En Anglais, on ne dit pas “quatre vingt dix neuf”, on dit “ninety nine” qu'on pourrait traduire comme “Hurr durr, regardez mois, j'ai un système de numérotation fonctionnel” et je crois que c'est magnifique.
My girlfriend is learning some French on Duolingo, and she’s still super early in the program. She just learned the word for “seventeen” (dix-sept, literally “ten-seven”) and commented to me, “Wow, are all French numbers this easy?” She’s a native Spanish speaker, so she’s pretty comfortable with having unique words for the numbers 11-16. I told her that yeah, they pretty much were that easy, up until you get to seventy. “What happens at seventy?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” I replied, shedding a single tear for the innocence I lost to French immersion in first grade.
At any given moment there are kilotons of human flesh streaking across the sky at astonishing speed.
Isn’t it wonderful that we live in a time when that sentence is true in the least terrifying way?
Don’t forget the area slightly outside of the Flesh Zone, where thousands of tons of bent and tortured metal hurtle through the infinite void! Some are broken down and silent, while others are forced to parrot their creators’ signals and messages until they too finally succumb. The lucky ones are destined to fall slowly and inexorably into the hot but tenuous conflagration at the bottom of their world, while the unlucky, set free too high and too slow, will be trapped forever in an unending cycle of stagnation.
Maybe if baby boomers weren’t spending so lavishly on avocado toast, they could actually afford to own their own homes.
This, of course, is the reason why December (Southern Hemisphere summer) days in Australia last approximately two hours and are separated by 22-hour Antarctic-temperature nights.
I never used to, but I got Anki on my Mac after reading this post a week ago, and used it for the first time two days ago because the class I was studying for was memorization-intensive. It works really well for me, especially if I’m following the linked advice on how to format the cards.
My favorite Anki (optimized flash cards and insanely effective at causing you to memorize things) thing was a review on a plugin called “Image Occlusion,” which let you see a picture with a bunch of labels on it, but with one label blanked out.
The comment was “I’m a med student and I make love to this plugin daily”
This whole things starts with my love affair with maps, my admiration and envy for Chris Wayans’ Planetocopia, and the desire for a setting whose most distinctive features are visible by looking at the map. So here’s a rough, very first-draft planetary map of Coldsun - a world where exposure to sunlight cools things down, rather than heats them up.
(Caveats: don’t worry about the exact shape of the continents above, because it’ll change; don’t worry about the microphysics yet either. This is just about the general biomes and climate - and even there, imagery that appeals to me can get a pass as long as there’s some sort of baseline plausibility.) So!
The move obvious consequence is that things are colder near the equator than at the poles, the reverse of the usual situation.
However, the tropical regions aren’t packed with ice and snow because it’s actually pretty hard for ice and snow to form. This is because ice and snow have a high albedo, meaning they bounce back a lot of sunlight. In our world, with sunlight that heats things up, this means that ice and snow are somewhat self-reinforcing, leading to both snow piles that last longer than they otherwise would and to glacial feedback loops that lead to ice ages/hothouse periods - geological time periods where lots of ice cover, high albedo, and high temperature (or the reverse of those) reinforce one another. The world of Coldsun, by contrast, is homeostatic on this front.
(Except, of course, if you’re dealing with massive fields and glaciers of sooty black ice! Burning coal can’t just cool things down by damaging the equivalent of the ozone layer (if there’s an equivalent of an ozone layer? idk yet) but by creating ice formations with a much lower and thus can last, maybe even spread under the right conditions. The civilizations here used to operate at a higher level of technology, but these factors (combined with a bunch of others less relevant to this post) led to a crash period.)
Coldsun’s climate bands reverse the wet/dry alteration of Earth. An Intertropical Divergence Zone near the equator starts things off with its falling, cold air and hence low levels of precipitation. A Subtropical Low around our own horse latitudes features rising air and high levels of precipitation, followed by a band of desert. And the hot polar zones feature high precipitation, rather than the cold desert conditions of our own poles.
Around this Subtropical Low, with its abundant water and sunlight, but cold conditions, we get evergreen jungles. Shaggy, warmblooded mammals occupy niches here that tropical frogs and other jungle denizens might in our own world. Snow and ice (with fewer climactic consequences) can form in the canopy, melting to nurse rivers in the winter.
Fungal forests bloom in the poles, where the heat and precipitation would be ideal for life if not for the long sun-droughts. Photosynthesis-based plants grow crazy-quilt and kuzu-like in the summer before being devoured by mushrooms in the winter.
And the thick cactal forest region? That’s just a personal caprice - with the excuse being some sort of vast but deep aquifer supporting a dense growth of phreatophytes - rather than anything that flows out of the “cold sun” thing.
here’s the inaugural Thing for my wb project or w/e
Okay, so this is awesome.
Also, in character, pls do a deep dive on biomes of a ringworld or Dyson Sphere next
