Grrl Power #1401 – Gateway to space madness
Oh, you wanted examples of gravity slasher movies?
Shear, rated Glip-Glorp 5 for overabundant teenage necking, sexual situations and violence.
Crush, rated Glip-Glorp 7 for inveterate exposure of secondary sexual organs, profanity, sexual situations, and violence.
The Spagettifier. The granddaddy of the genre, rated Glip-Glorp 9 for unrelenting nudity, shower scenes, girl aliens of one species making out with girl aliens of another species (and not the species you’d think), sexual situations, profanity, gore, sexual situations involving gore… like, two piles of gore make out, violence, blasphemy, and questionable financial advice. It’s a classic.
Event Horizon is the consummate “Hyperspace is/Wormholes lead to hell,” but of course there’s also Doom, Half-Life… which isn’t hell, but those portals still lead to a dimension full of jerks. Obviously Warhammer 40K. I don’t know how it works in Warhammer Zero K. I’m going to assume that wizards using teleport spells have a 5% chance of bringing demons along with them. I actually don’t know anything about Warhammer Fantasy. I assume they’re connected, like, the dark elves in WhF worship Slaanesh or Tzeentch instead of Lolth. I could google it, but if I don’t then it allows someone break out their esoteric Warhammer knowledge and a soapbox.
Then there’s edge cases like the Natural Selection asymmetrical multiplayer mod for Half-Life. It’s less “warpdrive is the devil” and more “deep space has mysterious fungus.” I think. Or maybe there is some sort of hyperdrive that attracts evil extra dimensional spores like a bug zapper minus the zapper. I’m not sure. I played it 2 or 3 times.
Oh, and I guess The Expanse, where defeating distance attracts evil shadow Pacmen. Spoilers. Look, if you haven’t watched The Expanse, it’s baaaasically the best Sci-Fi thing out there. I think it just edges out Stargate SG-1 and DS9, which are my other tippy-top faves.
Oh, I just thought of another one, From Beyond. One of Jeffery Combs’s earlier movies. Just after Reanimator, I think. Anyway, From Beyond is based on an H.P. Lovecraft book, and on that note, I suppose any movies with summoning circles, whether they’re drawn in lamb’s blood or are created by a bunch of janky electronics are all in the same… over-genre. Of course, the whole point of summoning pentagrams is collect calls to hell, so that doesn’t count in the whole “Who could have foreseen this outcome” category.
Ooh, look! A new vote incentive! And it’s updated with color!
Well, in progress, obviously. I have another one that’s actually a bit further along, but everyone was all, “Sydney Kobold vote incentive!” So I switched to this one. Plus the other one was a multi-character picture so it will actually take me longer to finish. I hope to have an update for this one each week, so stay tuned. There is a slightly higher res version on Patreon.
By the way, this gunmetal blue-ish background and teal pencils are how I draw the comic. I set it up this way so I don’t have to spend all day staring into a bright white blank page.
Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.
Now we have to ask why someone *wouldn’t* keep to the safe path and risk gravitation annhiliation. Maybe it’s faster or you can use the extreme conditions to otherwise shake pursuit.
Gravity is an acceleration, so if you can take the enhanced gravity, you could spend less time. I’m not a real astrophysicist, nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night. But I would assume that since the calculations are involving Distance and Time, and Time is pretty much T_sub_f = T_sub_I, that you’d increase your distance traveled by doing so.
I think the primary answer is “people who didn’t notice their navigation and/or propulsion systems are malfunctioning before they went in.” No doubt that sort of silent failure is extremely rare in a properly maintained ship, but sometimes you just win the disaster lottery, and sometimes you’re in a ship with an owner who tries to save money by skimping on maintenance.
The path is relative to the movement of celestial bodies, disrupted by microgravities (some caused by other travelers, some by other wormholes, some by passing too close to black holes). Get one number wrong out of millions and you just might end up arriving in three places at once, and probably in the past, present AND future… And likely very much dead in most or all of them
so are you telling me there is no “Event Horizon” in the near future?
/sad 40k noises
If you are going to include “From Beyond” there no reason to leave out “Rock and Rule”
You really need to distinguish true wormholes (normal space in an unusual shape, contains normal space things plus possibly weird gravitational fields) from hyperspace (alien to our universe, may have entirely different physics, could contain literally anything). Sometimes people say “wormholes” when what they mean is more hyperspace, confusing the issue, but the fundamental rules are very different.
I see Daphne has found the best seat in the room.
No mention of Niven’s hyperspace, which leads some to madness from “the blind spot?”
Yeah, that was my initial thought, as well
Seems especially ironic that Sydney would be asking, seeing as SHE travels via Etherium Causeway, and if *anything* is like the SF-horror depiction of interstellar travel, it’s that.
Yay, love for the Expanse! Even if it is only from DaveB and literally no one else. Great show, wish it wasn’t so underrated/watched. I’d say more but it’s hard to without major spoilers. The little that was said though, I consider minor and just misleading enough to not really spoil anything really.
Oh, I have another source of madness caused by transportation. Shards of Earth, I’ve only read the first book so far but it’s a fun space opera I’d recommend to people 13+. Though as an uncle with a 14 year old niece that loves to read but is easily scared and a 13 year old nephew that isn’t easily scared… I should say that the PG part should be considered. Some parents may be more ok with this story than others. If you’d watch the third prequel of star wars with them though, then you’re good.
So more Stargate with their… star gates.
I’ve seen reference to Lovecraft references in my quick scan of comments. Has Eternal Darkness for Gamecube been mentioned? Because that game screamed Lovecraft and insanity to me. Also has anyone mentioned Spaceballs going to plaid? I only read like half the comments and am close to sleeping, but this page and some of the comments made me think of these things.
Ludicrous Speed in Space Balls, unless the cartoon added more.
Oh, and there were aliens in “The Tick” who had a Lint Drive, because lint travels even faster than light…