"average greek sea voyage takes eight months" factoid actually just statistical error. sea voyages around greece are very short. Bad-luck Odysseus, who tripped over a monster every five feet, had to sail in loop de loops around greece to avoid various annoyed deities, and took eleven years to sail 565 miles, is an outlier adn should not have been counted.
absolutely love reading such a well-written story and falling a bit in love with the author based solely on the way they write. like baby the way you italicize words makes my heartbeat quicken.
You’ve just realized something strange about the humans. They’re a race that joined the galaxy recently, but you’ve just found evidence of them already been part of it for many millennia before, but it feels like everybody’s forgotten.
Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1
The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.
So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.
So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.
Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.
And the probe is working again.
From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.
Choke. Just think about it, seriously. Think about what choking is and imagine speaking while it’s happening. That would fuckin’ hurt, man.
Hiss. Look, it’s just not possible, okay? No matter how “evil” you want your character to seem.
Snarl. Animals snarls. The Beast from Beauty and the Beast snarls. The Hulk snarls. You know who doesn’t snarl? PEOPLE WHEN THEY’RE SPEAKING.
Shriek. Come on, 99% of the time, “shriek” is not the word you want.Let’s face it: if you put an exclamation point at the end of the sentence, your reader gets the picture. Don’t bring to mind banshees and screaming toddlers.
Sneer. I’m not even going to bother explaining this one. “SNEER” ISN’T EVEN A SOUND.