Last week the far flung eskimo village of Kivalina was surprised to discover the surface of their tiny bay was covered over with a bright orange film, as well as buckets and barrels the population had set out to collect rainwater. The film could be scooped up and formed a kind of oily goo, which scared residents into thinking that the unknown substance might have been some sort of petroleum by-product spill.
When removed from the water, the… stuff dried out and left a fine orange powder behind. The Coast Guard pretty immediately ruled out any kind of petrochemical leaks or spillage, but still had no idea what it was, thinking it may represent some as-yet-unknown form of algae. The state advised residents to boil all of their water before drinking or bathing in it, and fears that whatever it was, the bright orange goop probably wasn’t all that good for you caused considerable stress amongst the villagers.
Someone in town had the notion to send a sample of Orange to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Juneau. They were able to determine that the goop was… were eggs, billions and billions of teensy-tinsy microscopic eggs, each of which contained an even teensier-tinsier drop of orange lipid. What they were less certain of was exactly what these were the eggs of. There seemed to be some consensus that the eggs most resembled some type of crustacean, but then the discussion backed up a bit when no one could decide whether they were looking at actual eggs, or embryos. (I’m not certain myself of the distinction they were drawing between the two, so please don’t ask me!)
Now anyone who is a student of alien invasion strategies can tell you that one tactic many aliens will use is to seed Earth with dominant varieties of life from their own planet, which serves to begin reverse-terraforming our world and to create upheaval and chaos in the ranks of those who might resist their future alien overlords. It’s a proven winner, and the NOAA absolutely did not find that the eggs (or whatever) were not alien in origin. This is practically the same as saying that aliens are planting space-crabs in our water to take over our brains and turn us all into mindless, slavering, killing machines.
It’s an alien-space-crab-zombie-ghoul apocalypse. Time to gas up the chainsaw.
I think I’ve seen this movie before, I’m gonna go use a chainsaw in Doom-Roguelike instead because it’s more interactive.
http://doom.chaosforge.org/
I guess the point of Roguelike is that it makes the shorthand “DoomRL”?
Well, this game is most commonly called DoomRL but I expect that not everyone who visits your website knows what a roguelike is or would be fully interested in playing one if they knew. So therefore I give the acronym-expanded version of the name.
For the uninitiated: Roguelikes are one of the oldest styles of video game, which date back to people running old UNIX servers. In them you (generally) control one character in a combat/strategy type game shown in a grid where items and characters are limited to being in specific grid spaces. The earliest examples, and many roguelike games to this day show everything as text characters. Other examples get a set of replacement graphics that either optionally, or by default, substitutes the “@” and letters and such with graphical tiles instead. (DoomRL gives you the option.) Generally action in the game proceeds only when the player does something, making them very strategic type games. Years ago when DoomRL was new it used to be the best introductions to roguelike games because of how simple it was, and it mostly still is despite having gotten more complicated with achievements, skill-trees and unique items since then.
Oh, give us more credit.
Roguelikes are amazing.
Groovy!
Buzzkill!
..We need the Doctor
He would figure out a way to stop an alien-space-crab-zombie-ghoul apocalypse in its tracks and spoil everyone’s fun, wouldn’t he?
No, but he would look awesome standing around there in the snow?
Furthermore, why can’t they just keep a few eggs in a bowl and see what hatches? It may not but be quick, but it should work.
I think that as of the writing of my source materials, it simply hadn’t been long enough yet.
Fox News.
Not yet, but I have to wonder how many scientists are sitting around with their genome sequencers and world experts, and haven’t thought of this.
Nice find Kev! Same thing happened with the red rain over India a few years ago. Actually it’s very plausible that alien life would spread as spores on asteroids looking for a hospitable planet. When they find one that already has life like ours, they can’t compete with us and after a brief infection they die out. I figure this happens all the time. You want another? The Venus Flytrap has no relatives, and is native only to a swamp in New Jersey that is actually a meteor crater. Plus just look at the damn thing. Then there’s this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp
Hey, we know what’s going on, right?
Exactly.
Though I like the original ending, which was changed since test audiences didn’t like it (it’s the ending from the off-broadway musical version on which the movie was based)
You guys do know that the annual Meteor shower is happening currently, as in right now.
http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors
I wonder what part of that population have digested the goo when they learned they were eggs? alien-space-crab-zombie-ghoul apocalypse is going to happen!
Not too smart targeting Alaska though, population there are too easily contained.
Not to mention a population too good at catching Crabs for consumption…These are people who catch King Crabs…those things are upwards of 5-6 feet across…
It wouldn’t be the chainsaws they’d have to look out for…it would be melted butter and crab cracking pliers…
That’s “an annual meteor shower”, or “the annual Perseid meteor shower”; there are others (including the Leonids, and the Triffids).
What the fuck is a triffid?
A cheesy Sci Fi Flick, I think.
Derived from a 1951 John Wyndham novel. In the film most people were blinded by a spectacular fire-burst during the Trifid meteor shower. In the novel, the use of Triffid refers to the alien plants being tripodal.
Typo for Trifids; like the other annual meteor showers, the name indicates the region of the sky the trails trace back to, in this case M (or Meiser) 20, also called the Trifid Nebula.
So NOT a triffid that spits poison and kills?
Indirectly. See my response to Elfguy
Sigh. All my Rocky Horror quotes falling on deaf ears. What’s wrong with kids these days?
Oh, I heard it…I just wanted to give someone else a chance to come up with something, like “Like the ones Jeanette Scott fought? I really got hot when I saw that…”
I’m not sufficiently familiar with “Rocky Horror” to catch most quotes. As many of the best lines are themselves references to other films, that one probably refers to “Day of the Triffids”.
It is.
To be specific, it’s part of the Usherette’s song “Science Fiction, Double Feature”
The difference between an egg and an embryo is, the egg (either unfertilized or fertilized) is still a single cell, while the embryo is the next stage, after the cell has started to internally divide into a 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, 32-cell stadium and so on, during which time the conglomerate itself does not grow yet but simply divides into ever smaller cells, up to a certain ratio of chromosomes to cytoplasm mass. Such an embryo is called a morula, which looks a lot like a mulberry or exactly like the glowy ball at the end of the cylindrical whale probe in Star Trek IV.
For the next stages in embroygenesis, the morula starts forms a hollow in the center, like a hollow ball, and is now called a blastula. The blastula grows and forms grooves, as the number of cells increases and differentiates.
Thank you Christina! I was hoping you would answer that. (I just didn’t want to ask.)
Life is amazing is it not?
I’m impressed. Not many people could answer that question in more depth than I could off the top of my head, but there you go.
(I always forget the morula stage, and my explanation would’ve been along the lines of “… until it becomes a blastula…”)
Anyway, yeah. Good job!
Christina be brain.
Thanks. I actually had to look up the other stages: morula, blastula, gastrula, neurula, pharyngula. (I keep forgetting the gastrulation stage). Here’s a good description of the pharyngula stage embryo:
http://zfin.org/zf_info/zfbook/stages/phar.html
Of course, this concerns VERTEBRATE embryos (fishes, reptiles, batrachians, mammals, birds, etc).
I’m not an expert on crustacean embryological development… if those were indeed crustacean eggs. All those larvae (i.e. of crustaceans, starfish, cephalopods) that make up a lot of the zooplankton in the oceans can have very weird forms, distinctively different from the adult animal.
The orange glob would be yolk, most likely.
The exception to the rule! 😀
This calls out to be used as a Call of Cthulhu alien invasion scenario!
Mi Go spores eh?
That would explain a lot, really….. :O
You mean the question of where Al Gore’s brain has been? It’s orbiting Pluto in a capsule, BEGGING for “Global Warming”…