Galactic Mashed Potato Association
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baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Galactic Mashed Potato Association
@baryonicbeing.bsky.social
190 followers 440 following 1.6K posts
Space whale, big engines, friendly. Touring the galaxy.
mastodon.social/@BaryonicBeing
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baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Screenshot from the movie Wargames. The artificial intelligence WOPR (aka Julian) has just finished running a massive suite of nuclear war scenarios prior to launching the US nuclear arsenal. It has concluded that a nuclear war, which it was designed to execute, is unwinnable. The picture is of a screen at NORAD with the text: "Greeting Professor Falken" Professor Falken types in reply "Hello." WOPR replies: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play. How about a nice game of chess."
October 30, 2025 at 2:53 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
My phone took a decent bug picture for a change! A cricket, cautiously moving through the dense, grassy underbrush.
A close-up of what appears to be a field cricket. It's back is dark tan, and the rest of its body and limbs are black. Many green blades of grass can be seen both below it (in focus) and in the foreground (out of focus). Part of a dry brown leaf is visible on the left.
October 26, 2025 at 6:21 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Not a single skip.
Cover art for the album Dissecticide by Jackdaw4.
October 23, 2025 at 9:19 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Similar:
October 23, 2025 at 1:08 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Who's solving the Louvre robbery? Right answers only.
A still frame from The Mitchell and Webb Effect, a British sketch comedy show. A recurring sketch about a crime solving duo led by Sir Digby Chicken Caesar. He and his assistant believe they are detectives a la Sherlock Holmes and Watson but are evidently homeless and either insane, on drugs, or both. The above image portrays Sir Digby smiling manically, unshaven, wearing a tattered approximation of Sherlock Holmes' outfit, with his assistant (name forgotten) walking behind him looking a bit tired and wary. They are likely committing a crime rather than solving one.
October 20, 2025 at 11:28 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Giving away the ending here, but this series on Sparta is well worth a read.

acoup.blog/2019/08/16/c...
All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta. Sparta gives us almost nothing. Sparta was - if you will permit the comparison - an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
October 16, 2025 at 11:22 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Mega pancake complete.
October 11, 2025 at 10:56 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
The Comedian really distills the essence of these people.
Two screenshots from the movie Watchmen. On the top, Night Owl asks "What happened to the American dream?" On the bottom, the Comedian replies "What happened to the American dream? It came true! You're lookin' at it!" In the film, The Comedian then proceeds to start savagely beating civilian protestors, the first of whom is clearly an unarmed woman.
October 1, 2025 at 2:03 AM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Saw this moth in my kitchen the other day. Wish my phone camera was better, but the wing patterns came out ok at least. Never seen a moth like it before. (cc @lycomorpha.bsky.social )
A species of moth unknown to me. It is huddled into the edge where the wall and some wood moulding on the ceiling meet. Its wings are black, green, and white, with perhaps some green eyespots in a black bow-tie shaped region. The wing tips are white and look feathered. Same moth, from a slightly different angle and under slightly better light. A species of moth unknown to me. It is huddled into the edge where the wall and some wood moulding on the ceiling meet. Its wings are black, green, and white, with perhaps some green eyespots in a black bow-tie shaped region. The wing tips are white and look feathered.
September 9, 2025 at 6:28 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Summer 2020 in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy was much nicer than the real summer 2020.
"And then, even worse, he dreamed of John. He dreamed of the night he had sat in Washington and watched John on TV, stepping out onto Mars for the first time, closely followed by the other three. Frank left the official celebration at NASA and walked the streets, a hot DC night, summer of 2020."
September 6, 2025 at 5:49 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Yes.
The head demon from Stay Tuned, holding a TV remote and looking smug.
August 22, 2025 at 12:56 AM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
A picture of Napoleon gluttonously consuming ice cream in San Dimas, CA, from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. The text of the post reads "If they were ghosts, every single one of your pre-modern ancestors would be screaming at you to just eat ice cream what are you doing life is short and it's amazing 100s of thousands of years of humanity before it was invented you're so lucky!" I guess it's closer to millions of years, but you get the point.
August 16, 2025 at 6:49 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Another candidate from fiction to represent Newsom (Secretary General Sorrento-Gillis from The Expanse).
UN Secretary General Esteban Sorrento-Gillis from The Expanse. Purely ambitious, doesn't care about anything other than securing his legacy and appearing to be on the "right" side of any issue, regardless of what that entails. A fictional equivalent of Gavin Newsome.
August 15, 2025 at 11:17 AM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
A line of food trucks in front of the William Jefferson Clinton building in DC. It is a nice day and there is no crime being committed. A partially shaded grassy area on the National Mall, which extends quite a ways into the distance. People are having a good time and there is no crime happening. Maybe someone, just out of the picture, is buying an ice cream, but that too is not a crime.
August 12, 2025 at 1:50 AM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Absolutely love scientific papers written to clearly and concisely explain their points. Yes, you have to know some mathematics, but this is a wonderfully straightforward explanation. The whole paper is written this way. (Mardling 1995)
arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph...
An excerpt from a paper by Dr. Rosemary Mardling describing the various mathematical functions used to represent the tidal oscillations of a star interacting with a second star in a binary system (or as it is being captured into a binary). She works the reader up from one dimension to two and then three, providing a succinct overview in a short space before diving into the mathematics on the next page. The whole paper is like this and a pleasure to read.
August 8, 2025 at 9:45 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
A single server rack consuming 600kW will blow through more electricity in a day than my all-electric house consumes in a year.
Screenshot of an article describing how the next generation of Nvidia's chips will be incorporated into server racks that consume 600 kilowatts of power.
July 31, 2025 at 1:03 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Sorry junk mail, I'm only interested in continuous women, not discrete.
Junk mail titled "European Beauty." Message title reads "Discrete, Beautiful Women Waiting For You," but "discrete" is spelled in the sense that an object is separate or individual, not in the way that means a person is exercising discretion.
June 23, 2025 at 2:12 AM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Turning paper and graphite into knowledge. New knowledge? To me at least. To others, eventually.
A picture of a desk containing loose paper printouts, a blue mechanical pencil, a light green folder, and an open notebook with some notes in it, transcribed from the paper printouts.
June 6, 2025 at 1:22 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Federal government will be getting even slower and more chaotic once the people with knowledge of all the obscure minutiae leave.
From: archive.is/jOyEZ
May 17, 2025 at 2:41 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Skim of Wikipedia complete, on to the lecture notes. I'm starting, appropriately, with the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram as the main conceptual base to get a handle on stars.
A picture of a notebook page, grid lined, slightly oversized paper. At the top is the word "stars", below are two columns. The left column is (mostly) a list of concepts directly associated with stellar evolution as described by the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. The right column is a list of less directly related additional concepts and minor details that will need to be explored as well.
May 15, 2025 at 8:12 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Love a fresh notebook. Splurged a little on this one. Going to use it, to start, for notes and design for the star generation portion of my exoplanet project. Coding galaxies is on hold as my work schedule remains in flux, but I have enough time to read and organize notes at least.
A black hardbound notebook on a desk. It is slightly larger than 8.5 x 11 inches, grid ruled, by Leuchtturm 1917. There are two sharpened pencils next to it.
May 14, 2025 at 1:35 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
This is what Facebook shows me when I log on, sometimes more explicit, sometimes less. I probably clicked on something at some point that got me into this algorithmic track, but it's so weird to get sexual content like this. My family's on FB. My neighborhood group is on there. And its pornified.
A screenshot from Facebook, showing captures from a bunch of different videos all lined in a horizontal row. The first picture is of a man interviewing a woman, with the text "What is your body count?" superimposed over her. The second is of a woman wearing a very small top and shorts, crouching, and dousing herself with water. The third is a woman sitting in a restaurant eating chicken, with text "Chick Fila after pound town" superimposed over her face.
May 12, 2025 at 1:08 AM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Very little work done on my exoplanet project in the previous month, but I have at least created a (near final) order-of-execution guide for creating galaxies. Small excerpt below. There are about 47 steps in this design.
April 22, 2025 at 11:42 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
General Turgidson, from Dr. Strangelove, telling the president that, in a nuclear exchange, the US would take some damage, but overall fair pretty well. "Mr President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed."
April 9, 2025 at 2:19 PM
baryonicbeing.bsky.social
Such sights...
A closeup picture of pinhead, the cenobite from Hellraiser. He looks like a man with very pale white skin, has black eyes and numerous nails have been driven into his face and head in a grid pattern. He is not bleeding because he is an immortal demon.
April 7, 2025 at 1:08 AM