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Cake day: November 3rd, 2023

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  • Yeah, I am confused as well, I feel like there was a lot that was left on the cutting room floor. Either that or the author really wanted to skip past all the prelims to get to a more manageable cast of characters. But, it begs the question, if all the important characters that we know make it to the Archimedes and then make it through this first round, then what was the point of them? It just makes the past couple episodes feel like a waste.

    Also, Anaak just figured out it was Bam by watching him. Could nobody else up to this point? I feel like Viole’s identity is the worst-kept secret ever at this point.














  • It’s been a whole year of posting in this community! It’s hard to believe it’s been that long. It feels like just yesterday that I created this account after the drama surrounding the defederation from the ml instance.

    Something that I mentioned briefly in the post up above, but wanted to call out once more, is that hitagi might not be nearly as visible as I am in this community, but they actually do a lot behind the scenes to keep things running. In addition to everything involved with the infrastructure of running the instance, I was just looking through the reports I have received, and roughly half of them were resolved by hitagi prior to my ever seeing them. It also works out nicely that the two of us live on basically opposite sides of the globe, meaning that we have pretty good time zone coverage. So, even if they aren’t posting as much as I am (I mean, who is really?), hitagi has been a vital part of keeping things running smoothly here.

    As a sort of unofficial celebration of the anniversary, I am happy to do a kind of mini-AMA in this thread if people have any questions for me that are on their mind (either anime-related or not).





  • Unrelated to isekai, but I saw from your site that you migrated from Wordpress to Hugo. What method did you use to do that? I have an old wordpress site that I keep running for somebody, but it isn’t actively updated anymore. If I could convert that to static html and host it using something like github pages, that would be awesome. I looked into it once before, but there were a bunch of different plugins and methods, so the inertia of not doing it won out.


  • No big science section of the post today. Instead they brought together several of the scientific concepts they introduced earlier. See previous threads for my discussions on the astrolabe (tool used to measure the position of Mars in this episode), Ptolemy, and retrograde motion.

    I found this episode to be surprisingly emotional for me. I don’t think it is necessarily meant to be, but perhaps it was speaking to my inner scientist heart. Badeni’s insatiable thirst for knowledge had led him close to self destruction. When Oczy walked in talking about documents that could change his life, Badeni almost let the stifling and punishment of his curiosity send Oczy away. However, his curiosity managed to keep just enough of a desire for knowledge lit inside him that he took a risk on what Oczy talked about. He came so close to letting the most momentous thing to ever happen in his life walk out the door. It also harkens back to Rafal’s speech to Nowak, that the thing the church is trying to, and will fail to kill is curiosity and the desire for truth itself. Nowhere is that more evident than in Badeni.

    One thing that I wish we had seen more of was Oczy’s struggle to take that first Mars measurement. We see him facing a sky full of eyes and then cut to him having completed the task. I feel like there was likely a more meaningful struggle there. What was it that kept him there and helped him face his fears?

    Their demonstration of how retrograde motion appears was fine I think. I am not sure it would really help people that don’t have a grasp of it, but it’s hard for me to put myself in those shoes at this point. I think they did do a pretty good job explaining retrograde motion and epicycles this episode and show how persuasive a “beautiful” theory can be. @rikka@ani.social

    When I was in grad school, I was studying biophysics, but since I was in the physics department, I had to take classes in a broad range of topics including quantum and particle physics and many of my fellow cohort worked in particle physics and did stints working at the LHC. I remember having long talks with them about this theory or that theory of what could shake out after the LHC was powered on (super-symmetry and string theory were popular topics of the day). The general consensus among all of them was that the standard model had to be incorrect in some way. A non-insignificant reason for that was that it was too messy. It required caveats, corrections, assumptions, etc. that they didn’t like and felt should not be needed in a more complete model. All that is to say that this sense of how “beautiful” a scientific theory is remains a powerful motivating factor for practicing scientists to this day. So, having two models that both work practically, but one is much more beautiful, people tend to go for the beautiful model/theory.

    Speaking of beauty, this show continues with beautiful night sky shots. The end with Oczy being able to look at the night sky and find it beautiful was a really nice moment.





  • This has been a ridiculously cute series. I can actually kind of relate to the bit in the episode about how loud nighttime is out in the country. I lived all through grad school in various apartments in Boston, but not too long ago bought a house in the woods in one of the suburbs. I was not used to how loud all the crickets were at night. It was way worse than any street noise I dealt with in the city.

    I looked up the Aso Volcano Museum because the architecture in the show looked too specific for it not to be a real place, and sure enough, this is what it looks like in real life:

    Show Real life

    One thing that baffles me about this episode is where this frog came from. They weren’t near any trees, just standing in the middle of a lawn and it somehow jumped on her forehead? I call shenanigans. @rikka@ani.social