Del, 25. He/him. Personal blog for nearly all my interests. I've also got a side blog specifically for eurovision (eurovision-del). Icon by prideiconsforeveryone.
my most unpopular stranger things related but not stranger things exclusive opinion is that i am very bored with how almost every story that has paranormal or scifi elements eventually evolves into a story about stopping the end of the world. and i do know that apocalypse media has its enjoyers however i am not one of them and i very rarely choose to consume it so you see why it would exhaust me that so often all my horror shows and podcasts turn into an apocalypse thing
We need more scary infinite variants of manmade environments like the Infinite IKEA or the Backrooms.
May I suggest, The Lot:
I’m sorry to disappoint you but this is a real parking lot. I didn’t edit it.
Check out the lot-to-building ratio in any large American sports stadium
Some lots are so big they have bus services specifially inside it. The lots are broken into sections and buses go around to their sections at a set amount of times before the start of something and drive people to the main building.
The societies of lost people inside The Lot would probably operate something like that to locate and pick up new arrivals and bring them over to one of the major settlements.
In the Infinite Ikea or Backrooms you can convince yourself there’s gonna be a door round the next corner or behind that wall.
But despite it being completely open, there is no hope of escape from The Lot. Whereever you look it’s just more cars from horizon to horizon.
Sheesh, man, that’s
a lot
Any artists interested in illustrating some The Lot concept art? Things like
A new arrival realizing a they’re lost
Scavengers systematically going through cars for supplies
A small farming community that dug up the asphalt to plant crops
A veteran traveler coming across two sun-bleached skeletons wearing old-timey clothes next to some old cars, implying they’ve been there for more than a century
How Eldritch do we want this location to be?
More ideas:
Agriculture is impossible; all the food available is truck-stop fare, scavenged from cars. A group of people had the idea to dig up the asphalt to find dirt to grow crops, but the top layer is just laid down on top of a layer of an older kind of hardtop. At one point a group of people excavate a pit several meters deep, uncovering progressive layers of asphalt, concrete, tile, brick, cobblestone, etc. but they never reach dirt.
Since all food is scavenged from cars, groups have to stay on the move. Although, if you want, you could have unobserved cars reset according to some occult criteria, enabling cyclical migratory patterns. Or, if you want, you could have them have to keep moving outwards and hope they don’t cross a patch that’s already been cleared by someone else.
Any foods that actually contain any appreciable amount of fiber become the most treasured kind of food, as everyone gets constipated from eating only the most refined and processed of foods for every meal.
Part of the uncanny feeling of the place is that it is perfectly flat. It’s not immediately obvious because the only things you can climb to get a better view are lampposts, but there’s no curvature to the earth in this place. A cult forms around disassembling cars to build a tower to try and see to the edge. It’s unclear what’s going on with the sun, given there’s still a day/night cycle.
There are plenty of cars to shelter in, but the geomorphology of this place would lead to incredible windstorms at dusk and dawn, with a very still, hot midday, and a bitterly cold night.
As tempting as it might be to populate the space with some kind of intelligent threat (I’ve seen predatory planes and shadow monsters in the notes) I feel like the concept is better served by having the environment itself be the threat.
Maybe there’s never enough drinkable water; it’s mostly soda in the cars; most of the foods available are either very salty or full of sugar. After enough time in The Lot, everyone inevitably ends up pre-diabetic and chronically dehydrated.
Maybe we kick up the weather: black asphalt can get fucking hot at midday; hot enough to fry an egg if the sun is bright enough. Besides sitting in the cars (which may or may not be feasible depending on whether or not they can provide air conditioning), shade is in very short supply, and the abundant reflective surfaces of the cars means you’re gonna get sunburned, bad, if you don’t figure out what to do about noontime.
Conversely, blacktop radiates heat extremely quickly once the sun goes down, and with no plants or rivers to provide humidity the temperatures at night could easily get below freezing.
Flat topology also encourages cyclonic winds; regular, fully fledged tornadoes, flinging cars about and ripping people off their feet could be an actual serious concern.
Write it up like one of those 18th century Adventure Journals. “Day 127: the Swede has scurvy; Johnson’s foot continues to degrade; I would sell my soul for a bran muffin. Thought I saw a bird but it was a hallucination. Tornado at dusk again; we lost the Turk to a falling sedan. I miss waffles.”
I saw someone reblog this dismissing it as AI despite the fact they’re 1 click away from a search engine.
“Rosetta Nebula” is all you’d have to type.
Perhaps the biggest travesty with ai images is going to be robbing people of their wonder for what’s actually possible in the universe and continuing to shrink their bubble of understanding based on whether they believe it at a glance.
The image has been colorized differently above but the Rosetta Nebula is real and actually looks like that.
When I moved to Los Angeles it took me like five years before things stopped making me think “whoa just like on TV” because it turns out a lot of things I thought were movie/TV tropes (cops and doughnuts, random mariachi bands, inscrutably pretentious restaurants, etc etc) aren’t TV inventions, they’re writers drawing from the place they live. And much of Los Angeles is just Like That.
I have no doubt if I went to Japan I’d think “whoa just like anime” all the time and no doubt if I went to the UK I’d be constantly thinking about Call The Midwife and Doctor Who and that’s fine, actually. It’s obvious, sure, but like many obvious things that doesn’t make the experience feel any less novel when it happens to you. And we like to try to share the unsharable feelings we feel. It’s human of us.
I found a whole site with lots of square games. I haven’t been able to find any kind of main page but all the other puzzles are at the bottom of the page.
What a way to end the pool stages!!! Huge congrats to Portugal on their first world cup victory, they’ve been such a revelation this tournament! Also I’m very happy to see Fiji still make it to the quarter finals, whatever happened in this match it’s very deserved
King penguin chicks can hear a quarter of a second of their parents’ call and know it is them. While surrounded by hundreds of other screaming birds.
White bellbirds produce a call that hits 125.4 decibels — the same volume as a whole-ass rock concert.
Common nightingales have between 150 and 200 distinct song types. Mostly used for seduction (who’s surprised tbh?)
Parts of male zebra finch brains are 3-6 times larger than females to accommodate the complexity of their songs.
The cassowary head casque might have evolved primarily to act as a microphone to broadcast calls so low, us humans can’t hear them. They even tilt their head down and forward to make the broadcast more effective.
Superb lyrebirds are probably the best mimics on Earth, and tailor their courtship dances to particular sounds they’ve “collected.” They literally have a dance for the “song” of a chainsaw.
Truly bonkers shit these birds be doing with sound.
The club-winged manikin decided that vocalization was overrated and it would be cool if it played its own wings like a violin to make sound
Palm cockatoos are drummers
The whooping crane has a trachea that loops way back into its body to get enough resonance for its trumpeting calls
