#and i think that fundamentally requires size

[nonstandardrepertoire]

i am listening to a new arrangement of The Rite of Spring for wind band and it's hard b/c on the one hand i'm not sure i love this arrangement but on the other i also really don't like the interpretation, and it's a little hard for me to figure out whether i would think the arrangement better if it were conducted more to my taste

[centaurianthropology]

Using the costuming to figure out the budget of ‘Murderbot’

So I kept meaning to write other things, but what ended up lingering in my brain this week about ‘Murderbot’ was something a bit more specific to my training an interests: costuming, and more specifically, how costuming can indicate the budget of the show. 

I’ve seen posts on here and elsewhere criticizing certain aspects of the show for various costuming or setting choices (no drones, far less chrome and inorganic parts on both MB and Gurathin than I think a lot of us imagined, less visual representation of the Feed, things looking “cheap” or “plastic”, etc), and claiming that Apple has an enormous amount of money, so why did the show ‘cheap out’?

I think that A) fundamentally misunderstands that a single television production is not the same as its production company, and B) dramatically overestimates the budget this show almost certainly has.

I don’t think this is a low-budget show.  The CG is solid, the sets are lovely, and none of that is going to be accomplished with low budget, but looking at the costumes it’s clear this isn’t a high-budget show either.  Appropriately for a fairly unknown property, my guess is that season 1’s budget was modest. Keeping run-times down to 22 minutes an episode was likely both a stylistic choice (hooray serial adventure stories!), but was also a budgetary choice. Because every minute that makes it to air is a LOT of money on the table. 

But I can also see the mid-budget in the costumes, but also a lot of creative work-arounds for a limited budget. For one, most characters thus far essentially have two costumes: their civilian clothing (or MB’s armor), and the hab uniforms. And the uniforms themselves are modular, and so a good amount of customization can happen with a single costuming piece (which is both practical in universe, but also great for saving money for wardrobe). That means that more money can go into limited pieces.

There is certainly money that went into these pieces. We didn’t get to spend a lot of time with the original civilian pieces, but the uniforms all required a decent amount of tailoring, at least in the out piece, because let me tell you: jumpsuits are NOT one-size-fits-all. They have to be fitted to every part of a person in order to fit decently, which means each of the actors had a uniform made bespoke for them.  There are also prints (company logo) on a lot of the pieces that would also require custom work. The tunics Bharadwaj and Arada both wear may or may not be custom.

There are a lot of carefully cut corners that almost certainly lowered cost: the shoes, and probably the leggings and cargo pants, look like they were purchased rather than made.  Purchasing a costume piece, especially if you don’t have to purchase a brand name or a designer piece, is the cheapest and easiest way to costume. 

I think that, if they had unlimited budget, everything would probably be bespoke.  Even the fabricated clothing on the hab would be bespoke, down to the shoes (shoes are always the last thing to be bespoke, because very few costumers are also cobblers, and hiring someone to make shoes is VERY pricey).  I think they’d take all the little details they managed to work in, and go even farther with them.   I want to stress that I think the costumers did really well with what they had, and even had a lot of subtle detail worked into their pieces.  Having the company logo as a miniature texture print was particularly great.  And you can get away with the ‘printed’ clothing being made out of inexpensive synthetics, while still making it a stylistic choice.

If anything, I think they would have pushed the budget harder with the civilian clothing if they had a bigger budget. It’s stated that their clothing is hand-made.  If I were costuming the show, I would want their costumes from Preservation to be actually hand-made, with a ton of detail work, all made of natural fabrics to contrast the synthetics in the Corporation Rim.  I would want layered textures, embroidery, bead-work, knits.  I could see them trying to do that with the civilian costumes, but it was there that I still saw what almost certainly were purchased pieces that didn’t quite nail that feeling. And that’s what convinced me that this was a mid-budget show. If they had the budget of, say, ‘Game of Thrones’, very different choices would have been made. I mentioned the civilian clothing, but there would have also, likely, been a lot more obviously inorganic parts on Murderbot, and probably also Gurathin.

Anyway, I have no idea if anyone is interested in my thoughts on budget on a show like this, but it was this realization that made me fine with a lot of visual changes to save money. If our SecUnit doesn’t have metallic feet, and a ton of visible inorganics, I get it. A few visual effects shots of being reprinted (a fun thought!) are way cheaper than having to either provide makeup or costumes consistently to create believable synthetic pieces, particularly if you have to supplement them with CG. So it’s fine. It’s fine if they can’t afford that, or the drones. Hell, having the hab look cheap is not only fine, it’s perfect! This is the budget model, after all. It looks like an intergalactic air-stream, while the DeltFall hab (which was the deluxe version) is far more upscale sci-fi visuals. There is so much visual storytelling going on, not only working within the budget, but utilizing their lower budget to tell a story.

[cyberrose2001]

HUMAN PET AU <3

Ratchet finally comes home from working all day at the med bay, the poor medic is tired as hell and just wants to relax in the comfort of his own berth. Fortunately enough, ratchet owns an exotic pet. A human he has grown fond of. They are fully trained and even have their own collar (with the message “Please return to Ratchet if lost” written on it), they have also learned how to help Ratchet de-stress by letting him use their hole as his personal flesh light <3 His happy little human loves becoming his cum dump to help him get his frustrations out, such a helpful little pet <33

any continuity of ratchet is fine (pick ur fav!), afab but gender neutral reader please and thank you moni 🙏❤️‍🩹

A Sight For Sore Optics - Human Pet AU

IDW/MTMTE Ratchet x human! afab! gn!Reader

Hi Gem! Thank you so much for your request, I was literally foaming at the mouth ready to write this. To make this more anatomically possible, Ratchet's spike transforms to a more "safer" size. So I hope this is good please be good (I haven't finished reading mtmte yet so forgive me). Also if I have missed any tags please let me know!

Warnings: Xenophilia, Size Kink, Collaring, Oral (both receiving and giving), Masturbation, Praise Kink, Cum Dumping, Mild Dubious Consent (?)

Word Count: 2.3k

18+ ONLY MINORS DNI

Another day, another few thousand miles of endless space, another few sickly bots. Additionally, a few unkempt humans requiring attention due to poor conditions from their previous owners. With the new organic additions to the Lost Light at the captain's approval, Ratchet had found himself biting off more than he could chew, looking after bots and humans. Oh, how he wished he took up an organic health course or something other than primarily relying on Brainstorm's fervent research on the tiny creatures. Between juggling it all, Ratchet was unsure how much more his threadbare servos could take. Still, there was one thing the old medic was unmistakable about. He was tired.

One good thing, he must admit, is that he gets to return to you. His own human pet, a personal 'Thank you' gift on behalf of the entire crew for his selflessness and hard work, provided with you a basket with fundamental necessities. But the basket had long since been used up, and he had transformed it into a makeshift cot for you. It'll do for now, he had thought.

He was initially still trying to figure out what to think of you. Apart from very rudimentary health checkups and nutritional foods, there wasn't much that Ratchet could provide for you. There's not many enriching activities for such a tiny human like yourself. Until that is, he discovered something quite unusual that had been exhibited in almost every human adopted by the crew so far.

You have an insatiable libido.

Ratchet was unsure, if not downright nervous if other owners were to discover how incredibly beneficial humans could be. Whether or not they had already learned was an entirely different story. It wouldn't surprise Ratchet if that was the very reason why human pets were approved, though it seems shocking. It all seemed so innocent enough, adopting humans for the cuteness factor for the mechs on board. But as with most things, there's always more than just the surface level of what the optic sees. And Ratchet was already way too far below the surface.

Punching in the code for his hab suite, Ratchet waits eagerly for the door to open with twitching digits. He steps inside, tossing whatever work essentials he has on hand on the first bench he sees. He'll worry about reorganising later. Right now, he needs some pet therapy and a well-overdue overload. The dull ache behind his panels only gets stronger as his pedes carry him to his berthroom to you, curled up on his berth. It looked as if you neglected your rudimentary cot, choosing to sleep on his berth instead. The medic can't help the softened expression as he melts at the sight. Of all the things he didn't think he deserved, he never once expected it to be such an adorable little thing like you.

He lets his pedes wander over to you, like countless times before, careful and delicate. He always told himself that this 'fling' he had with you was only temporary and that it was purely for his curiosity, but he tends to find himself aching for you repeatedly. He can't help how his racing neurocircuits seem to fizzle out and calm down when he lies with you.

A roughened servo brushes over your hair to slowly stir you. It looked like you had been napping for some time now, which he believes is a good thing. Brainstorm did say that humans tend to sleep better in environments they consider comfortable. The gentle brushing causes you to stir and lift your head to greet him, though in a language yet to be deciphered. It's a pleasant greeting, and Ratchet can tell they're happy to see him. Something along the lines of 'I missed you,' he'd like to think.

"Hey, squishy. I missed you too," Ratchet smiles warmly. He brushes the hair away from your neck to reveal a collar, "You haven't ripped it off yet. Seems like you like it, hm?"

A slight, sleepy nod in confirmation, you've grasped at what he said. Ratchets' digits trail down to the collar, a small silver plate that reads 'Please Return to Ratchet If Lost - HabSuite ###" engraved in Cybertronian. Not that you tend to wander off, but more or less a just in case. Plus, he gets a thrill seeing his name attached to you. He thumbs it gently, admiring his handy work.

"I'm glad you do. It took me quite some time to make," Ratchet tugs at it softly, beckoning you to come closer. He watches you climb onto his lap, "Such tiny adornments are complex to create, 'specially with hands like mine." A servo cups your back, his thumb moving to play with your soft chest. He shivers when he hears a tiny whimper from you, and you seem eager to play with him already.

"I've had a busy day," A mechanical noise of shifting gears as his spike slides out of its housing, "I think you know what I need." It's well and truly bigger than you, much bigger than your tiny body could ever take. But the way your eyes light up in excitement assures Ratchet that you are more than pleased, already desperately taking off your quirky frame coverings. He eyes off your cute organic valve, notices how dripping wet it is, and staves off a moan.

"C'mere for a second," Ratchet scoops you into his servo to bring you closer to his face. He gets a whiff of your arousal, so earthy and addicting. The more you spread your thighs for him, the more he can smell. He brings you to his intake and licks one hearty stripe up your folds.

Oh yes, he thinks. Better than energon. Better than any high grade to ever pass his dermas, like a warm drink that soothes and revitalises his senses. It thickens on his glossa, groaning at the taste as he swirls it around your little node. He watches intently as you squeal in delight, your thighs trembling around his cheeks and how your little face contorts into one of pleasure. Well, he had always presumed it was in pleasure; you've never exactly shied away from his glossa. He hums when you feel him grinding, desperate little ruts chasing the vibrations.

Ratchet licks one last time at your slick, pulling away to observe. Oral lubricants coat your valve thickly, the sensitive area reddened from his torment. His optics wander up; your soft skin is already flushed and glistening with sweat. He wonders how close you were to overloading; it wouldn't have taken much longer if he had kept going. But his spike grows restless, throbbing against his abdominal plating, begging to be touched by much softer palms than his own.

"Do you want my spike? Hm?" Ratchet teases, "My big spike?" He knows you can't fully understand him, but he can't help but vocalise his salacious fantasy. Holding onto you carefully, he lounges back onto the berth. He bites his bottom derma and lowers you to his lap, showing you his engorged spike, "Go on then, have at it. I'll frag your little brains out soon."

With an encouraging nudge from Ratchet, you straddle the shaft. To anyone else, it looks ridiculous. A tiny human desperately attempting to wrap their arms around a spike that's two times taller than they are. But to any depraved fleshy fragger, it's a sight to behold. Ratchet once thought of snapping a picture to potentially maybe sell it to the highest bidder for those who crave the feeling of such a soft body grinding on them, for he is sure there's a market out there somewhere, probably more than half of the crew onboard. Still, the shame of it all prevents him. There's an image to uphold being the resident medic.

Besides, he'd much prefer to keep you and that curious tongue all for himself.

He feels your little licks along him, a tiny tongue wiggling through the grooves and smooth surface, reaching crevices with hidden nodes that cause his pedes to curl. Soft ruts of your hips press your soaked valve right up against him. He knows what you want. The medic brings a servo to grip around his spike with you squished between, only tight enough to keep you in place as he begins self-servicing himself. He hears you letting out a surprised gasp, then a muffled moan, feeling your grip tighten around him.

"Yeah? You like that, squishy?" Ratchet moans, moving his servo slightly faster, "I bet you-nghh do. You look so cute like that. So tiny pressed against my spike."

Only a taste of your warmth is given through your body, like the little tease you are. Ratchet feels the perspiration dripping off you, likely due to the rise of his internal temperature and the energon being solely diverted to his array. It makes for a mediocre yet acceptable lubrication. He could spike you with it alone, but Ratchet prefers to use alternate practices in the interest of your health. Primus knows how careless other Cybertronians can be with their pets.

The medic is becoming increasingly aware of his overload and yours by the looks of things, your little optics squeezed shut, and your limbs clamped tight around his girth. He consciously decides to stop before you reach it. The idea of you squirming on his spike played on his processor a bit too well. He hears your soft whine at the loss of friction, which Ratchet can't help but chuckle at.

"I know, I know. I'm so mean, aren't I? Hold on, squishy." Ratchet lets you rest against his palm while his weeping spike whirs and clunks inwards to a much more manageable size for a human. His spike may be smaller, but there's not much difference in sensation. Thank Primus for the minicon-compatability modes, "You alright?"

A small squeak from you, yes. The medic watches intently as you waste no time climbing on, guided by his careful servo. You press your little valve against the tip, hissing as it barely slips through. Ratchet digs his pedes into the berth at the intense sensation, gritting his dentae as you bottom out. The feeling is incomparable to anything else; it's uniquely organic, warm, and so, so much softer than mesh.

He then wraps his entire servo around you, effectively turning you into one perfect spike sleeve only for him. Perfectly snug inside you, his grip clenches and unclenches around your torso before gently unsheathing himself from you again.

Ratchet is always careful when he uses you in this manner, ensuring his grip isn't too tight. He pushes you back down again, and he feels you melt into his servo. He hears your little whimpers and cries for him, to go faster, he believes. He learned a long ago that he doesn't need to understand your verbal mumbles when your fleshy hips try to hastefully force yourself down onto him, only halted by his own hand. His grip ever so tightens and gives in to your desperation, or more or less his own.

"You're so good for me, squishy. Hah- Lettin' me use your little valve like a toy." Ratchet mewls, his helm lolling off to the side as his optics flick between your face and the way his spike disappears inside you, "Such a helpful little pet you are."

He feels your velvet walls clamp down on him with each and every praise he gives, your little arms draped over the top of his thumb, clinging on for dear life. Every now and then, he massages your breasts pressed up against it, eliciting more dirty moans from you. Such softness that he can't help but take advantage of.

"So- ngh- tight," Ratchet vents heavily, "Primus, you've ruined me for my own race."

He felt a twinge of shame hearing himself; it was as if he had entirely let himself go. But he knows he can no longer turn back, not when you're the best little creature to ever stumble into his life. Despite him having you wrapped around his digits, it is indeed him wrapped around yours. The relief you bring to him after every gruelling shift, after every stressful day upon this damned ship, had him truly addicted.

And with an internal affirmation of decadence and with your soft little valve clenching and pulsing around his spike, he's sent right over the edge.

"Frag yes, sweetspark!-" He glitches out, pressing you down on his thick shaft as far as your soft little body can tolerate. His energon pulses deeply and shocks his entire body with an overload, shooting gush after gush of transfluids into you. His frame lurches forward, his hips driving into the berth as he milks his throbbing spike, his servo driving it deeper into you in a lust-filled daze. Your whines and cries only spur him on more, and he doesn't stop until you're shaking like a leaf in his hold.

It takes only a few more moments for a spent Ratchet to collapse back with you still in his grip, albeit slumped against his thumb. You're panting hard, and he can only just feel your tiny heart pounding against him. You must have had your own overload by the looks of it if the bliss-filled smile on your soft lips is anything to go by. His optics linger down to your soft, distended stomach and the dripping mess that splatters across your thighs and onto his pelvic plating. Now that truly is a sight for sore optics, he thinks to himself.

Ratchet huffs, bringing his other servo to pat the top of your head, "Now there's my happy little human, huh?" He smiles warmly when he feels you leaning into his touch, "How 'bout I fill you up some more?"

If this was what it took for the old medic to de-stress and relax, then so be it. If he were to be exposed to the rest of the crew, then may he join the rest of them. In secret, for now, he will proudly declare himself a lover of organic flesh.

[centrally-unplanned]

could Congress in theory pass something similar to the Enabling Act of Nazi Germany or are the constitutional limits on delegation of powers too strict?

I think they could, yeah. It won't look the same, right? Like you can't get rid of the Bill of Rights that way. But there is a lot you can do in between the spaces there. The US Constitution doesn't create a lot of rules around election management, for example, beyond requiring they happen in some form. Congress could vest expansive authority in the executive to police elections against "foreign threats" and you could do a lot that way. You can use the powers of policing/antiterrorism/what-have-you to allow the executive to use the threats of property confiscation (civil asset forfeiture babyyy, no trial required!) or imprisonment to force compliance from the population. We used the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to break up labor strikes in the past, you can get there again and do a lot more!

The biggest limit is probably going to be state-federal; you can get a lot of power invested in the executive branch via creative framing (the product of an 18th century constitution being stretched to meet the needs of a modern nation state - what can't the commerce clause do??), but there are fundamental rights that states have that the executive cannot break. You can corrupt elections, but states have strong powers to determine their structure that the federal government can't override and definitely could not be outsourced to the President. And you will legitimately not be able to establish a state religion or some other key things.

In the soft version of the Enabling Act, of course. But you can just not be a fucking coward about it - Congress passes a law tripling the size of the Supreme Court which they can totally do, you appoint your cronies, and then file an Executive Order declaring martial law to revoke the entire constitutional order which they rubberstamp

Which really isn't an indictment of the US Constitution? If your ruling political party universally agrees to say Il Duce Vivre is the fashion of the times, you are fucked no matter what a piece of paper says. I don't think the Weimar Constitution was that badly designed! It is a bit of a myth. The Nazis had co-opted the conservatives, ran the state, and used the threat of violence to coerce compliance from dissenters. The wording of Article 48's "Emergency Powers Clause" wasn't gonna change that. This is the hard limit of legalism, it can never bind the hands of men who choose not to be bound by it. If the US truly faces a "fascist coup" moment it probably won't be because the Constitution has a loophole for the moment of the coup. It will be because of the one million failures of design that led to that being possible and desired by so many of the political elite and voting public.

[yusuke-of-valla]

The thing about conflicting headcanons re: Yusuke's financial situation post Madarame (ie is he actually poor, does he make money but spends it all on art because he has poor impulse control, is Kosei a money laundering scheme etc.) is that like Yusuke's financial situation is written to facilitate a running gag so it's not consistent.

The school gives him an allowance, but he's also being charged for utilities despite being on a scholarship and so showers in the cold and works in the dark and worries about the electricity bill.

We know he bought those lobsters that one time but realistically how much of his money is being spent on supplies for class vs non-necessities he feels inspired by? Because canvases are expensive and if there's a certain size expectation/requirement you can't save by getting a smaller canvas. So when someone says "he just spends all his money on art" what are we really talking about?

By Strikers he's very excited to have money from an art contest to spend on his friends but was that true during the course of the base game when he was in his slump? Because I have a hard time believing he was even entering competitions

The details don't really make sense because most of these details come from jokes that are never elaborated on into cohesive worldbuilding.

And even if you want to say the issue is just he's got bad spending habits, that's still a situation that would require intervention by an adult probably because uh, no shit?

Yeah of COURSE Yusuke is completely unprepared to live on his own and is incidentally starving himself, he was raised by a dude who convinced him that the only purpose he served was helping his Sensei. In what way would it have benefitted Madarame to prepare Yusuke in any way to live on his own or know how to balance finances, he actively wanted Yusuke reliant on him, because that's how abuse works.

I'm pretty sure Yusuke has never even conceptualized living on his own, and that's not even adding in the detail of Nakanohara being concerned he'd commit suicide if he stayed with Madarame. NO SHIT HE'D BE BAD AT IT? People don't just emerge from the womb capable of money management

In that situation is the proper response really "oh that Yusuke, he just doesn't understand money, it's not a big deal"?

And like regardless, he IS still starving. Like the extent to which you think it's self inflicted aside, he's a 16 year old who will constantly talk about skipping meals and eating sprouts from the park and that sucks. Someone should maybe like talk to him about the root cause of that!

TL;DR: Yusuke's financial situation doesn't make sense because it's not supposed to, so it kind of doesn't matter to me how people headcanon the nature of it, and I fundamentally think it's incorrect to say one option of "poor vs has bad impulse spending habits" is more correct than the other because arguably they both raise the question of "holy shit why is no one stepping in here" if you think about it all the way through

PS. Also I wrote this whole thing because I saw a tweet that was like "one big misconception i see about yusukes character and how he’s treated is people saying “Why doesn’t Joker/Haru give him money when he’s poor?” and the real fact is that he’s not poor (post madarame). He’s just EXTREMELY irresponsible with his spending and spends it all on art," and I was like "idk if that's a misconception really I think a case can be made for both because it doesn't make sense" and then AFTER I wrote it I remebered that I have repository of every Yusuke scene uploaded into my brain and was like "wait if you call Yusuke poor in PQ2 during the Akihiko/Shinjiro/Yusuke quest he'll agree" and then there's also the scene in Tactica where Marie calls him dirt poor and he doesn't disagree with the poor part, just that she insulted dirt

So like my point still stands but I'd ESPECIALLY not call it a misconception to say he's poor when canon material supports it.

[sergeant-angels-trashcan]

you seem know stuff about the ER I have a question (if you don't mind, of course disregard if you'd rather not answer!) but basically, how many doctors (particularly attendings and residents) could realistically be working a shift? I'm wondering how s2 of the pitt could play out since there's so many characters it seems like it would be tough to have them all working at once without another mass casualty event?

HI YES I LOVE OFFERING MY CIVILIAN KNOWLEDGE ABOUT EDs!!!!

so! for starters! i work in a pediatric emergency department so some of my knowledge is very lopsided. I'm also not a nurse, doctor, tech or social work, I do patient registration (ironically the only people not really focused on in the show--EVS felt like it got more time but I digress) so I might not know the whys of things

There's a few factors at play--how many people are on staff? which ties directly into--how many people can we afford? The show mentioned the nursing shortage but at least where I live there's also a straight-up doctor shortage. I found out a few weeks ago that basically the entire time I've worked at this hospital we've been short 2-4 attendings. That's INSANE.

There will be at least two attendings per shift. It depends on when their shifts start and end how many are in the ED at a given time, but evenings might start with 4 and then go down to 2 around midnight. Maybe 3 and a nurse practitioner. There might also be a fellow if your hospital has one--we had a fellow for a few years who recently became an attending, he has BIG golden retriever energy at the start of the night. I don't really get what being a fellow is all about but it's like. A super-resident, or maybe a baby attending. Not sure which.

I work at a teaching hospital and we have rotating residents (VERY annoying tbh) so every month or so we get a new crop of them. It's great when they're bad and sucks when they're good :( and that's where I don't know if it's a matter of "this is all we could afford to staff" or "this is how many we have". Three or four is a general average for residents? I've seen as low as two, not sure if I've seen more than four but I think we'd max out at six. But that also depends on how many beds the ED has. I don't remember how many beds the Pitt has. (boarding patients may also affect the number of doctors present, depending on if boarding care is done by floor teams or the ED; either way those beds aren't moving which changes the flow of patients and staffing needs)

But let's take a specific day--if we're staffing the 4th of July, a day all hospitals KNOW is going to be bad, an ideal staffing situation would be having 4 attendings at 7PM, 4-5 residents, 2 APRNs, and 3 charge nurses (1 actually charging and the other 2 resourcing. Don't ask me what resourcing is, I don't actually know, I just know you want to have that level of command and experience ready to roll), probably going down to 2 attendings around 1AM (after the major injuries will have all rolled in). I don't think the show really did anything with APRNs, I think they just had residents instead so I think you could have most of the cast there and it would feel reasonable. Five doctors would also feel accurate (two attendings, three residents) but again, size and staffing capabilities.

The thing is that the 4th of July has a high potential for trauma activations--which are different than mass casualty events. Even multiple trauma activations are fundamentally different than a MCI, and multiple high acuity/critical trauma activations would require a lot of clinical staff, which means you could in theory have all hands on deck again (specialties, consults, etc).

I hope that makes sense! I am very tired but I really enjoy explaining how emergency departments function because it's very weird and interesting. Please feel free to ask more questions--or if anyone else who works in an ED has clarifications or additions I'd love that!

[seeingteacupsindragons]

Headcanons about how things would go if Stan and Xeno somehow hadn’t found the time to tie the knot until after all this moon bullshit:

Xeno asks Senku to be his best man, on account of Stan is busy doing something else in the wedding

Senku, being Japanese, has no idea what the fuck a best man even does or what it means (wedding parties aren’t really a thing in Japan, and given what else we know of Taiju and Yuzuriha’s wedding, he wouldn’t have been Taiju’s best man)

Stan asks Ryusui on account of the same reason, who either already knows or does not actually care because ‘best man’ is the most important role in the wedding other than the couple, obviously, and he Desires This

Ryusui and/or Francois explains what this means to Senku

Senku and Xeno absolutely refuse to look each other in the eye but Senku accepts

They spend the entire pre-wedding period throwing zingers at each other and silently agreeing to avoid any and all eye contact whenever things are emotional and sincere

This means Senku has to plan a bachelor party for Xeno which is the funniest possible thing because like what do you even plan for this man? Why are you expecting Senku to plan a social event?

Stan got lucky. Ryusui will plan a banger bachelor party and also he has Francois

Stan’s party eventually involves some kind of target competition and nice drinks and food and chilling out and maybe some plane joyrides. Xeno’s not allowed to come, but Ryusui may have asked him for input on what Stan would like, as he is Stan’s best friend as well as his fiancé

Stan’s not allowed to come to Xeno’s, either, and Senku desperately asks Stan for help, who makes fun of him before helping because he wants Xeno to have a good time

Senku makes Sai build some kind of Civ game for the bachelor party. Suika and Chrome and Sai and maybe Chelsea and such come. Senku makes a giant table-sized touchscreen for the game, and he can reuse it! Practical! It’s a good time and much quieter

Rest of the wedding party: Suika and Chrome for Xeno, maybe Chelsea or Kaseki or something if they need another person. Probably Charlotte and Maya for Stan, maybe Kohaku? Stan is significantly less social and charismatic than Xeno is; harder to pick people for him, especially as he spends so much of his existence in canon as a rock

“But what about Gen” okay firstly that would require picking one of them for Gen to be closer to, and also Gen should probably be the officiant or reception MC or something because he would be good at that

Yuzuriha gets to sew custom suits for the occasion. She’s more excited about this than they are, but Xeno has lots of opinions. Stan only has a few

Ryusui tries to convince Stan to write heartfelt personalized vows. Gen gives up on this particular venture immediately. While I would like something along the lines about how he promised the Marines to always live by Semper Fidelis, he swore that to Xeno long before anyone else, I don’t think he’d actually say that

Xeno, however, is both a blabbermouth and a showoff. So yeah those vows are gettin’ long

Stan’s vows end up just being “I can” in response to Xeno’s ridiculously long vows

Xeno gets to dip Stan during their wedding kiss for the sole reason of “I think they both deserve it”

Senku’s best man speech is awkward and halting because he is fundamentally incapable of showing his emotions openly even when they are blatantly obvious. He absolutely does not want to be doing a speech about this. Isn’t the fact that he agreed to this charade enough? The entire thing ends up being about Xeno as a man of science. It’s fine

Ryusui’s speech keeps getting derailed because let’s be real, Xeno is the only one who really knows Stan really, really well. Ryusui would be doing his best to talk Stan’s skills up and about half of it ends up being about Stan’s vicious chase for Xeno across South America

The reception gets immensely better once all the traditions involving the mortifying ordeal of being known and actually talking about it are over. There are fireworks and those balloons full of confetti to shoot down at Taiju and Yuzuriha’s and skywriting and they plan it for a meteor shower or a lunar eclipse or something so everyone can go outside and watch

[trans-axolotl]

Hi! I'm currently researching prison abolition, both for the sake of becoming better educated about it and because I plan to write a paper on it for class. Two questions for you:

First— what books/articles/videos/any other resources on the topic would you recommend? I've been doing some research on my own, but I'd love to have some more sources.

Second— what solutions do abolitionists offer for people who pose immediate threats? I'm struggling to find a solid answer on this. I know it's going to vary based on who you ask! Just looking for some possible answers. Mostly, I've seen this question answered by redirecting focus towards prevention of the circumstances that lead to this kind of behavior, and obviously that is important and should be the main focus, but I'm not sure what possible methods there are for people who already exist who are a threat to others' safety.

(I especially have a hard time with this question because I'm coming at it from an anarchist lens and I don't believe there should be any sort of carceral system or any governing power, but I don't know how this sort of problem can be dealt with without there being some sort of power structure).

If you don't have an answer for that second one, or just don't feel like answering, that's alright! Thanks for your time :))

Hi!

I'm going to list out a bunch of random resources--this is a very incomplete list, just with a few things that came to mind first.

Articles:

Journalism from currently incarcerated writers:

Prison Journalism Project

Scalawag Abolition Week

Marshall Prison Project

Prison Writing on Prison Abolition by empty cages collective and incarcerated workers organizing committee

Other articles:

Truthout's Road to Abolition

Reports/infographics/organizations:

Advancing Transgender Justice: Illuminating Trans Lives Behind and Beyond Bars By Vera Institute of Justice and Black and Pink

Critical Resistance.

SWOP behind Bars

HEARD

Books:

Change Everything by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Assata: An Autobiography by Assata Shakur

Disability Incarcerated by Liat Ben Moshe

We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba

Are Prisons Obsolete? By Angela Davis

The New Abolitionists edited by Joy James

Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex by Eric Stanley & Nat Smith

Golden Gulag by Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement edited by Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

In terms of your second question:

short answer, it cannot be a one-size-fits-all solution--any abolitionist future needs to have a wide variety of options for addressing harm that are able to actual address the particular circumstances of harm and meet the needs of the people in that particular context. Harm is an incredibly broad category that can differ so much depending on context. It feels difficult to just give one broad answer for "this is what we do about harm"--it seems necessary to have a different response to someone breaking into your house versus sexual violence versus bigoted physical violence and on and on and on.

Long answer: You're right that a lot of abolitionist thinking focuses on preventing harm and fundamentally changing a lot of the circumstances that are currently causing harm in people's lives. A lot also focusing on rethinking our ideas of safety, violence, harm, and crime, and untangling all the ways a carceral state has shaped our views on those concepts. (this article titled Reclaiming Safety by Mariame Kaba & Andrea J. Ritchie is an important read for thinking about how the concept of safety is constructed in our society). But all that being said, you're right that part of building an abolitionist future requires us to have a way to respond to harm when it does occur, because change doesn't happen overnight and we need those skills now. And these abolitionist responses to harm are something that are already happening now in so many ways in so many different communities and neighborhoods--a lot of people aren't just talking about it using the terminology of prison abolition. For me, it feels really important to start by thinking about what we're already doing and look for ways we can increase our own capacity to respond to harm and to care for our community.

I don't have all the answers, but I'm going to list out some examples of ways that people are already responding to harm without prisons. i don't necessarily think that all of these approaches are applicable to every situation or that they would be the ideal response in a future when we have more options, but i do just want to emphasize that there are things that people are trying right now:

making sure that someone who caused harm isn't able to be in positions of power in organizations/work/community spaces, and making people aware of the harm that was caused.

meeting the material needs of survivors of harm--mutual aid, getting access to housing, resources, etc.

de-escalation training, having people in community equipped to step in to situations where harm is being caused. (i know a few places where this is more-or-less organized--some neighborhoods where people have sort of a neighborhood watch thing going on so people know they can call that group instead of the cops if they need emergency support. )

building up things like peer respite and many other alternatives for supporting people through madness--i have a post discussing the question of alternatives to psych wards for people labeled a "danger to others."

directly intervening in situations where harm is being caused: physically showing up to keep each other safe

financial reparations

community accountability processes focused on creating accountability for bigoted violence, gender based violence, etc.

and a bunch more ideas--I'm not going to list out every possible thing I could think of here.

I'd really recommend reading Beyond Survival, which is a trying to answer some of these questions through looking at examples of things that are already working, and challenges the idea that transformative justice is just community accountability processes where everyone has to sit down at a table together to talk and the survivor just ends up retraumatized. (some authors in the anthology talk in depth about times in which that kind of process would actually increase danger to survivors, in fact.) They also make a lot of room to talk about the experience of being a survivor who has all these complex emotions and feelings towards whoever has caused us harm, and makes a lot of room for messy, complicated feelings of anger or desires for retributive harm.

Some of the examples of transformative justices responses that they share include a public letter campaign to address an abuser who was popular in movement spaces, community created research databases tracking racist violence and murders, community led murder investigations through different tactics including documentary filmmaking, family members stepping in to confront abusers and remove children from unsafe spaces, building up community first aid and medical knowledge to reduce the amount cops get called, a toolkit for transformative justice plans within youth spaces, community defense groups, including groups prepared to do physical defense, and so many more examples of things that people are trying.

I'll also link the creative interventions workbook, which is a really extensive toolkit for thinking of ways to respond to interpersonal violence.

A frequent criticism of prison abolition is that it's not practical--that our suggested responses to harm are impossible and could never work. And I can understand why people respond that way. It can be really frustrating to see people list out a lot of things that wouldn't work yet where you live because your neighbors are bigoted, or you're currently incarcerated, or you live in an inaccessible city with no in person community, etc. That anger feels meaningful, because it highlights just how fucked up it is that those barriers exist and that we don't have more options for community care right now. And at the same time, if we only try ideas based on what is currently practical, we end up just using the same existing frameworks to try to build a new world, and accept the current limits placed on us through the violence of prisons and policing. I think that abolition must be a little impractical to be effective--we need to be able to move beyond what is currently practical within the carceral apparatuses of state violence, and instead work to build in a way that dismantles what the state defines as realistic.

Last thing I'll say is that for me, it is so vital to always remember that prison abolition is a political movement centered in dismantling a white supremacist system that enacts antiblack racist violence on a gigantic scale. It's not just a buzzword to throw around to refer to anything, it's important to stay connected to what this actually about, learn about the radical history and lineage of Black prison abolitionists in the US, instead of misusing and extracting political resources without having reciprocity and solidarity. And also to stay connected to prison resistance movements right now--recognizing that the most important works of abolition are happening in these carceral spaces as we speak.

if any followers have other resources about prison abolition that they want to add on, feel free!

[doueverwonder]

Table News: A Fork in the Road

Happy @wttt-week to all who celebrate!! I'm super excited about this week and I hope y'all are too! I decided our feds need some love so this fic has Gov, IDC (referred to as Dept. of State but they are the same character), DC, CDC, AotJ, Supreme Court, Coast Guard, Army and a whole bunch of OCs as well (including poor USDS who is now against her will known as DOGE). Obviously major warning for current events, a mention of the measles outbreak but mostly the Fork in the Road email. I'm trying to keep it silly because wttt is fundamentally silly but don't read this if you're not in the space to do so I take zero offense.

(nerdy side note "I serve at the pleasure of the president" is usually only for people who work directly in the White House but it seemed fitting for this fic so let me be)

ao3 link here

Federal meetings were…Gov searched for the right word, they were less chaotic, but their size made up for it. Between the cabinet, the agencies, the branches, Supreme Court and the Judges, plus anyone else you could think of there were easily over five hundred people in the room compared to the fifty-five to fifty-six that came with State and Territory Meetings. 

“How are you holding up?” Gov jumped as DC appeared behind him. District of Columbia was the only personification Gov knew of in the US to represent something on both a federal and non-federal level, so he showed up to both. He also knew Gov arguably hated Federal meetings more then State & Territory meetings, at least states and territories would tell him to his face that they hated him and not just make snide remarks behind his back. 

“I’m fine so far,” Gov frowned deeply, he knew he wouldn’t be asking unless there was a problem. “Why? What happened?” 

“Coast Guard is sitting with the D.O.D” DC gestured to the other side of the room, where Defense was sat with National Guard, Army, Marine, Navy, Air Force, Space Force and… Coast Guard, who was supposed to be with Homeland Security. 

“Have you asked him to move?” 

“No, figured it would be better to just let you handle it” 

Gov got up from his seat in the front muttering about how they never should have allowed the branches to date each other, so far it had only been causing problems. He was making his way across the room but not to them but to IDC he would rather let her tell Defense to man up and make Coast go back to his own seat. 

“Dizzy–” 

“Dizzy?” Her head swung around, she had a deep tan despite it still being February, part of her habit to take assignments only in warm climates during winter. 

Gov sighed, somehow with her it always slipped his mind to be more formal during Federal meetings, she was the oldest of the Cabinet and refused to not be seen in a serious light by the rest of the Federal government. 

“State,” he restarted, “Can you please tell our Branches that Coast Guard is required to be in his assigned seat, if he refuses to move, or one of the other Branches argues, give Defense and Homeland Security permission to order him to move.” 

“Aww, Gov, I can’t believe you’re trying to separate the lovebirds” she smirked, nodding to Air Force and Coast Guard holding hands under the table, something Gov hadn’t even noticed til she pointed it out. The real reason DC didn’t want to deal with it. “PDA in uniform isn’t allowed, just mention that to Defense and Coastie will leave for his own seat”

Gov huffed, “Can’t you do it? We both know he likes you more than me” 

“No, because I don’t want to and I think its funny watching how tense you get when the Branches salute you” 

He shook his head, “Its unnecessary” 

“You’re their commander in chief, have fun” Gov checked to make sure no one in the immediate vicinity was paying attention before poking his tongue out at her, she just rolled her eyes then went back to whatever she had been working on before he bothered her. 

He sighed heavily, but made his way over to where the Branches were sitting. Navy noticed him first, standing up the rest following suit as they looked to see why he was standing, Gov tried to suppress a laugh as Air Force half-yanked a zoned out Space Force out of her seat. 

The branches saluted, though none spoke, Defence taking that upon himself: “Good morning sir.” 

“Good morning, Defense.” He nodded to the rest, “Good morning, Branches” 

They dropped their salutes, but remained at attention as there was a chorus of returned greetings. Unfortunately for Gov, Coast Guard and Air Force were no longer touching at all, which meant he had lost his quiet way out. 

“Coast Guard, I believe that is not your seat.” 

Coast hesitated for a moment, “No sir, it is not.” 

“And why are you not in your seat with Homeland Security?” 

“I was discussing some matters with my fellow branches, I’ll return to my seat now sir.” 

“You do that.” Coast Guard left for his seat, Gov catching what was definitely a tinge of annoyment in Air Force’s expression as he left.

Everyone looked up, like someone was actually speaking from the sky as a small announcement asking everyone to return to their seats for the meeting to begin came over a speaker. Gov quickly told Defense to stop letting Coast Guard come over and mingle during official business, met with a yes sir and a slight eye roll, but no other complaints. 

A silence settled over the room as Gov returned to the front, taking his seat where everyone could see him, DC sitting to his right though he already didn’t seem to be paying much attention looking at something on his laptop. Gov took a deep breath, did his best to smile before, and started speaking; 

“Thank you everyone for attending, if my eyes don’t fail me for the first time in a while we don’t have an empty seat and I am grateful for it as we have much to get through.” He knew why everyone had come. He was hoping to be able to skip talking about it. 

Not a word was spoken, so he continued, “Usual ground rules, Independent agencies can comment as needed or requested, the rest of you should have already passed along your comments to your Cabinet rep; you may correct a misunderstanding or add on a short comment after they have finished speaking, one voice at a time please, I cannot hear when multiple people speak at once. There is a States & Territories briefing tomorrow, make sure to clearly indicate any information that is to be included in that; a normal reminder that we cannot force the states to listen, we can just suggest and hope. Feel free to take your own notes, but as usual DC has offered to transcribe and that will be sent out after. Any questions?” 

He stopped for another long moment waiting for someone to bring it up, most eyes stayed trained on laptops and ipads, either going over the agenda or entirely goofing off. Gov could not let out a sigh of relief yet, someone was bound to bring it up, but until then he would go on as if nothing was happening and pray to get to the end of the meeting. 

“Alright then, first on the docket is the measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico, Health and Human Services has updates on the spread so far, and what we know about containing it, as well as recommendations from CDC for us to take into consideration. If we–” 

“What about the fork in the road?” Someone half yelled it, Gov couldn’t tell who, the room got even quieter somehow. Any chatter going on dying out immediately you could have heard a pin drop as everyone looked to Gov waiting for the answer. 

He didn’t have one. Truly Gov wasn’t sure what he was supposed to say, he glanced to DOGE–who until very recently had been known as USDS, she had gone from no one knowing she existed to the most unpopular person in any room overnight, and was not taking it well–there was a long moment of debate in his head. She looked uncomfortable as is but it was technically her department… “If you have questions about that you may speak to DOGE after the meeting, right now we need to address the measles outbreak.” 

“So we’re not discussing it in the meeting at all?” Another voice rang out,

“We just want to know who all is losing their jobs” a third chimed in, 

“Some of us might not even exist tomorrow and we have a right to know!” The fourth is who broke the dam.

Agreements echoed around the room, the tense silence turning into a flurry of anger and anxiety that he would have to wait out. Gov focused on the one set of people in the whole room not freaking out, Defense and the Branches, while there were changes happening they were in the most stable position at the moment. He knew Defense would be in his office later, bitching about discharging thousands of perfectly good soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen and guardians, about the eight percent cuts in each branch’s budget, about how much time and money had been wasted in having to fire and rehire contractors. He and the Branches however were not concerned about waking up the next morning and being on the curb, and that was a blessing in itself. 

He waited for the chaos to die down but it didn’t, everyone continuing to talk over each other asking questions, demanding answers. It was fair, but it wouldn’t change the fact that he didn’t have them. Gov caught USD–DOGE leaving out of the corner of his eye, he couldn’t blame her if he had the option he would run away too. 

“Everyone, please calm down!” He tried to speak loudly, even with the microphone though the sound barely cut through. He tried again, and again, not a single person calmed or quieted down; Gov flinched at the sound of a gavel echoing through a room. He glanced to where Supreme court and Judges were sitting, Judges looked annoyed while Supreme Court just winked and gave a half hearted thumbs up. It did work, the room quieting down quickly, everyone focusing their attention on Gov though, now with an unusual amount of malice. 

“Thank you,” He straightened his suit jacket, “I know this is stressful for everyone, but we must keep doing our jobs regardless of hardship. Afterall, we serve at the pleasure of the President” 

“We serve at the pleasure of Musk!” Someone called out, immediately re-sparking the angry remarks throughout the room. Gov sighed heavily, it was going to be a long day.

[urists]

One of the things that I think is often underappreciated about heavy industry is how things that look like One Industry are not actually just One Industry. Like - okay, let's take oil and gas [1]. That's a pretty good-size industry - about 5 trillion dollars. Big players!

But realistically it's not monolithic. You can break it down into a couple of main groups - upstream (get the fossil fuels out of the ground), midstream (get the fossil fuels to a refinery), downstream (get the crude feedstocks into usable forms). Each of those groups has different incentives, because they do different things.

For example, a somewhat disconcerting fact I learned a while back is that downstream folks (as well as their close cousins, chemical manufacturers) generally adore regulations. Regulations mean that large companies have an incredibly strong barrier to entry, because they can afford the passel of lawyers required to parse the arcane guidelines put forth by multiple different agencies, while smaller companies fail. [2] More regulations, more consolidation, more oligopolistic profit.

Meanwhile, the upstream drillers, who occasionally implode catastrophically due to the boom-bust nature of drilling, generally don't consolidate [3] - but the oilfield service companies, who are in the business of fundamentally selling shovels (or, y'know, paramilitary contractors) frequently do! Because they have different incentives. Same industry, same group, but not interchangeable.

And yeah, the idea that "things are more complicated than they seem" is not new, and it's not limited to just heavy industry. But I do think heavy industry is one of the places were we can't see it nearly as easily. We put refined gasoline into cars to drive on asphalt roads to places heated or powered by natural gas. We can say that all of those things are products of the oil and gas industry, and that's not inherently wrong - but realistically, the fact that I can put refined gasoline into a car and then drive it on an asphalt road to a place that operates off of natural gas is a minor miracle that took a hundred and fifty years of continued innovation to accomplish. Lumping it all into one industry means you might risk forgetting about the fractal layers of complexity that actually make it possible.

[1] Because I know it decently well and have a fair number of contacts in it, but am not directly employed by it

[2] In unrelated news, the US has not successfully managed to build a large refinery since 1977. The refinery in 1977 was built by Marathon, the largest refining company in the US. It currently owns ~3 million barrels a day of refining capacity, or approximately 16% of the overall refining output of the US.

[3] this is a gargantuan generalization, but it's imo overall relatively true; the fracking industry is about as small-business-friendly as you can get in oil and gas

[tanadrin]

The latest 5-4 episode, on Hans v Louisiana, highlights a big problem with the history of the Supreme Court in the U.S., which is that a lot of Supreme Court decisions are the product of really specific political pressures--in this case, the lack of political will by the federal government in 1890 to enforce federal power against the Southern states thirteen years after the Compromise of 1877--for which the Court often acts as a release valve. But, because of the nature of the court and the structure of American law, these high-context political decisions have to be framed as eternal and general principles of law, which exert a heavy influence on later decisions of the Court. Sometimes, as with Hans (which made enforcement of civil rights more difficult) this might be consonant with the political outlook of the original decision, but sometimes it's just complete chaos. Cases like Bush v Gore that have no systematic principle behind them, but nevertheless have to be framed that way, to the detriment of future case law.

I don't know that this is a fully solvable problem! Certainly the small size of the Supreme Court introduces more variability into its decisions; that plus its highly politicized system of appointments makes it a really obvious place to fight for power; and the lack of a clean separation between its role as an appellate court and its role as a constitutional court muddles things further. But even if you could go back in time to expand the court massively, have cases heard by randomly-selected panels, split off the constitutional function into a separate court, and try to implement some kind of non-partisan appointment commission (all of which would require significant constitutional changes), I don't think you would necessarily get a different outcome in Hans, just because of how fundamentally apathetic the federal government was at the time to political dysfunction in the South, and how clearly they had demonstrated an unwillingness to actually follow through with the premise of Reconstruction.

I'd say that the thing that might help most in preventing decisions like Hans becoming millstones around the neck of future generations would be a willingness to call out obviously political bullshit masquerading as timeless legal principles, but I think nowadays people are pretty willing to do that. Bush v Gore, DC v Heller, Merrick Garland, Clarence Thomas's corruption scandals, and various other cases and stories have been a sharp reminder in recent years to anyone who was laboring under the illusion that SCOTUS really was an impartial machine of law, and even people who think it could or should be that are not very likely to claim it is right now.

But if the Supreme Court is going to be an ordinary political organ, I sort of think we should treat it like one, and just directly elect justices for fixed terms. Would that introduce grubby, messy electoral politics into the august body? Of course. But grubby, messy electoral politics is already there, the augustness is a sham, and presently the way that the court functions makes it a weird, tiny, by-appointment-only, members-serve-for-life third chamber of Congress, an American version of the Guardian Council, which is really bad for the coherent functioning of the political system.

[sailorsol]

Thinking about Pacific Rim on the way to work this morning, as one does, and how there is a fundamental misunderstanding of how nuclear reactors generate power. They would be terrible power sources for mechas, not just because of radiation concerns, but because of how much stuff they require. Like, inherently, you need the reactor but you also need a cooling system that generates steam to power a steam turbine to generate power in an electrical motor. Even a small reactor system like in a nuclear powered submarine is significantly larger than most people think.

Like, a Los Angeles class fast-attack submarine is 350 ft long. Almost half of that space is taken up by the power plant system. That's 175 ft, or over 50 m. That's roughly equivalent to a 14 story building. Gypsy Danger is 260 ft tall. If 1/3 of its height is the torso, that's ~80 ft. Not enough room for a small nuclear power plant. And that's with what we were capable of building in the early 2010s. That space also doesn't take into account all of the coolant needed, whether it's a water-cooled reactor or a sodium-cooled reactor. And that's not even considering the weight of all of that stuff. Plus the fact that, while a sodium-cooled reactor may be more efficient, it is also highly flammable. There's a reason Jimmy Carter refused to allow sodium-cooled reactors on US nuclear submarines, and he was basically considered the father of the nuclear navy.

On top of all of that, nuclear reactors are fussy. They don't like getting knocked around. There's a lot of delicate instrumentation, and the entire system is running at high temperatures and high pressures. We're talking 250 to 300 °C (482 to 572 °F) and >2000 PSI (136 atm, or 136 times normal outside pressure). You need a very robust system of pipes and pumps to handle that sort of thing, and if any of it breaks, at best you're getting irradiated water and at worst you could be looking at a hydrogen or sodium explosion depending on the type of cooling system.

All of these concerns regarding weight and size are basically why nuclear-powered jet engines never took off (hah). Yes, they were actually being designed, by both Pratt & Whitney and General Electric, the two major jet engine manufacturers in the US. While the GE design was "relatively" small, it was a direct air cycle, which means that the air powering the turbine was heated up directly by the nuclear reactor, meaning that the exhaust from the engines were irradiated. So using it meant spewing radiation behind it.

That's not even taking into account that the first nuclear-powered jaeger was built in ~2014, a time when nuclear power was especially contentious. If it had been pre-Fukushima, when the "nuclear renaissance" was still holding strong, I could believe that they may have tried for a nuclear-powered jaeger. But post-Fukushima? Not so much.

So yes, it's highly unlikely that we would have developed nuclear-powered mecha. What's more likely is that we would have seen huge advances in rechargeable batteries, fuel cells, and electric motors. We are just now seeing in the early 2020s an electric motor that can generate power on the same scale as a combustion jet engine, but the amount of power to run that motor is still beyond the capacity of what we have for battery storage. And the problem we see, of course, with the rechargeable batteries being used in electric cars is that they tend to catch on fire.

All that being said, yes, I recognize that it is a sci-fi movie and the science aspect is more or less just ignored. But this is what happens when you have a bored writer who has also been in the power generation industry for nearly 17 years.

Tl;dr. We wouldn't have used nuclear-powered mecha, we probably would have advanced electric motors and batteries by leaps and bounds.

[greyplainsttrpg]

My most memorable "gleeblor" experience during the early development of my game my was centered around inventory abstraction.

Early on in Greyplains, there weren't any equipment tables at all. Objects had properties, and the idea was that it was up to the player and the GM to understand what objects they wanted aligned to what properties.

For example, weapons have Size, Type (as per damage) and Name. Your character is some amount skilled in large weapons and blades weapons, they would be synergistically skilled with a large blade. They could then become extra proficient with a specific large blade weapon, up to the player and GM to determine.

However, early players, and my cowriter, couldn't grasp what this meant. Like, "okay, but what is a large blade?" type of questions. It is a blade that is large in size (both defined in the book). Like what the fuck do you mean "what is a large blade?" It's a large blade. "Yeah, but is a longsword a large blade?"

I don't want to list every weapon ever developed by every culture that possibly matches the possible description of "large" and "blade." A large blade is whatever matches the description of large and blade. "I think you need examples."

The same thing happened with the Value Tier Table. I define a range of value for things based on the amount of labor required to trade for it based on the estimated wages of a skilled medieval laborer (like masons or teamsters). This outputs a GP range for the good/service, but this way any monetary or barter system could be used to understand what things are worth using the game. It is then up to the GM and the players to discuss the finer details of the price based on the context of where, who, and why they are buying the item.

But no. "Okay, but what is a 'Large Blade' worth?" It is worth whatever the GM believes is an appropriate amount of time from their universe's equivalent to skilled labor to earn to purchase or trade for that product, and the exact amount is based on whoever is selling it and what their relationship to your character is. "Okay but that isn't a number."

I lost, and now people tell me that there is too much equipment. Or they still criticize me that "but X isn't in the tables, does it exist?" Fucking kill me.

I'm not sure if I should have ever capitulated to this. I think it makes the game fundamentally worse because it makes it narrowed to my own perception of reality as opposed to methods for GMs and players to construct their own realities. However, it undeniably makes the game more accessible.

I'm not sure who or what is to blame for this mentality. It was so shocking that people did not understand where I was coming from. Like, a longsword isn't real or platonic. The true longsword isn't divined by the ancients in a world of platonic forms and then laser beamed into your character's hands and belt-strap. It's an arbitrary object manifested via a combination of work, perceived value, relationships, skill, shape, and time. A longsword, like anything else, is a product of the mind and of culture. And instead all people wanted was "but give me simple to understand number... eww that's too many numbers."

GLEEBLOR!

[jcmarchi]

Ganesh Shankar, CEO & Co-Founder of Responsive – Interview Series

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/ganesh-shankar-ceo-co-founder-of-responsive-interview-series/

Ganesh Shankar, CEO & Co-Founder of Responsive – Interview Series

Ganesh Shankar, CEO and Co-Founder of Responsive, is an experienced product manager with a background in leading product development and software implementations for Fortune 500 enterprises. During his time in product management, he observed inefficiencies in the Request for Proposal (RFP) process—formal documents organizations use to solicit bids from vendors, often requiring extensive, detailed responses. Managing RFPs traditionally involves multiple stakeholders and repetitive tasks, making the process time-consuming and complex.

Founded in 2015 as RFPIO, Responsive was created to streamline RFP management through more efficient software solutions. The company introduced an automated approach to enhance collaboration, reduce manual effort, and improve efficiency. Over time, its technology expanded to support other complex information requests, including Requests for Information (RFIs), Due Diligence Questionnaires (DDQs), and security questionnaires.

Today, as Responsive, the company provides solutions for strategic response management, helping organizations accelerate growth, mitigate risk, and optimize their proposal and information request processes.

What inspired you to start Responsive, and how did you identify the gap in the market for response management software?

My co-founders and I founded Responsive in 2015 after facing our own struggles with the RFP response process at the software company we were working for at the time. Although not central to our job functions, we dedicated considerable time assisting the sales team with requests for proposals (RFPs), often feeling underappreciated despite our vital role in securing deals. Frustrated with the lack of technology to make the RFP process more efficient, we decided to build a better solution.  Fast forward nine years, and we’ve grown to nearly 500 employees, serve over 2,000 customers—including 25 Fortune 100 companies—and support nearly 400,000 users worldwide.

How did your background in product management and your previous roles influence the creation of Responsive?

As a product manager, I was constantly pulled by the Sales team into the RFP response process, spending almost a third of my time supporting sales instead of focusing on my core product management responsibilities. My two co-founders experienced a similar issue in their technology and implementation roles. We recognized this was a widespread problem with no existing technology solution, so we leveraged our almost 50 years of combined experience to create Responsive. We saw an opportunity to fundamentally transform how organizations share information, starting with managing and responding to complex proposal requests.

Responsive has evolved significantly since its founding in 2015. How do you maintain the balance between staying true to your original vision and adapting to market changes?

First, we’re meticulous about finding and nurturing talent that embodies our passion – essentially cloning our founding spirit across the organization. As we’ve scaled, it’s become critical to hire managers and team members who can authentically represent our core cultural values and commitment.

At the same time, we remain laser-focused on customer feedback. We document every piece of input, regardless of its size, recognizing that these insights create patterns that help us navigate product development, market positioning, and any uncertainty in the industry. Our approach isn’t about acting on every suggestion, but creating a comprehensive understanding of emerging trends across a variety of sources.

We also push ourselves to think beyond our immediate industry and to stay curious about adjacent spaces. Whether in healthcare, technology, or other sectors, we continually find inspiration for innovation. This outside-in perspective allows us to continually raise the bar, inspiring ideas from unexpected places and keeping our product dynamic and forward-thinking.

What metrics or success indicators are most important to you when evaluating the platform’s impact on customers?

When evaluating Responsive’s impact, our primary metric is how we drive customer revenue. We focus on two key success indicators: top-line revenue generation and operational efficiency. On the efficiency front, we aim to significantly reduce RFP response time – for many, we reduce it by 40%. This efficiency enables our customers to pursue more opportunities, ultimately accelerating their revenue generation potential.

How does Responsive leverage AI and machine learning to provide a competitive edge in the response management software market?

We leverage AI and machine learning to streamline response management in three key ways. First, our generative AI creates comprehensive proposal drafts in minutes, saving time and effort. Second, our Ask solution provides instant access to vetted organizational knowledge, enabling faster, more accurate responses. Third, our Profile Center helps InfoSec teams quickly find and manage security content.

With over $600 billion in proposals managed through the Responsive platform and four million Q&A pairs processed, our AI delivers intelligent recommendations and deep insights into response patterns. By automating complex tasks while keeping humans in control, we help organizations grow revenue, reduce risk, and respond more efficiently.

What differentiates Responsive’s platform from other solutions in the industry, particularly in terms of AI capabilities and integrations?

Since 2015, AI has been at the core of Responsive, powering a platform trusted by over 2,000 global customers. Our solution supports a wide range of RFx use cases, enabling seamless collaboration, workflow automation, content management, and project management across teams and stakeholders.

With key AI capabilities—like smart recommendations, an AI assistant, grammar checks, language translation, and built-in prompts—teams can deliver high-quality RFPs quickly and accurately.

Responsive also offers unmatched native integrations with leading apps, including CRM, cloud storage, productivity tools, and sales enablement. Our customer value programs include APMP-certified consultants, Responsive Academy courses, and a vibrant community of 1,500+ customers sharing insights and best practices.

Can you share insights into the development process behind Responsive’s core features, such as the AI recommendation engine and automated RFP responses?

Responsive AI is built on the foundation of accurate, up-to-date content, which is critical to the effectiveness of our AI recommendation engine and automated RFP responses. AI alone cannot resolve conflicting or incomplete data, so we’ve prioritized tools like hierarchical tags and robust content management to help users organize and maintain their information. By combining generative AI with this reliable data, our platform empowers teams to generate fast, high-quality responses while preserving credibility. AI serves as an assistive tool, with human oversight ensuring accuracy and authenticity, while features like the Ask product enable seamless access to trusted knowledge for tackling complex projects.

How have advancements in cloud computing and digitization influenced the way organizations approach RFPs and strategic response management?

Advancements in cloud computing have enabled greater efficiency, collaboration, and scalability. Cloud-based platforms allow teams to centralize content, streamline workflows, and collaborate in real time, regardless of location. This ensures faster turnaround times and more accurate, consistent responses.

Digitization has also enhanced how organizations manage and access their data, making it easier to leverage AI-powered tools like recommendation engines and automated responses. With these advancements, companies can focus more on strategy and personalization, responding to RFPs with greater speed and precision while driving better outcomes.

Responsive has been instrumental in helping companies like Microsoft and GEODIS streamline their RFP processes. Can you share a specific success story that highlights the impact of your platform?

Responsive has played a key role in supporting Microsoft’s sales staff by managing and curating 20,000 pieces of proposal content through its Proposal Resource Library, powered by Responsive AI. This technology enabled Microsoft’s proposal team to contribute $10.4 billion in revenue last fiscal year. Additionally, by implementing Responsive, Microsoft saved its sellers 93,000 hours—equivalent to over $17 million—that could be redirected toward fostering stronger customer relationships.

As another example of  Responsive providing measurable impact, our customer Netsmart significantly improved their response time and efficiency by implementing Responsive’s AI capabilities. They achieved a 10X faster response time, increased proposal submissions by 67%, and saw a 540% growth in user adoption. Key features such as AI Assistant, Requirements Analysis, and Auto Respond played crucial roles in these improvements. The integration with Salesforce and the establishment of a centralized Content Library further streamlined their processes, resulting in a 93% go-forward rate for RFPs and a 43% reduction in outdated content. Overall, Netsmart’s use of Responsive’s AI-driven platform led to substantial time savings, enhanced content accuracy, and increased productivity across their proposal management operations.

JAGGAER, another Responsive customer, achieved a double-digit win-rate increase and 15X ROI by using Responsive’s AI for content moderation, response creation, and Requirements Analysis, which improved decision-making and efficiency. User adoption tripled, and the platform streamlined collaboration and content management across multiple teams.

Where do you see the response management industry heading in the next five years, and how is Responsive positioned to lead in this space?

In the next five years, I see the response management industry being transformed by AI agents, with a focus on keeping humans in the loop. While we anticipate around 80 million jobs being replaced, we’ll simultaneously see 180 million new jobs created—a net positive for our industry.

Responsive is uniquely positioned to lead this transformation. We’ve processed over $600 billion in proposals and built a database of almost 4 million Q&A pairs. Our massive dataset allows us to understand complex patterns and develop AI solutions that go beyond simple automation.

Our approach is to embrace AI’s potential, finding opportunities for positive outcomes rather than fearing disruption. Companies with robust market intelligence, comprehensive data, and proven usage will emerge as leaders, and Responsive is at the forefront of that wave. The key is not just implementing AI, but doing so strategically with rich, contextual data that enables meaningful insights and efficiency.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Responsive,

[beautifulpersonpeach]

HYBE stocks are down so that means investors didn't believe HYBE's payola mediaplay of Jimin renewing his contracts. ONLY RM SIGNED HIS CONTRACT. It's shameful how you ot7s try to force people to doubt Jimin. Forcing people to think staying with the company after all the sabotages is good for him are we in upside down land? Well no and the stocks show it. Armys swallowed the purple koolaid but the investors live in the real world.

***

Please stop sending me asks like this.

Your ask is a very good example of something my friends and I were just talking about. This is the thread (linked here) that prompted our conversation.

Please read it.

HYBE is down ~5% in the hours following the contract renewal news.

Anon, I don't know how old you are or if you have your own bank account, but nobody who knows what they're doing looks at stock movements in isolation. It's a relative metric, by definition. And here's a few things that have happened in the last 48 hours that explain what stocks moved relative to:

The Market - All major Korean stock indices are down on the mixed resolution by the US Fed this week. It's a trend consistent with market movements in every country that does significant trade with the US and/or denominates trade in USD.

The Index - The index for entertainment companies (ex gaming) on the KRX is down ~3.5% over the same period.

The Peers - HYBE's closest peers for our purposes, i.e. JYP, SME, YG, Kakao, etc, are down on average ~6.5%. YG is the outlier here down ~13%. Excluding YG, the average return over the same period is HYBE's peers being down ~4.5%.

At market open following HYBE's contract renewal news there was a massive options call with a volume of about 8K at depressed prices relative to yesterday's closing. By its characteristics it's likely an event-triggered options call made for profit-taking. This is normal for retail and institutional investors who trade in liquid names. Excluding the options volume, HYBE's actual stock performance over the same period, is that they're down ~2.5%.

Meaning, HYBE actually outperformed their peers and the index (ex gaming) following the contract renewal news. The total entertainment index (including gaming) was only down ~1.9%, and so HYBE underperformed that index when you include gaming companies. But that's not a peer group that's usually considered for k-pop companies anyway.

So the stock movements you're referring to, are in effect showing the opposite of what you think.

*

This might be hard to believe, but I'm actually very neutral on HYBE. I have my own opinions about how they run their business, how the sub-labels are managed, etc. But when I see things I don't like, I don't go looking for any sliver of disjointed information to uphold my previously held belief. It's a sign that you're a living, breathing, thinking being, when the introduction of new information challenges a perception you have, you're able to meaningfully deduce the implications, and arrive at a more informed conclusion.

The new piece of information we received in the last 24 hours, is that HYBE's board has approved the resolution to renew BTS's exclusive contracts. Given the size of the payout to BTS, this is a customary requirement to finalize the renewals process. For the nature of company disclosures like this, there's the expectation of a time lag between when a deal is announced and when it closes, but the fundamentals of the deal do not change. The time lag is typically to hash out technicalities and to allow for other considerations (which we know in this case involves limitations due to 2seok's military service), but the fundamentals of the announcement do not change else HYBE will be charged for misrepresentation in their disclosures and for market manipulation at the Board level.

Basically, if HYBE was not at least 100% sure these renewals would be completed, that press release would literally be corporate suicide.

The quality of conversations here would be so much higher, whether in akgae or ARMY circles, if people actually knew what they were talking about.

Please don't spam asks like this in my inbox again. Take those ramblings to a blog that can tolerate it. I have extremely little patience for akgaes in general.

[sunriseverse]

@krownest thank you for handing me the bat my liege let us get down and dirty

okay so disclaimer before we start this is my opinion and i’m not calling people bad or saying they should stop writing yada yada yada etc etc (also wow this got long oops. readmore on ye)

i think the reason there’s such a deluge of “bad” fanfic comes down to a couple different reasons, some of them interconnected and some of them symptoms of larger issues.

i wrote and rewrote my definition of what “bad fanfic” is like, seven times, but in the end i think the characteristics of it are essentially: fanfic which makes you stop reading or become disappointed due to any number of issues, especially those which, if they were changed, would render the fanfic itself fundamentally a different piece of art (so, MOSTLY not cosmetic).

some of the most common issues i, personally, have, when trying to find new fanfic to read are ones that i’m sure you’re fairly familiar with: characterisation issues, dynamics which feel “off”, direct contradiction to the canonical themes without any seeming understanding that it is, in fact, contradictory, and prose. that last one is the trickiest, so we’ll set it aside for the moment being.

i think the first three tie together fairly neatly, and have simple to answer causes: one, people are writing not based off canon, but off fanon; two, people are not, generally, trained in media and literature comprehension and analysis as anything but a basic set of tools to pass their primary/secondary school exams; and three, tied in with one and two, people aren’t writing concepts as they would happen if they were applied to x character(s), they’re writing what THEY would want to happen in x scenario, and slapping the characters’ names over them.

obviously, we could sit here and argue for days about what “characterisation” is, what “canon dynamics” are, hell, what “canon” is, but for our intents and purposes: let us define these as the range of plausible interpretations one can draw from a canon, and find sources or references to argue the validity of (and make no mistake, this doesn’t mean there’s “one true [characterisation/dynamic/canon]”—there is, let us say, a dialectical continuum of possibilities, and the extremes, in any direction, are entirely unsupported, or outright denied by, canon). (i could tack on a rant here about why i think disagreement and different interpretations in fandom is not only healthy, but NECESSARY, as long as no singular faction dominates and forces the others to feel as if they will be ostracised if they suggest otherwise, but i digress.)

these aren’t problems that can be fixed overnight. media analysis is a tool that takes time and effort to grow, and when it comes to the average fan, in 2024, participating in an averagely-sized fandom: there is no external force driving them to stretch that muscle. fandom has, for better or worse, moved past what it once was: no longer gated communities with high bars of entry, which necessitate skill and effort and passion to enter, but more open and free for all. make no mistake, this isn’t necessarily bad—there are many, MANY problems with old fandom, not the least being cults of personality, actual cults, harassing commenters, etc, etc. my point is simply that new age fandom, by design, doesn’t require you to put in as much work—the barriers to reading fic, to POSTING fic, are far lower than they, perhaps, have ever been. open ao3, send an invite request, and bam: a week or so and change later, you, too, can post your very own writing for thousands of people to see, should they simply look.

this ties, i think, into prose; all of these things are, by nature, hard to do. some people have a bit more instinctive knack for them—but even if they do, they’ll never be able to improve if they don’t push themselves, if they don’t practice, if they don’t try and engage with canon and think critically about said canon and try, really try, to put just as much into writing as an athlete would put into running, or javelin, or swimming—but unlike physical sports, writing is not something with immediate, tangible results. it takes TIME. and in the end, it’s much easier for people to write the same fifteen tropes, the same variations on ship themes, follow fanon. i’m not here to be a prescriptivist and tell you how you MUST write fanfic—i really don’t care that much, honestly. if you want to do that, fine, be my guest; but i’m allowed to complain about it on my blog.

to end this post on a lighter note, if you do feel your fanfic isn’t very good, and you want to improve: i have suggestions! you should read as much as you can (published works, especially experimental styles, are good for for this), get your hands on as much meta (for characters, dynamics, themes, what have you), or if you can’t find any, practise writing your own the way you’d write an essay, and most keyly: don’t do things in your writing just because they’re popular in the fandom.

okay, cut! that’s all, for now, i think