miskatonicalumnus - Tumblr blog

[miskatonicalumnus]

According to a recent report published by the Aargauer Zeitung (h/t Golem.de), around three million smart toothbrushes have been infected by hackers and enslaved into botnets.

The most cyberpunk thing on your dash today.

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Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

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extremely weird to think about the fact that the internet is a collection of physical objects, like, if i send a message to a person on another continent, there's a continuous physical path that each packet followed between each of our routers and it probably passes through an undersea cable which doesn't feel like something that should be real how did people manage that

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I seem to remember the Witch Doctor comics from Image had some of this flavor.

Idea: Atheist occult detective.

"You're an atheist who fights demons?"

"I'm an exterminator. I kill bugs."

"But you know demons are real. Doesn't that refute your whole deal?"

"Nah. If science can't explain something, it just means there's an open question we haven't gotten around to answering yet. Nobody can explain where the demons come from, but nobody can explain large particle segregation, either."

"Large particle segregation?"

"Yeah. Y'know when you take a can of mixed nuts and shake it and all the big ones go to the top and the little ones go to the bottom? Nobody knows why that happens. Physicists have been arguing about it for centuries. Lots of good theories, but nobody's ever been able to come up with a testable proof. Life is full of little mysteries."

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[miskatonicalumnus]

eagle: so what do you think about stigmata

prometheus: you know we're in a pre-christian myth, right? like that word doesn't exist yet. your dumb joke is anachronistic.

eagle: stigma talons in your flesh

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Liches, watercolor painting by ayjaja

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jazz-induced psychosis

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Half life

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Happy Easter

[miskatonicalumnus]

It's that time of year when Tumblr celebrates Easter by posting pictures of crucified anime characters, and inevitably somebody in the notes will pop up to helpfully explain that crucifixion imagery has no cultural significance in Japanese media because Japan is only about 1% Christian, which bugs me because it's completely wrong.

It's true that in the majority of cases, crucifixion in Japanese cartoons isn't meant to be conveying any specific theological message, but something Western audiences are likely to miss is that a large portion of those random crucifixion scenes are referencing Ultraman.

Ultraman's creator was a devout Roman Catholic who explicitly intended the titular hero to read as a Christ figure, and consequently, various Ultramen have been crucified on multiple unconnected occasions throughout the franchise's history. Crucifixion scenes in Japanese cartoons are often directly name-checking particular crucifixion incidents from Ultraman, right down to emulating the compositions and camera angles of specific shots. It's like an especially morbid version of the Akira slide.

The upshot is that while it's true that the inclusion of gratuitous crucifixion scenes in Japanese cartoons typically has no (intentional) theological message, stating that they have no cultural significance is incorrect. A large chunk of the Japanese viewing audience are going to see them and immediately go "hey, that's an Ultraman reference".

Anyway, as an image tax, have a shot of four crucified Ultramen miraculously resurrecting a fifth Ultraman by shooting laser beams out of their hearts:

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Art by Laurie A Conley

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So cool. Love and Rockets art.

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Hellboy: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Art by Matt Smith

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