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duckirubb3r · 3 months ago

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To Be Hero X theory time

Disclaimer: I'm watching To Be Hero X in Japanese because it was the automatic option for the site I'm watching on. Because of this, anime-specific information will be using Japanese casting and English subtitles paired with the Japanese dubbing.

Okay so I never do this but I've become a deranged, obsessive fangirl who has been overanalysing everything for the past week and I have a major theory I need the world to hear before the second episode airs so it's apparent down the line that I'm either absolutely delusional, a giga genius, or some sort of mix of the two. There's only one episode so far and I want my 4D chess to pay off so I need as little canon evidence to go off of as possible to be more impressive.

I have more than one theory, but I'm going to focus on my biggest one. If you don't want to be spoiled or don't want to do a lot of reading, stop here. This post will be long.

Without further ado, my theory:

Ghostblade is the original Nice. The very first one to ever exist.

We know from episode 1 that anyone can replace a hero so long as people believe in them. Because no one was aware of Nice's suicide, everyone believed that Lin Ling, with his hair styled and painted white, was the real Nice. Thus, he became the real Nice. His hair became naturally white, his eyes turned blue, and his voice adjusted to sound like the former Nice's. Knowing this, it makes sense that even the Nice who killed himself probably wasn't the first Nice. Possibly not even the second or the third or even the tenth. There's a chance that a lot of former-Nices have existed.

After watching episode 1, I was desperate for more content which led me to this Tumblr post with character sheets for the top 10 heroes. When looking through each profile, I noticed something that felt way too strange to be just a coincidence: 4/10 of them, Nice included, have white hair, and all of those white-haired characters are 180cm tall. There's no way that's just a coincidence, right? So I ended up thinking about it more and more. I watched all of the character concept and character story movies (which I will henceforth refer to as CC and CS respectively) to look for more information and, before I knew it, I became a crazy theorist. My theories center around the white-haired heroes, but almost all of what I've thought of so far is exclusively about Nice and Ghostblade.

I saw the following promotional image that pictures the ten heroes focused on during the series.

Aside from the white hair and heights, I took particular notice of how Nice and Ghostblade look awfully similar in this image. This was when things really spiraled out of control for me.

Like dude, come on. Their hairstyle in particular is practically the same. It even parts on the same side.

Ghostblade's Character Concept and Character Story Movies

So I watched every character's CCs and CSs, but I really watched Ghostblades after coming up with this theory—and when I say I watched them, I mean I studied them. I analysed every frame I could, over and over. In doing so, I either became completely delusional or I found some very compelling evidence to support my theory that Ghostblade is the original Nice. I'm not sure how best to explain everything, so I'm just going to run through the videos themselves and do my best.

At the beginning of Ghostblade's CS, it shows him as a child—twelve years old, to be precise—in a dreary room with a mysterious man preparing to perform a surgical procedure on him. We're shown various screens with medical information on them. The text on these screens read:

“The cerebrum is not only the center of senses and voluntary movements, but also the center of mental activities such as memory and judgement. The cerebrum consists of two cerebral hemispheres connected by the corpus collosum, and the connection by the corpus collosum plays an important role in the signal transmission and interaction between the two cerebral hemispheres."

and

"The parietal lobe is located between the central sulcus and parieto-occipital sulcus, above the outer fissure, and contains the motor center that issues motor commands to the [...] somatosensory cortex [...] which are involved in processing [...] sensations such as touch, pressure, and pain, and are responsible for the sensory [...]"

All other text is unfortunately either unimportant or too blurry to read.

Using the text from these images, we can essentially determine that the surgeon was operating on twelve-year-old Ghostblade in an attempt to alter his voluntary movements, memory, judgement, sensations such as touch, pressure, and pain, and probably a lot more we aren't able to see.

Following this, we have a scene of Ghostblade standing in front of a mirror in what appears to be a restroom with smiley faces painted on the stall doors behind him. He takes a knife to the mirror and carves the Chinese character for “smile” before inspecting his teeth, leading us to believe the surgeon operated on them as well as his brain. But his teeth are perfect. Nothing is wrong with them. This means that the surgeon was probably correcting a flaw so that Ghostblade would have a better smile, hence the encouragement to smile with smiley faces painted on the walls.

So it seems to be the case that, whoever this surgeon is or whoever he's working for—whoever ordered these procedures to be conducted on twelve-year-old Ghostblade—was trying to make him a perfect person who's always shining a charming smile. Doesn't that sound familiar?

OH YEAH. IT'S HIM. "Mr. Perfect" a.k.a. Nice.

So, if Ghostblade's upbringing was an effort to turn him into the OG Nice, what other evidence is there for this? What are his parallels to Nice's character? How would Ghostblade fit into the Nice backstory? Don't worry, I've got you covered. Let's switch over to Ghostblade's CC for a bit. It's considerably shorter, but contains valuable insights.

It starts with Ghostblade in some sort of open structure where a field of what looks to be daisies is blossoming and moonlight is spilling through. There's a bit of action, but the sequence of scenes that follow paint a grim picture. First, Ghostblade raises a hand. which transitions into the hand of a man (presumably him) and a woman in wedding attire with the groom slipping a ring onto the bride's finger.

Afterward, Ghostblade is looking up at the moon as its light engulfs him and it enters what appears to be a sequence of memories and daydreams where he's holding out his hand as the scenery changes. It cycles from the current moment

to the image of a girl's hand in his,

rain collecting on his palm,

his bloodied hand in the room of a child,

and his dirty/scratched up hand clenching into a fist above rubble where a single flower grows.

After the sequence, it returns to the flower field where Ghostblade is reaching out to the moon as what appears to be blood splatters begin to obscure the image.

That's basically it in terms of the visuals for his CC. The only thing left to mention is his theme song, because the lyrics are very notably about love which seems bizarre for a character who appears so dark, mysterious, and badass. The lyrics (chopped for the CC) are as follows:

And even if I have to start again It's all because of you If you don't know it by now My love for you will grow Know that this is true

So, what sort of story does his CC seem to tell? I think a good place to start is the flower field. The flowers appear to be daisies. If we assume they were deliberately selected, then if we look at flower language, in most cultures daisies apparently represent innocence, purity, loyal love, cheerfulness, childbirth, and new beginnings. Which lines up a lot with what I've observed so far! Ghostblade wears prayer beads around his wrist, so I'm assuming he's probably a religious man. That could easily align with ideals of purity and innocence. Loyal love/loyalty and love could obviously refer to a lover. Cheerfulness ties back to all the smiley faces and encouragement to smile. Childbirth is rather straightforward and will be relevant in a moment, and new beginnings... we'll come back to that in a bit, but for now, the lyric "and even if I have to start again" sort of speaks for itself.

To me, it seems to be a story about about a future Ghostblade could have had. The girl's hand in his was a lover he dreamed of marrying. The child's bedroom was one he hoped to one day have a child of his own occupy. The rain and the blood and the rubble were a memory, not a dream. His dreams died with his lover.

But who was his lover?

Well, he appears to have a fixation with the moon. When he's staring at the moon, the lyric that plays is "my love for you will grow" so is it possible that the moon might symbolise something? Yeah, sure. I can already think of at least one character who loves a moon—Nice lmao.

Does this mean that Moon died? Yeah. I mean, she died in episode 1 too and we know there's been at least two Nices now—Lin Ling and the Nice before him. There have probably been more Moons too! Whether the Moon I reckon Ghostblade loved in my theory was the OG Moon or not, I'm not sure... but probably? Either way, that detail isn't very important.

So! If we suppose that Ghostblade's CC is about him losing his lover, Moon, and, in turn, the future he dreamed of with her, then how does that tie back in to his CS? Let's pick up where we left off.

After the scene of child-Ghostblade checking his teeth in the mirror, there are various visuals of people smiling and more smiley faces. We're met again with Ghostblade in front of the same mirror he carved on as a child, albeit as an adult now. Looking into the mirror, Ghostblade puts on his signature metallic mask and a frowning face flashes on the screen, contrasting the smile that was so prevalent in his childhood. We then see a sequence of a slaughterhouse. Inside the slaughterhouse, there's a close-up of Ghostblade's eye as he looks at slaughtered animals, followed by a shot of what appears to be a difficult to distinguish image of a cow(?) giving birth. After that, it switches to Ghostblade fighting people in suits rather than your typical villain dressed as uniquely as the heroes are.

A birthing cow seems rather out of place, but we've already encountered the theme of birth. Previously, I mentioned that daisies can represent childbirth. Additionally, Ghostblade appeared to dream of a future where he'd have a child with his lover. This is also where I'd like to come back to the idea of new beginnings. Once again, the lyric that plays during this slaughterhouse/birthing cow/beginning of the fight scene is "and even if I have to start again." From this, it seems as though the birthing cow symbolises a rebirth of sorts when he engages in the slaughter of his enemies, comparing them to animals. This rebirth is also implied by the shot of him putting on his metal mask in front of the mirror with the sad face showing up after. It was likely the first time he donned the mask, as well as the moment he threw away his identity as Nice and was reborn as Ghostblade.

It transitions from the fighting to a scene where Ghostblade is standing by the ocean in civilian clothes without a mask. There are various things littered and washed up on the shore, such as empty soda cans, a shoe, a cigarette, a keyring, and a still-breathing fish. The items left abandoned in the sand, specifically the keyring, could symbolise him discarding things from his life as Nice, and the beached fish—the fish out of water—could represent how he's gone from spending his entire life up to that point playing the role of someone he was forced to be and now being out of his depths as he tries to become someone else, whether it's the real him or not, and start again from scratch.

There's another short fight scene where Ghostblade is curiously wearing sunglasses, a plain cloth face mask, and a normal jacket instead of his hero outfit and metal mask.

It's possible that, in this particular scene, the concept of "Ghostblade" didn't exist yet and this was the OG Nice disguising himself to commit these killings. If people recognised him as Nice doing something like this, his Trust Value would go down and he'd lose power. His reputation would be shattered. But who is he killing, anyway? Who are these people in suits who don't look anything like the villains that show up in the other CCs and CSs, aside from perhaps X's? Well, maybe they're the ones behind the death of his lover, the OG Moon. But what group of shady, well-dressed individuals would want to kill Moon, a hero? Well, how about Spotlight Organisation, the group that, in episode 1, was responsible for attacking Nice/Lin Ling (and Moon because she was there too...)? That checks out, surely.

Finally, at the end of Ghostblade's CS, we see him by the ocean again. A stuffed rabbit is caught in the tide and washes up to him. Maybe it's another one of the things he discarded from his life as Nice. But he reaches down to grab it. Before he can get ahold of it, it's pulled further away again. He begins walking into the water to chase after the rabbit.

Why is this significant? Why is he chasing the stuffed rabbit into the ocean? Well, there's a Chinese folklore story about a rabbit on the moon. Known as the Jade Rabbit, it lives with the moon goddess, Chang-e, and creates elixirs for immortality. During his miserable life being experimented on and forced to smile and be perfect, the only thing that allowed him to keep pushing on was Moon. The only thing that gave him life, just like the Jade Rabbit, was Moon. Perhaps the stuffed rabbit represents Moon, how she was swept away from him, and how he's still chasing after her.

Aw. How sad.

Okay, time for some nitty gritty details! In episode 1, after Nice killed himself and Lin Ling became the new Nice, Lin Ling was the one everyone was seeing and therefore interpreting as being Nice. Because of that, the former Nice was no longer "Nice"—Lin Ling was. Thus, Lin Ling's appearance started to change, physically turning him into the new Nice. Using this same logic, we can reason that it probably works the other way around too! The former Nice probably would have had his appearance start to revert to what he looked like before, had he not died, because he was no longer the person everyone thought was Nice.

We can apply this same sort of logic to Ghostblade with his transition from being Nice to being Ghostblade. We know that Ghostblade already had white hair as a kid so it would make sense for his hair colour and style to stay relatively the same when reverting from being Nice and becoming what is now Ghostblade. After all, if he was the OG Nice, then "Nice"'s appearance probably would have stemmed from his. Nice and Ghostblade have different eye colours and voices, though. This is a little harder to explain away, but eye colour is a feature that's harder to notice without close scrutiny. Even still, both Nice and Ghostblade have light coloured eyes and it's plausible that his Trust Value affected his eye colour either gradually or before anyone actually noticed, because being packaged and advertised as "the perfect hero" immediately evokes a certain image from people. His voice could have potentially undergone a similar sort of process, but we also know that the experiments on Ghostblade started when he was twelve years old. If he became a hero while he was still young, it's plausible that his voice hadn't properly matured yet by the time he publicly became Nice so it was higher and had already made an impression upon his public debut. After abandoning his identity as Nice, someone else probably took over and replaced him. When the replacement became known as the new Nice, it's possible that Ghostblade's eye colour and his voice reverted, but his hair colour never had to change to begin with. Because of him no longer being Nice and his features changing back to what they used to be, he could now be seen as a different person, therefore opening the door for him to become a different hero altogether—Ghostblade.

So, how delusional am I on a scale from 1-10? Did I cook or did this shit come out burned to a crisp? I can't wait for this theory to get ripped apart effortlessly despite all the hours of intense pondering I've spent on it. It's gonna hurt if not one single element of this was even remotely close to being right. If it's wrong? I'll probably just turn it into a fanfiction lmao.

Edit: I forgot to add this, but on his character sheet linked to at the start of this horrendously long post, Ghostblades interests and skills include homemaking and cooking!! Bro was already training to be a housewife, I'm telling you.

#to be hero x #to be hero x spoilers #tbhx #tbhx spoilers #to be hero x nice #to be hero x ghostblade #tbhx nice #tbhx ghostblade #tbhx theories #to be hero x theories

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beardedmrbean · 1 year ago

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July 2 (UPI) -- The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will fund a program to help Panama remove illegal migrants from within its borders, the Biden administration announced Monday.

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The Biden administration also has created sanctions and worked with other countries this year in attempts to tackle irregular migration patterns that can affect the United States, particularly at the southern border.

In May, Blinken announced $578 million in humanitarian, development and economic assistance for various countries in the Western Hemisphere. He unveiled the funds in Guatemala, where he had led a delegation to a ministerial meeting of the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, a multi-country agreement aimed at combating migration and forced displacement.

Nicaragua also was the target of May sanctions from the United States. The Biden administration said Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, were profiteering off the plight of "irregular migrants" seeking passage to the United States.

In February, the United States expanded visa restrictions to transportation operators accused of offering services that facilitate irregular migration. The State Department said the new policy would target owners, executives and senior officials of "charter flight, ground and maritime transportation companies providing transportation services designed for use primarily by persons intending to migrate irregularly to the United States."

#nunyas news #they'll have to start further north then I guess

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linsnleddisplay · 6 days ago

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worldcup066 · 2 months ago

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supernumerary-ersatz-kingfisher · 2 months ago

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“Just through here,” Bethany said over her shoulder. Eric and Vera both noticed the fact that almost all the offices and lecture rooms the three had passed by were totally disused, and they would find that this was completely by design. A few moments later, Bethany had stopped them by a door crudely labeled “NCCRU OFFICE – BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.” This was written in sharpie on taped-up printer paper, crooked, next to a narrow glazed window, above which door was mounted a red light bearing the legend “ON AIR.” The light was currently off.

“Here it is,” and Bethany knocked three times.

A moment later the door was opened by a taller man in his sixties wearing, unbelievably, brown slacks and tweed. Jesus Christ, Vera thought, just how I expected.

“Bethany!” Holding the door so that the interior would not be viewed easily, perhaps of habit, he shook her hand, which seemed an unlikely reaction from a stuffy professional upon meeting someone like Beth, and her equally unlikely smile in response denoted their rapport. Eric’s skepticism of the excursion was partially lightened at the sight of a grown man who clearly took Beth’s ideas seriously.

“And… Eric, and Vera, yes? I am glad to meet you both. Come in, come in.”

They all did so, and the man closed and clicked locked the door behind them. What they saw in this room was a raised lecture stage in front of a long projector scrim, with four plush armchairs, each with a small table and apparatus which suggested dental equipment, tubes and cables and stainless steel. The floor was sloped, making the ceiling closer to the floor towards their end of the room, and Vera could imagine walking down an open mouth to get to the stage. Before this stage was a scene which could feasibly be described as a makeshift mission control used by an underground terrorist cell or pariah state competing with the world powers in the space race. A series of old blocky computers and monitors situated on desks and squat filing cabinets, racks of digital hardware and strange readouts and rounded analog screens. Vera recognized an oscilloscope dancing silently above a stationary geiger counter, and a stock-ticker scrolled through various numbers and acronyms, but all further screens and dials were lost on her. Along the far wall on the right leaned rows of all the theater chairs unscrewed from the carpet to allow room for this half-moon setup, leaving three rows to the rear for an audience. To the left of the stage there stood a number of tall tanks of compressed air. Scientific and sorcerous charts and diagrams cluttered the walls, humanities competing with STEM for real estate. Four students sat in swiveling chairs at their computers, amidst the piled messes of books and papers which such an environment must undoubtedly generate spontaneously, and they turned placidly to greet their guests.

The man turned back from the door to the two stunned and one relaxed newcomer, and said, “Thank you for joining us. I’m Professor Andriesson, and these are four of my finest students,” and gesturing roundly, indicated from right to left, “Maria, Agnes, Deshaun, and Pete.” Each name warranted a similarly demure raised palm and smile from its bearer. It was spooky.

“Now, I’m not sure how much Bethany filled you in, but allow me to first explain what we’ll be doing here today. Please, sit.” He gestured to the empty chairs, and led them to what had become the front row, just a few feet from the working setup where the four students sat. The lines of three and four faced one another, as Andriesson took his place at the inner center of the computer hemisphere, standing with a lean against the table behind him and arms crossed. His faced remained warm and he allowed a beat before speaking.

“Which of you seated here has ever heard of a field of study called hypnoeconomics?”

The four students on his side knew this address was not meant for them, and looked expectantly along with Andriesson at their guests. Vera noticed uneasily that Bethany was giving the same look to her and Eric. “No,” she said, feeling dumb, and shot a look towards Eric, who was only slumped back in his chair, as if he was already an hour into this lecture.

But Andriesson’s knowing smile was not touched by disappointment. “No. That’s because it is a body of work which is not from this world. It is relevant and of interest to our own field of study, yes, but our group is the only one of its kind. That is, we are the only ones who have studied the literature, we and our predecessors, because our transcriptions are the only places on this planet, in this whole universe, where it could possibly be found. It was not written by anyone in history, the academics who devoted their lives to its study were never born.”

Eric chimed in, “So, it’s fake? Like, fictional?”

Andriesson’s eybrows went up in good humor. “No, no, it’s not fake, we have Xafa’s Economy of the Unconscious right here,” he said, patting a filing cabinet. “Of course, ‘fictional’ is an interesting word, but we can get into that later. But… How do we have this? Writings from another world? How does one come upon that which is sold in no bookstore and published on no site? It is a simple matter of, well, putting yourself out there.”

Vera supposed this speech had been refined over the course of many iterative presentations. Her current reception into the physical space representing one of her least favorite student groups (competing with the Conservative Students Union and an ostensibly defunct remnant of D.A.R.E boasting three members) remained uncomfortable despite its apparent openness. She tried to keep her mind from wandering, and glanced at Beth’s rapt expression, with lips slightly parted; she looked a second too long, which act was ultimately inconducive to the endeavor.

“… And we find that our access is, in fact, unhindered by such diversities of fictions, compounded by our memories and perceptions thereof. On the contrary, each instantiation of such making for an increased volume of passages, we end up expending fewer resources in opening the desired way. We find that a denser forest paradoxically decreases our chances of getting lost, so to speak, such that each excursion is always easier than the one preceding. Of course, one starts to notice diminishing returns after ten to twenty, due to the relative scale of…”

Her mind had wandered. Eric’s had missed the alarm entirely.

“Once we were able to reach the SCP mythos, which you may have heard of, their Pataphysics Department provided all the necessary information to fill in the holes of our research. We knew that it would, we five, because our work influences the subject matter and authorial intent -- across time! The stories could be written before any of us were even born, and yet, due to the simple fact that our method is the only known way to enter these stories, the information contained therein becomes relevant to our research; it builds upon our research!”

Therein. Thereon. Heretofore. Notwithstanding. Please fuck off.

Vera looked again to her two companions, and was astonished to find that Eric was actually showing a mounting interest. What of this irritating jargon could have hooked him? And, what’s more, as she looked, Eric actually spoke once again:

“So you’re saying the stories kind of get more detailed than they actually are because you’re in them?”

“Exactly right, thank you. Consider this: if you were in a story right now, and you came into this very interesting room, filled with strange machines and papers which draw your attention, which matter most to the feeling of the room, could you reasonably expect your author would take the time to describe our gray ceiling? Now, look up.”

She almost laughed now. What did this have to do with anything? ‘Look up?’ Now she was surely being had, and for a half moment expected some parlor trick involving lights darkening to change the ceiling from white to gray and then purple, ooooh and ahhh, culminating in a rainbow, whereupon they would all get up and hold hands singing Godspell as the tip hat was passed around signifying the end of the play, yes yes thank you very much…

She looked up, and was suddenly gripped by a vertiginous and horrifying feeling, whose source could not be readily identified; everything could have gone the same another time, and she would feel a perfectly ordinary and contented, even self-righteous, sense of nothing in particular. But this was an inexplicable feeling worse than any of the discoveries the three had made in the past few weeks, worse than the encounter with Edgar in that office, because this moment was sapped of all adrenaline and real toothiness that accompanied ordinary danger. She looked up and, as she began gripping the arms of her chair, teeth clenching so that they might all crack and bleed, the ceiling was gray.

Are you sure it was gray before?

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lilyjovialfaceeagle · 3 months ago

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The LED Large Screen World: A "Three Kingdoms" of Packaging Technologies – DIP, SMD, and COB

The LED Large Screen World: A "Three Kingdoms" of Packaging Technologies – DIP, SMD, and COB The modern LED large screen industry resembles a "Three Kingdoms" era, filled with intense competition. Three packaging technologies—DIP, SMD, and COB—stand as dominant players. COB (Chip On Board) packaging, having matured in LED display applications, particularly shines in outdoor small-pitch displays with its unique technical advantages. As the battle rages, which technology will ultimately emerge victorious?

What is COB Packaging? COB, short for "Chip On Board," is a novel packaging technology distinct from DIP and SMD. In the field of LED display technology, COB packaging involves: • Fixing LED bare die chips onto PCB pad positions using conductive or insulating adhesive. • Conducting wire bonding via ultrasonic welding to establish electrical connections. • Encapsulating the chips with epoxy resin to protect the LED light-emitting components.

Differences Between COB, DIP, and SMD Packaging • DIP (Dual In-line Pin Package): The earliest packaging method, where pre-fabricated LED lamp beads (with leads) are inserted into PCB holes and wave-soldered to create semi-outdoor or waterproof modules. • SMD (Surface Mounted Devices): Uses surface-mount technology, integrating RGB LED chips into a single package (e.g., "three-in-one" SMD beads) with leads soldered onto the PCB via reflow welding. The key distinction between COB and DIP/SMD lies in the elimination of the 支架 (lead frame): • DIP/SMD rely on lead frames with 4-6 pins, requiring reflow soldering of these pins onto the PCB. • COB omits the lead frame, skipping the reflow soldering step for the lamp bead surface, thus simplifying the process.

Advantages of COB Packaging 3.1 High Reliability A critical metric for reliability is the dead pixel rate: • National standard for LED displays: 0.03% (3 per 10,000 pixels). • COB achieves: <0.005% for full-color screens; <0.0008% for single/dual-color screens.

Reasons for high reliability: • Fewer control points in production: o SMD requires controlling 9 process points (5 for chip bonding, 4 for lead soldering). o COB only controls 5 points (chip bonding), reducing failure risks. For a P10 screen (1m²), COB eliminates 40,000 solder joints; for P1.0, it eliminates 4 million—a massive reduction in potential defects like cold soldering or bridging. • No reflow welding heat damage: o SMD’s 240°C reflow process risks breaking bonds or cracking chips due to thermal stress, issues that may emerge after deployment. COB avoids this step entirely. • Superior heat dissipation: o COB directly attaches chips to the PCB, offering a larger heat dissipation area and better thermal conductivity than lead frame-based designs. • Gold-immersed PCB: o COB uses gold-immersed PCBs, enhancing oxidation resistance in humid, salty outdoor environments compared to traditional tin-sprayed PCBs. • Seamless protection: o COB’s hemispherical epoxy encapsulation covers all components, leaving no exposed leads. SMD, with angular lead frames, struggles to protect millions of solder joints during outdoor waterproofing, leading to potential oxidation issues. 3.2 Cost Savings • Material costs: Eliminates lead frames and taping. • Process costs: Skips lead frame cutting, sorting, taping, and reflow welding. • Transport costs: Lighter modules (e.g., COB P3 modules are ~5-10kg/m² lighter than SMD) reduce logistics costs. • Simplified workflow: Integrates mid-downstream processes (from chip to display) within one factory, cutting packaging, logistics, and quality control costs. 3.3 Ease of Small-Pitch Implementation • Unrestricted by lead frame size, COB can design lamp beads as small as 1.2mm in diameter with 0.5mm spacing, enabling theoretical pitches down to P1.7. Future 倒装芯片 (flip-chip) tech may push below P1.0. 3.4 Lightweight, Wide Viewing Angle, and Flexibility • Lightweight: COB modules are 50% lighter than SMD counterparts. • 180° viewing angle: Hemispherical encapsulation eliminates light obstruction, versus SMD’s 125°-160° angle. • Bendable: No lead soldering allows flexible designs, unlike rigid SMD modules. 3.5 Durability and Maintenance • Impact/abrasion resistance: High-TG epoxy offers: o Compressive strength: 8.4kg/mm² o Shear strength: 4.2kg/mm² o A single P4 lamp bead can withstand 51.66kg pressure and 25.83kg lateral shear. • Easy cleaning: Smooth, mask-free surfaces allow direct water 冲洗 (washing) for outdoor use.

Conclusion COB packaging revolutionizes the industry by streamlining production, enabling smaller pitches, enhancing reliability, and reducing costs—advantages that grow more pronounced as pixel density increases. For outdoor small-pitch applications, once scaled, COB will dominate in both technology and price. SMD faces challenges in reliability, miniaturization, and cost, compounded by variability in downstream manufacturers’ capabilities (PCB quality, soldering precision, waterproofing, etc.) and market pressures for low prices. In contrast, COB, unburdened by lead frames, is poised for a bright future. As the industry evolves: "Six-legged (SMD) can’t outrun four-legged (DIP), and four-legged can’t outrun legless (COB)."

#led

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nursingwriter · 3 months ago

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¶ … Jefferson Township, a part of Morris Country, NJ has experienced a surging problem with a higher number of Lyme disease reported cases each year. Approximately 30,000 cases have been reported by the CDC. These growing number of cases has created worry as afflicted patients are looking to doctors and nurses to help with this potentially chronic and debilitating illness. With Lyme disease quickly becoming the most common vector-borne illness within the northern hemisphere, especially in towns like Jefferson, public health concerns have led to a desire to take steps to prevent and diagnose the disease. Lyme disease is transmitted to humans via a bite from an infected blacklegged tick. The infection is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi, which then infects the human. Symptoms range from fatigue, a characteristic rash named erythema migrans, fever, and headache (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2015). Early diagnosis of Lyme disease can lead to prompt treatment and recovery. Patients treated with suitable antibiotics during the early typically recover speedily and fully. However, a later diagnosis can mean a potential development of chronic Lyme disease. Although a controversial diagnosis, patients afflicted have reported continued symptoms that last for years. Improved awareness, additional research, better-quality diagnostics along with advances in therapeutics are immediately vital to thwarting a growing concern and potential epidemic like Lyme disease. "There is an important role for the nurse in raising awareness, giving advice on prevention and correct tick removal, and in recognizing signs of Lyme disease to assist access to prompt medical attention" (Pearson, 2014, p. 37). If awareness can be increased through research and knowing the early signs and symptoms of Lyme disease, more people may get the treatment they need to avoid the possibility of developing chronic Lyme disease. This is especially important because the part of the population in Jefferson most affected are families with school aged children and seniors. Children who are infected may not know their symptoms mean Lyme disease and seniors may be unaware due to other health problems. It is important to check the skin for any rashes and recognize any symptoms. Early detection will greatly benefit the community because it will allow faster and full recoveries. Prevention efforts are also important because of the nature of transmission. Wearing long pants and putting on bug repellant may keep the ticks from biting and prevent infection. If the problem is not resolved and preventative and awareness efforts are not met, the cases will continue to grow as well as the chronic Lyme disease diagnoses. Politics have already led the action of creating the chronic Lyme disease diagnosis. However, community values and priorities need to center on creating awareness and increase prevention efforts to help keep families safe. The community can expect public service announcements, possible town meetings, and a newsletter discussing ways to prevent Lyme disease infection and what to look out for in regards to signs and symptoms. The main goal is to raise awareness of Lyme disease and increase prevention efforts to minimize the amount of Lyme disease infections each year. The three objective goals are as follows: 1. Primary- Increase awareness of the early signs and symptoms of Lyme disease. Secondary- Run diagnostics and administer blood tests for earl detection. Tertiary- Follow up meeting to assess progress. 2. Primary- Promote prevention methods to thwart potential Lyme disease infections. Secondary- Organized prevention newsletters. Tertiary- Implementation of prevention models to improve high-quality care. 3. Primary- Provide workshops and meetings that teach both awareness and prevention strategies. Secondary- Screening for Lyme disease. Tertiary- Referral to appropriate health clinics. These strategies aim to actively involve the community. Through education, awareness is raised of the issue. Prevention then becomes an engaging action followed by continuing methods of intervention. Program Planning Since Jefferson Township has around three miles of densely wooded land area, housing lakes, sporting facilities, and park, activities such as boating, hiking, and cycling are a favorite among the townspeople. Observations of the areas produced concern. Many of the residents wear shorts, snickers/sandals, and short sleeve shirts. Due to the high grass, occupational exposure, unmaintained lawns, and living with pets, prevention methods must also include property management, and checking body after exposure. Diagnostics are also an important part of raising awareness and increasing recognition and diagnosis of Lyme disease. As one article explains, blood work can be a great way to detect Lyme disease. "Complete blood counts with differential and complete metabolic panel were normal. Enzyme-linked immunoassay (ELISA) and western blot IgG and IgM were ordered. Erythema migrans (EM) is a common finding for Lyme disease" (Davis & Papachrisanthou, 2015, p. 836). Evaluation Heathypeople.com reports immunization as an important aspect of disease prevention. "Other important defenses against infectious diseases include: 1. Proper use of vaccines 2. Antibiotics 3. Screening and testing guidelines 4. Scientific improvements in the diagnosis of infectious disease-related health concerns" (Healthypeople, 2016). There was a time back in the 1990's when Lyme vaccinations were offered. "In the 1990s, 2 vaccines against Lyme disease based on the OspA protein from the predominant Borrelia species showed to be safe and effective in clinical phase III studies. However, failed public acceptance led to the demise of these vaccines" (Kaaijk & Luytjes, 2015, p. 757). LYMErix was one of those vaccines that were released, but were later removed. It may come back as people increasingly start to realize the need for preventative measures to stop the progressive rate of Lyme disease infections. While there are no viable immunizations for Lyme disease, there are tried and true first signs of Lyme disease. "A first sign of Borrelia infection is a circular skin rash, erythema migrans, but it can develop to more serious manifestations affecting skin, nervous system, joints, and/or heart. Vaccination would be the most effective intervention for prevention" (Kaaijk & Luytjes, 2015, p. 757). This information along with new and emerging data must be included in newsletters and meetings for the town. Taking into account the diverse situations present in the town that would make it easy to be bit by a tick, property management should be added to the program planning. A simple petition to set a meeting to discuss property management should be added. By keeping lawns well maintained and keeping grasses short, ticks cannot gain easy access to a new host. The program can have a great impact on raising awareness and increase prevention methods. By simply adding long sleeve shirts and pants to their wardrobe while doing outdoor activities, the people of Jefferson Township can decrease their risk to Lyme disease exposure greatly. By screening the skin for any rashes or tick bites, early treatment can be gained and potential chronic Lyme disease averted. References Davis, R. & Papachrisanthou, M. (2015). Influencing Factors and Decision-making Regarding a Painful Summer Rash. The Journal For Nurse Practitioners, 11(8), 836-838. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nurpra.2015.04.015 Healthypeople,. (2016). Immunization and Infectious Diseases -- Healthy People 2020.Healthypeople.gov. Retrieved 28 June 2016, from https://www.healthypeople.gov/2020/topics-objectives/topic/immunization-and-infectious-diseases Kaaijk, P. & Luytjes, W. (2015). Vaccination against Lyme disease: Are we ready for it?. Human Vaccines & Immunotherapeutics, 12(3), 757-762. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21645515.2015.1087628 Pearson, S. (2014). Recognising and understanding Lyme disease. Nursing Standard, 29(1), 37-43. http://dx.doi.org/10.7748/ns.29.1.37.e9073 Stanhope, M. & Lancaster, J. (2015). Community/Public Health Nursing Online for Stanhope and Lancaster, Public Health Nursing (8th ed.). Mosby. Read the full article

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ledcoms · 4 months ago

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Immersive gaming project made with LED hemispherical screen

#youtube

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lighthousenewsnetwork · 4 months ago

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LOS ANGELES, CA— In a shocking revelation that has left both fans and forensic Instagram analysts baffled, former Danity Kane singer and professional manifestation coach Aubrey O’Day insists she has been living in Bali for years. However, a growing body of evidence—including GPS data, delivery app records, and a blurry reflection of an L.A. Arby’s in her sunglasses—suggests otherwise. O’Day, known for her highly curated online presence, has spent the past year posting a never-ending stream of breathtaking Bali sunsets, peaceful jungle retreats, and deep spiritual captions like “Rebirthing my soul under the moonlight of the Eastern Hemisphere 💫✨”. But experts claim these images are nothing more than an elaborate illusion crafted within the confines of a one-bedroom Glendale apartment. “She’s Not in Bali. She’s in Burbank.” According to digital forensic analyst Dr. Mitchell Langston, O’Day’s posts contain several telltale signs of Photoshop abuse. “We first became suspicious when she uploaded a photo of herself ‘meditating by the ocean’ that included an identical stock image of a wave used in a 2017 Microsoft PowerPoint template,” said Langston, who led the team investigating her alleged tropical relocation. “Then, we noticed that in her ‘Bali jungle retreat’ photos, some of the palm trees were slightly pixelated—almost as if they were being rendered by an outdated version of Adobe After Effects.” A deeper dive into her Instagram metadata showed geotags consistently pinging from within a five-mile radius of a Ralphs grocery store in Los Angeles. “Unless Bali recently added a ‘La Cienega Boulevard’ as a tourist attraction, something isn’t adding up,” Langston confirmed. Eyewitnesses corroborate these findings. “I saw her taking out her trash just last week,” said her neighbor, who wished to remain anonymous. “She was wearing a silk robe with ‘Bali’ written on the back, but I could hear her arguing with her Wi-Fi provider about why her bill was still registered to an L.A. address.” The Investigation: When Reality Meets ‘Reality’ O’Day’s carefully curated content began to unravel last week when she accidentally went live on Instagram before setting up her signature backdrop. For 12 gut-wrenching seconds, followers saw what appeared to be an unfinished studio apartment filled with half-eaten Postmates bags, an unassembled IKEA bookshelf, and a massive green screen precariously taped to the wall. “My third eye told me something was off,” said longtime fan Jessica Ramirez. “Her photos always looked… too perfect. Like, her selfies in Bali had suspiciously consistent lighting—almost as if they were taken in the same room, under the same ring light, at the same angle every time.” Further suspicions arose when fans discovered a minor but damning detail: in a now-deleted Instagram Story where O’Day filmed herself “walking through a sacred Balinese marketplace”, a Walgreens receipt for Dry Shampoo and Takis could be seen poking out of her purse. Aubrey O’Day Responds: “I Am Bali” Despite overwhelming evidence, O’Day remains adamant that her digital paradise is, in fact, reality. In a passionate response posted to her Instagram Story, the singer addressed her critics: "Y’all need to understand something. Bali isn’t just a place. Bali is a frequency. It’s a state of mind. I have transcended physical geography. My haters are simply stuck in the matrix.” O’Day then launched into a 12-minute lecture on “quantum shifting,” suggesting that she has mastered the ability to “exist in multiple dimensions simultaneously.” She claims her detractors simply lack the spiritual awareness to comprehend how she can be in both Glendale and Bali at the same time. “It’s 2025, babe. Ever heard of manifestation? If I believe I’m in Bali, then I’m in Bali. And honestly, I feel sorry for the people who don’t get that.” However, skeptics were quick to point out inconsistencies in her argument. “I just saw her at Target buying a scented candle,” said a bewildered onlooker.

“I mean, I support personal growth, but if she was really in Bali, why is she using a self-checkout in Sherman Oaks?” The Rise of Virtual Influencing Social media experts say O’Day’s tactics may not be an isolated case, but rather a growing trend among influencers desperate to maintain an exotic, jet-setting image without actually leaving their apartments. “There’s a new wave of ‘digital nomads’ who, rather than physically traveling, just buy green screens and superimpose themselves onto footage from National Geographic,” said social media strategist Carla Benson. “Why spend thousands of dollars flying to Thailand when you can just deepfake yourself onto a beach and call it a brand partnership?” O’Day, for her part, appears unfazed by the controversy. Reports suggest she is already planning her next move—an immersive “living in Santorini” series, which, according to leaked emails, will involve nothing more than changing her green screen from “Bali Sunset” to “Greek Islands” and adding a few blue filters. Meanwhile, fans remain divided. “Look, I get it, reality is subjective now,” said one commenter under O’Day’s latest Instagram post, where she appears to be sipping a piña colada on an undeniably computer-generated beach. “But can we at least get a little effort? At least pretend to struggle through TSA once?” Call to Action: Is Reality Even Real Anymore? As the debate rages on, one question remains: Do we even care if influencers are lying, or are we all just here for the vibes? Should Instagram require proof of travel before allowing influencers to post about their ��spiritual journeys,” or should we just accept that, in 2025, truth is whatever has the best lighting? One thing is certain—whether she’s in Bali, Burbank, or simply lost in the depths of her own delusions, Aubrey O’Day remains a master of reinvention. And if nothing else, we should all take a moment to appreciate the sheer dedication it takes to live an entirely fictional life without breaking character. And if you need her, she’ll be “off the grid” in Santorini—right after she finishes paying her Spectrum internet bill. https://lighthousenewsnetwork.com/aubrey-oday-swears-she-lives-in-bali-but-her-doordash-driver-says-otherwise/?feed_id=15387&_unique_id=67c0c504c008a

#Uncategorized #AubreyODay #AubreyODayBali #AubreyODaycontroversy #AubreyODayInstagram #AubreyODaynews

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the-firebird69 · 11 months ago

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ALERT NUCLEAR HAZARD AREAS POINTED OUT IN THIS POST. PLEASE ADHERE TO OUR SOP TO STAY WELL

There are responses to our son and daughter making comments about the Continental Caverns firing lasers down and things like that and they're going down there to look. We have a lot of people who want to build the cena car right now and they're trying.

- They sent people to try and get trump to do it we have done it. They're down there looking at them and is poking around at it and so why should I use this **** **** ****. And he's trying to get a reaction and he is because it's not yours he's saying things like who's is it then it's not yours. And Tony Abbott's having me say it tommy F led in stunt Tony Abbott. This is Tony Abbott I said I have no ideas coming up on the screen. Says it is and then he says I'm gonna build it just one and no. Does you want me to build it'll take my stuff so don't be paranoid brian's already taking it and everyone else including the idiot tommy F. Says ohh yeah that's why so he's going ahead and he started and Darth Maul is helping in its our version. Not Tommy F. He says he wants him to but he really means he doesn't. He's got the design changes and he's he has the original plans and he's gonna change the window and he's going ahead with it now and if he does other people might try his doing his crappy city. And this crappy city in the upper Midwest is probably as truly as a crappy one up there it's outside of Michigan no it's into it's outside of Detroit and you took over the Obama territory and he took it over from Garth to by attacking him as George Floyd. And he's using the stuff up there and he needs to what's that. Our son says wait till I'm bigger I don't give a **** off so much testosterone i'll rip your nuts off your **** body and stuff into your eyeball sockets with your eyeballs still in and he says that's nasty we'll see with your nuts right they're flipping them around go ahead and hit them let's take a look. Yeah that would be my son and daughter in law darth Maul and Darth Talon. He was tell him thank you and that's nice closeness. Yeah I guess possessed to be kind of hard to tell. This is how it goes this kids bother me he says don't do that good good sign we're going ahead with this and it's gonna work now and we see positive things in other projects too.

- They also have some other things happening we do. If several groups that are paying but they are a pain in their at war and they're having a war in the rings and at the bunkers and it's a pseudo empire and the maximum warlock topside and below and foreigners and the max. There's some developments in the war.

---= The Macproper are tired of people attacking them and I've called them a counter strike and they're going to try and hit places and we have to stop them. And they're going to come topside they said tonight they said if there's any interference you're going to chop people up and we'll attack them if they try and it's happened before and we're going to build up right now. We need every man woman and child we have to sign on right now that haven't if you haven't you're in jeopardy within months we are going to be activating tons of things you might get left behind.

---= The Mack Warlock are attacking the pseudo empire tonight twice as many as last night and it's been incrementally increasing. The percentage tonight in total for the Western Hemisphere would be about 0.5 percent. That is very huge those armies are gigantic and each micro complex. They have been repelling them it's not true they've been losing those who don't have as much tank or weaponry and money to get it. The weaker ones are getting pulled off and occasionally a strong one loses a smaller complex. There's been some big losses overseas about 30% of all their bunkers mostly Justin and Ken and he says ohh boy that's a bit by my own hamburger and he might be able to force us to go to that crappy place. And that's the case

---= Another issue along with the attacks they are going to try and defend their caches stashes and bunkers there is a huge number of people who are attacking and they are sending troops from the populace they are running low on people and it's the drumsters for real they don't have that many left they had about 50% last week and now it's like 40%. Had about three years ago four years ago. It's really five years ago. But at that point they had around 25% so half would be 13.5% no it's 12.5% granted I keep saying they have more and it's gross but that would be 7% and 3.5% and it's right on the money. But we said 50% yeah the island there down to 4% because it's 40% roughly 4.4% and 3.6%. And after tonight it will be greatly reduced is losing them in the bunker he's losing them defending it and he will be smaller thank heavens boy what an absolute disgusting criminal he is a repulsive loser and evil is how mean and a **** on the loose. These are **** man a gifted man on the loose. Stupid ****. You think he'll be down to lower than three percent tonight off island or worse. This leads us to what's going to happen shortly

---= And it's going on now that we have an increase in buildup in troops by Trump and BJA mostly BJA and he is going to start attacking the pseudo empire with a lot more power. And he said so but he's going to stick with the doubling which still will bring it up there tomorrow in the Eastern Hemisphere he will be doubling today and tomorrow night doubling tonight which are pretty big and three times on Saturday night by that time the percentage will be up to around one percent each hemisphere and it is doubling in each hemisphere independently. That is a pretty hefty number but it doesn't match what they did before but they are changing it up to try and figure out what armament they need. And not just toasting themselves. by that time Trump will be probably around 1.5% off island and his island will be most likely cut in half. And he will become a serious threat and most of the people will be in his crappy cities. You would be lucky to have 0.5 percent outside of them then the fighting begins against his cities between a lot of people but mostly B J A period

- Accompanying this change and yeah the bunkers that are associated with Trump which they're huge ones and they're being destroyed also the bunkers with the pseudo empire some of them are being blown up but mostly the ones with Trump they are blowing them and out of the regular bunkers about 1/3 of those that are defuncts were destroyed with the bomb and they were using conventional no they're using nuclear bombs they blow up underground mostly the radiation doesn't come out sometimes it does but mostly now and we detect and we plug and and more it's been contained for the most part. We do notify people if there is a plume and we send out emergency notices. Brings us to the stashes and caches there are five big ones overseas that he's going to blow possibly tonight no it would be tomorrow and we don't think he's gonna make it it's very deep and it's through rock it's taking forever but other people are at the rest of them there'll be three parties ready tomorrow night and they will blow it and they will be in the Sahara Desert. That wind is coming this way and it's gonna be treacherous for a lot of people. Also tomorrow night after tomorrow is when Sahara will occur there will be four in the Western Hemisphere that are large that will be blown the very large will be further into the week Thursday Friday but tomorrow night those for three are in Costa Rica and two surrounding countries so one in each and the 4th is southern Mexico which is not the big one and it is large it's very it's pretty vague it's a deep hole it's around 20 miles wide by 600 miles deep they find out they have to blow it and they're going to that will go this way as well. And it will bring radiation here both of them one will be tomorrow and tomorrow night but the radiation will be here from the Sahara it takes several days no it's a missed number the winds going very fast up there and probably be here Thursday morning late and the one that will go off tomorrow is not far away will be here at probably the same time maybe earlier so Thursday is the day. We're sending out alerts and we're putting this notice up now.

Thor Freya

Olympus

Zues Hera

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accomnews · 1 year ago

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RACV Royal Pines Resort unveils Southern Hemisphere's largest hotel LED screen

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novankenn · 2 years ago

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"Jaune Gets A Gun AU - Day 3" Colonial Marines - Various...

Inspired by @howlingday's RU-JA-GUN-CON

The girls were still feeling a little off, like they had forgotten something big. Something related to the goofy knight that had captured all their hearts. But for the life of them all they couldn't put their finger on it, plus there was a sudden distrustful jealousy of Cheerleaders that they couldn't explain. So they just chose to go along with Jaune's suggestion to get some lunch.

As they were moving past the various booths on their way to the Food Court, they passed a very militaristic booth. It instantly reminded Ruby of the Mobile Infantry Recruiting Booth from Day One of the convention. She shivered, knowing that through her inaction she had allowed Jaune to enlist.

????: Jaune? Jaune is that you?

Jaune: Huh? Did someone call my name? That voice. It couldn't be?

????: It is.

Jaune: (Turns to his right) Aunt Ripley? When did you get back?

The girls all turned to their right, following Jaune's lead.

Ripley: Recently, and my, my you have gotten so BIG since the last time I saw you! Come give your Auntie a hug!

The girls watched as Jaune hugged the older woman, a bright smile on his face. When they ended the embrace, Jaune stepped back to stand with the girls.

Ripley: Now, who are these young ladies?

Jaune: Some friends from Beacon. Ruby Rose, team leader of team RWBY.

Ruby: Hi.

Jaune: Pyrrha Nikos, my partner and temamate on JNPR.

Pyrrha: Hello.

Jaune: This is Emerald Sustrai, she's from Haven and a member of team CMEN.

Emerald nods.

Jaune: and a pair of old friends from Ansel. You should remember Tiny Tina.

Ripley: I do. Good to see you again, Tina, and if my memory serves me correctly, you should be Jinx.

Jinx/Tiny Tina: Ms Ripley.

Ripley: So what brings you to this event, Jaune?

Jaune: My friends have talked me into getting a ranged option to round out my arsenal. Right now I'm only using Crocea Mors, so they think I should look at getting a gun.

Ripley: Not a bad idea. So, have you thought about what you want to get?

Jaune: A few people, I know, suggest a shotgun, but I'm still open to other ideas.

Ripley: Well, maybe I can help you. Come with me.

Ripley led the sextet towards the booth she had been at. As they closed the distance, they saw two armoured men, standing behind the display counter.

Jaune: They look a little serious.

Ripley: Hicks and Hudson are good guys, and don't let their appearances fool you (whispers to Jaune) They're big softies.

The girls spread out to look at the display case as Jaune was introduced to his Aunt Ripley's companions.

Ruby: They do have a pretty good selection.

Pyrrha: They all look pretty sturdy and robust.

Tiny Tina: What's this one? Here at the end.

Hudson: That's a M134 Motion Tracker.

Jinx: Motion tracker?

Hudson: Provides a 180 degree sensing hemisphere in the direction the operator is facing, that indicates the presence of anything moving, with distance from the operator. Great for watching for unseen or hidden threats.

Ruby: Is that a M41A with under barrel U1 grenade launcher?

Hicks: (Moving from Ripley and Jaune as they continue to talk.) You have a good eye. I have a feeling you know the specs too.

Pyrrha: She does. What about that big one? Looks like a machine gun.

Hudson: The M56 Smartgun.

Tiny Tina: Smartgun? How is it smart?

Hicks: Mounted on a self stabilizing arm that auto-tracks targets with an infrared target tracking system.

Jinx: So it would be good for someone with, like, NO firearms experience?

Hudson: It would. Takes the guess work out of hitting a target.

Tiny Tina: And this one here, next to the rifle?

Hicks: M240 Incinerator Unit. (Noticing the looks of the girls) It's a flamethrower.

Ruby/Pyrrha: Nope. Too brutal.

Hudson: When you're taking on Xenos... anything goes girlies.

Tiny Tina/Jinx: Xenos?

Hicks: Screen on the side of the booth, next to the armour display.

Girls: What the hell are those?

Hicks: Xenomorphs, or Aliens. Steel like exoskeletons and molecular acid for blood.

The girls all grew wide-eyed. Those things made the grimm look like stuffed animals. Ruby and Pyrrha grew even more concerned, knowing that the last time Jaune visited a booth about a military style unit, he ended up enlisting.

Jaune: So, what do you think? That shotgun looks promising.

Hicks: Solid and true. War Era M37 pump, modified with a short barrel, capable of slam-firing.

Jaune: The pistol looks nice too, but I think I'd go with the shotgun.

Hicks: It's my personal favourite. Like to keep it nearby for ... "close encounters"

Ripley: So, see anything that tickles your fancy, Jaune?

Jaune: I think I'll get the shotgun.

Hudson: Okay, just some paperwork to do and...

Pyrrha/Ruby: NO! (Each girl taking a side and hooking Jaune under his arm pits, and before Jaune could struggle, Tiny Tina and Jinx moved in and lifted him by his legs.)

Hicks/Hudson: (Shouting as they watched a potential customer being hauled off) What are you doing?

Ripley: Put him DOWN NOW!

Hudson: I don't get it? It's only forms to get the proper licences. That's an over reaction, if I ever saw one.

Emerald: I'm sorry, but Jaune already enlisted with the Mobile Infantry. Thank you for your time.

Ripley: HE WHAT NOW?!? JAUNE GET YOUR ASS BACK HERE! YOUR MOTHER IS SO GOING TO HEAR ABOUT THIS YOUNG MAN!

Jaune: (in the distance) I'm sorry?

Hicks: United Federation, those blood suckers always looking for fresh meat for the grinder.

Hudson: Game Over, man. Game Over.

Ripley: (Whipping about to face the two marines) Get hold of Gorman. Tell him personal favour. Find a way to get Jaune out of the that enlistment!

(So I'm giving up on the Bolding of all the speakers. If this you find it is better with the bolding, DM or comment, and I'll edit this, and continue the practice in further posts. Hope you enjoyed.)

#jaune gets a gun au #rwby #aliens #colonial marines #jaune arc #ruby rose #pyrrha nikos #emerald sustrai #tiny tina #jinx #lancaster #arkos #topaz #timebomb #ballistarc #ellen ripley #cpl dwayne hicks #pvt william hudson

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lazenby · 3 years ago

Note

I have a pet octopus named Blinky. Am I fooling myself when I think she is looking at me in the same way I look at her?

A neurosurgeon named Henry Marsh was once operating on a patient’s brain. He looked down a microscope and through a hole in the person’s skull. The patient was conscious and talked to his surgeon because the operation was conducted under local anesthetic. This is often the case for fiddlier brain surgeries. Patients are asked to speak or even play a musical instrument so damage or improvement to these functions during the surgery is easily seen. The patient was watching what Marsh saw via a small television. The surgeon moved one of his instruments to point at a patch of brain on the patient’s left hemisphere. Marsh said, “This is the part of your brain which is talking to me at the moment.” The patient fell silent as he looked at his own brain. Finally, from the other side of the ether screen the surgeon heard the patient say, “It’s crazy.”

The question of what consciousness is like poses all the difficulties of describing the deeply familiar. It has this in common with the taste of milk. What is the best way into this vast topic? If you believe the Universe is a circle whose center is the mind of its percipient then we can safely start anywhere and may as well begin with hands.

The signs one can make with the fingers are quite interesting. These gestures, like many authorless things in the commons of expression, have a buoyancy in them. This carries them away from the moment of their use, up into the symbolic. In this way the peace sign, the middle finger or the thumbs up remain comprehensible even if the hands bearing them are removed from the anti-war protest, the argument, or the moment of encouragement.

It was exactly this buoyancy that led the 10th century citizens of Pistoia in Northern Italy to carve two disembodied marble hands, each giving the fig. This is a very old gesture of insolence that represents the female genitals, where the thumb plays the part of clitoris (make a fist and slip your thumb between the index and middle fingers.) The marble hands were raised to the top of the tallest tower at Carmignano castle and aimed at Florence (the hereditary enemy). These hands remained the symbol of Pistoia’s independence for hundreds of years after. When Florence eventually conquered Pistoia in 1228 the first term of their peace was the tower’s demolition.

But even in this example—where a gesture has been so abstracted from particular hands on a particular person as to be severed, set in stone and elevated to something like a political identity—there is one aspect that can’t rise above and out of the moment: the pointing. The offensive hands were pointed at Florence. In doing this the entire city of Pistoia formed itself into a single person whose pair of hands expressed that civic person’s focused indignation.

The fig, like the finger, the thumbs up or the peace sign, can become an entity unto itself. The peace sign can do its work indifferently and doesn’t care if it’s in a text message, on John Lennon’s arm at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, or produced ironically by soldiers in a candid photo. In their indifference these gestures have a great deal in common with words. Strings of words can express intense betrayal or commitment, the feeling of hope or its escape through our fingers, the way we want the check split. But words themselves, string withdrawn, are so indifferent to us and the moments of our lives that when it comes to assembling definitive lists we find their initial letter the most appropriate way of sorting them.

But pointing is different. You can imagine a pickled lexicon of hands, hands severed in the moment of relating optimism or indignation—hands preserved in salt, to be dusted off when we next needed to express those feelings. Obviously this is more Genghis Khan than Noah Webster, but imagine the store room where these hands are kept. The thumbs up now seems ghoulish, the peace sign bitterly ironic and the middle finger entirely appropriate. These gestures are indifferent to their location and readily appear to mean something in any context. But what does the pointing hand express? What is a pointing hand when we cut the invisible nerve connecting the tip of its index finger to a desired object? The image of 9/11 that most haunts me was taken by the photojournalist Todd Maisel. It is of a severed hand he found in the street, pointing at him as it lay next to a single segment of Hershey bar. Like an empty theater, there is something mysterious about a hand that points to nothing.

Pointing, like every gesture, is an instantaneous sculpture the mind makes of its present state. This is necessary because each person’s mind is secluded by an absolute privacy. Our minds, such as we ourselves know them, can only be Morsed out to others through representations like gestures, kisses, silence, and speech. The temptation to examine the physical analogies the mind makes of itself in order to see what can never be seen of a person—their mind as they experience it—has proven irresistible.

A German psychologist called Franz Brentano seized on this in the 1870’s. He proposed that the essential difference between a mind and everything other kind of thing in the Universe was that minds could point. This has come to be called intentionality. Brentano put it like this:

Every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself, although they do not do so in the same way. In presentation, something is presented, in judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on. This [...] is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.

In other words, the contents of a mind are woven so tightly into the activity of a mind as to make it extremely difficult to talk about one without the other. Attempting to clip away one’s loving and the person to whom it refers—hoping to leave visible the intentionality that mediated the connection—would produce something approximately as grotesque, wistful, and mysteriously empty as the severed hand that points at nothing. Saying the mind points and calling this a characteristic activity of all minds is one thing, but the analogy yields a strange and frightening result when it is forced to describe a mind bleached of its contents. That is, when it is forced to describe consciousness itself.

You might say—very reasonably—that a mind never exists separate of the content of which it is conscious. If we excuse the edge cases of Buddhist nirvana and cogito ergo sum then this is probably true. Unfortunately, it is the quest for exactly this strange and frightening result that has driven the biological study of consciousness. You can get an idea of where things have been heading by looking at a recent study of cuttlefish camouflage.

Biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt realized something about the way these animals disguise themselves. It seemed to open a window into the neural pathways whereby the cuttlefish convert what they see into what best prevents them from being seen. Cuttlefish camouflage, along with that of octopuses, is by a very long way the most sophisticated found anywhere in the animal kingdom. Cuttlefish skin contains several million sacs of pigment, each of which can be individually stretched or contracted by muscle cells. This display organ is under the direct control of the brain and can completely alter the animal’s appearance in only a few tenths of a second. The crude analogy for us would be voluntary control of gooseflesh, whereby we could spell out words in any font we liked or for that matter depict memories by selectively erecting the hairs on our body.

Now, if you have a black box like the cuttlefish brain, whose secrets and techniques you would badly like to understand, there is an obvious strategy: control what the cuttlefish sees and carefully watch its reaction. If the unknown means by which the cuttlefish decides on a camouflage can be trapped between something you cause and an effect you record, it ought to be possible to infer a great deal about how its brain works.

The Frankfurt researchers accomplished this man-in-the-middle technique essentially by forcing cuttlefish to swim across a Kindle that displayed known patterns while recording from above the camouflage decisions these provoked. Their setup allowed each sac (also called a chromatophore) to be numbered and its dilations or contractions tracked individually over time. The research is still in an early phase but the goal is very clear: extract the method by which the cuttlefish brain has solved the problem of recognizing its environment and mimicking it.

Cuttlefish are able to camouflage themselves virtually from the moment they hatch. This implies two facts. First, that the method is in-born and genetically heritable and second, that because the method is genetically encoded it must be a relatively simple solution. This simplicity is tantalizing. It requires powerful computers, our most advanced artificial intelligences and hundreds of thousands of attempts even to begin to reproduce what an animal the size of a hen’s egg can do in a tenth of a second. All the operations that go into producing an effective camouflage—analyzing textures, finding edges, and displaying the average of what surrounds you—turn out to be extremely difficult problems for us. Problems to which our only answer at present is brute, computational force.

Whether or not this research will harvest a more efficient solution from the brains of cuttlefish remains to be seen, but the principle is as old as modern science: a method must be extracted from the place in which it operates, extracted and put to work for the relief of man’s estate. That's been the stated purpose of science since Francis Bacon first proposed the formulation in 1605.

Sadly, it is not difficult to say which men and whose estate will benefit from this relief.

Economic forces are aligning that give this research and others like it a depressing and sinister aura. Right now the second most profitable division of IBM is its “cognitive solutions unit.” This is a consultancy that helps other businesses identify inefficiencies (i.e., humans) that can be eliminated by automation. Something like 40% of all jobs presently occupied by people are expected to disappear in the next 15 years as machine learning becomes more adept at shuffling paperwork. Businesses that employ thousands of people in administrative departments are expecting automation to reduce these white collar salary burdens (i.e., humans) to 1% of their present level.

The software agents that will make possible these efficiencies of automation are not intelligent in any sense of the word; each agent will be a method for performing an arbitrary task that becomes less clumsy the more iterations of the task it performs. The millions of iterations these programs must run to achieve anything like proficiency at their assigned task makes these methods immensely cumbersome and very difficult to debug when they go wrong. Anyone who has spent time trying to make a machine learning agent work as well as the person whose capacities it is meant to imitate will instantly perceive the benefit of research that cops a solution from biology, where the millions of optimizing iterations have already taken place via natural selection.

Even with the primitive methods we now possess there will be only one historical analogy for this revolution in efficiency and that is the first Industrial Revolution. In the early 19th century the mechanization of cotton cloth production was so fabulously efficient, compared to traditional methods, that the profit margins of newly industrialized weavers were not 10% or even 20% per year but something closer to 10,000%. Needless to say, when efficiencies and profit assume these revolutionary magnitudes human misery follows it like a shadow. Given the economic forces that presently rule the world our complete failure to understand consciousness either analogically or literally is probably more of a blessing than a hindrance to humanity’s estate.

These economic forces require people for its extension and development, but they are no more essentially human than tapeworms are food. This state of affairs—beholdenness to parasitic forces that determine our history and perhaps large parts of our selves—makes the immunity of consciousness to description all the more painful, and our facilitation of these economic forces all the more complicit. Surely, we think, if we could reach up and grasp the awareness that can never be seen, because it is the seat of seeing, the loneliness that breeds so readily within it would not be as painful. The loneliness that is the mysterious accelerant of profit in a society of atomized consumers.

The privacy of minds from each other, and the loneliness it engenders, is one of the great immaterial conditions of human life. Most people are compulsively expressive in reaction against it. The human mind is almost defined by its expressiveness, and by its incredible surplus of this ability compared to the tasks survival demands. So much so that there is a serious account of language as an evolutionary force in itself. On this interpretation, humanity has become steadily less aggressive over time because language allows less belligerent humans to conspire the premeditated murder of the most tyrannical. Over thousands of generations, it is thought, language allowed evolution to select for highly cooperative and verbal, if ultimately cold-blooded, individuals.

Language often seems to beget its own surplus. I think of John Milton—blind, irritable and old—bleating, “I want to be milked!” as one of his daughters sharpened a quill to take the morning’s poetry dictation. Or even better, the nameless master of Englishing one’s feelings who first said of a talkative person, “I couldn’t get a word in edge-wise.” This phrase is at least two hundred years old. Its metaphor of turning a word to present the thin edge to a conversation is thoroughly dead. Nobody who uses it expects to be appreciated as witty. Yet we still recognize the frustrated state of mind that coined the phrase, and this keeps the dead metaphor in currency.

Recognition is an even better example of the mind’s reaction against its own privacy. Perhaps even more than they are made to speak our minds seem built to recognize one another. This power to recognize entities like ourselves runs through seeing a face in something like (ツ), past our revulsion at corpses and too-realistic robots, all the way to one of the most remarkable recognitions of mind it is possible to have.

A marine biologist called Jean Boal studies cephalopods at a university in Pennsylvania. She told a story to an Australian philosopher named Peter Godfrey-Smith, who relates it in his book Other Minds,

Octopuses love to eat crabs, but in the lab they are often fed on thawed-out frozen shrimp or squid. It takes octopuses a while to get used to these second-rate foods, but eventually they do. One day Boal was walking down a row of tanks, feeding each octopus a piece of thawed squid as she passed. On reaching the end of the row, she walked back the way she’d come. The octopus in the first tank, though, seemed to be waiting for her. It had not eaten its squid, but instead was holding it conspicuously. As Boal stood there, the octopus made its way slowly across the tank toward the outflow pipe, watching her all the way. When it reached the outflow pipe, still watching her, it dumped the scrap of squid down the drain.

The story is striking not because of how human (and even petty) the octopus seems but because of how anyone hearing it feels helpless not to recognize a mind at work.

Obviously this anecdote is not scientific research, nor objective proof of a mind—or even of intelligence. The inherent privacy of minds makes their rigorous study a frustrating game of inference, and this only becomes truer the less related we are to the animal under investigation. Even now, though we can look into the human brain with the full battery of medical imaging technology, there is no objective difference between a mind that is dreaming and one that isn’t. Scientists who study dreams have used the same method for decades to determine if one is taking place: they wake their subject up and ask if they were dreaming. In rather the same way intelligence is flexible and therefore difficult to define, minds are private and so, hard to prove.

It is very strange that octopuses, cuttlefish and one or two types of squid are even suspected by scientists—or felt by us—to have anything like a mind. Our last common ancestor with our closest living relative (the chimpanzee) lived around six million years ago. This proximity goes a long way to explaining the similarity of chimps to ourselves. We both use tools, lead highly social lives and have extraordinarily long infancies during which our large brains slowly mature. There is no direct evidence our common ancestor shared these properties but given the fact that humans and chimps both inherited these sophisticated traits, it seems very likely that it did.

The last common ancestor of humans and cephalopods lived 600,000,000 years ago. It is quite certain this ancestor shared very few traits either with ourselves or with cephalopods. This animal was probably a flattened worm, only a few millimeters long and very nearly brainless. Humans and cephalopods inherited virtually nothing from this ancestor more sophisticated than basic molecular biology (very basic: cephalopod blood is blue and relies on copper to bind oxygen rather than the iron in our hemoglobin.)

Despite this, each has evolved a complex brain and an intelligence that, in the case of octopuses, is so devious as to pose real difficulty to their successful captivity by planet Earth’s dominant species. Godfrey-Smith writes,

Captive octopuses often try to escape, and when they do, they seem unerringly able to pick the one moment you aren’t watching them. If you have an octopus in a bucket of water, for example, it will often look content enough in there, but if your attention strays for a second, when you look back there will be an octopus quietly crawling across the floor.

If your soft body offers a meal that’s nearly pure protein it’s very advantageous to know when you’re being watched. However, octopuses are often stunningly incautious around humans. Aristotle noted their blitheness, saying they “will approach a man’s hand if it is lowered in the water.” This is not an exaggeration, especially if a wild octopus is used to your presence. Godfrey-Smith describes a dive in Australia when “an octopus grabbed [a researcher’s] hand and walked off with him in tow. [The researcher] followed, as if he were being led across the sea floor by a very small eight-legged child. The tour went on for ten minutes, and ended at the octopus’s den.”

Lab research has confirmed that the giant Pacific octopus can recognize individual humans by sight, even when the octopuses had never seen these humans dressed in other than identical uniforms. Something similar seems to be true of other cephalopods. A Canadian researcher described “one cuttlefish who reliably squirted streams of water at all new visitors to [her] lab, and not at people who were often around.” This remarkable talent for recognition can actually invalidate behavioral research, which depends on the assumption that the subject is reacting to the experiment you’ve designed and not to the person conducting it. Perhaps tellingly, the Frankfurt camouflage investigators do not mention controlling for this recognition.

Many researchers of cephalopods report a sense of presence with these animals; and these are people for whom it can be quite inconvenient to have very strong, subjective impressions of experimental subjects. Nevertheless, some are moved to assign remarkable degrees of awareness. Godfrey-Smith quotes one researcher as saying,

When you work with fish, they have no idea they are in a tank, somewhere unnatural. With octopuses it is totally different. They know that they are inside this special place, and you are outside it. All their behaviors are affected by their awareness of captivity.

To be the subject of attentive perception is a very particular feeling. For humans, this kind of attention—whether it emanates from a pet dog, your mother, or a cop—is very difficult to distinguish from the feeling of being recognized as more than a physical phenomenon: recognized as the kind of thing that deserves, respectively, the extraordinarily subjective attentions of loyalty, love, or suspicion. And a reasonable working definition of a mind is that it is the kind of thing which merits, and can appreciate, attentions like these.

Hence, it becomes harmful and unilluminating to imagine a mind by itself—let alone to search after an isolable method by which the solitary mind generates awareness. Seen in this way, minds exist to recognize one another and minds exist through these recognitions. That is, the thing that makes a mind more interesting than any other feature of the brain is that its center of gravity does not lie in the skull.

Almost everyone understands this on an intuitive level. That’s why, for example, the lonely and selfish agent on which most economic models of human action depend requires several years of high-level academic conditioning to take seriously. These economic agents, like their counterparts in machine learning experiments, have a peculiar and obvious mindlessness. Each of these models of mental activity is not only empty of meaning but haunted by a ghost of intention. This is the same ghost and the same uncanniness present in the severed hand that points at nothing.

This bears repeating. Our species’ keenest minds created a model of human activity to describe our behavior and this model is a less convincing portrayal of mental life than the one we cannot help but see in this planet’s smartest mollusk. Think of the cosmic rebuke to our own powers of self-awareness this implies.

If I try to imagine my own thoughts while being led, hand in tentacle, on a leisurely tour of the seabed around an octopus’ home those thoughts would be from a poem. 350 years ago a poet called Andrew Marvell came up with a famous analogy about the nature of minds. He said the mind was “that ocean where each kind / does straight its own resemblance find.”

Whether cephalopods have a mind in this or any other sense is probably something that must be passed over in silence. However, the fact that certain of them are able to provoke the feeling of recognition on anything like our own terms is an extremely important result. The last time we had anything neurological in common with these animals was more than half a billion years ago, when each of us was a worm and quite unprepared to recognize anything. There is no shared inheritance of mind, as we have with fellow primates, priming us for this recognition. Yet in a few cephalopods Nature has conspired to produce something that grips with the special grasp one mind has for another.

If it is true that you can’t mow the lawn with a blade of grass, and the human mind truly is beyond its own comprehension, moments of recognition like these may be as close as we ever get to ourselves.

#txt

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starlightandfairies · 4 years ago

Text

Summer Christmas ~Dylan O'Brien~

Description: Y/N and Dylan go to Australia for Christmas. Y/N had lived in Australia growing up and wanted to show Dylan what Christmas was like for her growing up instead of the cold and snow.

Warnings: Fluff, female pronouns, a swear or two, just for those who don't know as Australia is in the Southern Hemisphere it's summer during December. Mentions of drinking alcohol, eating meat.

Key: Y/N = Your name, Hot Chips = fries, F/N = Father's name

Word count: 2737

First Person's POV

Dylan and I had just spent a lot of time on multiple different planes. We were jet lagged and just wanting a proper bed. We pretty much dragged each other to the hotel we were staying at and once we got to the bedroom we threw the bags down, locked the door and flopped on the bed. I missed Australia, but I also loved living with Dylan in America. I woke up the next morning to Dylan gently rocking me awake, I groaned and looked up at him tiredly. He gave a happy smile, I sat up and hugged him tightly. Feeling all giddy inside once Dylan hugged me back, we had been dating for almost three years, this year for Christmas I wanted to Show Dylan what I did for Christmas for most of my life.

I gasped as I saw a tiny, cheap Christmas tree in the hotel room, with some decorations on it and a Santa Christmas topper. I stared at it in awe, then looked at Dylan happily.

"I made the Santa, I remember you telling me how your family put a Santa on the Christmas tree and how you didn't get to keep it. So I decided to make one for you."

"I love you so much." I whispered, placing a kiss on his cheek, he smiled back at me and caressed my cheek before carrying me out of the bed and taking me to the small table that was in the room.

"I also got us room service.” I felt butterflies in my stomach, Dylan doesn’t even know his way around here and already did all of this. As we ate, we discussed what we’d be doing in minimal detail, I wanted it all to be a surprise for Dylan when we did each activity. I placed the dishes outside the door, looking to see a couple of other rooms to have done the same and then went back inside.

I walked over to Dylan, smiling as he brought me to sit on his knee. I wrapped my arms over his shoulder and blushed as he kissed my lips.

“So, what’s planned for today?” He questioned, keeping his hands wrapped around my waist. I thought about what I wanted to do with him and let my eyes lit up.

“We’re gonna watch a movie at the cinema and then go to the arcade.” I informed, he nodded and kissed my lips one more time. I hopped off and got dressed, grabbed my wallet. I looked at Dylan, smiling as he placed his baseball cap on.

“Ready?” I questioned, he nodded and followed me out to the lobby. We got a taxi to an arcade I had been to many times before. Once we got there, I paid with Australian dollars I got from a currency exchange place back in America. I got us the card that allowed us to use all the games and led Dylan to my favourite game. It was an arcade game where you sit in this little booth like thing and stimulate what happens on the screen and shoot whatever needed to be shot. It was Jurassic Park themed and gave the feeling of being in the movie. Sorta.

After we did a level, we decided to let some others have a go and Dylan dragged me to the dancing game. I huffed, knowing I had two left feet when it came to dancing and smiling sheepishly at Dylan. Halfway through, I couldn’t help but laugh as Dylan did his carefree dancing. We then went to do the basketball games, which I tended to be good at despite my horrible sport skills.

Dylan looked at me with a cheeky look on his face, scooted over to me while still being able to score a point in his own game and covered my eyes with his hand.

“Dylan!” I whined, wincing as I heard the fail sound from my machine. I stuck my tongue out at him once he removed his hand and continued to try and score points for myself. After we were both finished, I hit him across the shoulder and shook my head as he continued to flash his cheeky grin. We did a couple more games, like the Skei-ball and the ball toss game, while also doing another simulator game called the typhoon which made it seem like we were on a roller coaster or something.

After spending time at the arcade, we went to watch a movie at the cinema and then went back to the hotel room. We laid in bed, cuddling and talking about things we did growing during this time. Dylan currently had no movies or shows to watch and I was currently on a break from my job.

The next morning it was Christmas Eve, I took Dylan to the local beach and smiled at him cheekily.

“Now, I’m going to teach you the classic Australian rules, don’t touch a blue thing in the sand. More than likely it’s a blue bottle they suck and they are horrible. When in the water, never turn your back on the ocean, just a known fact. Always stay between the red and yellow flags. And keep the sunscreen up.” He chuckled at my little info guide, placed the towels on the sand and then placed then sat on his towel and started putting sunscreen on. I helped him put the sunscreen on his back, he smiled at me, then grabbed my arms and looked at me with a grin.

“So, what’s the slang for this?” He asked looking at my rash guard, I smiled at him and tilted my head to the side.

“A rashie.”

“And it saves you from putting sunscreen on your arms?” He asked looking at my long-sleeved rash guard/ rashie.

“Well, yes, but there are short-sleeved ones. But I prefer these ones honestly.” I grinned at him and pulled him off, kicked my shoes off and waited for him to do the same. He had the swimming trunks on that went just to his knees. I took his hand and ran into the water with him, going to where the water met my waist and was a little bit lower on Dylan due to him being taller than me.

I smiled as I jumped over a wave, feeling reminiscent as I leapt in the water, Dylan picked me up and fell into the water, letting me go as we came up for air, I fixed his crooked sunglasses and splashed water on him, laughing as he dove into a wave. We went further into the water, which caused me to need to hang onto Dylan for support. He kept an arm wrapped around me and dropped to his knees, taking me down with him and kissed my lips, then each cheek and then my forehead and once again my lips.

“So, you did this every Christmas Eve.”

“Yep. Family tradition, then tomorrow you get to meet my family over Christmas Day dinner.”

“Ooh, three years and I finally meet them. What embarrassing stories are they going to tell me?”

“A bunch.” He laughed at my statement, then picked me and swirled me around. Then once again dropped me in the water. After a little but of swimming and splashing each other with salt water, we grabbed our bags and went to a store that was nearby and grabbed a serving of hot chips. We placed our towels on the park bench that overlooked the ocean and ate the chips. I rested my head on his shoulder, smiling as he wrapped an arm around my waist and then placed a chip in his mouth.

After walking around for a little bit, we grabbed ice creams and continued to walk around hand in hand.

“You know, I’m surprised there’s been no fans wanting your autograph.” I stated, looking up at him and smiled as he kissed my cheek.

“They’re just too scared to approach me because I have the prettiest girl at my side.” I blushed at his comment, watching as he lifted his sunglasses up and winked at me.

We got a taxi home, did our normal routine and then watched a couple of movies. I guess we both had the same ideas because we woke up at different times in the night to put Christmas presents under our small Christmas tree. The next morning, we opened our presents, I got Dylan some Mets hats and shirts, some I managed to get signed. I also got him some books and boxsets of shows he likes as well as some photos of the two of us. Dylan got me some books, photos, fan merchandise from fandoms I like and also got me a locket that had our first photo together inside it.

“Merry Christmas, Dylan.” I whispered, kissing his lips, he smiled at me and whispered gently.

“Merry Christmas, Y/N” He kissed my lips, smiling into it and then pulled me up. He placed a Santa hand on my head, then placed one on his head. Dylan wore a white singlet with black shorts that got to his knees, I wore a white and blue dress which had a peasant top. It went down to my ankles and had slits that went just to my thighs.

We got to my parents home, I wore the necklace Dylan gave me and Dylan placed one of the shirts I got for him over his singlet but kept it unbuttoned. I was a little nervous for my parents to meet him, but I knew they’d love him. Dylan kissed my cheek, hanging his sunglasses on his singlet due to the fact he kept the Santa hat on just like I did.

“Y/N” My father exclaimed, I smiled and hugged him tightly, missing seeing him after all these years.

“Hey, dad.” Dad, looked at Dylan held out his hand and introduced himself.

“I’m F/N and you must be Dylan?”

"Yes, sir, it’s very nice to meet you.” Dylan introduced giving his hand a shake. Dad allowed the two of us in, I smiled at my cousins running around with toys they got for the holiday and walked into the backyard where mum was.

“Y/N!” She exclaimed, running over and gave me a hug, I hugged her back smiling happily as I hugged her.

“Oh I missed you so much! Is this the famous Dylan you’ve been telling me about?” I nodded, smiling as Dylan held his hand out for her.

“It’s nice to meet you.” My mum just hugged him and led the two of us to the cooler.

“Welcome to the family!” She exclaimed, I shook my head and smiled as Dylan kept an arm wrapped around me, mum handed me a vodka cruiser and showed Dylan inside the box. He grabbed a beer out and smiled at me as he opened the drinks and sipped on it. I dragged him down slightly so I could whisper into his ear.

“You sure you’re gonna be okay not knowing anyone?” He nodded, smiling and let me lead him around. Dad was cooking on the barbecue, making sausages and patties for burgers.

“Come on, I wanna hear embarrassing stories.” I giggled at what he said and took his hand, leading him back inside the house and up the stairs. I led him to my old room, showing him the insides of it.

“Wow. This my girlfriend’s room when she was a teenager. Where you angsty?” I scoffed, rolling my eyes playfully at his comment.

“Yes, just like any teenager I had a bunch of end of the world emotions.” He looked around the room, smiling at the items I left behind.

“Did you have like, dark makeup and a dark attitude?”

“No, I never wore makeup as a teen, unless it was for some event. Yes, I did have a dark attitude but then I started getting people I wanted to keep in my life and you were amongst them.” He smiled, hugging me tightly, being careful not to spill the drinks. We walked back downstairs, sat on the outdoor couches with plates in our hands.

“So, Dylan has Y/N told you about the time when she was about five and learning how to ride a bike at the age of five?” Dylan shook his head, looking at me curiously.

“As she was leaning to ride a bike, we were near a lake and she wasn’t too familiar with riding the bike. So there’s was a pathway that ended up breaking off into, you know a circle of path around the lake and she forgot to turn and rode straight into the lake.” Dylan looked me trying to suppress his laughter and then turned to my mum who decided to tell another embarrassing story.

“When Y/N was fifteen, we went to go on a holiday, we went to this resort that and one night we were walking around the busy, popular area and there was a fountain that had a statue next to it. So, we got her to sit on the edge of the fountain next to the statue and after we took the photo the statue moved. We knew it was a street artist but she didn’t so, the person scared the crap out of her and she fell into the water.”

Dylan looked at me with a questionable look, I wanted to defend myself, so I did.

“In my defence, I had just watched a horror movie, which you know I hate. So I was very jumpy and that person didn’t help. Which led me to falling into the water and being paranoid for the rest of the evening.” Dylan was taking a sip of his drink, laughed and ended up spitting the liquid into the glass and cover his mouth with the back of his hand and laughed.

Dylan and I got back to the apartment, showered and then laid in bed to watch ‘It’s a wonderful life.’ Both Dylan and I adored the movie, and it became our tradition every Christmas Day. I turned my head to the side, smiling as I saw Dylan staring at me lovingly, I smiled back at him and raised an eyebrow as he opened his mouth to speak.

“Any other embarrassing stories?”

“Oh, there’s a heap.”

“Well, one more.” He pleaded.

“When you and I first started dating, I really wanted to impress you and we both know I hadn’t been living in America for that long either and that I know shit about sport. I knew you like the Mets, so I went to this store that mainly had baseball stuff and asked the person that was working there about baseball and if they were a Mets fan. I ended up guessing the completely wrong stuff about baseball and how it works and ended up offending the person with my poor knowledge on baseball to the point where they gave me a gift card to the fundamentals of baseball class.”Dylan hugged me tightly, a huge smile on his lips and I held onto him feeling safe in his arms.

“Well, if it makes you feel any better, I wanted to impress you as well during that time and I knew that you loved the book series that you were reading at the time so I went to a library and saw a group of people reading the series. As I asked them about the author and the series. They gave me dirty looks, then whispered amongst each other before giving me a two hour speech about the series and then got me to recite it back, Then when I got confused with two characters and which one was which. So I ended up offending them all by saying that the most favourited character was the evil one and vice versa. They ended up chasing me around two blocks and then had me recite it again.” I giggled at him, smiling happily at him and pecked his lips.

“Well, at least we were both embarrassed to impress the other.”

“Shows that I fell in love with you early because you are just perfect” He whispered, leaning to his bedside table and held up some fake mistletoe, I giggled and leaned forward to kiss his lips. We both smiled into the kiss and ended up falling asleep in each other’s arms.

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vannahfanfics · 4 years ago

Text

Picture Perfect

Category: Romantic Fluff

Fandom: My Hero Academia

Characters: Sen Kaibara, Setsuna Tokage

Hello, everybody! I am super stoked to present my story for the @class-b-abuzz-bang! I had the pleasure of working again with my talented friend @danyartime, so be sure to check out their super beautiful and cute art for the story!

The smudge of ruby-red gradually came into focus as Sen twisted the dial on his camera, revealing a blooming rose nestled among the spiny branches of a rose bush. Its soft, silken petals glistened with dewdrops from the early morning rain. The little beads caught the sunlight to shine like crystal-clear gems on the red petals, their iridescent sheen glinting even through the lens.

Sen kept his hands steady as he fine-tuned the focus until he was satisfied; then, with a simple press, he clicked the shutter and captured the image.

He straightened up with a small sigh, letting the camera flop down against his chest while the thick leather strap around his neck kept it from falling. He tilted his head back to squint at the sun, which shone brightly in the azure sky amidst the white, cottony clouds. It was a lovely Saturday morning, still slightly cool with the lingering chill of the night. Sen was making his weekly rounds of the campus to practice his photography.

Sen had always liked cameras and had dabbled in photography in middle school. Once he arrived at U.A., he thought that homework and hero training would dominate much of his time. However, after Midnight had given them a lecture about the importance of maintaining a hobby to promote mental well-being, he’d picked up his camera again and taken to wandering the campus on the weekend. There were more things to capture than he’d anticipated, so he now had a large collection of candids taped to his dorm room wall and was adding more every week.

He picked up his camera to inspect the photograph of the rose, scrutinizing it for any imperfections. A smile slowly bloomed on his lips as he realized it was a quite pretty photograph indeed— definitely one he intended to print later. As he mulled about on the sidewalk, wondering where he should look next, he heard the glass doors of the dormitory open.

He glanced over his shoulder to see Setsuna trotting out onto the porch, and his heart thumped against his ribcage.

She didn’t notice him standing there at first, giving him an opportunity to unabashedly admire her. She walked out into the sunshine, closing her eyes and tipping back her head to let the warm rays fall upon her face and thread into her dark green-black hair. She wore a sleeveless white dress that hugged her figure and stopped a little above her knees. A golden belt looped around her waist, and shiny white boots enclosed her feet. A golden necklace with a lizard charm hung around her neck. Sen had always thought that Setsuna had impeccable fashion sense, in addition to being stunningly gorgeous. His fingers itched to hit the shutter and snap as many photographs of her as he could.

Of all the things he’d ever wished to immortalize in a picture, Setsuna Tokage was perhaps the greatest.

After soaking up the sun rays for several moments, Setsuna opened her eyes and finally noticed him standing in the garden in front of the dormitory. His body had grown slack with dreamly laxity while he’d gazed at her, but he tensed tight when a grin split her face. She cheerily called, “Morning, Sen!”

“Good morning, Setsuna,” he replied. She hopped down the steps and trotted toward him. He hoped the heat on his cheeks was from the intense spring sun and not a blush rising to the surface. She stopped in front of him and immediately looked down at his camera, and then her eyes widened in curiosity.

“Oh, are you out and about taking pictures? Do you have any good ones?”

Sen nodded and lifted the camera, turning it around so she could see the display screen on the back. She pressed up against his side to look over his shoulder, and he felt his face blaze with heat as her hair, still damp and smelling of her dewberry shampoo, brushed over his neck. He could hear her breathing in his ear; every inhale and exhale made him dizzier and dizzier. Somehow, he managed to retain enough control of his body to cycle through the photographs he’d taken that morning.

The first was of the sunrise. He’d climbed to the roof of the dormitory to catch the hemisphere of white emerging over the horizon, the blue curtain of night rising to reveal a flood of red-orange. It had been cloudy that morning, so the sunbeams had caught on the clouds to stretch in white lines across the sky. “Wow… That’s beautiful,” Setsuna praised.

“Yeah.” Except, he wasn’t looking at the photograph of the dawn.

The next photograph was of a squirrel sitting on the roots of the oak tree next to the dormitory. It rested on the gnarled chunk of root that rose from the loamy soil like a sea serpent. Its little paws clutched an acorn, holding it to its little snout while it scored its long front teeth across the surface to try to break through the hard shell. Its fluffy, long tail curled over its back like a plume of wispy brown-gray smoke. Setsuna giggled, “It’s so cute.”

“Yeah.” Except, he wasn’t looking at the photograph of the squirrel.

He showed her the photograph of the rose next. She inhaled sharply with awe, then leaned more over his shoulder to peer closer at the screen. His face darkened as more of her body pressed against him, but she was too enraptured by the beautiful bloom bursting in colorful pixels on the screen to notice. Her eyes sparkled as she murmured, “Amazing…”

“Yeah.” Except, he wasn’t looking at the photograph of the rose.

Sen lowered his camera back down when she pulled away, though he lamented the loss of her body heat along his side. She smiled radiantly at him. Sen felt his heart start playing his rib cage like a xylophone, and he lowered his face to fiddle with his camera so she couldn’t see the haze of red staining his cheeks.

“Wow, Sen! I never knew you were so talented!” she gushed. He mumbled some sort of gratuitous remark in response. “What are you going to take pictures of next?”

Sen felt a lump form instantly in his throat. He peered through his bangs at her, watching, measuring. He’d always wanted to photograph Setsuna, and here she was, so interested in his hobby. Would she agree to a small photoshoot? He didn’t want to bother her or creep her out, but… Holy cow, Sen had never seen someone that was more a work of art than her, and he was gripped with such an intense desire to see her through his photo lens that it was almost suffocating.

He swallowed several times, but that lump in his throat just bobbed in place. Somehow, he managed to force the words out around it: “I’d like to photograph you, Setsuna.”

Her eyes blew wide, two dark moons floating in a sea of white. She pointed at herself and squeaked out, “M-me?”

When he nodded, a bright flush of pink rushed into her cheeks, and a shy smile teased at her lips. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other while her eyes rolled up to the corners, unable to look Sen in the eye at the realization he wanted her to be his muse. He waited patiently for her to answer, despite his stomach twisting in his belly, until she uttered a meek, “O-Okay…”

Sen couldn’t help the giddy smile that tugged at his lips and the light that lit up his eyes.

“Okay,” he echoed, and the happiness that bled into his voice made Setsuna smile bashfully. He held out his hand for her, and when Setsuna coyly slipped her fingers into his, it felt like electric shocks rocketed up his nerves. He wanted to jump for joy, but he had to remain professional. He forced down his elation to focus on the task at hand— capturing Setsuna in all her goddess-like glory. Smiling softly, he tugged her down the sidewalk, walking backward while he led the bashful girl by the hand.

As he walked, he glanced around the garden to find some suitable settings. He couldn’t just photograph Setsuna in any old setting, no, no— it had to be something truly magnificent, fitting of his image of an angel fallen to earth. He thought of her standing on the porch, her head tipped back to soak up the warmth of the sun, and at the same time his eyes fell upon a patch of wild dandelions growing in a patch of empty green grass. Perfect.

“Here,” he said and pulled her off the sidewalk and into the grass. He treaded carefully, trying to disturb as few of the dandelions as he could. It wouldn’t be much of a backdrop if he kicked all their floaty little seeds to the wind before he could get started, now would it? Setsuna milled about next to him, her cheeks stained as pink as carnations, while Sen stared at the small patch of wildflowers and mumbled under his breath. A vision took shape in his mind, one that made him as floaty as the dandelion seeds.

He directed Setsuna to sit among the dandelions in the clearest patch they could find. She eased down into the dewy grass, tucking her legs against her side. Her right hand rested on her thigh, while the other pushed into the loamy dirt, supporting her weight. She tossed her tresses of dark green hair over her shoulder, and there was so much magic in that simple movement that Sen’s mind momentarily went black. He just gawked at her, wide-eyed, until Setsuna bashfully said, “Sen? Is this good?”

“O-oh,” he stammered, flushing. “Yeah, that’s good.” He crouched down a few feet away from her and picked up his camera, then peered through the lens. He tried to keep his hands from shaking— it would ruin his shot— but it was so hard with the way she smiled sweetly at him through the camera lens, her head tilted just so to give her a demure demeanor. Her eyes were lidded as she rested contentedly amongst the dandelions. Sen waited until the wind whistled across the grass, bobbing the dandelions and fluttering her hair, before clicking the shutter in quick succession.

While he lowered the camera to choose which of the set he believed to be the best, Setsuna turned to watch a few of the dandelion seeds float away on the breeze. As a serene smile graced her lips, Sen snuck a candid photo. Unfortunately, the click of the shutter betrayed him, and she rolled her head on her shoulders to smirk at him in amusement.

“I feel like a model,” she laughed. “I never thought I would be a part of a photoshoot.”

Sen blushed, using the bulk of his camera to hide his face.

“Well…” he mumbled, deleting the photos he didn’t intend to keep so he didn’t have to look directly at her. “Hopefully my photos live up to your expectations.”

“I know they will,” she hummed with so much conviction that it made Sen’s heart flutter. While waiting on him, she picked up one of the dandelions and gently blew on it. Sen scrambled to back out of his photos so he could snap a picture of her slightly parted lips blowing into the seeds, dislodging them into the breeze. They bobbed around her hair, some of them settling into the waves of dark green like little snowflakes. Suddenly, Setsuna laughed and flopped backward into the patch, slamming her arms down to send hundreds of the little seeds spiralling into the air.

Sen hopped to his feet, but he didn’t pick up his camera. He just stared in adoration at the beautiful sight before him. Setsuna’s hair spread around her head like a dark halo, threaded with grass blades and dandelion seeds. She gazed reverently at the seeds spinning above her body; with no wind to catch them, they slowly swirled down, down, down to settle on her form. Her eyes drifted to Sen, who was gaping at her like she was the most sublime creature on earth. A tinge of pink appeared on her cheeks as she asked, “What? No more photos?”

He played with the thick black strap of his camera as he stiffly said, “Some things a photo can’t even do justice.”

She tilted her head slightly at that, eyebrows creasing in just the barest hint of amusement. Sen took a deep breath, preparing himself for the crazy thing he was about to do; then, he pulled his camera off from around his neck and set it down amongst the grass. Setsuna just watched him as he walked to where she lay in the grass, her chest rising and falling with rapidly-quickening breaths and a knowing smile spreading over her lips.

“Is that so?” she breathed when he knelt down next to her, on her left side. Surrounded by the grasses, Sen could see the hidden rivers of emerald shining in her eyes and her hair. Even with the most expensive camera equipment, he could never capture those streams concealed within the dark of her hair and eyes; they were immortal only in Sen’s memory.

“Yeah,” he answered, his voice just as breathy. “A photo could never do you justice, Setsuna. Not in my eyes.”

A shy smile played over her mouth, and then she quickly swiped her tongue over her lips to wet them. This action did not go unnoticed by Sen; it made his heartbeat quicken and adrenaline surge through his veins. Setsuna’s hand snuck through the grass like a lithe snake, latching onto his. He didn’t resist as she guided him to crawl over her body, knees resting next to her hips, hands on either side of her head.

“Then why ask me to do a photoshoot for you?” she asked teasingly.

“It’s a good excuse to be able to look at you longer,” he answered matter-of-factly. Her face flushed red as her flirtatious taunt was turned so effortlessly back to her, and this made Sen’s mouth curl up into a smirk. “Besides, even if a picture can’t do you justice, I’d still like to have them. You’re beautiful, even through a camera lens.”

He brushed his fingers gently over the cascade of hair framing her face, teasing through the strands and dislodging the dandelion seeds. The way she was looking at him, the fire smoldering in the depths of her eyes, emboldened him. His fingers slowly shifted to skim over her cheek, feeling the heat that rose to the surface in response to his touch. He brushed down the curve of her jaw until he met her chin, and then he turned his hand to place his thumb just under her mouth, tugging down to part her lips ever-so-slightly.

��May I kiss you, Setsuna?”

“Please,” she whispered, literally agonized by the fact he wasn’t kissing her already. This made Sen chuckle, but he didn’t want to keep the lady waiting. He dropped down onto his elbows to bring his face centimeters away from hers. She craned her head slightly with a low, needy whine, bumping her nose softly against his with the motion. Sen chuckled again, then tilted his head so he could close the gap and slot his lips against hers.

Truth be told, Sen had thought about kissing Setsuna many times. Still, all his daydreams could never prepare him for how it really felt to have her lips melding with his. It felt like his heart exploded in his chest, filling him to the brim with a cloudy, floaty feeling from the crown of his head to the very tips of his toes. Sen pressed his body down against hers slightly, grounding himself because it really did feel like he was going to float away, just like those dandelion seeds.

Setsuna hummed against his lips as he moved his mouth over hers, kissing her with a growing hunger. She just felt so good, tasted so sweet, and that scent of her dewberry shampoo was flooding his nose again. He kissed her until his mind was growing fuzzy with oxygen deprivation instead, then pulled back with a deep intake of air. Setsuna’s eyes fluttered open to look at him reverently, like he’d just hung the moon in the sky for her. Damn it, Sen would if that’s what it took to see that look on her face every single day.

“You’re beautiful,” he whispered again. His voice cracked with the sheer amount of worship he put into the statement. Setsuna shyly bit down on her bottom lip, but the twinkle in her eyes intensified. Unable to help himself, he leaned down again to kiss her nose, each of her cheeks, and then her lips again. Setsuna giggled at the soft, feathery kisses brushing over her skin, and the sound was music to Sen’s ears.

“You’re not too bad yourself,” she joked cheekily. Sen rolled his eyes, but wasn’t exactly surprised at her impudence. Her overwhelming confidence was one of the many, many things he adored about her. He nosed along her jaw as he smiled softly down at her, making her squirm and giggle. She wound her arms around her neck, indicating that she had no care to go anywhere anytime soon. The wind rustled the grasses around them, dusting Sen in a few of the dandelion seeds.

No, a picture really couldn’t do her justice at all, Sen thought as he gazed down at Setsuna. She crossed her eyes as a dandelion seed drifted across her nose, then playfully blew it into Sen’s face. The little feathery fibers of the seed tickled his cheek as his lips teased up into a loving smile. A picture was worth a thousand words, many people said— but as they gazed into one another’s eyes, a million words passed between them that a picture couldn’t even hope to capture.

Enjoy this oneshot? Feel free to peruse my Table of Contents!

#sensetsu #setsusen #sen kaibara #kaibara sen #setsuna tokage #tokage setsuna #my hero academia #boku no hero academia #mha #bnha

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