#and will is only (apparently) coded afaik

[crazykuroneko]

Saw this post, and apparently now the whole season 1 of IWTV is available on Allblk (afaik, only episode 1 available for free there when S1 premiered)

On top of that, you get a promo code to watch S2 on AMC+ for free? Again, I'm not American, so perhaps anyone wants to try it.

[carlyraejepsans]

i lowkey disagree w u on ur position on fictional ships and certain portrayals of topics such as incest and pedophilia, but oh my fucking god to have the fucking. AUDACITY to accuse someone of real life pedophila and incest because they MENTIONED being NEUTRAL on a certain topic?? like you didnt even say you think fictional incest is cool and rad or wtvr u afaik (which. even if u did that ask would Still be abhorrent) but ur explicitly Neutral and are VERY carful to tag shit and i just. 1/2

cut for length and also sensitive topics

i cannot fucking imagine accusing someone of such a horrid act with such conviction bc u SLightly DIsagree on a topic. jfc. i block tags and if ur conversations ever drive me over the edge id Unfollow. im so so sorry people are such fucking assholes man. i hope people gain some sense abt these topics im so sorry

yeah no i completely respect your opinion. and i do know where it's coming from. to tell you the truth (basic decency of tagging triggers aside), i DO find most of those fanon portrayals to be cheap and uncalled for a good majority of the time, at least from a literary standpoint. things like dating a minor or your own sibling have serious implications on a character's moral code and interpersonal dynamics where most characters would... not fucking do that! and the moment you don't engage with those implications, it becomes either incredibly ooc or altogether shallow. some people act like a topic being problematic makes it inherently complex and rich, when it can be as tropey and flat as any other "safe" topic. being problematic doesn't make you interesting etc. my point isn't arguing over literary value, it's more like... there's people behaving horribly and cruelly towards the AUTHORS, and making disgusting assumptions like the one that was made against me, all because of fiction you can always filter out at the end of the day (assuming basic tagging etiquette is respected ofc) and like. that's too far. nobody deserves to be treated like this.

not to mention, the "incest fiction recs"/"pro incest posts" those freaks mentioned were literally 1) me gushing about revolutionary girl utena, a deeply feminist and self-aware series that unpacks the misogyny behind anime incest tropes by treating that abuse REALISTICALLY as patriarchal manipulation from a male relative and showing how the female victim suffers and emancipates herself from it and 2) me being annoyed that hs showed one of its characters suffering from csa without acknowledging it AS abuse, even when it would've been not just the morally decent thing to do, but also a genuinely good addition to his character arc (apparently it does do that in the endstory, but i didn't know it at the time). those are both posts about realistic, condemning, and well-thought depictions of incestuous abuse in fiction—which is the only way i ever enjoy the topic btw—but that didn't stop these people from deciding i had an incest fetish and harassing me for weeks on end to the point of accusing me of sexually abusing my teenage brother. like you said, it would be a ghoulish way to treat someone even if their assumption had been right (and it wasn't), but it's like they saw the topic being mentioned and that fact alone was unforgivable, regardless of context. and this crap happens to people all the time! if that's not fucking stupid i don't know what is

[madness-combat-confessions]

Okay idk if this is the most Obvious shit and im just slow or if theres been an ask about this or something but we need to talk about cloning and the AAHW more imo!!

If the thing about sanf and dei being previous members (and i think doc being confirmed?) then that begs many questions. Jeb and tricky were also members and we know their lore as past scientists for nexus and then jeb was "hired" by auditor and tricky too probably but we dont have a direct confirmation afaik but everyone else is just? Vauge?

Like either A) AAHW has people working for it that are not clones like the mass agents and soldats and engineers and they are never mentioned (which would be stupid imo considering how far we are into the story) or B) they are all clones that dissented which for deimos is yk not far fetched considering his poster outright stating it

BUT THEN THAT BEGS THE ISSUE ON HAND. Everyone that ive seen online considers the agents as personality-less fucking creatures and i think even canon says smt like that about them but like.. if a clone can dissent then they probably Arent as bland as they seem. And even that isnt far fetched, i mean they hold birthdays apparently and play games to pass time. How deep does it go? How much will do they have? They seem to be conditioned to never run when Hank aka (almost) certain death is around which is one thing but are they scared of death? Do they have favorite foods and colors? How human (or in this case grunt) are they? Is it just Some of them that have self awareness/personality? Are they coded to have a personality? If yes is it random or set? Would the AAHW bother to code a random persona generator?? Do they perhaps lose more of their indaviduality/humanity as they progress up on the food chain to be soldats or engineers??

Idk i keep seeing agents n shit in fics and stuff be shown as these sometimes mechanical creatures with 0 varying personality and 0 humanity and it makes me heavily wonder about them. Maybe theyre just a bit dumber than average due to being mass cloned? Shrug. I dont know i think theyre more interesting when considered to be actual people than just. Puppets. They are metaphorical and sorta physical puppets yeah but like they held a birthday man. Fuck. They had a birthday.

Agents keep me up at night.

-anon MMS if i can claim that cuz its funny /opt!!

Glad to know that I'm not the only one who also thinks about the AAHW!

I personally think/headcanon that basically everyone in the AAHW is a clone because anyone that could had been an actual real person is dead (lol). And idk how to explain it but from what I've read they lack S-3LFS, but they still are kinda like people? Like they might just appear like mindless clones who only wanna kill Hank, and they are that don't get me wrong, but I think they also still act like people to some extent (or at least some of them)

I mean one of the agents in MC 9.2 had been writing "We are abandoned " on a wall so to me that says they're capable of understanding their situation and feeling sad (?) about it?

Now I'm not sure on the engineers and the soldats, I mean a soldat literally blew a rocket where their team was because they thought their boss had told them to. Which makes me think two things

1: The AAHW is a bit too blindly devoted to the Auditor. Which is probably because they are clones that were made/'programmed' to be that way.

2: I think that the soldats and the engineers have less "free will" than the agents because of the ATP

There's also something else I wanna talk about

This:

Like hello? What the fuck did this guy do?

From my understanding what is considered a dissenter in this series is someone who goes against the Auditor and the agency. So what did this guy even do? Did he try to betray them like Deimos and Doc did?

Or was it perhaps something minor like not doing their job? Like actually make a decision for their own and don't do what the Auditor says for once, like how an actual person would do?

I wanna say that's a stupid reason to kill one if their agents, but it's a possibility: the Auditor is shown to not really take it kindly when people don't do their job, she literally sliced a grunt in half for it. Even though all the grunt did was play cards with some other agents.

I wouldn't be surprised if this was the case this guy was damned a "dissenter" and killed by the Auditor (or maybe the other members) for that reason.

So taken to account that they are soulless clones but can still 1: celebrate birthdays 2: play games to pass time 3: dislike their shitty ass situation I'd say that they have some personality, it's just that the Auditor is too strict to allow them to show/act like it. Because she doesn't want people with free will in the agency he wants mindless clones who'd do whatever she says.

Does this make sense I swear it does in my head I'm just bad at putting it to words.

[tenmyoujump]

adding a little to ur post abt chilchuck (this is not in a condescending way im just autistic and like restating stuff( its not just that half-foots are short, all of em have very round faces and big ears and eyes which can make them look like human children to other races, it’s a thing in the story that senshi thinks chilchuck is a literal child for like half of the story. u can see when chilchuck is made human in the gag chapter, his face totally changes, and same for everyone getting babyfaced when drawn as half foots

in universe tho, this is only a misconception to ppl who arent familiar with half foots! for example, chilchucks daughter wants to marry a dwarven man, and nobody has an issue because the dwarves she’s around will know she is an adult half-foot and not a young human. it is an in-universe thing that some half foots exploit their looks (grifting by pretending to be human kids) because they are already infantilized

so.. is kui a weird person? no, and its weird to insinuate that about her! is chilshi bad? no, but i see why some are uncomfortable with it. i mean make your own judgements here , i kinda see both arguments bc chilchuck is kinda a riff off of “1000 year old dragon” characters, but written well bc kui is not doing it nefariously. the fandom is just a rabid discourse machine.

chilshi to me feels more like the obligatory m/m rather than anything actually problematic from what little i know about it (which is funny bc i know laios/kabru already exists and afaik does have some basis to it) but shrugs

yeah i mean honestly i don’t think this particular case is bad because it’s usually a combination of looks young + acts young and chilchuk is apparently an alcoholic father of three. which doesn’t seem very kid-like to me

again though i’m not actually into dunmeshi this is just based off what i’m seeing but it’s kind of nuts to me. personally was astonished to find out chilchuk is actually middle aged but that’s just because he’s 29 and i didn’t know about half foot lifespans not really because of his appearance. sorry for the paragraphs i’m just. i really hate the whole “minor coded” thing as someone who is actually very short as an adult and whose whole family is also short

[citrusella-flugpucker]

((Things I said in the replies that I want to add as a caveat while reblogging this:

Your interaction in the new layout is almost definitely still being logged (as opposed to being considered the old dash) for analytics purposes (the A/B testing they’re doing to see how people interact with Tumblr differently with the new layout), so if you care about what they’re seeing in the analytics, note that they’ll probably still see it because there’s basically no way either XKit or a CSS style could do anything to touch that kind of logging. (EDIT: XKit probably CAN send information that causes an A/B test to disable (because apparently JS is capable of doing that under certain circumstances), but its settings probably DON'T here. CSS, on the other hand, is basically completely incapable of doing something like that though.)

The number of people in the reblogs and replies calling this a script are making me want to pull my hair out. It’s a user style, which uses CSS and is basically the web equivalent of rearranging furniture (special code that’s active all the time but doesn’t really “run”), rather than Javascript (what userscripts use, special code that usually only runs on page load (unless you do some funky stuff), the web equivalent of... IDK, running a Roomba?). It’s a semi-important distinction: Stylus cannot run JS user scripts (only user styles), and most user script extensions (TamperMonkey, ViolentMonkey, etc.) cannot natively run a CSS user style (AFAIK) without it being converted to a script that does nothing but implement the CSS code slightly differently.

The More You Know, and all that nonsense.))

i got the old tumblr dashboard back T_T

i got the old tumblr dashboard back T_T i used the xkit rewriten options in this post and installed the firefox application called stylus and installed this script through it for the old tumblr layout <3

(psst reblog and spread this so it can get to who needs it )

update :hi besties both xkit rewritten and stylus are available for chrome too!

[dxringred]

HELLO FELLOW ST/DDIE NOT-QUITE HATER BUT JFC DO THE DOUBLE STANDARDS REALLY NEED TO BE SO OBVIOUS?

i love the fandom, but this issue has been present since. forever. since steve stans were shitting on nancy after the halloween party scene, making fics and long-ass paragraphs bemoaning steve’s puppy-dog eyes when he heard that nancy say that she was pretending to be in love. as if the scene wasn’t about NANCY and her grief??

and then again! when robin came out, the initial “holy shit, we finally have some canon queer rep of quality!! robin’s such a cool character, and this was a beautiful scene!” people immediately latched on to the fact that she didn’t label herself explicitly as a lesbian in order to shove her and steve together. and again, the steve stans raved about what an excellent ally steve was, when the scene was about ROBIN and pushing past her obvious fear to tell steve something like that.

and most recently, with the vickie and robin scenes. i personally don’t ship them, but even that was, apparently, content tailored for the steve stans. the fact that the directors might be leading into an actual romance life for a canonical lesbian character (though nancy has literally been right there. even the actors are in support of the ship)? unimportant because look!! look how proud steve looks in that scene, look how happy he is for robin. wtf.

steve’s a great guy, a fun character and he’s got depth and kindness etc etc. eddie… i mean. he’s also really cool and i get why people like him, i really do. but he barely had a season’s worth of character development, and already he’s a fan favorite. i like the ship, but i hate the fact that once again, the fandom is full-on obsessing over the “cute white boys” and neglecting the wlw pairings

and it’s so much more than a bunch of people upset that their ship isn’t as popular. this is an actual issue, where the lack of wlw content and attention is forever being overshadowed by the mlm pairings.

damn, i didn't even know it was possible to send asks this long-

sadly, i don't know any history of the stranger things fandom since i've never watched the show, let alone engaged in the fandom, but i can attest to the rock/ie one since i've seen several posts mentioning how steve looked like a proud parent or w/e, and then others being all "poor steve" since he's single while robin has vickie and nancy has johnathon. (for now.)

on his own, steve's an okay character to me. his development was good until 4B messed it up with him latching onto nancy again, but even with that, i've never gotten the impression that there's a lot of. depth to him? like it's very much the basic character arc of "popular highschool asshole realizes it is bad to be an asshole and that he actually cares for others". totally fine but hardly groundbreaking lol. and if i see his chest hair one more time-

i haven't watched the show, so i can't attest to eddie outside of gifs, but again. nothing special from what i've seen. his little arc seems to be 'manning up'? instead of fleeing like he did with chrissy (which i thought was a perfectly valid reaction, frankly), he dives into lover's lake, helps save steve and then sacrifices himself which ultimately then lowkey negates the development because he's fucking dead lol.

maybe it's just because he's a far cry from my type of male character, but. yeah, don't get the fan favorite thing. don't get the petition with 75k signatures. don't get the ship (no issue with it yet though) when they barely had any scenes. it's definitely a case of them both being (arguably) attractive white men. cishet girls in particular will eat that shit right up.

the fact that ste/ddie shippers are now going around reporting ronance shippers and calling them names for giving them a taste of their own medicine and/or politely asking them to tag their fucking fics correctly is disgusting imo. it's giving lesbophobia. they seem to think their ship is more important, and therefore nobody else's tags and spaces matter. the way they behave, you'd think the average age of that fandom is 12. (and i wouldn't be surprised if it is, honestly.)

the only canon lgbt+ character is wlw. (i can't speak for will. i don't know if his sexuality has actually been definitely stated yet, and it hasn't in the show as far as i'm aware, so. vickie also isn't confirmed anything as far as i know.) and yet somehow mlm pairings with minimal scenes are heavily overshadowing any wlw content. (first it was billy/steve which. what the fuck, actually. now it's ste/ddie.) i don't know what the huge disparity is rooted in (lesbophobia, misogyny, mlm fetishization, all of the above) but it's fucking annoying and boring. broaden your horizons. get a grip. uggggghhh.

[time-to-write-and-suffer]

Looking into the code of twc book3, it's a fucking mess. No wonder choices don't matter. I saw she made a comment about how much better she knows choice script now?? And like??? It's only gonna get worse since nothing is tracked properly or even in a way thay makes sense. I understand authors are not programmers but I feel like the lack of effort is apparent

The whole "authors are not programmers" thing is partly why my own IF WIPs have taken an indefinite break. Even with simple code like in Twine, it's difficult when you don't know what you're doing and it's your first time. Half of my problems with Twine's code is not knowing the programming terms that are relevant and thus being unable to look for help/tutorials.

But like ... you can probably hire a programmer? If you have editors and beta testers (which, AFAIK, she has) you can defo get a programmer to do all the coding while you focus on the story itself. And since it's not "proper" code compared to bigger software projects, it'd probably be a bit cheaper, too.They'd probably be more useful to you than an editor, even, because even if your shitty prose doesn't work, at least the code will.

It's so frustrating because so many good stories never get finished or even get off the ground because the author doesn't have the resources to get a programmer or the time to learn to code themselves, but people who do have the resources just don't care enough to spend them where it matters.

[girlboss-enthusiast]

I'd love to hear more about your experience building a career in IT without a degree, if you're comfortable sharing. Desperate for inspiration right now!

Hello anon!! Glad to share! I think IT is a great career for people without degrees. This is extremely long, so it's under a readmore.

So, this answer varies a bit depending on what part of IT you're most interested in. I'm gonna tell you what I did, which was start out as a help desk technician. Afaik, this is the most common career path for IT without a degree.

First thing I did was get familiar with computer hardware. I did this by taking computers apart and rebuilding them while I studied online resources. I got the computers from the local university, which offers spare or old electronics for very cheap; there are probably similar programs in your area.

The second thing I did was find out what certifications I needed. Certs are the currency of the IT field; degrees are useful, sure, but IME certs will get you way farther.

The first certification you'll want to get is the CompTIA A+. The tests themselves cost about $350 each, unfortunately, but that is a one-time payment and you don't need to buy official exam prep material. HOWEVER, I also know people who have no certs and are sysadmins, so this isn't required. They typically started out in a tech support call center and work on their own projects on the side — building gaming computers, learning a coding language, that kind of thing. It's a little harder for them to get going than for those with certs, but not impossible at all.

The A+ focuses on entry-level hardware and software. It's a little deceptive as far as the actual job goes, though; for one, it tests you on technology that's a little outdated (my last test in 2019 covered Windows 7 and 8.1), and you have to memorize shit, like what speed of RAM you can use with which type of motherboard, etc. The good thing is that none of this memorized information needs to be retained. We have Google. Just remember it long enough to pass your test and keep the general theory in mind, no need to remember specifics.

For prep advice, Reddit is a good source (check out /r/comptia), and the books and tests recommended there can be found for free in the right places. Also, if you see this in the next 5 hours, Udemy apparently has their courses on sale for $19.99 (as opposed to $109).

So we'll assume you get the certificate. Now you get to apply for jobs. Lucky you!

I live in a semi-rural area, so my job searching experience might be very different from yours. Here are some general tips, though.

Play up your people skills. My first manager told me I was hired because it was easier to teach willing people technical skills than interpersonal skills. And before you worry too much, please consider that the standards here are "willing to help" and "not condescending." The snotty IT guy stereotype is alive and well, and if you can be more polite than that guy, you're in a good place. People can handle weirdness if you're nicer than the other options.

Avoid coding bootcamps. In general, be wary of paid training that doesn't give you industry-standard certificates. There are so many businesses out there who will happily take your money and teach you the bare minimum before throwing you to the wolves.

For all things resume and interview, I highly suggest checking out Ask A Manager's site. I basically learned all my office interpersonal skills from her.

Try to work in a place that gets public funding. Government, nonprofits, schools, etc. YMMV on this, but I find these environments to be much less (openly) sexist, and more willing to take any complaints seriously, if only because it's worse for them if something negative gets out than in the private sector. Downside: the pay is not comparable at all to private sector pay. It depends on your priorities.

Speaking of pay...what is a help desk technician's starting wage, you might ask?

Well, in my HCOL area, a technician job requiring an A+ cert and a high school diploma starts out at about $28/hour. In Phoenix, AZ, the same job starts out at $20/hour. In LA, looks like it's $20-25, same for Boston. As you gain experience, your value shoots up. My previous position was as tier 3 support (the person the help desk techs turn to when they're stuck), and I was making more than most of my college-educated friends. Except the engineers. But having seen what it takes to be an aerospace or chemical engineer, I'm okay with that.

If you are looking beyond the immediate future right now, you can also check out other IT subfields. You'll usually start off in help desk, but you can advance very quickly. I would suggest:

Cyber security

Data analysis or database administration

Networking

GIS (geographic information systems, very cool stuff)

Software dev (check this out if you like flowcharts)

As far as my career path: I worked as a computer technician for a university, then a tier 2 support job for local government. (I then job-hopped and had a mental breakdown. Simultaneously. I do not recommend that part.) Now I'm a database administrator and project manager. I'm very new to this job but so far it's great.

Please feel free to ask me more questions! Most of my friends are in IT and if I don't have an answer, I can find you one.

[coolmaycroft]

Like, if the AI training was made in an ethical and respectful way I'd have no qualms about it. But as time goes on, we've seen that on the long term, the neural network needs new artworks to keep it from incesting itself.

And there is no way to make training easy for the devs and compensated for the artists because companies so far live in fear of legislation against theft of artwork. AFAIK these two things cannot coexist. The same thing happens with other networks to generate text and video.

So, the problem with accepting ai art as inevitable is that, it also opens the door to a future where we simply don't own anything we produce. Progress is inevitable and inputs are the property of the networks because we need to train models; so everything I type, draw, record, etc. belongs to the devs.

This is all fun and games for devs until devs start stealing from devs to make other generators. Apparently the only time these entities call theft is when their code, models or weight is used without their permission to make something similar.

To accept this future is to accept letting other entities steal your work without credit or any ethical obligation to credit and no recourse legal or otherwise for restitution.

"you will own nothing and be happy about it"

finally, the comparison of AI to the technologies from other times doesn't match exactly because past technologies didn't need a constant stream of inputs to keep going. Sure all inventions built up on previous works.

But, To make the analogy more accurate; this time we need Leonardo to continue sketching inventions, we need Beethoven to continue making symphonies and we need Stephen Hawking to continue to crunch equations.

You can't argue against a technology. No one has ever, ever, in the history of humanity, argued a technology out of existence. The closest we've come are nukes and human genetic engineering. Nukes exist and multiple countries have massive arsenals of them, but we've agreed not to use them because it would mean humanity's utter destruction. Human genetic engineering cuts right to the heart of a bunch of ethical questions about health, equality, identity, and so on, and also up until very recently genetic engineering has been a long and extremely expensive process. We'll see how long human genetic engineering remains taboo now that it's getting cheaper and easier. But these are absolute outliers. In the vast, vast majority of cases, I mean literally in virtually every single case, when people fight a new technology—for any reason—they loose.

There is no tenable "anti-AI art" position, just like there was never a tenable anti-loom position, or anti-railroad position, or anti-horseless carriage position. These things were doomed to fail absolutely from day one, as soon as the technology existed, and anti-AI art is doomed to fail just as utterly and completely. There is just no path here, if this is what you've hitched your wagon to I really do not know what to tell you.

[dinamakan]

New

“So now you’re a K-popper?”

Newbie

This unexpected preference surprised some of my friends. Here’s the backstory: It all started last year when I discovered DKDKTV on YouTube. I enjoyed their non K-pop videos like vlogs and explanations on anything in South Korea. AFAIK, they’ve never been pretentious. The moment I realized that I’ve seen almost all of them (I guess), I started to watch their K-pop reactions as well, then I was more certain I wasn’t a K-popper. Songs from this genre are typically either too cute or too badass, which I think is totally okay but not my cup of tea. Nonetheless, YouTube keeps suggesting me K-pop stuff because of it.

NewJeans

An hour after their debut, YouTube algorithm showed me Attention MV (performance ver). Started by Hyein at the intro, I was smitten with it right away. She resembled Friday Night Plans in appearance and voice at first glance yet still unique. Music-wise, Attention was excellent up until the very end. I then liked this girl group instantly, which is obviously a part of K-pop. They caught my attention! Oh, I only like NewJeans in K-pop thus far. Danny Kim recently shared his opinion while hosting DK NEWS, “NewJeans is really providing something that K-pop was missing, which was good clean music that’s easy listening,” and I couldn’t agree more. Furthermore, ADOR released NewJeans fandom app named Phoning a couple days later and I fell in love with every single thing on it easily.

New(s)

I’ve read all the controversies including the latest statement from ADOR. My point is, I enjoyed their songs and visual concepts without sexualizing them— that’s all. I wish that all members are always safe and content.

New EP

What I’ve been waiting for a month has finally arrived. I decided to buy Weverse ver album, considering my unwillingness to pile up more bulky stuff. Apparently, it’s smaller than playing cards, too cute to be true. It consists of greeting card from NewJeans, lyrics book, digital album QR code, and 10 photocards. Weverse audio quality is top-notch! The bass is heavier, but I could hear more details that I wasn’t able to catch from other services. I wish Paramore could release their albums on Weverse, LOL. Unfortunately, I dislike the cover material. I understand the purpose of being eco-friendly (this one has no plastic coat like a paper cup), but knowing that it’s a collectible item, I expect something more durable. Why don’t they use tin case like Butter - BTS? Because of this flimsy cover, I’m thinking about buying a photocard binder or storage box— more plastic, more carbon footprint.

[dumbdancemomssideblog]

S1E1: The Competition Begins

okie dokie first ever episode of dance moms rewatch starts now :0 i actually remember watching this the very first time it aired on lifetime because i was channel surfing and saw a commercial for it earlier that day. that was the summer between 8th and 9th grade. ah memories... i didnt know what to expect because i did dance when i was a kid but not on a competition team and it was mostly ballet so i was pretty unfamiliar with this whole world. 

anyway lets begin. this is probably gonna be a longer post than what i’ll end up writing for the other episodes in season 1 bc the first episode introduces so much info, just a heads up

Act 1: (aside: yes its insufferable to divide this into “acts” when its really just like “segments separated by commercial breaks” but thats how they’re called in actual tv scripts so im just going with that cuz i cant think of a better/easier way uwu)

god this is so fucking early 2010s lmao

i miss these days where they were just talented nobodies from pittsburgh on a low budget reality tv show that nobody even knew would be successful. and the bad hair and makeup but idk if that was also just a 2011 thing lol

THE REAL HOUSEWIVES GREEN SCREEN INTROS IM DYING

the chalkboard !!!! they werent doing the pyramid on the mirror yet 

(apparently abby never did anything similar to the pyramid thing but the producers made her and it became a whole Thing on the show and thats why the moms were like wtf is this bullshit the first week)

mackenzie looks like a toddler. chloe is so tiny. theyre the 2 who changed the most physically over the course of the show

i remember watching this for the first time being used to ballet lyrical and jazz but never having done or really seen acro/gymnastics in dance choreo and being SO flabbergasted. i was thinking “a chin stand is not dancing what the actual hell” and yknow what? i was right

melissa: “my boyfriend knows how much i spend on dance because he signs the checks...............hermehhemrherrmehermh” (the most awkward laugh omg)

maddie is wearing a fucking bumpit in her hair i cannot

melissa deadass just said out loud “im here for my daughter im not here to make friends” ok everybody mark that one off on your catty women’s reality tv show bingo card!

camera man accidentally getting in the shot filming right in front of the huge wall-mirror.... what is this, amateur hour? i’ll let it slide since its the first day of filming rehearsal but step it up, boys

aw i forgot about maddie getting sick and crying :/ poor kid

melissa saying “i cant stand a chid that’s sick” sounds so edited like the intonation made it seem to me like they just cut her off mid-sentence i love lifetime

oh this was still when they were wearing normal stuff to class/rehearsal like black leotards bc they werent getting sent a trillion crazy 2-piece dancewear outfits for free yet bc they werent famous, man those were the days

Act 2:

[obligatory b-roll footage of downtown pittsburgh] 

the maddie chloe paige trio !!!! this is making me feel so nostalgic

“knees together, paige. you’re bow-legged, you need to fix that”

“you’re tall, you’re skinny, you’re a beautiful girl, you can do better than this. FOCUS” shes like 10 abby what the hell

“people think im tough and i guess i am but i would rather be the one to make your kid cry in the privacy of my studio than at an open-call audition in front of hundreds of people”

okay unpopular opinion alert: i agree with a lot of what abby says about stuff like this but her delivery is flawed, to but it euphemistically, that being said i think the production team of the show and the fame inflating her ego changed all of this somewhere over the course of the second season and its really sad to see :/ i can expand on that thought later tho

aw paige crying bc abby correcting her (but not saying anything personal or out of line, just technique corrections (at based on what we were shown, we dont know everything she said oop)) shes a sensitive kid she never should have been put on this show :( 

paige looks exactly like her mom i didnt realize that before

nia and holly were done so dirty throughout the whole series in terms of the narrative the producers set up about nia being the weakest link :/ 

Act 3:

cathy’s entire involvement in the show from the very beginning was so painfully obviously scripted (or at least heavily staged) 

vivi was also done dirty by the show’s narrative and she was only 6 and they presented her as like the butt of the joke bc her mom’s “character” was crazy and also she wasnt good at dance. i wonder how she feels about the show now that shes a teenager hmm. she really seemed not to give a fuck about dance for better or for worse when she was a kid tho so maybe she doesnt care ?

in what universe would an owner of another competitive dance studio bring her own kid to another studio more than an hour’s drive away, AND be under the impression that she could compete with them in a week, especially when they showed the kids’ and moms’ shocked reaction at the start of the episode to having to learn a dance in a week and compete it? like really what is the point of cathy and vivi being a part of this show im so ????

Act 4: 

THE MINISTER DAWN OUTBURST HOW DID I FORGET ABOUT THIS

this fight is about 50% of what got them a full season 1 and then things took off from there tbh. the other 50% was the electricity dance but thats a point for next episode..... :)

“you’re a minister act like one” “YOU’RE RIGHT I AM A MINISTER! LET’S PLAY THE BIBLE GAME ABBY, WHEN JESUS SAW THINGS THAT WERE WRONG HE WENT AFTER THEM, AND YOU’RE NOT GOING TO DO THIS TO MY KID” ma’am i think the wrongs jesus addressed were of slightly more importance than a preteen being told she cant take a dance class if shes violating the studio’s dress code

this is so good bc it wasnt staged afaik and there are regular students all throughout the building just STARING at them like lmao what even is going on, so im pretty sure this is real???

regardless, yeah dont wear socks and a tshirt to an acrobatics class, thats common fucking sense

another cameraman-in-mirror sighting, but its hard to think about angles when filming spontaneous drama like this, so i wont count it against them

“you called me fat” (i remember that being in the episode but thats not on the episode available through lifetime on demand that im watching from my moms tv hmmmmmm) “i told you to close and tuck in your two-piece costume, theres a big difference. HOW CAN YOU REMEMBER THAT BUT YOU CAN’T REMEMBER TO TURN YOUR FEET OUT” uh scream

she really called the police on this woman i cannot handle this. can you imagine being a police officer responding to this call? 

“we have a parent thats out of control. pardon? no shes doesnt have weapons, just her mouth” iconic

im sorry im still not over the hair and makeup. the flat hair with the side bangs. the black pencil eyeliner applied all the way around the eye. why did any of us think this was a look :( why did we do this :(

Act 5:

they went all the way to phoenix to compete 3 numbers, only 2 of which are shown in the episode.

i think this is the only time they ever went to west coast dance explosion because its an actual competition and they wouldnt allow filming after this lol i think they did go to wcde one weekend in addition to a competition where they were filming but it wasnt shown or mentioned at all

abby not wanting brooke and paige to have a french manicure on stage if theyre the only ones in the group with the french tips is perfectly valid idk why it was framed as some crazy micromanaging shit

i also am really not a fan of the whole “high functioning alcoholic wine mom/crazy stage mom” schtick they were pushing for the first few episodes of this show

in retrospect i feel like so many of the quips in this episode were intentionally fucking crazy just to get the audience engaged enough to want to watch more episodes...

“see those girls down there, those girls with the legs? thats who you’re up against, so step it up”

abby warning them that its dangerous for their little party hats to slip when they’re doing aerials and pirouettes and stuff: “what if you were at radio city music hall and they had the ice rink out and you were doing a side aerial and fell 13 stories down and died, huh?” fantastic point abby thank you for saying that to 5 girls ages 8-12 less than 5 minutes before they went on stage. perfect time for a teaching moment like that :)

i forgot how bad the camera work was in the first few episodes for footage of their performances. like they really didnt think the show’s audience would actually want to watch the kids dance, the producers and editors thought we just wanted to see stage mothers yelling at each other lol

also the mic feed over the music of abby talking to herself giving them corrections while watching them dance on stage.... im so glad they quit doing that. i dont remember them doing it like that for any other episode, i hope im right

this choreo is very basic and its a cute dance i guess but its very cringe in some places and for the first episode this is such a forgettable group routine

their scandalized reaction to placing third and the sad piano music is so funny honestly

and maddies reaction in the interview which was almost definitely fed to her by the producers where shes like “i win all the time i dont really know what its like to LOSE i always win or get runner up” so many of maddies lines from season 1 interviews sound so fake and she was probably too naive to know they were getting her to say that stuff so they could paint her as a conceited brat (she was EIGHT)

the trio costume was so ugly im sorry (is it supposed to be like a 50s pinup bathing suit?) (and the headband thing looks so bad) and also the music is bad but they had no real authority over that bc of copyright stuff

chloe’s headpiece coming forward and the ensuing drama was another moment in the episode that really solidified public interest in the show imho.... 

“YOU’RE IN THE BAR HAVING A DRINK AND YOUR KID’S HEADPIECE IS FALLING OFF” “it did not FALL OFF it CAME FORWARD it was FINE!!!”

“mistakes happen, we’re human.” “YOU are. mistakes like that dont happen to me”

and then the “next time on dance moms” with the WILDLY INAPPROPRIATE electricity dance, of course. genuinely that was really smart of the producers in terms of structuring things to generate intrigue lol. and obviously it ended up working....

[cruddyborderlandstheories]

alright alright alright it’s long overdue, but here’s my “Angel returns” theory from way back when her actress posted an image of her on twitter.

tl;dr: Angel is back and we see her getting digistructed in the dev trailer in the giant electricity machine thing

There’s some Commander Lilith spoilers below (main story and side quests) so if you haven’t beaten the whole dlc yet, don’t read!!

Alright so this obviously was kickstarted by the Sirentology quest lol 

I didn’t wanna say anything above the cut about that cause that’d be a dick move

let’s start with the thing I first noticed as soon as I walked into the prototype chamber!

ahahhaha yeah.

and if you’ve been following me since I replayed tales, then you might see where this is going

we see something similar here

this is from TFTBL, in the biodome where you find one of Gortys’s pieces (chassis? i don’t remember lol. the big ring one). It’s holding it up, like it’s being suspended in the air. I imagine this is the same technology Jack used to build Control Core Angel, keeping Angel suspended above the Vault Key. So this was built by Atlas, just keep that in mind, I’ll bring it back in a second.

You can see when Jack brings Lilith to the Vault itself, it keeps her stuck in the air, charging the Key

so obviously jack needed to improvise because he wasn’t about to bring Angel to the Vault with him, he wanted to wait until the key was fully charged.

I think Angel definitely got a little bit of leeway compared to Lily, though. I also think, since we don’t see any wires, the Vault key is sorta pulling the Eridium through Angel to process it and absorb it? and the thing above her is a pump/shield generator/suspension. As i understand it, in the new dlc we’ve seen Lilith actually flying with her wings in the final battle, and I do think Angel is using hers to move around (above), but I do think the Vault Key/machine thing is holding her suspended in the air. 

Anyway, the reason I’m bringing all this up is because of how Tannis acts in this DLC. @humphreyhornbeam commented on one of my interview posts with a great point and that is that “[Tannis] may or may not have blueprints and/or information that Jack used to create the Siren Collars and she may be the only one alive that has this info”. Which, oh fuck

Lemme point out some lines that are very suspicious from her just to let that sink in for a bit

we know Tannis has been studying Lilith for some time now, since the Assassinate the Assassins quest, and she has apparently dubbed such studies as “Sirentology”, hence the name of the quest.

so she wants to know exactly where Siren powers come from and how they act/appear over time (Understandably, we’ve seen Lilith’s exposure to Eridium allowed her to start teleporting)

we end up sending her the data through a console hooked up to the chamber

we don’t exactly get a choice.

normal reused console from other areas, with a little projection coming out of it (I’ll get to that soon)

Lilith comments this:

which… y’know… “she could have been so much more”. im not saying the devs are regretting killing Angel, but… that very well may be foreshadowing. Yeah, I’m getting there.

and Tannis is pleased (don’t think she quite cares about Angel).

so… i imagine Tannis is going to have some sorta hold on the story in the next game (”Tannis is not what she seems” is still relevant). Interviews have already confirmed this next game is focusing HARD on Sirens. This quest was 100% put in because of that. There’s no way they’d throw this in otherwise, it doesn’t make sense. 

This entire DLC was the devs’ way of ensuring we were prepared for bl3, and that means for (7? I’m pretty sure this dlc takes place about a year after the end of bl2) approximately 6 years, Tannis has access to some of the most in-depth Siren information. Ever. Remember, before BL2, Jack was smashed in the face with a Vault symbol and apparently got a shitload of information from it before that. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if he learned some stuff about Sirens through that. He’s even the one who first confirms there are only 6 Sirens in the universe(s) afaik.

so what’s going on here? What’s Tannis going to do with all this information? We don’t really know a lot in regards to what she’s trying to study. As I understand it, she’s mainly focusing on Eridians in general, so her study of Sirens makes sense. We know she had a large stake in what happened to the Vault Key in the DLC (she’s very upset Mordy is just leaving his drinks in it). We know she’s extremely interested in what happened to Typhon Deleon (which I don’t think is coincidence considering what her focus is).

I want to believe she’s trying to use this information to simply discover more about the Eridians. I don’t wanna believe she’s going to use it for evil. Her introduction as a Dahl scientist stranded on Pandora seems super legit, so I can’t see her being of alien origin. I suppose I could see her teaming up with something of alien origin trying to find out where the Eridian homeworld is, since she’s wildly smart and I imagine would have at least 1 or 2 leads (concerning the Vault Symbol on a slab/floor tile we see in her infirmary on Sanc-III). 

Also, I know it is largely assumed the CoV thing is a broadcast from the twins to their cult, but that just… doesn’t make sense to me. I’m gonna go wildly crazy here and suggest that the broadcast wasn’t from the CoV, but instead the Children of the Vault are another entity and the cult picked up the name after hearing said Broadcast. I mean, seriously, do you really think a bunch of crazed lunatics are going to want to call themselves “Children of the Vault” without a larger influence?

HEAR ME OUT.

okay, I do not play battleborn. at all. so idk what the deal is, but looking at videos that show the morse code easter egg shows this

now i did a little looking, not a lot because I am not a fan of battleborn and my disinterest made me terribly bored BUT

this is what i think a “Varelsi” (the enemy faction of Battleborn) portal is SUPPOSED to look like: 

so, you know, there’s a difference. probably the reason it’s called “anomaly”.

And we know the code we get from those anomalies is in morse code

which translates to this (thanks reddit. It’s been 2 years since I upvoted stuff on that post, btw. time sure does fly.)

And y’know, I JUST did a analysis trailer of We are Mayhem, and you know what was in that trailer? Maya’s Phaselock.

let’s take a look at that, shall we?

so we know that Maya’s ability “allows her to lock an enemy in another dimension, preventing the desired target from fighting back for a short while”. Do you see where I’m going with this, yet?

yeah.

Compare the phaselock to the easter egg “anomalies”, they’re both cracks in our dimension, though Maya’s is white, and they’re both cast against a space-like/starry background which I think is our look into the “other dimension” her description mentions.

in fact, let’s look at some other Sirens we know of, more specifically, let’s take a look at Amara’s arms

I think that’s all the same “stuff”. idk what to call it. just… “STUFF”. yeaaaahhhh.

Anyway, this is all a convoluted way for me to say that I think that morse code message we hear is coming from that dimension that Maya can open a rip to. She uses it to imprison people? yeah. Probably the same dimension Lilith can phasewalk through. idk the deal with Amara’s arms but I assume they take their power from that dimension as well. I imagine that dimension is also tied to the Vaults. We know the Traveller “teleports” places, I imagine he’s doing something similar to Lilith: jumping into the other dimension then quickly jumping out. (okay yes i just likened Lilith to Kurt Wagner, whatcha gonna do?).

Consider the idea that Sirens are this dimension’s connection with the other dimension we see within their powers, and that’s where this message is coming from. I think that’s why Sirens can be used to charge the Vault Keys. But wait, there’s more.

(Sorry i totally lost my train of thought, i got SUPER distracted.)

I think Eleseer (the inside of Elpis in TPS) is connected to this dimension as well, or traveled to through this dimension.

the holograms of planets, the stars- I mean the whole thing looks like a giant void, and I get it, the moon is HUGE, but you think at some point you’d see the outside crust or something. You’d think at some point the mines would’ve caused the planet to cave in or something. Fuck, even the Crackening, which we all kinda know was caused by the Eridians, you think that would have shown this GIANT cavern inside the moon.

I think the whole above bit, Tycho’s Ribs, the huge Eridian base thing, is powering a large rift or something into another dimension, the dimension that the TPS VHs drop into on that giant platform with the cutscene and everything. I mean…

COME ON. is all that seriously inside a MOON?

there is even a bubble shield surrounding the platform they get off on, something very similar to the shields Axton has around his turrets. I think that may be to prevent the atmosphere from escaping, anything visiting from getting out, or, possibly, things from getting in. If this actually is somewhere out in space/another dimension, then it would make sense that they’d wanna keep their magical floating future-seeing platform from getting knocked by asteroids or raided by other aliens

Okay, and I know the “planets” all appear as holograms, but look at that galaxy. the nebulas. Those aren’t holograms. 

Eridian writing on the outside ring there? Oh boy bl3 theories here i come. That’s looking very familiar right about now after my We are Mayhem analysis.

cloud/nebula. clearly not a hologram

there’s even a fucking galaxy down here like… Yeah guys I don’t think we’re on Elpis anymore

Even the entrance to the Vault which… y’know isn’t that normal Vault-y shape is a giant hunk of eridium with a huge crack in it. 

and when you touch it, what happens??

You teleport inside, and it even plays the same animation as when Lilith teleports you during the Hunting the Firehawk quest. 

It probably looks less organic than the one in bl2 because this is powered by Eridian machinery, but it’s definitely the same concept- you fade back in all purple and shit

then this asshole shows up out of an actual Vault symbol, which makes me wonder why we traveled all this way and if Vault symbols are actually gateways somewhere and by walking inside one (unlike every other VH), Rhys and Fiona really DID get teleported somewhere

also, a little off-topic but does anyone else think this is what the eridians are gonna look like?

just… the face after u shoot the mask off.

how did i get to this topic…??

oh yeah Tannis LMAO SORRY

Okay POINT BEING

I think that the easter egg message is coming from whatever dimension all of THIS is. If it IS the Eridians, then maybe humans (or the Vault Hunters- the Crimson Raiders?) are the “Children of the Vault” and the Cult took the name because they heard the broadcast. Because as it stands, “Do not open the Vaults” just doesn’t make sense coming from the Calypsos’s perspective. They WANT the Vaults opened. You know who doesn’t? The Eridians.

So the line: “Tannis is not what she seems” then wouldn’t be coming from the CoV, but instead from an outsider watching us. You know… someone getting info to whoever is in that dimension… like the Watcher maybe? Or maybe the Eridians are just watching us in general, like they can see things from their dimension or homeworld or whatever. They had the Elpis Vault that could see the future, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they could see the present anywhere. 

Anyway

TANNIS

I don’t want her to be evil is what I’m trying to say. but you know what? I didn’t even get into the MEAT AND POTATOES of this post yet

here we go

you know this thing? It’s from the dev trailer for bl3. looks pretty similar to the above stuff, doesn’t it? And it’s powered by electricity, because if you watch the tubes get filled up/emptied out in the video. I’m still trying to determine if the footage was reversed or not because the lava (?? I think???) outside the window is falling upwards when it’s playing normally.

So you might be wondering? Why bring this up?

Cause I think it’s possible Tannis has built this using the blueprints she got from Angel’s prototype room. and why is THAT important? 

Well, hear me out.

this is what a digistructer looks like. Imagine 2 of those facing opposite each other, supercharged by electricity

Now we know Tannis has built Digistruct peak to create fake enemies for us, but maybe those don’t last long/aren’t stable enough

and yeah I think you know where I’m going with this

I think it’s possible Tannis has somehow created a machine to digistruct Angel for us.

and you might be wondering

“why the fuck would she do that”

BECAUSE

IF YOU LOOK AT THE CONTROL PANEL WHILE YOU’RE UPLOADING THINGS FOR TANNIS

YOU CAN SEE ANGEL’S FACE APPEAR FOR A SPLIT SECOND

which only ever happened while she was speaking using her powers!!! I don’t even think you actually could “record” that because that’s her using her Siren powers to talk in your brain!! It’s not a part of your ECHO or a tv screen, that’s literally part of her powers

so what if Angel uploaded herself into Helios, then when AI Jack came barging in she had to hide somewhere she wouldn’t be found/overwritten by him

and please tell me if I’m wrong, i’ve been staring at a computer screen all day/night

but that looks like a body to me. You can see the left arm on the right, then a torso, then another arm slightly behind that

even the electric bursts coming out of them create the shape of a body standing there. I can very clearly see the hand/thigh/waist on the bottom and the shoulders/opening to a shirt? on top there

idk lmao. I’m trying my best to explain why her actress would tweet a picture of her with no context and then PIN it to her twitter page

why britanni. whyyy

[feyreshumanheart]

Your tag says you haven't read CC and want to be spoiled, but what the fandom refers to as the Dusk Court is something you've already seen many times in acotar, though more info in especially CC3.

It's the island with the Prison. Rhys tells us in acomaf:

He mentions specifically that it "may even be an eighth court" then and that it falls under his specific rule.

Afaik people even then started speculating it was Dusk Court because it was notably absent (4 seasonal courts for each of the 4 seasons but only 3 solar courts, a Dawn but no Dusk).

And then acowar shows that being mated to Rhys allows Feyre to also have that ability to access it.

So technically both Rhys and Feyre are leading that land as it exists in Prythian today and have been since when we were in Feyre's POV.

But we find out why Rhys's blood is keyed in and it's in his/the Night Court's jurisdiction in CC3. Silene, who was one of the daughters of the High King Fionn and High Queen Theia and married a High Lord of the Night Court and apparently looks just like Rhys's sister, describes how she bequeathed the Dusk Court (Prison) to her son:

That's why Rhys's blood is keyed into the Prison wards, it's said that it's his inheritance, which also makes him a descendent of the original High King/Queen.

The High Queen Theia specifically stated the Prison (Dusk Court) should be tended to by only her heirs:

However, as you can guess from above with Silene talking about how the island had "become barren and empty" and other bits we get in later books about the trapped power of the land, there's a ton of speculation about the future of the land and the restoration of it to something more than just a Prison that houses monsters.

There's been some slow unraveling of the mysteries and hints at something deeper with the Prison/Dusk Court across multiple books and since what currently exists is "dead", most of the speculation involves who will "restore the Dusk Court" and how.

Given the details about how the Prison/Dusk Court is so tied to Silene/Theia's family line, this has also led to speculation about other characters connected to them and/or their power. Rhys's blood specifically being coded into the wards raises other questions, like is it only for the descendent who is High Lord and did Mor's family branch off before Silene?

Next acotar book will surely give us more detail, especially because it's established in CC3 that Rhys didn't know this history of his bloodline.

As for the High King/Queen plot and references, Amren alluded to Rhys's bloodline connection (or at least it was foreshadowed) in acosf, calling it his "birthright" when discussing him becoming High King in acosf:

CC3 establishes the whole family (Fionn, Theia, Silene) as not great and especially delves into Fionn and Theia being power hungry. That said, it's notable that when High King/Queen is brought up, Rhys pushes back as wanting to share power and not wanting to turn conqueror (which is the exact thing Theia does, with that phrase used). So the contrast has already been drawn, especially with the current plot being brought up as a unified ruler being needed to protect from impending conquering rather than to be conquerer.

But it's all up-in-the-air and lots of speculation is ongoing as a result.

That's the TL;DR on what the "Dusk Court" is and how it belongs to Rhys currently from CC info.

i found out that there is such a thing as a dusk court, and that it somehow belongs to rhysand (and now feyre), which leads me to question why wouldn't SJM write more books for them where they restore and rebuild and lead both courts? or do the high king and queen plot already? she's a coward, that's why.

[definitely-not-an-alb]

Magical Machines In RoL: A short Round-Up

Shortening because this is long.

There’s a surprising number of  magical or mysterious devices we keep encountering:

The Pin in one of the Cat-Girls temple in Moon Over Soho

The Cunning Device in A Rare Book of Cunning Device

Lesley’s Phone-Bomb in The Hanging Tree

“Mary Engine”, (Might be related to Ada Lovelace’s design, as per Peter’s observations, might be some type of early calculator?)

“Some Type of Device” Babbage (Who worked with Lovelace) was working on for the Folly, according to Nightingale

And then there’s Lady Helena’s insistence that her tradition’s Magic Salons go back to Caroline from Ansbach, who, Peter notes, also hung about with one Gottfried Willhelm Leibniz (Who was – hopefully – not a machine, though he did write like he was running out of time and was generally low-key bonkers)

First three are kind of ??? so let’s look at the last three (+) instead

Why the fuck is Leibniz relevant for us?

Now, I’m not one for Great-Man-Histroy, but even I have to admit that Leibniz was, again, kind of off-the-Weird-Genius-charts. If you, say, want a literary or historical counterweight to Isaac Newton in Allsasser-Excentric-Genuis-Bullshit, he’s the man. Literally. Anygays. There are five(ish) things that connect Leibniz to the rest of the RoL Universe;

He’s connected with Caroline from Ansbach, as stated above

He dabbled in alchemy (well, he dabbled in everything)

He got into an academic bitch fight with Isaac Newton (Because either on of them plagiarized the other or they just invented the same Important Math Thing at roughtly the same time – we will never know ~~~)

He either  invented the binary code*  (aka thing that makes Computers go be-bop) or greatly improved it/anticipated a bunch of logic-probelms with it, depending on who you ask

He revolutionized early calculators by inventing the Leibniz Wheel (aka, the things that made Calculators go shrrrrrrrrrr for 200 years before things got funky and analytical)

(All of this is somewhere between the late 1660s – 1716s) (* same problem of the )

Early Calculators and Leibniz Wheels

(Aka a long and rambly part that you can skip if you don’t want to learn about Fancy Early Tech)

Early Calculators where mostly stuff like fancy modefied Abaci, but in the 1640s this french dude Pascal build an Arithmetic Machine, which used interlockign wheels to do what it says on the tin crunch numbers. This machine was both very cool and very suck-tastic; it could do math for you (yay); But it was also super expensive, hard to transport, harder to build, even harder to opperate and therefore prone to human error (boo). It was also limited to addition an subtraction. It didn’t really catch on.

Along comes Leibniz and designes the Leibniz Wheel (which, unlike the A.M.’s wheels, which needed 10 rotations per single digit, only needed a single rotation for any operation involving a single-digit number and could, in conjunction with other Leibniz wheels, carry over into higher digits more easily. He used it to build the first really usable Calculator(s). This Stepped Reckoner (which is what you get when you badly translate Stufenrechner) was easier to operate and it could perform all four basic operations. You could actually use it. Or, as this book puts it:

“The demand for Leibniz’s machines was largely for it’s help in calculating tables of common mathematical functions. In the seventeenth century producing one of these tables might have been a lifes’s work.”

Just, in case you wanted to know how rad people thought this was.

Here’s a link to a video of an animated Leibniz Wheel in use.

Babbage’s Difference Engine and Analytical Engine

Babbage’s Difference Engine (1820s/30s) and Analytical Engine (1830s), genreally considered the ‘first computer’ if they’d actually build it, was basically the attempt to stack as many Leibniz Wheel-ish Wheels (they used a variation, btu it‘s afaik the same concept) as possible on top of each other and operate them all simultaneously by using the technology of Joseph Marie Jacquard’s “programmable” Loom (invented around 1800, uses Punchcards to weave different & complex patterns) to brute-force complex mathematical problems.

The Difference Engine was supposed to use this system to calculate and print mathematical tables. It was supposed to be able to calculate polynoms and use sinus and cosinus and such (!!! I know that sounds easy when we all have a graphical calculator lying around at home like a useless math brick, but this is so cool!)

The Analytical Engine was a step up from this, as it should have functioned without human intervention and was upposed to be fully programmable. It even had something like 10 kB memory space. It was a computer, is what it is.

Now, Ada Lovelace took one long look at that and went “well, clearly this isn’t cool enough yet” because she was born a Byron and Just That Extra. She was also apparently called the Enchantress of Numbers by Babbage ... just ... like ... maybe ... okay.

Anyways, Ada, while trying to explain what the fuck this thing was supposed to do to the general science public, casually invented the analytical computer program. As you do. As you fucking do.

(Still using this book as well as this book btw) 

To make this clear: Babbage is that one kid who’s always finished first in Math Class because he actually knows how to make tht Unloved Math Brick Of Ugh do what he wants; Ada is that kid who wrote her own game for her Math Brick, hasn’t payed attention since Grade 6 and is currently reading a college-level informatic book under the table. In the first row, Isaac and Gottfried are throwing chalk at each other. Well, you get what I mean.

The Mary Engine

The Mary Engine is produced in the 1840s and is small enough to fit into the store room’s shelves. It’s not a Differentiation or an Analytical Engine, and probably also not a Stepped Reckoner.

But. This thing is actually incredible. The Mary Engine is TINY.

Babbage never finished either Engine. They only build on around 1900 iirr. Second off, the Engines where fuck off huge. Things the size of the Mary Engine really only came around in the early 1900 or so. ‘Enigmas’ (aka Rotor-Crypto-Machines, which are way less complex then actual calculators), while ‘invented’ shortly after WWI all over the world, only became small enough to be moved comfortably on-person during WWII. How the fuck did they get the Mary Engine that small in the 1840s?

If there’s anything I’m missing (or that I’ve gotten horribly wrong, because I’m a computer noob in the end) hit me up so that I can amend this thing. I don’t really have a Grand Fandom Theory or anything. This is just a list (+ minor explanations) of Cool Stuff. A lot of people probably already know this stuff, but I had fun writing this and it might bring people who weren’t raised in Leibniz-Central up to speed somewhat.

Now, another thing, because someone pointed it out a while ago (and I can’t! Believe! I didn’t make that connection!); Linden-Limmer. I really should have seen that one: I fucking live here. So: Hannover, Germany is kind of a bonkers town.

[dandart]

I like quizzes...

1. What is you middle name?

Walter. Not kidding.

2. How old are you?

28

3. When is your birthday?

4th June

4. What is your zodiac sign?

Classical: Gemini

Revised: Taurus

5. What is your favorite color?

Deep purple. Also orange sometimes.

6. What’s your lucky number?

4, 16, 64... powers of 4.

7. Do you have any pets?

1 black cat, 2 lutino cockatiels, a venus fly trap and a "puppy" (shytsumiki is my Chise)

8. Where are you from?

Devon, south west England.

9. How tall are you?

175cm (about 5'9" in ye olde measurements)

10. What shoe size are you?

Like 7... ._. That's tiny. It makes it painful to walk. (EU 41, US 9)

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

One that I actually use. But then I occasionally share with my darling Angel shytsumiki, but I also have more impractical ones stashed.

12. What was your last dream about?

Ah fuck now I don't remember... it was interesting though.

13. What talents do you have?

Coding, origami, musical instruments, tech in general and uhmm not a lot else?

14. Are you psychic in any way?

No one's psychic. That's never been proven. I can barely read emotions when I look at faces. I am remarkably imperceptive.

15. Favorite song?

Starset's My Demons, Pink Floyd's Comfortably Numb or Focus' Anonymus 2.

16. Favorite movie?

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. But I do also enjoy me some others. Ask for my imdb if you're interested.

17. Who would be your ideal partner?

My babygirl shytsumiki was my childhood crush. No one I have ever met has come close to being so magically attractive to me.

18. Do you want children?

No, I have my babygirl shytsumiki and our pets are our babies.

19. Do you want a church wedding?

Noooooooooooo. One in the dead of night in the woods would be just lovely.

20. Are you religious?

In as much as I occasionally personify the world or the universe, but not seriously.

21. Have you ever been to the hospital?

Yeah. I even stayed overnight but only to stay with my little Angel shytsumiki.

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?

Umm... once as a kid I didn't know how to do anything nor what I was doing, and punched a teacher after she stopped me stealing and eating broken biscuits and had to talk to a policeman. But other than that, not since I was like 7. Gosh I was a horror.

23. Have you ever met any celebrities?

Yeah, I met the Linux Outlaws and co, I've met the Gadget Show crew, I went to see Biffy Clyro live... of all bands... I've spoken to a few coding legends too... erm... tweeted with Carmack, and Akira, that vfx guy for Star Trek...

24. Baths or showers?

Baths are soothing but I usually shower because I haven't always got the patience.

25. What color socks are you wearing?

Nihilism.

26. Have you ever been famous?

I should hope so. I was known as The Cloud Man by LO, got published in Linux Format, once had a thousand twitter followers and had feedback from strangers on my code. I am also in the OEIS, thrice.

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity?

Not in the classical papparazi pop star sense, but to be a household name who doesn't have to hide his face in public sounds okay. A legacy would be nice, after all.

28. What type of music do you like?

Uber metal and prog rock, usually. Soundtracks too.

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping?

Noooooooo eww.

30. How many pillows do you sleep with?

Two, but I often share two with shytsumiki and iunno if she counts <3

31. What position do you usually sleep in?

Sideways unless my neck hurts (physiological problem) in which case back or front.

32. How big is your house?

Three bedrooms but still pokey. We have too much stuff.

33. What do you typically have for breakfast?

A nothing sandwich with bread made out of thin air with a side of invisible chips.

34. Have you ever fired a gun?

Only a bb and a fairground one.

35. Have you ever tried archery?

Yeah once and I loved it and want to take it up again.

36. Favorite clean word?

Either discombobulate, defenestrate, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis or jam.

37. Favorite swear word?

Fucknugget? Anything which is half swear and half clean is a winner in my book. Shitsticks.

38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?

Around 40 hours I should think.

39. Do you have any scars?

Myes. That's a story which perhaps requires a tw...

40. Have you ever had a secret admirer?

How would I know? If it's secret I wouldn't know. My little darling is my exsecret admirer though apparently.

41. Are you a good liar?

Nope. I am forgetful so I wouldn't even be aligned in the answers I was giving. Plus I just don't like it. It makes me too guilty.

42. Are you a good judge of character?

I hope so but haven't had many chances to find that out just yet.

43. Can you do any other accents other than your own?

Sure. It's-a pizza, italiano! But seriously I am okay at some but terrible at others.

44. Do you have a strong accent?

I wouldn't say so but no one would. I would just say "generic Southern English"

45. What is your favorite accent?

Some Southern hemisphere or east Asian I like a lot, also a few European.

46. What is your personality type?

INTP afaik

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?

I don't actually know, I don't go for expensive, nor care for my clothes especially.

48. Can you curl your tongue?

Yes.

49. Are you an innie or an outie?

Innie.

50. Left or right handed?

Right.

51. Are you scared of spiders?

Nope.

52. Favorite food?

Sushi.

53. Favorite foreign food?

...sushi. Alright, different answer? Takoyaki?

54. Are you a clean or messy person?

Extremely messy.

55. Most used phrased?

It changes every so often. Dunno right now.

56. Most used word?

Also changes. Still don't know.

57. How long does it take for you to get ready?

For climbing? Jk like a minute?

58. Do you have much of an ego?

Used to, now I don't.

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?

Both.

60. Do you talk to yourself?

All the time. I know, right?

61. Do you sing to yourself?

Yup.

62. Are you a good singer?

Only if I try which is rare and even then rarely.

63. Biggest Fear?

Losing my Angel. Or dying.

64. Are you a gossip?

Nope. Not at all.

65. Best dramatic movie you’ve seen?

I don't actually know.

66. Do you like long or short hair?

Having? Long. Seeing? Don't mind as long as it's not a buzzcut. So from vaguely short and floofy to massively long.

67. Can you name all 50 states of America?

No I can't, and it would be weird to expect that of me.

68. Favorite school subject?

Maths and physics and IT.

69. Extrovert or Introvert?

Intro now, ex extro

70. Have you ever been scuba diving?

No but it sounds llike good fun.

71. What makes you nervous?

Jealousy and making the wrong moves.

72. Are you scared of the dark?

Nope. Used to be a bit when alone.

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?

Sometimes, less than I used to, when it would be useful.

74. Are you ticklish?

A bit. Less than I used to be since being bigger.

75. Have you ever started a rumor?

Nope

76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?

Not official governmently but I have owned projects, and in other places.

77. Have you ever drank underage?

Probably.

78. Have you ever done drugs?

Hasn't everyone done soft ones?

79. Who was your first real crush?

My Angel Baby shytsumiki

80. How many piercings do you have?

None.

81. Can you roll your Rs?“

Yes.

82. How fast can you type?

Reasonably fast I should think.

83. How fast can you run?

Reasonably slow.

84. What color is your hair?

Brown to me, dark blonde to my mum and ginger in an underground coding quiz apparently.

85. What color is your eyes?

Are? Blue.

86. What are you allergic to?

Probably prawns.

87. Do you keep a journal?

No, wish I could remember to.

88. What do your parents do?

My mum's a mosaic artist and my dad's a retired satcom engineer.

89. Do you like your age?

Ummm, it's alright??

90. What makes you angry?

Die hard cruelty and things that make people or animals suffer. Including wars, all of which are inexcusable. Come on people, the best for the most, keep up! I am the judge.

91. Do you like your own name?

It's alright. Better than some, not as cool as others.

92. Have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?

Bob Jim Ted because they are hilarious names. Not that I'm using them for anything but fiction.

93. Do you want a boy a girl for a child?

No. I already have my babygirl shytsumiki.

94. What are you strengths?

Code. Logic. Maths and science. Compassion perhaps.

95. What are your weaknesses?

Memory, communication and showing emotion.

96. How did you get your name?

My folks picked it from a comic. "Dan Dare: Pilot of the Future". Middle name from a great uncle.

97. Were your ancestors royalty?

Everyone's were. I haven't traced exactly how but have traced up to 500 years in some places.

98. Do you have any scars?

Yes, you asked that before.

99. Color of your bedspread?

Colour. Currently red and black.

100. Color of your room?

Colour! Well white as are all of them atm.

These are fun. Thank you.

[yesthatsatumbler]

This depends on what counts as active use! I can name six calendars still in reasonably-active use offhand and at least six more that were still in use at some point after WW2 (some of which might still be used in contexts I'm less familiar with).

...actually no, make that seven: Christian (or however we're calling the calendar used by most of the world), lunar Islamic, solar Islamic (Iran), Hebrew, Thai, Japanese [regnal], Ethiopian. And that's just the ones that are actively used on circulating coins. ...darn, forgot Nepalese. Eight. I'm pretty sure there's a few more that I'm missing at the moment. [Ugh, just remembered Taiwanese. And I think North Korea has one too?]

(The after-WW2 ones: the funky Iranian one they used for a while when they went away from the Islamic years, Korean, Saka [various Indian princely states], Seleucid [Yemenite Jews*], and I forgot what the other two were; possibly some of the calendars I ended up reclassifying as currently used. A bunch more briefly actively used calendars became obsolete as a result of WW2. Vatican used to date their coins in papal regnal years [usually in parallel with the AD date] at least into the reign of John XXIII [1958-63 AD] but I'm not sure if they still do? [Looked it up; apparently technically they still do but only on commemoratives rather than general-issue euro coinage.] I think some other regnal and/or revolutionary years also came up in a few contexts. Mongolia comes to mind for the latter specifically as used on coins but AFAIK the latest coins to use that calendar were contemporary with WW2.)

I do have to admit that (I feel like) we should probably use more stuff like "since the foundation of the republic".

(And also yeah, if the state of the world changes sufficiently to make calendars counting by years impractical and/or inconvenient, we might indeed end up with a situation where people legitimately don't know which year it is. Or for that matter with a situation where the answer to which year it is depends on whose standard on year length you're following.)

(Alternately we could, even without all that much change, end up in a situation to the effect of "of course we know which year it is, it's the consulate of Catulus and Lepidus**", whereas the local default calendric reference does not actually include any kind of meaningful numeric order of the years.)

*) Technically the Jewish legal code explicitly prescribes the use of the Seleucid calendar in some legal contexts! But apparently this was only kept up into the post-WW1 era as a living tradition in Yemen.

[Which reminds me, "different calendars legally used for different purposes" is also a thing that I feel like there really should be more of. I believe British statutes are still officially numbered in regnal years, and Israel insists on doing holidays by the Judaic calendar even as (e.g.) ages of majority had been relegated to the Christian calendar, but other than that and the Seleucid thing I'm failing to think of any other examples.]

**) This is actually [part of] the date of the oldest known inscription in Pompeii. I wonder if the people who found that had to look up the consuls in a table; it's about 150 years prior to the period you'd expect Pompeian inscriptions to have been written in.

It only happens rarely but I'm always slightly annoyed at sci-fi stories that are like "oh we don't know what year it is anymore"

Bullshit. Humans love calendars, and there's nothing special about the gregorian xalendar's epoch. Just make a new one.

At least in The Matrix I think we can interpret the canon as there being a new calendar, Morpheus just never bothers telling it to Neo because "years since the founding of Zion" would be meaningless to him. He just says we don't know the gregorian date.

But Transmetropolitan has no excuse. There's no year and no one has come up with a replacement epoch.