The First Rule Of Starfaring: Do Not Stare Into Hyperspace. Never, Ever, Stare Deep Into Hyperspace;

“The first rule of starfaring: do not stare into hyperspace. Never, ever, stare deep into hyperspace; not because of what is there -it is not a separate place from the space we know- but because of what it is. Hyperspace is simply normal space in another direction, one you could not think of if you wanted to, and that in itself is the problem. When a ship flies through hyperspace, it moves by vectors that we can only understand through the comfort of abstract math. Watching it happen before your eyes is a sure way to drive yourself mad. Because the second you stop staring at that void, you will know that for a fleeting moment you understood God, and the only way to get that moment back is to confront the void again.”

— Brother Nicodemos of the Order of Saint Mercurion, describing voidthrall

Voidthrall is the insanity which befalls those who have spent too much time directly observing the reality of hyperspace. Within the shifted resonance state of hyperspace the mind can, to some extent, process the nature of fifth-dimensional reality, as the neural connections made to do so utilize the extra dimension. However, upon the return to the fourth-dimensional resonance state, these connections are inaccessible, leaving only the impression of a greater understanding and the burning itch to know something just beyond reach.

Voidthrall is, without exaggeration, eldritch madness: an obsession with the inherently unfathomable. The afflicted are haunted by echoes of things they cannot imagine without the bone-deep humming of a ship's hyperdrive, unable to make use of this knowledge, yet still plagued by memories of a far greater truth. The longer the afflicted have gazed into the abyss, the more desperate they become to regain their comprehension of the incomprehensible.

The madness is, to date, incurable. The only effective treatment able to soothe those who pathologically seek the unknowable truth is further exposure to hyperspace, until the point where the afflicted become unable to neurologically function in normal space.

That was the first thing I thought about as well, but unfortunately I realized that's just not possible. For one thing, the oldest of these stars only formed about 40 million years ago, and it took a few hundred million years for Earth to form and cool enough to host life.

More to the point, though: none of those stars can host planets because there isn't enough planet-stuff around. See, most of intergalactic matter is hydrogen and helium. The intergalactic void simply does not have the same amount of heavier elements you find in galactic environments, because there hasn't been a long chain of prior stellar death to form them out there. However, that also means that this stellar strand is likely composed of some of the purest-fusing stars the universe has seen for eons.

Putting that all aside, if we imagine ourselves on an impossible world in this cosmic wake, the night sky would look very strange. Most of the heavens would be very dark, flecked with a handful of stars. However, there would be two opposing splotches of bright accumulated starlight, gradually fading outwards. How alien would that be to us, with our Milky Way?

Fresh news from Hubble, and it's a real doozy this time: it found a runaway supermassive black hole.

Let me repeat that:

A runaway SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE.

Half the universe away, an immense object born of concentrated primordial chaos, so powerful it once bound an entire galaxy together, hurtles through the intergalactic void. Its flight through the cosmos so unfathomably violent that it leaves a stream of newborn stars two hundred thousand lightyears long whirling in its wake. Gas and dust in the space between galaxies is spread so thin a particle might never touch another for a million years, and yet this escaped galactic core has dragged the matter in its path into fusion.

What a universe we live in!

So I've gotten a lot of new followers in the last 48 hours or so, all of which appear to be very new to the site -they're blank apart from the following tab and occasionally some likes. Spam bot red flag, right? But I've noticed two strange things. The first is that almost all of them only follow a handful of blogs instead of successively following hundreds of random blogs. That's RPB (Real Person Behaviour). Second and more curiously, they have all followed myself either immediately before or immediately after following one well-known David J @prokopetz. My only conclusion, though I have yet to actually test its veracity, is that the goddamn Glock Function post and maybe last week's Hubble post netted me enough attention from whatever algorithms drive the blog recommendation feature to qualify me as something akin to "tumblr-famous" and place me adjacent to Mr. Prokopetz as a similar blog.

Huh.

this one actually made me laugh pretty hard im not gonna lie

Mixed Heroes

A two-page ttrpg about saving the world, solving problems, and being mixed race.

A two-page ttrpg about saving the world, solving problems, and being mixed race. This was made in less than 18 hours out of pure, incandescent, white hot rage.

Pick it up on my kofi! It's currently pay-what-you-want!

Ko-fi

Mixed Heroes - Megan Caldwell's Ko-fi Shop

A two-page TTRPG about saving the world, solving problems, and being mixed race.

Reboot and put in the tags a song that gets better with its music video