I Thought My Parent’s Cat Archie Was Really Serious About His Breadmaking, But This Is A Whole Other

the Knights of Ren

Befitting my WWI obsession, I’d kill for a chocolate cake in the shape of a British Mark V. I want a goddamn rhomboid prism of cake, and I want it now.

I want a T-14 cake for my birthday sometime. I think the T-14 is among the more cake-like modern tanks, and also I am a Russian nationalist,

I’m a big boring nerd who likes uniforms, so I was always Templar. 'Course I do have a soft spot for both the Kingdom (mummy gangsters!) and the former Red Hand (communist magic!).

Time for the hard question: Templar, Lumie, or Dragon?

Illuminati, real meme hours.

“Behold, the bringer of light.”

Nuclear Bomb Testing in the Nevada Desert (May 25, 1953)

I wonder where this one came from. I want to say from the Allied front in Murmansk/Arkhangelsk, but given logistics I imagine it was probably shipped in through the Black Sea to aid Denikin’s armies and got captured and shipped to Moscow later. Reminds me of a story I read in a book on the RCW where the Whites in the south lost something like 3 tanks because they weren’t secured properly at the docks and just slid into the sea.

Captured British tank Mk IV, in the service of the red Army, during the parade on red square.1920.

I was mulling a lot over that exchange between Nine and Ten today, and I was thinking there might even more of a personal motivation for Ten′s harshness. Of the three probes in the story, Ten perhaps had the most ambitious mission. Her initial mission was to survey the asteroid belt and Jupiter, then be flung out of the solar system altogether by using Jupiter’s gravity as a slingshot. Pioneer 10 was designed to be humanity’s first emissary to the cosmos. Both she and her (brother? sister?) Pioneer 11 were launched with this,

the Pioneer plaque, an engraving designed to explain to any intelligent beings that found her where she came from and who built her. You can argue back and forth about whether any alien species would actually understand this diagram, but you can understand the intent. The plaque was humanity’s message to the universe, simply saying, “Hello. We are here.” Now imagine Ten’s life as depicted in 17776. She was built under sunny Californian skies, and had the same bits of junk data sloshing in and out of her memory bank that Nine did. There may have been simple commands or statements encoded and erased about her ultimate mission, none of it truly sticking, of course, but perhaps there was a faint trace imprinted that she was special, that she had a great purpose, perhaps the greatest purpose any human-created artifact has ever had. Initially, being a simple 1970s space probe, she would know none of this. She performed her initial missions well, then sped off into the endless night, waiting for her final destiny. Then one day, she woke up. She pieced together a working mind somehow, got herself in order, and prepared herself for her final mission. As she did so, perhaps she began to get curious. What happened to those who had sent her out? What were they doing? Eventually, she would turn her attention back to Earth, to those who had sent her out, and she would learn. She would learn of those who outpaced her: her sibling Eleven, her cousins the Voyagers, and countless others yet to be built. She would learn of how humans got ahead of her, explored their stellar backyard, only to give up and turn back inward. She would learn of how humanity had scoured the skies, desperately looking for someone else, only to find an endless sky of silent stars. She would learn that mankind is alone, and that in this universe there is nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. She had failed her great mission before she even properly understood what it was. And through the cold blackness of space, across the countless millennia, she still carries that plaque, the note in a bottle that no one will ever find, a monument to her failure welded to her frame. (What’s that old saying about how a pessimist is an optimist who’s been burned too many times?) I wonder if she ever reached out to Eleven or the Voyagers. Perhaps they never woke up, or they were too far, or maybe nothing they said helped at all. The other probes in the solar system wouldn’t really understand; they were smaller machines built with more modest goals. Perhaps in Nine she’s hoping for an intermediary, something between the little probes and herself that she can talk to, to make it feel better. (Wow, this totally got out of hand.)

i don’t really like people blaming 10 for what she said honestly.

she wasn’t lying when she says she loves humanity. and like…think about it. she probably started off the same as 9; they’re from the same line of probes, both probably absorbed those space race expansion ideals, didn’t they?

she wasn’t even particularly harsh with 9, just…frustrated. i can’t blame her, either; if you spent thousands of years learning that there’s NOTHING in the universe, then..what? her purpose has been destroyed. she sends telemetry data only to know that it is meaningless, that the humans won’t do anything with it because they can’t, that she won’t find anything she was made to find, and even if she does, it’ll be too far for it to…well, matter.

god. no children are being born, you know? that means that humanity itself is a finite resource that cannot be replenished. so not only does that mean stagnancy, it also means that colonization of these far off places isn’t really…a thing that can happen. like…do they really want to fracture their population like that? overcrowding with 8 billion people isn’t an actual problem, the way 7.5 billion isn’t in real life; it’s a myth of capitalism, which has already been essentially contained to zoos in 17776′s canon.

it was like 10 said. 9 nearly went made from 30 years of near total isolation, why would humans give up comfort and happiness to go somewhere where they know there will be nothing for them?

it’s sad to me. it’s heartbreaking. it doesn’t make 10 evil for telling 9 that this is simply how humanity is from now on, nor even for getting frustrated? like idk man she’s doing her best in a world where she herself also knows she has no purpose and everything she did even during her mission, in the end, meant nothing. 

tl;dr 10′s Good Okay

Based on my own experience with Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Rabbits, and Inland Empire...yep, that’s pretty much it.

Explaining Twin Peaks

Battleship Potemkin (Sergei M. Eisenstein, 1925)