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I do realize that there's canonical art for Wooden Overcoats characters, but I didn't see it until after I finished the podcast, so while I was listening, I just pictured Rudyard and Antigone as some sort of cartoon villains.

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hi! I want to make a patch for my jacket with the names of all the crew members of the first hephaestus station, and I kinda want to sort of mimic their handwriting, so do you have any headcanons for what their handwriting is like? (not only them but any of the other characters if you want— I love character's handwriting headcanons haha)

oh, that's a fun project!! i'd love to see it when you're done. and an interesting question; i cannot say i've ever thought about lovelace's crew's handwriting before, haha. you probably know more about handwriting styles than i do, but here are my ideas:

lovelace: generally legible, but not concerned about aesthetics. maybe a little slanted. mix of printing + cursive with no particular logic, just depends on her mood. has a semi-consistent signature, maybe with a bit of a flourish on the L that she thinks is fun.

lambert: even printing with frightening consistency; might as well be typed out. the only real variance in his writing is that you can tell how frustrated he is by the intensity of the lettering; he starts really gripping the pen when he gets mad. signs his initials and then writes his full name out underneath it.

selberg / hilbert: unreadable. barely even words. his written notes are indecipherable to anyone who isn't him, but he doesn't think anyone else should be reading them anyway. has one of those quick scrawl Doctor Signatures that doesn't look like his name at all. ... any of his names.

rhea: i hate to just assign her Digital Typeface, but all we really know about her is that she's professional and takes her job seriously. she gives me the sense that she'd prefer to type than write by hand, even if it was a viable option, but her handwriting would be very neat.

fisher: doesn't write much if he can help it, mostly fills out forms in big block all caps with whatever abbreviations he can get away with. definitely readable, but not exactly neat or even.

fourier: ... well. her diaries are proof she spent a lot of time writing by hand, and i would guess that's a lifelong thing for her. maybe it's just her appreciation for jane austen and similar writers, but she strikes me as the kind of person who would've gotten very, very into writing cursive. there's kind of a romantic, old-fashioned flair to even her casual note taking. definitely practiced a signature.

hui: complete opposite. he was supposed to practice, but was much more interested in other things, and his handwriting is notoriously kind of a mess. thinks much faster than he writes, and so will skip over words sometimes, etc. he also practiced a signature, but he wanted it to be abstract. hui and fourier definitely teased each other over their respective note-taking styles, especially given how often they were reading each other's notes.

i like to think maybe hui dictated his letters to his family to fourier, and she was the one who actually wrote them down - as a way to keep her close, and to give her some way that she could help him, near the end.

this is already long, but, briefly: the other three characters i have to talk about...

minkowski: incredibly neat handwriting, as a result of lots and lots of practice "standardizing" her penmanship as a child. keeps white-out on hand just in case. signs her full name in cursive.

hera: fairly neat, if sometimes shaky, and it bothers her if it looks too uniform; intentionally incorporates writing quirks that catch her eye; also a mix of printing + cursive in whatever way she thinks flows best.

eiffel: usually not unreadable, but definitely not neat. if he makes a mistake, he'll write over it to fix it and make it worse to the point it's illegible and then just leave it like that. has difficulty with writing in straight lines or even-sized lettering; it's all over the place. you know he's a doodler.

we do, in fact, have writing samples for him, courtesy of the dssppm:

... and he crosses his z's. i think that's cute.

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Such a big, big universe and you only gave yourselves the tools to speak about a tiny portion of it.

happy 10th anniversary to Wolf 359! here's some art I did for this occasion (and waited like two months to post it). this is an illustration of Am I Alone Now?, the first episode I listened to in the distant year 2017. this podcast is very dear to me, please listen to it if you haven't already!

(no text version is under the cut)

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in episode 37 (“overture”), when asked if she’s curious to know what’s been going on with the musical transmissions, minkowski replies: “tchaikovsky’s alright. i’m really more of a chopin gal, myself.” this could easily be written off as simply naming another random composer as a haha funny quip, but here’s the thing:

chopin was a proud pole. his mother was polish, and his father was french, the opposite of minkowski. he moved around a lot, and settled down in paris (the meeting place of minkowski and her husband), but ultimately didn’t quite feel “home” anywhere. he adored poland and its traditions, and the majority of his works include mazurkas and polonaises. honestly, if he hadn’t contracted tuberculosis, he probably would’ve moved there to retire. minkowski’s polish heritage is so deeply important to her that it influences even the music she listens to, which makes it that much more heartbreaking that she was forced to anglicize herself for the sake of being seen as a person.

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I've just started listening to the Welcome To Night Vale podcast, and I'm pretty sure that everyone in Night Vale only hates Desert Bluffs because they're the normal version of Night Vale.

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clap if you believe in podcasts

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hera after almost accidentally killing everyone on the station again

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beach day!! ☀️ (by @quibbs)

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circumstances surrounding the “leaked” documents about eiffel’s sentencing in need to know, as i understand them:

one of the very first things kepler does is offer eiffel, minkowski, and lovelace a drink. in true “at any given moment, kepler has about eighteen ulterior motives” spirit, it is, among other things, “hospitality”, sure, a test for eiffel, definitely, but… i think the main reaction he was checking for was minkowski’s. will she look at eiffel, or react to his reaction? how much does she know? how much does he trust her?

in don’t poke the bear, jacobi and maxwell stop lovelace from breaking into kepler’s server by pretending to be in on it with her: “she’s very good. it might turn into a problem.” / “i’ll run it by kepler.” two episodes later, files from kepler’s very secure server are “leaked.”

(the words "need to know" are spoken offhandedly by eiffel in the episode itself, but it also calls back to the excuse maxwell gives lovelace: "colonel kepler practically lives by the words 'need to know.' and, apparently, nothing i can say will ever convince him that i 'need to know' everything that's in our databanks.")

need to know opens with minkowski finishing an eleven hour shift, and then finding out kepler moved that shift to, well. now. she’s already frustrated and sleep deprived.

minkowski complains to kepler. jacobi and maxwell, on cue, barge in and complain to kepler. kepler assigns minkowski, jacobi, maxwell, and lovelace to punishment detail, taking eiffel out of the group because “you’re the only one who hasn’t wasted my time with pointless whining.” lovelace says: “um, i don’t think that i did any complaining either, so…” but that doesn’t matter. it’s just an excuse to remove eiffel from the group; he could just as easily have been singled out for special punishment. either way, it was going to happen.

hilbert isn’t there. not the most significant factor, since he’s already been effectively sidelined by kepler, but remember he already knows about eiffel’s sentencing, doesn’t care (about eiffel’s history OR about anyone else’s personal drama), and will later respond to minkowski asking by telling her to grow up and get back to work. it simplifies things to not factor him in.

consider the files themselves: we know from happy holidays that maxwell not talking to her family is common knowledge, but jacobi reacts like it’s news. we know from hera’s performance review flashback in memoria that kepler and jacobi were aware of “multiple attempted crew member homicides” in her record. the file about hera’s bentham directory was on kepler’s server. if there’s one person who would’ve been briefed on everything there was to know about hera, it would’ve been maxwell; her shock is entirely feigned. in fact, almost every reaction from jacobi and maxwell here is feigned. they’re black ops specialists who arrived prepared with divide-and-conquer tactics. there’s no reason they wouldn’t know these things. also note that none of the “leaks” reveal anything about the mission they didn’t already know, and that nothing about the si-5 is incriminating - if anything, it’s mostly silly and even humanizing. and, yes, all of that contextualizes maxwell’s reaction to “skiing?!”

eiffel’s file comes through last, once they’re already worn out. kepler sends eiffel to check on them at the same time so that he’ll walk in. jacobi shows minkowski the file. he lurks around waiting to see how her not-confrontation with eiffel goes, and then cements the thought in her head: what about you? are you going to care?

it’s true that there are aspects of the mission only kepler knows, but as far as information on the hephaestus crew goes (barring one very particular detail about lovelace)? that’s part of the job they were chosen for. when they kill the plant monster, kepler says: “you think we didn’t know about that thing? please. we listened to every log that you beamed down to canaveral.” kepler’s entire foundation is shaken when jacobi turns on him because this is how they operate: “have one person take the blame, say the mean things. meanwhile, the poor, betrayed little guy gets a bit more leeway - just enough to sneak up and hit you from behind.” the show is not subtle about any of this. you can pick apart any early-s3 interaction between two hephaestus crew members and an si-5 agent and see the same divide-and-conquer tactics at play. jacobi and maxwell are always - in morals, loyalty, job description - closer to kepler than they are to the hephaestus crew, and to even sort of believe otherwise is falling for that facade. it’s worth remembering that the hephaestus crew are prisoners. some of them were aware of it from the start, and some of them were lied to, but none of them were meant to leave. the si-5, on the other hand, went up there with a unified goal, and the knowing intention they would be, among other things, prison guards.

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wolf 359 is a show that poses many important questions such as “how much training do you REALLY need to go to space,” “is it still a war crime if you’re light-years away from the nearest living soul,” “how many times can you send one guy into the limitless void before he gets pissed enough to kill you about it,” “what if the ship of Theseus was a person,” “how many different ways can you kill someone without them dying,” and of course, “would that be fucked up or what”

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[ID: A traditional collage around a sketch of Hera from Wolf 359. Hera looks right at a 3/4th angle, with a slight smile and upturned eyebrows. The line art is sketchy pen, and it is colored in with watercolor pencil. The background is simple sheet music. Scattered around the paper are yellow stars, cut out from bulleted paper, cut out pictures of a night sky, and blue, striped washi tape. In the top right and bottom left are half priced books merchandise stickers. In the top left are the printed out and cut out lyrics to the bridge of Brick by Boring Brick by Paramore. In the bottom left are lyrics from the chorus of The Dog Days Are Over by Florence + The Machine. End ID]

In honor of Wolf 359's 10th anniversary, have a spread of Hera that I did a bit ago. Unfortunately I didn't have time to make anything bc I was moving. I am always thinking about her.

Fun tidbit! The sheet music is for "Eiffel Is Being A Bit Melodramatic Why This Time," or as its otherwise been described, Hera and Eiffel's theme, or the "tenderness" theme

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what gets me about minkowski and eiffel's relationship is that they are the polar opposite of "i would find you in every life" like i don't think they'd find each other in ANY other life!! they don't share interests; their values conflict; their personal habits and hygiene standards drive each other crazy. the fact that they end up desperately important to each other isn't based on any kind of personal compatibility, but just the bare minimum of "you are a person and you want to go home and we are in hell together" and that's ENOUGH because that's more than the prevailing powers want to allow them. minkowski is determined to get them home and eiffel is determined to make sure they do it without sacrificing what makes them people and it's moving to me that this scraped-bedrock common ground is enough for love to grow from

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Hello, 👋

I hope you are well. 🌷

My family and I are facing very difficult circumstances due to the war, and we urgently need help to save them.

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link here! best of luck to you and your family <3

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imagine you cut your hair and some random guy on a radio station with a track record of being in love with you doxxes the barber on live air because he hates it so much. love is love really

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i would say that the archives employees could get away with murder but that might seem a bit gauche (ft. a number of unnamed institute employees) 

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A very dumb doodle in PowerPoint (feat. Dr Sally Grissom)