r/interestingasfuck • u/GoldenChinchilla • 8d ago
Grasshopper infected and consumed by Cordyceps fungus /r/ALL
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u/LisaWinchester 8d ago
Poor little guy
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u/salesha 8d ago
I’m so sad for him
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u/Free_Hat_McCullough 8d ago
Me too, he’s even got that shit coming out of his eyes.
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u/dawg_will_hunt
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Bomb. Now let me go home so I can be with my family.
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u/bobscc 8d ago
Hit hard AF. There is no cure. There is no vaccine.
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u/mrcockboi69 8d ago edited 7d ago
Is that actually true? If it jumped to humans we’re fucked unless we kill it all off?
Edit: I’m a big fan of TLOU already. Just wondering if the premise is legit
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u/SuprNntndoChalmers 8d ago edited 7d ago •
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Probably not. Fungal cells are different enough to human cells that we could find proteins or functions to target that would not effect human cells. Much like antibiotics
Might take a while to make effective anti fungals though.
EDIT - well this blew up.
This is of course assuming that there's nothing off the shelf we could just use. But then the last of us would be a pretty boring show if they just went down to the chemist and stopped straight away. Just 10 episodes of Joel living a normal life.
EDIT2 - some people have pointed out that Fungi are more closely related to animals and so would be more difficult to treat. The thing is, fungi are much larger and more complicated than bacteria or viruses, so when you get down to the molecular level, there's loads more stuff you could use as a target. e.g. the technology used in mRNA vaccines; despite what anit-vaxxers would have you believe, was being tried for about a decade before the pandemic as a method of treating cancer. All you do is change the mRNA sequence to attack a target on the cancer cells. If you can find a target on cancerous cells, which are identical to normal cells that have just gone rogue, I'm sure finding a target to trigger an immune response on fungi would be a lot easier.
Or maybe we could just get the athletes foot spray out, find the nearest pub and wait for all this to blow over.
Also, I'm not a mycologist, so happy to be corrected.
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u/joeskrimps 8d ago
Terbinafine would likely ruin cordyceps' day.
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u/Knyxie 8d ago
Fluconazole: “Lemme at ‘em”
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u/HippopotamicLandMass 8d ago
One of the first tools that clinicians turn to when fighting a fungal infection are a class of antifungal drugs called azoles. But as usage has increased, invasive fungal pathogens have adapted and become resistant, just like many bacterial diseases have become resistant to antibiotics.
Unlike bacterial resistance to antibiotics though, the source of this antifungal resistance can be partially explained by environmental usage of antifungals. "One of the major fungicides used to protect crops from fungi is an azole. It's now become pretty clear that agricultural use is driving some of the clinical resistance," says Momany.
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2022/10/26/1131602076/who-releases-list-of-threatening-fungi-the-most-dangerous-might-surprise-you "The World Health Organization releases list of deadly fungi : Goats and Soda : NPR"
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u/loganverse 8d ago •
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Thanks for taking away our hope, azole.
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u/wutthefvckjushapen 8d ago •
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My uncle was killed by azoles which sucks because he was a fungi.
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u/eidetic 8d ago
I initially read that as:
The World Health Organization releases list of deadly fungi, Goats and Soda
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u/FloweringSkull67 8d ago
Yea, we already have anti-fungals. It might be ugly for a bit, but it wouldn’t be TLOU
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u/FrameJump 8d ago
My fingers are still crossed.
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u/verminbury 8d ago
But are you crossing them consciously or is the fungus doing it for you?
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u/FloweringSkull67 8d ago
It’s been said in the thread already, but Fungi are not viruses nor bacteria. Fungi are more closely related to animals than plants or viruses/bacteria. It would take millions of years of evolution for a fungi to evolve to zombify humans
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u/Jjhammer31 8d ago
This. It's been infecting insects for fifty million years and still doesn't infect a single type of bird or mammal. Evolution finds a way but I'm going to say mammals and birds are so different than insects that this won't happen. However, a fungus that kills a few billion people or more is what you should really be worried about.
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u/DBeumont 8d ago
Insects don't have an adaptive immune system (antibodies,) which is what vertebrates use to fight fungal infections. They do have an immune system, just not an adaptive one.
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u/Raffello 8d ago
There’s too many variables to say what would happen in real life. We have effective anti-fungal medication now. However, the disease in the show takes over so quickly that it would be difficult to get any treatment delivered in time. You go from infected to raging cannibal in like a couple hours. If there’s any disease like that, fungal or otherwise, we’d be pretty fucked. Especially given how bad our society seems to be at following best practices to avoid spreading illness.
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u/Novadreams22 8d ago
Yep. There was a study done based off of world war z book that if zombies actually ran, the world was fucked but if they moved slow the human race would survive. It’s all about replication rates
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u/satisfried 8d ago
I think it’s worth considering two things. A sizable chunk of the population would simply not believe it’s happening at all until it were too late. And, it would be very hard for the average person to kill infected people they once knew/loved. That’s how they get ya.
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u/Jokerzrival 8d ago
The book is a great read because that's part of what happened in the west during the outbreaks. People just ignored it and refused to believe it was real. Then there were people claiming anything they found in the closet was a cure for the plague and selling it even though it didn't work at all
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u/nonlawyer 8d ago
Especially given how bad our society seems to be at following best practices to avoid spreading illness.
I don’t need no fancy scientists telling me I can’t go get drunk at Applebees and hug the infected!
I heard on Facebook it’s all hoax anyway, getting infected actually just makes you a really Fun Guy.
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u/vedalux777 8d ago
That line gave me goosebumps.
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u/eman00619 8d ago
I had to rewatch that scene tbh, the acting of that general and the doctor was amazing. You could see the terror in his eyes when she delivered that line.
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u/EasterBurn 8d ago
The scientist in each episode's opening basically said "we are fucked". Really hone in on Ellie as the only hope for humanity. Something not really touched upon in the game.
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u/missanthropocenex 8d ago
It’s always fun in science fiction when you see a scientists skip straight over all of the minutia and jump straight to “burn it all down”.
It’s like the dilemma from something like ALIEN typically, a scientists job would be to capture a specimen and bring it back at all costs in order to understand it and learn from you. You have an obligation to do that for the greater good of science. But what if something was SO bad you had to just say “fuck all that” and just Nuke the thing.
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u/The_Roptor 8d ago
Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
Going back to the first Alien film, it is saying that the company wanted the specimen for profits, not for the sake of science in my opinion.
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u/DeadSnark 8d ago
TBF the Alien was bad enough that nuking it would be justified (a species of killer creatures that reproduces using their victims and is almost impossible to stop in a futuristic spaceship with plenty of room to run and hide? Yeah...). Weyland-Yutani just wanted it for their bioweapons division to make a quick buck, ignoring the fact that it's night impossible to actually capture and transport one of those things without it inevitably causing trouble.
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u/MaethrilliansFate 8d ago
Like finding the Flood from Halo on a planet. Glass the whole damn thing from orbit and move on because that entire world is a lost cause.
Dealing with an "extincter" such as an ultra aggressive disease or petri dish swallowing invasive species isn't a matter for figuring out a treatment, it's scorched earth and pray it's not fireproof
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u/tman391 8d ago
I love how her hand shakes in fear when he tells her 14 workers are unaccounted for
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u/xanderholland 8d ago
and missing for around 30 hours, she knew immediately that only drastic measures would stop or at least slow it down.
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u/redundantsalt 8d ago
the way she delivered those line plus the officers reaction, gave so much gravity to the scene. Still gives me chills. Great piece of cinema.
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u/10000-1-_-1-10000 8d ago
That is a horrible way to die. ☠️
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u/GabryLv 8d ago
The worst part is The grasshopper is not dead, he is still alive, the fungus however is the one who manipulates every move of the little living being
It’s a torture for the mind of the little fella
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u/Ok_Feedback4198 8d ago
At that point, it ded
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u/LeonidasSpacemanMD 8d ago
It’s also an insect so it probably has exceedingly little concept of anything that is going on at any point in its life. I’m sure this is no picnic and it probably feels pain, but I doubt there’s any kind of existential fear like we would experience
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u/Edward_Tank 8d ago
I remember reading somewhere (Don't quote me on it) that scientists figured out the fungus wasn't overtaking the insects mind and rewiring it, it was literally overtaking its limbs and forcing it to move using its nervous system, so the insect knows whats happening and can only watch in horror as it moves it.
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u/Jean-Ralphio_S 8d ago •
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“Back in 2017, Prof. Hughes and his team scanned ultra-thin slices of infected ants under a powerful microscope to build a 3D model, painstakingly marking which parts were ant and which were fungus. That gave them a much more detailed look at what was happening structurally at the cellular level. They found a surprisingly high percentage of fungal cells in the ants' bodies. The cells were concentrated directly outside the brain without ever penetrating the brain.
Instead, the fungal cells formed an elaborate, interconnected 3D network, enabling them to communicate with each other and exchange nutrients. They essentially cut the brain off from the rest of the ant's body, so the networked cells can control its behavior. As Ed Yong wrote in The Atlantic, "The ant ends its life as a prisoner in its own body. Its brain is still in the driver's seat, but the fungus has the wheel."
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u/thebirdisdead 8d ago edited 8d ago
I am baffled by how a fungus without a nervous system, brain, or neural processes of any kind can coordinate this level of goal-oriented behavior. I would have thought that would require some higher level processing?
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u/Procrastinationist 8d ago
It doesn't have to know what it's doing; evolution drives specialization to absurd lengths given enough time.
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u/myaltduh 8d ago
Think of the stuff AIs can now do by constantly adapting to whatever information has been given to them.
Though slower, evolution has had billions of years to find fiendishly clever solutions to one imperative "survive and reproduce." Nothing humans have had time to come up with even comes close.
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u/Cucumbers-are-snakes 7d ago
The "goal-oriented" behavior is an illusion, because it is more intuitive for us to presume there's a particular purpose to things. Fungus on the other hand does not have a purpose - it just does what it does, because this particular behavior happens to be beneficial to fungus' survival and reproduction, and so the selection pressure phased out other kinds of behavior (fungus that didn't do it - didn't reproduce as successfully).
It didn't just immediately start controlling insects - it happened over millions and millions of generations with millions and millions of random mutations. Each mutation that improved the reproductive ability of the fungus - got passed on to the next generation. Other mutations, that were detrimental - didn't. From being able to infect an insect in the first place, to growing in a particular way, to making an ant twitch, to making it twitch in a particular way, to making it move, to making it move in a particular way, and so on. There are numerous miniscule steps that ultimately lead to something that appears "purposeful".
Fungus has no more "intention" of controlling an ant than our eye has an intention of gathering and focusing light. It's just does what it does.
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u/ThatFreakBob 8d ago
Geez, thanks for the new existential dread universe. Makes me think of how it feels when I have sleep paralysis, only something other would be driving my body around instead of it being locked in place.
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u/pancakebatter01 8d ago
Employer: why are you doing xyz wrong? Employee: my brain is in the driver’s seat, sir.. but the fungus has the wheel
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u/EpsilonX029 8d ago
Look, John, we know you’ve tried shrooms in the past, but that doesn’t mean you can excuse this behavior with old habits.
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u/atatassault47 8d ago
There's a reason why fungal infections like this are only found in insects: We mammals are too hot for most fungus. The few fungal infections we do get are topical.
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u/MagnumOpusOSRS 8d ago •
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The plot of the Last Of Us is that the fungus adapts to survive higher temperature alongside global warming.
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u/Uripitez 8d ago
These fungi developed side by side with these species over millions of years. There isn't going to just be a switch that turns for them where they can suddenly infect humans, control their nervous systems, etc...
Or maybe there will be. Can't ever be 100% sure.
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u/Dropbeatdad 8d ago
I think for some of us the existential dread is more a result of empathy that any living thing should have to die in such a horrifyingly brutal way, and that the processes of evolution allows for such horrifying mechanisms to exist in the first place.
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u/Internetallstar 8d ago
Fungi has taken my sight, taken my speech, taken my hearing, taken my arms, taken my legs, taken my soul, left me with a life in heeeelllllll.
Queue epic guitar solo.
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u/ImmaDoMahThing 8d ago edited 8d ago
That makes the game/show way more terrifying. There was a scene in the game where someone questioned whether or not the person was still alive without any control over their bodies. And now this kinda just confirms it 😕.
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u/Ritzanxious 8d ago
I think remember a part where if you hide long enough, you could hear the infected cry
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u/GummyBearGrylls 8d ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHiDnPC3oYY link for anyone wondering
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u/lizzyhuerta 8d ago
whoa that just about ruined my whole night
Edit: incredible performance by the voice actor, though. Holy shit.
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u/erakattack 8d ago
0:51 "NO... I DON'T... WANNA KILL YOUWEUGGHH.."
jesus christ... 😳
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u/Krail 8d ago
The Head Crabs in Half Life operate similarly. I remember at one point, after playing it, reading that the people were still conscious and themselves in there, and I had to step away from the franchise for a bit.
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u/ztherion 8d ago
Fun fact if you play the headcrab zombies screams in reverse they're intelligible English and mostly yelling about how they're in agony and begging for mercy.
Anyway, good night!
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u/Airdropwatermelon 8d ago
There is an infected lady in the game crying as she consumes a body....
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u/Low-Caterpillar-9913 8d ago
In Part II you get to explore one of the hospitals that were among the first to get hit by the cordyceps, and you meet a bunch of infected still living, but fused together by the cordyceps into a single entity known as the Rat King.
If you think being a regular infected is terrifying, imagine being that. For 25 years.
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u/Long-Dead-Stars 8d ago
The Rat King is one of the most terrifying things I’ve seen in any game.
Like Dead Space levels of terrifying…
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u/18bananas 8d ago
On the bright side, once you get past the initial terror of getting infected and then attacking and infecting your whole family, you all get to spend some quality time together without the pressure of trying avoiding infection. Just roaming the wastes as a family, ripping survivors to shreds. There’s always a silver lining
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u/frrrni 8d ago
What game/show?
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u/ImmaDoMahThing 8d ago
The Last of Us! It’s on HBO if you wanna watch it. Or it’s on PlayStation if you wanna play it.
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u/Shitty_IT_Dude 8d ago
And oh my God that show is off to a great start.
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u/Super_Jay 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's exactly what I was hoping for from the guy that made Chernobyl (Craig Mazin) and the writer of the game (Neil Druckmann). It's so good.
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u/WangoBango 8d ago
To add to the replies, there's only 2 episodes of the show out so far, but it's really good. And the game is absolutely fantastic. Survival horror/stealth, with some of the best story telling I've personally experienced. The original is widely loved, but the sequel (The Last of Us Part 2), is definitely much more controversial among fans. I won't go into why because spoilers, but I personally love part 2 almost as much as part 1. Both are absolutely worth playing if you can.
Also, I'd say play the game before watching if you're interested. At least the first one. The show so far has followed the plot of the game pretty damn close, even some shot for shot recreations of some of the cut scenes.
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u/ButtaRollsInMyPocket 8d ago edited 7d ago
Wow that's scary, this reminds me of an episode of Guillermo Del Toro's show on Netflix, Cabinet of Curiosities. A guy inspecting bodies found an alien that takes over bodies by controlling their brain, I believe.
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u/DrF4rtB4rf 8d ago
Wouldn’t be surprised if that ends up being a twist/big reveal later in TLOU. That all the infected are still sane in their minds yet unable to control themselves. The worst suffering imaginable. Excruciating physical pain on top of the existential horror. Ugh
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u/mistic_darkness 8d ago
I mean, they might be concious, but they're definitely not sane after going though that
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u/idkiwilldeletethis 8d ago
If I remember correctly,bit's something that some characters in the game wonder about but it's never expanded upon, the closest thing is that if you stand around in stealth you can hear some infected crying
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u/Grimy_Earthborn 8d ago
But I am wondering if the brain can still see and sense if the fungus has taken over?
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u/phileric649 8d ago
That's actually so much worse. Thank you I hate it! :D
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u/budoucnost 8d ago
What is up with fungi/parasites having such gruesome and horrifying interactions with bugs…please don’t tell me anything like this can happen to things bigger than a bug
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u/Blights4days 8d ago •
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Tip: Don't watch The Last of Us.
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u/TXYankee14 8d ago
Creepiest part was the reaction from the fungi specialist.
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u/CustomerSuspicious25 8d ago
Loved the intro. She did a great job and so did the commanding officer with his reaction to what she suggested be done.
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u/I_eat_mud_ 8d ago
I’m just happy they elaborated a bit about countries outside the US. It wasn’t much, but it was always something I was curious about. If the US government could survive in the Last of Us universe, surely other country’s governments survived too right?
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u/Mr_Sarcasum 8d ago
NEWS: GREENLAND SHUTS DOWN SEAPORTS
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u/I_eat_mud_ 8d ago
Greenland and Madagascar must just be completely normal in the Last of Us universe
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u/AceSpades15 8d ago
Saying the US government "survived" is kind of a stretch. The game's opening credits sequence mentions a military coup has turned the country into a dictatorship. Kind of hinted at in the show with the hangings and the Fireflies directly saying they're fighting against a military dictatorship.
Part II also goes further into the new societies that are beginning to take root in a post-cordyceps world, and the US government isn't really a meaningful force in it. It might technically still exist, but if it doesn't really have any true authority, does it?
That said, I do love that we're seeing more of the world than the US too.
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u/_Meece_ 8d ago
The US government doesn't really survive. The US gov creates something called FEDRA and it dictates a variety of Qurantine Zones across the country to varying degrees of success.
There's still a military within the country. But there's no real government, just a sparse groups of military presence around.
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u/LeonidasSpacemanMD 8d ago
The two intros so far have been really awesome little tone setters for the universe. I feel like by the end of the show I’ll wanna watch all the intro scenes edited together
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u/NerdicusTheWise 8d ago
That's a great game though
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u/larowin 8d ago
Show is surprisingly good too, giving me major flashbacks to playing it years ago.
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u/xanderman524 8d ago
No. The fungus that does this can't survive in temperatures present in most organisms, making most things immune to it.
The first episode of "The Last of Us" on HBO Max, based on the videogames of the same name, has a researcher talk about it, and the hypothetical potential for mutations making it able to survive. This, however, is fiction, and is nothing more than a "what if?"
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u/EnesPig2005 8d ago
So, in the last of us, the infected people are aware of the awful things they are doing but are powerless to stop them? Jesus christ
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u/punkkface 8d ago
exactly, in the first game you can hear a couple of runners eating a corpse and "crying" at the same time, and some words can hear be spoken like "oh no, oh god no" while they're feasting on the bodies" Makes the infection and the sadness even more horrific.
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u/Hellofriendinternet 8d ago
Some of the sprinters/stalkers who still have faces have horrified/scared/sad expressions like they are aware of what’s happening.
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u/PosiedonsSaltyAnus 8d ago
Oh shit I was wondering why I would hear people panicking when I was only around infected, this is wild
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u/Natganistan 8d ago
Jesus fucking christ, that world is infinitely more disturbing now
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u/punkkface 8d ago
Welcome to The Last Of Us, it's honestly such an emotional rollercoaster. I've completed both of the games multiple times and every time they just destroy me. The attention to details, soundtracks, the fungus, infected, the characters, how they behave. It's just beautiful and really, really sad. It burns me out emotionally every time
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u/Natganistan 8d ago
I really want to play it for the first time, but I am hesitant for this exact reason
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u/VahnNoaGala 8d ago
Don't deprive yourself of one of the best IPs, stories, and characters in existence. Not to mention as a survival horror game it is top tier even without those things
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u/Unkn0wn_Ace 8d ago
Like the zombies in half life 2 that scream and yell a reversed “help” dialogue
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u/Chainsaw_Viking 8d ago
Yeah, that was really disturbing, especially when they burned. I tended to end them as quickly as possible to end their suffering, even if they were just computer people, with computer head crabs controlling them.
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u/SleepyCatSippingWine 8d ago
Reminds me of system shock where the muted says things like sorry I think
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u/Abbigale221 8d ago
It’s like those horsehair worms that outgrow their hosts so the parasite makes the insect drown itself so it can escape into the water to find a bigger host.
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u/Several-Associate407 8d ago
Countless evolutionary paths to go and this fungus decided to be a dick
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u/CameoAmalthea 7d ago
It wants to go places but it’s a fungus, no legs. So it learned how to pilot insects like a mech suit to take them where it needs to go and when it gets there it uses them to grow mushrooms.
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u/Flaccidwashjeans 8d ago
clicking intensifies
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u/paulusblarticus 8d ago
shiv
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u/His_name_is_LUIGI 8d ago
Nah man, horde those shivs. What if you find 3 locked doors in a row?
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u/MartinusLucanius 8d ago
Not sure if it's common knowledge or not, but molitovs worked great too. I would get so much alcohol and cloth I could spare them. Then when you have multiple clickers, you can throw the moly between them and they'd all run to it and burn to death. More opportunity to hoard shivs.
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u/Various-Month806 8d ago
Molotovs the absolute beast in TLOU. Ditch your guns and ammo and just wander aimlessly searching every wrecked car and home you could for alcohol and rags. Almost no other way to deal with bloaters.
(Guess who just played again after E1? My save files said Jan 2016 since I last played. Incredibly I remembered nearly all the puzzles and routines to complete within a week.)
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u/thesnapening 8d ago
It's amazing how so many people suddenly know what cordyceps is in the past couple of weeks.
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u/nznova 8d ago
It’s funny seeing the whole cordyceps discourse repeat itself. There was a whole cycle of it in the gaming community when the last of us game came out and now we get it again with the show.
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u/Freakin_A 8d ago
I felt alone when reading The Girl with All The Gifts. Didn’t realize there were several other cordyceps groups I could have joined.
Now I’ve played through both games and saving a few more episodes before I dive into the show.
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u/pauloh1998 8d ago
Hell, it's like a cordyceps enemy got ahold of some people and they're now posting anti-cordyceps propaganda
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u/pastafallujah 8d ago
Big Plant and Big Animal are the anti-cordycep illuminati. WAKE UP, sheeple!
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u/RussellTH11 8d ago
I used to supplement with cordyceps all the time, as an adaptogen 😂😅
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u/skilriki 8d ago
There’s a difference between the one that you were buying and this one.
The one that grows in insects costs crazy money and you can pretty much only get it in china.
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u/this_sort_of_thing 8d ago
It was David Attenborough’s documentary Planet Earth that first put this fungus into the mainstream limelight (I remember watching that specific episode), from there folks at Naughty Dog got the idea of making a post apocalyptic zombie game with this fungus as the star of the show, with the game came the TV series
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u/Moresohn 8d ago
It appears this fungus stole the idea from The Last Of Us video game
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u/Supraphysiological__ 8d ago edited 8d ago
Mad to think this parasite was growing inside it and is literally sporing out through its body. This reminds me of something Stephen Fry would state in a "God can't be real because" debate. Insane...
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u/Tarzan_OIC 8d ago
Darwin lost his faith when discovering shit like wasps laying their eggs in caterpillars.
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u/TheSecularGlass 8d ago •
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I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs, a very endearing sight, I'm sure you'll agree. And even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged onto a half submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's wonders, gentlemen. Mother and children dining upon mother and children. And that is when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.
Terry Pratchett
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u/Whind_Soull 8d ago
I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters, who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy.
Until I got to the end and realized it was a quote, I thought "well, aren't we feeling poetic on reddit today."
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u/HelloWorld1352 8d ago edited 8d ago
Imagine if there was a video game/live-action tv franchise with the fungus jumping to humans, unleashing a zombie apocalypse where a middle-aged man has to protect a teenage girl who’s mysteriously immune to the disease in order to survive.
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u/Merlin-the-Pirate 8d ago
Lameee. It would never work. Nobody would play the game and the show would be unwatchable
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u/sW1nG42 8d ago
My son's bearded dragon would still chow down on that thing the instant it moves.
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u/Jakob535 8d ago
That’s what it wants.
I believe the entire lifecycle of the fungus is grow on ground. Infect bug that walks by, take control of bug. Grow big. Deliberately attract attention of bigger predators like birds and lizards. Get eaten. Get shat out onto ground somewhere else. Start growing again.86
u/MattHack7 8d ago
At least certain species of cordyceps compel the host to climb to a high place. They then break through the dermis of the host and release a cloud of spores which travels and covers a wide area in the hopes of landing on or being eaten by a new host
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u/manthighs84 8d ago
if i remember right its ants on leaves theyll climb hold by the grass blade and get eaten, i also swore theres on parasite that wants to be eaten by a herbivore gracing and continues its cycle in its guts
fascinating
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u/big_dawg_energy 8d ago
Oftentimes the fungus will force the insect to climb to higher ground, then the host will die and the fungus will sporulate, infecting passing insects below.
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u/DiscountNinjaGaming 8d ago
Do you want The Last of Us? Cause this is how you get The Last of Us.
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u/SalizarMarxx 8d ago
Funny thing is I saw a video the other day saying that the human temperature keeps going down over the last few generations and no one knows why.
Now the whole thing was that this fungus couldn’t grow in human’s since our body temperature was so high.
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u/69_Beers_Later 8d ago •
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Ok so according to the show's first scene, "Fungi cannot survive if its host's internal temperature is over 94 degrees."
So if the average human body runs at about 97.5 degrees today, and each year the average gets lower by .003 C (or 0.0054 F), then the average human body will be susceptible to fungal infection in the year 2671.
Remindme! 648 years "you're fucked"
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u/rebelmime 8d ago
There's also global warming increasing the need for things to evolve to handle higher temperatures. Might meet somewhere in the middle
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u/doggotaco 8d ago
Has anyone done the math to model fungus adaptation to global temps and human body temps getting lower?
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u/JackONeillClone 8d ago
It would be cool if like, we get infected, but by wholesome fungus that just help us do our chores and inspires us to be better
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u/pomaj46809 8d ago
Yeah, but controlling an insect's nervous system is a fuck load easier than a mammal, let alone a human's. Even if it could live in a human it would take a fuck load of attempts to have similar control.
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u/satisfried 8d ago
Body temp isn’t the only barrier, fortunately.
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u/Imperium_Dragon 8d ago
Yeah our immune system is fighting fungal infections every single day.
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u/strawberry_space_jam 8d ago
At my workplace we scan our temperatures daily as part of a screening and the average is in the high 96 range
I grew up knowing 98.6 to be the “normal” body temp.
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u/Such_Combination_889 8d ago
Must’ve spent too much time in Caelid.
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u/02grimreaper 8d ago
Thank you! First thing I thought: is this a dark souls enemy I don’t remember?
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u/alphabytes 8d ago
Eli5 whats stopping it from infecting Humans....
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u/Godkun007 8d ago
It literally has nothing to gain from it. These fungi are designed to basically grow, infect, move to a new location, plant itself, die, and then start again.
They aren't intelligent beings with master plans. Their goal is just to continue the cycle of their lives. They have no reason to mutate to infect humans as there really wouldn't be much of an advantage.
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u/manthighs84 8d ago
ELI5
thing developed with its hosts by a loooong loooong fucking time
it doesnt work on us because we arent its host nor have we grew side to side with it by millions of years.
think how some virus and bacteria are compatible between man and dog but others not, the more complicated an organism like taht (parasites come in many kingdoms) the harder it is too mutate, and jumping hosts as different as man to ant would take a lot of mutation
you can still get fungus in your lungs and die, or have it grown on you just not the take over kind
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u/DustyBirdman 8d ago
As shitty as COVID is, I'm glad the world got rona instead of the human version of this.
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