danimia

[danimia]

"Revenge is a dish best served cold" recommendation actually a holdover from times before modern food safety standards, owing to the perishable ingredients in a traditional recipe. Modern revenge, whether home-cooked or store-bought, retains more than 90% of its cathartic force when microwaved for two minutes at low power

[danimia]

So I finally finished FF6, and, surprising no one, Celes is my favorite.

[Image Description: Digital artwork of Celes stabbing Kefka on the Floating Continent. Kefka's back is to the viewer, and Celes looks at him with disgust as she grips him by the shoulder and runs him through with her sword. Some paces behind them, Terra is lying on the ground, just pushing herself up on her arms to watch. Two of the statues are partly visible out-of-focus in the foreground, framing the scene. /end ID]

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how the fuck did this girl get so goddamn lucky to get a lesson from the Eradicator

Heard lesbians like them

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I've decided to start posting Twenty-Five Percent online! I'm hoping to keep a 1 chapter/week cadence, and we'll see how long I can keep that going.

If you like sci-fi and/or computers, maybe check it out, and consider reblogging this! It'd mean a lot to me if you do.

[danimia]

I've been off Tumblr for a little while, but I came back to discover that one of my moots has deactivated and I have no way to find them again, because we had no one in common 😢💔

Xena, in the extremely unlikely event that you happen to see this, drop me an ask?

[danimia]

Twenty-Five Percent Teaser 2

News! I've decided that I'll be posting my hard comp-sci-fi thriller Twenty-Five Percent to Scribble Hub at a hopefully chapter-per-week cadence, starting in the near future. I'm still getting everything all set up, but in the meantime, I thought I'd leave folks with a more substantive teaser than I've posted here so far: the first few pages of Chapter 1. So, without further ado:

It took me a long, long time, but I finally came to realize that most people understood software development about as well as I understood most people: very little, approaching not at all. There’s this impression of the Hollywood programmer, typically a young white guy with a bag of chips and a case of whichever soda brand won the sponsorship, who has a brainstorm and starts furiously hammering away at a keyboard, writing line after line of code nonstop. There will probably be some sort of spectacular visual effects to keep the audience interested, and maybe some cheesy narrative about a “mind palace” or whatever, and the end result is that after a couple hours, he staggers out of his programming cave, clutching a USB stick that he claims will save the world, or stop the evil plot, or discover alien life or whatever.

(Someone at the lunch table told a joke, and I didn’t need to break my train of thought to giggle appropriately.)

That’s not to say that there aren’t times when a software engineer (that’s the professional way to say ‘programmer’) gets in the zone, hyperfocuses in on the code, and just starts writing and writing; I’d done that plenty of times myself, and it was always the best feeling in the world when it happened, but that isn’t what programming is. Programming is an art form like any other, but unlike a filmmaker who plays with emotion, a photographer who manipulates perspective, or a painter who controls perception, anyone who works in the software industry must befriend, beguile, or otherwise come to terms with uncertainty.

My terms for uncertainty were unconditional surrender.

(I carried my paper plate to the trash can in the corner of the conference room, smiling apologetically at whichever of my coworkers it was that I had to scoot past without otherwise registering their presence.)

That was the ideal, at least. There were, in fact, precious few things in the world that I could be absolutely certain about. That I existed was definitely one of them, but I couldn’t take credit for that; Descartes got there before I did. My name and pronouns I knew to be ‘Maya Brown’ and ‘she/her’, respectively, as they had been my whole life, but since I was the only person in the world who could speak to my identity with authority, that wasn’t a particular accomplishment. I was short, which I got reminded of any time I needed to reach a high shelf or match someone else’s pace; I was in my early thirties, and I could figure out the exact number by subtracting my birth year from today’s date, if I ever bothered to (which I didn’t); I was both curvy and beautiful, as my husband Chris liked to remind me whenever he got a chance.

(I waited patiently until Rashmi had a pause in her conversation, practicing my next conversational performance in the back of my mind.)

Beyond those unwavering constants of my existence, however, things got a lot less certain and a lot more contextual. As a software engineer, I worked for a company called Setheory Incorporated (which despite the name had literally nothing to do with set theory), and I knew that because they let me in the door every day. I was almost certainly one of the better programmers of my generation, given how often I was able to intuit the answers to problems that stumped my colleagues and my cohort, and how rarely anyone else had answers to problems that stumped me. I was, apparently, autistic; I’d gotten the diagnosis when I was young, but it always seemed like a bigger deal to other people than it was to me. People were just a little bit more unpredictable than computers, that was all, but I wasn’t about to give them up just because they were a challenge. I liked challenges.

(Rashmi turned towards me and I let myself gush effusive thanks for her delicious cooking, just as I’d been practicing.)

Sometimes, like now, there wasn’t that much else I felt very sure of at all. I was supposed to be working on building out a new software feature, but every time I tried to think about it, it felt like a huge massive cloud of uncertainty that I wasn’t sure where to even start with. Right now I was letting it cook on the back burner, and I refused to let myself consider it even a little. Right now I was indulging myself in a hobby: looking for ways in which my computer wasn’t behaving to my exacting specifications, diving into the code to find out why, and then figuring out how to fix it.

Having finished my social obligations, I fled the conference room, digging my computer out of a pocket and thumbing it on. The word processor—the Setheory word processor, I thought smugly—had a strange performance issue I’d been seeing sporadically. It wasn’t anything that would have been particularly obvious to anyone else, but I’d written most of the word processor code. I knew where it was efficient and where it needed work, and sometimes, it felt like my computer was lagging even during what should have been efficient operations, ones I’d personally tuned and optimized. It rankled.

I thumbed open my standard test document, filled with a bunch of placeholder text and some extremely unusual formatting, just as I got back to my desk. I dropped my computer in its cradle and the monitor on my desk blinked to life, the document fleeing my computer’s own tiny screen for the much vaster expanse of a desktop monitor. I grabbed the standard-issue company headset off my desk and put it on, tucking my hair behind my ears and adjusting the boom mic to in front of my lips. This served the dual purpose of allowing me to use voice control if I needed or wanted to, but it also helped coax my brain into “engineer mode.”

I frowned at the document, my eyes narrowing, as I considered my approach. I’d already tried all of my usual diagnostic and debugging techniques many times in the past, like pushing the software harder and harder until the performance issues became glaring, or taking random profiling samples during long editing sessions, or running leak detectors to monitor for wasted memory usage. I’d turned up a number of leads that way, and some of them even led to some useful discoveries and fixed bugs, but none of them had any sort of performance implications.

I was getting nowhere with my usual techniques, so maybe I needed to start trying some unusual techniques. Rather than come up with a plan for what I was going to look for and how I was going to find it, I just started clicking. I cleared my mind of everything, every expectation I had for what I might find, and every dead-end I’d explored in the past, and I just let my hand move the mouse on automatic, wandering through the user interface completely at random. My eyes glazed, but I never took them off the screen; I refused to think about what I was doing, letting my subconscious process what I was seeing without me peering over its metaphorical shoulder.

Some probable fifteen minutes later, I found myself just clicking around in the text, watching the cursor move, sometimes double- or triple-clicking. I clicked inside the text; I clicked outside the text; I selected a sentence from front to back, and then I reselected the same sentence from back to front. It formed a rhythm that felt somehow satisfying in how deliberate and consistent it was. Mouse clicks, and cursor moves. Mouse clicks, and cursor moves.

Mouse clicks—

[danimia]

A hummingbird thought a man’s orange hat was a flower [x]

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My favorite jokes are about mispronouncing philosophers' names but I'm afraid it's a nietzsche subgenre

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hey its me your immune system. looks like we caught somethin here. try sneezing real fast see if that gets rid of it. yeah no dice, huh... alright lemme try filling your lungs with fluid. no yeah i do it all the time dont worry works like a charm. hmmm... still no good... alright well just hold tight here for a minute maybe it just needs time to start working. in the mean time ill go fire up the ol' neuron cooker n see if that helps

[danimia]

Badly Explained Magic Tag

Explain the magic system of your current WIP as poorly as possible. Bonus points if you use bullet points

Ooh it's a meme! I got tagged by @abiteofhoney, and while Twenty-Five Percent doesn't have a magic system per se, I have it on good authority that any sufficiently-advanced technology is indistinguishable, so...

magic used to be made out of incantations

certain syllables held magic power

each sound can do one extremely simple thing

so people made arcane dictionaries with them

words that sound like nonsense to the human ear but make the universe sit up and obey

figure out the arcane words to speak and you can make anything happen

but be careful

mess up even one mouth-tearing syllable and the results can be disastrous

wizard schools would jealously guard their dictionaries and libraries, even for the dumbest spells

there were like fifteen thousand different Light spells, all of them made up of like three minutes of chanting

the better ones, if you got part of the spell wrong, only set your hair on fire

everything changed when one school said "this is dumb"

they looked at all the magic syllables and threw out all the ones that actually hurt to say like "H̵̭̀f̴̭͐a̷̫̎x̸̭̒h̶̗͆"

(everyone knows one "H̵̭̀f̴̭͐a̷̫̎x̸̭̒h̶̗͆" is the same as two "Ctah" plus one "Hiy" anyway)

(maybe it takes a little longer to say "Ctah Ctah Hiy," sure)

(but isn't that better than having to get the stupid razor blade positioned right for "H̵̭̀f̴̭͐a̷̫̎x̸̭̒h̶̗͆")

then they used the easier syllables to make up an arcane language that actual humans could speak and understand

now, instead of delivering a three-minute-long diatribe in a caustic, unintelligible tongue

(which translates to an extremely well-reasoned and bulletproof argument about why the universe MUST concentrate more photons in this area, but not too many, just enough for the speaker to be able to see, unless the speaker is blind, in which case just enough for the bystanders to be able to see, unless there are no bystanders, in which case...)

everyday people can just switch to "wizard-speak" and say something like "hey universe, can I have a little more light here"

and because the language—and therefore the universe—knows what 'light' is and what people mean when they ask for it

the universe is just like "oh sure fam I gotchu"

all the old wizard schools hated it

but they were so busy figuring out new syllables to confuse their apprentices with that they never quite got around to explaining why people shouldn't just learn wizard-speak

also, Apple is still making new iPhones

that was silly but fun! no pressure at all, but I'll pass the tag along to @max-rambles, @nondelphic, and @eminthegrave :)

[danimia]

ooh how fun! I'll have to figure out how to adapt T5P's technology to this 😄

Badly Explained Magic Tag

Explain the magic system of your current WIP as poorly as possible. Bonus points if you use bullet points

I was tagged by @pizzamanstan to do this and it looks fun, and the magic from Worship might be a good one to do this with. the magic here is religion based :)

imagine a woman

that's God

she owns all the magic

all of it yum yum it's hers

except

if she keeps too much of it for herself….

....not great things happen

so she has to get rid of some of it

she does that by "blessing" people with magic

just giving them a little taste

people with magic become immortal so that’s cool

but Watch Out !

because she can also take her magic back and that is an Unpleasant Experience™

uhh i think that’s it. sorry this took so long. no pressure tag @theaistired @inhurtandincomfort and @danimia

[danimia]

yeah listen buddy, Wil Wheaton was one of the OG draws to come to Tumblr. This dude is basically Matt Mercer to us gen Xers/elder Xennials. I made a blog here because I would be able to follow Wil.

I say this with love. Do not cite the old magic to me, friend. I was there when it was written.

I appreciate this ... acceptance? It's nice to be acceptable.

But I feel obligated to point out that I've been posting on this hellsite (affectionate) since at least 2008.

I don't know what this invasion is, but I am not part of it. I've been here so long, I'm part of the furniture.

I'm not going to play the Elder card, but I am going to tap the sign.

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I'm just down to start fights at this point.

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A history and mythology lesson reminding you that trans and non-binary people have always existed! [Long post]

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this is how I'm learning my cousin has a podcast now, wow

Hi, you had an anon asking about how current prison regulations are affecting trans men. Based on current anonymous reports from inside the prisons, trans men are losing access to medical care and being increasingly threatened with solitary confinement, internationally recognized as a form of torture. Many of these trans men are already held within women's prisons, so transfer is less likely but certainly not impossible if the administration decides malgendering is their preferred tactic there. [guardian article]

I'd also recommend listening to the recent interview by Margaret Killjoy with Eric King about it on the podcast It Could Happen Here [link] which does focus primarily on trans women, but also includes a lot of ways to help trans prisoners King was incarcerated as an openly antifascist activist and helped edit a book called Rattling the Cages in 2023 [link] that details the lived experience of people behind bars. Another interview (from 2024) with him by the same person on one of her other networks can be found here [link] and includes general commentary on how to survive in prison as well as comments specific to the trans experience via people he knew and things he witnessed while there.

!!! Thank you for this.

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and that's not even considering the physical debuffs I take on with the weed I smoke to keep myself in my fun-loving, chipper, entertaining mood rather than falling into the murder-eyes "I will destroy this game" place

If during a stream clip you see me go totally stone faced and then suddenly start to kick ass at the game that's me using 100% of my power. Usually when I'm streaming my brain is occupied with Speaking and Acting Human and Doing Comedy Bits which leaves only maybe 10% of my gaming skill available to me. But if I go silent and autism faced you know I'm locked in. That's me reaching my final form. That's me shedding my humanity to use the full extent of my power