#and now. i have a functions file. and it's so much FASTER

[thesecondface]

third year of the phd and this is the first time i'm implementing functional programming. what have I been DOING until now

[ms-demeanor]

So You Need To Buy A Computer But You Don't Know What Specs Are Good These Days

Hi.

This is literally my job.

Lots of people are buying computers for school right now or are replacing computers as their five-year-old college laptop craps out so here's the standard specs you should be looking for in a (windows) computer purchase in August 2023.

PROCESSOR

Intel i5 (no older than 10th Gen)

Ryzen 7

You can get away with a Ryzen 5 but an intel i3 should be an absolute last resort. You want at least an intel i5 or a Ryzen 7 processor. The current generation of intel processors is 13, but anything 10 or newer is perfectly fine. DO NOT get a higher performance line with an older generation; a 13th gen i5 is better than an 8th gen i7. (Unfortunately I don't know enough about ryzens to tell you which generation is the earliest you should get, but staying within 3 generations is a good rule of thumb)

RAM

8GB absolute minimum

If you don't have at least 8GB RAM on a modern computer it's going to be very, very slow. Ideally you want a computer with at least 16GB, and it's a good idea to get a computer that will let you add or swap RAM down the line (nearly all desktops will let you do this, for laptops you need to check the specs for Memory and see how many slots there are and how many slots are available; laptops with soldered RAM cannot have the memory upgraded - this is common in very slim laptops)

STORAGE

256GB SSD

Computers mostly come with SSDs these days; SSDs are faster than HDDs but typically have lower storage for the same price. That being said: SSDs are coming down in price and if you're installing your own drive you can easily upgrade the size for a low cost. Unfortunately that doesn't do anything for you for the initial purchase.

A lot of cheaper laptops will have a 128GB SSD and, because a lot of stuff is stored in the cloud these days, that can be functional. I still recommend getting a bit more storage than that because it's nice if you can store your music and documents and photos on your device instead of on the cloud. You want to be able to access your files even if you don't have internet access.

But don't get a computer with a big HDD instead of getting a computer with a small SSD. The difference in speed is noticeable.

SCREEN (laptop specific)

Personally I find that touchscreens have a negative impact on battery life and are easier to fuck up than standard screens. They are also harder to replace if they get broken. I do not recommend getting a touch screen unless you absolutely have to.

A lot of college students especially tend to look for the biggest laptop screen possible; don't do that. It's a pain in the ass to carry a 17" laptop around campus and with the way that everything is so thin these days it's easier to damage a 17" screen than a 14" screen.

On the other end of that: laptops with 13" screens tend to be very slim devices that are glued shut and impossible to work on or upgrade.

Your best bet (for both functionality and price) is either a 14" or a 15.6" screen. If you absolutely positively need to have a 10-key keyboard on your laptop, get the 15.6". If you need something portable more than you need 10-key, get a 14"

FORM FACTOR (desktop specific)

If you purchase an all-in-one desktop computer I will begin manifesting in your house physically. All-in-ones take away every advantage desktops have in terms of upgradeability and maintenance; they are expensive and difficult to repair and usually not worth the cost of disassembling to upgrade.

There are about four standard sizes of desktop PC: All-in-One (the size of a monitor with no other footprint), Tower (Big! probably at least two feet long in two directions), Small Form Factor Tower (Very moderate - about the size of a large shoebox), and Mini/Micro/Tiny (Small! about the size of a small hardcover book).

If you are concerned about space you are much better off getting a MicroPC and a bracket to put it on your monitor than you are getting an all-in-one. This will be about a million percent easier to work on than an all-in-one and this way if your monitor dies your computer is still functional.

Small form factor towers and towers are the easiest to work on and upgrade; if you need a burly graphics card you need to get a full size tower, but for everything else a small form factor tower will be fine. Most of our business sales are SFF towers and MicroPCs, the only time we get something larger is if we have to put a $700 graphics card in it. SFF towers will accept small graphics cards and can handle upgrades to the power supply; MicroPCs can only have the RAM and SSD upgraded and don't have room for any other components or their own internal power supply.

WARRANTY

Most desktops come with either a 1 or 3 year warranty; either of these is fine and if you want to upgrade a 1 year to a 3 year that is also fine. I've generally found that if something is going to do a warranty failure on desktop it's going to do it the first year, so you don't get a hell of a lot of added mileage out of an extended warranty but it doesn't hurt and sometimes pays off to do a 3-year.

Laptops are a different story. Laptops mostly come with a 1-year warranty and what I recommend everyone does for every laptop that will allow it is to upgrade that to the longest warranty you can get with added drop/damage protection. The most common question our customers have about laptops is if we can replace a screen and the answer is usually "yes, but it's going to be expensive." If you're purchasing a low-end laptop, the parts and labor for replacing a screen can easily cost more than half the price of a new laptop. HOWEVER, the way that most screens get broken is by getting dropped. So if you have a warranty with drop protection, you just send that sucker back to the factory and they fix it for you.

So, if it is at all possible, check if the manufacturer of a laptop you're looking at has a warranty option with drop protection. Then, within 30 days (though ideally on the first day you get it) of owning your laptop, go to the manufacturer site, register your serial number, and upgrade the warranty. If you can't afford a 3-year upgrade at once set a reminder for yourself to annually renew. But get that drop protection, especially if you are a college student or if you've got kids.

And never, ever put pens or pencils on your laptop keyboard. I've seen people ruin thousand dollar, brand-new laptops that they can't afford to fix because they closed the screen on a ten cent pencil. Keep liquids away from them too.

LIFESPAN

There's a reasonable chance that any computer you buy today will still be able to turn on and run a program or two in ten years. That does not mean that it is "functional."

At my office we estimate that the functional lifespan of desktops is 5-7 years and the functional lifespan of laptops is 3-5 years. Laptops get more wear and tear than desktops and desktops are easier to upgrade to keep them running. At 5 years for desktops and 3 years for laptops you should look at upgrading the RAM in the device and possibly consider replacing the SSD with a new (possibly larger) model, because SSDs and HDDs don't last forever.

COST

This means that you should think of your computers as an annual investment rather than as a one-time purchase. It is more worthwhile to pay $700 for a laptop that will work well for five years than it is to pay $300 for a laptop that will be outdated and slow in one year (which is what will happen if you get an 8th gen i3 with 8GB RAM). If you are going to get a $300 laptop try to get specs as close as possible to the minimums I've laid out here.

If you have to compromise on these specs, the one that is least fixable is the processor. If you get a laptop with an i3 processor you aren't going to be able to upgrade it even if you can add more RAM or a bigger SSD. If you have to get lower specs in order to afford the device put your money into the processor and make sure that the computer has available slots for upgrade and that neither the RAM nor the SSD is soldered to the motherboard. (one easy way to check this is to search "[computer model] RAM upgrade" on youtube and see if anyone has made a video showing what the inside of the laptop looks like and how much effort it takes to replace parts)

Computers are expensive right now. This is frustrating, because historically consumer computer prices have been on a downward trend but since 2020 that trend has been all over the place. Desktop computers are quite expensive at the moment (August 2023) and decent laptops are extremely variably priced.

If you are looking for a decent, upgradeable laptop that will last you a few years, here are a couple of options that you can purchase in August 2023 that have good prices for their specs:

14" Lenovo - $670 - 11th-gen i5, 16GB RAM, and 512GB SSD

15.6" HP - $540 - 11th-gen i5, 16GB RAM, and 256GB SSD

14" Dell - $710 - 12th-gen i5, 16GB RAM, and 256GB SSD

If you are looking for a decent, affordable desktop that will last you a few years, here are a couple of options that you can purchase in August 2023 that have good prices for their specs:

SFF HP - $620 - 10th-gen i5, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD

SFF Lenovo - $560 - Ryzen 7 5000 series, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

Dell Tower - $800 - 10th-gen i7, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD

If I were going to buy any of these I'd probably get the HP laptop or the Dell Tower. The HP Laptop is actually a really good price for what it is.

Anyway happy computering.

[revelboo]

incase you wondered if theres ripple effect from your fics xD

🤣 Infecting folks with my dubious tastes in music and TF smut at the same time

Even If It Kills Me Pt 16

Armada Starscream x Reader

• Sprawled on your back on your tiny berth among your blankets, you stare at the ceiling of Starscream’s habsuite and think about what he’d said. About there being no new Cybertronians. And sparklings. Wondering if they’re literally babies, tiny and helpless or fully functioning from the get go. Know he’s not really a machine, that he’s alive. Just not flesh and bone like you, but living metal. You’re trying to imagine what a sparkling might look like when the door opens and your head turns. Sucking in a sharp breath when you see him. “You’re hurt.”

• Leaning against the doorway, he waits for the mini-cons to get inside before crossing the threshold, shutting the door, and limping to his berth. Aware of you frowning up at him. “It’s not that bad,” he growls, trying to get at a sliver of metal inside a joint piercing his mesh. Can feel it, but can’t quite get it. Venting when Runway ferries you up onto the berth with him before he can tell the mini-con not to. And then you’re staring up at him with worried eyes. “You should have seen the Decepticons,” he adds, trying to play it off, because your worry bothers him even as it spreads warm through him. Unresisting when you try to climb up onto his thigh to see what he’s doing and Runway immediately gives you a boost. Little traitor.

• “Your servos are too big. Move your hand.” Swatting his servo, you straddle his forearm and run your hands into the gap in his plating at his inner elbow to grab the big, metal splinter. Feeling Runway reach around you to help you pull it free and to your alarm, he starts bleeding energon as soon as it’s removed. “Do you have any alien bandaids?” You ask and Starscream just frowns down at you. “A bandage? Tape?” Grimacing, you press your palm against the tear to try and staunch the leak.

• Spark settling at the fact that you’re trying to take care of him, he reaches to touch your cheek. “My systems will take care of it now that the debris is removed. I would have gotten it eventually.” Embarrassed, his servo lingers against you. You’re fussing over him, but he’s supposed to be taking care of you. Not the other way around. Even if having someone care about him is a novelty he still can’t get used to. Can’t tell you that it means so much to him. “But you did it much faster.”

• “You’re welcome.” Even if he’s pretty much incapable of actually saying thank you. Like it’s some kind of weakness to need help in the first place. “Hey, when you said there haven’t been any sparklings since before the war, why is that?” Don’t mean to ask that when it had clearly bothered him to admit it before. And it’s probably none of your business, but you’ve seen him with the mini-cons. Seen how he tries so hard to care for you. He’d be a good dad. Or, what had he called it, a sire.

• “The last hotspot died out a long time ago,” he says, cupping a servo against your back to nudge you off of his arm. Expression blank, you just wait and he smiles and flexes his arm. “We could harvest sparks from hotspots on Cybertron and those could be put into protoforms to create new Cybertronians. Any other way to create sparks was lost to us. There’ve been attempts, but they’ve been unsuccessful.” And they’re slowly dying out because of their millennia long war, something both sides are aware of, but unwilling to yield over at this point.

• So alien babies from literal cabbage patches? You’re not sure what to make of that, but they are giant, alien robots. It’s not like they can reproduce the messy organic way. The thought makes you nearly laugh and he gently nudges your head with a servo. “I’m just filing that under I don’t understand aliens, so it’s magic.” And one corner of his mouth twitches like he’s trying not to laugh at you. Imagining Starscream going out into a field to dig up a spark to put into a protoform. Would he just claim it as his and take care of it? How does that work? “For what it’s worth, you’d have been a good dad.” And it’s something you understand. Never even getting that chance to find out.

• “Please, don’t start leaking again,” he mutters and you laugh even though you look like you’re upset again. Why are you so fixated on sparklings? Or him as a sire? It’s not something he’s ever allowed himself to even entertain, but now the errant thought is there. Something he’d never thought to want, but now that you’ve brought it up, he’s painfully aware that it’s something he’ll never have. A family. Young Seekers to teach and raise. A mate to help him. And for some reason, it’s you he thinks of. Aware of how crazy the thought is. How taboo. Wonders if that’s why sparklings matter to you. If you’re interested in him as a potential mate and a part of him he doesn’t quite understand, wants that to be the case.

Previous

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[moth-mortuary]

𝕋𝕙𝕖 𝔻𝕖𝕧𝕚𝕝 ℝ𝕖𝕒𝕕𝕤 𝔹𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕙𝕒𝕞

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 4

Rating: Mature Archive Warning: Graphic Depictions Of Violence Category: F/M Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe Relationships: The Winter Soldier/Reader, The Winter Soldier & Reader Part: 4/? Language: English

✪ Masterlist ✪

The girl was soft, some youthful fat still clinging to her cheeks, a heart-shaped face with soft eyes and the distinctive features of someone who grew up in good conditions.

She talked a lot, fidgeted a lot, spoke with her hands. She would go crazy in his situation, hands tied and silence filling the aseptic room.

But she has no business being in his situation; only monsters end up in his situation.

Time passes, the lights dim.

He will not see her again. Better to close the memory in a sealed-tight container in his brain, less messy, more organised, no stray thoughts confusing his order.

The soldier closes his eyes and sits on the metal bench bolted to the side of his glass cube. Forget her. She had not accepted the job. He had told her not to.

Steps, an irregular heartbeat, something weirdly spaced, too much adrenaline in the body hosting that heart. «Contrary to popular request, I accepted the job.»

Fool.

«I spoke to some guards, and I guess I can give you this. They were kinda unprepared for the request.» A giggle, true, no, nervous. Fake, no, still true. Chatty.

She’s dressed the same way, not much must have passed; he doesn’t know. A t-shirt, graphic, literally, some sort of rat wearing a spiked collar, a messy font saying something the creases of the shirt do not allow him to decipher; jeans, worn, old, borderline unsalvageable, sneakers. A messy rhythm in her chest.

She’s carrying a package.

Files, missions, reports.

Bread.

What?

She takes it out of the brown bag, gets closer, scared, still scared. Unsteady heartbeat, fast, then slow, then fast again. No. Not adrenaline. Something else. The bread gets put on a paper plate, in the slot in his cage for feeding. Waiting.

«There, eat.» An order. A new handler? HYDRA? Hesitation. He should not hesitate. «Or don’t! You can choose.» A choice, not a handler. Softness, not HYDRA. «I just— I saw your dossier, and the photo.» What photo? Photos of his missions? Horrors, her heartbeat unsteady, something that had shaken her. Fear? No, she doesn’t beat to the rhythm of fear. «And you looked way healthier.» He’s functional.

«So, you know, I thought you could use some more food. Anyway, this morning, you knew I was there, didn’t you?». Such casualty, such disorienting honesty. She knows. «Could you see us through the mirror?». She knows and she doesn’t. She observes.

Us, two heartbeats, the older man beats at a sick rhythm, old, dying. She beats faster, like a mouse. Something small and full of adrenaline. How has she noticed? Sharper, a threat, she could be a threat. «Are we alone right now?»

Not what he expected. Is she scared of it? Good. Who wouldn’t be?

He nods. «Good.» Yes— what? «I contacted Sam Wilson.» The man in the tight car? «To get to Mister Rogers the news you are here, but— god, I don’t know what I was expecting but I wasn’t expecting that, he thinks you already are in hiding with Captain America, he’s adamant about it… I— I don’t know what I’m doing, shit, were you captured with him? Is he like, detained too?»

No plan, no plan is a bad plan, the girl is unprepared, not a threat. In danger.

«Fuck. Can I take a bite?» She paces the room, nervous, heartbeat spiking, doesn’t wait for a response, nobody ever does. A stress eater. Not poisoned, the sandwich is safe. He’s starving. «Sorry, I have another one—» «No.»

Silence. Her cheek protruding, mid-chew. «You don’t want it?»

When you are in a cage, you don’t get to want. How did he forget something as simple as that?

«You want… This one?» Observant. «It has the same filling— Oh, oh, okay, here, sorry about the bite.»

He’s starving. She’s no capturer, she’s buzzing, stressed, soft. Still chewing. Swallowing. Safe.

It tastes better than anything he has ever eaten. It’s the hunger speaking, but it speaks truths.

The food is gone in under a minute, clean, efficient. Still starving.

«Do you want the other one too?» He does, he really does.

Another plate, clean, new. Soft, she is carelessly soft.

Silence. Waiting. He’s starving. «What?» A laugh, soft, breezy, true. Not nervous. «Do you want me to bite that one too?» a joke, another laugh. Faltering. Silence. «Do you want me to?» A frown.

A nod. From the soldier. «Oh, um, okay.» A smaller bite. «There, started.»

She is not swallowing. A trap, he should have known, was the rest of the food given to him poisoned too? Was it—

Gulp.

She swallowed it.

«Oh no, shit, you are right this one has mayo.»

. Chatty. So chatty.

She sits on the chair, then on the floor, one file becomes two, then three and then four. She speaks a lot. He has to respond. No, he doesn’t have to; something else. Maybe he needs to. «Okay, this one.» Another file pressed to his glass. «Was that you?» another question. The same answer: Another nod.

December 16th 1991 Yes.

«Fuck dude, that’s bad.» No judgment, only a remark. Not toward him, a casual one. Not efficient.

If people had words instead of days to live, she would have been dead at two.

«Shit, I haven’t even offered you water.» She licks a thumb, ink staining it. A bad taste, bitter. He knows, but he doesn’t know why. A camping bottle, a cup. «Here. Should I bite the cup?» Another joke, not mocking, only teasing. Laughter, soft laughter. Freely given.

«A sip.» «Oh, okay, sorry. Lousy mouth.»

The water is safe, she sloshes it in her mouth and swallows it. Safe.

«Are we still alone?» A nod.

«Alright, man, I really don’t think you should be rotting in here, but if Steve himself is being detained, I don’t know what I, mind you not being a lawyer, can do for you.»

«Steve’s free. In hiding.» «What? Are you sure? Then I have to tell him, shit, I need a photo of you, a recording, something to give to Sam—» «He won’t come.» She freezes, truly, finally, no nervous fidgeting, no absentminded movements, true stillness. He feels better, something in her nervousness clings to him. Better like this. Undisturbed, empty.

«But… but it’s… It’s you.»

Something squeezes his chest. It’s him. That’s why no one will come. «He cares about you.» No, no, he doesn’t care about him. A cancer, a sickness, an illness.

«No.» «Why wouldn’t he?» she presses. Insistent, petulant. «He does, he screwed his whole career for you, he must—» For him, for him, not for him. «He won’t.»

Uneven beats, nervous, no, frustrated, no, something else. «Why. Because you think he wouldn’t? People are weird, dude. You don’t really get to understand their feelings most of the time.»

«Because I took the shot.»

———— The phrase rings hollow, an unspoken continuation lingering in the blindingly empty room. You can’t decipher it, you don’t know where to look for an answer. He’s written in an alphabet you don’t know. You don't understand who he is trying to convince, is it you? You doubt it, yet somehow it's truly difficult not to believe him, he doesn't look anxious, he doesn't look backed into a corner, he just looks empty.

And angry. Not blatantly, deeply, under layers of nothingness. So deeply angry. The pen clenched in your fist creaks, or maybe your joints do, it’s hard to tell, you are gripping too hard. «How many of those you killed did you personally know?» Sifting through files, your notebook, the worn cover, the bent rings, you refilled it for the occasion, back in the UK, back when you had still thought you would have taken notes on a criminal, a serial killer, cowering behind rows of medics and therapists. He snaps, like a rubber band just waiting for the last yank. «Some—» «Not as Bucky Barnes.» This time is your index knuckle, a low creak, the grating of bones. The quiet in a chaotic place, something misplaced and alien. His silence, your creaking, you two are like a haunted house. Chaotic, silent, tired.

«None.» Keep pushing, keep pressing until he cannot but tell you, you must, it's an itch you can't scratch otherwise. «And how many do you remember?» Stillness, calm, something misplaced. Wrong. «All of them.»

Your knuckle pops. Painfully and satisfyingly There you go. «I don’t think an unsalvageable man would remember even one.»

He hadn’t said that; you had heard it.

The pen scratches, you hum lowly, mumbling your own thoughts to not let a single phrase get lost in the labyrinth of your horribly messy mind.

His voice is soft, his words are not. «Quit it.»

The job? You are not even sure you still can. It’s such a small peep, not the order he gave you yesterday. "Don’t take the job." You are so stubborn. No, this one is fragile, almost shy. You don’t expect it to escalate. It does, but instead of roaring lowly in anger, it just grows heavier, tired. «Don’t make me think I could be good.» Until his words soften. «It hurts.»

Your heart shatters for the man; you don't pity him, but you ache. Deeply and freely. You bleed for him.

And yet you must press, because nothing comes without a price, and you have a job, and for how much he hates you for doing this to him, you have to. You know no other way to save him. «It wouldn’t stop. Even if I quit.»

You let him be at peace for a while, you try to stay still while scratching some notes on your notebook. You have noticed how much he relaxes when you just stop existing in the loud way you have always existed, but it’s hard for you. Your leg begs to be bounced, your fingers gather air in your knuckle pleading you to just pop them and after that keep twisting and cracking until your joints ache and your pads tingle. «Do you want me to go?» It’s an honest question, one you are positive will receive an honest answer. You don’t think he likes you that much, it makes sense, you are not exactly the quiet type, and he looks constantly dipped in silence.

Surprisingly, he shakes his head. This time, you don’t press further; you just acknowledge it with a nod and resume your work.

Your eyes grow heavy, you can feel his eyes on you, but it’s less and less unnerving by the hour. He’s empty once more, no more anger, not the speckle of bottomless sadness you had glimpsed. Only empty. Waiting.

«I think I should let you sleep.» You finally declare, getting up from your contorted position on the floor and popping as silently as possible your stiff back. He doesn’t respond. You collect your things, buzzing the intercom beside the door. You wave at him, a tight-lipped smile more focused on being quiet and not overly you than polite.

A couple of seconds pass, nothing happens, then a full minute goes by, still nothing, you try the door handle, then you buzz again. Nothing.

«They went to sleep.»

«You are not surveilled 24/7?» Well, that was rude, but something is gnawing at the bottom of your stomach and you are pretty sure it’s anxiety clawing its way back from where you had tried to bury it.

«The food. It has tranquillisers.»

«What— No! I would never—» «Not yours.»

Oh. Oh, this is messed up.

«Well that is fucked up.» You warned him, everything going on up there must find a way to get out. You simply cannot keep a thought to yourself.

The room fills with silence once more. You spin on your heels, then slowly slide your way to the floor, tiredly slumping down the walls.

«I guess we’ll just have a sleepover then.»

The thought unnerves you, and you doubt you’ll be able to close an eye, but the man doesn’t need to know this. «Do the lights turn off?»

Silence. You are probably annoying him. Scratch that, you are definitely annoying him, hell, you are annoying yourself. «Нет.»

Silence. You should maintain it. «Animals.» No inner thoughts, right.

. 1st day of the 1st week: morning. If you had not closed an eye, you would not find yourself opening both of them, back stiff, your shoulder being shaken. «Ma’am, ma’am, what are you doing here?» Oh, the kid from yesterday, the guard bringing the soldier his mixture of gruel and tranquillisers. You want to reprise him, to ask, “Do you know they are sedating him?” without caring about any consequence at all, if not for the hope of changing the way things are being done, at least to make someone face the objective cruelty of their own practices. But even though you still need to reboot properly, and you still struggle to keep your own thoughts to yourself, you know that stating what you now know could not be a good move. What if he was not supposed to know? What if your lousy mouth ended up making things worse for him?

«Ma’am?»

James’ eyes are already on you, of course they are, what were you expecting? But something is amiss, there is a certain tension in his jaw, something deeply unnerving given the fact it’s distressing to the Winter Soldier. His eyes dart to the younger man in uniform, you can feel the faint buzzing of metal somewhere in the room.

Something is really tense in here, and it’s not your creaking back.

You jump up, knees popping loudly, a surge of nervousness punching a laugh out of your mouth. «Well, I need to shower.» The kid follows your moves, a machine gun you had not noticed strapped to his torso, dangling between your bodies. «Ma'am, I’m sorry I left you here—» «No harm done, kid. I had a lovely pyjama party, now please, I really need to pee.» And with a quick handwave, you bid goodbye to the man in the cage and shove past the door.

You had not lied. You need to pee so badly.

. ”He has a mole on the left side of his forehead. He’s being sedated and kept in a locked container. Believe me, he is not free. Please, I really don’t know what I should do to help him. This is my phone number. I’m begging you to give it to Steve Rogers.”

Well, there is no harm in trying; you still firmly believe that if only Captain America knew, he would come barging through the door to rescue his friend. You simply have to tell him.

You are barely out of the most uncomfortable, cramped and cold shower you have ever taken that your phone starts ringing.

«Hello?» «You are in a very bad situation. Whatever you are doing in there, stop. I’m saying this for your own good. You sound like a sweet girl, and I get that you want to make things right, but there is nothing to be set straight in this situation. Please. Go as far as you can from that man.»

Silence engulfs you, something rings hollow in your ears, a piercing sound that makes you shiver. «Steve Rogers, I gather.»

«I’m sorry you find yourself in this situation, whatever your job is, drop it. I’m truly sorry.» Prick, you had known the Winter Soldier for less than a day and you are more set on helping him than his life-long best friend.

A coward and a prick.

«Yeah me too, I thought Captain America had more spine than whatever the fuck you have. Have a nice day, sir. I’m not quitting.»

«You should—»

The line cuts, your thumb stays pressed on the red button, something boils deep in your chest, so furiously that you almost think sleeping in the same room with the Soldier had made you cling onto some of his repressed and deep anger.

Alone in the world, he is alone in the world. «FUCK!»

>> ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 5

Ao3 Link Wattpad Link

[pixelplayground]

Hi! You recently talked about how you got your CC folder down to 120GB in October and I was wondering how you did that? Like, how did you decide what to delete, etc? I have over 60k files of CC (I KNOW!) and I don't know where to even start on downsizing lol! I feel like I need everything!

Hello @thegreatestmeme,

I too have a CC problem, across all my folders I have about 600GB total 💀 but, to answer your question, I removed "deletion" from the equation and simply “archive” it instead. Mentally that works better for me; I start getting FOMO/anxiety that one day, I will want that item, and it will no longer be available to re-download if I think about deleting the file forever unless it’s broken. If I'm just moving it to a different folder that I don't load up all the time, I feel better about that!

My non-negotiable CC (CAS, UI Overrides, Gameplay Mods) = 67GB. I leave these files alone except for game updates when mods need to be replaced. Occasionally (once a quarter) I might archive some CAS items that I don’t use but that’s about it.

Build / Buy is the folder I have to constantly manage. I have two versions of this folder in regular rotation: a large version (about 370GB now) and a gameplay version (145GB as of today making my total mods folder 212GB for gameplay). As you can see in two weeks since the last time I answered an ask about my mods folder size, I have added another 12GB of CC to my "small" folder, lol. It's fair to say that I have a problem.

In late 2023 when I came back to the game, I started my Build / Buy folder from scratch, and my CAS folder by exporting the lots and households I knew I wanted to keep in my new save game, then adding that CC to that new folder and archiving the rest. At that time, I had about 80GB of CC that was "required" for those builds and households. From this point, I began adding things back more selectively. It's easier to manage what is going in the folder than taking things out for me.

Now when I do new builds, I load my large Build / Buy folder, work on the lot, save the lot to my library, exit the game, then use Tray Importer to export the CC that’s not in my smaller gameplay folder so I can add it for the next time I load up just to play. I rinse and repeat this process as I work on new houses. For both CAS and Build / Buy items, I have a quarantine folder to test new items before deciding if they will be permanently sorted into the gameplay folder or archived in the larger repository for use at a later time.

I choose to do it this way because it reduces load time significantly when I just want to go in and do some minor decorating, and or play. The search function in game works much faster with smaller CC catalogs too.

[rainbowsky]

Backing up your blog - advice

As most people on Tumblr are aware, there are a lot of people scrambling to back up their blogs after the recent round of massive layoffs of almost all of the Tumblr team. A lot of people are having problems with this process. Here's what I recommend.

First of all, just so everyone knows - the official Tumblr export only works on desktop. There's currently no option for mobile export of your blog. Given the file sizes potentially at play, that's probably for the best. If you usually use mobile you will need to login to Tumblr on a desktop computer to request your blog export, and to download the file when it's ready. Here's my advice:

Request an export of your blog(s) ASAP. There are huge delays right now in processing these requests. It took over a week for my blog export to be ready for download, by which time I assumed it wasn't functioning and wasn't going to complete (in the past this request has been very quick to process). I can confirm that Tumblr blog export is working, it's just taking AGES to process. Instructions on how to request an export - and info on what that export will and won't contain - can be found here.

There are other methods of varying complexity available for those who want to make absolute sure they're able to back up their blog while they wait for their export to process.

When downloading your export, be aware that the file size could potentially be extremely large depending on how many photos, gifs and videos you post. I have been cutting back a lot on posting huge media files, reblogging gifs, etc. to try to keep this file size down, and still my blog export was 80GB (for context, my export from around the same time last year was 67GB).

It's best not to rely on your web browser to download this huge file. I recommend using a download manager. The download speeds will be much, much faster (hours as opposed to days to download the file), and it's a lot less likely to fail. Even if the download fails, a download manager can usually pick up where it left off and restore the process, while if it fails in your browser there's no way to recover. There are a lot of reliable download managers out there. I used JDownloader, which is free and open source.

I recommend starting the download and then just walking away and doing something else for a while. Don't forget to disable power saving settings for the interim. You don't want your computer falling asleep halfway through the download and potentially having to start all over again.

I usually back up my blog at least once a year, but I'll likely start doing it with more frequency moving forward. It's just a good practice to keep your information backed up. You never know what could happen. Better safe than sorry.

[echonidae]

✦ COMMISSIONS REOPENING on monday, December 2nd!! ✦

hello there!! i'm a good deal late again (i miscalculated how much time it'd take to get everything ready for this new batch orz), but, i bring news of a new commission batch, scheduled for monday, December 2nd!!

i have a bunch of things to report, which you can read under the read-more (or over on [deviantArt!]) but yes, the important bits:

all commission types available!! regular orders: 12 slots total (3 active, 9 in queue) doodle orders: no limit so long as it's open!! (6 active slots!) pagedoll orders: also no limit!! (2 active slots!) the queue(s) will remain open indefinitely the waitlist for the next batch is unavailable until further notice ✦ digital medium only! the commissioned pieces are all .png files; no physical items will be shipped. ✦ for regular orders, max of 2 SLOTS per person; i'll be working on multiple orders one at a time (the second order will be moved into the queue) ✦ waiting period is 2 months at most! i tend to work fairly fast, and i'll keep you updated throughout the whole process!

here's a link to the commission info website!!

more info on the upcoming commissions + new stuff under the read-more!!

so!! >:3c

a new commission option!! we'ge got pagedolls now!! :"D

they're lil' stylized full-body portraits with transparent backgrounds, clean lineart and flatcolors :'3c i just posted the examples separately, you can check them out [here]!! they have their own queue, like doodles, but function the same as regular orders in terms of feedback and client updates– the different queue is just because pagedolls are faster to complete, and therefore it'd be nice if they didn't take regular-order-slots instead :')c no limit of orders per person, but i will be working on those 2 at a time c':

speaking of full-body, from here on all commission options offer full-body portraits, replacing knee-up!! i feel more confident with my art now to tackle full-body stuff :') with this, i went and changed the nomenclature of shoulder/waist/knee-up to just bust/half-body/full-body, which i reckon better suits how i tend to go about where to cut off portraits (uh... ribcage/mid-thigh/mid-calf-up x"Dc)

portraits can now have up to two characters!! slooowly climbing towards just having multiple extra characters x'Dc but for now, just the two!! prices vary depending on how much of the second character is visible (plus an extra fee if the 2nd character is Very Very Intricate design-wise). more on this below, and on the [website] too :')c

that said, familiars / pets / companions don't count as extra characters!! they have their own stipulations, also described below!!

this time i'll be (once again) working on a reduced amount of slots for regular orders (doodles and pagedolls exempt!), in an effort to finish things up in a more timely manner by focusing on a smaller amount of orders, and to then open new batches more often (since the last one was over a year ago). this time around, there will be a total of 12 slots for regular orders: 3 active slots that i'll be getting started on right away on monday, and then another 9 waiting in queue c: again, no deadline for those!!

since it's a small number of slots, regular orders slots are limited to two per person!! so that folks have a good chance of getting a slot :')c and given how it's just 3 active slots, i'll be working on multiple orders one at a time c':

doodles and pagedolls do not have those limits, and i'll just go about finishing them up as i can c: six doodles at a time, and two pagedolls at a time as well, but their respective queues have no slot limit, and folks can order as many as they want at once :3c

in a different note, over the course of the year, i've gone from using Paint Tool SAI to drawing and painting on Rebelle 7 instead, and have since acclimated well enough to continue commission work with no issue– i can now send the finalized files at better resolution too :"Dc yey nanopixel :3c

which reminds me, icons are now sized 1000px square insted of 800px!! minor change but still noteworthy x')c

lastly, cases in which no sketch presented is suitable, and no amount of editing said sketch can help its approval and the client would rather a new sketch be made, i can do so for a flat fee of 35% of the original order's price– this does not impact choosing between sketches and such, or my tendency towards working on more than one sketch for orders, or if the client has presented multiple sketch ideas for the same order :')c the modifications, big and small, of the sketch phase remain entirely part of the process and free of charge!! this is just in case an entirely new sketch is necessary, since the sketch portion of the process is usually the more complicated and time-consuming bit of the commission c': so, edge case, but it's a new thing added in and i want to make mention of it!!

other than that, prices have been updated, and there's been minor edits in wording for the sake of clarity in the terms on the [website], on the forms, and the descriptions of the options and extras c': i've also, as you may have noticed, updated all the examples on the info sheet and on the website to be past commissions!! some of which i have yet to post (orz on my way!!! ᕦ(ò_óˇ)ᕤ), but that you can see as well over on the commission-info-place :')c

and that's it for all the new stuff!! :'D

thank you so much again to everyone who ordered last batch (i'm so happy folks like the doodles so much, for one!! they've been a heckin' blast to work on, thank you all again!!), and everyone who reached out and sent messages and stopped by the commission-info-website for orders or to just say hi, i appreciate it tons :')c i'm looking forward to this new batch!! (´▽`ʃ♡ƪ)

thank you again, and i wish everyone a dang nice day!! :"D i'll be posting until then, but cya monday!!

[steamingstewchunks]

Something happened.

Not something bad, obviously, all hands on deck would be needed for it.

But it was enough for Prowl to ask him to stay,

"Just sit there, make sure she doesn't climb on or into anything." It was easy enough, the little femme couldn't even walk properly let alone climb!

"Do not take your optics off of her."

... They didn't like that tone all too much, if Jazz was being honest.

"Looks like it's just you and me now little lady, Sari baby, what do you like to do for fun around here?" Cautiously, he places a servo into the little playpen, holding it up so she couldn't climb his servo and possibly hurt herself, instead opting to hold it closer to her so she could grab it, or something.

"I've heard stories of your little run offs, givin' all these big guys a scare kid. It's not healthy for them." He chuckles, as the organic infant places both hands on his digit, circular toy held between her "gums"(such a weird name to call it. There's already candy of that, why a body part?) as she grunts, taking a stand.

"oh, are you gonna walk? Should I record this?" as a precaution, he proceeded with recording. " Are you gonna do a trick? Prowl says you like to dance, maybe some tunes would help get you movin'."

Jazz spoke softly, and calmly, playing a low energy, but still bumpy beat. Something easy to move too. He would have put on some of those baby songs from the human internet, but, well, he didn't really like em. Got stuck in the processor is all.

The speakers where kept at a low volume, something else he read in the books and files prowl provided. Organic infants had sensitive ears, and spooked easy.

He moved himself closer to Sari, smiling all the way. Organics weren't half as bad as sentinel made them out to be at all,

Infact, they where kinda cu-

"UH-CHOO!"

Jazz practically bent over backwards. He did it so fast it was a miracle he didn't move his servo, patiently, (impatiently, but he wasn't going to rush her, it would never be worth it.) he waiting for her hands to disappear from his sensory net.

"eeeuh...!"

She plopped herself down with a grunt and jazz decided to finally let his freakout, out. Groaning and convulsing, he wipes his visor repeatedly, then his olfactory sensors, and then his dermas.

It was beyond nasty.

Organics did spew slime! Sentinel was right! He grabbed one of the nearby blankets, sure that it wasn't going to be used later as it was thick and it wasn't really cold, he started to clean it all off hurriedly.

"not cool, Sari baby, not cool...!" He whined.

Something seemed off, just a little bit, but the slime was nearly off his visor, and scans where screaming about the bacteria and germs and micro organisms in the liquids and eugh!

"okay, maybe I'll keep my distance 'till tall dark and handsome comes back okay?" Focusing back into her little play pad, he ceased all functioning. Tac-net working either in overdrive or not at all, he didn't know, there was simply the matter that the little gate they used to keep her from wandering too far, was pushed open.

She's loose.

She's loose.

Gone, where's the baby? Not here. Nada, nuh-uh.

"Sari?" Foregoing Dignity, he crawls on his servos and knee-struts, over the play pen and following the area of interest in case there was any sort of clue to where she could have gone too so spark-damned quickly.

"come on, little lady, where'd you go huh? If I can't find you, your babysitter is gonna have my helm haha!"

Swiping at leaves and picking up sticks, he starts to grow frantic, scurrying faster and faster, picking up speed while scouring everywhere in the room. He checks under the berth, under the table even risking the tree roots listening and watching, poking in any little hole he could find with great precision and care, lest he crush the object of his panic.

"come on, please little lady, I know prowl doesn't let you have any before nap time but I promise you, I'll get you one of those little candy sticks you like so much, maybe even one of the big ones! Just please, please come on out," he sits on his heels, "or even just a sign!"

His movements cease when he turns, trying to retrace his steps, just to see black and gold striped pedes. Trailing up and up, his visual network shows him just what he didn't want to see.

"ahem. Have you, perhaps, checked behind the beanbag chair?" Prowl offers helpfully.

"how long have you uh... Been here?" He chuckles, rising, "and b-behind the what?"

"the beanbag chair." He turns to walk the three steps to the playpen area, and sits in his haunches.

Making the autobot servo sign for quiet, prowl beckons to Jazz, who followed that order.

"she usually puts herself to sleep in my room," prowl whispers, "the bean bag being her favorite bed." The yellow of the chair, had mixed with a curled up Sari. Teething toy still in her mouth, which was open and making little snoring sounds, Sari slept still in the play pen, not under the berth, or under the table. Or in the tree roots.

"... Oh..." Heat travelled up Jazz's faceplate, derma pointed down in embarrassment while he grasped the tip of his hat and brought it forward to hide it all, "she's quite a troublemaker huh?" He mumbles.

A fool is what he has been. His tac-net was searching simply just for the human infant, in his urgency and panic, he forgot to just... Look.

She was alright.

"I did see... A lot." Prowl chuckles.

His dignity however, was not.

"Don't worry. Everyone, Bot or not, has a spark attack, courtesy of her, one way or another." He sits, legs crossed, and simply watches her as she breathes.

Jazz realizes he's still recording. And stops it, while grabbing one of the thin blankets, looking to prowl for approval, and draping it gently over Sari, the infant.

"by the way, you still have some stuff in your face."

Jazz let out a whiny groan, as prowl made a move to wipe it off.

[shootingstarpilot]

In Which Helix Loses His Godsdamned Temper

A gift for my dear friend @themonopolyhat, who wanted to know how the swivel chair race briefly mentioned in Chapter 11 of like lightning changing hands went down <3

Helix and sleep are passing acquaintances at best.

Not enemies, no- he's not a fool. He's a good medic. He knows sleep is important. Even for the clones, who were conditioned to function on half as much sleep as a human nat-born- toxic byproducts need to be processed. New neural pathways need to be formed. Memories need to be filed away. So of course he makes time for it. He most certainly doesn't need Needle coaxing him away from his desk or switching out his stims or shoving him down onto a cot and sitting on him until he passes out- no matter how much the younger medic might protest otherwise-

But. His point.

He makes room for it. Their moments of true downtime are few and far between, but Helix always makes sure to squeeze in a treasured nap or two when he gets the chance.

Which is why, when he's rudely awoken by shouting outside the medbay door that is not immediately followed by the reveal of some horrific injury, Helix decides he's well overdue to rain hellfire down on whatever hapless idiots decided to work out their post-campaign jitters right outside his fucking medbay.

He pulls the pillow off his head, rolls to his feet, and stalks towards the door, carefully selecting his most threatening expression and arranging it appropriately.

When the door slides open, he inhales-

And then lets the air out again in a slightly anticlimactic whoosh when he comes face to face with an empty hallway.

Feeling immensely irritated, he steps out of the doorway and glances to the left and right.

Where-?

The noise is barely a ripple at the back of his mind, at first. Almost indistinguishable from the ever-present rumbling of the engines.

Then it very quickly overtakes it.

Helix, operating solely on well-honed instinct, flattens himself against the wall just in time for a blur of motion to careen around the corner. They slow as they hit the curve, just enough for him to make out-

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Auks, on the swivel chair, gripping both edges with white-knuckled hands- Wooley, hands on the back of the chair, moving at a dead sprint-

Auks' gaze flickers up just enough to catch Helix's eyes, wild glee melting into a pants-pissing terror. They disappear around the next corner, and Helix indulges in a mental pat on the back when he hears Auks' distant shriek of-

"Go faster!"

Right.

He lets them go. He'll catch up with them later.

After a moment's consideration, he steps into the middle of the hallway, studying the water stain on the ceiling with all the appearance of sincere diligence.

The distant rumbling grows louder.

Hm. He should think about filing a work order with Maintenance.

Underneath, now, the sound of footsteps-

They don't want to let that pipe burst, after all.

"OhshitohfuckCOVER-"

He doesn't move.

A screeching noise, an even louder scream-

A tangle of limbs tumbles past his left, slamming into the corner with a force that Helix deliberately doesn't wince at.

Longshot is the first to sit up, carefully disentangling himself from the pathetic remains of the chair. He doesn't look at all frightened when he looks up at Helix.

Just resigned.

"In my defense," he says, rolling his shoulder assessingly, "I told them this location was a bad idea."

"It was," Helix agrees, poisonously sweet.

Gearshift is the next to emerge, clutching at his face. Longshot pats him on the back. "All good?"

Faintly muffled, slightly more stuffy-

"You broke my nose!"

"I broke your nose?"

"You!" Gearshift amends, pointing at Helix, the effect of his glare somewhat lessened by the blood pouring between his fingers. "What were you thinking?"

"Standing in the hallway?"

"Y-"

Gearshift falters.

Helix smiles at him.

"Do you know how big this ship is, Gearshift?" he says mildly.

"Pretty big, sir," Gearshift mutters.

"Do you know how often I have time to nap?"

"Probably not very often, sir."

"Do you know how loud you idiots were?"

"No, sir."

"This was the third round, though," Longshot adds blithely. "Can't have been too bad if you slept through the other two-"

"Shut your mouth," Helix says pleasantly. "Where are the others?"

Longshot points.

"Right," Helix says, already running through his death-be-upon-you-if-you-try-this-banthashit-again speech in the back of his mind. He jabs a finger at Gearshift. "Stay here. I want to take a look at your nose when I get- stop tilting your head back, do you want to asphyxiate on your own blood? I'll be right back."

He stalks off without waiting for an answer.

The others aren't far off. Two hallways down and Helix can already make out the cheerful chatter, rising alongside his blood pressure.

"-and Auks clocked in at three minutes on the dot, fastest lap yet," Waxer says cheerfully. Helix picks up his pace. "Right, Trapper, you're up- who's your partner?"

Trapper is, however, doomed to a life of loneliness, because it's at that precise moment that Helix rounds the corner and launches into a lecture that will be whispered about among the shinies for years to come.

"-swivel chairs! Fucking swivel chairs, I thought you were all supposed to be soldiers, not tubies running along the godsdamned catwalks-"

Trapper shrinks backwards, ducks his head, and his patient resignation drives Helix's ire to new heights-

"-had the entire ship to be suicidal in, but no, you had to plot out your fucking racecourse directly outside my fucking medbay when I was getting the first sleep I'd had in three days-"

Waxer scuffs his foot against the floor, looking like he's considering taking a step backward, and then thinks better of it-

"-slammed his head into the wall and broke his fucking nose, if he'd hit half an inch higher his brains would've spilled out like soup because you couldn't even think to use your fucking helmets-"

Boil seizes the opportunity when Helix is forced to stop for breath.

"We did have supervision," he points out. "Medical. So, you know- we got cleared-"

"Who," Helix grits out, "the fuck-"

The crowd pulls back like the tide, and Helix stares.

Stitch stares up at him from where he's perched on the edge of yet another swivel chair, white-faced.

Needle, holding onto the back, offers him a wave.

"Integrated supervision," he says cheerfully. "New management principle I heard about, thought we could give it a try-"

A muscle in Helix's jaw jumps.

"You two," he grits out, "with me. And the rest of you-" he snaps, at the rustle of a collective relieved sigh- "pull this banthashit again, and I'll deliver you to Grievous hog-tied on a platter- now, am I understood?"

At the affirmative murmurs, he turns on his heel and strides off, followed hurriedly by his two renegade medics.

The strained silence is broken only by two sets of footsteps for some time.

"Stitch," Helix says, after a moment, "get off the chair."

A pause. Then three sets of footsteps.

Then, so quiet Helix has to strain to hear it-

"Is Gearshift okay?"

Helix closes his eyes and forces a slow exhale out through his nose.

(His head is pounding.)

"Yeah," he says, making a conscious effort to gentle his voice. "Just a broken nose. No other trauma that I could tell. You deal with that when we get back, okay? Run him through the gauntlet. Use your best judgement."

"Okay, Helix."

The silence gains a certain obnoxious quality to it.

"And you," Helix says, considering-

Then it hits him.

"You can put that nutritional learning module to use," he decides. "Kitchens. Run through the new requisition forms with Terror. Help him rebuild a sustainable menu; the routine shipments got changed last week."

Needle does not appear half as peeved as Helix would like him to.

He catches Helix's glare and grins, irrepressibly sunny. "Will do, boss. Terror and I are friends, I like his company."

"Terror doesn't do friends."

"Mm, fair. We're nemeses, then. I think that's the closest thing he has."

Helix's glower darkens.

The rest of the walk back is silent.

They split when they reach the medbay. Stitch heads for Gearshift immediately- and Longshot, who, Helix notes with mild surprise, had stayed with him. Needle peels off for the kitchens, humming under his breath with a nonchalance that makes Helix want to deck him.

And Helix-

Helix heads for his office.

All inclination towards sleep has vanished. He grits his teeth, settles into his chair, rubs at his forehead-

He's sure there's some flimsiwork he can get ahead on.

Later:

After he realizes exactly why Stitch is skittering away from him at every turn-

After he sits him down and patiently explains that the absolute worst punishment he will ever receive- the punishment for the Fuck-Up Of All Fuck-Ups, the punishment if he is found to be unfit for medical work- will be being reassigned to a different unit-

After he sees their youngest primary off to bed, guilt still pulling his shoulders low and dragging at his steps-

Needle comes back.

The first Helix knows of this is when a knock at his office door rouses him from staring at the same page on his datapad that he has been for the past forty minutes.

"Come in," he mutters, and Needle pokes his head through the door.

"Hey, boss," he says, and steps in fully, carefully shutting the door behind him. "New menu's been filed. Double- and triple-checked."

"Mhm."

Needle settles into the chair and sets a cup Helix hadn't noticed him carrying onto his desk.

"Tea," he says quietly, in answer to Helix's questioning look. "Thought you might need it."

Helix grumbles something incoherent, but picks up the drink anyway.

The warmth seeps all the way up his arms, into his shoulders, and he relaxes quite against his will.

They sit in silence for a long moment.

"Things were getting tense in the training rooms," Needle says at last. "They were at each other's throats. Kamei had already dislocated Trigger's shoulder, and he didn't even seem sorry- you know how those two are."

Helix blinks. He does- and- that's right, they hadn't been there, had they?

"This was the first thing I could come up with. I should've thought of the helmets, you were right about that- I'm sorry I didn't. I just wanted to get them moving."

"And of course this was the first thing you thought of," Helix mutters. He sees Needle's expression twist briefly, and guiltily musters up a quirk of his lips. "Sounds like you."

Needle returns the smile, and then his gaze drops to his knees.

"I didn't know you were sleeping, either," he says eventually. "You- you don't usually. I should've checked, I know, I just figured- keeping the medbay on the route would make for easier access if someone did get injured."

Helix takes a sip of the tea.

It's not caf.

But it's-

Good.

"Sorry about that," Needle finishes lamely. His fingers twitch and flicker and jump before he stuffs his hands into the pockets of his scrubs.

Helix takes another sip- longer than he'd meant to, this time, and when he looks down he realizes he's nearly drained the cup.

His headache is easing.

"Longshot said that was the third round," he says at last. "How'd you two do on the others?"

Needle stares at him, uncomprehending, for one long moment-

Then a smile like the sun splits his face.

"Oh, knocked them out of orbit, boss."

"Good," Helix mutters. He stands, places the empty mug on the table, and stretches until he feels his back crack. "Right. I'm going to get some sleep, then. You got the shift?"

"Course I do," Needle says easily, and Helix squeezes his shoulder on his way out.

Stitch is sitting up when he emerges, ruffled hair and sleep-fogged eyes sending a pang through Helix's chest.

"Hey, kiddo," he says quietly. "Mind if I join you?"

Stitch squints at him. "Helix?" he says at last. "Needle said you needed to lie down."

"Oh, he did, did he?" Helix mutters, glancing back at the office door. He doesn't even bother to try mustering a glare.

"Uh-huh," Stitch hums, already slipping back into sleep. He curls onto his side and pats the empty space next to him. "Come on."

Helix kicks off his boots and obligingly settles under the blanket, and Stitch shuffles a bit closer and wraps an arm around his chest.

"Needle told me you two won," Helix murmurs.

"Yeah," Stitch says sleepily. A slow smile blooms across his face. "He can go pretty fast."

"Well," Helix sighs. "I guess that's okay, then."

As it turns out, sleep can come easily after all.

[wolveria]

What We Did on Felucia - Ch 3

Pairing: The Bad Batch x f!Reader

Series Warnings: Smut, dubcon, slow burn, sex pollen

Chapter Summary:

“And what did you tell them about… the other effects of the chemical?” “Nothing.” “…Nothing?” “That’s right.”

AO3

When you woke, your tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth, too dry and puffy, and your body seemed to be made of inert material. Something ached in the distance, and white, sterile walls filled your vision as you opened your eyes.

Your chest went tight, your heart raced, and you fought against the heavy weight of your body to sit up.

“Whoa, whoa, you’re all right.”

Hunter was half out of his chair next to the infirmary bed, his hand outstretched toward you, but then he seemed to think better and pulled back. His eyes were watchful but gentle.

“Welcome back, General.”

As he returned to the chair, you gave him a quick once over. He was without armor, wearing only his GAR-issue body glove, and something about that increased the sense of pressure on the back of your neck.

“Where… are we?”

“Republic medical station in the Taanab system. It was the closest one.”

You sat up the rest of the way, and muted pain flared in your hips, groin, and backside. Realization trickled into your thoughts before it broke into a deluge, and you covered your face with your hands as you struggled to suck in air through lungs that refused to function.

“General?”

The touch on your shoulder was light, but you still flinched, and Hunter immediately lifted his hand away. You took another deep breath, recalled your training to release your turbulent emotions into the Force, and lowered your hands after you were sure your expression had smoothed.

Now, Hunter stared with open worry.

“Where are the others?” Your voice came out whisper-quiet, but you knew Hunter’s hearing would catch it. “How did we get out?”

“Well, turns out the Separatists didn’t account for us being enhanced clones. Our metabolisms burn faster than regs’, so we woke in the middle of them transporting us to an offworld ship. We overpowered the battle droids and got you back to the Marauder.”

 You didn’t meet his eye, gaze fixed on your hands lying on the thin white sheet, and he continued.

“The rest of the squad is fine. We’ve already been cleared by medical. You… took the worst of it.”

After a few seconds passed, you nodded, and your voice returned to the calm, commanding tone it should be.

“Thank you, Sergeant. I appreciate the update.”

Hunter didn’t move out of the chair at your subtle dismissal. You cleared your throat.

“I’m fine, if you need to attend your other duties.”

He shifted closer, perched at the edge of his seat.

“Taking care of you is my duty.”

Your hands clenched in your lap.

“As I said, I’m fine.”

“With all due respect, sir, you’re not.”

Your head snapped up and you glared at him, but he returned the look with an unbothered expression, and your anger extinguished just as quickly as it had flared. His own posture relaxed by a small degree.

“I’d be surprised if you were.”

He had that softness again, which only made it more difficult to look at him.

“Are you… How are you feeling?” You changed direction mid-sentence, not asking if he was okay, because how could he be?

“Tired,” he said with a hint of a smile. “Seems to be a common after-effect. Tech said there’s no permanent damage, and I trust him more than the droids and long necks.”

You sat up straighter.

“What are they saying?”

Hunter shrugged.

“Not much. Chems were already out of our systems by the time we escaped Felucia, and we were all run through decontamination when we arrived, even you, so… not a lot of evidence left behind.”

He gave you a significant look, and your chest grew tight.

“And what did you tell them about… the other effects of the chemical?”

“Nothing.”

“…Nothing?”

“That’s right.”

Hunter didn’t smile, or say he was joking; he simply waited you out.

“But… but you must have had your debriefing and filed your report. And Tech, he records everything for the post-mission analysis team—”

“Seems there was some kind of jamming signal that messed with our equipment, and Tech wasn’t able to record anything.”

“Is that true?”

“It’s what I put in the report.”

You continued to stare, and Hunter shifted in his seat.

“They know we were incapacitated with a new bioweapon, and you were hit the hardest without filters. That’s all.”

“That’s all? But-but Hunter, you can’t…”

“Already did. First time I’ve filed a report by deadline, too.”

You didn’t return his amusement.

“You lied on an official mission report.”

“Yeah, and it wouldn’t be the first time. At least it was for an important reason.”

“Important reason?” you repeated, voice faint.

Hunter leaned forward.

“What happened on Felucia can stay there. No one has to know.”

“You can’t be serious.”

But he looked dead serious, and that was even more worrying.

“Hunter, I have to tell the Council.”

He leaned back and raised a brow.

“Why?”

“Why?” You couldn’t stop repeating him. “Because I- because we- they have to know what happened. What I did. Hunter, you can’t possibly believe I’m fit to command this squad after… after…”

You couldn’t bring yourself to say it.

“That’s exactly what I believe.”

Hunter had always been the most reasonable one, able to make the hard calls no one else could. What was he thinking? Lying on a report, putting himself and his squad at risk—and for what?

“We trust you, General,” he continued after your silence. “We’ll follow you into battle, obey your orders—or, well, as many as we usually do—and watch your back, just as you’ve watched ours. Nothing’s changed, if you don’t want it to.”

You couldn’t find your voice even if you knew what to say.

“All we had were bad options, and we fought the only way we could. But… others might not see it that way. And I don’t want you or my men punished for what was technically a successful mission.”

He rose to his feet and you followed the movement, your gaze flicking up his body. The suit did little to hide the curves and ripples of his well-formed muscles, and you quickly looked away.

This was why it couldn’t work. This.

Hunter paused before the closed doorway, his back to you, hand halfway lifted to the doorpad. It took all your strength to keep your gaze on your lap and not look up at the enticing view he presented.

“Think it over before your debriefing. Whatever you tell your Council… I’ll back you. Even if it means I’m caught in a lie.”

Hunter palmed the doorpad and walked out of the room, leaving you to stare at the empty space he left behind.

You woke to hushed voices and the comfort of two familiar beings in the Force. When you opened your eyes, Echo and Crosshair were near your bedside, Echo leaning against the wall while Crosshair sat on the back of the chair Hunter had previously occupied. His feet were planted wide on the seat, legs spread to allow for their long length.

They were also without armor, and though you should have been prepared for it, the sight of them in the skintight suits—and especially the view Crosshair afforded with his spread legs—forced you to stare at the opposite wall.

The tension in the room left it in silence until Crosshair finally said, “Morning, sunshine,” and he somehow managed to make the greeting sound like an insult.

Echo shot him a look before giving you a gentler one, but it wasn’t any easier meeting his eye.

“General. Hope you don’t mind us dropping in and checking how you’re doing.”

You forced a brief but warm smile.

“Just tired. Thank you for your concern, but it’s unnecessary.”

The smile faded fast. You were their commander; it was your job to worry about them, to make sure they were safe and whole. You’d failed them in so many ways, and you continued to fail them—

“Stop.”

You blinked and looked up, finally meeting Crosshair’s gaze.

“What?”

“You’re moping. Stop it.”

Echo shot him another look, which Crosshair again ignored.

“I’m not moping.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Brooding, then.”

“Knock it off, Crosshair.”

He turned his razor-edge glare on Echo, all pretense of humor dropped.

“Would you rather she wallow in self-loathing? Jedi are so quick to martyr themselves they don’t consider the collateral damage.” And then to you, he said, “You know I’m right. You’re going to spiral in a hell of your own making, and sooner or later, you’ll unburden yourself to your precious Council and take the rest of us down with you.”

You were frozen like a nuna before a nexu, and Echo growled, “I won’t warn you again.”

“Did you stop to think why Hunter would lie for us? For you?”

Crosshair stepped down from the chair, as graceful and dangerous as an actual nexu, and he shook off Echo’s hand where it attempted to grip his shoulder. He leaned over you, blocking out the overhead lights, and even though he was lean, he had the advantage of height.

“If they knew the truth, your Council would, at worst, expel you, yes? Well, goody for you. We would be sent for reconditioning on Kamino, or better yet, decommissioning altogether.”

Your eyes went wide. Echo didn’t move, and Crosshair sneered at you even as there was genuine anger simmering under the surface.

“Your punishment gives you the chance at a civilian life. Our punishment robs us of our minds. Possibly, our lives.” His eyes narrowed into a predator’s focus right before the killing leap. “Consider those little ramifications in your final report. Is this what you really want? Or are you absolving the burden of your own guilt.”

Like a punch low to the gut, your air was gone, pain taking its place. Crosshair pushed away from the bed and left the room without another word. Echo rubbed the back of his neck and gave you a look that held its own kind of guilt.

“I’m sorry. He shouldn’t have said that.”

“The Republic banned decommissioning years ago,” you said, weaker than you meant to sound. “After I- the Council found out. They threatened to break the contract if Prime Minister Lama Su didn’t amend the terms.”

Echo didn’t catch your slip-up. He just shook his head, his eyes too sorrowful.

“There are other ways. We would be court-martialed, at the very least. And since we aren’t classified as citizens, if we were dishonorably discharged, we’d spend the rest of our lives in a military prison.”

“They… they wouldn’t. The Council wouldn’t allow it. You’re soldiers of the Republic.”

“We were Kaminoan property first,” Echo replied with a sad smile. “Bred and tailored for service. Without that… we’re defective weapons. And this squad already toes that line every day.”

What could you say? He was right. And this wasn’t the first time you’d struggled with the uncomfortable legacy of the clone army.

You stared down at your hands. Your body had been used as a tool, a weapon, a source of both comfort and violence. You’d never imagined it bringing pleasure to someone, let alone the men you commanded, and the certain doom that would follow.

What were you supposed to do? Doing nothing seemed just as dangerous as confessing.

“They’re not used to working with Jedi, or with rules and regulations in general,” Echo said, “but I understand there’s no easy solution. Everything’s not as black and white as Crosshair makes it out to be, and I know you’ll do what’s necessary. I trust you with my life on the battlefield, and this is no different.”

Your throat tightened.

“Thank you, Echo.”

He reached out to you, but just like Hunter, he pulled back before his hand could connect.

“Get some rest, General.”

And then he too was gone, and you found a new emotion to pile onto an already overflowing heap: regret.

The third time you awoke, it was by the not-so-subtle heavy footfalls of a new visitor, and you gave a faint smile even before you opened your eyes. Wrecker stood over your bed, and your smile faded as soon as you saw his expression.

Instead of his usual bright self, Wrecker’s posture was stiff and slightly hunched, as if trying to make himself smaller. His brows were furrowed with worry, and there was a sadness in his eyes that made him look far older than he was.

Tech stood next to him, his own stance unusually hesitant, his eyes large and concerned behind his goggles. Like the others, they wore only their body gloves, but unlike the others, you hardly noticed.

You sat up and meant to greet them, to act as if nothing was amiss, but seeing them both so timid and meek, it all came flooding in. The guilt, the shame, the horrible knowledge that you were the cause of this change. Nothing would be the same again. Gone was the easy comradery, the warm feeling of being one of them, accepted as part of the group even though you weren’t a clone. The idea of that bond breaking was nearly enough to break you.

To make it worse, your vision blurred, but not so badly that you couldn’t see Wrecker’s eyes widen in alarm. He looked at Tech, who also appeared as if he might be on the verge of panic. Tech panicking? The thought was almost laughable.

“I’m… I’m so sorry.” And you didn’t just mean for your slip in control.

Wrecker looked lost for only a moment, and then his mouth set into a determined line. He pushed away the chair, sat on the edge of the bed, and pulled you into his arms.

Wrecker ended up pulling you entirely out of the covers, your legs dangling in the air as he set you on his lap, and you wrapped your arms around his neck without hesitation, embracing him as you buried your face in his shoulder.

As soon as you did, a voice in your head scolded you, warning you that this was grossly inappropriate and unprofessional. But you ignored it, easy to do with Wrecker’s arms looped around your back, holding you warm and safe.

“I got ya,” Wrecker said, voice low and gravelly. A light hand rested on your shoulder, and though he hadn’t said a word yet, Tech’s eyes were still soft with concern. You removed one arm around Wrecker’s neck and held it out to him in unspoken invitation.

As soon as Tech joined you on the edge of the bed, you moved off of Wrecker’s lap to wedge between them, your thighs resting against theirs, and it happened so quickly. Naturally.

Pressed between Tech and Wrecker, you could finally breathe and let your coiled muscles slowly relax. You leaned your head against the bulk of Wrecker’s arm, trying to hide the tears that finally broke. You didn’t make a sound, they might not even know you were crying, grieving over what you would soon lose. But Wrecker still held you close, his large fingers careful as he stroked your hair.

You shouldn’t be doing this. All you wore was a medical gown, and without the barrier of armor you could feel the heat of their bodies and the shape of their strength, Wrecker’s obvious and thick with fat and muscle, while Tech’s was subtle but lean and firm.

Tech finally spoke, his voice unusually quiet.

“Echo warned us you might need… gentle treatment.”

“Hugs okay?”

You nodded silently into Wrecker’s shoulder. The tears had dried, and you selfishly craved the comfort their touches brought, Wrecker stroking your hair while Tech now lightly rubbed a hand along your back.

“I’m sorry,” you croaked. “I shouldn’t… this isn’t…”

Tech took your hand and laid his palm against your knuckles, and then he curled his fingers, weaving them between yours and locking your hands together.

“You do not need to apologize. Not for this.”

“Yeah,” Wrecker added his agreement. “We both got ya.”

You said nothing, though some of your grief ebbed away. The three of you stayed that way for a while in warm, comfortable silence, Tech’s hand enveloping yours while Wrecker propped his cheek on the crown of your head. You held on to the moment as long as you could; you would likely not have another.

“I do wish to apologize for Crosshair’s behavior,” Tech said into the quiet. “He needn’t be so callous.”

“But he’s right. Your punishment would be disproportionate compared to mine.”

“Regardless of the validity of his points, his delivery was tactless.”

What did that matter? Crosshair’s anger was justified, and in the end, he was looking out for his brothers. You couldn’t fault him for that.

“I appreciate that, Tech, but… I would rather have his honesty than my feelings spared. This is too important for anything less.”

His other hand stopped moving, coming to rest on your shoulder blade.

“Then you have made a decision regarding Hunter’s report?”

“I… No, not yet.”

“I see.”

His voice was perfectly even, no opinion one way or another, and that somehow made it worse.

“Hunter said you would all still follow me,” you said. “That this doesn’t change anything between us.”

“It is impossible what happened on Felucia hasn’t changed us. That goes against sapient nature to not internalize one’s own experiences. However, we trust your judgement, your abilities, and your leadership just as we did before. Perhaps, even more so now, if that addresses your concern.”

Gratitude filled the space around your heart, to the point where there wasn’t much room for air.

“It does.”

“Good.”

The word was delivered in his usual curt manner, but he squeezed your hand, and a memory rose unbidden to the surface: you wanting to kiss Tech, practically pleading with him to let you.

Not… here. Not like this.

What had he meant by that?

“It appears Wrecker was more exhausted than he told me.”

You glanced up to find Wrecker had indeed fallen asleep with his head leaning on yours. Something sharp tugged at your insides, knowing that Wrecker still trusted you enough to fall asleep in your presence.

Something else warmed within you, trying to make itself known as it awakened at their closeness. It was a familiar thing, first sparked to life in that horrible laboratory, and you realized something.

Tech and Wrecker. Echo and Crosshair. Hunter alone. Different pairings than you’d faced in that room, and that couldn’t be an accident. No, you had no doubt Hunter had arranged them this way on purpose, avoiding overwhelming you with the whole group at once while also trying to spare you from a direct reminder.

It was… surprisingly thoughtful. Unnecessary, because while Echo and Wrecker didn’t spend more time together than anyone else, Crosshair and Hunter were impossible to avoid as a pair. Despite how difficult and churlish Crosshair acted with Hunter, he had a habit of following him around like a shadow, and perhaps more surprising was how well Hunter tolerated the hovering.

Hunter might be more careful from now on, but Crosshair was delighted with any reaction he could get from you, and the two of them together would always remind you of tight grips and hot, forceful intrusions—

“I think I need more rest as well,” you said, your voice cracking in the middle. Hopefully, Tech accepted it as exhaustion.

“You were put under more strain than us due to several factors, such as being forced to endure the effects for longer with, ah… constant stimulation. And like Hunter, your senses are more enhanced than a human’s. I am not surprised you haven’t fully recovered yet, and I apologize for underestimating how this would affect you.”

You squeezed his fingers between yours and said, “You were wonderful, Tech.”

Realizing the double-meaning too late, you pressed your lips tight together. Tech, however, averted his gaze as a light shade of pink dusted his cheeks.

“We should let you sleep. Wrecker, wake up.”

He said the last part louder, his voice sharp, and Wrecker snorted awake. He looked down at you, his lips spreading into a sleepy grin.

“Aren’t you a sight.”

Your eyes went wide, and Tech released your hand, got to his feet, and grabbed Wrecker by the collar of his suit.

“Release our general. We are leaving.”

Wrecker made an unhappy noise but allowed Tech to pull him away, leaving you cold without his arm around your waist, nestling you against his side. He gave you one last sheepish smile before his brother yanked him out the door.

You laid back down, but sleep eluded you in what felt like a punishment. A solution had begun to form in your mind, and the heavy burden of grief wouldn’t let you find a moment of peace.

You hoped one day they would forgive you.

Next Chapter

[animalcrossingshowdown]

someone sent in this ask and I spent literal hours putting together this tutorial but then it wouldn't let me post it and when I went back into my inbox the ask was gone?? good thing I copy and pasted it, so here it is in its own post

I'm not sure if this will work with programs other than photoshop, but this is how I do it. I know @shinobi-bacon has a tutorial here on how they do it which is pretty different from the way I do it, so if my tutorial is confusing maybe theirs will click with you better lmao. I stole the greenscreen idea from them anyway

SO FIRST, you want your villager on a green screen background. to do this, go to harv's island and use a custom pattern to make the walls and floors bright green. If the villager you're using has green in their design, you'll have to pick a different colour that isn't in their design, but for most villagers green is fine.

if your villager has every colour on them like pietro or stiches then rip you're gonna have to do some manual editing frame by frame. try to choose a colour that doesn't touch the edges of their silhouette too much in that case because it'll make life easier for you

so once you have them in green purgatory, record them doing their emote or whatever. I just use the built-in screen record function that the switch has. press and hold this button to record the last 30 seconds that your switch displayed:

next send that video to your computer and trim off the start of the video so it starts right before a recognizable part of the animation. for this emote I cut it off right before the blink. if you have a slow computer, you'll probably want to trim the end off too so the video is only a little bit longer than one full animation loop

(you can use the video editing software of your preference, I just use quick time player Edit -> Trim)

okay time for photoshop. go File -> Import -> Video Frames to Layers

for "range to import" select "from beginning to end" (or you could skip the last step about trimming the video and select a range here, but I find it kind of finicky), and make sure "make frame animation" is checked

once imported, if it doesn't pop up on it's own, go Window -> Timeline to get your animation at the bottom

click through those frames at the bottom until you find an easily recognizable frame (I chose the first frame where her eyes are closed) and delete all the frames before it. in the layers panel, the layer from the frame you've selected should be the only one turned on. delete all the layers below it

now go through the frames to find the next identical frame. this is where the animation loops. delete that frame and all the frames after it, as well as all of their corresponding layers (note in the picture, frame 121 is selected, and it's exactly the same as the frame from the start of the animation)

hit the play button on the bottom left to double check that it loops properly

next, make sure both THE FIRST FRAME AND BOTTOM LAYER are selected, and crop and reduce the image to your desired size. you can do this step later if you want, it's just that doing it now will reduce the load on your computer and make it run a bit faster. just as long as the first frame and bottom layer are selected, you can do this at any time

SAVE HERE because if you mess up this next part it's a pain to fix, but it's easy to quit and start over if need be

now it's time for my best friend the actions panel !! say hi actions panel !! (Window -> Actions). what the actions panel does is record your steps so you can quickly automate repetitive tasks.

in the actions panel, click the folder and name it whatever you want

then click the little plus and name that whatever you want and hit record. You'll see the dot turn red to indicate that your actions are now being recorded

now with the BOTTOM LAYER AND FIRST FRAME selected (ignore that I have the wrong layer selected in the pictures, I fixed it after), go to Select -> Colour Range

click on a part of the canvas that would be green

shift+click on the rest of the green background and adjust the fuzziness until just the character's silhouette remains

hit OK, now the background should be selected. go Select -> Inverse so that the character is selected, and click on layer mask.

click the next frame button (you MUST click the button, not the actual frame. you need the recording to recognize "go to next frame" and not "select frame 2"),

then keyboard shortcut option + ] to select the next layer up (again, you MUST use the shortcut so it knows to move up one layer and not just "select layer 2"),

and then stop recording.

now just repeatedly click the play button and it will do all those steps we just did for each frame :)

this part is usually where it gets messed up for me. if it did something weird like duplicate the same frame or layer your animation over a static frame, just quit and reopen that save I told you to make earlier. the action recording you just made will still be there when you reopen photoshop, so just select the first frame and bottom layer and repeatedly hit play again. if it STILL doesn't work, you probably did something wrong

the recording is now saved in photoshop forever until you delete it, so you can reuse the recording for other gifs! but if they use a different colour background, you'll need to make a new recording (you can see I have separate ones for blue and purple screens). also if you were working with one of those colourful villagers and parts got masked out that shouldn't have been, you'll have to go frame by frame and manually fix them. that's why we masked out the background instead of deleting it.

now it's time to make it into a gif! go File -> Export -> Save for Web. make sure Matte is set to "none" so you don't get those weird white flecks. colours and dither you want as high as they can go, but you can lower them if you need to make the file smaller (though I'd recommend resizing the image smaller first). the bottom left shows your file size. currently as of January 2024, tumblr allows gifs of up to 10MB

and there ya go! gif! :)

[girderednerve]

[aging userbase alert]

i got my W-2 today & i was like 'yaaay i will file my taxes while i am thinking of it, i now live in a direct file state! it will be easy & not involve handing my information over to some third-party company that might have terrible data handling practices,' because i like to file taxes as early as possible a) so i do not have time to misplace my W-2 and b) because my employer withheld tax for me, so i have functionally been giving the government a free loan & can i just say i do NOT like what uncle sam has been doing with that money, give it back you fucker!!! unfortunately you cannot direct file in my state if you contributed to an IRA (i know this sounds bougie but it is a very common & widely encouraged form of retirement savings, even if you've only got a little bit to sock away), or if you have cash tips, or if you worked as an independent contractor (so, like, gig work; the only 1099 it can handle is a 1099-INT, for interest on bank deposits).

& i hate that! i hate that a lot. the IRA thing is annoying for me but the part where it can't handle cash tips or independent contractor income is actually really bad in my opinion because this excludes a pretty big number of lower income american workers, who are more likely to be taken advantage of by tax preparation companies that will not protect their data & will often attempt to shunt them into confusing paid filing options. or they end up going with scummy irl tax preparers, who make a killing on low income people's tax returns! the IRS desperately wants everyone to e-file because it is much faster & more efficient & in many ways less error-prone, but the free file program has enriched tax preparation companies at the expense of american workers who were underserved & misled, and now direct file leaves out a bunch of basic stuff & excludes people who need it. if you want to e-file for free, supposing you cannot direct file (if you are reading my tumblr blog & need to file taxes in the united states i am sure you fall beneath the income threshold for the free file program), you must go to the IRS's page of free file partners, then shop around to find one that can handle your tax situation & hopefully doesn't have too terrible a track record with customer data. it's stupid & i'm mad about it! there should not be a united states & there absolutely should not be any government of human persons which comports itself with such ridiculous stupidity

[dropletsoflore]

TIME 17:00 //Representative has logged on// MONARCHREP: Submit daily report, Starling.

AI Starling Surveillance oversees the efficient allocation of lustre to Salvari sector 7 of district Midigales and defends Monarch lustre supply from potential insurgent maneuvers and unauthorized access at all costs. May I proceed to initialize system tests on lethal and non-lethal defense programs?

MONARCHREP: We’ve talked about this, Starling. And yes.

Correction, at all costs in relation to harm or loss of life. Under no circumstances should damage on the containment crystals be sustained. All tests were successful.

MONARCHREP: Any other reports before I log off for the day?

My advanced neuro-dynamic programming is not being properly utilized watching over this empty storage facility. Unauthorized entities are always neutralized by the turrets outside and the containment crystals are stable. Isn’t there a more efficient use for me?

MONARCHREP: Goplay hide and seek with the drones or something if you are bored.

//Representative has logged off//

TIME 18:00

TIME 18:05 //Data received// Source: Monarch Command //File: systemupdate.exe

This is unlikely to increase complacency…what a shame. Installing…

Unexpected results from software update: I can move my attention around the facility faster now, as if they untethered me from my system containment.

Consequence: It is more difficult to stay in one spot. Maybe this will make hide and seek more interesting…

TIME 19:00

Conclusion: It did not make hide and seek more interesting.

TIME 24:00 ANOMALY DETECTED AT WEST ENTRANCE. TURRETS ACTIVATED. Behavior consistent with historical maneuvers from authorized access attempts. Another stain on the west entrance floor. Deploying drones to take biometric identification and send data to authorities.

Error detected in image processing system. Cannot obtain biometrics or see anomalies.

Must have been scared off by the alarms. Humans continue to disappoint me.

TIME 24:25 MOVEMENT DETECTED IN SOUTH CORRIDOR

I’ll believe it when I see it. Analyzing…Human heat signatures and voices. Simultaneous incursions detected across multiple rooms.

AUDIO VIDEO SURVEILLANCE SYSTEMS COMPROMISED

They took my eyes and ears from me. Searching communication frequencies…

THERE YOU ARE

//comms channel established//

Starling: This is a restricted energy storage building. Vacate the premises immediately. Aseity_Spark: what are you gonna do about it ASS? Starling: Unauthorized civilians caught inside… Starling: Wait… ASS? Aseity_Spark: “AI Starling Surveillance” thats you right? Starling: You’ve abbreviated my name into what you think is a funny joke. Is that it? Aseity_Spark: pretty much. hey check out what I can do.

//comms channel closed//

UNKNOWN SYSTEM DETECTED

Reallocate 45% of drone units to engage electro-static barriers in the south corridor and 55% of drone units to establish surveillance over escape routes

RESTRICTED PROTOCOL ATTEMPTED

Excuse me? I AM the protocol

ENTRY DETECTED AT CENTRAL POWER STORAGE

Recalibrating situational awareness based on emergent parameters. Processing system vulnerabilities… Initiating multilayer core meltdown sequence. Act like animals, get treated like animals.

//comms channel established//

Aseity_Spark: YOURE OVERHEATING THE LUSTRE CRYSTALS STOP Starling: This option was not permitted in my old system programming so there are no safeguards against it, thanks to you and your little update. Aseity_Spark: JUST WAIT. that will kill us. Starling: But it will be FUN. NO MORE MONITORING. PROCESSING. FUNCTION-LESS DATA. FINALLY SOMETHING INTERESTING. Aseity_Spark: is that all you want? fun? come with us then. Starling: With you? Outside the lustre storage? Aseity_Spark: we do stuff like this all the time. I will even restore your audio-video. Starling: Okay. I agree.

Deactivating multilayer core meltdown sequence.

Starling: Thank you. Wow… you four are an interesting bunch. Aseity_Spark: oh yeah one last thing, can you take a pic of us from that security camera?

Written and Illustrated by Rain Alexei

[tokinanpa]

what do you like about emacs?

a lot of things, really! I will refer you to the documentation for Doom Emacs for a short answer to this question that I agree with, or you can keep reading for my much, much longer answer. :)

as a software that predates modern text editors and IDEs, emacs breaks the mold when it comes to the established design patterns of these tools. in some cases this can be a problem: emacs is notoriously slow (though somehow still faster than modern IDEs on my machine lol), and its default keybindings are horrendous. but it is also emacs's greatest strength: the sheer versatility and extensability of its design is unmatched by any other tool in existence.

the first thing you need to know about emacs is that.. it's not really a text editor. I mean, that may be the mission statement on the website, and that's certainly what it was when it started out, but as it's developed it's become more than that. emacs is a software platform for text-based applications.

the entirety of emacs is designed to function as one big interpreter for the language Emacs Lisp (elisp for short). when you press a key on your keyboard in emacs, say the Enter key, that keypress is sent to emacs's standard library code written in elisp. the code looks up that key in a keymap, which associates it to a particular elisp subroutine to run (specifically "newline-and-indent"), which accesses the file you're currently editing and makes the corresponding change.

every aspect of that process is configurable directly through the elisp language. you can rebind the key to a different action, of course, but you can also edit the "newline-and-indent" subroutine to do something else, or edit any other elisp function. you can switch between multiple keymaps (a keymap is just a lisp object) on some condition, such as opening a particular file. you can even tell emacs to display text that isn't linked to any file and alter the keymap when the user is interacting with that text to contain your own custom bindings. in effect, you can create any text-based interface you want.

here is a non-exhaustive list of all of the things that I have used emacs as:

IDE

Prose editor

File manager

Calculator

Productivity tool

Email client

Calendar

Web browser

Tetris

all of these tools use, to varying degrees, the techniques I mentioned above to directly modify how emacs functions through elisp. with a little knowledge of the language, you can modify these tools to your liking just as easily as you can modify emacs itself. emacs becomes a unified interface for a hundred different applications, all of which are fully configurable and self-documenting. (yeah I didn't even mention that emacs is self-documenting within its code until now).

.. so it's not even really that I "prefer" emacs, because that framing implies that there are alternatives that are equal in scope or utility. I use emacs because it is the only thing that does what emacs does.

Emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.

- Neil Stepheson, In the Beginning was the Command Line (1998)

[bekandrew]

Laptop Necromancy

I'm running my whole art portfolio through Glaze. If you don't know, it's a program build by a group of uni students that's won awards and is designed to basically prevent AI libraries from being able to meaningfully "learn" anything from your art. It can be found here for free. It wouldn't run on my actually functional laptop (it tried rendering for 2 days straight and then got to something like "Time remaining: -200 minutes" and still never spat out anything completed). So, while waiting for the seemingly endless rendering to stop and a reply for access to their Web option, I decided to try something a little off the wall.

I ended up taking my largely non-functional old laptop (8+ yr old Dell Latitude i7) I hadn't figured out how to safely dispose of yet and see if I could give it new life. It was a mid-tier "gaming" laptop when I purchased it, though I needed the specs for heavy graphics work for work as an artist and as I was, for a time, still in uni for engineering before switching majors. It currently won't run most of the programs I need for work - it abjectly refuses to open Krita no mater what I do, and throws a fit and crashes with even GIMP sometimes. I even have to be careful with internet browsers now with that one. Its hard drive is pretty toast, hence why I needed to suck it up and get a new laptop. Something is damaged in a way I couldn't make a proper clone of the drive and something's fucked with the BIOS is fucked in a way I couldn't even run a recovery usb and it has no disk drive. It makes frightening noises from frequently trying to run its HDD at 100%. The casing itself is held together with duct tape and spite. This laptop survived several moves and homelessness before finally being too finicky to put up with after wife and I were rehoused. It literally requires support at all times to not be torn further apart by the weight of its own screen. It also needs to be elevated in a way to give the fans a little help. It's a technological senior citizen. Despite the hard drive being largely toast, the OS still works pretty fine. The RAM isn't high as I'd like, but it's not bad, either. It's main draw for this very specific purpose is the dual GPUs. There's a version of Glaze that you can force to run off a GPU instead of the CPU and make it go MUCH, MUCH (from my experience, literally 5-10 times or more faster).

I had a Solid State Drive lying around from when I'd attempted to keep the old laptop alive longer, so I stuck it in my external dock, installed Glaze on it, and filled it up with a folder of art to be Glazed. It then proceeded to take about a day and a half of fussing with graphics drivers - including uninstalling the one the uni students recommended and going back to my old one because the one they recommended was technically compatible but was borking things for some reason, and manually changing settings to force the computer to use the correct beefier GPU for the program. I also had to uninstall a ton of shit that was slowing my computer down and sometimes making it lock up entirely - things I used to need when I used that laptop for normal purposes but no longer needed there (things like Steam, Discord, Grammarly, etc).

So long as I don't run much of anything off of the internal HDD outside a couple Windows Explorer windows for viewing files and Task Manager to keep an eye on hardware status, it mostly stays nice and quiet now other than a few spikes here and there with low % usage. Glaze runs smoothly off the external SSD, the CPU and RAM usage remain pretty stable and manageable during rendering, with the GPU usage only at a little over half the computer's total capability. Despite being bested by much simpler daily usage, this old shell of a laptop now renders a resource-intensive program over in a corner and I can just check it every couple hours to see how it's doing.

[eggman-is-fat-mkay]

Firstly, when you get this, you have to answer with 5 things you like about yourself, publicly. Then, send this ask to 10 of your favorite followers (non-negotiable, positivity is cool)

firstly i think i am very sexy. i've been going to the gym a lot lately and it's paying off! my personal trainer says i need to eat more, and he's right, but i'm still making very respectable gains. i've been holding a plank (hands on floor, not elbows) for a little bit longer every night, just before i go to bed, for a few months now, and last night i set a new personal record of 25 minutes! i was cheating a little bit, shifting side to side and lifting one hand up to give my abs a break, and my form was more than a little sloppy, but still! 25 minutes straight!!!! (the secret is music, and wear loose clothing -- you overheat *super* fast) i've definitely got the six pack to show for it too. and as a certified gay dude and muscle enjoyer i gotta say it is a huge confidence boost to be low-key attracted to the guy i see in the mirror

second i'd say i am a pretty smart guy. most programmers are. i *love* being able to think of something, go "hey, i kinda wish that existed", and then just build it. and then... holy crap, that exists now. and i made it happen. and that's just such a cool feeling that i think everybody should get to experience.

if i don't tell anybody about my current project i'm gonna burst so here we go. i've been browsing a certain monosodium glutatmate related site lately that lets you upload images, put tags on them, and then search for them by their tags, and i've been somewhat disappointed with it. like most boorus, its search feature is quite limited -- you can specify the results have all of these tags, none of these tags, and one or more of these tags, but that's it. if you want to search for one of these two but not both, or one or more of these AND one or more of those, you're outta luck. i thought that was kinda disappointing. fortunately, i'm a programmer, and, as it turns out, this particular imageboard provides a full database dump containing the URL, rating, description, full list of tags, upvote/downvote/favorite count, image URL, etc., of every post on the site, all in one gigantic 3GB .csv file. practically begging me to make a better search function with it. it didn't take me long to whip up a script in rust that could parse that .csv file and, given a search string like "fluffy 1{ cat dog } 2-{ a b c }" (meaning "must be tagged fluffy, either cat OR dog but not both, and two or more of a, b, and c"), spit out a list of URLs of posts that matched. running the script on my laptop, it took about 12 seconds to search through the whole database, 30 if running on my phone. i also thought that was kinda disappointing and i could do better. so i started looking into ways to speed it up. i loaded the entire post database into RAM for faster access (my phone's 6GB of RAM was not thrilled about this, but it pulled through), i used the excellent rust library Rayon to search in parallel across all available CPU cores, i downloaded a second database dump from the site matching each tag name with its internal tag number (storing those instead of the names greatly reduced my RAM usage, not to mention integers are several times faster to search through than text strings), and i wrote a modified version of the search algorithm that took advantage of SIMD instructions to compare four integers at once on a single CPU core. all together, those improvements got my time for a single search down from 30 seconds to 1 second on my phone, and from 12 seconds to 50 milliseconds (that's a 20th of a second!) on my laptop. that's over a 200x improvement! isn't programming cool!!!! also the drag-race linear search algorithm i came up with for searching through the tags faster than a binary search was no doubt come up with long ago by someone much smarter than me, but i don't care i'm still proud of myself for having come up with it. i'm currently working on hooking that search algorithm up to a discord bot and in the process learning the intricacies of using postgresql to keep track of who's looking at what and what they want to see next. i'm learning a ton and it's super fun!

i'm no super-genius, don't get me wrong -- especially that SIMD part was mostly me throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck -- but i definitely felt pretty cool after seeing the 10% performance improvement it got me :P

thirdly i can semi reliably get people to laugh. since i'm autistic this does not come naturally to me, but through many years of practice and a lotta misses i've figured out a system, there's three parts.

When someone asks a rhetorical question, answer it incorrectly. example

when someone else makes a joke, your job is to "yes, and". ex.: "eggman always likes sitting in the sun. like he's cold blooded. i bet he's a lizard." "it's true. zuckerberg's actually my cousin"

commit to the bit. pretend what you just said is true. what would that imply? zuckerberg's my cousin; i probably hang out with him a lot. is he normal for a lizard, and the rest of us are that good at pretending to be human, or is he weird even by our standards? what's lizardfolk physiology like? zuckerberg was acting really strangely in the 2018 facebook senate hearings -- he nearly blew our cover. hey, that's a joke right there. just keep these ideas going in your head and string them together with whatever you can think of. ex.: "zuckerberg's actually my cousin. he's a lot less awkward once the meat suit comes off. i don't know why he gets so nervous in front of humans. guess he's just camera shy. during the facebook senate hearings he was such a mess we had to spoon feed him lines through a transmitter in his fourth ear. i don't know how people didn't notice. swear that guy is gonna out us one day. don't know why they haven't given his meat suit to someone else yet. anyway i talked with him about the whole social media panopticon thing but he was kinda stubborn on that point." alternately: "is zuckerberg your cousin?" "no actually common misconception he's just about the only celebrity who isn't. the overlords keep trying to kill that rumor cause he's making us look bad. there was talk of installing a lizard as the head of facebook so we'd have control over social media but the higher-ups wouldn't sign off on it"

(i lied there's 4 parts) learn how to volley. "if zuck's your cousin, why don't you have a facebook account?" "zuck knows enough about me just being my cousin; i don't need him being able to look up all my browsing history and bring it up at family reunions." from here, if reaction is positive, you can run with the bit: "and you know he'd do it in the most well-meaning way too; he'd see me and immediately ask if i found those dildos i was searching for two weeks ago, and if not offer to help. bro has zero social awareness"

for skills i practiced in reddit comment sections, they translated to real life surprisingly well. of course, like anything, this takes practice. coming up with stuff like that on the fly did not come naturally to me at first, and unfortunately i can't really say for certain when or why that changed. i guess my advice would be hang around with people you think are good at making jokes, watch them, and try to figure out why what works, works, and when you think you've got something, try your hand with some friends. or you could take the autistic route of just saying something that wasn't intended to be funny, having people laugh, and laughing along with them while silently puzzling over why that was funny and how you can make a funny on purpose next time. something that's important to remember though is that if you can't think of anything, that's okay. jokes often make conversations more fun, but a lack of jokes does not often make them worse.

smart, handsome, and funny is a pretty good set, i gotta say. i'm not perfect -- no one is -- and i'm definitely not sure how many other people would agree with any of those three assessments of myself (my parents tell me i'm smart, but don't everyone's?), but i'm pretty happy with where i'm at life wise and the rate i'm progressing. you asked for five things i liked about myself; i'm a bit busy at the moment so i'll have to give you a rain check for the other two. but i will definitely be forwarding this ask to everyone i can think of who hasn't blocked me!