Nah, listen to “Hokus Pokus” and “When I’m Clownin” and “Let’s Go All the Way”. Those are the kind of songs you can shuffle in your favorites playlist without being an obsessive fan.

I really like Slayer’s “God Hates Us All” album, but nothing else I’ve heard from them has gripped me in the same way. It’s good stuff, I just don’t like it enough to listen to it more than once. Yes, I’ve listened to Reign in Blood and Seasons in the Abyss.

(edit: I kind of regret posting this image for reasons described below, but I’ll leave it up for context.)

I kinda like this variation on the theme:

They clenched around the world like a fist, each black as the inside of an event horizon until those last bright moments when they all burned together. They screamed as they died. Every radio up to geostat groaned in unison, every infrared telescope went briefly snowblind. Ashes stained the sky for weeks afterwards; mesospheric clouds, high above the jet stream, turned to glowing rust with every sunrise. The objects, apparently, consisted largely of iron. Nobody ever knew what to make of that.

For perhaps the first time in history, the world knew before being told: if you’d seen the sky, you had the scoop. The usual arbiters of newsworthiness, stripped of their accustomed role in filtering reality, had to be content with merely labeling it. It took them ninety minutes to agree on Fireflies. A half hour after that, the first Fourier transforms appeared in the noosphere; to no one’s great surprise, the Fireflies had not wasted their dying breaths on static. There was pattern embedded in that terminal chorus, some cryptic intelligence that resisted all earthly analysis. The experts, rigorously empirical, refused to speculate: they only admitted that the Fireflies had said something. They didn’t know what.

Everyone else did. How else would you explain 65,536 probes evenly dispersed along a lat-long grid that barely left any square meter of planetary surface unexposed? Obviously the Flies had taken our picture. The whole world had been caught with its pants down in panoramic composite freeze-frame. We’d been surveyed—whether as a prelude to formal introductions or outright invasion was anyone’s guess.

https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

Maybe it’s bc I’ve been doing a lot of proofreading recently, but the first thing I noticed was reference to “the Battle of Dover Straight” instead of Strait.

“word shitting”. Lots and lots of words that say fuck all.

This is a great way to describe LLM-based AIs. I’ma use it.

Hey fellow slrpnk.net refugees… if you’re looking to recreate your list of subscribed communities, here’s a good place to start:

(luckily I was posting this to newcomers whenever I had the chance…)

Sorry to hear that! My main account is on slrpnk.net. But don’t let it stress you out, “solarpunk” says “punk” which implies “DIY” which means this sort of thing happens. Much better to have an instance run by an admin who truly cares, rather than some soulless corporation.