#actuaL link between the numbers and letters other than that so far. It's the patterns the numbers apPear in. Prepare for a hunt.

[the1andonly-adrienbillcipherfan]

fuck this shit y'all have to deal with me being cryptic and trying to display messages through vague codes and shit

Also warning for panicked,dark,and gorey themes in the future.

heres a small code cipher for the time being

2.1.1.0 → hello 1.2.0.7 → we / I 2.0.3.3 → help 2.1.3.7 → hill 3.9.9.0 → lost 3.0.0.2 → need 1.3.3.2 → are

Also the message in this one is pretty easy to find so

2.1.1.0 1.2.0.7 1.3.3.2 3.9.9.0 1.2.0.7 3.0.0.2 2.0.3.3

one code isn't in use currently

Tags for reach.

@buggz-owlz

@thatacefrog

@literallylink--who-tf-is-ravioli

@xx-a-str4ng3-cr34tur3xx

[birdsareblooming]

Sonic may actually be lost royalty

I keep going down these rabbit holes I shouldn’t go down BUT! Although this theory is one that I don’t fully believe in (unlike the infinite/solaris theory and the chaos emerald theory) I still have a good argument that I want to talk about very bad.

I also tried to make this as short as possible but there’s a lot of ground to cover, but at least it’s not the infinite/solaris theory. But I have a TLDR at the end.

[Spoiler Warning for Sonic and the Black Knight]

let’s start with a ✨numbered list✨

1. Blaze the Cat

Blaze is the biggest caveat for this theory, but I think it’s best to start with her.

Now, firstly I need to clear up some things.

[Eggman: My world...]

[Eggman Nega: and my world...]

[Eggmen: are in a manner, inextricably linked!]

[Blaze: Like two Eggmans?]

Part of the Blaze’s world is that it’s a parallel universe. Parallel Eggmen, Parallel emeralds, Everything else that isn’t stated outright. Like how Tails and Marine are definitely counterparts. Seeming as Tails came from South Island and Marine came from southern island, Tails is definitely based on a kitsune and Marine, in theory, based on a tanuki. 

And, although not stated completely, Blaze and Sonic are universal counterparts.

[From Sonic Wiki: Blaze was designed as a charater who was equivalent yet and alternate version of Sonic’s character.]

Much like the Sol and Chaos emeralds, Sonic and Blaze are a mirror version of one another, although slightly different.

Alright, now that we have that out of the way:

Looking at the connections between the others, Sonic and Blaze seem, a bit too different.

The Sol and Chaos emeralds fulfill the same role, although their different appearance, and have a similar story.  Tails and Marine fulfill the same role, although their different appearance, and have a similar story. The Eggmen fulfill the same role, although their different appearance, and have a similar story. 

Blaze and Sonic fulfill the same role, although their different appearance, and have a... completely different story. 

Blaze was born to a royal family, and set to protect the Sol Emeralds and the Jeweled Scepter as her birthright, and it’s somewhat hinted that her powers may also be a birthright. Sonic, on the other hand, has no known past, and seems to have just run into the Chaos Emeralds by accident. 

You could claim that Blaze does take on the role of both Sonic AND Knuckles, which is fair and stated on the wiki, however Knuckles is also never stated to be any kind of royalty, and certainly doesn’t have that kind of past, his past being one of the more tragically alone ones. 

And here’s something interesting.

Time has warped our vision of Blaze. We all know her as “Princess Blaze the Cat.” But from watching Sonic Rush, her opening game... she is never mentioned to be a princess until the very end.

[Burning Blaze: As princess, it is my duty to protect the Sol Emeralds...]

From what I remember, this is the FIRST mention of her royal status. 

From this game’s viewpoint, they reveal the mirror status of the dimensions. They then show both Blaze and Sonic having mirror super transformations using their emeralds, highly implying that Sonic and Blaze were mirror versions. (also this was implied already by just Blaze’s shoes.) and then it’s revealed that Blaze is royal, and a princess. 

So if she’s the mirror of Sonic, what does that mean for Sonic? Especially right after showing the two of them being, well, mirrors.

2. King Arthur

SATBK is much less transparent about the counterpart universe thing.

Now this is an alternate universe, set up by Secret Rings, and surprisingly not just a story Sonic told as an elaborate excuse.

They don’t hide obivous Sonic characters being put into roles, and their in these roles for a reason.

Blaze and Silver as Percival and Galahad, the knights who quested together for the holy grail. Knuckles as Gawain literally only because of “Gawain and the Green Knight” But I respect that so much. Jet as Lamorak because of Lamorak’s fiery temper and competitiveness.  Shadow as Lancelot because he’s the “closest knight to the king” stated in game (👀) Tails as a Blacksmith because that’s p much the medieval version of a mechanic. Amy as the Lady of the Lake because like. Fuck she’s the most powerful one there. (but seriously, in forces she’s shown to be the most level headed leader and strangest, especially in Sonic’s absence. As well as “sensing” that he was still alive and having a past in tarot.) And Merlina as Merlina because... well that’s a whole other theory.

(all my theories are being brought up in the post. like i know the first two were expamples of theories I fully belive in but damn this is like a avengeners, ok,)

But Sonic as King Arthur makes sense when it’s revealed. Although he wasn’t anyone’s counterpart in Secret Rings (because secrets rings was confused as hell) He is in this game, and as the ring leader of everyone following him in SATBK, it makes sense. 

Although something that was never brought up...EVER is the Knight’s backstories, which are EXTREMELY important not only in Arthurian legends, but for the knights in Sonic lore. All of the knight’s mentioned backstories are important to their character, in both contexts. Although their never brought up.

*DEEP BREATH* Alright. The similarities between Sonic Character/Knight backstories.

Shadow and Lancelot have pretty simmilar backstories when getting down to it. Shadow/Lancelot were both raised for greatness, but still outshined by Sonic/Arthur. Although remaining loyal to them, even if for Shadow it’s only in times of need. Shadow doesn’t want to admit he’s a supporting role to Sonic, although Sonic generations kinda throws that Idea out of the water when Shadow cheers Sonic on while watching from the sidelines, much like early Lancelot.

For Blaze and Percival, in multiple interpretations Percival is of noble birth. Upon meeting Sonic’s Gang/The Knights, Blaze/Percival get’s inspired by their heroics and eventually joins them.

“Lancelot and Percival prove morally superior to Gawain who follows the rules of courtliness to the letter rather than the spirit.“ Is an actual quote from Wikipedia. Although it is VERY hard to find a concrete backstory for Gawain other than “separated from his home”, I think this proves enough. As well as the Gawain and the Green Knight story (in which Gawain tries to slay the green knight and then he picks up his head and says “see you in a year” is pretty representative of Knuckles constantly breaking the master emerald in a comedic light.) 

Lamorak/Jet are known for challenging Arthur/Sonic to competitions. 

Galahad/Silver are searching for an object/person aided by Percival/Blaze

So now that we’re all good, do you see the similarities between part one.

Although everyone else has given backstory similarities, Sonic is given none, seeming as, as far as we know, Sonic HAS no backstory.

But isn’t it interesting that King Arthur’s backstory is being lost royalty? And the secret son of the king? Wack.

3. Sonic Fucking Underground

Now, most of you are probably unfamiliar with Sonic Underground. Good.

If you’re not, you watched it as a kid and you’re nostalgic, and let me tell you I watched the entire show recently and it’s not as good as you remember.

But Sonic Underground’s quality and history could be a post on it’s own, it doesn’t matter here. What matters is the plot:

[From Sonic Wiki: Sonic, Sonia, and Manic are the children of Queen Aleena, the rightful ruler of Mobius and are pursued relentlessly by Doctor Robotnik and his bumbling bounty hunters sidekicks, Sleet and Dingo. As infants, the siblings were separated and placed in hiding to fulfill a prophecy made by the Oracle of Delphius (a spoof of the Oracle of Delphi of Ancient Greece) that the triplets would grow up to find their estranged mother, overthrow Robotnik and take their places once more as Mobius' rightful rulers.]

FORGOTTEN ROYALTY YOU SAY.

Now, Sonic Underground is VERY SEPARATED from Sonic Lore, and nothing has ever taken from it besides Manic appearing in some comics, although from what I know he’s never mentioned to be Sonic’s brother. So This is the part I always take with a grain of salt, however;

4. In conclusion/TLDR

We have Two Instances of Sonic being lost Royalty (One in a separate reality and one in a separate continuity) We have Two Instances of Dimentional Counterparts of Sonic being Royalty (Blaze and King Arthur) We have zero given backstory for Sonic We have Three instances of Sonic, or a counterpart, being royalty

And from what I remember hearing, three’s a pattern.

[shiftysdogtags]

In His Hands

@phoebewrose I really hope you like this and i used the two prompts for Nixon. It's a bit angsty but i happy ending. As always feedback is appreciated. 

‘Hi I was wondering if I could request something from your prompt list? I really like #3 and #59, for either Lewis Nixon or Ronald Speirs. You don’t have to combined both of the numbers you can just pick one, it’s completely up to you! I just love your writing so much!! Thanks😊’

Prompt 3: “If I don’t screw this up, I’m going to marry you.” “You better not screw it up then.”

Prompt 59: “C’mon, it’s been years. Didn’t you miss me?” 

Gif isn't mine.

 2.2k words

The train station was filled with hope and sadness. Hope for the safe return of all those who will leave and yet sadness at the reality that many won’t. It reminded Y/N of a waiting room of a funeral home except the dead were still alive at this point in their inevitable journey to the unknown. They walked around not knowing they were yet dead. 

Each had their own story, their reason for wanting to serve their country and with a glance around Y/N couldn’t help but imagine what they were. Perhaps an only son wanted to bring glory to his father’s name or a younger brother wanting to follow in the elder’s footsteps. Maybe it was as simple as wanting to do good but that didn’t sit right with her. 

The sombre tone of all the voices begging for promises that can’t be kept turned Y/N’s stomach yet it couldn’t stop her from asking for one of her own. “Lew, promise me you will write, at least once a week.” Y/N squeezed his hand letting him know she was serious. 

“I promise, sweetheart.” Lewis held her cheek, forcing her to look at him. He wanted to memorise every freckle and the way her eyes glittered in the light. “If I don’t screw this up, I’m going to marry you.” It was unromantic in the most romantic way possible. It was the Lewis Nixon way. 

When the fog cleared from her head, with the help of the station master screaming for the last stragglers to board, Y/N had realised she hadn’t answered him. “You better not screw it up then.” It was her way of accepting and asking him to stay alive and be okay without actually asking him. She couldn’t ask him something like that it wouldn’t be fair. It was a vow he couldn’t keep, and she wouldn’t ask him to make it to only break it. 

Lew held her hand the whole time, not letting go until he had to. To her, it was her physical confirmation he was there with her, he was safe. Once he let go, he was gone, as far as she was concerned. If you had asked Y/N, the moment Lew left was the moment his hand slipped from her death grip to pick up his rucksack. For Y/N, it symbolised him slipping away from her like he was gone and wouldn’t return. 

A bittersweet smile briefly crossed his face and was washed away with the final whistle of the train. This was it, the final goodbye. A brief yet passionate kiss was their final farewell before he took all that was his to basic and to war. 

The train pulled out, and with one last wave to her lover, Y/N willed him to come back to her. She silently prayed with all the others left behind that their loved ones will return safely and unharmed by the sorrow and long hand of death. 

Y/N stayed until the train was long gone and for some time after that. She had never felt so alone. 

……………………………………………………

She had never realised how much she appreciated Lewis’s company until he was gone. She had to learn to rely on herself more and learn to enjoy her own company again. Every week he was dragging her to some event his father insisted he attend or to some fancy dinner and a show. With his absence came a wave of free time she didn’t want. It only served to fuel her constant worrying and longing to hear his voice again. 

The void Lew left grew bigger as each day passed. Trying to fill the silence and the emptiness in the pit of her stomach Y/N tried to take up some extra hobbies such as painting to pass the time, but she was never very good, and it was short-lived. Everything without him felt so wrong. She was left behind in a comfortable house with everything she could need while the man she loved was on the other side of the world sleeping in a ditch or some bombed-out farm shed. It was all so wrong.

Lew’s mother was good to her. She offered constant updates in her frequent letters and words of encouragement. Her reassurance and confidence in her son allowed Y/N to find some sliver of comfort. 

Letters from Lewis himself were plenty in the beginning, keeping his promise to write at least once a week but once he was sent to Europe they took longer and longer to arrive. That was if they arrived at all. It was understandable that he was busy, but it didn’t stop her from writing to him. 

Often wondering if he got her letters at all, Y/N thought of all the useless things she had told him with her perfect handwriting. Somehow her words meant very little, yet they meant everything. The ink conveyed the link between them, they kept him close to her, as close as he could be in a time of uncertainty. It was like the ink the bled through the page held the truth of what she wanted to tell him, how much she missed and longed for him. 

The dreaded letter asking her to stop her pointless ramblings never came and she took it as a good sign. If he didn’t want to hear from her, he would surely tell her. Of that much she was certain. Whether or not he read what she wrote was another thing entirely. She was trying and that was the main thing. 

As the war dragged on and eventually ended relief washed over her. He had survived. He was one of the lucky ones who would eventually come home. Y/N can’t remember a night she slept so peacefully. The knowledge of his imminent return replaces the endless and reoccurring nightmares. It was his hands that usually soothed her back to sleep. The intricate and random patterns he drew on her back as he held her close to him made her feel like he wouldn’t let anything come between them to cause her harm. 

Although there was no set date for his return, Y/N held her breath every time the mailman came around. She had hoped he carried the precious letter that contained a clue that would give her something to look forward to. Such a letter never came. Yes, Lewis wrote to her, but scarcely and never about when he would see her again. He never mentioned wanting to see her or even missing her in the slightest. He never mentioned his proposal on the platform either. 

Many men had begun to return from their various corners of the war but never her Lewis. She waited and waited. And waited. And waited. The waiting for his return was almost worse than not knowing if he was safe. Weeks had passed and still nothing. Nothing from him nor his mother, even she had no notion of when he would come home. 

It is not that he didn’t want to tell her, he did, he just couldn’t find the words. What was he supposed to say, ‘Hello, sorry I haven’t written in months, but I will be home in two weeks’? It felt disrespectful of him. He thought it was best to explain and ask for her forgiveness. 

When the day finally came a sickening feeling settled into his stomach. It reminded him of the war he eagerly wished to forget. He couldn’t shake it even though he tried to cover it up with false confidence. Lewis caught a glance of her through the window and he stared. All plans on storming up the front garden to slam the front door open were gone. He watched her potter about doing her daily cleaning routine. It brought him a sense of joy to know she hadn’t changed something so simple while he had been gone. 

He couldn’t help himself but watch her in all her intricate simplicity. She moved throughout the house with that serious and determined look that he loved so dearly across her face. It reminded him of how determined she used to be and how she always saw a task to the end. There was an air of invincibility about her. She appeared to not let anything bother her; nothing shook her. It gave him peace of mind of knowing that no matter what happened to him she would be alright. Come what may to him, but his little lover would be unchanged. 

Y/N was unaware of the eyes prying into her home and disappeared to continue her cleaning. The weight of his sack that sat uncomfortably on his shoulder and the fact he couldn’t see her anymore forced him to come to the reality that it was time to ring the doorbell. 

Normally very confident, Lewis was a wreck. In the few seconds it took for Y/N to answer the door he suddenly regretted all the letters he didn’t write or refused to send. He regretted leaving her hanging on the uncertainty. The uncertainty he had given her was now returned in the uncertainty of her reaction to his return. Behind the door stood his reason to come home and he had hoped she would still want him, that she would accept him for everything that he now was. 

The front door creaked open in the slowest way possible. Every second felt like an hour. It was the calm before the storm of emotions they would have to work through together. Y/N’s eyes drew a long look from his feet to his face, yet her brain didn’t register who was standing in front of her. It was as if her brain had forgotten what he had looked like or the fact he was once a real person she knew and loved. A few blinks later and Y/N jumped back with a hand to her mouth. Her loud gasp and the sight of her physically standing before him and not in the form of a creased and ripped photograph caused Lew to drop his sack to the floor. 

“C’mon, it’s been years. Didn’t you miss me?” With arms outstretched to dramatically announce his reappearance Lew chuckled at her shocked reaction. 

At first glance, she could have sworn it was her imagination playing a cruel trick on her. Y/N had to all but pick up her jaw from the porch floor and steady her breathing again before she could answer him. He had given her the fright of her life. She was all too aware of his survival in Europe, but she felt like she was talking to a ghost. 

“Where the Hell have you been?” She answered his question with a question of her own. He noticed the look of surprise on her face before she could change it to mock anger and frustration. 

With a raised eyebrow, he gave her his signature puzzled look. It silently said, ‘you know where I’ve been’. For a split second, he was left to wonder if she would slap him or kiss him. He couldn’t begin to describe the feeling that blossomed in his chest when she pulled him in and chose the latter. 

All emotions shared between them was poured into this single action. All the unwritten words and lack of letters he wanted to write but couldn’t bring himself to do was channelled into this kiss. For a moment they had reverted to who they used to be on the train platform all those years before when they had been what felt much younger and innocent. The long-awaited kiss secured their bond with one another. Their past is forgotten and their future promised. 

His touch which she so desperately craved he willingly gave to her. It was his silent apology and she accepted it thousands of times over. For a man who grew up in the privileged environment of extreme wealth and fortune where he learned the skill of having a silver tongue, he couldn’t express his feelings for her with his words. It was through his touches she knew his heart's true intentions. They conveyed everything his word couldn’t. It was a spark shared between them that kept her coming back for more. 

They both pulled away at the same time as they knew they could continue to kiss and kiss and kiss until the sun went down and maybe even for some time after that. They needed to get reacquainted with each other and the new people they had become. Learning to fall in love with someone you never stopped loving to begin with would be one of the most difficult things either of them had to do. But they were willing to do it together. 

Lewis held his hand out to her, hoping she would accept it. He discreetly asked her if she would still have him in the way he wanted her. Y/N tiled her head to the side with a sweet smile on her face and gladly placed her smaller one into his. His hand although rougher than she expected made her forget every little worry she had ever had. He would have a lot of explaining to do but he could do that as time passed on. For now, Y/N was content with having his hands in hers and she vowed from this day forward he was not allowed to let hers go. He was back and, in his hands, she was home.

@curraheewestandalone @liebegott @vintagelavenderskies @inglourious-imagines @happyveday @easy-company-tradition​ @sydney-m​ @josephtoye​ @50svibes

[bubmyg]

try three times - myg

pairing: yoongi x reader

genre/warnings: lawyer!au, established relationship, fluff, angst (with a happy ending!!), the introduction of seokjin’s character, nonchronological with my other lawyer!yoongi drabbles (linked on my masterlist!)

word count: 4,027

summary: yoongi doesn’t want to admit that seokjin knows what he’s doing or the one about three different weddings and where he proposes (kind of) while smelling like fish.

It’s easy to be in a room full of people and feel as though you’re the only one that doesn’t have their shit together. 

For example, the banquet hall was filled with twenty-somethings who had probably ate ramen out of peculiar objects more than they had with proper cutlery in the past six months, but you couldn’t tell it at first glance. The twenty-somethings tucked into tightly collared shirts and lace hemmed dresses mixed among actual adults, family and friends of the wedding party becoming one moving machine, sipping alcohol and munching on weirdly shaped cheese poked onto the end of toothpicks. 

Yoongi’s conscious didn’t have the heart to remind him that no one has a clue what the hell they’re doing, too overcome with the way he was clutching his champagne glass and trying to figure out an equation in his head for the amount of time spent at a friend’s wedding versus how many people you were supposed to interact with for it to be considered acceptable. 

This is Seungcheol’s fault, his conscious instead convinced him, eyes narrowing on the aforementioned groom as he gripped a tight hand with a brand new diamond band strapped on one finger around his bride’s waist. Of anyone in the room, the bride and groom seemed to have their shit together. Seungcheol was graduating a semester early. They’d just moved into an apartment together. His wife had recently gotten a full time position with her summer internship. 

Yoongi, on the other hand, had just switched his major, twice, only to end back up in what he originally started in. He would be a semester behind on credits because of it. He’d spent a strange three months in a fraternity. Law school entrance exam textbooks occupied every square inch of his desk. His shortlist of schools had only been narrowed to ten. He hadn’t touched his personal statement since high school. 

And then there was you, a year old addition in his life that seemed to fill in all the puzzle pieces of things he wasn’t. He glanced at your empty chair to remind himself that you’d disappeared twenty minutes ago to get more to drink and to grab him a slice of cake, only to be held up in three separate conversations. He’d made it to get more champagne in less than thirty seconds. 

He gulped at the sparkling liquid in his glass to feel it bubble in the pit of his stomach. 

A paper plate appeared in his peripheral, something white with pink and gold chevrons racing down the center of it, geometric patterns cut off by the slap of white cake resting on the center of it. There was a plastic fork curling out of the treat, fingers gripped on the end of it as the utensil tore off a sizable chunk and lifted into the air. 

“Mingyu cut the piece for me,” You muffled through the bite you plopped on your tongue, handing him back the fork to plop back into your chair, “Told him it was for you and he gave you a deluxe piece.” 

Yoongi hummed, absently replacing your grip on the fork. He drug one pointed prong through a small blotch of icing that had fallen away from the cake. “I’ll have to tell him thank you later…”

“I told Jihoon to mix up the playlist a little bit.” 

You were referencing the auburn headed audio engineer major who was hidden behind an array of open laptops and a giant headset at the front of the reception hall. Yoongi had a feeling he knew what you meant, but he glanced at you from the corner of his eyes anyway. “Oh yeah?”

“Yeah,” You leaned forward in your chair, nudging Yoongi with a soft grin, “I wore closed toed shoes for a reason. Need some non-toe breaking slow dances with my man.”

“Nice try, but I don’t think you’re going to get Jihoon to leave his equipment all alone, especially not with a drunk Soonyoung lurking around—”

You giggled a little bit but there was a sizable amount of offense held in the downturn of your eyebrows as you caught the apex of Yoongi’s elbow and tugged. When he glanced at you, cheeks full of cake, you shook your head, “I meant you, nerd. I want to dance with you.”

Yoongi paused in the next bite of cake he was cutting, blinking at your intense gaze. Something inside him panicked even if his outside demeanor remained calm. The mix of emotions within him clearly rained confusion in you, especially when he cleared his throat and went to set his plate aside. 

“You know, I have to take that practice exam tomorrow morning. Jin is supposed to drive with me and I don’t want to, you know, hold him up or anything,” He averted his gaze the more hurt yours grew. He wrung his fingers together in his lap, uncrossing his legs to lean forward, still avoiding your eyes, “I was thinking we leave here in a second, if that’s okay?”

“Sure,” Yoongi heard it in your voice. He didn’t need to look up. After a moment, he saw you stand, dress fluttering past your knees in his peripheral, “Are you done with your cake?”

His eyes closed, knowing he couldn’t salvage your feelings by changing his mind, sucking it up, and asking you for a dance. Without a word, he nodded. 

You disappeared with the plate in hand just as the first slow song of the night began to play.

“You have to work,” He told the string of fairy lights currently suspended by a few stick on hooks. Deft fingers continued to fumble at the battery packs, turning the batteries inside a second time, forcing the lids shut, nail curling into the on and off switch. Nothing. 

Frustration made the battery pack, the heaviest part of the entire device, slip from his grasp, tumbling to the mountain of pillows pressed against your headboard and effectively yanking all his hard work with the lights from the wall. All that was left was a sad wooden shadow of your initials, nailed into the apartment walls. With no lights.

Yoongi had spent the greater part of the day decorating. The extensive list on your planner in the tiny kitchen said you wouldn’t be home until after dinner and he’d been determined to get something done. 

It’d only been a few weeks since you’d moved into your first place together, just a week since he’d started his first required internship of law school and just a day since your classes had returned. Thus, plastic coverings still sat taped to the television and the window of the microwave and the pull on the blinds. Unpacked boxes made a mountain where there was supposed to be a dining table, an item you didn’t have nor could you afford. 

But Yoongi could afford his day off to dig through the boxes to find all your favorite trinkets (picture frames, fairy lights, candles, the tiny porcelain cat you’d bought him as a joke) and arrange them accordingly. He’d finally set up the printer in the room you’d designated the office just to print off some of your favorite pictures together, losing a few nails along the process but managing to stuff the pictures into frames and scatter them along the walls. 

The pair of your initials next to each other had been his own touch, a quick trip into a craft store where he felt rather underwhelmed by the selection and overwhelmed by the price he’d covered with his debit card. He’d hung them above the bed, center on the wall and the headboard, the dark wood matching the navy pillows you’d stacked to give, as you’d said, some sense of put togetherness. 

A thought had entered his mind when he was shuffling through the options in the middle of the craft store. It would be so much easier if we shared initials. Just one giant M in the middle of the room…

He’d shied away from that thought when he finally located the curve of your surname. 

Yoongi mounted the bed with a wheeze from both his lungs and the worn mattress springs, effectively ruining the decorative pillow mountain as he dug for the string of fairy lights. A similar strung together list of curse words left his lips as he pried at the battery pack again, the flower shaped lights dancing against his short clad legs until there was a gentle knocking on the bedroom door and he dropped them again. 

“Bubs?” You took one step into the room before pausing, aweing around the space. There was a glint in your irises, one he could see from his compromising position, “What are you doing?”

“Can’t get your fairy lights to work,” Yoongi offered shyly, pink creeping to the back of his neck. “I think they’re the ones that were in your dorm, but—”

“If you used the batteries that were already in them, that’s why. They’re like three years old,” The mattress swayed as you clambered on to stand next to him, touching his hand where it had curled around his neck. You laced your fingers together, letting your arms dangle between each other as you again did a sweep of the room. “You did all this?”

An embarrassed sound of affirmation left Yoongi’s throat, watching you carefully. He nearly stumbled into the wall and his carefully hung lettering when you looped your arms around his neck, holding him tightly. 

“Thank you,” You murmured, kissing his throat. 

Yoongi was hesitant in the way he fit his arms around you, subconsciously leaning into your touch. 

Just as soft, he nodded, “I’m trying…”

No amount of wine seemed to moisten his tongue where it was stuck to the roof of his mouth. 

You were effortlessly gorgeous, as always, wrapped up in some emerald sequins number and a devastating smile that made his heart hurt worse than he could ever properly articulate. Yoongi’s cheeks hurt from introducing you, always coming with a shy yet wide smile when his classmate in question made some sort of playfully snide comment about how you were far too beautiful for him. 

At Seokjin’s wedding, it was a bit easier to feel less overwhelmed. Yoongi didn’t know everyone, but he knew a lot of people. Despite Seokjin’s career path not exactly diverging to where Yoongi’s seemed to be going, they were still classmates and thus still shared a lot of the same acquatences, professors, advisors, coworkers. He knew what he was doing for the foreseeable future. He’d recently passed the certification exam, marking him as someone who could now, legally, practice law. He had a job waiting and available for him, one while not exactly ideal would suffice to get his foot in the door and his rent paid for the next few months. 

Yoongi knew you’d be there, too, in his future. Even if his tongue dried every time he thought of how. 

Except he didn’t have to ponder the never ending question of rings and proposals and weddings while attending a wedding. He just had to figure out how to ask you to dance. He’d never forgiven himself for hurting your feelings at Seungcheol’s wedding. 

It was you that was trailing him the entire evening, him being the connection between most of the people at the reception and yourself. You were the stranger this time, not each of you mutually connected to the guests at the wedding. Yet, it didn’t stop you from becoming fast friends with Yoongi’s classmates and professional connections alike, dragging each of you into twenty minute long conversations about the state of nonprofit litigation and the staggering rate of black cats put down by animal shelters. 

Breaks between people gave Yoongi the opportunity to wet his tongue with a splash of sacchrine wine, poke his tongue around the tulip shape of his lips, and attempt to ask, no matter the music playing through the loud speakers overhead, only to be interrupted again. And again.

And again. 

Yoongi thought you were free by the time you’d nearly circled back around to your table where Taehyung and Namjooon were engaged in some sort of debate that involved the plastic knives from their baked chicken. He stopped you before you could sit, dragging crooked fingertips down the inside of your wrist to lace into your fingers and tug. 

The muscle felt heavy inside his mouth and he couldn’t bring himself to hold your eye contact as his heart hammered wildly inside his chest, reminding him suddenly of all the things. Nearly five years together. Two apartments together. Both of your names on the car lease. 

“Yoongi,” Your thumb swiped over his knuckles, immediately calming the roar of blood in his ears. A frown had slowly worked into the creases on either side of your lips, and you tugged back on his hand. “Is everything okay?”

He was a half second away from blurting out his impulse request, not caring about the nagging part of his subconscious that noted your open toed shoe choice for the evening when your grip was falling away from his. 

“Sorry, Yoongi!” Seokjin cheered as he spun a drunk circle in the opposite direction with you curled tightly in his embrace, “I have to steal a dance from your girlfriend.”

Yoongi watched as happiness easily overtook your features, clinging to Seokjin’s shoulders as you threw your head back at whatever rambles were leaving from his friend’s stupor. 

“Just wanted to know if you wanted to dance,” Yoongi murmured to himself, letting his arm fall limp to his side, “I hate myself for hurting your feelings every day that I can’t get my shit together and just—”

“Yoongi,” It was Namjoon saying his name, waving around his plastic knife. “You okay?”

Taehyung ignored the obvious discomfort on his friend’s features as he approached the table with dragging steps, still muttering to himself. 

“What do you think about sporks?”

“Where are you going?”

The droopy bucket hat in Yoongi’s grip crumpled more, keys still clinking together where they dangled from his free hand. He turned cheek to shoulder where you stood in the threshold with your arms crossed. 

“Fishing with Jin,” He lamented, “I told you that a week ago.”

“A week ago we didn’t have a closet full of laundry to do. Or a sink full of dishes to get done.”

You bristled at his involtunary check of his watch. “It’s only seven in the morning. We have all day to get those things done. I’ll help you when I get back…”

“I have to have our loan papers into the bank by tomorrow morning. Are we going to finish those too when you get back?”

“Yes,” Yoongi said simply, “There isn’t that much left to do on them.”

“For yours there isn’t. You’re the primary signee. I have virtually the entire packet left to complete,” After a second of staring angrily at him, you shook your head, “You know what, I’ll just do it all while you’re gone. Have fun.”

He knew you weren’t upset about a packet of questions you had to complete in order to approve you as a secondary individual on the loan for the house you two were planning on purchasing. You were upset about having to fill out an entirely different set of paperwork based on your relationship status. You’d voiced it tightly while handing him a second pen the night before when the ink in his had ran out. 

“This would be so much easier if we were married,” You’d tried to smile when his gaze flicked up to yours but he caught it anyway. He was hurting your feelings. Again. Not because of the paperwork. Because of what the paperwork implied. 

Because of the contents of the tiny velvet box that had been shoved into the front pouch of his laptop bag for the better part of six months, idle, without a finger to reside on. 

The shut of the door behind him was just as soft as his pained, “Bye…”

Yoongi, numbly, let the reel release, watching the reflection of the blue tinted line as it soared into the water, landing yards away from him with a soft plop. He set the reel in his hands, gently turning as he watched the end of the line where it disappeared into the lake create tiny ripples as it slowly came back toward where he stood on the shore. 

“How did you know?” Yoongi blurted suddenly. 

Seokjin didn’t miss a beat, “Well, generally, the fish is big enough that you can feel it tug back on the line. You have to set the hook so it doesn’t get off but don’t let it swallow it because that’s not good and—”

“No,” Yoongi stopped spinning the reel to drop his pole into the stick made stand he’d pushed into the mud on the bank. Both his fingers went to his face, dragging down on his cheeks. “How...how did you know when it was right to propose?”

“Ohh,” Seokjin stayed silent when he cast his pole again, clicking gentle as he turned the tiny device. “That’s what this is about. Has she said something?”

“No. She doesn’t have to. I can just tell.”

“Is marriage something you’ve talked about?”

“Yes.”

“Is it something you both want.”

“Yeah…”

“Do you love her?”

Yoongi’s hands fell away from his face and his features screwed up starting from his nose and ending at the part of his mouth where he, almost offended, affirmed, “More than anything else.”

“Then what’s stopping you? You could elope tonight, if you want,” Seokjin eyed Yoongi as he brought in an empty hook, letting it dangle from a second in mid air before tossing it back out into the water, “We’ll be your witnesses or whatever—”

“I’m scared.” Seokjin stopped talking upon Yoongi’s blunt statement, quietly turning away at his reel until Yoongi continued, floodgates now let loose, “I can’t hurt her feelings like I continue to, but what if it’s worse when we get married. There’s never been anyone else and there won’t be anyone else. I have no fucking clue what I’m doing because of it.”

“You’re a lovesick fool,” Seokjin confirmed, “Hey, your pole is jiggling and as much as your my friend and whatever, I’d rather not lose it, so—”

Yoongi begrudgingly picked up the pole where it was bouncing around in the makeshift twig holder, slow at first in turning at the handle but releazing whatever was on the other end was going to need more effort from him. He grunted into the next few turns, “I can’t even fish right.”

“You never could. You waste my bait everytime we go out,” Seokjin shrugged, “But you try. And I love you, in like, a brotherly way. That’s all I care about when I ask you to come along with me.”

“Is this your weird analogy to tell me that I won’t know until we try and that love is all that matters in the end?” Yoongi stumbled in trying to tug back on whatever the massive object was he was bringing in. 

“No,” Seokjin sat aside his pole, striding across the bank to slide the pole from Yoongi’s grasp. “I’m telling you to go propose to your soon to be wife while I get this moss off.”

“How do you know it’s moss and not a record breaking catfish?”

“It’s moss. Go.”

Yoongi found you curled up on the couch surrounded by half folded laundry, your eyes clearly lined in the slightest tints of pink and red, the loan application half open on the floor. He wasted no time, not wanting to hear your garbled inquiries as to whether he’d had fun or not because frankly, with how you were at the moment, he didn’t deserve to have had fun. 

“I’m not giving you this, yet.”

Your attempt at a friendly expression morphed into a confused squint. “What?”

He dug the box from his sweatpants pocket, flicking it open to show you a glimpse of the glittering jewelry inside. “I’m not giving you this, yet,” He repeated. He approached you, knocking aside a stack of his hoodies to kneel in front of you, hand engulfing your knees while the latter placed the ring box on your thigh, “but I’m going to. Soon.”

You laughed in spite of yourself, gentle at first and then bitter on the end, “I’m not upset because you haven’t proposed to me yet, Yoongi. I don’t like the implications of that.”

“I know I’m hurting your feelings. All the time,” He lifted a finger when you went to protest, “You don’t have to spare my feelings, of all things.”

“I try really, really hard for you. All the time. But that’s not a guilt trip, I know I need to do better. I’m trying right now, to give you a glimpse of what I should have done a long time ago.”

“I know that,” He let you interrupt him this time as the tiniest of tears lipped down the slope of your nose, “I’ve never doubted that. I just thought you’d changed your mind.”

Yoongi wanted you to vocalize your feelings, so he squeezed your knee and offered, “Changed my mind about what, love?”

“About us. Our future,” You shrugged, casting your gaze aside, “Not that marriage is the end all be all or that it’s just a title that helps with some tax information it’s just...”

“What you want for us,” Yoongi nodded, “It’s what I want too. I haven’t changed my mind.” 

“I didn’t really think you had it’s just...hard to not let myself think those things sometimes.”

“I’m sorry I ever made you doubt any sort of commitment I want to have in our relationship,” Yoongi leaned forward to chastely kiss away the droplets of tears clinging to the pouted round of your bottom lip. “I’m sorry I haven’t been trying hard enough for this, either.”

“I love you,” You cupped his cheeks, keeping his lips a fraction from yours. 

“I can’t wait to propose to you,” He countered.

“And I can’t wait to say yes.”

Yoongi didn’t hear the words the DJ was projecting through speakers stationed at all corners of the reception hall. He was too focused on the swirl of lights on the dance floor, ones that had dimmed into a glittery gold and ceased to move in the calculated circles they’d previously been completing. The back part of his mind wondered did we pick that color? Gold matches pink...and then he glanced at the baby pink bow tie clipped onto his collar, one he subconsciously straightened as the DJ continued to chatter on. 

He contemplated the color of the lights and the flavor of the cake icing and the extensive guest list in which half hadn’t RSVP’ed for the reception but now milled among everyone else and kept taking him away from you to chat. It was silent now, no one around him except others members of the wedding party around him, and he didn’t have to contemplate whether to seek someone out for conversation or search his subconscious for the name of your cousins’ significant other. He knew his next move, bending at the waist in front of the high backed chair you perched in and holding out a gentle palm for you even as the DJ continued to chatter over the soft applause of the guests. 

“Hey,” Yoongi murmured.

You smiled under the gold lights as they cast shadows down the contours of your features, “Hi.”

“I like your ring,” His fingers crooked when you placed your hand in his to fiddle at the diamond studded band. 

“I like your last name,” You squeezed his hand. 

Yoongi’s lips covered your fingers, gentle in pecking each one, spending extra time on the one where diamonds reflected in the gold. 

His voice muffled on the bend of your digits. “May I have this dance?”

You stood at that, gripping his fingers tightly. 

“I thought you’d never ask.”

[tiramisiyu]

Tears of Themis: Main Story 5-13 Translation

Translated parts: Chapter 5 – Sounds of Falling Snow (Part 1, 2, 3): 5-1 / 5-3 / 5-5 / 5-7 / 5-9 / 5-11 / 5-13 ♦️ ♦️  5-14 / 5-16 / 5-18 / 5-20 / 5-22 / 5-24 / 5-26 / 5-28 ♦️ ♦️ 5-29 / 5-31 / 5-33 / 5-35 / 5-37 / 5-39 / 5-40 / 5-42 / 5-43

Translation Masterlist: here

Video:  https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Bv411C711?p=7

Xia Yan and I placed the documents we had found in Kong Moli’s house in front of us. We suddenly felt that this case might be more complicated than we’d expected.

Xia Yan: This Wang Han is the head of Rainbow River Village.

Xia Yan: He was always storming at the front lines of the rights protection fight for the pollution of the Rainbow River water.

Xia Yan: Liu Yuhai – I just checked from the citizen information database. He should be a village citizen of Rainbow River Village.

Xia Yan: But in the NXX case file, I didn’t notice this person’s information.

Xia Yan: On the surface, he seems to not be involved with this case.

MC: No need to talk about Qiu Heng, the essential person behind Kong Moli losing the case.

MC: Then linking the dismissal letter and the investment plan record together…

MC: Could it be hinting at Kong Moli’s boss?

MC: As for that notebook… the missing pages just might record information that directly implicates Heirson.

Xia Yan: If these deliberately-left clues are all related to Kong Moli or the Rainbow River pollution case…

Xia Yan: Don’t you think the related people are too many? Plus, the relations between these people are not clear.

Xia Yan: Especially Kong Moli’s unexpected death…

Xia Yan: Theoretically, if Heirson planned to shut her mouth, they would definitely do this quietly. 

Xia Yan: All of a sudden, so many involved people come in – aren’t they afraid of the plan leaking?

Xia Yan: Plus, Kong Moli is just a typical reporter. If they want to deal with her, they don’t need to mobilize such large forces.

MC: Why do I feel that after investigating around, my doubts increased instead?

MC: We still have no way of confirming the hacker’s identity…

MC: Could it really be Youyou?

Xia Yan: Instead of guessing this and that here, it would be better if we directly looked for Mu Ziyou and asked him clearly.

The colour of the sky was gradually darkening. The fiery setting sun lit up the puffs of clouds in the sky.

I took up my phone to look – it was already time for dinner. 

The orphanage’s receiving time for outsiders had already passed. Today, there was no way of meeting Youyou.

MC: It’s late, we should get off work for today. Do you have any plans for dinner?

MC: Do you want to come to my place? I’ll cook something with noodles.

Xia Yan: I’ll send you home; we should get takeout.

Xia Yan: Though I really want to eat the noodles you make, you must be really tired from running around all day. Let’s do it next time instead.

MC: That’s also fine. Then in a moment, send me back on your motorcycle; I kind of want that place’s takeout. 

Kong Moli’s House’s Neighbourhood

Xia Yan and I locked up Kong Moli’s house door, taking all items and descending the floor.

We’d just gotten out of the floor door when Xia Yan suddenly got close to me, one hand blocking my waist.

MC: Xia Yan, you…

Xia Yan: Shh, quiet, there’s someone following us. 

MC: !!!

Instantly, a current of cold air climbed along my spine. The skin on my back seemed to pop.

My heart was in a panicked frenzy, and I agitatedly looked in all directions, yet I didn’t dare to make movements that were too large. I could only subconsciously hold my work briefcase in my arms tightly.

Xia Yan: Don’t be worried, walk forward naturally. I’m here.

Xia Yan’s arm was continuously placed behind my waist, keeping its distance.

He didn’t touch me, yet it let me feel the warm temperature transmitted from his body.

Just like the words he spoke near my ear – though the sound was quiet, it still let one feel particularly at peace.

Xia Yan: Listening from the footsteps, it’s not an adult man. I’ll count 3, 2, 1, you’ll run forward, and I’ll deal with him.

I nodded lightly and carefully analyzed the road conditions in front, selecting the best course of action. 

I reached out my hand into the briefcase, feeling the lipstick tranquillizer gun Xia Yan gave me.

I didn’t know how far the shooting range for this thing was, and if it could help Xia Yan. 

Xia Yan: Ready? 3, 2, 1!

As soon as the words fell from Xia Yan’s lips, I immediately ran forward two steps, took out the lipstick tranquillizer gun, turned around and pointed it in the direction he had sprinted in. 

In one stride, Xia Yan leaped to the road corner’s flowerbed, his hand movements so fast that you could almost see an afterimage, pulling out a skinny little body from behind the flowerbed.

Xia Yan: I didn’t believe it when I heard the footsteps earlier – how is it actually a little kid?

Seeing the person that Xia Yan had grabbed in his hand, I was startled.

The clothes on the child’s body were so dirty, his mouth set in a pout, and stubbornness was written all over his white, tender small face.

But his eyes were very cold. He looked coldly at Xia Yan, then at me, not saying a single word.

MC: Youyou, why are you here!

--

Home

I never could have thought that we would meet Youyou on the bottom floor of Kong Moli’s house. 

It further confirmed Xia Yan’s and my guesses about Youyou’s identity.

He should be that hacker that invaded the big data lab.

MC: Orphanage head, don’t worry, Youyou is here with me. 

MC: It’s late now, I’ll let Youyou live for a night at my house. I’ll send him back to the orphanage tomorrow.

MC: Sure, sure, no problem at all, it was me that brought trouble to you.

MC: Mm, goodbye. orphanage head.

I hung up and turned around to see one big and one little boy sitting on the sofa, clutching the iPads, looking completely engrossed.

MC: Aren’t you two… going to eat?

MC: Plus, Xia Yan, didn’t I tell you to give Youyou a bath first…

On the way home while bringing Youyou, aside from buying dinner, Xia Yan and I bought Youyou two sets of clothes so he could change and wash. 

Looking at that child’s wretched look, he must have suffered a lot to sneak out of the orphanage.

I had originally intended to have Xia Yan give Youyou a bath and have him be able to eat while fresh and clean, but these two people…

MC: What kind of game are you guys addicted to…

I thought that my own pressure was already sufficiently low, dealing with the indifferent two people sitting on the sofa.

Just when I was about to make my move and snatch away with iPads, Xia Yan suddenly gave a proud laugh towards Youyou. 

Xia Yan: Did you see the time? 10 minutes, 9:42 seconds. Faster than you by three whole minutes. Do you give in?

Mu Ziyou: …

Xia Yan: You should tell me now – why did you hack into the big data lab? Exactly what suspicious points does Kong Moli’s case have?

Xia Yan: Where did you get the evidence clues that you put back in the loft?

Xia Yan: And the password cylinder – what’s the password, and what’s installed inside?

Mu Ziyou: …

Mu Ziyou stared at Xia Yan once, still refusing to open his mouth. 

Xia Yan: Jeez, this kid – a man should be willing to pay if he’s agreed to the bet.

Xia Yan: We just agreed that whoever lost would answer all the other person’s questions. It was clearly you who lost, alright?

MC: Xia Yan, can you explain to me exactly what you two are doing?

Xia Yan: Don’t we have a heap of questions to ask this kid? But he won’t open his mouth no matter what.

Xia Yan: So I just made a bet with him. Who would’ve thought that he would refuse to acknowledge his loss…

MC: What did you two bet?

Xia Yan: Whoever can break into the big data lab’s basic-level firewall faster.

MC: …

What did Lu Jinghe do wrong? What did the big data lab do wrong again...?

Xia Yan: Don’t worry, it won’t damage the big data lab’s systems.

Xia Yan: I also chose this to give him a break – after all, he’s more used to the systems of the big data centre.

MC: (What you say has logic. You could even talk the sky to death…)

Youyou, having heard what Xia Yan said, shot him an even colder glance, lowered his head, poking at the iPad without a word.

MC: Youyou, do you still remember me?

MC: We’ve met at the beginning when your adoptive mother came to consult about adoption procedures. At that time, you still called her Auntie Moli. 

I cold-shouldered Xia Yan on the side, walking up to Youyou, squatting and tilting my head up. In an instant, I actually had somewhat of a feeling that while things hadn’t changed, he had. 

He was still that child who disliked interacting with others, but that woman that he cherished with all his heart had already left from the earth forever.

I didn’t know where or when it was that Kong Moli had met Youyou.

But she officially finished adoption procedures around the end of July last year.

By my calculations, the time for which Youyou had a family was actually just over a month…

MC: Youyou, are you hungry…

I inadvertently took a glance – the pattern on the inside of Youyou’s left arm grabbed my attention.

INSPECTION START

“3” Tattoo

MC: (This child’s arm has… the number 3? Looks like it was burned on?)

MC: (My god, it couldn’t be that someone deliberately burned it on, right…)

MC: (I’ve heard that some human traffickers will give a number to trafficked children. Youyou couldn’t be…)

MC: (What exactly has he gone through…)

Sallow cheeks, bad facial colour reason:

> Insufficient nutrition

> Negatively affected by medicines

MC: (Why is Youyou so thin? Typical children will have some baby fat, yet his cheeks…)

MC: (Lawyer Zuo and I have gone to that orphanage before. Child abuse is something that definitely wouldn’t happen there…)

MC: (Could it be that Youyou originally had a weak constitution?)

MC: (He should still be going under treatment for his autism, right? Could it be that the medicines negatively affected his development?)

MC: (How about we send him to Dr. Mo tomorrow. Perhaps there will be a better treatment method.)

Height

MC: (Youyou is already 10, why do I feel that he’s a lot shorter than boys the same age as him…)

MC: (There are many secrets hidden on this child. If he’s not willing to talk, it’s best to not force him.)

INSPECTION END

Mu Ziyou: Get revenge for mom. I’ll give you two the password of the password cylinder.

MC: Revenge?!

Such a term coming from a child’s mouth – I felt inevitably frightened.

Xia Yan’s and my eyes met. Looking from his eyes, I could see that his way of thinking was the same as mine.

Xia Yan: Mu Ziyou, do you understand what you are saying?

Mu Ziyou: Qin Shan is almost dead. When he dies, mom will be forever hated by people.

Mu Ziyou: The things you need are in the password cylinder.

Mu Ziyou: Get revenge for mom. I’ll give you these things.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Inkayacu paracasensis

By José Carlos Cortés 

Etymology: King of the Water

First Described By: Clarke et al., 2010

Classification: Dinosauromorpha, Dinosauriformes, Dracohors, Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoromorpha, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Averaptora, Avialae, Euavialae, Avebrevicauda, Pygostaylia, Ornithothoraces, Euornithes, Ornithuromorpha, Ornithurae, Neornithes, Neognathae, Neoaves, Aequorlitornithes, Ardeae, Aequornithes, Austrodyptornithes, Sphenisciformes, Spheniscidae

Status: Extinct

Time and Place: Between 37.2 and 33.9 million years ago, in the Priabonian age of the Eocene of the Paleogene 

Inkayacu is known from Yumaque Point of the Otuma Formation in Ica, Peru 

Physical Description: Inkayacu was an extinct penguin, and had a lot of similar traits to other extinct penguins - though resembling modern forms, extinct ones were unique in having extremely large bill size and just large body size in general. Inkayacu was about 1.5 meters long, which is a significant jump from the biggest living penguin (the Emperor Penguin at 1.2 meters long), and Inkayacu wasn’t even the biggest penguin at the time. It had a long, pointed bill, much longer than those seen on living members of the group. And - uniquely - we know the color of Inkayacu! Unlike living penguins, which are all varying shades of black and white with some splashes of other colors elsewhere, Inkayacu was grey and brown. We only known these colors form the flippers (wings), which show grey backs of the flipper and brown fronts, but it’s reasonable to suppose this pattern would follow the patterns of living penguins, where the color of the back of the flipper extends throughout the back of the animal, and the color of the front extends to the front. Thus, we depict Inkayacu with a grey back and a brown front, but this is still a conjecture. The melanosomes are similar to modern birds, long and narrow within the feathers - living penguins actually have wider ones. Other than that, the feathers of Inkayacu are similar to modern penguins in other ways, indicating that it had the same aquatic lifestyle. As such, it was flightless.

Diet: Inkayacu, like other penguins, would have fed on a wide variety of fish and aquatic invertebrates. 

Icadyptes and Inkayacu by Apokryltaros, CC BY-SA 3.0 

Behavior: Though shaped in a lot of ways like living penguins, Inkayacu was different in a number of ways. It had fewer melanosomes in its feathers than living penguins - and these melanosomes provide rigidity in modern penguin feathers that help with deep-sea diving. Without such melanosomes, Inkayacu might not have been as well adapted to deep diving. Still, it was clearly adapted for spending its life in the sea, diving and sea-flying all over its habitat. It would have used its long beak to stab and grab food, especially slippery food that might be hard to get a grip on. Using its flippers, it could propel itself through the water. Its feet were small and not good for moving, so on land it would probably waddle. This is not an uncommon bird to find, fossil-wise, and so it stands to reason that it would have been very social like living penguins. It would have probably laid its eggs on land, and took care of its young with mated partners. Given it lived in Peru, in the Eocene, it was more adapted for warm weather than cold, and wouldn’t have ventured very far south. 

By Julio Lacerda, used with permission from Earth Archives 

Ecosystem: Inkayacu lived along the Pervuian Priabonian coast, the Western coast of South America right as the global rainforest of the Eocene was collapsing and being replaced with more varying and arid climates. This was also a time of notable climate change and effects on the ocean, leading to a small mass extinction (especially in the oceans) at this time - killing off many iconic forms, including proto-whales. The conditions of this mass extinction actually allowed the penguins to flourish, and Inkayacu was a part of that flourishing. Inkayacu lived alongside proto-whales like Cynthiacetus and Mystacodon - a toothed baleen whale. Inkayacu wasn’t the only penguin in this area, but was joined by the larger and longer-beaked Icadyptes. As for proper fish, there were ray-finned fish like Engraulis and Sardinops, and unnamed sharks. There may have also been the marine snake Pterosphenus. There were many kinds of invertebrates as well. Inkayacu would probably have had to look out for the sharks and whales, though the fish would have had to look out for it! The coast that Inkayacu would have spent its time on would probably have been more rocky than sandy, though it’s uncertain either way. 

By Ripley Cook 

Other: Inkayacu is very closely related to living penguins and is just outside the group of modern penguins and their closest relatives, so it showcases the evolution of penguins towards what we’re familiar with today. It’s interesting to note that short beaks seem to be characteristic of the modern crown group of penguins, and that long beaks were found in penguins even as close to the crown group as Inkayacu.

~ By Meig Dickson

Sources under the Cut 

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Clarke, J.A.; Ksepka, D.T.; Stucchi, M.; Urbina, M.; Giannini, N.; Bertelli, S.; Narváez, Y.; Boyd, C.A. (2007). "Paleogene equatorial penguins challenge the proposed relationship between biogeography, diversity, and Cenozoic climate change". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 104 (28): 11545–11550.

Clarke, J. A., D. T. Ksepka, R. Salas-Gismondi, A. J. Altamirano, M. D. Shawkey, L. D’Alba, J. Vinther, T. J. DeVries, and P. Baby. 2010. Fossil evidence for evolution of the shape and color of penguin feathers. Science 330

Hoffstetter, R. 1958. Un serpent marin du genre Pterosphenus (Pt. Sheppardi nov. sp.) dans L’Éocène supérieur de L’Équateur (Amérique de Sud). Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France 6:45-50

Hooker, J.J.; Collinson, M.E.; Sille, N.P. (2004). "Eocene-Oligocene mammalian faunal turnover in the Hampshire Basin, UK: calibration to the global time scale and the major cooling event". Journal of the Geological Society. 161 (2): 161–172.

Ivany, Linda C.; Patterson, William P.; Lohmann, Kyger C. (2000). "Cooler winters as a possible cause of mass extinctions at the Eocene/Oligocene boundary". Nature. 407 (6806): 887–890.

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Marocco, R., and C. d.e. Muizon. 1988. Los vertebrados del Neogeno de La Costa Sur del Perú: Ambiente sedimentario y condiciones de fosilización. Bulletin de l'Institut Frances d'Etudes Andines 17(2):105-117

Martinez-Cacers, M., and C. de Muizon. 2011. A toothed mysticete from the Middle Eocene to Lower Oligocene of the Pisco Basin, Peru: new data on the origin and feeding evolution of Mysticeti. Sixth Triennial Conference on Secondary Adaptation of Tetrapods to Life in Water 56-57

Molina, Eustoquio; Gonzalvo, Concepción; Ortiz, Silvia; Cruz, Luis E. (2006-02-28). "Foraminiferal turnover across the Eocene–Oligocene transition at Fuente Caldera, southern Spain: No cause–effect relationship between meteorite impacts and extinctions". Marine Micropaleontology. 58 (4): 270–286.  

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[anodyne-sunflower]

Smutty ABC’s for Newt Scamander (Req.)

A/N: As promised, the sexual alphabet for Newt. Again, these won’t be overly done. If you want more detail, you’ll have to request a letter for them. Enjoy! I can’t link the Headcanon game, but I reblogged it a day or so ago, so feel free to go find it. :)

***

A (Aftercare)- He’s affectionate in his own way, that semi-awkward, oddly charming behavior you come to love. There is a silence a bit after intimacy with him, but not an uncomfortable one. Just a soft silence, barely cut by the sounds of your breaths returning to normal. Newt often observes your body, gently letting his fingertips trace the curves and any fine details his curious eyes take in. He likes these moments, because nothing is more satisfying than mapping out every fine point about you.

B (Body Part)- Newt doesn’t particularly have a favorite body part of his own on him. He doesn’t much pay close attention to himself, but to you, he does. If asked what he likes physically about you, it’s everything. There is none he likes more than the other, he simply finds beauty in every part of you.

C (Cum)- There is one thing he tends to have a bit of a fondness for, and while he can’t bring himself to outright ever say it, it can be obvious to you. It’s those times he goes down on you, tongue and lips pleasuring you in so many ways you easily cave to the affections. Your cum sticks to his lips, sometimes his chin and cheeks whenever you squirm too much or can’t take it anymore. He pulls away after, laying a soft, tender kiss on your inner thigh before trailing up and hesitating above your lips. He has that spark in his green eyes, trying to compose himself but then he does it, kissing you gently and letting you taste yourself.

D (Dirty Secret)- Love marks. Newt may not always bluntly say every fetish he holds, but who needs words when there were actions. It made him smile looking at you, knowing underneath your clothes there was evidence of your lovemaking. Every small mark showing where his lips had been, sometimes on the juncture of your neck and shoulder, hidden just barely under your blouse. Or, right on your thigh, covered by the layers of your dress. You weren’t aware of his fervent gaze, but that made him smile all the more.

E (Experienced)- Newt was never the type to sleep around exactly, but that didn’t make him inexperienced. He was well versed in the anatomy of humans, just as he was creatures. He understood the complexities of it all, and even found it rather intriguing. To say he knew his way around your body, would be an understatement.

F (Favorite position)- Doggy style. While he loved watching you be pleasures beneath him, every facial expression on display, there was something far more tantalizing about viewing you from behind. He could tangle his fingers through your hair, his lips could travel down your spine and feel the delightful chills it caused. He could figure out what made you tick without having your pleasured face to go off on, and that made it entirely exciting for him.

G (Goofy)- Newt isn’t purposely goofy in bed, but it can happen. There are moments he manages to make humorous by just being himself. Being intimate in his work space was the number one cause of that. You couldn’t count all the times you’d be in the beginnings of passion only to roll over onto a Zouwu toy. Or have your jewelry stolen by a Niffler, or even your blouse, with all its shiny buttons, being dragged away.

H (Hair)- Newt doesn’t exactly take the time to always shave every part of himself. But, that’s what you believed suited him. He was well groomed enough, and there was always some delight in seeing that patch of hair as you unbuttoned his pants.

I (Intimacy)- He’s very affectionate. Whenever you or him initiate sex, there’s much foreplay. And it need not be overtly sexual at the start. Sometimes it’s brief touches, just delicate enough it’s like a soft breeze that causes a sigh of comfort. Or a few kisses here and there, trailing across heated skin and to more private areas. He undresses you slowly, sometimes looking to you for approval, or simply to watch your expression change from anticipation to full blown arousal.

J (Jack off)- Newt doesn’t really do this often, as he finds himself far too busy to worry over such matters. He’s well happy just spending those pleasurable moments with you involved. But, when he does find himself in need, and too far from home, he’ll do it in the confines of his bed or shower. He doesn’t take his time, he just envisions you and that’s all he ever needs. His strokes are rushed, somewhat sloppy on himself, but he imagines you’re there and before he cums, he bites down, fighting the groan that is begging to be released.

K (Kink)- He couldn’t recount when it started, but it was like some precious habit he had come to eagerly await. Every time you came home to him, he’d be there, nearly running up the steps of his hidden basement to the kitchen where you always placed your keys and belongings. Sometimes you’d find him out of breath, barely having made it up the steps and to you on time. He had a flustered look, but one of arousal all the same until you smiled at him. “I’m back.” You’d say, before teasingly walking up to him and barely curving a finger around one suspender and tugging him down for a kiss. You’d pull away, letting him go and giggling as he just smiled and looked away in happiness.

L (location)- Newt isn’t picky on places to have you. It could be your bed, shower, office or even in his own work space. If the moment is right, you’ll both have each other.

M (Motivation)- There are so many things that causes Newt to be in the mood, but most of all it’s just you in close proximity. It’s as if his sense kick into overdrive, and everything is slow and perfect and he feels this overwhelming need to have you. He can smell your perfume, reminding him of how well it mixed with your own scent as you made love. Or just the heat of your body near him, so warm and inviting. It would be your touch that ended him, though. No matter how innocent or meaningless, it could simply be a pat on his back congratulating him on this or that and he’d find himself gripping your wrist and silently begging you not to go just yet. Not until he could love you properly.

N (No)- Newt wouldn’t be into anything overly kinky. He wouldn’t mind introducing new toys or positions into the bedroom, but overly rough play wouldn’t be one of them. Not if it actually caused you pain, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

O (Oral)- Newt highly prefers to pleasure you. He isn’t opposed to blow jobs, but he finds watching you in throes of passion to be a far more blissful time. He’s quite good at it as well, knowing exactly how to use his tongue and lips in unison. It doesn’t take much to bring you to the edge, almost as if he studied just the proper techniques it took to get you off. He always starts slow, tasting you, noting the movements and patterns that cause a particularly loud moan to come from you. He looks up on occasion, eyes beaming when he can see just how much you’re enjoying it.

P (Pace)- Newt starts off slow, always giving you both time to enjoy the session and build up to that high. But, as it goes on his pace becomes more desperate, sloppy, eager to reach that peak.

Q (Quickie)- Newt does not mind a quickie one bit. He likely encourages them, and finds it amusing when you come down to the basement and drag him off somewhere before you leave for the day or before bed.

R (Risk)- Newt has no issue experimenting, he is a researcher after all. It’s in his nature to take risks. If it’s something that excites you, it’ll easily capture his attention.

S (Stamina)- He’s got an average stamina, but he can go a few rounds so long as there is rest between. That being said, he’s happy to keep you entertained between sessions. Your his main concern, after all, and he’ll often pleasure you with his fingers or tongue if you’re still awaiting more.

T (Toy)- Newt doesn’t exactly own toys for you both. He wouldn’t actively seek them out either. He’s content with what you’re naturally equipped with, but he wouldn’t be opposed to them being introduced if you wanted to try it.

U (Unfair)-Newt is a tease, even if he won’t outwardly admit it. There’s something wonderful about watching you squirm and try to hold onto whatever control you have before you must beg him. He never takes it too far, but just enough to see you moan and whimper in bed.

V (Volume)- Newt isn’t very loud in the bedroom. Most of his moans and groans are bit back or muffled by him nuzzling into your neck. He’d much rather listen and hear you call out his name or some mangled form of it while in ecstasy.

W (Wild card)- Newt has this thing, where he doesn’t mind watching you bathe or shower. It’s only when you invite him to join you, but he’ll find himself standing back and intently noting every action of yours. There’s something beautiful about it, the way the water and soap slip down your skin, curving patterns that perfectly envelope your figure. He has to fight back bothering you, because he simply wants to catch the water droplets and follow their trail along the dip of your back and bottom.

X (X-ray)- Newt is of average size, and just above his cock there’s a patch of hair that leads the trail to it. It’s tempting to look at, and even better when he’s aroused.

Y (Yearning)- Newt has a pretty stable sex drive, and it doesn’t take too much to arouse him. It wouldn’t be unfair to say that if you both are around one another, he is always eager to be intimate with you.

Z (Zzz)- He doesn’t fall asleep easily at all, you often do before he does. He spends the time watching you, smiling softly as you remain peaceful besides him. He touches you gently, just enough to allow you your sleep, and runs his finger up your side. He merely wishes to admire you.

***

A/N: Damn, what a journey lol Pretty sure I wasn’t taught the alphabet as a kid just to grow up and write smut about it...but, here I am.

[darkspellmaster]

Young Justice Theory: Connections to the Crisis Quartet....

So about this rather interesting spoiler I discovered thanks to the CBR board... Better safe than sorry on this one because if this turns out to be true then it’s a doozy of a situation that the crew is going to be put into. So a fair warning before you dive in...there are spoilers below to several DC comic events: Identity Crisis, Count down to Infinite Crisis, Infinite Crisis, Identity Crisis, Crisis on Infinite Earths, 52, Countdown to Final Crisis and Final Crisis. 

These stories contain: Death, some gore, and at least one has a rather unpleasant factor of rape being involved as part of it’s story. Because I’m going to be discussing the above things partly in this and there will be pictures that might upset some people I just want to give people a heads up. You have been warned going in. 

Okay so what the hell am I going on about and honestly when I was reading this I was freaking out. So a post of so ago I mentioned some theories about this season and talked about the possibility of the Anti life equation factoring into the story. Thanks to the gallery for the next three episodes, this wonderful post here from Spitfire or Bust, the Behind the scenes footage from this season on the DCUniverse, a post on CBR’s forums, and a link to  young justice.tv spoilers, I can almost 90% say Seasons 3 and 4 and possibly 5 will be dealing with the Crisis Quartet, or at least three of them, from DC’s main comics. 

We know that this is going to be a thing as Greg already confirmed in season 2 that season 3 was going to deal with Apokolips, just not how much directly (as this story can’t be told in 26 episodes, no way in hell it would be horribly paced). 

We also know that the names of the episodes have been pretty much confirmed as Episode 11 is Called Home Fires and the Behind the Scenes image confirmed the title in the image that we see with Iris and Bart. 

The site in question has it as episode 9, however this confirms it as Episode 11. However they have the others right so far, so either BTS got the number wrong or the site did. Doesn’t change the factor that there’s some thing interesting in the titles. 

Take each of the first letter of the first word of the names of the titles, and you get: 

Prepare the Anti Life Equation. 

This little message, has ties not only to Apokolips and Darkseid, but it also has ties directly to the Crisis Quartet and the fall out that happened after. 

So first what is the Quartet? Well it is a group of four Crisis that happened in DC comics, three of which were between 2004 to 2010, while the first happened in 1985 -1986 and affected all stories that followed going forward after it. 

So to simplify things. Here’s a fast rundown on the important factors about these Crisis and their connections to YJ Season 3, 4 and maybe 5 if things go well. 

So Way back in the 1980s DC was having issue with keeping up with it’s own continuity because there was so many books and worlds. Because of this and their own anniversary coming up they tasked then Teen Titan’s writers Marv Wolfman and artist/co-writer Jorge Perez, to come up with an event that would solidify the DCU’s continuity. These two came up with: 

Crisis on Infinite Earths: 

Now this story while really important as the backbone in the main DCU going forward doesn’t have as much to do with YJ in the long run as of yet. But it does have some important factors that will be coming into play I think later on, and we already saw a part of this happening in Season 2 with Walley vanishing. So bullet points ahoy for only the things that are important in this story for later in comments. 

Short and long of it is that a being named the monitor trying to stop another creature named the Anti-monitor from destroying the Universe. All the different DC worlds come together to fight him, Super-girl dies, along with several other characters, during this event where all the worlds in DC merge into one world with a over all collected history.  (This collection is still in print and you can find it at your local bookstore or comic shop.)

- Barry Allen vanishes as he’s running from the future or from an event that is coming from the future to warn Batman and the others an disperses into the speed force. 

We’ve already seen this with Wally in his run where he vanishes in season 2 following a pattern of what happened to Barry. 

- Superman from the Golden age, his Lois Lane, Alexander Luthor (son of Lex Luthor from another earth where the Villain versions of the JL resided and Lex and the others there are heroes), and Superboy Prime ( a superboy that is the lone hero of his world) all are put into a pocket dimension as the worlds are merged into one. 

We haven’t had that yet, but it’s an important point in later stories. The reason I bring these guys up is because of their role and how other characters can easily fill in for them in the coming events. 

Fast forward several years. The DC Universe has been remade and during the later part of the 80s and into the 90s we saw the whole “let’s go dark and gritty” thing happen. Characters like Batman had their back broken, Superman died and was reborn, Wonder woman had to figure herself out. There were light spots, JLI for example and parts of the Teen Titans, but a lot of things grew darker. Like the Outsiders and the whole Judas contract. While things did lighten up a lot in the late 90s and into the 2000s, we got Lois and Clark married by then, Jason died and came back to life, Babs got shot by Joker, YJ and a lot of other books that were more upbeat came about in the mid to late 90s, However DC decided that there was still a lot of things that could be fixed and decided to create, basically for the upcoming Anniversary of CoIE, a new set of crisis to happen. 

This started with Brad Meltzer’s quasi thriller:

Identity Crisis

This story actually has importance. While not as exact as the other stories in regard to what’s happening there are enough key things going on here. The major plot point is that someone has murdered Elastic man’s wife, and the JL has a dark secret revealed that rocks every one. (Again you can find it still in print.) 

One of the main reasons that there is significance to this story is not only does Batman leave the Justice League but also there is some tie in to characters in the past and their actions. What’s interesting here is how this narrative can be woven into the recent events of Season 2 and could become significant in season 3 and 4 given what’s going down now. 

-Zantana mind wipes Dr. Light and several other villains, and does the same for Bruce when he discovers what’s been going on and is against the altering of Dr. Light’s mind. 

Connections here may not be obvious as its clear the story line is taking Bruce leaving from the creation of the Outsiders. However there is significance here in that Batman doesn’t trust the league at this point, which adds into his paranoid view of the world at times. 

While it’s clearly not Zantana in this case, Megan has been showing similar actions in season 2. We saw her changing Conner’s memory in the past season, and we know she did the same to Psimon, and Kaldur. We can’t be sure if these were the only cases, as Greg does like to play with expectations. 

It would not be too much to buy into the idea that Psimon could play the part of Dr. Light in this story and eventually come back to form a group of villains that were mind altered by M’ggan. Now while I don’t think it will be exactly the same I feel like there’s going to be backlash from people when they find out what she did two years ago. As shown when Gar mentioned that it wasn’t cool what she did to Conner when he found out. And you know that Batman will be pissed by this, wondering if she did the same to Dick, not to mention Kaldur and wondering if he’s compromised. 

-Deathstroke takes on the League and beats them by himself. 

Deathstroke is known for being a bit OP at times, but in this story he outdid himself when he took down the whole league. We haven’t seen this happen yet as he’s only been in a handful of scene’s but given that there are hints of him returning, what with Tera missing, it wouldn’t be that hard to buy into the idea with the titles we have of one of them leading to a defeat of the whole YJ team, and pretty much protecting whatever investment he has been hired to protect. 

Not sure how he’s going to fit in or who’s he’s protecting as of yet, because he was hired by Dr. Light in the original, but I feel certain that he’s going to end up causing a lot of issue for others in this case, more than likely Aquaman and possibly Geoforce. 

-Events cause Batman to create Brother Eye, leading to the OMAC project

So because of the fact that Bruce figured out he was mind wiped by Zee, he decides to create the Brother Eye satellite that eventually goes rogue because of Maxwell Lord and Alexander Luthor mucking about with it. The main goal was to have the Satellite watch Metahumans because of the mind wipe that Batman and other had had. 

Now we recently saw the appearance of Brother Eye, don’t believe me, just look at Oracle’s eye at the moment. It’s purple and it’s the same shape as the Omac logo. Thing is, Omac’s colors, along with Brother Eye’s are purple, Oracle’s are traditionally green. 

This means that Bruce already may have built the Brother eye set up, since we don’t know if Babs could have built that sort of set up. This seems more like a Bruce thing. In addition to this, if he already has the Brother Eye project going this means that he probably knows about M’ggan doing her mind things, but isn’t telling anyone that he’s keeping an eye on them. Why? Well it’s Bruce, he’s paranoid. 

So what would this mean for this season and upcoming ones? Well...

Countdown to Infinite crisis 

In this case the story line was covering Ted Kord -Blue Beetle, who had tracked down a mystery which ended up getting him killed by his former friend Maxwell Lord who had taken over the Omac project and brother eye.  

-OMAC project lead to the death of Ted Kord via Maxwell Lord and then this allowed Checkmate to take over Superman and have him nearly kill Batman and Wonder Woman and the other JL members. Leading to Wonder Woman to snap his neck and kill him to stop the whole thing from going down. 

So one key thing here, Maxwell Lord was sort of the “Charlie” to the JLI’s “Angels”. He sent them on missions and the like, and while he wasn’t exactly a bad guy, he wasn’t exactly a good one either. By the end of the series he had realized a lot of his own faults and dealt with some issues that would take a while to discuss, so let’s say that he redeemed himself...

Then DC said screw it, we need a villain and made him become the head of Checkmate, a black ops/Shield like organization in the DC universe. He killed Ted Kord when he found out that Max was going to basically use a bunch of cyborgs and take over Superman’s mind. 

Now while we know that Ted died when he stopped Sportsmaster and Deathstroke from obtaining the scarab, and we assume it was the Light that sent them to get it in the first place, there may be some connection to this part of the story given that we may see the play out of the mother box and possibly Ted having found out info prior to his death about certain things happening. I don’t think they will go for the “Wonder woman snaps necks” but it’s possible that something else will take it’s place. 

(Okay strike that...given what happened recently with Halo in episode 6, I can see them allowing this if it’s within the reasons for the story.) 

It is important though to note that if Brother Eye is involved this could lead to an additional army for Darkseid. Brother Eye and Omac did eventually control Superman, which could be something that may happen in YJ as an option. They also became a dangerous group that attacked everyone on earth trying to protect them from Metahumans. 

And what are we seeing a huge backlash against in Markovia? Metahumans. 

-During events prior to Infinite Crisis several events happened that caused a lot of issues. Among them being a point where Superboy (Conner Kent/Kon-El) was triggered by Lex to attack the Teen Titans at the time.

While this hasn’t happened yet, we do know that Conner has DNA that links to Lex, and in this story line Lex allowed for the triggering of his DNA to basically cause Conner to shave his head and become a villain that went on to try to decimate the teen Titans. 

It’s not that hard of a guess that this could be something that could happen to him given that we’ve seen them pair up Brion with Superboy and it seems if anyone can take him on head to head in regard to raw power it’s Brion. This could lead to a moment of Brion trying to help his mentor. 

-Following Identity Crisis and during the lead up to Infinite Crises we had Day of Vengeance, where the Rock of Eternity that housed the powers of Shazam was shattered by the Specter due to breaking from Hal Jordan. 

Here it’s less about the Specter as we have not seen him in YJ proper, but the idea that someone could attack the Rock of Eternity is a rather big thing. Remember we have two powerful geological users here, and it could come down to Terra doing that over Specter in this case. Either through use of her own powers or possibly enhanced by New God equipment. 

Reason I at all bring this up is the focus on Billy in Episode one and how no one yet knows his secret ID. This may become important later as if that Rock breaks, Shazam and all his power are gone and Billy would be revealed to be a kid. This would be something Greg would do to weaken the JL and lead to Superboy having to take on something more powerful without the Big Red Cheese to help him out. (For those that don’t know that’s the nickname of Captain Marvel -Shazam.) 

Billy falling from the sky leads to the start of Infinite Crisis, which would be a very strong opening to possibly season 4 or towards the end of season 3. 

Villains United

The reason I bring this up is because this group seems to be likely the new Light. Humor me here for a moment. In Villain’s united,follows a series of events where an individual by the name of Mockingbird groups together the organization that will be later known as the Secret Six to stop the Secret society of Super Villains that seems to be run by Lex Luthor. The story goes on to have ties to the events of Infinite Crisis, but also build up to some very interesting revelations in regard to Lex and Alexander Luthor. (You can still get this run at the book store.) 

The thing about this mini series is that there’s a lot of things going on in there that could easily show up in the next few seasons of YJ. 

-Lex Luthor who is the president amasses an army to stand against the super heroes. 

We’re already seeing that Lex as Secretary has plans and is playing against the Justice League with the UN. We’re also seeing that there’s an army being made for fighting via Darkseid, but it’s clear that there’s more to it than just them giving him kids. We’re also seeing the Lex is helping to get others to dislike the Metahumans, the JL and possibly heroes. 

Now while there is no Alexander Luthor (as far as we know), we also know that Lex, like Ra’s isn’t a man that just would let Darkseid walk all over his world. So I’m curious about this. If he’s playing up the dislike for Metas and heroes as a means of using them against something bigger. 

-the Secret Society of Super Villains consists of Dr. Psycho, Deathstroke, Talia al ghul, Black Adam, Calculator. 

Of these characters we’ve seen at least three on the show so far. Talia was just shown this season, though I don’t know if she’s going to have any role working with the Light. She could easily be replaced by Queen Bee, DeathStroke we know is probably connected to the League of Assassins and could be representing them for the Light group (though that could be another person as well) and was on the show in season 2, Black Adam was shown in Season 1 and as for the other two, we know Count Vertigo is working with them still, so you can take out Dr. Psycho, and since we now have Oracle, I would expect them to get Calculator to counter her at some point in time. 

-Cheshire, Vandal Savage’s daughter and other characters that have played parts in YJ play a part in this story and here we learn about opposing groups in that story to the villains group. More importantly we learn that Lex may be playing more than one side. 

We’ve seen last season that Lex is willing to play around a lot in regard to the side he’s on. This story line could be used as an explanation to where Cheshire is at in YJ and maybe show that there’s more going on that the kids and the JL doesn’t know about. It would certainly fit into the idea of more information in coming seasons and also could be used to push Luthor into becoming President. Which is honestly where I think Greg is going with this. 

With all the new information coming out with these last three episodes, I think there’s more clues showing up for the option of Infinite Crisis happening and how that is connected into Final Crisis. 

Infinite Crisis

This long event series, written by several of DC’s best writers at the time, covered various events that had linked to the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths. This story was coinciding with the anniversary of COIE, and heavily mirrors it but also acts as a book end to the after math of the more hopeful ending of that one with a mixed bag of an ending with this one. Several well known character’s end up dead, we get a new villain, and some massive changes happen to the characters that it would take another Crisis to undo. 

The important thing about Infinite is it’s sort of the middle event, or Empire like story, for these Crisis. It also plays a role in leading up to events in Final and setting the ball rolling for Darkseid to make his moves. 

We have a number of important characters that play a huge role in Infinite Crisis and then later Countdown to Final Crisis and Final Crisis itself already on YJ and it seems like this story has aspects that could easily fit in with this season or the next. 

-Actions taken by the main trio of bad guys in this lead to the destruction of the Watchtower, and the trinity fighting with one another. Superboy Prime kills several people including Superboy, Kal -L (Earth two Superman) tried to get batman on their side but he refuses, They’re trying to use earth as a tuning fork to create a paradise and reshape the many different worlds. 

While there are a lot of things in this story that I don’t see happening, I do see a few that can be used to effectively lead into Final Crisis. For one thing having M’comm replace Superboy Prime and also have him act as the instigator in various fights and wars by having the Martians go and pretend to be other characters. 

We’ve already seen that Conner is engaged to M’ggan and her brother try to enlist her the same way that Kal tries to get Batman to join him. We’ve also seen the images of brother eye in the form of Oracle’s set up, and that the Mother boxes are being used in some way. M’comm is arguing for a revolution to make a paradise like world and we know that he is extremely strong and could easily play the part of Superboy Prime if he wanted too. We also see he’s willing to kill, something that SBP was more than willing to do, and blamed others for his actions. 

These smaller items could lead into more dramatic moments later in the series, including Superboy’s death as a possibility. 

Important events by the end hint that Bruce goes off with Dick and Tim to train, Diana returns home to find herself, and Clark has to lay low and rest to get his powers back after the events in the story. Given what we’ve been seeing with the recent episodes, we may be seeing similar things going on here. Bruce leaving to train with Dick and Tim seems likely as the story line seems to be invoking Judas contract as well and probably will be affecting Dick, who more than likely will have issues with the fall out of Brion and Tara, and Tim is going to be dealing with whatever happens with his new little crew. 

Diana is a hard one as we don’t know her relationship with Cassie or Kaldur, so it’s up in the air, but Kal may take Diana’s role of leaving to find himself after the events in the story. And if Superboy doesn’t die, then he may step up for Clark in this case, or we’ll see other Super’s come into that role. Unless Conner is the one to lose all his powers. 

52, World War III, and One Year Later

Following in the wake of Infinite crisis there’s the story of 52 which covers the time span of the 52 weeks between the end of the Crisis and the start of the countdown for Final crisis. While I don’t think 52 and the companion piece One year Later, is going to feature in this season I do think that we may see it feature in the next building up to the idea of a Final crisis like story and eventually into another time skip. 

-52 worlds come out of the Infinite Crisis and Booster Gold learns about it with another time traveler Rip Hunter, oh and his robot friend goes evil. 

It’s unknown if Booster is going to show up in this season, but there have been rumors. However, if he doesn’t show up this story line could go to a number of different characters, including Traci 13, Impulse, Flash, or even one of our new characters. 

-Cult of Superman

While the story line regarding the Cult will probably drastically change, I do think that there are a few things that may come about from it. I think that it could be Zee working with Fate to deal with Neron, and Faust if he becomes involved. 

-The Everyman project that Lex creates, which leads to Steel and Natasha Irons playing a large role. 

This I can see happening in the wake of us losing members of the JL that depart for various reasons. Either because of the fight or they have to step down for some reason. I could easily see Lex using this in later seasons to grow his own mini power struggle with the Light and it would fit in with the idea of the Government wanting to regulate the Metahumans that are now showing up. Though I feel like this would be next season over this season. 

-Jason Todd taking over as Nightwing and Supergirl returns from the 31st Century. 

We already can assume a Red Hood story will come out of this recent revelation with Jason showing up, and we have Wally missing much like Supergirl was, and it’s not that hard to buy into the idea of Wally returning from the future feeling completely unsure of himself and talking about things that can happen due to what’s going down now. Jason, more than likely, could take over Dick’s costume and screw with stuff just because he can and probably feels a bit left out of things. 

-Donna Troy takes over as Wonder Woman and Arthur becomes the Dweller of the Depths. 

In the actual story there are reasons for both, but I think that Donna may take on the role if they have Wonder Woman kill Maxwell Lord. On the other hand I think Arthur may have saved Sub Diego during the two year jump and the reason we don’t have him is because he’s become this creature known as the dweller of the Depths. This would have lead Kal to becoming a leader while Mera acts as ruler underwater while Kal acts as leader in place of Arthur. 

-J’onn comes to a different conclusion about being a martian on earth after being mind linked to Black Adam. 

While I don’t see this coming into play during this season or during the time skip in the future, it may explain where M’ggan’s new look comes from. Maybe she’s changed to her new look due to some sort of event that plays with what happened to J’onn. While I don’t think that it will happen exactly as in the comic the precedence is there as an option for the two year time skip. 

Other aspects that could play into the story and season 4 as a possibly: the trinity step down from their roles, Aquaman allies himself with Dweller of the Depths and King shark, New Doom Patrol, Hawkman goes missing, Jason and Dick both are Nightwing, New Birds of Prey is formed, Oliver Queen becomes the Mayor of Star City, New crew of Teen Titans, Vandal Savage starts up plans to regain his immortality, New JSA, Bart becomes the Flash, Tim Drake tries to clone Superboy to bring Kon back....

Not all of this will happen, but a number of these seem like givens. 

Given how the UN is treating Meta humans, I can see the Trinity being forced out of their roles for a period of time. Kaldur may have to make deals to protect his friends if Apokolips is setting up for something dark and in doing so he may get in over his head. I can easily see Greg building up a new Doom Patrol in a one year later situation, and we don’t know where Hawkman is as of right now since he’s in the Rann shot. 

Babs forming the Birds as a means of dealing with the Light and the League would make sense, Oliver could step into role of Mayor allowing for Conner Hawke to come into YJ as the new Green Arrow, and we know that the younger crew of YJ is going to come more into play. We also know that Vandel is working with Darkseid and into whatever plan he has for the Anti life equation. Bart becoming Flash could be an option if Wally isn’t brought back till later, and I have no doubt that should Conner die M’ggan will more than likely try to pull off Tim’s clone game to bring him back. 

Would be interesting in lieu of Conner coming back we get Kara and have her show that there is more than just Superman. 

Countdown to Final Crisis

So now we have come to the part where things become interesting. Countdown to Final Crisis covers the events that were supposed to lead to Final Crisis, but some of it doesn’t go anywhere. So I’m just focusing on Darkseid in this case, and if any hints of other stories shows up later in the show I’ll point it out. 

-Darkseid is planing on being the Architect of the universe, and his brother Drax, aka Infinity man (who can be summoned by the Forever people) is killing the New gods. 

Given the images we have so far and what we’ve seen in the episodes, it seems that this could be something that could play out in some way. We know Darkseid is working on creating something, probably the Anti life equation. We have Forager who comes from this story showing up in the show so far. The thing is that in this case we know that the with Infinity Man killing off the New Gods this leads to events in Final Crisis. 

Honestly I can see some of this playing out here slightly. We do have the Forever People around and it would fit into the possibility that a New God is the one that is inside Halo. 

I think for the sake of lenght that I’m going to tackle Final Crisis as it’s own thing over going forward with this one as it’s already really long. 

See Final crisis theory of YJ for the rest. :) 

[jamesstegall]

Stop saying “delta plus.” It doesn’t mean anything.

If you’ve been worried by recent news stories about a strain of covid called “delta plus,” it may freak you out to hear that scientists just expanded the delta family from four variants to 13. 

Please take a deep breath. Scientists would really like you to understand that there’s no evidence delta has learned any new tricks, and these new names are for helping keep track of covid’s evolution—not nine new reasons to panic. And many researchers are also really, really hoping you’ll stop saying ‘delta plus.’

“The name ‘delta plus’ is completely incorrect, because it gives the perception that this will cause more damage,” says Anderson Brito, a member of the Pango Lineage Designation Committee, which assigns scientific names like B.1.1.7 to new branches of the virus. “So far, we have no evidence any of the mutations affect behavior compared to the original delta variant.”

It might be helpful to think of covid as a tree. Delta is like a thick branch on that tree—a big family of viruses that share a common ancestor and some of the same mutations, which let them spread between people more quickly. When the big branch grows new twigs, which happens all the time, scientists keep track by using technical names that include numbers and letters. But a new scientific name doesn’t mean that those viruses will act any differently than the branch they grew from: and if one of those new branches does start to change its behavior, it gets a new Greek letter, not a ‘plus.’

(Now is a good time to note that while some of delta’s mutations make it more transmissible, vaccines are still very good at preventing severe illness from every known strain of covid.)

What’s in a name?

This naming confusion stems mostly from journalists (and their scientist sources) blending two commonly-used systems of tracking covid’s evolution—despite the fact that the approaches have very different strategies and goals. 

The alphanumeric system that gave the first delta variant its scientific name—B.1.617.2—is called Pango. It’s meant for researchers tracking small genetic changes to the virus. It doesn’t determine whether new lineages act differently in people, just whether they’re different on a molecular level. There are currently over 1,300 Pango lineages, 13 of which are considered part of the delta family.

The name delta, meanwhile, comes from the WHO system, which is meant to simplify genomics for the general public. It gives names to related covid samples if it believes they may be of particular interest. There are currently eight families with Greek letters, but until there’s evidence a new sublineage of the first delta strain is acting differently from its parents, the WHO considers them all to be delta. 

“Delta plus” takes the WHO designation and mixes it up with Pango’s lineage information. It doesn’t mean the virus is more dangerous, or more concerning.

“People get quite anxious when they see a new Pango name. But we should not be upset by the discovery of new variants. All the time, we see new variants popping up with no different behavior at all,” says Brito. “If we have evidence a new lineage is more threatening, WHO will give it a new name.”

Tracking evolution

“For a genomic scientist like me, I want to know what variations we’re seeing,” says Kelsey Florek, senior genomics and data scientist for the Wisconsin state public health lab. “For the greater public, it doesn’t really make a difference. Classifying them all as delta is sufficient for communicating with policy makers, public health, and the public.”

Fundamentally, viral evolution works like any other kind. As the virus spreads through the body, it makes copies of itself, which often have small mistakes and changes. Most of these are a dead end, but occasionally, a copy with a mistake replicates enough inside a person to spread to someone else. 

This week, scientists split delta’s ‘children’ into 12 families in order to better track small-scale local changes. None of this means the virus itself has suddenly changed.

As the virus spreads from person to person, it accumulates those small changes, allowing scientists to follow patterns of transmission—the same way we can look at human genomes and identify which people are related. But in viruses, most of those genetic changes have no impact on the way it actually affects individuals and communities.

But genomics scientists still need a way to track that viral evolution, both for basic science and to identify any changes in behavior as early as possible. That’s why they are keeping a close eye on patterns in delta, especially, since it’s spreading so rapidly. The Pango team continues to split descendants of the first delta lineage, B.1.617.2, into sub-categories of related cases.

Until recently, it had registered 617.2 itself, plus three “children”, called AY.1, AY.2, and AY.3. This week, the team decided to split those children into 12 families in order to better track small-scale local changes—hence the total of 13 delta variants. None of this means the virus itself has suddenly changed.  

“Especially at the margins, with these emerging variants, you are splitting hairs,” says Duncan MacCannell, chief scientific officer of the CDC’s Office of Advanced Molecular Detection. “Depending on how those definitions are crafted and refined, the hairs can split in different ways.”

What matters to the public?

It’s worth noting that not all variants with WHO nicknames are equally bad. When the organization gives a new family a name, it also adds a label telling us how worried we should be. 

The lowest level is a variant of interest, which means it is worth keeping an eye on; in the middle is a variant of concern, like delta, which has clearly evolved to be more dangerous. Often, variants of interest are given that label because they share a mutation with variants of concern—they’re under surveillance. 

The CDC has an additional, more severe category, a variant of high consequence, which has never been given to a family of covid. It’s reserved for potential future strains that might cause serious illness in vaccinated people, don’t show up on commonly-used diagnostic tests, or perhaps resist multiple treatments for covid symptoms.

The two Pango lineages that are most commonly being referred to as ‘delta plus,’ AY.1 and AY.2, both have a mutation previously seen in another variant of concern, called beta, which first emerged in South Africa. But in the several months since AY.1 and AY.2 emerged, there has been no sign they behave any differently than their parent. 

“We identify mutations that we think have significance, and there’s some evidence to support that. Sometimes those pan out, and sometimes they don’t,” says MacCannell.

So if they don’t act any differently, why are many public health agencies—including the CDC—splitting out the sublineage of delta cases when they report their figures? 

“A lot of it is trying to head off questions. If we just put up a ticker that says, ‘delta has this many cases,’ we get questions like, ‘do we have any AY.3? I’ve heard that AY.3 is concerning,’” says Florek, who created Wisconsin’s covid sequencing dashboard. “It’s not just the media. It’s facilities, hospitals, clinics—all the customers we serve as a state public health laboratory.”

“As far as what the best approach is? I’m really not sure. I think we’re all kind of learning the best way to communicate the necessary information, in a way that’s actionable and interpretable by a large audience.”

Scientists will always have educated guesses about which genes are linked to changes in behavior. That speculation, though, is often based on lab experiments that look at the effects of individual genetic changes. 

In reality, mutations happen randomly across the genomes of viruses in all the millions of people who are infected. Some of those mutations die out, and a few spread to other people. As changes accumulate, they interact with one another, and with human actions, in complicated ways to give rise to real-world behavior. 

It takes a long time for scientists to do the research and really understand what’s going on—a lot longer than it takes to write a news story or post a paper online without peer review.

“Genomics is not everything, it’s the beginning of the story. It tells us that this variant exists,” says Brito. “We can be anxious when there’s a reason, but not for minor changes.”

This story is part of the Pandemic Technology Project, supported by The Rockefeller Foundation.

from MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/3sfFWww via IFTTT

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Depending on your philosophical views on time and calendars and so on, today is something like the 4.5 billionth Pi Day that Earth has witnessed. But that long history is nothing compared to the infinity of pi itself.

A refresher for those of you who have forgotten your seventh-grade math lessons1: Pi, or the Greek letter \(\pi\), is a mathematical constant equal to the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter — C/d. It lurks in every circle, and equals approximately 3.14. (Hence Pi Day, which takes place on March 14, aka 3/14.)

But the simplicity of its definition belies pi’s status as most fascinating, and most studied, number in the history of the world. While treating pi as equal to 3.14 is often good enough, the number really continues on forever, a seemingly random series of digits ambling infinitely outward and obeying no discernible pattern — 3.14159265358979…. That’s because it’s an irrational number, meaning that it cannot be represented by a fraction of two whole numbers (although approximations such as 22/7 can come close).

But that hasn’t stopped humanity from furiously chipping away at pi’s unending mountain of digits. We’ve been at it for millennia.

People have been interested in the number for basically as long we’ve understood math. The ancient Egyptians, according to a document that also happens to be the world’s oldest collection of math puzzles, knew that pi was something like 3.1. A millennium or so later, an estimate of pi showed up in the bible: The Old Testament, in 1 Kings, seems to imply that pi equals 3: “And he made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about … and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about.”

Archimedes, the greatest mathematician of antiquity, got as far as 3.141 by around 250 B.C. Archimedes approached his calculation of pi geometrically, by sandwiching a circle between two straight-edged regular polygons. Measuring polygons was easier than measuring circles, and Archimedes measured pi-like ratios as the number of the polygons’ sides increased, until they closely resembled circles.

Meaningful improvement on Archimedes’s method wouldn’t come for hundreds of years. Using the new technique of integration, mathematicians like Gottfried Leibniz, one of the fathers of calculus, could prove such elegant equations for pi as:

\begin{equation*}\frac{\pi}{4}=1-\frac{1}{3}+\frac{1}{5}-\frac{1}{7}+\frac{1}{9}-\ldots\end{equation*}

The right-hand side, just like pi, continues forever. If you add and subtract and add and subtract all those simple fractions, you’ll inch ever closer to pi’s true value. The problem is that you’ll inch very, very slowly. To get just 10 correct digits of pi, you’d have to add about 5 billion fractions together.

But more efficient formulas were discovered. Take this one, from Leonhard Euler, probably the greatest mathematician ever, in the 18th century:

\begin{equation*}\frac{\pi^2}{6}=\frac{1}{1^2}+\frac{1}{2^2}+\frac{1}{3^2}+\ldots\end{equation*}

And Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught mathematical genius from India, discovered the totally surprising and bizarre equation below in the early 1900s. Each additional term in this sum adds eight correct digits to an estimate of pi:

\begin{equation*}\frac{1}{\pi}=\frac{2\sqrt{2}}{9801}\sum_{k=0}^{\infty}\frac{(4k)!(1103+26390k)}{(k!)^4 396^{4k}}\end{equation*}

Much like with the search for large prime numbers, computers blasted this pi-digit search out of Earth orbit and into deep space starting in the mid-1900s. ENIAC, an early electronic computer and the only computer in the U.S. in 1949, calculated pi to over 2,000 places, nearly doubling the record.

As computers got faster and memory became more available, digits of pi began falling like dominoes, racing down the number’s infinite line, impossibly far but also never closer to the end. Building off of Ramanujan’s formula, the mathematical brothers Gregory and David Chudnovsky calculated over 2 billion digits of pi in the early 1990s using a homemade supercomputer housed in a cramped and sweltering Manhattan apartment. They’d double their tally to 4 billion digits after a few years.

The current record now stands at over 22 trillion digits — thousands of times more than the Chudnovskys’ home-brewed supercomputer — worked out after 105 days of computation on a Dell server using a freely available program called y-cruncher. That program, which uses both the Ramanujan and Chudnovsky formulas, has been used to find record numbers of digits of not only pi, but other endless, irrational numbers, including e, \(\sqrt{2}\), \(\log{2}\) and the golden ratio.

But maybe 22 trillion digits is just a bit of overkill. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses only 15 digits of pi for its highest-accuracy calculations for interplanetary navigation. Heck, Isaac Newton knew that many digits 350 years ago. “A value of \(\pi\) to 40 digits would be more than enough to compute the circumference of the Milky Way galaxy to an error less than the size of a proton,” a group of researchers wrote in a useful history of the number. So why would we ever need 22 trillion digits?

Sure, we’ve learned a bit of math theory while digging deep into pi: about fast Fourier transforms and that pi is probably a so-called normal number. But the more satisfying answer seems to me to have nothing to do with math. Maybe it has to do with what President John F. Kennedy said about building a space program. We do things like this “not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”

But there’s one major difference: The moon is not infinitely far away; we can actually get there. Maybe this famous quote about chess is more apt: “Life is not long enough for chess — but that is the fault of life, not of chess.”

Pi is too long for humankind. But that is the fault of humankind, not of pi. Happy Pi Day.

[shirlleycoyle]

It’s Crunch Time and Data Shows the USPS Is Still Experiencing Delays

This article was sent on Tuesday to subscribers of The Mail, Motherboard’s pop-up newsletter about the USPS, election security, and democracy. Subscribe to get the next edition before it is published here, as well as exclusive articles and the paid zine.

Hi everyone, exciting news: Our second zine has been printed and is currently on the way to us, and will be mailed out to subscribers later this week or early next week. This month's edition is about a topic that has always been near and dear to our hearts: Hacking. Since most of our hacking coverage is about things that happen online, we thought it'd be cool to have a snapshot of where hacking culture is, in a printed zine. The issue features stories by Motherboard staff and this incredible cover art by Rebekka Dunlap:

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We are now a week from Election Day (somehow!) and mail service in many parts of the country still sucks. Two areas in particular where mail service sucks are Philadelphia and Detroit, Democratic strongholds in key swing states. The Washington Post published an article focusing on mail problems in those two cities as well as other swing states, although the article also made clear they're hardly the only areas experiencing delays.

Mail delays are persisting despite the USPS's carefully worded promises to stop doing some—but not all—of the stuff that made people angry over the summer, at least until the election is over. For example, they stopped dismantling sorting machines but didn't promise to put any back in service (a few recent media reports claimed a federal judge ordered them to put the machines back together; the order merely stated the USPS must do so if it could no longer accommodate election mail which the USPS has long maintained won't be an issue). They said they would not ban late or extra truck trips or overtime but also insisted they never did that in the first place, even though they obviously curtailed them significantly. And the USPS never in fact fully resumed late or extra trips, which still lag far behind pre-DeJoy levels along with overall service. In sum, delays are persisting despite court orders that mandate USPS management knock it off (to use a technical legal term). 

Why does mail service still lag its pre-DeJoy levels? And does it matter for tallying votes?

We live in a country in which all votes matter but some votes matter more than others. If you live in a swing state, the marginal value of your vote in the presidential election is a lot higher than mine is in New York. Similarly, mail delays in some parts of the country could have a much greater significance than in others.

Using performance data released by the USPS as part of one of the court cases, I tried to create one chart that summarizes first class mail delivery performance since the beginning of the year. It's a little messy since it's broken down by the USPS's 67 service districts, but I think it tells an important story. Below is a screenshot of the chart, but you can play around with an interactive version of it here (the big swooping outlier that runs off the chart in April is the New York district).

USPS First Class Service Performance by District

Every chart tells a story, sometimes misleadingly so. But the one this chart is telling me accords with all of the reporting I and many others have done on the USPS so far. So I think it's worth listening to.

The story goes like this: In 2020, two events destabilized USPS performance in different ways. The first was the pandemic, which began in mid-March in certain parts of the country and, in case you haven't noticed, is still going. It destabilized service in specific places at specific times. While this could impact delivery rates elsewhere if it caused key sorting facilities to be short-staffed, in general the impacts were relatively localized. To tell this story in terms of the way the graph looks, it caused some districts to get detached from the big clump of lines that represents the pre-2020 status quo. But the status quo clump didn't change much if at all.

Then, in July, the clump undergoes a "W" pattern, where service tanks, briefly rebounds a bit, tanks again, then rises once more to almost-but-not-quite reach the status quo levels again. This second destabilizing event coincides with Postmaster General Louis DeJoy's sudden policy shifts as well as the peak of coronavirus case counts over the summer. 

However, I think it's pretty clear this "W" pattern was the result of DeJoy's changes, not coronavirus cases as the USPS continues to argue. We saw throughout the previous months how coronavirus affects mail service, and this looks altogether different. 

When coronavirus delays mail service, some districts fall off the clump as case counts rise in that area. That's not what we see in July. Instead, we see a sudden, simultaneous drop-off across the entire postal network. Districts didn't fall off the clump. The clump went into freefall. 

What happened afterwards is the most important lesson for today: the clump stopped being quite so clumpy, meaning service performance became more erratic and with a higher variance between districts. You can tell this by comparing the density of the lines in January to that of September. In January, the clump ranged from 85 percent to 95 percent, or a 10-point variance. By September, the clump is spread out from a high of just over 90 percent all the way down to about 70 percent, or a 20-point variance.

In total, the story of this chart is one of an organization losing control. Not just in swing states, but everywhere. Even non-swing states like Alabama and Mississippi are struggling with mail service, ranking towards the bottom of first-class mail delivery.

Which brings us back to the second of the two questions I asked at the top of this newsletter: does the USPS service tanking matter for counting votes? The best answer I can give right now is: probably, but we don't yet know how much.

First, we simply don't know how many people are waiting to mail ballots until the last minute. According to the U.S. Elections Project, there were 47 million mail-in ballots still waiting to be returned as of Sunday. Some of them will be mailed back in the last week. A smaller number of them will probably be mailed back on November 1 or 2. But many likely won't be mailed back at all, with voters either opting to cast their ballot in person on Election Day, during early voting if available, or not at all. Plus, a few states have changed postmarking and ballot delivery deadlines to add some buffer time for sluggish mail service, so even if a ballot is mailed back on, say, November 2, it might be counted in one state but not the other, even if they are both delivered on November 4.

Second, it's not clear whether the overall first-class mail statistics accurately reflect how ballots specifically are handled (which are only about two percent of overall first class mail during these election weeks). The USPS has pledged to make all possible resources and alternatives available to expedite ballot delivery, particularly in the final week before Election Day. How much will they actually do, and to what extent will it move ballots faster and more reliably? This is all yet to be seen.

Third, the distinction between being on time and being two days late has a huge difference in service delivery. According to the USPS, for the week of October 10 to October 16, 97.25 percent of first-class mail was delivered either on time or less than two days late. That's within a percentage point of its performance in January. 

So a randomly selected voter within the U.S. would have roughly the same expectation a ballot mailed by Thursday will reach their election official by the end of Election Day with the similar confidence as before the pandemic. But, on aggregate, a one percentage point dip across tens of millions of ballots could mean hundreds of thousands of ballots not getting delivered in time. That could make a huge difference if these delayed ballots are concentrated in just a few key areas like Detroit and Philadelphia. It could also make little difference if they're spread out across the entire country roughly in proportion to the service performance lines we saw above. And, of course, smaller numbers of ballots make bigger differences in outcomes the further down the ballot you go. How much of a difference the USPS will make is one of those things you can only really know by doing the math after the votes are tallied. But I think we can all agree it would be better for democracy if the USPS was functioning like it did in early June.

This Week in Mail

I just sent links on Thursday and not that much has happened since then. Here’s a cool story about India’s postal network. Which reminds me, I’ve gotten a few questions about how postal services work in other parts of the world, how they have handled the internet transition, etc. I will have more to say on this but for now please read this excellent London Review of Books article from 2011.

Postcards

Wash hands

Wear masks

Write letters

Aaron

It’s Crunch Time and Data Shows the USPS Is Still Experiencing Delays syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[anneboleynresearch]

Appearance & Likeness

“By the time of her coronation in 1533, one hostile observer would be reporting to the court at Brussels that Anne’s crown did not fit, and she was badly disfigured by a wart, and that she wore a violet velvet mantle with a high ruff to conceal a swelling in the neck, possibly a goitre. Some writers have taken this seriously, although much of it is wilful misrepresentation. The crown was quickly taken off her after the actual crowning, but this was because it weighed seven pounds. For the rest of the ceremonies Anne wore a crown specifically made and weighing only three...As for the high collar, Anne wore the required coronation surcoat with a mantle of ermine, although the material seems to have been purple velvet and not white cloth of gold. If the style was the same as the surcoat and mantle her daughter wore at her coronation in 1559, then the neck was high. The need to conceal a goitre is malevolent embroidery.

“George Wyatt, writing at the end of the century to contradict Sander, and having access to some genuine family traditions of his own about Anne, was compelled not only to accept her ‘beauty not so whitely as clear and fresh, above all we may esteem’, but to admit that

“...there was found, indeed, upon the side of her nail, upon one of her fingers, some little show of a nail, which yet was so small, by the report of those that have seen her, as the work master seemed to leave it on occasion of greater grace to her hand, which, with the tip of one of her other fingers might be, and and was usually hidden without any blemish to it. Likewise there were said to be upon some parts of her body, certain moles incident to the clearest complexions.

“A minor malformation of one fingertip thus seems very probably, and so too one or two moles, possibly on the chin...”

...not that she was ever a ravishing beauty. Lancelot de Carles did call her ‘beautiful and with an elegant figure’, and a Venetian reporting what was known of her in Paris in 1928 described her as ‘very beautiful’. Yet John Barlow, one of her favorite clerics, when asked to compare Anne to Elizabeth Blount...replied that Elizabeth ‘was more beautiful’, although Anne ‘was very eloquent and gracious and reasonably good looking’. Simon Grynee, a professor of Greek at Basle whom Henry VIII employed to canvass Swiss opinion as to the validity of his marriage to Katherine, was similarly cautious (and also not entirely persuaded to her morals): ‘young and good-looking’ was his verdict. The Venetian diplomat, Francesco Sanuto, was even less certain, though he clearly knew of no goitres or ‘large wens’: ‘Not one of the handsomest women in the world; she is of middling stature, swarthy complexion, long neck, wide mouth, a bosom not much raised and eyes which are black and beautiful’. Henry, as we shall see, saw nothing wrong with Anne’s breasts, but the overall evidence of these less prejudiced observers hardly suggests compelling physical attractiveness. All reports agree that Anne was dark...when her daughter Elizabeth was born it was remarked how fair she was, taking after her father rather than her mother. A feature of which Anne herself was clearly proud of was her hair. A good deal of comment was caused by her wearing her hair down for the coronation procession through London, but again this was simply in accordance with established etiquette. Anne, however, had also worn her hair down for the entirely unprecedented ceremony where she was created marchioness of Pembroke.

“Looks only tolerable, but a splendid head of dark hair and fine eyes -- this was the impression Anne Boleyn made on her contemporaries, but it would be good to have some pictorial evidence. Here the past has not been kind. The painter coming into prominence at the English court was, of course, Hans Holbein the younger, but no painting of Anne by Holbein is known to have been made, and certainly none has survived. Two of his drawings are alleged to be of her: one in the set of his drawings in the royal collection at Windsor and the other formerly at Weston Park and now in the British Museum. The Windsor drawing carries the legend ‘Anna Bollein Queen’ in eighteenth-century lettering; the Weston Park drawing, in a hand dating from the first half of the seventeenth century, has the Latin legend: ‘Anne Bullen was beheaded, London 19 May, 1536′. The names on the Holbein drawings at Windsor are said to have derived originally from Sir John Cheke, Edward VI’s tutor, and since Cheke had known Anne, the identification might appear to have authority. However, the Cheke story is suspect -- several of his supposed identifications are demonstrably incorrect -- and there is evidence on the ‘Anna Bollein’ to link it with the Wyatt family. Moreover, the sitter is in evident deshabille, and why should any such likeness of the queen be commissioned? It is also the case that when both Holbeins were in the collection of the earl of Arundel int he late 1630s, the Czech artist, Wenceslaus Hollar, chose to engrave the British Museum drawing in preference to the one now at Windsor. Why Hollar selected that as likeness of Anne it is impossible to say; either he had advice or the Windsor drawing had not yet been claimed as ‘Anne’.

“One firm contemporary likeness of Anne Boleyn is a single specimen of the portrait medal struck in 1534; it carries her motto, ‘The Moost Happi’ and the initials ‘AR’ -- Anna Regina. Such a piece can only have been prepared on royal authority. The common assumption is that the medal was struck to mark Anne’s coronation, but the date makes that improbable. Between Anne’s coronation and a 25 March start to 1534 was ten months. The more likely occasion is the expected birth of Anne’s second child in the Autumn of 1534, and her miscarrying would explain why multiple copies do not survive. Unfortunately the nose has been badly damaged, perhaps deliberately, so that its value as a likeness is impaired. Nevertheless, the shake of the face is clear -- long and oval with high cheekbones, much the sort of face that her daughter Elizabeth was to have, according to some painters. Given the condition of the medal, it is impossible to go further than that, but it cannot be said to inspire confidence in the British Museum likeness endorsed by Holler and still less the Windsor example. Judged by the medal, Anne sat for neither of the Holbein drawings. 

“A number of paintings from the later sixteenth century are claimed to be of Anne. They survive from sets of ‘Kings and Queens of England’ which Elizabethan and Jacobean gentry liked to have in their houses to demonstrate loyalty. There are two patterns which clearly represent separate traditions. The one best known at the time...depicts Anne in a gable hood with a single necklace of pearls and a cross decorated with rectangular stones. In a painting in this pattern...Anne wears a brooch in the form of a single drop pearl hanging from the monogram ‘AB’ in gold. The alternative pattern -- and the one commonly reproduced today -- has Anne in a French hood with a gold letter ‘B’ hanging from a pearl necklace. Several examples survive...Neither pattern, however, can be regarded as authoritative since neither is earlier than fifty or sixty years after Anne’s death or linked to the portrait medal, either directly or via a common ancestor. 

“There is, however, a resolution of this pictorial game of ‘find the lady’. The key is an Elizabethan ring belonging to the Trustees of Chequers...the ring itself is mother-of-pearl, the shank is set with rubies and the bezel carries the monogram ‘E’ in diamonds. It was previously in the posession of the Home family, having, it is said, been given from the English royal treasures by James I to the then Lord Horne. The head of the ring is hinged and opens to reveal two enamel portraits, one of Elizabeth circa 1575 and one of a woman in the costume of Henry VIII’s reign, wearing a French hood. The portrait is minute...but not only is Anne by far the most likely woman of the previous generation to be thus matched with Elizabeth, the face mask is quite clearly the sitter in the Hever and National Portrait Gallery printings. Two important conclusions follow. First, the late Elizabethan ‘Kings and Queens’ image of Anne is pushed back some twenty years. Even more significant, that image must have been accepted in Elizabeth’s court as a likeness of the queen’s mother. Elizabeth herself could obviously have had no clear recollection of Anne’s face, but others around her had known Henry’s second wife well. 

“How does the Chequers enamel compare with the 1534 medal? There is a forty-year interval between them and the head-dresses are different, but the sitter is evidently the same - long, oval face, high cheekbones, strong nose, and a decided chin: a face of character, not beauty. There is thus an authenticated sequence for Anne Boleyn, comprising the medal, the Chequers enamel, and the Hever/NPG pattern.

“With such a tiny ring it is hard to be certain, but between it and particularly the National Portrait Gallery example there seems to have been a prettying up and a loss of spirit. Fortunately, the sequence also has the effect of corroborating a seventeenth-century miniature in the collection of the Duke of Bucceleuch and Queensberry. Charles I had this copied as ‘Anne Boleyn’ by John Hoskins the elder...and it is now endorsed ‘from an ancient original’. How ‘ancient’ it is impossible to say. Although the relationship to the examples in the NPG pattern is evident, these were only thirty years old or perhaps less. It is more likely that Hoskins had access to an earlier image of the kind from which the NPG image originated. A full-length portrait of Anne was owned by Lord Lumley in 1590 and existed as late as 1773. Could it even be that Hoskins’ source was or was derived from a Holbein painting now lost? Speculation apart, the Hoskins is important because it preserves what a highly talented seventeenth-century miniaturist made of the image, and though again further softened, it is the best depiction of Anne we are likely ever to have, failing the discovery of new material. Portrait medal -- Chequers ring -- Hever/NPG pattern -- Hoskins miniature: the chain is complete. We have the real Anne Boleyn.

“...Establishing a reliable image for Anne Boleyn only accentuates the evidence of contemporaries that her attraction was not outstanding natural beauty. What, then, explains her power? In the first place she radiated sex. The heir of Northumberland would try to break a six-year-old engagement for her; Sir Thomas would become passionately involved; and it was the inability of a Flemish musician to stand the heady atmosphere around her that would help bring Anne to destruction. As for Henry, the king’s own letters show how explicit was his desire...”

“That Anne was aware of her attractiveness to men seems obvious. While in France her place beside the retiring queen would have kept her away from most of the notorious licentiousness which flourished in Francis I’s own household. Nevertheless, Anne cannot have been made aware of her power during such visits as Claude did make to a court which was much more explicitly erotic than those at London or Brussels...days after her death de Carles waxed lyrical about her expressive eyes...

“Yet sexuality was only part of Anne Boleyn’s attraction. What made her stand out was sophistication, elegance, and independence, in fact the continental experience and upbringing which we have explored...

“France and Queen Claude, and, one might add, Margaret of Austria: these had made the difference. There were other foreign ladies at the English court. Some, now aging, had come over with Katherine of Aragon, but among the English there was nobody with a tithe of the continental polish of Anne Boleyn. One of Wolsey’s servants who had known her remembered how she stood out among the other women at court for ‘her excellent grace and behavior’. A less than enthusiastic Protestant writer of the next generation told how’ albeit in beauty she was to many inferior, but for behavior, manners, attire, and tongue she excelled them all, for she had been brought up in France.’ A Catholic account of the same period stressed that ‘she was in the prime of her youth’, and as well as her musical abilities ‘had her Latin and French tongue’...Even the recusant tradition remembered her elegance and gave her credit for it, if for nothing else: ‘She was the model and the mirror of those who were at court, for she was always well dressed, and every day made some change in the fashion of her garments. But as to the disposition of her mind...’

“Anne Boleyn had style, and continental style at that. George Wyatt might look back and write of ‘the graces of nature graced by gracious education’, but Carles declared at the time: ‘no one would ever have taken her to be English by her manners, but a native-born Frenchwoman’.”

[chocobabyporcelain]

How would the bros react to an S/O who wears jfashion? (I'm trying to think of things you like but all i can think of is jfash)

I am so here for this. But of course, you knew that.I did a different subfashion with each bro, but if you wanna see a specific bro with a specific fashion, just shoot me an ask and I’ll get to it.I’ve included a links to a pinterest baord on each fashion so if you’re not familiar, you can get a better visual.(Also, side note, I can totally see Iris dressing in Visual Kei)

Tags: @neko-otaku13 @itsmootothecow @itshaejinju @mp938368 @ffxv-milkshake @bespectacled-girl @insomniacapples @expectogladiolus

Noctis –Decora:

Noctis had known you since middle school, but he’d never seen yououtside of school before. Which meant he’d never seen you inanything other than your school uniform and the minimal makeup yourschool would allow.

Whenhe saw you at the arcade, dressedbrighter than a rainbow, he couldn’t help but stare. Nobody couldhelp but stare. Not all of them appreciative.

Youwere dressed in a bright yellow cut-sew with multicoloured polkadots, along with a red and blue chequered skirt over rainbow tights.There were glittery greenplatform sandals on your feet and a strawberry patterned jacketdraped loosely over your shoulders. You had a seemingly impossibleamount of hair clips decorating your bright red wig and plasticjewellery lining your wrists and fingers. Yourfuzzy, blue monster backpack was hanging limply from your arm as youand your friend, who was dressed similarly, battled on one of themachines.

“Yes!” you yelled out your victory, throwing your hands in theair as you jumped up and down, your backpack bouncing on your arm.

You friend groaned loudly and threw her head down in a pout. “You’reonly good at this because you have more experience.” she grumbled.

Noctis could hardly believe it was you. Could this really be (Y/N)?The girl in his class who kept to herself and barely said a word toanybody? The girl who got so embarrassed when she mispronounced“disestablishment” that she refused to speak for the rest of theday?

He took a deep breath and slowly made his way over to you. “(Y/N)?”

Youturned to face him, youreyes widening when you saw exactly who was addressing you. “PrinceNoctis!” You stepped back, subconsciously pulling your jacketfurther around yourself, as if trying to hide.

Your friend cast a look between the two of you and smiled. “I’mgonna go grab some sodas.” she said, slipping away before you couldcall her back.

An awkward silence stretched between you, both of you looking aroundin different directions.

“It’s—”

“You—”

You both spoke simultaneously, and then laughed nervously atyourselves.

“You first.” Noctis insisted.

Younodded.“I was just gonna say it’s a little strange seeing you outside ofschool.” You pulled yourbackpack to your front, running your fingers through its soft fuzz. Anervous habit you’d picked up somewhere along the line.

Noctissmiled at you, giving your coord a once over. Which made you a littleself-conscious, honestly. “You look amazing.” he gesturedvaguely at your clothes. “So bright andbeautiful.”

It was hard to tell who blushed harder at that comment, you orNoctis.

“Colourful!”he corrected. “Bright an-Bright and colourful.”

Youchuckled. “Thank you.” Youlet one arm fallfrom your bagto your side, fingers playing with the hem of your skirt. “It’scalledDecora fashion.”

“I’dlove to hear all about it,” Noctis was almost embarrassed at howquickly he’d spoken. “If, y’know, you’d like to tell me?”

Youswayed a little, rolling up onto the balls of your feet with a brightsmile. “Yeah, I’d really like that.” you replied, maybe alittle too eagerly.

“Cool.”

Iswear, Decora is a lot nicer looking than the coord I just described.

Prompto – Fairy Kei:

You were sat on a high wall just behind the overlook in Lestallumwhen Prompto first saw you. He caught sight of your pastel pink andbaby blue sneakers dangling just above his line of sight. “Oh,”he muttered softly as he looked up and saw you in your entirety.

Your fluffy tutu in pink, mint and lavender splayed out either sideof you, draping over the pastel candy-print tights that encased yourthighs. The pink sweater you were wearing (in Lestallum, which wasquestionable enough) was easily three times too big for you, one sidehanging off your shoulder, and had “Barbie” written across thefront in pretty cursive letters. You wore baby blue knee-highs overyour tights, with little pink teddy bears holding balloons on thesides, disappearing into your high-top sneakers. Your hair was dyedin split colours, pink one side, blue the other, and was tied up intwin-tails, with slightly uneven tie-off points which looked clumsy,but cute. You were swinging your legs daintily, fully engrossed inyour phone.

Prompto couldn’t help the smile that stretched across his face ashe looked up at you. A real life fairy princess, perched comfortablyatop her vantage point, looking out at the world. You were beautiful.A true vision in soft pastels.

He took a deep breath, gathering the courage to call out to you.“Exc– Excuse me!”

You peered over the top of your phone, unsure whether or not thevoice was calling you. You saw the blonde man down below waving toyou, and you gave your own shy, tentative wave in return.

“Hey, this might sound weird but, um,” he lifted his camera, asif to make you aware of its existence. “Would you be comfortablewith me taking your picture?”

You knitted your eyebrows, worrying your lower lip a little. “Oh,erm…” You considered it, briefly.  He seemed genuine enough andhe did ask permission first. That’s gotta count forsomething, right? You took a breath and forced a smile. “Yeah,sure.” You placed your phone down beside you and held up a peacesign.

Prompto hesitated. “Are you sure?” he called up. You werebeautiful and he definitely wanted a picture of you, but hewasn’t prepared to make you uncomfortable.

“I’m sure.” you replied, giving a short chuckle.

Prompto smiled up at you once more and aligned his camera, spending alittle time adjusting in a way that was comfortable and got a goodangle. He framed it perfectly, the midday sun behind you in a waythat made you glow radiantly.

“How do I look?”

“Gimme a sec.” He quickly made his way up the small hill, and youswivelled around on the wall to greet him.

You jumped off your comfy perch and grabbed your soft backpack offthe ground, stuffing your phone back into the yellow fluff.

Prompto stopped short when he caught sight of it. The fluffy birdshaped bag was recognisable anywhere. “Is your backpack a chocobo?”he asked with an excited smile.

You giggled, pulling your soft bag closer, cuddling him like aplushie. “Yeah. He’s super cute. I love him.” you said, swayingthe bag as if nursing a child.

“I think you might be my favourite person.” Prompto muttered,unable to stop the heat rising to his cheeks.

Blushing just as bright, you gave another nervous giggle, buryingyour face in the soft fluff of your chocobo backpack. “Do you, um,”you lowered the bag from your mouth, realising it was probablymuffling your speech. “Do you think you could email me that pictureso I can use it for my blog?” you asked, gesturing to his camera.

“Oh, sure thing.” Prompto reached into his pocket and dug out hisphone, opening his notes app and handing it to you. “Here, writedown your email address.”

You took the phone from him, typed in what you needed to, and handedit back.

Your name, email address and phone number.

“(Y/N?),” he smiled. “That’s a pretty name.”

“Thanks.” You began to fidget with your bracelet, a band ofplastic, pastel beads spelling Cry Baby that was previouslyhidden beneath your sleeve. “So, do you have a name, orshould I credit you as Mr. Camera.” you asked.

Prompto snorted at the nickname. “It’s Prompto.” he replied,maybe hoping a little that you’d call him Mr. Camera anyway. Maybehe thought it sounded kinda cool.

“Prompto.” you repeated.

That’s when a car horn decided to blast, startling the both of you.

“(Y/N)!” you heard your friend’s voice call.

You looked up to the road, where you could see the car of anotherfriend, the one in question leaning far out of the window. “Get in,loser. We got a tea party to get to!”

You waved and turned back to Prompto. “That’s my ride.” Youhesitated, rocking slightly on your heels. “So… text me later?”you trailed off cautiously.

“Sure thing!” Prompto’s reply was immediate. “I’ll send thephoto tonight.”

You smiled and nodded. “Thank you so much.” With that, you rushedto your friend’s car, pausing to wave before you climbed in,ignoring your friends as they teased you.

Prompto waited until the car drove off before looking back at hiscamera, at the photograph of you, sitting atop the wall with thatsweet smile. “Ah, geez.” he muttered.

He had it bad.

Hereis my very own Fairy Kei board!In fact, most of the coord in this is based off my actual wardrobe.

Also,can I throw out the headcanon that Prompto is totally prepared totwin with his Fairy Kei S/O?

Ignis – Uchuu Kei:

For as long as Ignis has known you, he’s known about your penchantfor space. Many a time he’d found you, in the wee hours of themorning, curled up on the woven chair that sat on your balcony,staring up at the night sky.

He loved the sound of pure excitement in your voice as you pouredover your star chart, talking endlessly about the vastness and beautyof space, yet to be explored.

The crescent moon string lights you’d hung around the vanitymirror, the nebula print cushions you’d decorated the bed with, thenebula soaps in the bathroom, all of it may not have been to Ignis’staste, per say. But, a shared home should have equal representationof all parties coexisting, and that was your mark.

He’d noticed you were starting in integrate your passion for spacein your outfits. It started with your nails, your usual block colouracrylics traded in for nebula patterns. Then, there was a pair ofholographic creepers you had your heart set on from the moment yousaw them.

You’d started to wonder if you could make your whole wardrobe spacethemed. Or would that be silly? You supposed it was. After all, youweren’t a little girl anymore, and they probably didn’t even makespace themed clothing in your size.

Still, that didn’t stop you looking it up at home whileprocrastinating work. You scrolled through pages and pages ofchildren dressed as aliens and astronauts, becoming more and morediscouraged at each microhuman you saw draped in silver, green andUFO print.

Until, you stumbled upon something amazing.

You slammed your hands down on the table, staring wide-eyed at thescreen on your laptop.

“(Y/N)?” Ignis called, poking his head around the door of thesmall dinning room, where you were (supposed to be) working. “Whatwas that? Are you alright?”

You smiled at him over the top of your heavily decorated laptop.“It’s a thing!” you muttered, your voice pinching slightly asyour excitement become more apparent. You beckoned him over to showhim the images on your screen.

Ignis came to stand behind you, placing an arm across your shoulders.He watched with you as you scrolled down the page, showcasing imageafter image of people—adults—wearing nebula patterns,silver, constellations, aliens. Space fashion was a thing!

“It’s called Uchuu Kei,” you said, opening a few images in newtabs for a closer inspection. “I can’t believe it’s actually athing!”

The excitement in your voice brought a smile to Ignis’s face. “Ithink it’d suit you nicely.” He pointed to a particular image onthe screen. I girl dressed in a silver dress, navy, star sprinkledtights and holographic creepers. “You’re halfway there, you justneed the dress.” he commented with a chuckle.

You laughed along, mulling it over in your mind. Could you reallypull it off? You wanted to, but you weren’t convinced. What if youjust looked really silly? “You think so?” you asked, a littleshyly.

“Certainly.”

And with that, your mind was made up. You’d try out Uchuu Kei. Andif it didn’t suit you, it didn’t suit you, and it would be alearning experience and you’d move on.

It started with you collecting garments, tucking them away in yourcloset until you felt you had enough to build a semi-decent coord. Itwas mostly tops and sweaters, you noticed. All with aliens, crescentmoons, rocket ships and various other space motifs. You only had ahandful of suitable skirts and one pair of shorts, and two pairs oftights.

When you felt you had enough, you wanted to work on building a coord.You gathered all of the Uchuu clothes from your closet and laid themout neatly on the bed. You’d pick up a shirt, lay it over a skirtand then put it back, picking up a different shirt and trying again.

You were there for hours, and quickly growing frustrated.Why was coording so hard?

When you finally settled on what you hoped was a workable coord, yougot changed, applying a little makeup and checking yourself over inthe mirror. “Ignis,” you called, making your way out of thebedroom and landing before your boyfriend in a cute curtsy. “Do Ilook alright?”

Ignis regarded you with an appreciative hum. You were wearing a shortsleeved t-shirt, black with a little green alien riding in a UFO withthe words I BELIEVE written in bold, friendly letters.On top of that was a nebula print suspender skirt, the strapsdecorated with badges of UFOs and rocket ships. You were wearing oddsocks, one navy and sprinkled with glittery stars and one a plainwhite, both pulled up to just under your knees, and on your feet,your beloved holographic creepers.

With a gentle smile, Ignis got to his feet, placing a hand on thesmall of your back, pulling you closer. “You look exquisite,darling.” he whispered, softy brushing a stray lock of hair fromyour face. “My little space princess.”

Someexamples of Uchuu Kei.

Gladiolus – Oshare Kei:

Gladiolus has known you for a long time. He’s seen all of yourabrupt style changes, and they happened often.

When you two met, you were playing around with Gyaru. It was acomfortable style, but the fake tan was annoying, and the bleachedblonde and heavy makeup really did not suit you.

You very briefly tried a Classic Lolita style, but thatquickly evolved into a more Gothic Lolita style, which youfound far more suited to you. Far more stylish.

Moriwas one of Gladio’s personal favourite looks on you. Theloose, floaty dresses and thick woollen cardigans gave you adelicate, doll-like look, and the earthy tones made you appear like aforest sprite.

When you announced, out of the blue, that you wanted to try adifferent style, Gladio had to admit that he was sad to see yourforest girl look go.

He very quickly changed his mind when he saw your next style.

Thefirst thing he noticed was that you haddyed your hair again. Mostlyblack this time, with neon pink dip dye. The vest you had on was alsoblack, full of rips with more neon pink peeking through. Hecould see the slightest hint of black, Lycra shorts peering outbeneath your short, pink and black tartan skirt. Yourblack and pink striped socks were uneven, one just below your kneeand the other pushed down to mid-calf, both disappearing intobattered, black converse.

Youspun on the spot, your skirt flaring out and showing off how snuglythose shorts fit. “What do you think?” yourquestion ended in a nervous lilt to your voice as youendedyour twirl in a cute little curtsey.

Gladiolooked you up and down, a muted grinplaying on his lips. “I think,” he said, pulling himself up offof the sofa and approaching you. He held your wrist in his hand andtwirled you once more, leaving you giggling and almost falling intohim. “thatyou look amazing.”

He stepped back, admiring you all over again. “What’s it called,again?” he asked.

“OshareKei.” you answered. “It’s kinda like Visual Kei, but morecolourful.” You swayed alittle, glancing down at your outfit. “Well, more pink, on thisoccasion.” You chuckled nervously, suddenly becoming self-criticalof your chosen colour scheme. Was it too same-y?No, no, plenty of coords use a two-colour palette, you looked fine.Better than fine. You lookedamazing! Right?

Gladioraised an eyebrow at you. “Hey, I know that look.” He lifted youup by the waist and held you with one arm under your butt and theother supporting you back. Herested his forehead against yours and looked you in the eye. “Believeme, (Y/N). You look incredible.Better than… the girl fromthat… Visual band you like…”he trailed off, trying toremember the band, or the girl, or anything, really.

Youscrunched your nose a little. Well, that was vague,but you decided you’d take the compliment, anyway. You smiled,wrapping your arms around Gladio’s neck, swinging your legs gentlyat his sides. “Thanks, Gladio.” you muttered.

Ican see Gladio really being into the “soft punk” vibe Oshare Keigives.

[willswalkabout]

Mexico 

Mexico was an absolute whirlwind and for that reason I would love to return to delve deeper into it, see more, and get a slightly more rounded experience, however I still loved my time there. A combination of cheap flights, and wanting to be in Cancun on Saturday night, meant my trip was pretty oddly organised on the face of it. I began with two nights in a hostel in the centre of Mexico City. It was an odd place to arrive the first night. I was immediately stuck by the number of police, standing on practically every street corner. It found it hard to decide if this made me feel safer or not! The Spanish also felt very different from what I had become accustomed to in Peru. Much harsher, and with less personal sympathy for my inadequacies. I found a cheap bar and had an early night. I was also fairly annoyed at myself for making a mistake I had already made on my trip, of picking a massive hostel more suited to school trips. You may remember this happened to me in Sydney. I think my only thought was the great experience at the Buenos Aires hostel, which was also fairly big. Luckily my room which I had to myself the first night, shared a bathroom with another adjoining room, where Will and Alicia were staying. They were from California and Texas respectively, and I spent the next day wondering around the city with them. 

On day two myself and Will went on a free walking tour the hostel had put on, though sadly it was probably the worst I’ve done. Which is saying something as Christchurch was pretty awful. Mexico had so much to offer, but we were taken to the government building, which housed the department for education I think. To its credit all 3 floors had some pretty impressive murals on all the walls, however we were convinced our tour guide was purely interpreting them in his own way, like we could ourselves, as opposed to delivering actual knowledge. Will and I bugged him with more questions than he was wanting, and I seem to remember he eventually told us that there is actually very little written about the murals, so he has a difficult job. At this point we thought it best to leave the tour and forge our own path through the chaos. We walked through a market for a bit before meeting Alicia, who come to think of it may have only flown in that morning. We had a few drinks, before going up Mexico city’s tallest building, which had some pretty decent panoramic views, despite the smog. Anyone that knows me, and certainly anyone that has been reading this blog, will be well aware that I love a good view. What in a somewhat pathetic way really thrills me, is that these views have been unbelievably varied over the trip. Highlights would be the night hike in Hong Kong, one of my favourite skylines of the trip. A week later I was on Koh Samui off the Thailand coast, riding a scooter up a hill to see sunset over the beach. Then there’s of course New Zealand, where the treks were absolutely awe inspiring. Santiago’s funicular did a pretty decent job, and now I was looking across the chaotic sprawl of what was once the world’s most populated city. We spent that evening looking for a bar with little success. Myself and Will were sent in the direction of couple of Mexico’s hip/bar areas, and as we aimlessly walked through the streets we were met with little success. One of my biggest disappointments of Mexico was failing to find these areas, and hopefully I’ll be able to link up with a local when I next visit. We still had more luck than an Australian guy in our hostel, who from mishearing one letter of a place name, had ended up in the city’s gay quarter, which he made clear to us was not his intention. 

The next day I did a much improved walking tour of the city. It was actually more like a lesson in the history of the nation, illustrated by buildings and monuments, but did a good job of demonstrating how the city was formed, and the tour guide was excellent, I then flew to Cancun that evening. Mexico city’s airport look very central on the map, but the traffic can mean you actually have to leave 45 minutes for the 5 mile journey if going at peak times. As soon as I landed 2 hours later in Cancun I was hit by the wall of heat. This was not as bad as Austin turned out to be, but was still a step up from the city. I walked the 5 minute trip to my hostel and checked in. The hostel had looked pretty amazing both on the website and by the reviews, and it was one of my favourites of the trip. It was laid out very similarly to the ‘Love Island’ villa, a reference I’m not sure all readers of this blog will be able to relate to. There was also the added bonus of free dinner and breakfast, both of which were excellent. The pool was also great to cool off, and as a social aspect. My hope in Cancun was to meet a load of Americans. Mostly because I’ve had a good time with them so far, and I assumed it was where a lot of them come for the summer. It was then a bit of a shock when I joined a circle of chairs to find that the hostel was about 75% British and Irish. I’m still not sure why this was the case, given Mexico is a <3 hour flight from so many large American cities. I don’t remember all the names, but I got along well with another Will, who had been schooled in Dubai, but was about to go to Bristol University to do Medicine. I also met Sabrina, who was I think a trainee primary school teacher from San Francisco. I had thought I’d go out that night, it being Friday, though it seemed there was a pattern of big nights, and no nights. Thursday had been a big one for most people at the hostel, and I was fairly happy to settle for an early night. 

Breakfast was probably the best I’ve had from any hostel. This poor cook stood in an absolute sweat box of a kitchen, and was happy to cook you omelettes with your choice of filling, subway style. We went to the beach that day with a few others, I’m struggling with names but I can always remember nationalities. At times it annoyed and confused Americans when I would refer to them as Colorado, Arizona, Seattle or Buffalo, but it’s what always sticks with me, over the names themselves. So in this case there was a Dutch and a German girl, as well as an extremely irritating French-Canadian who went by the name of Swanny. He spent a considerable amount of time telling us about the factories he owns in China, while being a waiter at college. I’ve learnt not to question these people as it’s just not worth the effort. After a day at the beach where I probably burnt, we did go for a big night out at a club called ‘The City’. The hostel did an all-inclusive deal that got you transport (which turned out to be 50 cents…) entry to the club, your own table, and an open bar. I was shocked to find out this would cost $50. I had budgeted for far less, but I guess you have to remember that these institutions are solely serving tourists, and are American owned. A few of us briefly considered finding our own ‘locals outlet’, but then realised with no knowledge of the local area, little Spanish, and with the hostel organising the main night, we might as well just do it as a one off experience. I’m sure there’ll be some pictures in this, but it was pretty incredible. As the largest club in Central and South America it was just enormous, and more like an arena than a club. Safe to say I can’t remember a huge amount of this night past the initial amazement the size. I did for an unknown reason choose to jump in the pool when we returned to the hostel at about 4 in the morning. For this I was told to leave the premises or go to bed. Soaking wet, I sat outside for a while and I think dried off while dozing off to sleep. Later in the morning at about 5 I think Will turned up outside in an uber. I remember he left pretty early in the night. What made little sense was that on closer examination his uber had departed from a few hundred metres away from Cancun Airport. He had no clue how he’d ended up there, it’s about a 30 minute drive from the club. One theory is that he fell asleep on a bus going the wrong direction but I’m still not sure. 

The next day we visited Playa Delphinas, an absolutely stunning beach with picture perfect white sand and turquoise waters. Following the pattern, it was another quiet night, bar a beer pong tournament. I knew my success in this field had peaked back in Buenos Aires with Roy, so chose to sit this one out. The next day was a flight back to the city. I told you it was a bit of a mad trip. I’m not sure what I think of Cancun. I’m sure if you stay in one of the many resorts it can be a lovely place to holiday, but I’m not it has anything you wouldn’t possibly find cheaper in Europe. The issue is that the whole town is run on its tourists, and so finding Mexican prices, which was possible in the capital, was not here. I would possibly give it another go, but would prefer to see the nearby Tulum, or the pyramids at Chichen Itza. Having already ticked off 2 of the modern wonders on this trip (Great Wall of China and Machu Picchu) I was gutted not to have time to make the day trip to the Yucatan. 

On my return to the City I had booked a hotel for two nights. I had the money spare and it was only $25 a night. What I didn’t know, was that I was to be upgraded to the room with a huge Jacuzzi.. This was unbelievable news, and a situation I was desperate to share. I met up with Will, and Alicia that evening who were still at our hostel, and we played drinking games with a load of Dutch guys that evening before being kicked out. The next day I was pleased most of our group, plus some German girls and Israeli guys fancied visiting the pyramids of Teotihuacan. This partly made up for missing Chichen Itza. We could have done with a guide book as the Wikipedia page was fairly useless, as was the signage. We hung on the back of a couple of tour groups, but concluded that these guides went a lot slower, and in far more detail than we would have liked. It was built and largely functioned between 100 and 700AD. A lot of it was destroyed in the 6th Century. I think the story loosely goes that the Mayans built it and lived there, before the Aztecs decided they liked the look of it, and defeated the Mayans to take it. It is a hub for Archaeologists and I think still has a lot to be found. There’s a lot of controversy over the fact the dividing president Diaz somewhat rebuilt it in 1910 when he was trying to make Mexico City like the cultural capitals of Europe, and he may of destroyed some of the original stonework. Wikipedia also claims to me now that the government agreed on some proposals to build a Walmart there before they were defeated by UNESCO. That night those of us that went to the pyramids, along with a couple of English girls who moved in that evening, ended up back at my room in the hotel, with some drinks. Once you’ve seen a photo of the size of the jacuzzi, it would feel stupid to keep it to myself. In the morning having had very little sleep, I flew into the heat wall that was Austin.

[philipholt]

The PICO-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

I love everything about PICO-8. It's a fantasy gaming console that wants you - and the kids in your life and everyone you know - to make games!

How cool is that?

You know the game Celeste? It's available on every platform, has one every award and is generally considered a modern-day classic. Well the first version was made on PICO-8 in 4 days as a hackathon project and you can play it here online. Here's the link when they launched in 4 years ago on the forums. They pushed the limits, as they call out "We used pretty much all our resources for this. 8186/8192 code, the entire spritemap, the entire map, and 63/64 sounds." How far could one go? Wolf3D even?

"A fantasy console is like a regular console, but without the inconvenience of actual hardware. PICO-8 has everything else that makes a console a console: machine specifications and display format, development tools, design culture, distribution platform, community and playership. It is similar to a retro game emulator, but for a machine that never existed. PICO-8's specifications and ecosystem are instead designed from scratch to produce something that has it's own identity and feels real. Instead of physical cartridges, programs made for PICO-8 are distributed on .png images that look like cartridges, complete with labels and a fixed 32k data capacity."

What a great start and great proof that you can make an amazing game in a small space. If you loved GameBoys and have fond memories of GBA and other small games, you'll love PICO-8.

How to play PICO-8 cartridges

If you just want to explore, you can go to https://www.lexaloffle.com and just play in your browser! PICO-8 is a "fantasy console" that doesn't exist physically (unless you build one, more on that later). If you want to develop cartridges and play locally, you can buy the whole system (any platform) for $14.99, which I have.

If you have Windows and Chrome or New Edge you can just plug in your Xbox Controller with a micro-USB cable and visit https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php and start playing now! It's amazing - yes I know how it works but it's still amazing - to me to be able to play a game in a web browser using a game controller. I guess I'm easily impressed.

It wasn't very clear to me how to load and play any cartridge LOCALLY. For example, I can play Demon Castle here on the Forums but how do I play it locally and later, offline?

The easy way is to run PICO-8 and hit ESC to get their command line. Then I type LOAD #cartid where #cartid is literally the id of the cartridge on the forums. In the case of Demon Castle it's #demon_castle-0 so I can just LOAD #demon_castle-0 followed by RUN.

Alternatively - and this is just lovely - if I see the PNG pic of the cartridge on a web page, I can just save that PNG locally and save it in C:\Users\scott\AppData\Roaming\pico-8\carts then run it with LOAD demon_castle-0 (or I can include the full filename with extensions). THAT PNG ABOVE IS THE ACTUAL GAME AS WELL. What a clever thing - a true virtual cartridge.

One of the many genius parts of the PICO-8 is that the "Cartridges" are actually PNG pictures of cartridges. Drink that in for a second. They save a screenshot of the game while the cart is running, then they hide the actual code in a steganographic process - they are hiding the code in two of the bits of the color channels! Since the cart pics are 160*205 there's enough room for 32k.

A p8 file is source code and a p8.png is the compiled cart!

How to make PICO-8 games

The PICO-8 software includes everything you need - consciously constrained - to make AND play games. You hit ESC to move between the game and the game designer. It includes a sprite and music editor as well.

From their site, the specifications are TIGHT on purpose because constraints are fun. When I write for the PalmPilot back in the 90s I had just 4k of heap and it was the most fun I've had in years.

Display - 128x128 16 colours

Cartridge Size - 32k

Sound - 4 channel chip blerps

Code - Lua

Sprites - 256 8x8 sprites

Map - 128x32 cels

"The harsh limitations of PICO-8 are carefully chosen to be fun to work with, to encourage small but expressive designs, and to give cartridges made with PICO-8 their own particular look and feel."

The code you will use is LUA. Here's some demo code of a Hello World that animates 11 sprites and includes two lines of text

t = 0 music(0) -- play music from pattern 0 function _draw() cls() for i=1,11 do -- for each letter for j=0,7 do -- for each rainbow trail part t1 = t + i*4 - j*2 -- adjusted time y = 45-j + cos(t1/50)*5 -- vertical position pal(7, 14-j) -- remap colour from white spr(16+i, 8+i*8, y) -- draw letter sprite end end print("this is pico-8", 37, 70, 14) print("nice to meet you", 34, 80, 12) spr(1, 64-4, 90) -- draw heart sprite t += 1 end

That's just a simple example, there's a huge forum with thousands of games and lots of folks happy to help you in this new world of game creation with the PICO-8. Here's a wonderful PICO-8 Cheat Sheet to print out with a list of functions and concepts. Maybe set it as your wallpaper while developing? There's a detailed User Manual and a 72 page PICO-8 Zine PDF which is really impressive!

And finally, be sure to bookmark this GitHub hosted amazing curated list of PICO-8 resources! https://github.com/pico-8/awesome-PICO-8

  Writing PICO-8 Code in another Editor

There is a 3 year old PICO-8 extension for Visual Studio Code that is a decent start, although it's created assuming a Mac, so if you are a Windows user, you will need to change the Keyboard Shortcuts to something like "Ctrl-Shift-Alt-R" to run cartridges. There's no debugger that I'm seeing. In an ideal world we'd use launch.json and have a registered PICO-8 type and that would make launching after changing code a lot clearer.

There is a more recent "pico8vscodeditor" extension by Steve Robbins that includes snippets for loops and some snippets for the Pico-8 API. I recommend this newer fleshed out extension - kudos Steve! Be sure to include the full path to your PICO-8 executable, and note that the hotkey to run is a chord, starting with "Ctrl-8" then "R."

Editing code directly in the PICO-8 application is totally possible and you can truly develop an entire cart in there, but if you do, you're a better person than I. Here's a directory listing in VSCode on the left and PICO-8 on the right.

And some code.

You can expert to HTML5 as well as binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's a full game maker! There are also other game systems out there like PicoLove that take PICO-8 in different directions and those are worth knowing about as well.

What about a physical PICO-8 Console

A number of folks have talked about the ultimate portable handheld PICO-8 device. I have done a lot of spelunking and as of this writing it doesn't exist.

You could get a Raspberry Pi Zero and put this Waveshare LCD hat on top. The screen is perfect. But the joystick and buttons...just aren't. There's also no sound by default. But $14 is a good start.

The Tiny GamePi15, also from Waveshare could be good with decent buttons but it has a 240x240 screen.

The full sized Game Hat looks promising and has a large 480x320 screen so you could play PICO-8 at a scaled 256x256.

The RetroStone is also close but you're truly on your own, compiling drivers yourself (twitter thread) from what I can gather

The ClockworkPI GameShell is SOOOO close but the screen is 320x240 which makes 128x128 an awkward scaled mess with aliasing, and the screen the Clockwork folks chose doesn't have a true grid if pixels. Their pixels are staggered. Hopefully they'll offer an alternative module one day, then this would truly be the perfect device. There are clear instructions on how to get going.

The PocketCHIP has a great screen but a nightmare input keyboard.

For now, any PC, Laptop, or Rasberry Pi with a proper setup will do just fine for you to explore the PICO-8 and the world of fantasy consoles!

Sponsor: OzCode is a magical debugging extension for C#/.NET devs working in Visual Studio. Get to the root cause of your bugs faster with heads-up display, advanced search inside objects, LINQ query debugging, side-by-side object comparisons & more. Try for free!

© 2019 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.

      The PICO-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker published first on http://7elementswd.tumblr.com/

[suzanneshannon]

The PICO-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker

I love everything about PICO-8. It's a fantasy gaming console that wants you - and the kids in your life and everyone you know - to make games!

How cool is that?

You know the game Celeste? It's available on every platform, has one every award and is generally considered a modern-day classic. Well the first version was made on PICO-8 in 4 days as a hackathon project and you can play it here online. Here's the link when they launched in 4 years ago on the forums. They pushed the limits, as they call out "We used pretty much all our resources for this. 8186/8192 code, the entire spritemap, the entire map, and 63/64 sounds." How far could one go? Wolf3D even?

"A fantasy console is like a regular console, but without the inconvenience of actual hardware. PICO-8 has everything else that makes a console a console: machine specifications and display format, development tools, design culture, distribution platform, community and playership. It is similar to a retro game emulator, but for a machine that never existed. PICO-8's specifications and ecosystem are instead designed from scratch to produce something that has it's own identity and feels real. Instead of physical cartridges, programs made for PICO-8 are distributed on .png images that look like cartridges, complete with labels and a fixed 32k data capacity."

What a great start and great proof that you can make an amazing game in a small space. If you loved GameBoys and have fond memories of GBA and other small games, you'll love PICO-8.

How to play PICO-8 cartridges

If you just want to explore, you can go to https://www.lexaloffle.com and just play in your browser! PICO-8 is a "fantasy console" that doesn't exist physically (unless you build one, more on that later). If you want to develop cartridges and play locally, you can buy the whole system (any platform) for $14.99, which I have.

If you have Windows and Chrome or New Edge you can just plug in your Xbox Controller with a micro-USB cable and visit https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php and start playing now! It's amazing - yes I know how it works but it's still amazing - to me to be able to play a game in a web browser using a game controller. I guess I'm easily impressed.

It wasn't very clear to me how to load and play any cartridge LOCALLY. For example, I can play Demon Castle here on the Forums but how do I play it locally and later, offline?

The easy way is to run PICO-8 and hit ESC to get their command line. Then I type LOAD #cartid where #cartid is literally the id of the cartridge on the forums. In the case of Demon Castle it's #demon_castle-0 so I can just LOAD #demon_castle-0 followed by RUN.

Alternatively - and this is just lovely - if I see the PNG pic of the cartridge on a web page, I can just save that PNG locally and save it in C:\Users\scott\AppData\Roaming\pico-8\carts then run it with LOAD demon_castle-0 (or I can include the full filename with extensions). THAT PNG ABOVE IS THE ACTUAL GAME AS WELL. What a clever thing - a true virtual cartridge.

One of the many genius parts of the PICO-8 is that the "Cartridges" are actually PNG pictures of cartridges. Drink that in for a second. They save a screenshot of the game while the cart is running, then they hide the actual code in a steganographic process - they are hiding the code in two of the bits of the color channels! Since the cart pics are 160*205 there's enough room for 32k.

A p8 file is source code and a p8.png is the compiled cart!

How to make PICO-8 games

The PICO-8 software includes everything you need - consciously constrained - to make AND play games. You hit ESC to move between the game and the game designer. It includes a sprite and music editor as well.

From their site, the specifications are TIGHT on purpose because constraints are fun. When I write for the PalmPilot back in the 90s I had just 4k of heap and it was the most fun I've had in years.

Display - 128x128 16 colours

Cartridge Size - 32k

Sound - 4 channel chip blerps

Code - Lua

Sprites - 256 8x8 sprites

Map - 128x32 cels

"The harsh limitations of PICO-8 are carefully chosen to be fun to work with, to encourage small but expressive designs, and to give cartridges made with PICO-8 their own particular look and feel."

The code you will use is LUA. Here's some demo code of a Hello World that animates 11 sprites and includes two lines of text

t = 0 music(0) -- play music from pattern 0 function _draw() cls() for i=1,11 do -- for each letter for j=0,7 do -- for each rainbow trail part t1 = t + i*4 - j*2 -- adjusted time y = 45-j + cos(t1/50)*5 -- vertical position pal(7, 14-j) -- remap colour from white spr(16+i, 8+i*8, y) -- draw letter sprite end end print("this is pico-8", 37, 70, 14) print("nice to meet you", 34, 80, 12) spr(1, 64-4, 90) -- draw heart sprite t += 1 end

That's just a simple example, there's a huge forum with thousands of games and lots of folks happy to help you in this new world of game creation with the PICO-8. Here's a wonderful PICO-8 Cheat Sheet to print out with a list of functions and concepts. Maybe set it as your wallpaper while developing? There's a detailed User Manual and a 72 page PICO-8 Zine PDF which is really impressive!

And finally, be sure to bookmark this GitHub hosted amazing curated list of PICO-8 resources! https://github.com/pico-8/awesome-PICO-8

  Writing PICO-8 Code in another Editor

There is a 3 year old PICO-8 extension for Visual Studio Code that is a decent start, although it's created assuming a Mac, so if you are a Windows user, you will need to change the Keyboard Shortcuts to something like "Ctrl-Shift-Alt-R" to run cartridges. There's no debugger that I'm seeing. In an ideal world we'd use launch.json and have a registered PICO-8 type and that would make launching after changing code a lot clearer.

There is a more recent "pico8vscodeditor" extension by Steve Robbins that includes snippets for loops and some snippets for the Pico-8 API. I recommend this newer fleshed out extension - kudos Steve! Be sure to include the full path to your PICO-8 executable, and note that the hotkey to run is a chord, starting with "Ctrl-8" then "R."

Editing code directly in the PICO-8 application is totally possible and you can truly develop an entire cart in there, but if you do, you're a better person than I. Here's a directory listing in VSCode on the left and PICO-8 on the right.

And some code.

You can expert to HTML5 as well as binaries for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It's a full game maker! There are also other game systems out there like PicoLove that take PICO-8 in different directions and those are worth knowing about as well.

What about a physical PICO-8 Console

A number of folks have talked about the ultimate portable handheld PICO-8 device. I have done a lot of spelunking and as of this writing it doesn't exist.

You could get a Raspberry Pi Zero and put this Waveshare LCD hat on top. The screen is perfect. But the joystick and buttons...just aren't. There's also no sound by default. But $14 is a good start.

The Tiny GamePi15, also from Waveshare could be good with decent buttons but it has a 240x240 screen.

The full sized Game Hat looks promising and has a large 480x320 screen so you could play PICO-8 at a scaled 256x256.

The RetroStone is also close but you're truly on your own, compiling drivers yourself (twitter thread) from what I can gather

The ClockworkPI GameShell is SOOOO close but the screen is 320x240 which makes 128x128 an awkward scaled mess with aliasing, and the screen the Clockwork folks chose doesn't have a true grid if pixels. Their pixels are staggered. Hopefully they'll offer an alternative module one day, then this would truly be the perfect device. There are clear instructions on how to get going.

The PocketCHIP has a great screen but a nightmare input keyboard.

For now, any PC, Laptop, or Rasberry Pi with a proper setup will do just fine for you to explore the PICO-8 and the world of fantasy consoles!

Sponsor: OzCode is a magical debugging extension for C#/.NET devs working in Visual Studio. Get to the root cause of your bugs faster with heads-up display, advanced search inside objects, LINQ query debugging, side-by-side object comparisons & more. Try for free!

© 2019 Scott Hanselman. All rights reserved.

      The PICO-8 Virtual Fantasy Console is an idealized constrained modern day game maker published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/