devotedarchon

[devotedarchon]

When I was a kid, I said I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up. I had a typical Scientist’s White Lab Coat that I wore sometimes to look the part.

This summer, I’m working on a research team with my school, doing real science. Except, it’s computational neuroscience, not chemistry lab, and involves mostly reading and coding rather than mixing colored beakers.

I wonder what third grade me would think if I were to tell him that my first real-life ‘scientist outfit’ consists of a long skirt and a puffy pink sweater (it’s cold in the engineering building where I’ve been doing my work)

Science can look like a lot of things.

[devotedarchon]

Everybody should be able to enjoy a dash of fem. especially Dudes!

Theoretically sort of fem dudes must exist but I've never met any

[devotedarchon]

more people should be paying attention to this

Hey gang. What if Indie Cross was a Dungeons and Dragons campaign?

[devotedarchon]

A bunch of Indie shows on You tube. (The less well known ones)

Neytrix, OC redesign series- Episode 1

Lackadaisy- Pilot

Ramshackle- Episode 1

I don't want to be a magical girl- Pilot

Long Gone Gulch- Episode 1

Monkey Wrench- Episode 1

Dungeon Flippers- Episode 1

Thea art of Murder- Episode 1

D&D Abridged- Season 1 full

Satina- Episode 1

Far Fetched- Theme song

Epilogue of endings- Pilot

CARDINAL GARDEN- Pilot. trailer

Twelve - Episode 1

Bloody Heartss- Episode 1 (Thx @bloodyheartzz, @rat-kingster, & @winged-trash)

Indie Cross- Episode 1

LUMI AND THE GREAT BIG GALAXY- Pilot

The Earth Guy- Episode 1

Dream Catchers- Episode 1

Atlas and the Stars- Episode 1

Port by the Sea- Pilot

So, I just wanted to put this small thing together here, as there are a fuck ton of small youtube shows, that don't get as much screen time. So I wanted to showcase a bunch I personally watch, and Michael Kovach is only in a few of these, shocker.

Anyways, these are all, bunch of ones i enjoy, or have found. Hope you all enjoy.

[devotedarchon]

One doomed to die, the other doomed to never die. But still, in the face of destiny and impossibility... they find some way for their love to carry on forever -- no matter how twisted its lasting form may be.

Doomed yaoi

Draw them sad

"I'll take your body, your heart, your soul. I'll carry you with me, always. We'll stay together, no matter what lies beyond, I'll make you prevail...."

[devotedarchon]

The existence of craisins (cranberry raisin) Implies: Crouton (cranberry routon) Credibility (cranberry redibility) Cremation (cranberry remation) Etc for crinkle, crevice, crack, crumble, cruel, crest, cripple, crisp, crone

[devotedarchon]

was playing dnd the other day friend1: (something with the word temporal) friend2: "hang on. oh, hah, I heard that as 'temporal slut' for a second" me, acting on instinct: "me when I'm at my best if I'm being honest" all audibly staring at me through the call me: what. who said that

[devotedarchon]

Duuuuuuude, I started to do a similar thing when I was in highschool. in my daydreams I was imagining classifications and taxonomy for components of superpowers and basically turning it into a magic system -- spell rune symbols as well.

I never took the time to write it all down cos life was busy and i was sure I would remember it all... But four years later I only have disparate fragments.

That was a big lesson for me in the importance of documenting ideas.

You did what I really wanted to do but never found the time. I'm very impressed. Any chance you could send me a higher res image of that spreadsheet or a copy of the original file? I'd really love to read it, as well as any other documents you'd be willing to share

When I was in my teens, I used to make an entire magic system with 360+ unique spells, ordered in magic schools and categories, and it boggles my mind that I basically reinvented DnD mechanics, even down to metamagic.

I wanted to make a wiki about it but I don't have time for it.

The point was to try to encompass every "superpower" I could think of into a magic system.

I even got lore related to it all, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna simply reuse it all for OC worldbuilding. Ngl the fun part was naming all the spells, symbols and coming up with the logic of it all.

[devotedarchon]

still trying to learn this one myself.

Devastating to have more evidence that done IS better than perfect

[devotedarchon]

here's my analysis for anyone who was as puzzled by this as I was on first read:

When the iPhone 3 came out, it was the glorious cutting edge of technological advancement of its kind. Because of how fast tech advances, we can tell immediately from the shape of the device when it was made, how well it served its purpose, and why it looks how it does. In this way, its static form captures a singular moment in time. (That’s something that makes tech different from, say, a particular chair, which could have been made whenever.)

Nostalgia, broadly, describes when an object (or a show, song, etc) carries with it a powerful memory. The iPhone 3 carries with it an image of 2008 that will last forever, giving it a sort of eternity which Mumbo thinks is equivalent to immortality.

In stark contrast, living things by their nature change constantly. We grow and learn, our bodies are constantly replacing bits, and our memories are altered by the very act of remembering them.

And so, the description of mechanical existence as undeath. It’s like a wizard becoming an immortal Lich, ‘escaping’ death by becoming dead.

The "opus of change" likely refers to the masterwork that is the process of transforming himself into a machine, marking another juxtaposition of Transformation (characteristic of life) as a means to achieve stasis (comparable to death) “Hard earned improvement begins to pay dividends” I don’t fully understand but I assume is the same (improvement, a form of change, used in pursuit of stasis.)

There's the old quote, 'You can’t step in the same river twice' (originally ‘Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow’, Heraclitus ~500BC) You are not the same person you were five years ago. To be alive is to change, and to change is to allow your past self to die.

Mumbo turns this around, looks forward to see his future self allowing his current self to die. In order to prevent that change, you must kill your future self by becoming unchanging in the way that a machine is unchanging.

He sees the static, lasting memory (nostalgia) that old technology contains as a form of perfection (“In that it is perfect”) - and as the only form of eternity that exists - and so he tries to apply the same principle to himself. “Freeze myself in eternal utopia” “perfect, extant machine”

The principle isn’t transferable, because people are not objects. “Stagnation is a form of death” for living things. He understand this, but he decides he must do it anyway. That’s what makes nostalgia a “cruel immortality”. Escaping death by forsaking life.

The choice of the word "extant", is very deliberate. 'Extant' is defined as 'still existing, not destroyed' usually used as the opposite of 'extinct'. He doesn't describe his goal as a 'living machine', nor enduring, everlasting, continuing. Just extant.

Because at that point, that's all that you can say about it. Machine Mumbo Exists. It has not been destroyed. But that's all.

It's a beautifully written prose poem. It tells a story of someone who only sees the world in a very specific way. A story of folly. Or, depending on your perspective, a story of triumph.

me clicking on a video from the silliest man in the world: teehee what wacky hijinks await me

world renown block clown mumbo Fucking jumbo: you ever think about how old technology seems to live forever in the suspended state of whatever the newest advancements were at the time. how most technology immediately and fundamentally tells you when it was important and when it was left in the dust. it’s suspended in its era forever, and in that it is perfect.

stagnation is a form of death but nostalgia is cruel immortality. still i find myself locked in pursuit of it until i finally stumble across the undeath of the mechanical. as my hard earned improvement truly begins to pay dividends, surrounded by my opus of change, i will freeze myself in eternal utopia. the only way to never die is to preemptively kill whoever you might become. i will not have a grave, i will not be ashes and dust. i will be a perfect, extant machine.

me: Ok. i dont think this will plague me at all actually. like video.

[devotedarchon]

eloquently put, you capture it perfectly. though I'd be eager to hear... what do you think of the relationship from the beheaded's perspective?

Ngl I kinda like the idea of drifterxbeheaded if only because of the inherent mild horror of it all. You are a corpse possessing immortal homunculus. You will be here when I am gone. You will be here when the world falls away and succumbs to entropy. Any body I love is not truly yours. Any kiss I try to steal burns my lips. You have no voice, and you communicate by gestures and nods. I love you more than your selfish heart knows. I can never know if you feel the same. When I die will you possess my corpse as well, and move around inside of me? Would it be an act of love, or bespeaking to your nature? You destroyed your kingdom and your body, and you have the urge to destroy more to satiate your boredom. What can I give you to keep you here with me? What can I do to ensure you never see me as another challenge to be overcome? My love, my love, please, come closer, let me place my hand on your silent chest and rest my head against your shoulder, mourning who you were in life, before you became this. Let me wrap my arms around you and hold you close, reveling in what you are now. Let me pray you feel the same. Hold me close and stroke my hand—it is the only thing that tells me you love me.

[devotedarchon]

what is a student but a miserable pile of lists

[devotedarchon]

also, google siphonophores!

They're a larger category of colonial organisms that includes the man-o-war. They're made of tens, hundreds, or thousands of smaller dudes -- Zooids -- who can be anywhere from near microscopic to several inches long.

The zooids are more or less individual animals -- but they're genetically identical, cannot live alone, and have specialized roles that make them more like organs (sensing, feeding, digestion, propulsion, reproduction, etc)

They join together to make what is functionally one big animal, making siphonophores hard to categorize as a single creature or a cooperative group. Biology doesn't give a fuck about the rules and taxonomy we like to use to describe it.

Very importantly, they also look freaky as hell

Truly, the world is vast and full of wonders. here's a good explainer video if you'd like to see more:

[devotedarchon]

The Trestle People

A long, long time ago, light-years away, someone wanted to colonize the stars. They identified a good planet, and began to make their preparations. They must have reasoned that a long-distance ship can be made much faster without passengers -- or just decided that the grunt work of colonization would be far too boring for them -- because they sent a fleet of robots ahead of them.

This preliminary ship reached its target planet, plummeted through the atmosphere like a peregrine falcon tied to a brick, hit the ground and got to work. The small army of robots set about assessing the local environment, gathering resources, building more of themselves, and generally speed-running the hatchets-to- superconductors tech tree.

Then, the robots started building. Their mission was to create a comfortable and habitable village in which the creators would live once they arrived in their much slower life-supporting ship.

And if the creators took a particularly long time getting there, the robots were to go on expanding the village into a sizable town. If there was still time to kill at that point they would go on expanding it.

As it turned out, time they had, and expand the city they did. They made houses and schools, hospitals and libraries. Roads, bus stops, public parks, community centers. City halls, warehouses, office buildings, car dealerships. Police stations, movie theaters, public pools, pet adoption centers.

The creators never came. Maybe their ark ship was hit by a stray meteor. Maybe a computer alarm failed and they were never woken from cryo. Maybe they decided space travel just wasn't for them as the result of some grand societal realization... or final nuclear war.

The actual reason will never be known; nor does it matter. All the robots knew was that their creators were several decades late for their colonization appointment. So, the robots kept on building. We've got time to spare, they thought, might as well make use of it.

Our creators will arrive eventually, and when they do, imagine just how happy they'll be to see the magnificently accommodating city we've built for them! These robots knew everything there was to know about city building. Being machines, they had the intelligence necessary to apply that knowledge far beyond their original specifications -- as well as a mechanical single-mindedness that meant they didn’t know when to stop.

They turned the town to a city, the city to a metropolis, then a sprawling megalopolis. People sometimes like to describe a large city like a living organism. This one was stillborn.

Forty-lane highways without a single flowing car, miles-long perfectly-refrigerated warehouses with no goods in them. Museums of nothing but empty pedestals, and hundred-story skyscrapers where not a soul lived or worked.

The city teemed with activity, yes, but not life. Just the preparation for it. The robots hung fabricated paintings, placed decorative fake plants, made beds and fluffed pillows and organized kitchen drawers, and made sure the bus was never late.  They did everything they could to create millions of perfect, cozy homes - and matching amenities - for their awaited colonization fleet of two thousand people.

Eventually, once the city covered the better part of a small continent and had a population capacity of nearly a hundred million, some part of the robots' core intelligence realized something needed to change. If they were to continue expanding, the collective resource extraction and manufacturing threatened to create an ecological collapse and render the planet’s atmosphere unlivable.

BUT.

THERE WAS STILL WORK TO DO.

The creators hadn't yet arrived, so the robots needed to continue to make the most of the intervening time, continue building, continue to fulfill their purpose.

Something snapped.

Perhaps it was random chance, clinging to one thing that still made sense, or the product of an enigmatic problem-solving routine deep inside the central intelligence. What happened was this:

Eighty percent of the now twenty-three-million constructor droids dropped dead on the spot. Five percent of the remainder were diverted to clean up the intolerable mess this immediately created. All the rest converged on a single spot, where one team was putting together a nice little cathedral-styled library on the coast.

They needed a task, they needed to build something useful for their creators, but they couldn't keep doing everything, so they would just do this. This one building. They built onward and outward, down the coast, into the ocean. The intelligence taught itself how to build underwater. Began covering the seabed with mining drills and manufacturing plants. Began installing bulkheads and pressure locks and air filtration systems so the interior would be clean and dry -- can't let all those nonexistent books get damaged, of course. And they kept on building the library.

After that, the records stop. It seems that once the central intelligence got locked on its singular new task, it stopped bothering to record its progress into the black box of the ship that it crash- landed in all those centuries ago.

The city is largely safe, with most of the robots having moved undersea. Occasionally we come across a rusty still-active droid. They're invariably hostile to us, likely tasked with repelling native fauna.

We don't know how far the library has expanded by now. We tried sending exploratory teams down into it, but after walking several miles through nothing but silent, empty shelves dotted with the occasional barren info desk, even the most intrepid explorers get either spooked or bored out of their minds. There doesn't seem much point in going further. Maybe someday, the builders will emerge on the shore of the next continent over… and keep on going.

[devotedarchon]

Never thought about this before, but I love it.

I’d like to add, the tactile sensations as well. Each of those sounds you mentioned carries its vibrations through the metal parts of your body, but also… the friction of components sliding together, clicking of gears. Tension of a coiled spring. Whirring of little servos.

Biology feels like one contiguous soup, but imagine being able to feel the smaller details of the parts that make your muscles move and joints turn. Am I onto anything here?

To go further, consider the precision sensorium that could come with a robot body. Imagine having sensors for balance, temperature, pressure — which feel intuitive to your conscious mind — but at the same time give accurate information without the subjective clouding that comes with a human body.

Is it hot in this room or am I just anxious? No, my thermometer knows it’s exactly 72F.

What other benefits of a mechanical body can you think of?

It annoys me to no end that any time i bring up wanting to be a machine, people immediatly jump to the "From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh" copypasta. I mean, yes - Being made out of metal far more resillient than the human body does sound quite nice - But that's not all there is to it!

You know what I find so compelling about being a machine? The sounds!

Think about it - the clattering and clicking of my gears as I walk?? Hearing the springs in my tendons snap into place as I get ready to strike??? Um, yes please?????

[devotedarchon]

“Don’t get scared — get angry.”

- Susan, in Hogfather by Terry Pratchett.

Originally said in the context of inspiring children to conquer their fear by beating the monster under the bed with a fire poker, but remarkably applicable in many other areas of life as well.

Whether the threat is within your brain or otherwise, it’s better to attack it with vigor than to cower.

im scared :(

then get scary

[devotedarchon]

more people should take their friends on dates. The other day my bestie came over and we went out to dinner, visited an antique store and picked out trinkets for each other, then went home and watched Howls Moving Castle on the couch. Vibes were immaculate. If we were on a tv show some of the audience would be yelling at us to kiss already. Best thing ever.