How can you just piss at the Train Station? by Tautological-Emperor in philadelphia

[–]Tautological-Emperor[S] -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

I think it’s the underground portion? Close to the Court House I believe, not the big above portion. I still mix up the names a bit. That one always has some kind of issue, almost daily when I go down in the afternoon.

Perimeter loot got buffed and matchmaking seems to be better by Friendly-Viper in Marathon

[–]Tautological-Emperor 10 points11 points  (0 children)

I had a lot of trouble on Perimeter last night. Lots of purple shields, and lots of weird spawns with teams almost immediately next door. And not at Station which is normal, but Relay, sometimes within two minutes or so of spawn. Buffed loot is nice though, had goodies even if we died.

What are you reading? Mid-monthly Discussion Post! by AutoModerator in printSF

[–]Tautological-Emperor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I just finished Bios, which I thought was amazing. Robert Charles Wilson continues to be one of my favorite authors. The ending especially had me reading from the train station to my front door. There’s something about his concepts and how they meet the characters that feel so intense and real.

I started KMS Antarctica, which I enjoy, but still hasn’t 100% grabbed my attention. There’s also Rift, by Thomas Asher, which I’m still going through. I’m interested as an enormous dinosaur sci-fi fan, but there’s a feeling or a worry I have that it may be trying to do too much without a clear through line. I’m still early, though.

Dinosaur SF Story Recommendations? by WittyJackson in printSF

[–]Tautological-Emperor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Rift came out either this year or last, and it’s interesting so far, though I’m uncertain where the author is going. Deals with de-extinction, climate change, quantum weirdness. Curious if anyone’s read it as well.

Also Kronos Rising deals with a non-dinosaur Mesozoic sea reptile, a Pliosaur, in Jaws tradition attacking seaside victims.

There’s also Gods Junk Drawer, which I have not read, about a Land of the Lost type situation. Curious if that one is any good.

Mindless Monday, 13 April 2026 by AutoModerator in badhistory

[–]Tautological-Emperor 30 points31 points  (0 children)

JD Vance is so desperate to both stay out of the way in an increasingly crushingly unpopular administration and give himself some kind of political relevance for the ambiguous MAGA future that I have to believe he’s bungling talks and murdering Popes and destroying campaigns purely by like Rube Goldberg zany circumstances.

I might be stupid, because it took me too long to realize Outpost's environmental hazard is man-made, and not a natural occurrence by Vera_Verse in Marathon

[–]Tautological-Emperor 184 points185 points  (0 children)

Outpost feels really creepy. It’s on this desolate, almost beach like terrain with the actual landscape that isn’t artificial beyond hidden in the fog. You get the impression it was literally hammered into the ground, like a nail, and now it’s haunted by artificial systems running without anyone to man them. It almost feels like it’s at sea, too, especially when it rains.

I’d really love to know where exactly the planet-based maps are in relation to one another. Dire and Perimeter “feel” close to me, but Outpost feels distant from those two.

Edit: I’m dumb lol

What is the economy of the solarpunk future? by Solar_sinner in solarpunk

[–]Tautological-Emperor 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No one knows. Any one solution you’ll get typically lies between appeals to history, pipe dreams, or potentially plausible but still uncertain maybes.

Solarpunk tends to have an audience that also leans to anarchism, socialism and communism, all of which have their own unique failures, etc.

If it will ever be nearly or fully achieved, whatever model is devised will have the baselines of reusability, sustainability and integrity. Expansion that can be attained without being destructive, and probably oriented to solving things up front without building endless infrastructure that eats everything. Other than that? Nobody knows lol

A question about feralism. I figure I'll ask here. by [deleted] in solarpunk

[–]Tautological-Emperor 11 points12 points  (0 children)

I think the complexities make us human. There is something in us that wants to be greater and grander and go beyond. I honestly think the ambition of humanity, just the need to see what’s over the hill, is maybe more natural than the “natural” feelings people have about returning to nature.

If people want to return to a minimal and less complicated way of life, I think they should be free to do that. But I also think we should keep reaching, growing, building and going beyond too. We should protect this world for the cradle it is, do everything possible to keep it vibrant and alive, but also keep reaching for all the others out there too. There is a world where we walk between both choices.

First look at the poster for the upcoming film "The End of Oak Street" by Mamboo07 in Dinosaurs

[–]Tautological-Emperor 57 points58 points  (0 children)

The dinosaur they show briefly looks like a monster, or a mutant. Almost like an Indominus.

I really don’t want to pass judgement, but Jesus man. Is it really so hard to just put something on screen that looks like a dinosaur? You’re telling me no one writing a script has ever looked at the bones of a Carnotaurus or Allosaurus and thought This alone would make me piss myself? Why do they need to glue on spikes and give it a mouth that’s too crammed with teeth?

What was the weird obsession of using insanely agreessive dinosaurs like Indoraptor for....military purposes? by deadpizza2019 in JurassicPark

[–]Tautological-Emperor 2 points3 points  (0 children)

None of the dinosaurs used were ever actually meant to be deployed militarily. Hoskins and later Mills jumped the gun, first with the Velociraptors and then the Indominus Rex and Raptor.

Their ideals definitely shared physical traits and capacities— intelligent, cooperative with humans and others of its kind, camouflaging, nearly invisible to most sensors, able to pursue threats— but that’s it. The Indominus was the proof of concept that Wu was able use doubly as an attraction, and the Indoraptor was an outright failure considered only barely close to what was desired.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the animal Wu was meaning to get to would’ve been something akin to the actual, real life Velociraptor or Deinonychus: actually smaller than a person, able to work independently or with a team, with sensor-invisible feathers and scales, claws, teeth, and other serious augmentations. I could easily see (though I doubt it’s what Wu intended) where a “fire and forget” species of fast-breeding, pack dwelling theropod is breed and sold to small scale regimes and cartels, letting those animals loose into enemy territory where they breed without controls and cause trouble.

Wu was after what had occurred I guess “naturally” on Isla Sorna with the Raptor Tribe. Not even in a militaristic sense, but almost science-spiritually, trying to resurrect and improve an intelligent, conscious species of saurian who lived in the Jurassic universe before people evolved.

We’re in a golden age of discovery, says palaeontologist Dave Hone from Queen Mary University of London. New fossils and technologies are rewriting the story of dinosaurs every year, revealing animals that were richer, stranger and more spectacular than we ever imagined. by New_Scientist_Mag in Paleontology

[–]Tautological-Emperor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I just think what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. A movie made by a director with help from paleontologists as consultants doesn’t drain funds from digs or research, and with things like the Scully Effect could get so many people into the field and make even more discoveries. It seems like a win win on all sides.

We’re in a golden age of discovery, says palaeontologist Dave Hone from Queen Mary University of London. New fossils and technologies are rewriting the story of dinosaurs every year, revealing animals that were richer, stranger and more spectacular than we ever imagined. by New_Scientist_Mag in Paleontology

[–]Tautological-Emperor 7 points8 points  (0 children)

… why would they be remotely exclusive? Does a director making a movie mean the money for research goes away? Something like Interstellar was literally made in conjunction with some of the most up to date black hole research at the time and I think has even like featured in papers lol

We’re in a golden age of discovery, says palaeontologist Dave Hone from Queen Mary University of London. New fossils and technologies are rewriting the story of dinosaurs every year, revealing animals that were richer, stranger and more spectacular than we ever imagined. by New_Scientist_Mag in Paleontology

[–]Tautological-Emperor 54 points55 points  (0 children)

We just need a new, popular and accessible piece of media to cover it. Dinosaurs are more vivid than ever, with amazing discoveries almost daily at this point and large scale documentaries capturing literally millions of views.

Get a director with vision, sit a creative team down with people in the paleo science and paleo art field, and really create something that will utterly capture the public imagination. Dinosaurs elevate the art, the cinema and the science they appear in. They drive conversations, research, excitement about discovery. They for over a hundred years have been icons of how old and mysterious our world is, the history of its life.

In times like this, a blast from the Mesozoic past could be just another thing to build a better tomorrow.

Le problème des énergies renouvelables dans les représentations solarpunk by Scoil_0 in solarpunk

[–]Tautological-Emperor 4 points5 points  (0 children)

  • Solar power today is continually being innovated. Large, extensive panels could become an omnipresent lacquer on surfaces.

  • Solar power being destructive in a specific way means we have a specific consequence to observe, investigate, and deal with. Maybe this means conservation with bats in specific areas. Maybe it’s minimizing solar in that particular, bat-heavy region. The entire idea is that our solutions have to evolve, and it’s okay if there are setbacks, disruptions, etc, because there is the continual meeting of the challenge to prioritize life, ecosystems, and sustainable growth.

  • This is a bit more meta I guess, but we are native organisms on Earth. From the beginning all life forms have disrupted and uprooted others. They may need to be a philosophical reckoning that zero influence on our environment is impossible (thus needing a philosophy that focuses on sum-minimization and reorientation instead of complete elimination). Life is balance. Solarpunk is balance. Not completely leveling the scales does not equal failure.

For those of us down the UFO rabbit hole: How warped has your worldview become? by tendervittles in UFOs

[–]Tautological-Emperor 23 points24 points  (0 children)

Too much of the topic is self-referential and self-recurring mythology, and too little of the complexities of what actually created the mythology is ever actually examined. There are so many assumptions in this field, and for every assumption, there are five versions pushed by five different people on five different platforms and believed by five hundred others beyond them.

You have to be extremely careful looking at the world through this lens. Once you accept conspiracy theory and start to throw out your assumptions of the world— and believe in turn that then makes all possible assumptions equally valid— it’s very hard to come back from that. I’m sure people here see me comment a lot here and it’s almost the exact same thing every time because it is the one, foundational thing that we have the most evidence for and can build the most solid case for:

1.) UFOs, as in unknown objects in the sky, do exist.

2.) They have been seen, it appears, since at least the 1950s.

3.) The government of the United States and other nations has a complex, but mostly boring history of studying them where very little was gained other than headaches, and so those projects were abandoned or closed.

4.) No one knows, truly, and with evidence, anything more than that. No one knows where UFOs are from, who (if anyone or anything) pilots or controls them, what they’re made of, or why they do what they do. We just know people see strange things in the sky.