A rod of Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive isotope. There's a reason it says on the side "Drop & run". Its radioactivity is the reason it's messing up the photo- as the energetic radiation strikes the cells in the phone camera, it causes those cells to light up.
It's part of this Analog Horror video by Gooseworx: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Td2x8s9GZlo
A thorough explanation for those who don't want to watch
It's a video of two different fake commercials for fictional drugs called Thalasin and Thalasin Plus. While the former is ostensibly for emotional regulation, the latter supposedly allows the taker to experience increasingly strange and alien 'emotions'. Over the course of the video, a human face is used to emphasize these emotions, both normal and strange, though the faces with Thalasin Plus slowly grow more and more twisted and painful.
My most recent game was a Hive Mind. I think I assimilated some 75% of the galaxy, getting right to the endgame crisis before the most recent update dropped. I've kind of lost interest in the save, partially because I played with Gigastructural Engineering and that updated with Machine Age as I was playing, so the save file is a little borked. Looking forward to playing with the Cosmic Storms and the upcoming Grand Archive, though.
I think I crushed two Fanatic Purifiers and assimilated the Great Khan, so you're welcome, the rest of the galaxy.
There is somewhat of a case to be made for Materialist, considering Cosmogenesis and the Synaptic Lathe. But obviously not every materialist empire goes into that. To be a fanatic purifier, you need to be Fanatically Xenophobic and either Militarist or Spiritualist. I'd expect Xenophobic empires to not care (or care significantly less), but the other two ethics are a little more debatably nebulous as to how much they'd care.
There's a video linked from the thread that I wanted to get other people's opinions on: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xguam0TKMw8
The video tries to analyze how the cycles of rise and fall of different empires in the past can be used to interpret the present.
The work has some grounding in reality, though we should question some of the hidden assumptions made behind the work. I feel like this isn't a complete system, however. He over-simplifies how the myriad states work and only focuses on the world power vs the rest of the world. While there is a focus on how an empire rises and how the systems interconnect, comparatively little is done to question how an empire declines and how those systems break down, only how the latest does.
A rod of Cobalt-60, a highly radioactive isotope. There's a reason it says on the side "Drop & run". Its radioactivity is the reason it's messing up the photo- as the energetic radiation strikes the cells in the phone camera, it causes those cells to light up.