by making it go really fast. Which coincidently, is also really helpful when you are wanting to deliver that energy to a target in as short a period as possible.

[megdchristopher]

When food is the central love language that binds people together, what place is there for those of us who don’t want to be fed? If “eating is[…]the exclusive privilege of the living,” does that make me simply the walking dead? You can’t be a picky eater in the dungeon. Okay, but – hear me out – what if you are?

WOULD YOU, COULD YOU, EAT A DRAGON? an essay about picky eating, ARFID, and Dungeon Meshi is now up on neverseemenaked.com, and I’d love it if people took a look, even if it’s to yell at me about completely missing the point.

(You can also find my cartoons about asexuality, anxiety, and other a-words!)

[bugbearsandbookends]

The Thing That Wants Me Dead: A Folkloric Take on Familial Trauma

There's a voice in my head, a presence. It is me, but not me, too. Failure, it says. Failure, failure, failure--you're a failure. Your life is over, it whispers, or it really should be. It's a ghost, a specter in the haunted house of my brainpan.

A vampire, a revenant. I can't exorcise it. Pills to the brain or stakes in the heart. Nothing is effective, or effective for long. It's there. It's always been there. It runs in my family. It preys on my family.

Consider the bridge-jumpers, the shotgun-eaters, the pill-poppers, the committed, the cirrhotic, the just plain crazy: They must have known the damned thing, too. The thing that killed them. The thing that is trying to kill me.

Trauma? Genes? An epigenetic collision happened somewhere on the spiral highway of my DNA, and the hole it left was big enough to allow this thing--this me-not-me--to crawl through and attach itself to my brain.

The depression, the thoughts, the impulses, the monster. It's there to stay. I have to live with it or die with it, and I have chosen the former.

Here’s a thought experiment for you.

It’s just a what-if, a story, an extension of the vampiric metaphor—if you like.

What if this thing isn’t actually me at all?

Not even me-not-me?

What if it isn’t you, or anyone who’s ever known that voice?

What if it isn’t us at all—but something that feeds on us?

Imagine an invisible parasite—a psionic vampire that feeds not on blood, but on suffering.

Its teeth sink not into throats, but into minds, draining its victims slowly, sapping their will. It whispers in a voice that sounds maddeningly like their own, twisting thoughts, eroding resolve.

And when its host finally succumbs, it detaches—seeking another to feed upon.

Perhaps the thing attaches itself to families, feeding on one generation after another, like the German nachzehrer, a vampire that devours the living from the darkness of its own grave, or the Romanian strigoi, rising nightly to drain the life from those it once loved.

Maybe—just maybe—we’re not haunted by our ancestors.

We’re haunted by the things that killed them.

[sapphire-wine]

If ace attorney gets a new game but one of the characters is inexplicably bald, which one would it have to be for you to not play it

[spontaneousmusicalnumber]

A thought experiment

Imagine you are trying to control populations of a non-native mammal species. If uncontrolled, they will overrun the carrying capacity of their habitat. This will cause the animals in question to suffer as they starve or sicken, and make it harder for native species to compete for the food and water they need.

What population control method do you reach for first? Remember you have limited funds and time.

For the purposes of this post, you don't get to know anything else about the mammal.