When someone says a fact about Greek Mythology that I didn’t know about

Triberg waterfall, Schwarzwald, Germany.

DM after failed stealth roll: Hmm… You try to sneak around but you’re dummy thicc and the clap from your ass cheeks alerts the guards. Roll for initiative.

“my battery is low and it’s getting dark” is so hauntingly human, so crushingly lonely. I can’t articulate the deep, profound ache that sentence evokes. It’s acceptance and defeat and terror and sadness all at once, all from one tiny machine we asked to explore the stars for us.

and this is the last image it ever broadcast back home:

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a gentler, better summary of death.

this morning NASA abandoned their mars rover Opportunity (aka Oppy) because it (she) got hit by a storm on Mars and it knocked her camera and wheels out and her last words to the team were “my battery is low and it is getting cold”. I know she’s a machine but I’m devastated. Oppy is the one who discovered water on Mars. RIP oppy ily space baby

they didn’t abandon her!! they tried eight months to reach her!!!! as their last farewell to her yesterday they played her “I’ll be seeing you” by Billie Holiday:

“I’ll find you in the morning sun

And when the night is new

I’ll be looking at the moon

But I’ll be seeing you”

They love her so much and they tried so hard!!!

Oh man, It doesn’t end there.

This isn’t the first song NASA sent Opportunity. They had a playlist:

https://www.space.com/41434-mars-rover-opportunity-wakeup-music-playlist.html?fbclid=IwAR3uL6q4tOmLQTIEhiwYegGc99nv4N01HQKItpCLQiQYIptBOevNN6uIyT8

It’s on Spotify, it’s called “Opportunity, wake up!“

This is what’s great about NASA and it’s what’s great about people. These are world-class engineers. When they sent a rover to another planet they could have easily looked at it as just another scientific tool. But people don’t do that. We can and will get emotionally attached to the most inanimate of objects. We can and will anthropomorphize anything. And frankly Opportunity’s camera mast looks like a little face with eyes and everything, so why not?

So they started calling it her.

They nicknamed her Oppy.

They told her to take a selfie not long ago.

After 15 years of Oppy flipping the double bird to her original 90 day life expectancy, when a planet-spanning dust storm finally knocked her out and she stopped responding to the engineer’s wake-up messages, they started playing music for her.

And after 8 months and almost 1000 unanswered wake-up messages, when it was finally clear that Oppy was never going to wake up, the last thing these world-class NASA engineers did for their little rover on another planet

Was play her a love song

gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering “is there anybody out there” and hoping and guessing and imagining

because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe

and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for us– we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, we’d never get to meet them

and then

we built robots?

and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image

and maybe in a hundred years we won’t be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and we’ll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we won’t be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! we’re people, too! you’re not alone any more!, maybe we’ll be gone

but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?

the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.

and they told us to tell you hello.

this is far and away the most popular post i ever made on tumblr. people have asked me if they could illustrate it, people have asked me if they could turn it into a novella, people just messaged me to say it made them cry. that means more to me than i can say.

you probably heard that the mars opportunity rover died today. 

it was hard news to hear. i cried at my desk at work. it doesn’t make it easier that it was only supposed to run for 90 days at all; it doesn’t make it easier that it lived 14 years longer than it expected to. it lived a full life. it lived a very good life. it was the first set of eyes on miles and miles of mars. it was an explorer, it was tough, it was very, very brave. and none of that makes it easier, none of that makes it okay that it is not going to sing happy birthday to itself again.

about a year ago, my childhood cat died. i loved her more than anything. i don’t live near my family any more, and i wasn’t there for it, but my parents were, and they held her while her body gave out, and they say she knew she was with them, she knew she was loved.

i know opportunity was a computer inside a movable body, and not a person, or even an animal. still, i wish it had had people to hold it. i wish it had been with the people who cared for it. it seems very hard to me, to die so far from home.

but i think - to the extent to which we can say computers “know” things, which i think is a great deal; i think knowing is most of what computers do; i think if they have a consciousness, knowledge must be nearly all of it-

i think opportunity knew it was loved. 

every couple of months i dream that i’ve gone home and my cat’s there. even now, even though my grieving is over and done with, i visit her in my dreams, and i hold her, and every time, she purrs. she missed me. she’s so happy to be with me again.

that’s a very human thing, dreaming of what we’ve loved. what we’ve lost. dreaming things that outlast death. like robots, and singing.

Art by Marzia Palomba

Meet our new King.

Alita: Battle Angel (2019)

Wii Shop Channel | Nintendo Wii (2006)

The Wii Shop Channel closes its virtual doors today, around 13 years after the Wii’s original launch date. The end of an era. RIP 2006-2019

shepard, signing off

A little something

Harry Potter Film Concept Art by Adam Brockbank (x)