general anomalous phenomena & occurences thread
for lack of a better name.
I've tried to make these before but I'm going to tag and bookmark this one so I don't lose it.
To kick us off, what the flipping shit.
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
I'm sure everybody's heard of it, but in summary it's an illustrated book written in an unknown language in the early 1400s.
By itself that's not totally strange, as there have been a lot of languages over the centuries that have been destroyed so utterly that we don't even have records of their being records of them. It is, however, pretty rare, especially when it comes in the form of a reasonably well maintained medieval-era manuscript rather than some incidental characters on a piece of pottery.
Furthermore, the illustrations would be appropriate for a sort of brief encyclopedia. There's a part that looks like an herbal (a compendium of plants with a paragraph or two of description), but the plants pictured can't be identified. Some things look kind of like star charts, a bit. But a lot of it just doesn't make a ton of sense.
The text seems legitimate in all the ways you can tell without being able to read it: words are composed of letters from a limited alphabet, orthographic rules can be barely identified, letter frequencies aren't appropriate to ciphers, that kind of thing.
It's like a little excerpt of someone's understanding of the world, and we can't read it for shit.
e: and the person who made that name possible is Tabby (Tabetha Boyajian). i guess naming things after yourself is too silly
"We call ourselves 'humans'."
"Oh okay, what does that literally mean? We can come up with a way to say it in 8462852ese."
"Uh..."
the comments include very detailed research on historical documents. they find that a ham radio operator went to Bouvet Island in 1962, because ham radio is more hardcore than i ever knew. but he probably didn't leave the boat, that was a Soviet birdwatching expedition in 1958.
this is why i'm antsy about any news i can only find on a blog
i'm not sure if being experienced enough to be cynical about seti is cool or no
like, a game with a setting where, no matter how hard you look, some things remain unexplained
and it's done in intriguing ways
like, basically, i'm looking for a game where i can be creeped out by an Upsweep or Bloop or Julia, and perhaps i can venture forth to search for the source, but there's just something so immense about it that i can't ever truly know if there's "something else out there"
maybe even things that change outside of my control in ways that are never revealed to me as a player?
i dunno how to say it...
edit: maybe, are there any games that intentionally focus on the presenting "unexplained phenomena" to the player?
seems like wrong thread tho