What's your favorite headcanon? 3: The mods must be crazy

[Rater202]

Raz, I think you misunderstood.

Hogoromo sharing his chakra with others and teaching them Ninshu resulted in everyone else learning how to mold their physical and spiritual energy together to make their own chakra.

So you're partly right in that it didn't directly have anything to do with being descended from the Otsusukis, but humans couldn't use chakra until Hogoromo showed them how.

[Lord Raziere]

Raz, I think you misunderstood.

Hogoromo sharing his chakra with others and teaching them Ninshu resulted in everyone else learning how to mold their physical and spiritual energy together to make their own chakra.

So you're partly right in that it didn't directly have anything to do with being descended from the Otsusukis, but humans couldn't use chakra until Hogoromo showed them how.

ah, I see. that still says to me, that humans could've discovered chakra eventually on their own without Otsutsuki intervention, because the talking animals I think are implied to be able to use chakra or senjutsu to power what they do, and they've been around since before the whole Kaguya thing happened. like Hagoromo in the episodes I've seen talked to a toad who gave him a seal to save Hamura for a thing and like taught him stuff to help fight Kaguya.

[Rater202]

If we assume that the Hogaromo and Hamura focused filler episodes are canon, then the toads(and presumably the snakes and Slugs and any other animals that were arond back then) used what is called "Sage Power" which is using pure natural energy to do very basic stuff, and the Toads tought this to Hogarormo.

[Lord Vukodlak]

So in the movie Demolition Man the number one song is.
"Armour Hot Dogs."


So okay in a world where anything bad for you is illegal including but not limited to "Bad language, chocolate, gasoline, uneducational toys and anything spicy." Am I suppose dot believe that
HOT dogs are legal? No they can't be legal.
So my headcannon is that for them its the equivalent of a song about hard drugs. So imagine cops singing along to music about Cocaine or Pot.

[No brains]

So in the movie Demolition Man the number one song is.
"Armour Hot Dogs."


So okay in a world where anything bad for you is illegal including but not limited to "Bad language, chocolate, gasoline, uneducational toys and anything spicy." Am I suppose dot believe that
HOT dogs are legal? No they can't be legal.
So my headcannon is that for them its the equivalent of a song about hard drugs. So imagine cops singing along to music about Cocaine or Pot.

The definition of hot dogs may have evolved with the times so gradually that the people singing about them don't realize what hot dogs were. Do remember, Taco Bell has become the only place to eat in a world where you shouldn't have excess salt. It's a brave new world.

[Cikomyr2]

- the Lion King is actually a popular retelling of an old Wakanda succession crisis that happened in the 1000s where the younger brother of the king tried to take control of the throne with the help of some Banished tribes

The rightful heir to the throne ran away to a trading port and befriend two outcasts (an European and an Indian), and brought them back with him.

[TwilightSandwic]

Gotham City in "Batman: the Animated Series" was stuck in some sort of time-distoration-vortex and only got out of it by the time of "The New Batman Adventures". That's why it was so aesthetically distinctive from the rest of the DCAU and seem to take place in a sort of timeless world where the 1990's and the 1930's are happening at the same time, and why Robin is eternally college-aged event though mapping the timeline together implies that the show should've taken more than four years and explain that one episode in the last season that implied that somehow Joker only became Joker a year ago.

[Cikomyr2]

Interstellar is a prequel to Firefly-verse, since Earth-that-was is lost and the entire of humanity has colonized another star system despite having no apparent FTL abilities

[Ruck]

My wife's version of this is: people, men and women alike, follow him because he's so good looking.

For Jon Snow, or for you?

Anyway, one more headcanon, for Better Call Saul: The (presumably late) elder Hamlin of Hamlin Hamlin McGill was / would have been played by Phil Hartman.

Throughout history the odd person has killed themselves by suffering a burst bladder after "holding it in too long" e.g. at a formal feat when it was very impolite to leave the table to relieve oneself.

Tycho Brahe is the famous example I've always heard.

[Rynjin]

One I've held for a long time and only just remembered after dipping back into Kingdom Hearts 2 again: Namine gave Sora severe, irreversible brain damage from futzing around with his memories.

He is noticeably dumber and more "anime protagonist-y" after the events of Chain of Memories, which is a bit of a contrast to his portrayal before that (where he seemed like an average kid of his age).

[KorvinStarmast]

For Jon Snow, or for you?

Alas, Jon Snow.

Anyway, one more headcanon, for Better Call Saul: The (presumably late) elder Hamlin of Hamlin Hamlin McGill was / would have been played by Phil Hartman.

Oh yes.

Tycho Brahe is the famous example I've always heard.

[NovenFromTheSun]

Elder Scrolls:

Bacteria is aedric, but viruses are daedric.

[Bohandas]

In the cthulhu mythos story The Fire Vampires, despite what the scientists imply in their conversation the fire vampires' planetoid-fortress does not move faster than light. The author neglected to account for the fact that light does not move facter than light, so seeing it leave abother star and then seeing it appear here a moment later is what we would expect if it were moving at lightspeed or a little bit slower

[GloatingSwine]

Yes, if something were to travel faster than light and was visually observable at its starting position it would still appear to be there for the entire light-distance duration. So if something was visually observable at Alpha Centauri and travelled to earth at ten times the speed of light it would appear to be in both places at once for approximately 3.8 years before appearing to depart and catching up with itself.

[Lord Raziere]

In Elder Scrolls, its canon that Dragons because of Shouting see no difference between debating and fighting. My headcanon is thus: Alduin and the Dragons coming back to attack everyone isn't just some meaningless attack.....but a big argument that Alduin is trying to have with the entire world. After all, he wouldn't see the difference between invading somebody and trying to argue against their entire nation. Alduin thus thinks he is having philosophical debate where he has concluded that he is the best to rule, but humans and elves don't care, he's still killing them after all. and that Paarthurnax by taking the humans side isn't just fighting for us for our survival, he is taking the other side of a debate between him and Alduin as he is philosophically opposed.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

In Star Trek, Deep Space 9 in particular, there is a substance called latinum that's used as a currency. It's usually stored in a stable solid form attained by mixing it with gold in some way, but its pure form is a silvery liquid. It presumably cannot be made by a replicator, otherwise it wouldn't be much of a currency.

My latest headcanon is that this is an island of stability isotope, in particular a form of oganesson, element 118.

What is the island of stability? Well, starting around element number 84 elements no longer have a any stable isotopes, which is to say that all versions of that substance that can be made show radioactive decay that eventually turns the into lighter elements (meaning: a smaller number of protons). This decay speeds up as the elements get heavier. uranium (92) is still stable enough that it occurs on Earth in some quantities after having been formed in a supernova explosion (or similar astrophysical event) billions of years ago, but around number 97 we get to the elements that were only discovered after the second world war, either because they're mega rare on Earth or because they are non-existent on Earth and we can only create them in particle accelerators. But in the very heaviest of those elements a curiosity appears, sometimes the half-life is longer than expected, even a bit longer than that of lighter elements. They decay a bit slower than you'd expect if elements just decayed faster and faster as they became heavier. We're still talking about a half-life of seconds here, but it's something. This leaves the possibility that there will be superheavy isotopes who are relatively stable, with a half-life of days or even years. There probably aren't any actually stable stable new elements out there, for one we probably would have found those on Earth, formed from supernova (or something) remains and all, but there is wiggle room in the theory that says they could exist.

This would explain why latinum is useful as a currency. Even in Star Trek times it's a heavy enough element that you can only make it with a very powerful particle accelerator (or maybe mine it in very small quantities from the remains of the most violent of astrophysical phenomena, but I want to focus on the accelerators here). It's a bit like an interstellar cryptocurrency. There is no central bank that issues the currency, and there are no prominent deposits that make you rich if you happen to own the right plot of land. You can only make it by dropping boatloads of energy, and that's only worth it as long as latinum prices keep up with the cost of energy. (Completely aside: minor spoiler for Discovery ahead in this paragraph.) This in turn means that latinum experiences a steady inflation over time. Assuming that energy gets more plentiful and cheaper over time as it tends to do in science fiction universes, latinum gets cheaper too. (I'm ignoring the future from Discovery for this purpose. Yes, that was the spoiler.) This does not have to be bad for a currency, it invites people to spend it. Although the obsessive latinum hoarding the Ferengi tend to engage in does become a bit odd. Well, more odd.

But if latinum is a super heavy element, it would probably be solid at room temperature. Yes, we have quicksilver being a liquid metal, but that's not nearly as heavy as the elements we're talking about. That's where oganesson comes in. It sits in the group of the noble gasses. These elements are gasses because they don't interact with any other particles other than through the weakest of forces, the van der Waals forces, sometimes called cohesion or apolar interactions. Well, that's not entirely true, the heavier noble gasses can undergo some reactions. But the more interesting part here is that the heavier noble gasses have a much higher boiling point than the lightest ones, because they're heavier particles and the van der Waals forces are greater on heavier particles. On element 118, the heaviest element currently confirmed to have been created by humans, the forces might be big enough that if you have a macroscopic amount of these atoms they might even be fluid at room temperature. Barely fluid, you'd probably see quite some evaporation, but still. If oganesson had a stable isotope, it might look a lot like latinum.

As an aside, the idea that latinum cannot be replicated would mean that the technology used in a replicator is not the same as that used in a transporter. Latinum can, it seems, be transported just fine. Meaning that you're not broken down on one end of the trans/teleporter while an exact copy is being printed on the other side. They actually send your own particles over. They might do that through some sort of quantum mechanics/strong theory like effect where the particles are transformed into some sort of subspace waveform, but they're in essence still the same particles.



And finally, okay, okay. There are some guidelines to where you're expect to find island of stability isotopes in terms of how many protons and neutrons they would have, and oganesson is not really a candidate. Wrong number of protons. But hey, you can't always have all your details match.

[Cikomyr2]

A currency being an energy-storing medium is actually very reasonable and actually grounded in the petrodollar theory of modern currency valuation.

Basically, latinum represent "energy credit" in their purest form.

[BisectedBrioche]

Wouldn't that make it more analogous to gold than cryptocurrency? If it's rare, stable and can be mined naturally, used in grey to black markets, and only synthesised at great expense.

I mean, while there's in-universe lore for it being "gold pressed", from a Doylist perspective, it's clearly just so the audience sees something that looks like bars of gold and thinks "aha, this is rare and expensive, like gold!".

[Cikomyr2]

Wouldn't that make it more analogous to gold than cryptocurrency? If it's rare, stable and can be mined naturally, used in grey to black markets, and only synthesised at great expense.

I mean, while there's in-universe lore for it being "gold pressed", from a Doylist perspective, it's clearly just so the audience sees something that looks like bars of gold and thinks "aha, this is rare and expensive, like gold!".

If its a way to store energy that can be extracted, i still argue its closer to petrodollar

[Peelee]

- the Lion King is actually a popular retelling of an old Wakanda succession crisis

Hamlet is Wakandan?

Anyway, one more headcanon, for Better Call Saul: The (presumably late) elder Hamlin of Hamlin Hamlin McGill was / would have been played by Phil Hartman.

I love this, and it will always be true in my heart.

Tycho Brahe is the famous example I've always heard.

Tycho Brahe is the best example of how to be an absolute badass ever.

Also, is likely the basis for Hamlet.

If its a way to store energy that can be extracted, i still argue its closer to petrodollar

There's no reason to expect its a way to store energy, though. All species have ways to store vast amounts of energy, and energy in the Trek universe is cheap anyway. Latinum is primarily used by Ferengi, a hyper-capitalism society that values material goods. Latinum cannot be replicated, so the scarcity is its inherent value.

Its gold. It's directly analogous to gold. It really is as simple as that.

[Lvl 2 Expert]

I hadn't actually considered the idea of being able to get the energy back out. I think it's an intriguing idea, and it's definitely at least kind of possible. If I try to think it all the way through it does probably open up a few extra assumptions. The simplest way to get it to work is by stating that replicators cannot make these superheavy elements, but they can break them down into lighter elements and use or store the energy. We would also need to assume that the process to make the latinum, while energy intensive, is pretty efficient.

The amount of energy stored would be huge by today's everyday standards. The energy density of oganesson that will be processed down to say lead (and you're probably going further to get to a nice useful material) is at first glance going to sit at least somewhere in the hundreds of millions of MJ/kg (10^14 J/kg), where fossil fuels sit around 50 MJ/kg, about 10 million times lower. I'm just not sure if this would still count as high energy density by Star Trek's standards. I think the most comparable thing to our universe would be their impulse engines. Because warp speed is magic anyway. I think those engines can usually take them up to one third of the speed of light or something? Wild guess? At one third the speed of light energy costs are still relatively close to Newtonian, which means that for every 1000kg of space ship (not a completely unrealistic number for one human and the minimum amount of ship needed to keep it alive) that would be e = mv^2 = 1000*(1*10^8)^2 = 1*10^19 J. (I think? I've been corrected before that e=mv^2 somehow doesn't work in space and it's actually much cheaper???) You'd need the energy from approximately 100,000 kg of oganesson per passenger to tear out of space dock like there's no tomorrow.

I do really like the concept of currency being essentially high power batteries. Either as stable physical coins or as a bank card/power bank hybrid (a power bank card?) that just lets you pay the right amount of joules for your purchase. I might start claiming that was my idea here all along.



I was originally thinking more along the lines that like our particle accelerators, the isotope is really hard to make partly because the process is so inefficient. The energy cost is the limiting factor making it rare. I was comparing it to cryptocurrency rather than gold to underline the idea that creating the substance from lighter elements would be the main or only way of obtaining the stuff, contrasting it from anything naturally occurring like gold.

(And yes, the gold pressed latinum is gold because than audiences can see it's valuable money stuff, the fun is in figuring out how to make it work in universe. And also making the theory more interesting than "it's a stand in for gold, next!" Because it's not much of a head canon if I do that.)



There are of course major differences with cryptocurrencies, quite probably much bigger differences than with gold, so maybe that wasn't the most clever way to phrase it. The mining mechanic for cryptocurrencies is in essence only a mechanism for creating their initial distribution. A "mature" cryptocoin is priced by supply and demand only, and is worth whatever you need to pay to get it. It's designed to be a super strong currency, as long as demand keeps going up the value will keep rising making the early adopters filthy rich. Which is one of the reasons why we should probably just all stop demanding these coins. An island of stability isotope that doesn't occur naturally would be worth around as much as the energy needed to create it. If it drops below that mark people stop "printing money", if it gets too far above it more people build a particle accelerator. It's kept at a stable and over longer periods even slightly decreasing price level. No, I don't think the currency would do very well if demand ever shrunk. Then again, I don't think any currency handles that situation particularly well...

[Cikomyr2]

There's no reason to expect its a way to store energy, though. Ask cities have ways to store vast amounts of energy, and energy in the Trek universe is cheap anyway. Latinum is primarily used by Ferengi, a hyper-capitalism society that values material goods. Latinum cannot be replicated, so the scarcity is its inherent value.

Its gold. It's directly analogous to gold. It really is as simple as that.

Man, read the thread title. No need to piss on other people's headcanon

[Peelee]

No need to piss on other people's headcanon

Just because someone has a headcanon does not mean that it's exempt from criticism. The "latinum is energy storage" idea makes no sense and doesnt really fit with the established universe. If you object to that, then perhaps any sort of argument against would be a better rebuttal than "you're a meanie".

[Bohandas]

Cryptocurrency is like the opposite of the petrodollar, it's like dumping energy resources into a hole

[Cikomyr2]

Oh. I got one i am real proud of.

Its about the Legends timeline.

The plague that cut off the Rakatas from the Force turned out to be the Midichlorians. But they did not actually *cut* the Ratakas from the Force, they just disseminated and spread the Rataka's natural force sensitivity across all living beings in the Galaxy. Kind of Force Leeches

Some people (and some Ratakas) have a genetic disposition to have more Midichlorians and are force sensitive.

[Peelee]

Oh. I got one i am real proud of.

Its about the Legends timeline.

The plague that cut off the Rakatas from the Force turned out to be the Midichlorians. But they did not actually *cut* the Ratakas from the Force, they just disseminated and spread the Rataka's natural force sensitivity across all living beings in the Galaxy. Kind of Force Leeches

Some people (and some Ratakas) have a genetic disposition to have more Midichlorians and are force sensitive.

I like it. Imean, it's definitely a damn sight better than midichlorians as presented in the movies and books.

[Ruck]

I love this, and it will always be true in my heart.

He really deserved a shot to get the serious dramatic roles like Odenkirk and McKean did. And god, he and McKean together would have been dynamite.

Tycho Brahe is the best example of how to be an absolute badass ever.

Right up until the end, anyway.

[Lord Vukodlak]

So at the end of Disneys Jungle Book. The girl lures Mowgli into the village. Now why Mowgli followed her was never a mystery but one thing that had he scratching my head for years was why did this girl entice a strange boy to follow her inside? Did the village have stories about seeing a wild boy in the jungle?
Then i realized the simple truth, she didn’t want to carry the heavy water jug.

[Peelee]

He really deserved a shot to get the serious dramatic roles like Odenkirk and McKean did. And god, he and McKean together would have been dynamite.

Imean, McKean is an acting powerhouse. Spinal Tap may not have been a serious dramatic role, but it's clearly one hell of a job to pull off.

Right up until the end, anyway.

Eh. It makes for a nice story, but an incredibly rare complication occurring to one of the most noteworthy scientific figures of the time who also had several other medical issues that were undiagnosed to not even considered medically relevant at the time, coupled with an already legendary life, is likely to be simple just another wild story about a man whose entire life was wild stories (albeit those were mostly real).

[ghbok]

So at the end of Disneys Jungle Book. The girl lures Mowgli into the village. Now why Mowgli followed her was never a mystery but one thing that had he scratching my head for years was why did this girl entice a strange boy to follow her inside? Did the village have stories about seeing a wild boy in the jungle?
Then i realized the simple truth, she didn’t want to carry the heavy water jug.

Water is surprisingly heavy, after all. Learnt that from all the times I had to carry a full bucket of water, or even a large filled-up water bottle.