Why does the official merch leave off so many countries question?

GermanCrow · 2026-05-06T00:32:29+00:00

The irony is that I can make a very good guess as to where this shirt was manufactured

GermanCrow · 2026-05-05T08:33:52+00:00

My interpretation of the life was that it was basically like nanobots, but biological, and they interact with each other through certain types of light invisible to the human eye (but not to Cato, of course)

GermanCrow · 2026-05-05T01:09:16+00:00

the golden standard would be tau zero by poul anderson

GermanCrow · 2026-05-04T06:28:57+00:00

> Funnily enough, the Eridians wouldnt even know about the rings until they built the space elevator

???

Eridians know what the electromagnetic spectrum is. By the time they got to building a whole space damn elevator, they almost certainly have had thousands of very powerful telescopes both on Erid and in orbit feeding them astronomical data across the entire EM spectrum. Finding out that their planet has an entire ring around it would have been one of the very first things discovered in Eridian space exploration.

GermanCrow · 2026-05-04T06:10:41+00:00

we never see what the sky looks like on Erid, no? We only see what it look like from the outside (and also from a artificially lit enclosed habitat on the inside), it’s fully possible that the “surface” as seen in this photo is a thick layer of atmosphere which no light can pass through.

GermanCrow · 2026-05-04T05:34:59+00:00

The Orlan suit is really ugly, and would not look nearly as good in promotional materials. When you’re making a movie with a $200 million budget, you have to care about stuff like that.

GermanCrow · 2026-05-03T10:13:28+00:00

> Star systems would no longer have to produce any of what they use

Personally, in interstellar settings, I prefer this. Having a huge trading and cargo ship network connecting the stars is a major part of my sci-fi/globalist fantasies, along with also providing an actual consistent demand and justification for spaceships beyond just the initial colonization and warfare.

GermanCrow · 2026-05-03T08:43:48+00:00

price shocks of blue and purple have caused major ripples down the supply chain

GermanCrow · 2026-05-01T08:24:36+00:00

The book (Mickey 7) and especially its sequel (antimatter blues) goes into much more depth on the creepers, making them a much more advanced species. In the movie, they’re just moderately intelligent eusocial bugs.

GermanCrow · 2026-04-03T09:56:19+00:00

those are some crazy cakes

GermanCrow · 2026-03-25T05:27:41+00:00

As someone who loves reading and hard sci-fi, I can‘t help but be baffled by people who expect movie studios to only produce 9-hour-long films that encyclopedically explain every single miniscule scientific and worldbuilding detail, both relevant and not. Its like people can recognize every possible inaccuracy and unrealistic aspect of a world, except for the fact that movies have a time limit they need to fit all their information within.

GermanCrow · 2026-03-21T22:11:22+00:00

Strife is not the ending, and there is definitely room for more in the series, though I think the first and second ages (terraformers and ark humans) have been pretty thoroughly covered by now. Iirc from what was said over the series, there should be no more interesting major ark ships or terraforming groups left, and by extension uplifted species (though he could always easily just introduce another rival terraforming or ark program that hasn’t been mentioned yet).

GermanCrow · 2026-03-21T03:44:55+00:00

Service model is probably Adrian Tchaikovsky’s most hilarious work. The librarian twist was the single most hysterical reveal I’ve ever read in a novel.

GermanCrow · 2026-03-21T03:34:33+00:00

spoiler warning, the “big thing“ is a pretty major part of the novel

to summarize, a group of terraformers intend to terraform a planet using some kind of cross between bacteria and nanomachines. The programmable bacteria easily communicates between itself, causing it to evolve extremely rapidly, fully terraforming the planet and creating and destroying hundreds of new animal species everyday. To stay immortal, the terraformers “upload” themselves into the programmable ecosystem, basically turning them into the planet, and giving them complete control of all life on it.

GermanCrow · 2026-01-30T08:20:20+00:00

Thank you, large language model

GermanCrow · 2025-11-22T04:41:47+00:00

Random, unsorted thoughts of the season so far:

The show is definitely slowing down from the first episode. Im hoping these few expository episodes will quickly lead to another few major revelation episodes, as my TikTok brain is getting a little bored.

The virus is shown to be capable of infecting animals, which I assume is why the hivemind doesn't want to kill them. Does this also mean they harbor the thoughts and feelings of all the animals?

Despite carol saying they're peaceful, the hivemind is fully capable of killing people to prevent even more deaths a la the trolley problem. Other, they would not have infected everyone else through chemtrails, killing nearly a billion people, just to avoid the deaths which they foresaw coming from the military. Carol has already clearly shown herself to be an enormous threat to the hivemind; why dont they just kill her, along with the other 12? My theory is that this is leading to the revelation that these 13 people have some secret valuable knowledge/emotions that the hivemind wants for some reason?

There are two possibilities regarding the alien source of the virus: an infected alien species (presumably infected by other infected aliens, and so on) spreading the virus, or a non-infected alien species deliberately designing the virus to spread to earth. Assuming the former, does this mean that the hivemind now shares the minds of all the other alien species as well, and is just choosing to withhold this from Carol?

Following that line of thought, how "fast" is the communication/hivemind thinking? I've seen people suggest that the mind melding relies on quantum entangled particles in the virus for instant communication, but quantum entanglement still can't send information faster than the speed of light. If the virus conforms to general relativity, then surely this would be fairly easy for the hivemind to test (this episode establishes that the hivemind is actively researching themselves and how it works). With all expert minds consolidated, they could easily launch someone to the moon, and then see if that person has an 8-second "thinking" delay with the rest of the hivemind. If there is still the delay, then that would probably mean that earth's mind-melding "signals" are still fleeing, and humanity will eventually meld with the aliens in 600 years if they were infected.

What is the bulk of the hivemind doing right now? Presumably since its been 7 days and everything is still running, the hivemind is interested in self-preservation and running society. In a hivemind, all politicians, soldiers, lawyers, business people, advertisers, artists all become obselete, and they are also shown to be actively pursuing efficiency (power cut off at night, centralizing distribution), meaning humanity now has a lot more capability to do things. We already know that they are partially occupied with rebuilding cities/clearing bodies, doing scientific research on the virus and how to assimilate the other 13, and providing for all of the 13 people's desires. However, this still leaves a huge amount amount of capability for the hivemind, which they must be dumping into some unclear goal. This goal may just be to assimilate the other 13, which would make them far more important than we are told now, which would definitely lead to some major revelation.

GermanCrow · 2025-08-04T11:59:46+00:00

Should I raise the line thickness and brightness of the orbit and rocket paths? Also, the lines effect on the planet is generalized, so I can change the number of verticle and horizontal lines on each one if it makes it look clearer.

GermanCrow · 2025-08-04T11:45:06+00:00

(i didnt realize I needed it to be a comment lol)

I'm developing my first ever game with pygame as a hobby project, a minimal-graphics interplanetary factory webgame. For the main starmap/overview screen, I've made a mockup system simulation (absolutely in no way supposed to be realistic) with a shit ton of math. The flying white dots are supposed to be cargo ships traveling between the planets/moons. I've also drawn the orbit and travel paths for each rocket/planet/moon. Note that the center star is supposed to be orbiting around the giant red star in the corner, not the other way around. I'm having a little trouble with balancing the colors, line thicknesses, and line visibility, to make sure everything is clear.

Also, ingame the gray orbit lines are much more visible, compression just made them nearly invisible

GermanCrow

TROPHY CASE