Outer space is impossibly vast, but it’s really not that difficult to learn all the important types of objects that are out there (kinds of stars, kinds of planets, kinds of galaxies, whatever), which sort of weirds me out. There’s a lot of complexity within that, and a fair amount we still don’t know, but it’s eminently plausible to get the gist of it. A precocious preteen could handle it all. We aren’t there yet, but I find it very easy to imagine a future in which space is well understood and seen as nothing but a dull, endless repetition of the same few dozen building blocks. There should be more variety to it!

Hard disagree (says the planetary geologist). Almost every planetary body in our solar system is the only known object in the universe that does [x], and a good chunk of the larger moons too.  Some of these are probably common in a larger extrasolar framework, and we can expect to see them in many solar systems; but others may be very rare, and very precious.  Consider the hemispheric dichotomy of Mars, which places its northern hemisphere kilometers below the southern half of the planet, or the equatorial ridge around Iapetus that circles it like the seam from a cheaply molded plastic toy.  Consider the sulfur raining down on the surface of Europa as its orbit trails in the shadow of Io’s volcanic emissions, gently mixing water ice with potentially bioavailable nutrients from two worlds.  Consider the plumes of Enceladus, the ice of Mercury, the shining salt domes of Ceres. This is true in time as well as space; Mars had a hydrological cycle and surface weathering processes unlike anything we ever saw on Earth (which is causing all kinds of trouble trying to pick up the pieces here in the present, let me tell you); I myself participated in some research not long ago suggesting that mountains on Mars might have grown from the top up.  Earth has had several major climate regimes with a radically different character, none of which exists elsewhere in the solar system.  Venus almost certainly had a very different surface and atmosphere than it does today; whatever that looked like, it’s a safe bet that something unique was lost forever. We have models of planetary formation with some granularity; within broad strokes, planets will evolve along certain pathways and within certain limits.  Yes, the cosmos is ordered.  But those limits are broad enough to encompass literally everything you have ever experienced, and we have not begun to exhaust even the simpler possibilities of worlds that are barren of life.  Other systems with other worlds will do things we never imagined, and probably never will imagine without first going to see what the universe has to offer. In a sufficiently vast universe, all of these will come again.  But then, in a sufficiently vast universe, so will you.  Below that threshold, these things really are incredibly interesting.

If you lead a sufficiently sinful life there is exactly one shot at avoiding perdition—if your dreamself was sufficiently virtuous, you might still be in the clear. Unfortunately, this doesn't help me much, but I encourage you all to learn lucid dreaming before it's too late

the sharpest bitterest nail in the coffin of this hell class is that I woke up at 7:20am for the final, interrupting a tender truth pollen dream about a rarepair incest ship I have, and instead of turning over in bed and holding it to my heart for a few more minutes I immediately had to get dressed and leave. Biking to my exam on a frigid morning, I felt the last tendrils of it slip away from me, replaced by boring facts about networking protocols that I’ll probably never care about again after this day.

almost 9 years on: indeed I remember nothing about networking protocols (I’m baffled to learn I even took a class on it) but did immediately remember the dream was Francis/Richard

I never got any good at networking - I don’t know whether to blame the class (it wasn’t very good), the book (it wasn’t very good) or me (it wasn’t very good) but it felt like, instead of picking between low level details or high level abstractions, we were taught the exact midpoint and got the worst of both worlds.

I still have no idea how networking works.

the sharpest bitterest nail in the coffin of this hell class is that I woke up at 7:20am for the final, interrupting a tender truth pollen dream about a rarepair incest ship I have, and instead of turning over in bed and holding it to my heart for a few more minutes I immediately had to get dressed and leave. Biking to my exam on a frigid morning, I felt the last tendrils of it slip away from me, replaced by boring facts about networking protocols that I’ll probably never care about again after this day.

almost 9 years on: indeed I remember nothing about networking protocols (I'm baffled to learn I even took a class on it) but did immediately remember the dream was Francis/Richard

Every time I see a duck I think to myself that I want to pick up that duck. There is a sort of quality of the duck that makes it feel like the act of picking up the duck would somehow be analogous to those strange videos where people use knives to cleanly cut through multilayered cakes. There would be a sort of accumulative act even without taking permanent possession of the duck. It would rather be more like pulling the lever on some ancient machine which makes a counter increase by one. The duck is the lever. I hope my meaning is clear to you all?

Severance 2.10 "Cold Harbor"

definitely top 3 favorite type of villain is “guy who would be normal if he just had access to community theater”

mr milchick yet another tragic example of an antagonist who would have been fixed by community theater.