It is buck wild that these networks can generate shitty English by sight alone. These aren't the robots that scanned all the books in the library. This is purely visual.

Or PTSD from that dam.

It almost sounds wrong without the hit markers and low-health beeps.

Thumbnail looks like a horny cacodemon.

Gradually gliding into a gaseous cloud that the sun lights up would be genuinely fascinating, but still probably kill everyone. Pros and cons.

... would it affect the northern hemisphere first? I have no idea which direction the solar system actually proceeds.

Does this count?

They look fine. Maybe some rosemary? Decently browned, too. All I'd worry about is "new potatoes" getting gummy when slow-cooked.

Garlic powder and salt when they come out, spritz of lemon, she'll be right.

"Why do you want that?"

Incorrect. Next.

I’d guess that we’d probably wind up turning ourselves into the largest explosion that humanity has ever observed in the universe.

With front-row seats.

perhaps some would be wise enough to realize that the sudden dimming of the sun - eight minutes as it turns to a dull, occluded, sky-colored haze, as if it had just melted away -

Huh. If it all snapped into existence, it'd catch the light traveling through space, at that moment. So Earth might briefly get brighter? The dark side obviously would, as Rayleigh scattering turns our penumbra blue... all the way out to fucking Neptune. On the bright side, at first, it would genuinely be more sky, but-- I don't-- I just cannot wrap my head around how to even model that. The entire solar system would flash as bright as the daytime sky, give or take a couple AU, for like a billisecond. And then that energy would bounce around until it's mostly absorbed, surely. The image of the sun might vanish instantly. Even on Earth I expect most photons do not arrive having dodged the entire atmosphere.

Thinking about modeling this ridiculous hypothetical is going to keep me up tonight.

Science values independent discovery of exactly how fucked we are.

I hadn't considered foreign asteroids. If this ridiculous setup was somehow stable, bits of it would routinely light up from space rocks plunging through at terrifying speed. Hailey's comet is coming back to stay.

Yeah, this question kinda undersells how it's sprinkling a couple aspirational rocks into an enormous cosmic gas cloud, rather than providing those rocks with a quaint environment. Even the provolone-slice model that's 1 AU thick is only lighter by two orders of magnitude. It's one million times the total mass of everything else in the solar system. Spreading it on as thickly as our soupy atmosphere, where even certain mammals can flap hard enough to hunt in midair, would have an impact on world events the way a period impacts a sentence.

A saga about nothing.

That is to say - standalone movies, mostly, with some tidbits for people who've seen everything or know the lore. Not setting up dominoes for a decade later. Just sprinkling in bonuses for anyone paying attention.

Then they could really lean into how all these characters barely coexist, in their own stories. Spider-Man has decades of stories that mostly take place in a few boroughs of NYC. The X-Men are always doing their own thing upstate, and Peter might hear about them on the news, but there's not some grand crossover coming because they don't hang out together. The unlikeliness of ever even meeting Iron Man can be a running gag.

So embrace how television handles the long stories, nowadays, by making superhero movies more episodic. None of them need to be So-And-So Begins. Throw in a flashback if you really need to explain to any living person what Captain America's deal is. Chances are pretty good they already get it. Let people pick up any of these movies, whenever. Give them a self-contained story where the premise takes five lines of dialog and using your damn eyeballs.

This can still have multiverse bullshit! You're free to start a movie with "the distant future, 1997" and show a laser battle. Just resolve that shit in that movie, instead of making it a cliffhanger for a teaser for a crossover for blaaah.

Larry Niven has a setting that's vaguely like this, called the Smoke Ring.

This sounds like an XKCD what-if that ends with an explosion that could deafen god himself.

Like, if it just pops into existence, "static" relative to the sun, it'd all slowly fall into the sun. The solar system is ehhh 100 AU wide, atmospheric density's about 1 kg per cubic meter, 1 AU is ~1.5e11 m... volume of a sphere is 4/3 * pi * r^3... that'd be 4.5e39 kg of gases, or basically 500,000,000 times the current mass of the sun. So, at a wild guess, probably enough to form a black hole? But it cannot be good for the inner solar system either way. Especially not if we work out how an Earth-shaped column of that gas falls into the sun with Earth in the way.

(Edit: Sagittarius A* is only 4e6 solar masses. 5e8 is borderline supermassive. Things would go poorly.)

If it spins instead - if it's all playing nicely with the orbits of each planet and the general flow of the asteroid belt - we probably don't all die fantastically. At least not for a while. We can assume it'd be a plane instead of a sphere, maybe 1 AU thick, as if the sun had rings. I don't think it'd just diffuse out into the cosmos? Once all that mass is orbiting, you'd only lose the weird exceptional atoms that reach the edge with a bunch of energy and then don't hit anything for a zillion miles. That also happens at the top of Earth's atmosphere, and we've got gravity keeping it in check. So let's just hand-wave that this situation lasts, like, at all.

Those bands in the rings will experience friction. Any speed differential has consequences, and I do not want to think about the computation requirements for that kind of fluid simulation. I think at worst they'd separate. They can't all take the same angular velocity because that's not how orbits work. They might fuck up the planets moving through them? Like, I don't know much about astrophysics, but when a planet has rings it's not because things went well for the satellites in that range.

Actually that highlights how the planets would have the same issue as the sun, if a bunch of mass magically appeared overhead, in their reference frame: it'd fall. Air doesn't weigh much, but when you hand-wave an entire gazillion miles of it, that adds up. We'd have problems well before the atmosphere started to outpace the entire solid mass of Earth.

If this atmosphere orbits each planet, the way the whole shebang orbits the sun - you're back to speed differentials. Just thinking locally: there'd be different spin for air that refuses to fall toward Earth, and air that refuses to fall toward the moon, and somewhere in the middle those two streams would meet. Or - at best! - they wouldn't quite meet. The gaps would separate themselves. You could maybe do a cool sci-fi setting with that, but your space 747 would need to zoop clean out of Earth's sky-ocean and catch the moon's.

Oh. And I don't think sunlight would be visible through one hundred and fifty million kilometers of atmosphere. At least, until the sun slurped up a couple yottatons of it, at which point we'd have whole new problems.

Given typical inflatable-pool marketing, that ice bath is two feet wide.

One bed, half bath.

Nonprofit gacha. That's a new one.

Still no.

Video game stories being famously unique and not at all formulaic.

I fondly remember Beaucoup, mostly because of the boundless optimism necessary to assume Americans could spell Beaucoup.

Google played themselves by making an autocorrect that wouldn't swear.

Hey - I should found a business named Thus.

Because that sounds like what you want to hear, and if I say it, you will give me your money.

Name eating thingy, SCP-5300... ish. Reclassified a few times as prior efforts were misplaced. You'd swear they were right here. One of them had a good name, something-phage. Borderline antimemetic. Passed back and forth between departments, and never really lost, but not exactly pinned-down to the foundation's typical standards. Rated safe - just kind of a pain in the ass. Mostly harmless.

Tangentially, Ingmar Bergman.

Is dubvee run by and for one guy? What little I've seen (and dealt with) feels like a level of pettiness antithetical to any level of organization. More than once, I've checked the site, and expected it to be like those self-hosted users... the vanity plate of the Fediverse.

Thanks, Satan.

"Because otherwise there wouldn't be a mooovie."

Nothing inside a video game should cost real money.

The difference between this abusive horseshit and any cheaper example is quantitative - not qualitative.

I'd argue Unity's implosion was wholly evitable. All they had to do was announce, going forward, there would be different licensing. Big new version six months from now? Hey guess what, we'll do things differently from then on, so make your preparations accordingly. But no - they fucked over existing projects. They tried to retroactively interfere with the business decisions of games that were years into development.

Oracle only gets away with that shit because they're an eight-ton gorilla. And people still desperately look for the exits every time Larry Ellison announces a relicensing scheme based on how many computers you can think of.

Cutie.

Because that's how it's fucking spelled.

See also "ancient stone tool."

Qt? They insist it's "cute," which, no.

Godot? Don't care.

https://r33b.net/

No amount of precedent will get me to stop pronouncing it G'doh.

This isn't a Qt situation where the people who named it are objectively wrong about how those letters should get said. I just do not like any of the other options.

Alternately: hail seitan!

Evasion tactics! Nobody's favorite.

Gin and hubris tell me the leading defense will be other drones. Defense still has the range advantage: assholes come to you. You can easily make faster and lighter drones than whatever's targeting you, and if nothing else, punish attacks with loss of materiel. Which doesn't even require blowing up your zippy little drone, if the enemy's rotors can be fucked by anything more substantial than Silly String.

Let's not water down the concept of lost media. Black & White was sold on physical discs with twee 2000s DRM. I guaranfuckingtee you it's easily pirated, alongside the Fisher Price version of Windows it ran on.

'If you were not the twat shouting at other people for using the road, please bring this telling-off to their attention.'

Honk.

Dracula Flow disqualified.