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Phantom of the Sewers

@dreamofelectric

Nature had produced something totally unexpected in both
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magentaicecream
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deep-space-netwerk

So Venus is my favorite planet in the solar system - everything about it is just so weird.

photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov

It has this extraordinarily dense atmosphere that by all accounts shouldn't exist - Venus is close enough to the sun (and therefore hot enough) that the atmosphere should have literally evaporated away, just like Mercury's. We think Earth manages to keep its atmosphere by virtue of our magnetic field, but Venus doesn't even have that going for it. While Venus is probably volcanically active, it definitely doesn't have an internal magnetic dynamo, so whatever form of volcanism it has going on is very different from ours. And, it spins backwards! For some reason!!

But, for as many mysteries as Venus has, the United States really hasn't spent much time investigating it. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, sent no less than 16 probes to Venus between 1961 and 1984 as part of the Venera program - most of them looked like this!

www.space.com

The Soviet Union had a very different approach to space than the United States. NASA missions are typically extremely risk averse, and the spacecraft we launch are generally very expensive one-offs that have only one chance to succeed or fail.

It's lead to some really amazing science, but to put it into perspective, the Mars Opportunity rover only had to survive on Mars for 90 days for the mission to be declared a complete success. That thing lasted 15 years. I love the Opportunity rover as much as any self-respecting NASA engineer, but how much extra time and money did we spend that we didn't technically "need" to for it to last 60x longer than required?

Anyway, all to say, the Soviet Union took a more incremental approach, where failures were far less devastating. The Venera 9 through 14 probes were designed to land on the surface of Venus, and survive long enough to take a picture with two cameras - not an easy task, but a fairly straightforward goal compared to NASA standards. They had…mixed results.

  • Venera 9 managed to take a picture with one camera, but the other one's lens cap didn't deploy.
  • Venera 10 also managed to take a picture with one camera, but again the other lens cap didn't deploy.
  • Venera 11 took no pictures - neither lens cap deployed this time.
  • Venera 12 also took no pictures - because again, neither lens cap deployed.

Lotta problems with lens caps.

For Venera 13 and 14, in addition to the cameras they sent a device to sample the Venusian "soil". Upon landing, the arm was supposed to swing down and analyze the surface it touched - it was a simple mechanism that couldn't be re-deployed or adjusted after the first go.

This time, both lens caps FINALLY ejected perfectly, and we were treated to these marvelous, eerie pictures of the Venus landscape:

universemagazine.com

However, when the Venera 14 soil sampler arm deployed, instead of sampling the Venus surface, it managed to swing down and land perfectly on….an ejected lens cap.

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literallymechanical
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bunjywunjy
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brainbubblegum

I love the Winnie the Pooh newspaper comics. Everyone’s such a dick to eachother, it’s so out of character. Is it simply called “Winnie the Pooh”? I never bothered to read the title, I just call it “It’s Always Sunny in the Hundred Acre Woods”

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grawly
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megasonger

piglet strikes back

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winniethepoohheritageposts

winnie the pooh heritage post

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bunjywunjy
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mylordshesacactus
01010101010101010111-deactivate asked:

All right, since it's the anniversary of the Titanic sinking, do you want to tell us about how the Carpathia sank?

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mylordshesacactus answered:

i very much want to do that.

I feel a little guilty, sometimes, over this. I made all these innocent people fall in love with Carpathia, and then they go to read more about her and learn she was unceremoniously sunk in WWI and it understandably upsets them.

But I don’t think it should. So today I’m going to tell you what happened on July 17th, 1918.

There’s…poetry, in the story of Carpathia’s final hours. Sometimes things happen that make you believe in fate. Parallels. Things that ring true, the echoes of harpstrings across time. History doesn’t repeat itself but sometimes it rhymes.

She was a comfortable little cruise liner, not flashy but safe and steady; perfect for getting people where they needed to go. Arthur Rostron having been promoted and given a new position following the Titanic rescue, she was under the command of a Captain William Prothero. The British navy commissioned her as a troop carrier at the beginning of WWI, transporting supplies and soldiers from Canada to the European front. On this mission, she was part of a convoy en route from Liverpool to Boston.

This is how Carpathia dies: On the morning of July 17th, 1918, she is 120 miles off the coast of southern Ireland.

So is the German submarine U-55.

She takes one torpedo on the port side; the damage is serious, yet not catastrophic. But it knocks out her wireless. Her attempts to send an SOS fail.

The second torpedo hits the engine room.

Three firemen and two trimmers are killed instantly in the explosion that dooms her. One life would be too many, five men are dead and five families are in mourning. I do not dismiss or disregard that loss. But there will be no more casualties today. Carpathia has never given people over to Death without a fight.

The order to abandon ship is given calmly and professionally, long before the situation becomes desperate. Lifeboats are lowered in time, and filled quickly. They know what they’re doing, and they do it well. By the time she begins to sink in earnest, every person onboard is safely in a lifeboat and well away from her.

She stays afloat exactly long enough to save them. There are worse ends for a good ship than this: No one dies in the sinking of Carpathia. There is no terror in the dark, no drownings, no one trapped and forgotten.

The U-boat surfaces. There’s a third torpedo.

Carpathia buckles quietly and starts to vanish, and that harpstring…shivers.

There was another group of lifeboats, once. Alone and facing death, too small, too scattered, tossed like toys and struggling to stay together. Helpless on the open ocean.

This is not the sinking of the Titanic. Carpathia has done everything right, and her people are still alive. They can still be saved. But this is not the sinking of the Titanic, and the threat is not cold and time but German torpedoes.

And this time, Carpathia cannot come for them.

There is a cosmic cruelty in this moment. It’s wrong, an injustice the universe can hardly bear. It’s not fair, for Carpathia’s story to end like this. It’s not right. 706 lives were saved because of a moment of kindness and a friendly wireless transmission; she should not go down cut off and silent, unable even to cry out. This ship who gave so much, who tried so hard, who broke and transcended herself in a thousand tiny moments of bright glory, burning hope as fuel against the dark–for her to die alone, and have no one even try to help.

U-55 comes about. Its machine guns train on the lifeboats.

HMS Snowdrop appears on the horizon.

She’s a little thing, relatively speaking; not a battleship, not a destroyer. A minesweeper sloop on patrol–important but not terribly prestigious. But another member of the convoy, seeing the steam liner taking on water and understanding the radio silence, has sent Carpathia’s SOS for her. And Snowdrop may not be the strong arm of the British navy, but she is no refit passenger liner.

U-55 has done what it came to do; its crew came here to eliminate ship tonnage, not risk themselves and their vessel over a few lifeboats. There is a brief exchange of gunfire with Snowdrop, but U-55 quickly peels off to run.

Carpathia disappears quietly. It breaks my heart that we lose her–but far better, always, to lose a precious ship than to lose her crew. She will sink and drift more than 500 feet below the surface before she settles, almost upright, on the ocean floor. She will rest there until 1999, when an expedition that could not bear to forget her, that could not bear not to try, will finally locate and identify her wreckage.

But that’s in her future. Right now, on a clear morning off the coast of Ireland, the minesweeper HMS Snowdrop takes on 215 people–save for the five lost in the engine room explosion, the entire ship’s company.

The date is July 17th, 1918, and RMS Carpathia has pulled off her last miracle.

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that-house

Making a shitty one-page RPG called Oh Shit It’s the Killer. The premise is simple: you’re a high schooler spending the weekend in the woods with your besties. The Killer is there also. He is trying to the Kill you

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that-house

I say shitty not to demean the quality of my work but because it’s less an exercise in good game design and more an attempt to induce paranoid internal conflict that turns into murder (in game of course). It has like three mechanics and one of them actively encourages you to murder the other PCs

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that-house

Great news!

It’s done

I put like three braincells into this, so if there’s anything about it that outright sucks, uh. Sorry not sorry, L + ratio + let’s use the 1-page restriction as an excuse for any unfun mechanics

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that-house

“What if there was a game about being a genre-savvy slasher protagonist murdering their way to the role of Final Girl?”

“Sounds cool when exactly does the PvP start”

“character creation”

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that-house

With 10 point font I can fit the last mechanic I want to include, Gear, adding another layer to the backstabbing and manipulating mess that is character creation.

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canmom

honestly a solid one-page RPG, and it isn’t another Lasers and Feelings hack, so points for that as well! I like the gradually ratcheting up difficulty, it is reminiscent of Pandemic.

the only point that feels like it needs elaboration is “multiple people can win by teaming up to defeat the Killer”. is this the same is the Final Stand mechanic, a skill check for each player? and is there a limit to when it can be triggered? otherwise the winning strat is blatantly to team up and attack the Killer as soon as possible while their power is low. horror-movie narrative logic says premature attempts to attack the killer should fail, but reveal something important about the nature of the threat. I suppose the narrator’s job is to forestall such an attempt by inserting as many skill checks as possible and offering bad decisions.

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that-house

Yeah attempts to attack the Killer only truly work during the Final Stand. Notably, that’s also when throwing your buddy to the killer is a wayyyy easier option than making those checks

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that-house

I can’t promise that the system math, like, works. I didn’t test it at all. For a more drawn-out and difficult experience you could switch to 3d6 + bonuses, keeping the three highest, have the Killer’s power range from 4 to 18, the difficulty of killing an ally be 11 (or 12 if you want to discourage infighting a little more, and the number the Final Stand begins at be 18. That’ll usually result in longer games with probably only one winner.

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mallosoar

@that-house I could not stop thinking about this all day

(edit: updated image - minor tweaks)

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that-house

This fucking rules.

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theimpossiblecool

“Don’t plant your bad days. They grow into weeks. The weeks grow into months. Before you know it, you got yourself a bad year. Take it from me - choke those little bad days. Choke ‘em down to nothing.”

Tom Waits.

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lost-carcosa
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arnivold

Castle of Memories

Looking for a solo TTRPG to help pass the time? Have a tarot deck and some dice handy? Want to explore a magical castle as an amnesiac trying to find out who they are?

Check out: Castle of Memories

Castle of Memories is a solo TTRPG where you play the role of someone who has lost their memories and wakes up in a magical castle full of dangerous enemies and interesting secrets. You'll use dice to randomly generate your stats and to simulate combat, and tarot cards to represent memories you recover by fighting enemies and exploring the castle.

Using your Strength, Agility, Presence, and Mind, you'll roll dice to navigate a randomly generated castle room by room, and go up against undead, demons, monsters, and beasts who stand in your way. Spend XP earned from felling enemies to increase your HP, attributes, and to recover new memories.

When you receive a memory, you draw a tarot card and use its meaning and/or illustrations to learn something new about yourself. You learn more about your character as you play the game, starting only with your name and a weapon at first. These memory cards are also used to represent spells you can cast using a simple [verb] + [noun] spell creation system. Your cards can also save you from death: By sacrificing a memory and choosing to forget it, you can respawn in a safe room when killed.

Use a variety of reference guides and handy charts to help generate your adventure as you explore the castle, meet NPCs, and collect treasures you can exchange for equipment and one-time use spell scrolls.

The object of the game is simple: Gather as many memories as you can and escape the castle. After the first area, you'll easily find the exit: The question is, how far will you venture to remember who you are? The number of cards you choose to finish the campaign with will determine your ending, of which there are 4 possible.

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Castle of Memories by Adrian Lumm
A solo-TTRPG about exploring a castle and finding lost memories
itch.io

Check out Castle of Memories today!