One More Thing - Litterbox Comics
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Ooooh, my kid does this, but in a more devious way. When it's bedtime or close, he'll ask me questions that will make me go off on a tangent.
Two days ago he turned to me when I announced it was bedtime and asked "Why did you find 'Subnautica Below Zero' so disappointing?" and I just couldn't help myself. He knew.
Little punk.
And? Why did you?
For me it just left an empty feeling. It was shorter, I felt like the world was much smaller, the above sea parts were confusing and I got lost so much. I ended up missing so much good stuff because of it. I remember when the credits rolled, I just exclaimed, what the fuck?!
OKAY, LISTEN:
[ !! Spoilers for both games written in this comment !! ]
The first game has you exploring and picking up clues, all served to you through the environment and audio logs.
The world was big, scary, and lonely. No dialog other than people long dead.
When you hear a sound, it can fucking TERRIFY you, because it's either unknown, or a rare enough creature that you don't want to encounter it.
Environments varied from underwater volcanic fields, to coral reefs, to fluorescent jellyfish caves.... incredible.
The land is scarce and somewhat eerie, with its inhabitants leaving trails of life in wake of their tragic deaths.
The ending? You find life. Someone was trapped here like you. Only it's too late for them.. you understand this creature, and the sorrow of its ending but the hope of life it leaves you makes you feel something..
Then you orchestrate your own escape, piece by piece. It's satisfying that you are the architect of your own future. You did this. You are leaving. And yet.... there's a sadness in it, as you grew to know and love this world, the creatures, and its many environments you have become so intimately familiar with.
You leave a note. And you finally.. go home.
The second game:
DOES ANYONE EVER SHUT THE FUCK UP????? Please let me make my own observations about the world!!!!! I do not need a voiced character doing the reacting for me!!! In the first game,I would sometimes stop and look around frantically, like "wtf? What was that? Did I just hear something? Oh no...." as the dread creeps into me. "Below Zero" doesn't need to have the "Wow oh no what was that??" From the protagonist. I AM THE PROTAGONIST. PIPE DOWN!! Took me right out of it.
You're spoonfed everything through the dialog unnecessarily, because I picked up most of it through the environment. Like "hey dumb dumb! Here's a recap in case you're too stupid to put together the pieces to understand!" Give players some credit, dear lord.
Also: That ain't my sister! I don't know her! I do not have the same bond with her as the protagonist! Why y'all trying to make me care??
Too much talking. Even the creatures talked too much!! The first game had creatures coming at you in a spaced out manner, making noises as they came at you.. sometimes not!! You needed to pay attention!! It spooked me! In BZ? I was hearing constant spooky noises so much that I just eventually ignored them and would even yell "shut up!!" as it got so annoying. Sparse sounds kept the atmosphere tense! Constant roaring desensitized me and just got on my nerves.
And the ending..... oooooh, I had no sense of accomplishment of doing anything myself. Allen does all the cool stuff??? I just did fetch quests!! And then there is no real conclusion to make any of it satisfying!!! Other than a sequel teaser!! This game felt like a really fuckin' long teaser trailer!!!!!
It's not a terrible game. But compared to the first, I was left so disappointed in the atmosphere it failed to capture from the first.
I love Subnautica. Guess that's why I have such a passionate opinion on this. It really moved me in a way that no game ever had before or since. The devs did a great job on both games, regardless of my opinion on their direction of the second. But the first Subnautica is a game I keep revisiting. It's so wonderful, and I'd recommend it to anyone looking to go on a journey.
No one is going to bother reading this lol I am absolutely shocked at how many people took the time to read my rant. No idea it would have so many folks agreeing with it, either. Y'all are funny.
I couldn't even bring myself to finish BZ. Finally admitted to myself only recently that I'm not going back. Thanks for writing this up, you put it into words I could not find.
I think I got a few hours in and gave up after realizing they crippled the vehicle list.
Side note, if you play Subnautica, try Deep Rock Galactic and Elite Dangerous. I like to pretend they are all in the same universe even if their art directions are a bit different. :)
Oh dear lord, the vehicles... not only that, but my kid hearing me yell about pissing on the bike and then throwing it at those damn Tremor worms had him in stitches. I was only half-joking, though.
Thanks for the game suggestions! I'll look into those.
I think the worst part of it (for me) is that I was so giddy to play BZ at first.
[ !! SPOILERS BELOW !! ]
The thing that broke me was finally meeting Margarit. I heard her voice and instantly recognized it, getting very excited that she was still alive after reading snd hearing about her exploits in the first game.
I met her initially, was waiting for the follow-up, went to her base on there bergs, and..... she tells me that err'body dead.... YES, MARGARIT! I already knew that through looking at everything and being spoonfed the dialog!!! My sister may have purposefully killed people to prevent further disease infection!! I KNEW THAT!!! This changes fucking nothing!!!! And.... that's it. I was so fucking disappointed that this badass lady who survived through the first game and you meet in the second, has nothing meaningful to do or say.
"Below zero" impact on the story, am I right?? Ha! Ha ha! Haaaaa. God, I'm so mad at this game.
Wait, the lady from the voice logs in the OG Subnautica survived and had no direction on the second game? xD
I would've read it if you didn't say spoilers, I only scrolled to the bottom of your comment and noticed you mentioning how many people read the comment, so add me as a honorary addition to that count
Or, hold on to your hat because this is where it gets wild; MEN have feelings too and are on average made of even MORE atoms!
Of course women only get 70% of the atoms that men do. ATOMIC PATRIARCHY BE DAMMED!
"What do we want?"
"Atomic parity!"
"When do we want it?"
"On second thought, it's probably a bad idea!"
Eh, I think it's an hard clear Yes. The radiation released by an element when coming out of an excited state depends on the energy difference between N levels and it is generally consistent for that given element.
How do they get excited? You give them energy. How? One way is by shinning a light.
Is there a name for radiation of a specific frequency within the visible spectrum? Yes. A color.
All rare gas lightbulbs even have a specific color.
The only way for us to discount the emission specturm as a color is if we go philosophical about the nature of color. And that's for literary nerds, not physics nerds, and I doubt people google the former as frequently as the latter.
True, but a childish intuition about "having a color" would most likely imply that you can see a structure of the thing (like a ball) that is colored in (which you can't with atoms). On the other hand if you consider an atom a tiny pointsource, like a star in the sky, then it makes sense again.
Instead of comparing it to a ball with colour on it, you could compare it to a ball of colour. Which atoms are.
No, they are transparent. “Color” as would be defined by a child is a phenomenon resulting from white light having some of its spectrum absorbed by a surface, and the resulting visible light diffusely reflected and absorbed by their retinal cells. Even ignoring absorption of narrow frequency bands, individual atoms reflect far less than 1% of the light that encounters them. Color is a phenomenon that relies on the bulk effect of lots of atoms working together. In the same way, a drop of water looks transparent, but get enough of it together and it becomes shades of blue or green, and eventually almost black.
I would disagree. Elements have an emission spectrum and emit visible light when excited electrons drop to a more stable orbital. Hydrogen, for example, emits 4 wavelengths of visible light. You can see these ias bands in a Balmer Series. The atoms emit the light instead of reflecting light.
While it’s true that atoms emit light in specific wavelengths when excited electrons drop energy levels, this isn’t the phenomenon most children would associate with something “having a color”. If you shine a white light at a yellow piece of paper, the paper would appear yellow and be described as yellow. If you shine a green light at yellow paper, it appears green, but most children would still say the paper is “yellow paper” that just looks green because of the light.
Similarly, if you ask what the natural color of a TV screen is, I think most people would say “black” even though depending on the state of the components inside it can produce different colors.
By extension, hydrogen atoms’ color would be naturally black, but if you energize it properly it can emit reddish light. That still doesn’t mean the atoms themselves have a reddish color.
(Not the same person)
I disagree, but I appreciate the reasoning behind your opinion.
If a lot of water molecules look blue, then what, if not the water molecules, have that color? Just because it's faint doesn't make it colorless. (Water is molecules, but the same applies to atoms)
Edit: also I would definitely call a low pressure sodium lamp orange, even if it requires electricity to run it.
This comic put me down a rabbit hole of quantum field theory that I was not ready for at midnight last night
Ho boi, that.. hooooo. That one took me awhile to grasp and I’m not sure I have the solid understanding needed to convey it. Something about sometimes light acts as a wave, sometimes it acts like a particle? I’ve heard someone else say “photons” are used as more of an illustration tool, because when you get down to it, light is weirder and freakier than a mimosa-laden aunt.
The super over simplified version is all matter is essential very compressed energy. And the whole matter vs energy spectrum is more of a continuum than a hard line. Photons are pretty close to the middle of the continuum, it is useful to use photons for some math, and waves for other math, but they're both equally valid.
Photons are a type of particle known as a boson, and are considered an elementary particle of the universe like quarks are. While bosons may have some properties that are similar to matter, they are not entirely identical.
This is one of those questions that seems really difficult to answer but I feel like it's really easy to answer.
For one, we can quite easily assemble enough atoms to be visible and to interact with light and then look at the color that comes off of that, so in that instance yes atoms do have colors.
Colors are, after all, fundamental consequences of our perception of the electromagnetic frequencies of a very narrow band of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Do they tho? A single atom is too small to have an actual "color" I believe, and if you arrange them differently you'll have different colors. For example, carbon arranged like a diamond is clear, but carbon in coal is black.
In that regard, color doesn't exist on its own but is an emergent property of the wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum, or at the very least of the way our eyes perceive it.
The carbon case is that light passes by, it's beyond me but that comes down to molecular structure and not individual atoms.
Atoms actually have color, just not one. Atoms have these electron orbits, if an electron gets hit with the right energy (which is actual discreet energy levels) the electrons can jump to a higher orbit. It can then fall back, and emit light of a specific wavelength corresponding to that energy difference. It's how spectroscopy works, by testing all visible colors of light (and probably outside visible spectrum too) you will get dark areas in the color band where said light/energy was absorbed.(because the emitted light of the same type that hit it goes off in random directions)
Each atom will therefore have a unique color strip for identification, so we can say atoms have colors!
Elementary particles didn't have a color for most of history, but recently xkcd made a comic on the topic, giving us a definite answer to the question.
I always thought of Protons as blue for some reason, but I'm glad everyone thinks of Electrons as yellow.
Reminds me of my daughter when she was around 3 or 4 years old. She would find any excuse to get out of bed right after we put her down. Almost every night she would "forget" something. So one night and ran through a checklist with her to make sure she had everything she needed. Not 5 minutes later we hear her door open and in her soft toddler voice ask, "why isn't Pluto a planet anymore?" Cue a 20 minute conversation on what defines something as a planet.
The answer is no, but if you take an imaginative view of color charge in quarks then yes!
Because color is photons in a narrow range of wavelengths/energies visible to the human eye. Atoms have electrons that can emit and absorb photons under certain circumstances, but don't have any intrinsic color themselves.
Color charge is a property of quarks thats trinary in nature, and is usually described in terms of red, green, and blue, since color is a useful analogy to how it functions. Despite the name, colored light and color charge are not actually related outside of the analogy.
So atoms don’t have color because some photons have wavelengths outside of the visible range? That’s irrelevant and in no way justifies the claim