#2134

Honestly, it makes sense. It’s probably stored on a grub, after all.

It's not up to you to decide what you retrieve from your sylladex. It's up to the spirits.

Poor Aradia is being micromanaged so hard, she doesn’t even have control over her own inventory. That’s fucked up, man. 

Looks like the spirits are being cooperative today, if a bit cryptic, as usual.

It spells ‘Bing’, but - thank god - they mean the Bing Crosby laptop, not the search engine.

You found this baffling artifact some time ago on one of your digs. The creature on its facade is completely mystifying. You have taken to using it as your primary computing device on account of its bizarre novelty, as well as convenient portability.

I’m not even going to ask why this thing was buried in Alternian soil - I’m sure we’ll learn later - but it is interesting that Aradia finds a human being completely unrecognizable.

I mean, from our perspective, they’re just trolls without grey skin or horns - and the laptop even has grey skin! Maybe trolls and humans look less alike than their comic depictions would have you believe. 

GA: Hi Again Aradia AA: 0h n0000000 GA: So I Guess Tonight Is The Night You Blow Everything Up AA: 0_0 GA: Is There Nothing I Can Do To Change Your Mind

GA, as expected, knows exactly what’s going down tonight. The trolls are getting information from a wide variety of sources, so who knows where she’s getting her lore from. 

She’s currently referencing an early Jade conversation - albeit from the opposite side - and she already has plenty of Jade vibes, so maybe, like Jade, she’s been putting her dream self to work. 

AA: but y0u sh0uldnt pretend as if y0u believe this has anything t0 d0 with the state 0f my mind AA: 0r the decisi0ns it will make 0r has already made

They’ve talked about this before. GA knows about Aradia’s railroading, but unlike her nihilist friend, she’s still trying to change their fate.

She won’t succeed tonight, but I still think she’s got the right idea. 

GA: I Thought Id Be Friendly Though GA: And Remind You That You Do In Fact Have A Hand In All The Terrible Things That Are About To Happen

I don’t have a comprehensive understanding of Sburb’s time mechanics - and I don’t know what happened to Aradia to convince her of all this - so I’m not going to judge her too harshly. 

But she is making a choice here, whether she admits it or not.

See, she doesn’t have all the facts. The Voices aren’t telling her everything - they really only seem to be telling her what she needs to know - so she should at least be open to the possibility that she’s wrong about fate. What has she got to lose?

If Aradia was willing to listen, to try and figure out if there are any other options - like John is slowly convincing Karkat to do - then that might change everything. Maybe things are only inevitable because she’s making them so, acting as a pawn for the Voices. 

If you already ‘know’ you’re locked into an unfavorable outcome, why not try and change things? Isn’t an unknown, but potentially non-zero chance of success better than the 0% chance you have if you don’t try and fight fate at all?

We don’t know, because Aradia has decided - maybe as a defense mechanism, to prevent herself from getting even more hurt - that she’s 0k with this outcome. Maybe, as a result of whatever happened to her, she just doesn’t have the strength to fight. 

I’m not judging her. She’s a teenager being manipulated by shadowy forces, and that’s not an easy trap to get out of. It’s completely reasonable for her to shut down, when faced with this kind of existential despair. 

But the fact remains - we won’t know if she can do anything to stop this, until she actually tries. 

GA: Ill Be Here To Help GA: If You Need Me AA: 0k AA: thanks

Tienimi per mano al tramonto, quando il giorno si spegne e l’oscurità fa scivolare il suo drappo di stelle…

Tienila stretta quando non riesco a vivere questo mondo imperfetto…

Threads of blue

A ripple of bright blue threads through this galaxy like a misshapen lake system. The foreground of this image is littered with nearby stars with their gleaming diffraction spikes. A keen eye can also spot a few other galaxies that, while masquerading as stars at first glance, reveal their true nature on closer inspection.

The central galaxy streaked with colour, IC 4870, was discovered by DeLisle Stewart in 1900 and is located approximately 28 million light-years away. It contains an active galactic nucleus, or AGN: an extremely luminous central region so alight with radiation that it can outshine the rest of the galaxy put together. AGNs emit radiation across the complete electromagnetic spectrum, from radio waves to gamma-rays, produced by the action of a central supermassive black hole that is devouring material getting too close to it. IC 4870 is also a Seyfert galaxy, a particular kind of AGN with characteristic emission lines.

IC 4870 has been imaged by Hubble for several studies of nearby active galaxies. By using Hubble to explore the small-scale structures of AGN in nearby galaxies, astronomers can observe the traces of collisions and mergers, central galactic bars, nuclear starbursts, jets or outflows, and other interactions between a galactic nucleus and its surrounding environment. Images such as this can help astronomers understand more about the true nature of the galaxies we see throughout the cosmos.