Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/15/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 4)

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There are interpretations of the Milky Way other than the arms of a distant galaxy. The Milky Way candy bar, invented in 1923 in Minneapolis, is still going strong domestically and globally. Its inventor was one Frank Mars, who gave his name to — you guessed it — the Mars Bar. You’d think he chose the name Milky Way to continue the astronomical theming, but the name just happened to be one of a popular milkshake of the time whose flavors he borrowed. To be fair, the milkshake itself might have been inspired by the galaxy, as the Milky Way was much in the news in the 1920s. It was only then that the astronomy community reached the consensus that it was, in fact, a galaxy, and that there existed many other galaxies just like it in the cosmos.

This MGM cartoon from 1940 also plays around with the idea. Three little kittens (note their resemblance to Jerry the Mouse of Tom and Jerry fame, who was yet to be born) have a collective dream about visiting the Milky Way in a hot air balloon, where they encounter waterfalls of cream and hills of butter. Similar riffing occurred in other cartoons of the time, no doubt confusing young watchers.

As I said earlier, the Milky Way was realized as a galaxy in the 1920s, so 2024, and this whole decade, marks it as its centenniel of a sort. Happy 100th birthday, Milky Way!

When writing speculative fiction, though, no one says the Milky Way has to be part of the picture. What if this galaxy, which looks like a giant malevolent eye with its rings of dark dust, hung in your world’s night sky?  Its mythology would be very different.

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Then there’s the world below, which lies in a whole cluster of galaxies, including a curious Ring Galaxy.

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And what if we kept the ring but lost the galactic core?

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The folk of this world could tell a legend of how the core decided to wander off one day, never to return.

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Pity the solar system caught between two interacting galaxies, engaged in a gravitational tug-of-war to tear each other apart and eventually merge. But likely the inhabitants would never know it; galaxies move in a timescale of millions of years. Though they would see some spectacular skies.

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Not all galaxies have to appear as strips or disks in the sky. If a world was within an elliptical galaxy, one would see an enormous glowing ball. This world is on the edges of such a galaxy looking in through bright, closely packed stars. This might also be what a world in a globular cluster would see.

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A world in an irregular galaxy would see a big blobby area in the sky. This one is very bright because it’s forming new stars.

I hope all this has been informative as well as fun. If you’ve got the chance this summer, go off hiking or camping somewhere remote, and see if you can see the Milky Way for yourself!

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/8/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 3)

Marduk had two pairs of eyes and four ears and flames shooting from his mouth, a rather off-putting deity if you ask me. Tiamat is depicted as a not unusual dragon.

The Greeks weren’t the only ones to create origin stories for the Milky Way. Centuries before them, the Babylonians had their own version: it was the tail of Tiamat, the dragon/serpent goddess of primordial chaos, placed there after her defeat by the god Marduk. Likely the first version of the chaos vs. order megamyth, not to mention female vs. male.

In my last post I talk about the different views a planet might have of its home galaxy, assuming it was the same as Earth’s. Today I’ll continue the discussion.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 5/1/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 2)

The Birth of the Milky Way (1668) by Peter Paul Rubens

The Birth of the Milky Way (1668) by Peter Paul Rubens

The painting above, by Peter Paul Rubens, offers a different take on the Milky Way’s origins. I like it a lot better than Tintoretto’s which appeared last week. For one thing, it feels more real. There’s a story being told as your eye travels from element to element in the painting. But it’s not the same story as Tintoretto’s. It’s more direct and less busy. In Rubens’ painting Hera suckles baby Heracles  willingly as Zeus fumes at her back, a bundle of lightning bolts at his feet, annoyed he isn’t paying attention to her. Heracles looks amazed at the size of Hera’s boob and so misses the stream of milk she squeezes, which turns into a glowing cloud at the lower left of the picture. In contrast, Tintoretto gives up just a few measly stars.

In addition to the cloud, Heracles and Hera are lowing with light, bringing them to front and center of the composition. In a nice touch, the dark shapes of Hera’s peacocks, which she uses to draw her chariot, look like the dark clouds in the center of the Milky Way that, in less light-polluted times, were more visible.

Like the myth, a planet’s view of the Milky Way can change depending on where it is placed and the tilt of its axis.

First, some basic astronomy.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/24/24: Let’s Talk About the Milky Way (Part 1)

The Origin of the Milky Way (1575) by Tintoretto.It’s hard to make out the action, but the nude central figure is Hera, the baby under her flailing left arm is Heracles, and the divine milk he spilled takes the form of tiny gold stars shooting upwards from his head.

The Milky Way  takes its name from a Greek myth about Heracles (Hercules in Roman myth) the son of Zeus and the mortal woman Alcmene. His mother, fearing the wrath of Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife, abandoned Heracles in the woods. But the infant was rescued by Athena, the goddess of wisdom and warcraft. Not being a motherly type, she placed him next to the sleeping Hera so he could suckle on her milk. Unfortunately, he suckled too hard, making Hera wake, and she pushed him away. The mouthful of milk that  spilled became the galaxias, or the way of milk, in the night sky, as the Greek word for milk is gala.

Over the centuries, galaxias eventually became galaxy, the familiar term we use today for these titanic clusters of stars and gas.

Other cultures gave the softly glowing arch, which rotates over the night, their own explanations. Many of them, as the Greeks did, reference it as a path or a road, and often a river, stream or sea. For example, Hindu mythology called it Kshira Sagara, or the Sea of Milk, perhaps related to the myth of Samudra Manthana, or the churning of the Ocean of Milk by a mountain. Other ways of explaining it were a giant chain, a fence, or even an animal’s belly or tail.

In that spirit, here’s a list of names some other culture might use.

 

Other names for the Milky Way

The Arc of Ascension

The Veils of Venus

Tiamat’s Tongue

Causeway of the Gods

Great Churn of Heaven

Misty Bridge

Abandoned Skyway

The Star-spindle

The Great Tether

Breath of the Frost Gods

Bone-powder Path

 The Starstream

The Nightbow

Tail of the Great Serpent

The Lodges of the Star-Kin

The Great Loom

Falling-blossom way

Path of the dead

Cosmic crack

Creamy Cleft

Pearly Path

The Celestial Oarfish

Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/17/24: The Best of Twittersnips (Horror and Halloween)

Christine Daae unmasks the phantom in the 1925 silent movie The Phantom of the Opera. The scene still gives me goosebumps.

Oh, the horrors! Here’s a selection from Twitternaps of the past. All meant in fun of course.

 

Horror and Halloween

Horror movies
 The Reptiloid Slayer
The Island of Medusa
Echoes of the Silence
Attack of the Giant Centipede
Mark of the Zombie
Lake of a Thousand Lunatics
Blade of the Werewolf Queen
Horror movie taglines
 See the Headhunter King Murder Helpless Coeds!
Vile Experiments Lead to Man’s Ruin!
Mad Science Creates a Race of Clam Zombies!
It would not die… yet dominated death!
Killer grave robbers from Bikini Island!
Reptile Girls Run Amok in a Top Secret Military Base!
Horror novels
 The Zombies of Paradise
The Sheath of Shadow Door
Cold Breath/Stolen Breath
The Prophecy of Area 51
Warn a Cursed Bride
Twisted Daughter
Vampire novels
 Sanguine Nectar
In a Succulent Vein
Evil coat-of-arms
 An ape’s skull on a field of indigo and white stripes
Foul villains
 Shammoki Hellsprung
Eyel Fetidbask
Lord Rukek Ravenslaughter
Giletto Otis Skullford
Queston, Necromancer of the Wounded Finger
Queen Umyrantha the Bloodless
Halloween Costumes
 Witch Doctor Cheerleader
Rastafarian Nun
The Bacon Witch
Redneck Mummy
Punk Rock Mermaid
Baby Freddy Krueger
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Drag Queen
Hawaiian Cyclops
Pool Noodle Skeleton
Day of the Dead Mr. Rogers
Elizabethean Barrista

Passing Obsessions 4-24

The Spanish region of Navarre is famous for its white asparagus. For a time the farmers’ cooperative was sponsor of the annual Running of the Bulls in Pamplona.

Rock band Wet Leg.

There’s a new ai art engine called Sureel.ai that uses “responsively sourced” image references.

Hamsters, and iPad games featuring hamsters. This one’s gonna hang around for a while. I missed the Squid Game train, but there are dozens of hamsters on YouTube playing rodent versions, which is more entertaining.

Quiet on Set, a documentary currently airing on Max about behind the scenes abuse going on at the Nickelodeon children’s network in the 1990s and 2000s.

Asparagus. I once had a co-worker named Jean-Phillip, who was from a village in France. He said that every spring during the asparagus harvest they would eat it every day, at every meal. Puzzled, I asked him, “Didn’t you ever get tired of eating asparagus?” and with a gentle logic, he said, “No. Because it was so good, you see?” And… he was right.

Asparagus salad with sesame oil

1 lb. asparagus, thin stalks
1 tbs. sesame oil
1 tbs. sesame seeds
Kosher salt
Fresh ground black pepper
1/2 cup thinly sliced onion, red onion is best

Boil asparagus in salted water until soft enough to pierce with a fork, but still firm. Cool and cut into 2″ pieces. Put into a large bowl and mix with sesame oil, sesame seeds, and onion, grind the pepper over it to taste. Tastes best cool.

 

Why I hate the Nirvana smiley face logo

I’m sure you’ve seen it on someone’s t-shirt: a roughly drawn smiley face with X’s instead of eyes and a protruding tongue. Together with the word Nirvana in its distinctive, elongated typeface – the font is Onyx, a popular one in the early 1990s – the effect on the viewer is striking.

Enlightenment? Or something else?

Right away the viewer notices that the word Nirvana, the Buddhist concept of the highest state of consciousness, is presented with levity and elegance, but the drawing of the conked-out drughead below is scribbled and rude, something that might have come from the margins of a high school notebook. The contrast might have been critical or aspirational; there’s no way to tell. Oh the irony!

But it never was intended to be the band’s official logo. It’s only official by default, helped along by the vast amount of consumer goods anointed with it.

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Worldbuilding Wednesday 4/10/24: Hamsters

When Zhu Zhu Pets came out in the beginning of the 2010s they were the hottest toy around. These little stuffed creatures were modeled on hamsters and came with wheels, so they could zip up and down trackways and do all the things Hot Wheels cars could. In addition, they made cute noises when they banged into each other or hit obstacles. Giant plastic playsets that looked like Habitrail cages came out so children could house their zhu zhus together, watching them interact and zip around. (So strong was their impression that for years I thought they were called Zhu Zhu Hamsters, until today when writing this post. That was my Mandela Moment.)

As a gender-neutral toy they were nearly perfect, appealing to both boys and girls. Unlike living hamsters, they could be mashed and crashed with glee, and didn’t need to have their cages cleaned or be fed. That, in my mind, is what made them such a great plaything — they saved the real-life animals from death and neglect.

Ever since I started these Worldbuilding Wednesday posts I wanted to make up randomly assembled names for them, but the project kept falling to the wayside. After my AI posts about hamsters the time seemed right, but to my surprise I received another Mandela Moment shock. I had remembered the creatures in the toy section back then having silly names like Squeaky and Gigglescooter, but in reality, only a few did. Most had more plebian monikers. Nevertheless, I’m sticking to my memories of the names, which would also be fitting for actual hamster pets.

 

Hamster Names

Bloobelle

Buttnoodle

Captain Tankjet

Chubby Primple

Chubdoozle

Chunkling

Coobits

Dydeedoodler

Flaptootle

Flitterbrip

Floopster

Flubwuffle

Flurkler

Fushwugguns

Fuzzrample

Gigglepants

Glimkins

Hypepper

Hyromp

Jerringle

Kooffle

Koozoo

 Li’l Bitstuff

Lompi

Major Shirfy

Meegle

Miss Chunkfluffle

Miss Dashdingle

Miss Pingling

Moogle

Mr. Pipkins

Mrs. Crashboongle

Mugglette

Mushboy

Nordle

Oompers

Plooftastic

Ploon-a-choo

Popscooter

Schlubbins

Scrunchfrazzle

Sergeant Nudgenongle

Shiffle

Shookmums

 Shootzie

Springle Girl

Shrellow

Shroomlegs

Sir Squashinator

Snickershart

Snikwaffle

Snowheelie

Squashcheeks

Teapopper

Tinkiebomb

Toonmallow

Tubbystubbs

Whufflup

Whumpy

Wrinkleberry

Yefluff

Yeekie

Yibble

Yinky-dink

Zoondink

Zoybutt

 

AI Art Adventures: Hamster Accident (with Dave Grohl)

Well, I had to find some way to link the recent book review with the posts before and after it, didn’t I?

Hamsters are often inflated to the size of cats when AI lends a hand.

Two Daves are better than one!

From an old news story about Dave.

 

The Storyteller
[Reading Challenge 2024]

The Storyteller

by Dave Grohl
HarperCollins, 2021

Dave Grohl’s The Storyteller is not the usual kind of rock and roll autobiography whose arc most often goes from rags to riches with a side tour into addiction. Instead it’s a series of short vignettes that illustrate his love of music and his gratitude towards the people and circumstances that helped him get where he is. In that is very refreshing to read.

Grohl started out as the drummer for the grunge band Nirvana. Though his career with them lasted only four years (up to the time of Kurt Cobain’s suicide in 1994) it’s perhaps what he’s best remembered for, even though his later band, the Foo Fighters, lasted eight times longer and garnered more Grammys. I had followed Nirvana’s career since the Bleach days, but neglected to follow up on Dave’s. Most of the 2000s I was immersed in the world of Latino music, Rock en Español, as it seemed to me that with the decay of the Grunge era, and the rise of boy bands, there was nothing new or interesting in the U.S. rock scene anymore. Perhaps I should have. There was no dirt in the book on Kurt (for whom he had the highest respect) or Courtney Love, and I didn’t expect there to be. The Storyteller is not a book about bitterness.

Grohl’s tone is genial and he comes across as the world’s biggest geek, and also the world’s biggest rock and roll fan. That was the main difference I found between him and some other music autobiographies I’ve read — Pete Townsend, Grace Jones, Scott Weiland. He felt more like a peer than a virtuoso. We are six years apart in age but grew up in similar circumstances – middle class East Coast – and experienced the same eras. It was sobering, in fact, to realize that we both lived through decades that are long gone and never coming back, and that the music world itself has inexorably changed from the time Nirvana first released Nevermind.

The book’s design enhanced the text. The front and back inside covers are filled with Grohl’s handwritten notes and notable comments of his in the text are set off in a font based on his handwriting. There are many fine photographs and some of them gave me a bittersweet feeling as well, like the postcards he sent to his mom from the road, which are crowded with innocent text and little drawings, something I, too, did in the late 1980s while traveling and quirky postcards were available everywhere. It’s hard to remember that Grohl was barely 21 when he joined Nirvana, and not even 25 when it disbanded. Even though I was older when they were at their height, I thought they had worlds of experience beyond me. Turns out, I was wrong. The first thing Grohl bought with his first Nirvana check were some air guns and a game system from the Olympia Fred Meyer.

A bittersweet journey overall.