In this modern monster tale of Dracula’s loyal servant, Emmy nominee Nicholas Hoult (Mad Max: Fury Road, X-Men franchise) stars as Renfield, the tortured aide to history’s most narcissistic boss, Dracula (Oscar® winner Nicolas Cage). Renfield is forced to procure his master’s prey and do his every bidding, no matter how debased. But now, after centuries of servitude, Renfield is ready to see if there’s a life outside the shadow of The Prince of Darkness. If only he can figure out how to end his codependency.
Renfield will hit the big screen on April 14th, 2023, and I really want to see it. Looks entertaining as hell!
They were new. We didn’t know much about them. They came from an unexplored arm of the galaxy. They came in ships that were so primitive, we couldn’t help but laugh. Thin aluminum hulls, no energy shields, radio-based detection, and communication gear. Their sublight drives were mostly chemical rockets. They relied on so much ancient technology it was a miracle they left their home system, let alone made it to an entirely different arm of the galaxy.
We gave them a gift to welcome them to the galaxy. A few basic quality-of-life improvements for their ships. They even graciously submitted to an inspection of their FTL drive to see what of the five known methods they used.
That should have been our warning. That should have been the biggest red flag about these new bipeds. They kept environmental suits on the entire time they visited during First Contact, gold faceplates kept down obscuring their features. It was very prudent and wise of them to self-quarantine on their first-ever contact. We hoped they would stay wise and prudent in all things.
What we didn’t expect happened only fifty standard solar cycles after First Contact with the Newcomers. They arrived again in much better starships. 3D Printed they called it. They somehow looked like machines AND organic, a combination of so many things. Redundancies heaped upon redundancies, plasma shields, EM shields, and even exotic defense weapons we had honestly never encountered before. It was all reverse-engineered from the simple technology we gifted them. They had taken the simplest of things, like a subspace communicator, and made the most unexpected technologies from them, including medical technology we are still studying and learning.
We also found out that they armed ALL of their ships. From merchant freighters to science ships to asteroid crackers. We didn’t see their warships until the Catar decided to “liberate” some of the Newcomer’s territory. Their ships were all over weaponized crew lockers with oversized drives bolted on. They used fleet carriers, screening Frigates, missile ships… everything and anything they could weaponize, they did. Even their medical ships were a kind of weapon that they used on the Catar war packs. The Catar expected a standard war of attrition. They didn’t expect small teams of stealthy chaos bringers behind their lines. They didn’t expect infrastructure sabotage. Nor the tactics the newcomers called “decapitation strikes” where a Pack Leader was the only casualty.
The thing that lost the Catar the war the fastest, though? The Newcomers weaponized compassion. War wounded were brought aboard their hospital ships, treated with the best medical technology, and even given entire replacement limbs if needed. The Catar wounded soldiers were rehabilitated right alongside the Newcomers wounded. That’s when the Catar found out the Newcomers were hyper-social apex predators like them, and that they too pack bonded easily.
Catar war wounded were returned to their people as soon as they were healed enough for travel. It was unheard of for any war species to engage in such mercy. Catar scholars asked why their “enemy” was so kind while at the same time being avatars of war itself. The answer Newcomers gave was… shocking. They gave the entire galaxy a peek at their pre-stellar history. There wasn’t a single solar cycle that wasn’t absolutely dripping with the blood of their own kind.
They were Death Worlders. Their home planet was a blue jewel Class 4 Death World. Evolution Gone Bonkers. They came from a world with Apex Predators that dominated entire biomes. We found out why every ship was armed to warship levels of any other species.
They were afraid.
The Newcomers were afraid of finding something out there worse than themselves. So they were on a perpetual war footing. Even in their most peaceful explorations. They spoke of “bugs” with acid for blood, of shape-shifting predators, of entire dimensions devoted to macabre and incentive methods of torture. They weren’t just terrified of finding these mythical monsters in space, they were terrified we might find them first. So the Newcomers always prepare, always explore, always invent as if all of existence depended on it. They didn’t want to lose their new friends.
The Catar have been their closest trade partners ever since the Border War at Alpha Centauri. Newcomers have started spreading to every culture, every planet, bypassing borders simply by being wanted. We are being taken over by the friendliest of Occupations ever experienced in known galactic history. We want them with us, and they are all too happy to oblige.
They are the friendliest, craziest monsters you’ll ever meet. The Humans from the Sol system.
Republished with permission from the author, Reddit user u/BlackHatGamerOzzy173. Image created using Stable Diffusion
For today’s edition of “Deal of the Day,” here are some of the best deals we stumbled on while browsing the web this morning! Please note that Geeks are Sexy might get a small commission from qualifying purchases done through our posts (as an Amazon associate or a member of other affiliate programs.)
Reading isn’t a natural function of the brain, and it requires explicit instruction to activate different areas responsible for vision, sound, and meaning. Fluent readers possess a complex reading circuit comprised of neural pathways of white matter, allowing them to process words in milliseconds. However, individuals with dyslexia exhibit a different reading circuit.
For the past few decades, research has mostly focused on the challenges associated with dyslexia, including reading, spelling, and grammar difficulties, but it is essential to acknowledge the cognitive strengths associated with the “condition,” such as visuospatial processing, narrative memory, problem-solving, and reasoning. Understanding these strengths is crucial not only for the approximately 20% of people with dyslexia but also for colleagues, peers, and educators to better support and embrace neurodiversity.
Here is the first teaser trailer for Sweet Tooth Season 2. The most amusing part about it is that the main villain looks almost exactly like Doctor Robotnik from Sonic, and it makes total sense since Robotnik is all about capturing animals for his evil plans. I mean, this guy looks a lot more like “Eggman” compared to Jim Carrey in the Sonic movie. Watch the trailer below!
Curious Kids is a series for children of all ages. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to [email protected].
Why does time change when traveling close to the speed of light? – Timothy, age 11, Shoreview, Minnesota
Imagine you’re in a car driving across the country watching the landscape. A tree in the distance gets closer to your car, passes right by you, then moves off again in the distance behind you.
Of course, you know that tree isn’t actually getting up and walking toward or away from you. It’s you in the car who’s moving toward the tree. The tree is moving only in comparison, or relative, to you – that’s what we physicists call relativity. If you had a friend standing by the tree, they would see you moving toward them at the same speed that you see them moving toward you.
In his 1632 book “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” the astronomer Galileo Galilei first described the principle of relativity – the idea that the universe should behave the same way at all times, even if two people experience an event differently because one is moving in respect to the other.
If you are in a car and toss a ball up in the air, the physical laws acting on it, such as the force of gravity, should be the same as the ones acting on an observer watching from the side of the road. However, while you see the ball as moving up and back down, someone on the side of the road will see it moving toward or away from them as well as up and down.
Special relativity and the speed of light
Albert Einstein much later proposed the idea of what’s now known as special relativity to explain some confusing observations that didn’t have an intuitive explanation at the time. Einstein used the work of many physicists and astronomers in the late 1800s to put together his theory in 1905, starting with two key ingredients: the principle of relativity and the strange observation that the speed of light is the same for every observer and nothing can move faster. Everyone measuring the speed of light will get the same result, no matter where they are or how fast they are moving.
Let’s say you’re in the car driving at 60 miles per hour and your friend is standing by the tree. When they throw a ball toward you at a speed of what they perceive to be 60 miles per hour, you might logically think that you would observe your friend and the tree moving toward you at 60 miles per hour and the ball moving toward you at 120 miles per hour. While that’s really close to the correct value, it’s actually slightly wrong.
The experience of time is dependent on motion.
This discrepancy between what you might expect by adding the two numbers and the true answer grows as one or both of you move closer to the speed of light. If you were traveling in a rocket moving at 75% of the speed of light and your friend throws the ball at the same speed, you would not see the ball moving toward you at 150% of the speed of light. This is because nothing can move faster than light – the ball would still appear to be moving toward you at less than the speed of light. While this all may seem very strange, there is lots of experimental evidence to back up these observations.
Time dilation and the twin paradox
Speed is not the only factor that changes relative to who is making the observation. Another consequence of relativity is the concept of time dilation, whereby people measure different amounts of time passing depending on how fast they move relative to one another.
Each person experiences time normally relative to themselves. But the person moving faster experiences less time passing for them than the person moving slower. It’s only when they reconnect and compare their watches that they realize that one watch says less time has passed while the other says more.
This leads to one of the strangest results of relativity – the twin paradox, which says that if one of a pair of twins makes a trip into space on a high-speed rocket, they will return to Earth to find their twin has aged faster than they have. It’s important to note that time behaves “normally” as perceived by each twin (exactly as you are experiencing time now), even if their measurements disagree.
The twin paradox isn’t actually a paradox.
You might be wondering: If each twin sees themselves as stationary and the other as moving toward them, wouldn’t they each measure the other as aging faster? The answer is no, because they can’t both be older relative to the other twin.
The twin on the spaceship is not only moving at a particular speed where the frame of references stay the same but also accelerating compared with the twin on Earth. Unlike speeds that are relative to the observer, accelerations are absolute. If you step on a scale, the weight you are measuring is actually your acceleration due to gravity. This measurement stays the same regardless of the speed at which the Earth is moving through the solar system, or the solar system is moving through the galaxy or the galaxy through the universe.
Neither twin experiences any strangeness with their watches as one moves closer to the speed of light – they both experience time as normally as you or I do. It’s only when they meet up and compare their observations that they will see a difference – one that is perfectly defined by the mathematics of relativity.
Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to [email protected]. Please tell us your name, age and the city where you live.
And since curiosity has no age limit – adults, let us know what you’re wondering, too. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we will do our best.
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