Greek or Hellenic (Modern Greek: ελληνικά [eliniˈka], elliniká, "Greek", ελληνική γλώσσα [eliniˈci ˈɣlosa], ellinikí glóssa, "Greek language") is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to the southern Balkans, the Aegean Islands, western Asia Minor, parts of northern and Eastern Anatolia and the South Caucasus, southern Italy, Albania and Cyprus. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history; other systems, such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary, were used previously. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic and many other writing systems.
The Greek language holds an important place in the histories of Europe, the more loosely defined Western world, and Christianity; the canon of ancient Greek literature includes works of monumental importance and influence for the future Western canon such as the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey. Greek was also the language in which many of the foundational texts of Western philosophy, such as the Platonic dialogues and the works of Aristotle, were composed; the New Testament of the Christian Bible was written in Koiné Greek. Together with the Latin texts and traditions of the Roman world, the study of the Greek texts and society of antiquity constitutes the discipline of Classics.
Eris (minor-planet designation 136199 Eris) is the most massive and second-largest dwarf planet known in the Solar System. It is also the ninth-most-massive known body directly orbiting the Sun, and the largest known body in the Solar System not visited by a spacecraft. It is measured to be 2,326 ± 12 kilometers (1,445.3 ± 7.5 mi) in diameter. Eris is 27% more massive than dwarf planet Pluto, though Pluto is slightly larger by volume. Eris's mass is about 0.27% of the Earth's mass.
Eris was discovered in January 2005 by a Palomar Observatory–based team led by Mike Brown, and its identity was verified later that year. It is a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) and a member of a high-eccentricity population known as the scattered disk. It has one known moon, Dysnomia. As of 2014, its distance from the Sun is 96.4 astronomical units (1.442×1010 km; 8.96×109 mi), roughly three times that of Pluto. With the exception of some comets, Eris and Dysnomia are currently the second-most-distant known natural objects in the Solar System (following the November 2015 discovery of V774104 at 103 AU).
The Dark Tower is a series of books written by American author Stephen King, which incorporates themes from multiple genres, including dark fantasy, science fantasy, horror, and Western. It describes a "gunslinger" and his quest toward a tower, the nature of which is both physical and metaphorical. King has described the series as his magnum opus. In addition to the eight novels of the series proper that comprise 4,250 pages, many of King's other books relate to the story, introducing concepts and characters that come into play as the series progresses. A series of prequel comics followed the completion of the novels.
The series was chiefly inspired by the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" by Robert Browning, whose full text was included in the final volume's appendix. In the preface to the revised 2003 edition of The Gunslinger, King also identifies The Lord of the Rings, Arthurian Legend, and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as inspirations. He identifies Clint Eastwood's "Man with No Name" character as one of the major inspirations for the protagonist, Roland Deschain. King's style of location names in the series, such as Mid-World, and his development of a unique language abstract to our own (High Speech), are also influenced by J. R. R. Tolkien's work.
Line by line the artifacts spilling across a western world awash in imagery and apathy entrenched...
we dine together in here on stark, immiserating axioms, make our beds, dig our graves...
bled from this cold irrationality onto the corpse of a world...