Your players are faced with an ancient Sumerian curse! However, since the early ancient Sumerian language was only used for recording tax debts, it turns out to actually be an ancient Sumerian bill.
and therefore they need to get hold of some ancient Sumerian coinage and bring it to the ruins of the ancient Sumerian tax office, because the Sumerians had a pleasingly direct way of preventing tax evasion, namely horrifying curses.
well I don’t have any coin but I have these copper ingots, lovely copper ingots, from a very reputable merchant, never heard a word said against him, very thorough with his paperwork, anyway they’re guaranteed pure copper and proper weight, so can I pay my tax with those?
I just want everyone to take a step back for a second and really think about how we’re using the most powerful knowledge tool in history to make jokes about a specific dude who lived almost 4000 years ago.
it’s fuckin wonderful, is what it is.
Ea-nasir has been dead for 4700 fraudy fraudy years.
I don’t think most people realize how terrifying the Moon Landings were. They look back at it, and see this great achievement in human spaceflight but don’t grasp the gravity of the situation. (No pun intended)
OP mentions Michael Collins, who is often forgotten. He was the third member of the Apollo 11 mission, who manned the Command Module whilst the other two landed with the Lander Module. People might hear that and thing he got the short end of the stick, but honestly… I’d argue the opposite. At 20:17:40 UTC on Sunday July 20 1969 the Landing Module touched down on the Moon. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldren spent 21 hours, 36 minutes on the surface of the Moon before beginning ascent to rendezvous with Michael Collins in the Command Module.
This is where things get unnerving. The thruster used on the Lunar Ascent Propulsion System used a hypergolic fuel, which is a fuel that spontaneously ignites when the fuel and oxidizer meet. Hypergolic fuels are useful for when spacecrafts need reliable ignition or repeated ignitions, however they’re nasty things. The specific fuel used for this thruster was a mixture of Aerozine 50 and Dinitrogen tetroxide. These are incredibly toxic, and more importantly incredibly corrosive. In fact, they are so corrosive that once you fire an engine you essentially have to completely rebuild it in order to reuse it. This means that the engine on the Lunar Ascent Propulsion System had never been fired before.
That engine was their bridge home. If it failed, they would be stranded on the surface of the Moon. As mentioned the Moon Landing lasted roughly 22 hours. For twenty two hours the two astronauts were on the moon, completely unsure if the never-before fired thruster would even fire up. Completely unsure if they’d be able to go home.
This picture shows the entirety of the human race on January 21st, 1969. All of it except the man who took it, that is. Micheal Collins stayed back on the Command Module during the mission to await Aldrin and Armstrong’s return… or potential lack thereof. This earned him the title “The Loneliest Man in the Universe”. For about 50 minutes for each orbit around the Moon Collins would be out of contact with the earth. That means for about 50 minutes during each orbit he’d have no way to contact any other human, completely alone over 230,000 miles from earth. For roughly 50 minutes during each orbit Collins had no clue whether his fellow astronauts were still alive, and them not returning was a very real possibility. Orders were in place that if the other two could not return to the command module that Collins would return alone.
This wasn’t just some disaster protocol either. This was a very real possibility. Both the astronauts, and NASA were very much prepared for it to happen. So much so that Richard Nixon, the president at the time, had a speech prepared if it were to happen. It doesn’t sugar coat it. It starts off
“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery.“
If that isn’t bone chilling, then I’m not really sure what is. People often romanticize space exploration, but back then, and even today, well… this is the reality of it. All of that is what astronauts go through.
It was a tense time. I watched them land and take off from my hospital bed because I had my tonsils removed in the middle of this all, and I remember the absolute hush that fell over the floor as we waited for them to connect. Even at eight, I knew that if they didn’t, there was no coming home.
One if the reasons I did was because my dad was one of those been one of the team that had worked to get them there. He wasn’t with NASA by the time they launched; he’d left after the capsule fire in Florida. But he understood the calculations because some of his work was in there. And the loss of Grissom — a man I’d met a couple of years before — and his crew underscored how dangerous this exploration could be.
We learned it again with Apollo 13, watching helplessly as waited to learn if those men would make it home. There were the deaths in the Cosmonaut program, even if we didn’t know the details then. Challenger — which found my father and repeating the conversation we’d had after the capsule fire of how dangerous it was and how we need those risks. Columbia.
Exploration is dangerous and the men and women who chase that dream are a special breed. But every time a flight goes up, there’s a breath thatks held until they’re safely home again. And a prayer we won’t have to hear a speech like Nixon’s.
why are straight white guys so obsessed with world war 2
like i’ll talk about my interest in history and i’ll have guys be like “yeah i’m a history buff too i love world war 1 and 2″ like cool i was talking about ancient history. like the conversation was literally about ancient egypt.
my fave thing is replying “oh, cool. i just can’t get into it. i like everyday life and religion and art. personally, i find war boring.” and let me tell you it’s a journey to watch them try and understand that killing thousands of people indiscriminately doesn’t hold my attention.
See, I’m not much of a historian. I love history, but I don’t always understand it, and a couplea weeks after Charlottesville happened in America I asked my dad how Nazism could possibly be on the rise again, after a lifetime of learning from my teachers that what transpired during WW2 was one of the worst crimes against humanity in recent history. (They were never subtle about it. We got all the photos from the concentration camps, all the statistics laid out for us, footage of the piles of shoes recovered from Auschwitz, everything.) (And bearing in mind that my grandfather and mother were/are Jewish -)
“It’s the 70 year cycle,” he said. “People forget after 70 years and then it all goes around again.”
I’m not sure what this post is suggesting exactly – straight white guys shouldn’t be interested in the world wars? Or that they’re interested in it in the wrong way, guns and tanks instead of people and shoes? I get the latter thing, I do, but on the other hand those are the exact people we need to get interested in this stuff, how the wars started and how to ensure they never happen again. There are a lot of people in power right now who are absolutely delighted that World War 1 and 2 and all their horrors and racisms might soon be considered boring, because man won’t it be easier then to whip people (especially straight white guys) up into patriotic fervour, point at another group and say “they’re the enemy, go kill them.” Over here the defining symbol of World War I is a poppy, but over the years it’s been slowly warped into a subtle symbol of Islamophobia, and it will probably only get worse.
We need better education and we need so much of it and we need it right now.
I’m not entirely sure what I’m saying here but I suspect it’s “the fact that people went out and killed thousands of people actually not very indiscriminately but with carefully thought out and prejudiced purpose, that needs to hold your attention.” Not specifically in regards to straight white guys, necessarily, but holy hell it does.
homophobes are not allowed to use computers because the inventor of the computer was gay
People think this is just a joke but Alan Turing was the inventor of the computer and his sexuality was illegal in his time (which was not even 100 years ago) and he was arrested. They put him on drugs that destroyed his genius brain and committed suicide a year after being covicted. He was gay and a war hero as well. He helped to break enigma which was a German code that they put all their messages through. He shorted WWII by two years and saved so many lives in the process.
Friendly reminder that if not for Alan Turing you wouldn’t be reading this post and we might be ruled by the nazis
The Alan Turing statue on my campus
I used to live down the road from Bletchley, home of Bletchley Park where Alan Turing worked. Not too far from it there’s an LBGT club called Pink Punters, and there there’s an art installation which according to its creators is
“the world’s first public work to recognise him as a gay man.”
(The club itself also has a room called “The Alan Turing Room”)
A row over a landmark above my village seems to have gradually escalated (welcome to rural life). Two thoughts:
1) If you’ve ever seen the prices at the Bradgate Park gift shops and cafes, you just miiiiiight come to the conclusion that they don’t actually need the money
2) Let us hope the people guarding the image of Old John the landmark do not incur the wrath of Old John the person, who was (apparently) a servant killed in a freak bonfire accident when the Earl of Stamford decided a great way to celebrate his son’s birthday was to set an entire hill alight and have a party on it. I’m just saying, my dudes
We should be more pro-active or we’ll see more of such sad fates of honest people.
And the utterly ironic thing is I’ve seen repeated tumblr posts of that iconic photo absolutely slagging the shit out of Peter Norman as “lol white guy so uncomfortable” “Why the fuck isn’t he supporting them”, etc etc.
