Drives Me Nuts The Amount Of Times I Have To Hear "a Black Hole Is A [blank]* From Which Nothing Can

Drives me nuts the amount of times I have to hear "a black hole is a [blank]* from which nothing can escape, not even light!"

Brother I KNOW we have been over this literally ad nauseam PLEASE just get to the interesting part

*sometimes object, sometimes region of space, sometimes other, seems to be little consensus there

RIGHT? Everyone and their mother knows what a black hole is now, Documentary Makers, so please tell me in detail what happens when you smash them together instead.

Ozymandias

by Percy Shelly

I think that what's brilliant about The Far Side is how it can imply an entire narrative with only a single panel. It's sequential art without the sequence. Like this one

There's the obvious implication of what's going to happen in the future (there's going to be a hunt), but it also stretches into the past: what circumstances in the anthropology of this group of cavemen must have happened to establish a tradition of dancing with Woolly Mammoths? Why does it, in spite of it's obvious absurdity, feel kind of right that there should be a dance before the cavemen and the mammoths engage in mortal combat? The reluctant fearful expression on the caveman at the bottom; is this his first hunt? Are those his elders trying to reassure him? Does the one mammoth actually seem to fancy him? What about the one looking fearfully back at his friends? How does he feel that the others aren't there to reassure him? One of the mammoths in the upper right looks just as fearful as the cavemen; why? etc.

And all of this is purely evoked. There's only simple line-drawing and two sentences of text, but you see it and it reminds you of other sorts of narratives you've seen or experienced, and your brain constructs a whole temporal sequence; and any possible answer you could get to above the questions would never be as satisfying as what your brain fills in.

I could write an entire essay about this.

The Realms

An up-to-date overview of my 8 worldbuilding projects.

Edit: As of 2023, Diaspora [DSP] has been renamed to Astra Planeta [ASP]. As of 2022, Aedrynn [ADN] has been retired from the list, replaced by The Midnight Sea [TMS].

ASP | AV | OE | SPH | TMS | CDL | LOR | PR

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