this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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Turn it landscape and it's even cooler.
"Earthset." Fuck, that would be such a cool title for a sci-fi novel. I'm sure someone else has taken it already, but still, it's such a cool word.
I couldnβt find one, surprisingly. At least no popular title. However, there is an Asimov short Earthset and Evening Star, I could find no reasonable sources to preview the story.
So the title might be up for grabs as a story. Maybe a trilogy beginning with Earthrise, Earth(?) born?, Earthset in the end.
In german when the sun sets, we say "die Sonne geht unter" (the sun goes below / the sun sinks). And for doomsday we say "die Welt geht unter" (the world goes below). What we're seeing here is doomsday.
The fact that this is just a handheld iPhone video and not a professionally shot thing makes it so much more surreal
Meh, I would have preferred they used a nice camera. Those Z9s they brought with them can shoot 8k video at 60 fps. When youβre something thatβs once in a lifetime, for all of humanity, do it in the best quality possible.
Judging from first few seconds of this, I expected Cylon Raiders to come screaming across the horizon.
That part of the footage was not published.
The fact that the astronauts were replaced by cylons is also kept secret for now.
And they have a plan!
No Green Flash.
I π§β𦲠am happy π that you π«΅ put these emojis π, otherwise I π§β𦲠wouldn't have understood π€·
I still don't understand this use of emoji.
It's not "I shoved a π΅ up my π", I could get that, reject alphabet return to pictogram for the sake of compression if nothing else. But no, it's "I shoved a cactus π΅ up my dick π" which is just...why are we doing this?
It's only compressing the message visually (it generally uses more data)
Also, at least for me, it takes more work to parse the images than words require. I have to like... shift out of reading mode, comprehend the image and then go back to reading.
How do emoji use more data? They're one, maybe two unicode characters?
And thus more data
Than an entire word?
Take "cactus" for example. Each letter in the word "cactus" is one unicode character, for a total of six. π΅ is one unicode character, U+1F335.
Unicode characters are 4 bytes long, so "cactus" takes 24 bytes to transmit, where "π΅" takes 4. Unless something something UTF_8?
You're close, Unicode characters don't imply a number of bytes, it's how they're encoded that does (utf-8 most commonly). Utf-8 can be as little as one byte or as many as four, depending on the specific character. I don't know about emojis but I imagine they're in the four bytes section. Whereas "asdf" is also four bytes in utf-8.
So I just looked it up, the UTF-8 encoding for the cactus emoji is 4 bytes long: 0xF0 0x9F 0x8C 0xB5
Where the Latin alphabet is in the 1-byte region.
So it takes 6 bytes to transmit "cactus" in UTF-8, and only 4 to transmit βπ΅β. So any emoji that replaces 5 or more letters is more efficient. π breaks even with "dick" or "cock", more efficient than "penis", more than twice as compact as "eggplant" or "aubergine".
But that's not what people are doing
They always use a word and an emoji
Yes, to be clear I meant the example I gave where the word was replaced with the emoji was compression, not where they give the word and its emoji. That's as long-handed as possible.
Emojis are great when you want to convey tone or emotion that you normally can't do through text alone. I find them especially useful when a sentence as-is sounds a lot colder than you actually mean it to be
Obviously not the intention of OP and it's definitely excessive IMO but I do also find that they can be useful markers for longer texts. It gets a lot of hate but I find emojis really useful in codebase READMEs since you can quickly scan through and pick out the bits if information you're looking for
Having grown up chatting with friends and hitting on chicks via MSN messenger, I'm aware. "I'm gonna get you for that π‘ " and "I'm gonna get you for that π " are two different messages.
I will allege that emoji are badly suited to that task though. First, there are too many emoji. Even just the facial expressions, there are dozens of them. Second, they aren't designed to parse to emotions, they're designed to parse to facial expressions. Many of which are specific to Japanese culture. Third, they're rendered kinda tiny in a lot of fonts. With a font size and screen zoom level set where I can comfortably read text, many emoji are just...yellow circles. Or little blobs of color that I have to bring the screen much closer to my face to make out than the raw text.
Emoticons did the job better with less. But, entropy ruins all.
π Are you a little bald headed baby βοΈ
Missed opportunity to use πΆ
πΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΆπΏ
Sadly, you can't see that anywhere actually on the moon, because of tidal locking.
Unless you run really fast.
And there's also the libration wobble.
Does this make them the first people to never see the Earth?
No, the Apollo missions also circled the moon.
No, I just closed my eyes.
People sleep
close your eyes
count to three
you just became the last person to never see the earth.
I used to know a guy who saw the Earth once.
Cool beans.
Shhhlooop... and gone