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.

Ancient Mother Earth, cradle of the human miracle yet half-forgotten by her long-departed children, appears in the 53rd century as an overgrown playground of gods. Vast and awesome constructs, in various stages of disrepair, dot the slowly-healing landscape and the orbits above, evoking an image of toys left scattered on a bedroom floor. The human race once longed to spread its wings and fly to the stars, and Earth now remains the empty nest from whence they fledged.

Yet, she is not all empty, after all. Some could not bear to leave their mother behind, and for millennia now they have toiled in quiet solace to care for the weary Earth after her labors to birth starfaring humanity. And, much as one turns to the halcyon of childhood to comfort the grief of adulthood, so too does humankind their Earthbound infancy: now, slowly, a tide of reverent hiraeth sweeps across the people of the stars, drawing them back to the garden.

Mother is calling her children home.

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.

Cunk on Earth | Philomena's Castle

Researchers have used Easter Island Moai replicas to show how they might have been “walked” to where they are displayed.

VIDEO

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!