Here’s the list of destinations Tom is picking from so you don’t have to hold your screen up to a mirror.
destination subjective time
Straylight 3s
Vesta 14s
Czarina-Kluster 23s
Funk Soul 372s
Shaeffer’s Choice 2942s
Höel 70042s
Strangedown 78309s
Eros Kluster 82409s
Pasiphaë 146239s
Sinope 146935s
Amalthea 147001s
Ganymede 147007s
New Val Halen 147002s
Callisto 147003s
Shaeffer’s Choice 147014s
The Moose Denied 147020s
Europa Nature Preserve 147004s
Himara 147271s
Io 147692s
Elara 147848s
Leda 148234s
New Amsterdam 183327sApparently Shaeffer chose both ways.
This is a mix of names I made up, orbital/asteroid habs from books that influenced me, and several of Jupiter’s moons – I guess Pallas is hanging out near the Jovian system at the time of this story. Which I suppose could give an enterprising nerd a guess as to the exact date this is happening, if I’d actually done any of those calculations myself. Which I did not.
And I don’t know about you, but I really do not want to visit a place called “Höel”. I think it was colonized by a bunch of Ren & Stimpy revivalists. shudder
Is The Moose Denied a nod to Invader Zim?
Oh, yeah, there’s that “Room with a Moose” episode, isn’t there? Nah, it’s not, unless it’s cryptomnesia.
Any particular reason the Europa Nature Preserve is out of order?
My first guess was that the list includes willingness of the destination to receive sudden visitors as part of a complex weighted algorithm rather than naively sorting by transit time. Second guess was typo, which I think means that I respect you quite a bit as an author.
Completely intentional as you guessed! A gold star is you.
No, actually, it just got screwed up when I was rearranging the destinations to put the best ones where they’d be visible; there were about eight more I came up with that were kinda stupid-sounding. WHO WOULD ACTUALLY NAME THEIR COLONY “CHUP SCUGGLE”.
I think I can get away without editing it in the actual image, too, since those digits are lost in the highlight on Tom’s arm. Score!
Hmmm. The more they jump between realities, the more the Panopticon seems to be manifesting in Rita1’s world. I suspect this is Not A Good Thing. I’m sure we’ll find out, but first I think Rita1 has some havoc to wreak in Green Rita’s world.
I read them before I saw that you kindly listed them in the description (which I greatly appreciate). I did, however, read the “Europa Nature Preserve” as the “Ewoks Nature Preserve…”
I also found it interesting that past 147000 they all plateaued. Though now that I read your list, I can see that they don’t actually quite plateau. But I guess a lot of them must be all near Jupiter? (I realize you said you didn’t do the calculations. So, I’ll not read too much into it.)
Looking at the list and my comments below the page, I think “near Jupiter” is definitely the reason for the clustering of stuff around 147k seconds of travel. I think the idea I was working with was “there are settlements on a lot of the moons, plus some notable space stations”.