#TRANSPOSE() Function

[aidenwaites]

I know how to play only the single most fucked up version of Dead Man's Hand

[supatroopa]

2 dnd campaign ideas on the wall, 2 dnd campaign ideas, plan one out (a bit), get a group starting, 3 dnd campaign ideas on the wall

[andorjimi]

Convert Vertical Data Into Horizontal Data in Excel

Learn how to convert vertical data into horizontal data in Excel with this step-by-step guide! #Excel #Spreadsheets

Introduction How do you convert vertical data into horizontal data in Excel? This was a question I was asked this week. A friend of mine was asked to convert an Excel spreadsheet that contained a list of classes and their students from one long column of text to rows of classes and their students. What is TRANSPOSE() TRANSPOSE() is a built-in function in Excel that converts a vertical range of…

[badboydevotee]

Love In Legato

Summary: As the season burns brighter, you find yourself pulled into a quiet unraveling—Jin’s walls cracking like glass under summer’s touch, a melody he’s never dared play written just for you. A letter sealed with music and silence may be all he has left to give.

The ocean breeze slips in through cracked windows, dancing through chiffon curtains and touching the ivory keys of a grand piano sitting untouched in his room—until today.

It had started with a letter.

A single envelope slipped beneath your door. You had thought it might be from a teacher—maybe Tohma, considering his habit of leaving you unexpected tasks. But the handwriting was too refined. The paper was too expensive. When you broke the wax seal, the scent of fresh-cut cedar and sea salt hit you like a memory.

“Come to the music room. 5 PM. Don’t be late. —J.K.”

No signature. Just initials, though there was no mistaking who it was from.

You groaned out loud. ���Not this again…”

Jin Kamurai had been a pain in your side ever since your first mission together—a disaster that ended with you soaked to the bone and him scoffing while effortlessly saving the day. He was everything you didn’t like: cocky, aloof, way too confident for his own good. And he called you “servant.” You made it a point to walk away every time.

But despite all of that, your heart never listened.

The moment you entered the music room, you regretted it.

Jin sat at the grand piano, head tilted slightly toward the light as he pressed the keys—soft, aching notes that wrapped around you like a second skin. His white suit shimmered faintly in the fading sun, and his silver-blue hair ruffled slightly with the breeze. His eyes—icy blue, unreadable—lifted to meet yours.

"You’re late."

You scowled. “Only by thirty seconds.”

"Thirty seconds longer than I had patience for.”

“Then why invite me?”

He stood, the piano's soft melody cutting off mid-chord. "Because," he said, voice low, “I’ve written something. For you. And since you’re not going to come willingly unless it sounds like a command, I had to make it one."

You blinked. "You wrote a piece?"

He stepped closer, closing the space between you. You noticed the gold chain around his neck glinting faintly as he handed you a folded sheet of music.

"No. A letter. But I don’t write letters the normal way."

You unfolded the sheet. No words. Just notes. A haunting melody in G minor, swelling and falling like ocean tides.

"You expect me to read music like a love letter?"

His expression didn’t waver. “Play it.”

When you sat at the piano and played the first few notes, a hush fell between you. The melody was tender—vulnerable in a way Jin never allowed himself to be. And as you played, you realized: this was his heart. Every harsh word, every arrogant smirk, every time he pushed you away—it was all here, transposed into the language of music.

By the time you reached the last chord, your hands trembled.

"You said you didn’t care," you whispered. "But this—"

"I never said that," he cut in. His voice had dropped, quieter now. "You just assumed I didn’t. Because I don’t say things with words like you want."

He knelt beside you, hand brushing yours on the keys.

"I’m not good at this," he murmured. "At… people. At feelings. But I’m trying. For you."

The next few weeks passed like a dream.

You never officially became "a thing," but it became obvious to everyone in Frostheim. Jin would “accidentally” show up in the hallway just as you were walking by. He’d “forget” to mention that the cafeteria had your favorite dessert until the last minute, then drag you there without waiting for a thank-you. His favorite insult now came with a smirk: “Stupid servant. Can’t function without me.”

You rolled your eyes every time. But you never walked away.

One afternoon, you found yourself on the beach outside—sand warm underfoot, the sky painted with lavender and pink hues. Jin was already there, sleeves rolled up, hair tousled from the breeze. In his hand: a bottle, sealed with ribbon and a wax stamp.

"A gift," he said, tossing it lightly to you.

You caught it, eyebrow raised. “What is this? A message in a bottle?”

"Open it."

Inside was another letter—this time in words.

You’re loud. You’re annoying. You’re too stubborn for your own good. And I don’t know when I started liking all of that. Stay with me. Even if I’m difficult. Especially if I’m difficult. I don’t care what you call me—just don’t walk away again. Yours, even if I won’t say it out loud. —Jin

Your chest ached.

He was standing there, waiting, not saying anything. You stepped closer, slipping the bottle into your bag.

"You still owe me a better nickname."

He blinked. “What?”

“If you ever call me ‘servant’ again, I’ll push you into the sea.”

A pause. Then—he laughed. Not a smirk, not a scoff, but a real laugh. His voice, deep and rich, rang out like the piano's final note.

“Fine. Then I’ll call you…”

He leaned closer, breath warm on your cheek.

“Mine.”

That night, back in Frostheim, you returned to the music room. Jin was already there, waiting with a second page of music.

He looked up, a ghost of a smile playing on his lips. "You coming in or what?"

You sat beside him at the piano. Together, you played. The room filled with your music—his rough, perfect chords and your gentle accompaniment blending together.

And when the stars lit the icy sky above, Jin reached over, hand resting on top of yours.

"You make summer feel… less unbearable."

You smiled softly. “You make it feel like a breeze I never want to lose.”

Title Legato - "smooth and connected." When notes are played legato, they flow into each other without breaks—gentle, emotional, and continuous. The title suggests a love that may not be loud or sudden, but instead flows quietly and deeply—like the subtle, growing affection between Jin and the reader. It reflects Jin’s tsundere nature: he doesn’t speak his feelings outright, but his emotions come through in soft, connected gestures—like music played legato. Jin expresses his feelings not in words, but through music. The "legato" represents how love forms gradually through shared moments, even if neither of them says it aloud.

Inspo song

Mad by Martin Garrix and Lauv this song's stuck in my head, I had to put it somewhere.

Ao3 vers. I keep saying love in gelato..

[jayrockin]

Sorry if this has been asked before, but what do the different sophonts call their parents? Like a centaur or bug ferret equivalent of mom/dad/etc?

Many things in thousands of different languages. I will explode and die if I have to make that many conlangs so I'm going to talk about English terms. There's gender neutral endearment terms for parents in English, which often originate from tailed spacer communities, like "per," "parry," and "sasa/zaza/xaxa." These sometimes get transposed onto aliens when referring to their familial relationships, since most Anglophones in RttS refer to aliens as non-gendered, as it's considered polite form. With avians dun and bright tend to get slapped on as a prefix to specify relationships, like brightparent and dunparent. With centaurs most humans would probably just refer to the parents by their clan roles. I.e. matriarch and entourage sire. But humans tend to be quicker to gender centaurs since their sexes function similarly to ours, so automatically gendering matriarchs as feminine isn't uncommon.

[kairiscorner]

˗ˏˋ ✮ kairi's AUtober !

double feature 4: college miguel o'hara, your genius tutor. (college!miguel o'hara x bimbo!reader)

"is it... 2?" "no." "um... 3?" "still no." "uh, um..." "if you have the value of f(x) as 5, just substitute the values." miguel directed you as he pointed to the algebraic expression before you right then and there. you scratched your head and tilted it to the side as you hummed in thought. "so like... how do i do that?" you asked him with a sing-songy voice and with a bright smile, making miguel groan and rub his eyes from underneath his glasses. he sighed and took the pencil and began scribbling down the solution step-by-step for you to understand. as he explained the rules of the distributive property of multiplication and transposing to you, all you could focus on was how high his cheek bones seemed.

"you're like... a pretty statue, miggy." you murmured, poking his cheek bone with the pad of your index finger. he furrowed his eyebrows at you and flinched. "can we please focus on the problem?" he asked you all irritated, but you could see his eyes softening a little from underneath his thick, knitted eyebrows. you giggled. "but it's been an hour, i can't function with all these functions in my face..." "and i can't function if you'll keep acting like a child." he snapped back at you, making you grumble. "miggy, please, no more math, it's mind-numbing!" he sighed as you clung on to his arm and shook at it, like a child begging for a toy they really wanted. "just one more problem, and we can do whatever you want." "you mean it?!" you perked up with the sweetest smile on your face, with miguel warming up a little at your adorable reaction. "y-yeah, yeah, i mean it." he reassured you as you sat up straight and looked at the next question he prepared for you.

"erm... can we have a simpler one...?" you asked miguel all softly as he pouted and furrowed his eyebrows again, but took in a deep breath and nodded. "fine, fine... baby steps, right, baby steps..." he repeated to himself as he whipped up some simpler questions for you. "if you need any help, i'm right here." he told you as he moved closer to you, anticipating for you to ask him a question any second now. "ah, i have something to ask." "yeah?" "if i get this right... can you go to the mall with me later to go shopping?" "shoppi—do i look like the type to enjoy doing that?" "well, you... do seem like the scary boyfriend type... i've always wanted to go to the mall with someone to scare the boys who keep looking at me away..." you said fidgeting with your fingers. miguel sighed again and looked at you, watching you quietly solve the problems with some pauses, but noticed you were on the right track. "...alright, fine. i'll... go shopping with you later."

you smiled and clapped your hands together. "oh, you're the best, miggy!" you exclaimed as miguel looked over at you and nodded, looking away from you as you grinned up at him. "i'm not that great... n-now back to the problems at hand." he reminded you as you got back to work, with miguel trying to shake the thoughts raging in his mind about how adorable you looked, being all enthusiastic about him doing the simplest things for you; and... it really made him wanna do more things for you, everything for you, actually. the spell you unknowingly cast upon him was working, he... oh, he really was beginning to fall—but he'd give it time, he wants you to get better at your academics before he gives his everything to you, wholeheartedly; but maybe he'll beat himself to being at your every beck and call and do everything in his power to make you the happiest lovable airhead in his life.

tags !! @miguelswifey04 @hearts4gabri @hisachuu @wreakingmarveloushavok @simsrandomstuff @luvstarrstruck @popeheywardssecretgf @meeom @arachnoia @melovetitties @fable-library @ophanimgold @smokeywhalee @capnshtfce @obi-mom-kenobi

[romanceyourdemons]

i deeply enjoyed the killing of a sacred deer (2017), a film that knows exactly what it is doing and has a very clear methodology for doing it. the film’s goal is to portray and defamiliarize the function of the hospital as a modern quasi-hospital, with surgeons as neo-gods. in soundtracking the film with grand scale catholic masses while having the characters perform with the short and stilted diction of an operating theater, shooting hospitals like cathedrals and transposing the imagery of iphigenia onto the setting of upper-upper-middle-class american suburbia, the film both achieves and affect of surrealism and fosters a deep tension; we know in our hearts that it is right for the surgeon to have utter control over the bodies of his patients and potential patients, for everyone involved in the hospital to bow and cater to him in case they need his power over life and death, but to see that power over life and death shifted to a non-surgeon and the whole structure of medical worship shift from its proper course to cater to this new neo-god sets the whole carnival into clear, tragic light. in this film, surgery is alluring and erotic not because of the flesh, but because of the power the surgeon is given over the flesh. in this film, the surgeon can do no wrong because he is the surgeon, and if he can do wrong then he must not be the surgeon after all. in this film, the power over life and death is a reward and a curse in a grand and precisely articulated thought experiment that i found extremely interesting and well done. i would consider the killing of a sacred deer (2017) to be a masterful film, and i would recommend it

[postsforposting]

getting the picture

When Wade first meets Vanessa, he asks, "What's a nice place like you doing in a girl like this?" It's a transposed cliche, but it's also a reference to a surrealist short film by the same name.

It's unclear if the titular "nice girl" is Algernon himself or if it refers to his wife; I think it's both. This feeds into the character gender fuckery in the Deadpool movies that becomes more explicit later. Vanessa is not a "nice girl"; she's a euphemistically bad girl, a gender neutral "nice place"--a nice commercial break--in Wade's worse world.

The film is about a man who is pushed into buying a picture he doesn't want, only to become so obsessed with it he can't function. It's of a man in a boat, his friends tell him it's not much to look at. He's alienated from everyone around him.

The way the film is set up, we hear Algernon (the main character, a writer, he repeatedly insists) assert things BEFORE we see the other characters do them, as if he's clairvoyant. He gets married to a painter in an attempt to stave off his obsession, but "all good things come to an end"--like Wade and Vanessa's relationship. Algernon gets newly obsessed with a painting by his wife of the ocean. The film ends with him inside the painting, after he follows the directions of his psychoanalyst to "stare it down" because "it's all inside his mind and he has to fight it". He doesn't win.

Wade, however, starts off as fiction in one of our stories. He's already inside the frame. After becoming Deadpool, he breaks the fourth wall and reaches out to us from inside the frames of the film. He transposes the cliche to show us that he's our painting we obsess over, that he's the one trapped in a surreal--beyond real, aka fictional--world trying to get out. I suspect that, if there is a next Deadpool movie after DPW, that he'll do exactly that: reach through the fourth wall to become his own writer. He's already become his world's big bang originator, after leveling up the stakes in each movie from saving his own life to rewriting his timeline. He next needs to take down Loki god of stories, who stands in for us as the author-god-painter outside the frame.

Algernon went from having an unwanted photo of a man in a boat--a guy keeping his head above water--pushed on him to being so obsessed with it that he joins not the man in the river, but the ocean itself as the endpoint and source of water. At the end, he appears to be drowning even though he sounds cheerful about it. Much like Wade using humor to cover pain, no? Life is fraught with peril, so you might as well give in to the absurd.

Wade wants to go the other way: he's already in the ocean of surreality and he wants out. He tried to avoid becoming our main character, our obsession he can't escape from, by derailing his story with Vanessa as Algernon was initially saved by his wife. When he failed to derail his story, Wade left her--left her out of it--to save her from the same fate.

All good things come to an end, because all good stories require drama, but it isn't a very nice thing to inflict on someone you love. In dp2, Vanessa gets cut out of the story by death; Wade turns around and rewrites the past, but cut her out of his future (broke up with her) in order to save her. He actually cuts himself out of his own future too, in giving up the suit. I think he cuts Cable out too in order to save Cable--both Cable's family and Cable himself from being part of Wade's story. Cable couldn't save his own family and so is not immune to drowning in the narrative. In the comics, Wade stays away from people because he believes he ruins everything; movie Wade pushes people away so they're not fridged by the crossfire of his narrative. Wade's going to give himself one nice AU where nothing goes wrong, even if it kills him. On the inside or the outside.

Worstie Logan's impossible to kill. He can't be sucked into the narrative waters. He's both safe from the narrative and has the ability to save people--to change the picture for the better. Wade wanted that power but couldn't get it until Logan saves him back, which nobody else could have survived.

Wade pulled Logan from his narrative, saving him; Logan jumped into the matter streams FOR Wade. Whether they survived or not, they'd have escaped *our* moving picture narrative that we pushed them into.

[hballegro]

re; a previous post

babygorl is back and hes 6'7"

bts below cut [highly recommend, theres a little treat at the end] [its just him with something written on his shirt]

him posing with his AMAZING placeholder face

his legs before i went 'hangon lets buckle down he needs Hams and a Carpet'

portion of my inspiration

and the shirt before i 1. hiked it up a little more and 2. decided the words were too hard, sorry folks

and me transposing the Baby Girl onto the shirt just now, lazily

[final bonus; me learning how to use the Distort and Perspective functions in CSP lmao]

[kuliak]

Last few patches were too derivative - switched a lot of signal flow up for this one.

Exploring more settings too. Chords are Piston Honda under heavy modulation, through Milky Way for Reverb, then through Data Bender. EOC of the volume envelope goes through Maths to create a slew envelope to control Data Bender's mix parameter, so the glitches swell only "after" the note and just affect the reverb tail but then get ducked again at the next note.

Three Body through Sinc Bucina is the core of the west coast-y voice. I'm using Vice Virga as a sort of 4x2x2 switch array so it goes through either Magneto or Rainmaker before the final mix.

There's a very subtle bass of Banshee Reach through QPAS then Melotus Versio, though it only comes in towards the very end.

Master pitch/transpose comes from DFAM, clocked very slow and quantized.

Main kick, snare, and one hihat variation come from Akemie's Taiko modulated by Traffic. Now that I have enough free function generators, I'm able to use a Maths channel to slightly delay the trigger so parameters can update before Taiko triggers. I like a lot of the sounds, and there's a lot of cool sounds to explore. Due to the range of sounds the module can make, it can be a bit hard to dial in with just 3 parameters - I wish I could have something like PV44, but Traffic is good enough for the size for most uses. Probably just takes more practice to dial them in - I remember getting some amazing kicks out of AT when I was just starting out.

Additional hihat and cymbal from Tyso Daiko and Crucible respectively. Whole mix does through Ikarie then Erbe-Verb. The metallic room reverb sounds amazing on percussion, but using it as such loses my ability to pan sources around with Jumble Henge. Is it worth it to use a handful of VCAs as a sort of wet/dry control to get the panning and stereo reverb? Probably. Lots of fun new ideas fo keep exploring from this patch. Also, I need more cables, again.

[thelongestway]

Story 4, here we go. Tentative working title is "Roots and Branches" (ok, for once it's maybe not nameless, unless I change it later).

This one? Looks like it's going to be heavy on pop sociology, I apologize in advance. :P

Chapter 1: Allergies

Being in charge of security for humans travelling on two ships instead of one was incredibly annoying. Especially because once ART and Dandelion started to do their own jumps, I could only access feeds on one ship at a time during wormhole transit, and I had to do it so heavily shielded I could barely hold two processes at once. (And if one of them kicked me on accident, it would still hurt like the ships were hooved planetary fauna the size of a shuttle.)

(At least they wouldn't turn my brain into mush anymore on accident. Just leave it heavily bruised.)

(Probably.)

It was even more annoying that my stupid Preservation humans didn't just agree to travel with ART because they were supposedly doing "observation" and "research" on Dandelion's humans. (I thought they would object and make my life a hundred times easier, but no, of course her stupid humans didn't. Because they also got to do "research" on Preservation humans. Who also didn't object. There were two-way papers signed and everything.) Which meant that I actually had to let ART do its own security on those parts of the route where ART and Dandelion went through separate wormholes to throw off anyone tracking them.

(This was a good move security-wise, but also really sucked for me. ART and its crew had gotten pretty good at jumping, and ART even installed some air-gapped servers to help with data tracking, so they would be fine. And ART said it would be fine, and told me to stop being an idiot and go take care of my crew. My threat assessment agreed, so I did. But this was supposed to be our first mission together, and I was spending most of my time on board Dandelion. I felt like I was failing at my job. Again.)

You might also notice I put "observation" and "research" in quotation marks. This was because the one in charge of the observations was Thiago, who constantly insisted on doing incredibly dumb shit like picking a human and following them everywhere for a day, even for doing maintenance tasks he was completely unequipped for, or drinking mind-impairing poisonous substances with Dandelion's humans, and called it research. (And for some reason none of the other Preservation humans objected to this. Or Dandelion's humans. Or even Dandelion, who presumably knew this was a stupid idea, because she was a doctor.)

And the absolute most annoying part of all of this shit? When I told Thiago to restrict imbibing poisonous substances to areas without venomous fauna (which he just happened to be allergic to), he said the risk was justified by his research. This pissed me off, so I told him to show me a complete threat analysis if he wanted me to agree to that. Instead, he sent me a reading list that was several thousand positions long.

Normally I'd be fine with more reading material, but this was the worst-written media I'd ever seen, even after the fucking horror show that was Dandelion's training program, and I refused to read crap which had sentences like "systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures" just to understand Thiago's stupid project, so I sent the list to Mensah with a complaint. She grimaced, then called Thiago in to ask him about his reasoning and tell him I preferred visual media.

Thiago apparently expected the query, because as soon as he walked in, he said, "SecUnit specifically said it wants to see a full justification of my work. I simply obliged. If SecUnit wants to understand the theoretical apparatus of the social sciences, then it can do the relevant readings up to the project level, and then we'll talk."

Mensah said (in her I-am-annoyed-at-you-on-a-professional-level voice), "It said it wants to see a full threat analysis, Dr. Thiago, not a 'full justification.' I would like you to keep in mind that SecUnit isn't a misbehaving student. It is our security consultant, and I will kindly ask you to help it do its job, not give it 800-year-old readings. Give it a proper layman's summary, and if it doesn't understand, then you can walk it through your reasoning."

"Dr. Mensah," Thiago said, just as annoyed, "I was the one who wrote the 'social threats present on board the Tenacious are not high enough to forbid a Preservation diplomat to travel with her family' analysis that convinced our planetary administrative board to even approve the mission in the first place. SecUnit has seen that analysis, and even signed off on it. It is simply being intentionally obtuse right now."

And you are intentionally compromising your judgment and physical coordination next to a source of deadly venom. I sent into their feeds.

"We are on a medical ship!" Thiago glared straight at my drone hanging over Mensah's shoulder for a second, then looked away, still glaring. "Nobody is going to let me die from a bee sting!"

(I suspected that even if the crew quarters weren't feed cut in the first place, Dandelion would have cut off this room just so she wouldn't have to listen to this incredibly stupid conversation.)

Thiago sighed, looked past the drone again, then addressed me directly:

"Look, SecUnit. I promise you: the moment an actual threat happens, I will follow your every command to the letter and dot without a word of complaint, no matter my own judgment. But if a group I'm interested in is meeting in a garden, I want to be able to participate in its activities as appropriate. Which also, on occasion, means sharing food and drink, some of which is designed to lower social inhibitions, which often makes interactions between unfamiliar parties smoother, which is absolutely excellent for my research!

"I do not imbibe enough to significantly impair my judgment, I have medication on hand at all times," he pulled out a pocket injector to wave it dramatically for the drone camera, "and, let me say that again, the ship itself is a doctor. There is no real threat. It is a two on the scale SecUnit provided us with if I drink the normal amount, maybe a four if I miscalculate. This is not enough, by any metric, to interfere with my study."

This was the most bare-bones threat analysis I had ever seen, but it was essentially correct (and I knew from prior data that Thiago did not lie about his behavior patterns), so I made a transcript of the recording, stamped it with a "threat assessment approved" message, and dropped it into Mensah and Thiago's feeds.

Mensah turned to Thiago and said, "Was that so hard?"

"Of course it wasn't! But a point needs to be made here," Thiago snapped, and turned to stare at my drone. "SecUnit, you cannot control our every move in completely mundane situations. That is beyond unreasonable, you're not a-"

"Enough." Mensah said with a sudden weight to her voice. Thiago shut up. Most people did, when they heard Mensah speak like that. "Thiago, your objection is noted, and I take responsibility for this decision. SecUnit, are there any more standing issues on your end?"

No, I answered in both of their feeds.

To Mensah, privately, I sent a list of small issues that were potentially dangerous when combined with other small issues. Just in case Thiago decided to be even more obtuse. She silently acknowledged and said, "Then I thank you two for doing your best to keep your actions reasonable. We're representing the entirety of Preservation here, people, keep that in mind. Let's get to work."

Thiago frowned. This was probably not the encouragement he'd been expecting. But somehow I didn't feel like I won this, either.

Ugh.

I acknowledged Mensah, then disconnected and checked my other feeds, including those being mediated through Dandelion. Which was when I noticed she'd been dedicating around half a procent of her processing power to me for a while. I just didn't notice because I was so busy having an emotion about Thiago being an idiot. I sent her a ping of acknowledgment, and she replied with a Query?

I really didn't feel like talking, so I just dumped a bunch of logs and materials into a workspace and invited her in to look for herself if she wanted to.

She sifted through the materials, then highlighted the location of the medical kits in the walls, and gave me access to her estimate of how fast a smaller drone of hers could get to a greenhouse ring from their standard rest spots. I asked to move a few of them closer based on Thiago's medical data that I had, and she silently complied, which made even the worst-case scenario fall to a green three out of ten.

For some stupid reason, this made me have an emotion. I swept most of the data from the workspace, leaving only Thiago's cut-off sentence and Mensah's clipped response.

There was something strange about that response. I could count the number of times Mensah used that tone with her team, including me, on one hand. (This was the tone in which she'd told me to "calm the fuck down" during the GrayCris extraction.) Why did she use it just now?

Dandelion hummed quietly, running some sort of estimate, but didn't say anything after she finished. I queried her.

It will be a guess, and you will not like hearing it.

I confirmed.

"You're not a prison guard," she said.

I ran her guess against Thiago's subvocalizations, and the match rate looked really fucking high. Thiago's rating among my humans was pretty abysmal already, but now he was rapidly becoming my least favorite non-hostile human. I took a few seconds to form a sentence that wasn't just "fuck you, Thiago" on repeat. (I decided to form the sentence because Bharadwaj said that emotions occasionally went away when you did that. And they actually did sometimes.)

He really doesn't fucking know what he's talking about, I finally said, twenty seconds later.

No oxygen rations, Dandelion said evenly. No kill switches.

(The tone Dandelion used usually made my threat assessment spike. It did this time, too, by the standard 2 percent. But I didn't really care right now. I was way too busy processing.)

No backbreaking labor, no lack of medical assistance, no full-cycle surveillance, I finished. The emotion didn't go away, but became even stronger. (Fuck you, emotion). Fuck him for even thinking that.

That was probably why Dr. Mensah did not let him say it.

Fuck him, I said again. Stupid idiot who's never been in a prison.

Dandelion swept the workspace clean, and placed a show in it instead. It was one of her medical disaster dramas.

This one is very unrealistic, she promised.

[crimeronan]

i do eternally think it's really funny to take amity's canon "i do stupid things around you and i don't know why" thing and transpose it into an AU where luz is the empress & amity is very very very intimidated by her power. amity is like this girl has the capacity to end me with one twitch of her finger and every reason to do so (vaguely true?), she's a calculating manipulator who thinks through everything she ever does (BLATANTLY false), we're technical co-conspirators in a violent political succession (sure), and my sworn nemesis who's kinda my closest friend is the captain of her guard (UNFORTUNATE). i need to be So So So careful around her.

and then she just. keeps walking into walls. and falling over. and saying the stupidest, most dangerous, most reckless shit IMAGINABLE.

because. 1) she's too invested in honesty and in winning arguments to shut the hell up, and 2) she is too gay to function.

[transmutationisms]

so i read the hp lovecraft short stories that the film ‘re-animator’ was based on (internet archive link) and the answer is yes, the source material is openly and deliberately racist, and it is not coincidental or accidental that the film so clearly recalls the history of american medical schools obtaining human cadavers through various deeply unethical means, esp the bodies of enslaved black people in the south. the lovecraft stories were serialised in the magazine ‘home brew’ in 1921–22 and are neither very long nor very good, but a few points of interest stood out to me:

both wikipedia and the encyclopedia britannica attribute the ‘modern’ zombie largely to george romero’s 1960s films; in ‘the undead eighteenth century’, linda troost suggested only that zombies appeared in literature as early as 1967 and were described as spirits or ghosts, not cannibalistic monsters. however, although lovecraft never uses the word “zombie” in “herbert west—reanimator”, i think it is fair to draw a clear connection from the haitian mythology to his story of reanimated, violent, cannibalistic bodies. because lovecraft was simultaneously satirising and paying tribute to “frankenstein”, the anxieties in the stories centre around the narrator’s discomfort with west’s materialist view of life, his fanatical devotion to scientific experiment, and the idea that living matter is only distinguished by accidents of matter and function, rather than by the operation of a divinely given soul. thus, when the narrator describes the outcomes of his and west’s experiments as “unthinkable automata” (30) we ought to understand this as a relatively early (again, these stories ran between 1921 and 22) example of american literature invoking the haitian zombie to work out a strikingly different set of social anxieties than enslaved africans in haiti did. in lovecraft’s stories, then, the medical students’ literal reanimations of stolen (sometimes murdered) bodies are almost themselves symbolic of lovecraft’s own deployment of the zombie myth, transposed into the context of debates about materialism, vitalism, and the nature of life and consciousness.

speaking of the cannibalism, yes, it is racialised. although the re-animated bodies exist largely out of view of either the narrator or west, and thus we cannot say for sure what they are or aren’t eating, the confirmed act of cannibalism is specifically attributed to a black re-animated man described as “gorilla-like ... [with] a face that conjured up thoughts of unspeakable congo secrets and tom-tom poundings under an eerie moon” (14) and later “a glassy-eyed, ink-black apparition nearly on all fours, covered with bits of mould, leaves, and vines, foul with caked blood” (16–17). this is the scene in which he is discovered eating a white infant: “a snow-white, terrible, cylindrical object terminating in a tiny hand” (17). he is consistently referred to as “cannibalistic” throughout the rest of the story, emphasised to be violent and dangerous. he, along with the other re-animated people, eventually joins a kind of re-animated army led by west’s own former army (wwi) commander, who is now headless (also re-animated); this ‘army’ eventually kills west. thus, west’s body-snatching and literal possession of the stolen bodies are flipped around, as the bodies develop allegiance to one another and then invert west’s violence against them: where he forced them to live again, they directly cause him to die. because this is lovecraft, though, the re-animated bodies existing and developing agency is the central horror of the story, even despite the unflattering portrayal of west; this is actually translated pretty accurately into the film sequel ‘bride of re-animator’ as a scene in which their version of the undead ‘army’ rampages through west’s backyard/cemetery, and we are treated to extensive shots of the bodies writhing, spasming, and seizing, in ways that simultaneously telegraph disability and (what is framed as) terrifying strength.

there are at least flashes throughout the stories of racialisation of the re-animated bodies occurring precisely on the grounds of having been re-animated: for example, of an early (white) re-animation experiment, the narrator reports that it was “like a malformed ape”, and lovecraft writes:  “For it had been a man. This much was clear despite the nauseous eyes, the voiceless simianism, and the daemoniac savagery” (11). thus, the fact of having been re-animated is itself what gives this white body its simian / ape-like qualities—descriptions which are of course racialised in american literature in general, and specifically in this series (see above).

in connection with lovecraft’s racism, the stories frequently engage in generalised physiognomical efforts to read a person’s moral character and personality from their physical appearance. this includes overtly racialised traits (west is described as blond and blue-eyed numerous times, an appearance that hides his "diabolical” machinations and “fanaticism” [7, 18], and contrasts to both his morbid fascinations [3] and to a “brawny young workman” with brown hair whom he re-animates [5]). there is also a link raised multiple times between nervous sensitivity and physical strength: one specimen is “a man at once physically powerful and of such high mentality that a sensitive nervous system was assured”, and west seeks out specifically “men of especially sensitive brain and especially vigorous physique” (25, 27).

although lovecraft’s stories are hardly making any manner of radical critique, they also contain flashes of tacit admission that west’s experiments, although cosmetically off-putting to the medical establishment, are not in fact diverging in deeper ways from ‘normal’ functioning of these institutions. for example, in the first installment, as the narrator and west attempt to secure a supply of fresh corpses from christchurch cemetery, the narrator notes that “we found that the college had first choice in every case” (4), a remark that for the modern reader alludes to the true and extensive history of american medical schools and anthropology departments purchasing or simply snatching cadavers and anatomical specimens (in recent years there have been a few high-profile cases of attempts at repatriation of skull and other collections). later, when re-animating buck robinson, the aforementioned black man, the narrator notes that “our prize ... was wholly unresponsive to every solution we injected in its black arm; solutions prepared from experience with white specimens only” (15). this remark has two major implications: one, lovecraft’s narrator is endorsing a view of physiology that assumes black and white bodies function essentially differently, ie that the white and black ‘races’ are intrinsically and undeniably biologically different to one another (this viewpoint is never challenged or questioned throughout the text); two, that lovecraft specifically portrayed medical students who experimented on white bodies, an echo of the medical schools’ focus on white patients and white health, with black bodies treated as more disposable, black patients as less valuable, and the entire medical endeavour aimed toward the preservation of wealthy white people and plantation owners (nb: west worked out of boston).

although the films and the stories both take a somewhat whimsical tone toward their subject matter, i found it hard to engage with the films on a genuinely comedic level largely because these elements of the lovecraft stories are still present. i do think the concept here (white medical students body-stealing, and forcing a partial and torturous version of ‘life’ upon those bodies) has quite a bit of potential as a horror premise; unfortunately, both lovecraft and the filmmakers approach this subject matter in ways that attempt to mine comedy and horror from it without thinking through the larger historical context they are clearly and explicitly invoking, and as a result the whole thing falls flat for me. 

[toa-arania]

Subnautica would make a good Pikmin game

Probably a weird take, but if you drained the water from Subnautica's map and gave the Pikmin the ability to build ways up and down between areas, you pretty much already have a Pikmin game. You have to slowly make your way through different areas, collecting resources that let you go deeper and evading the planet's giant predators.

Some of the area hazards even already resemble ones from Pikmin if you squint. The cloud of radiation around the Aurora is functionally poison, and could be circumvented with White Pikmin. Reaper Leviathans and Burrowing Snagrets are cut from the same cloth. The brine pools in the Lost River can be turned into just actual water to give Blue or Ice Pikmin something to do (and to be honest other areas should have small water hazards too), and the Crab Squid and Ampeel (or equivalents) are prime Yellow Pikmin targets. The lava zones would make for an interesting way to force Red Pikmin use back into relevance (presuming you still get them first but their hazard resistance has been outclassed for a while). The Kharaa disease could even be transposed into the player slowly becoming a Leafling, leaving the Sea Emperor as the Ancient Sirehound (surrounded by Bulblaxes in the place of Sea Dragon Leviathans). Stray too far out and you're suddenly being swarmed by Smoky Progs.

As for area progression, getting more resources could (instead of allowing you to build submarines) allow your otherwise fairly weak escape pod to travel further down and still have the power to get up to orbit. Engine upgrades could then still preserve the depth mechanics even without water, and you could find additional landing sites like in Pikmin 4 to start in different areas as if you had bases there. Using a resource system more like Subnautica's could also be an interesting way to handle progression by having certain types of things needed rather than just quantity like in P4. To that end, Rock Pikmin could be used to get into wrecks in lieu of the laser cutter to track down more blueprints, and if the Purple Onion is found inside the Aurora then it would be kind of like the Prawn fragments and allow you to mine resources from the larger deposits. I haven't thought of anything specific to do with Winged Pikmin, but if the Pink Onion is in the Primary Containment Facility they could be a late game reward to make the search for the hatching enzyme and Neptune Rocket components a bit easier (and for clearing up the remaining resources and upgrades) without introducing them early enough to invalidate Blue Pikmin.

I'd suggest a Pikmin order of Red (Safe Shallows), Rock (Grassy Plateaus), Yellow (Mushroom Forest?), Blue (Floating Islands?), White (Jellyshroom Caves?), Purple (Aurora), Ice (Lost River), Winged (Primary Containment Facility), but I'm not entirely sure what to gate White behind to require Blue. Probably something relating to the Degasi storyline? I also think it could be fun to introduce a new type of Pikmin in the Grand Reef but I don't have any ideas for what it could be. Maybe bringing back the darkness mechanics from Pikmin 3 and introducing some kind of luminous Orange Pikmin could be fun, since the rest of the game from there is so deep underground. Unsure what to do with Glow Pikmin though since I can't think of a good reason for there to be Night Missions. Also, since Red, Grey, Yellow, Blue, White, Purple, Orange, Cyan, and Pink are already covered the second new type would realistically have to be Green (no idea what it'd do), which could get confusing if Glow Pikmin are there too.

I don't have anywhere near the time, skill, or knowledge to put this together in any real form btw, it's just fun to speculate. Maybe it could make a good fanfiction comprised of the Captain's logs...

[jackalgirl]

Blender: A Gory Struggle - or - an example how software doesn't think in narrative

I'm working on a project in Blender where I'm trying to transpose an old-timey map, which has been rendered in gores (a series of vesica pisces shapes which, when cut out and carefully glued onto a sphere, would transform a flat map into a globe).

So I've got your standard sphere, and I've marked out the seams for the UV map to make these gores. There are twelve. It looks great, right?

Ha ha! Foolish human!

Even though I was careful to mark the seams in series, Blender apparently decided that these islands could be in some apparently random order. If I apply a texture map where the gores are numbered 1 through 12, I get the above. There is no rhyme or reason or identifiable pattern that I can find that would tell me that maybe I could mark the seams differently and get it to do what I want.

Now, I can move these UV islands around; I could in theory move the gores so that they're in numerical order now that I know where Blender decided to place them. But Blender doesn't seem to support precision movement of islands except by super tiny increments, and it won't tell you any informational readout (such as the location, on the x + y axis, of the geometric selection of points you've selected). Maybe it does, but I haven't figured out how to display this yet and I got tired of Googling "how do I (do this thing I want to do) blender" because lately that's all I seem to be doing. So maybe later. But the problem is: if I move them manually and I'm inaccurate (which I will be, because I'm human, which is why I'm using Blender in the first place) then it will mess up my texture map.

Okay, so the other option is to simply separate the gores of my image and move them as needed to assemble the final texture map. If I use the above as a guide, and then move the numbers on the texture map to where their gore-island actually is on the UV map, I can make it work:

This will function, but the problem is, if I wanted then to print out this texture map and hang it on my wall, the gores would not be in order and it would look terrible.

The frustrating thing is that I know, like any reasonable human being, what the gores are, what they're for, and that they should be ordered 1-12 in sequential order around the globe: I am telling a story, which is "How to use an old-fashioned gore-style globe map as a texture map in Blender, and how to possibly export procedurally-generated globe maps into an old-style gore map because this would be cool to print out and hang on my wall." But the software, not being human and having no sense of narrative at all, completely does not understand this. What makes sense to it, in terms of what goes where, is not what makes sense to me.

[abendrotanima]

With my hands submerged in water, I peel the skin of the pomegranate.

My nails cut the tender flesh of the seeds, and they explode.

My face is bloody, and my beige Ralph Lauren sweater has stains I can’t get rid of.

I stained the wall and the tablecloth.

They turned purple like my veins.

I am inside myself, picking at my blood cells, trying to put this machinery back to work.

It stopped functioning properly this morning.

I forgot to drink water, maybe that’s why.

I haven’t tasted liquid in two days and a half, and my throat feels like the dry sand on the shore I wish I drowned.

Today, I am transposed in time.

I witness a scene I never knew I committed.

My hands are shaking with expectancy. I am so curious about the taste that haunts my dreams.

I take a spoonful to my mouth, and there comes disappointment.

The seeds have seeds.

That’s all that there is to this world - seeds on seeds on seeds and yet… The people are starved.

They’re too impatient to let the fruit grow, and I’m too scared, so I let it rot.

My favourite flavour is putrid.

~ September 4th, 2023