kingofterrors

[kingofterrors]

Your are the monarch of a historical/fantasy kingdom, who perished many years ago and your name is only written down in recorded history, know only to future generations.

Out of the 130 options in the picker wheel here (all are gender neutral),

And yes: there is a 'no epithet' option in there.

I got The Oathtaker.

[kingofterrors]

@pscentral event 07: Space

↳ The Expanse + A Guide to Troubled Birds

(in/sp)

[kingofterrors]

someone on twitter is trying to claim that use of an em-dash is an indication of AI-generated writing because it’s “relatively rare” for actual humans to use it. skill issue

[kingofterrors]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/60873730/chapters/161550331

The Coven-less Witch - Chapter 7 KingofTerrors - Agatha All Along (TV) [Archive of Our Own] archiveofourown.org

Chapter 7 - Reap the Whirlwind

In which Agatha experiences consequences.

(8,381 words out of a total 36,795)

Here's a snippet from the beginning - as Agatha deals with the aftermath of the carnage of the last chapter.

-

She wasn’t sure, afterwards, exactly how she got out of Salem Village. But it must have been quickly, quietly, dodging from corner to corner, because if she had been seen by anyone, normal or witch, it would all have been over.

When she finally felt safe enough to pause she was well outside Salem Village, several minutes’ walk into the woods, and her legs gave way under her. She pitched forward onto her hands and knees, before she abandoned even that support and just lay prone, cheek resting on the leaf litter that coated the forest floor.

She breathed.

It hurt, she realised. Lots of her hurt. Her torso, where Grace’s punch had landed. Her knuckles - skinned and bruised. But most of all, her throat. It hurt to breathe. Every breath rasped.

But she was here. She was alive. The loam beneath her smelt good. It smelt good even through the salty copper scent of blood that overlay everything.

She breathed.

And gradually the trembling eased, and the weakness passed, and she pushed herself up to a sitting position, leaning back against a tree.

Her face felt weird – stiff and hard – so she scrubbed at it with her fingertips. Dried blood flaked off in big dark brown patches. There wasn’t much that could be done with her shirt and bodice. They were soaked through, and even with Anne’s best laundry skills, she didn’t think they would be salvageable. It would take genuine magic to shift those bloodstains, and it seemed unlikely Evanora would oblige.

Grace had bled a lot.

The thought brought her some satisfaction.

No surprise. How else should someone ‘born evil’ feel?

Born evil.

Agatha tried to feel around the edges of that thought, like a tongue probing at a broken tooth. But she couldn’t. Her mind shied away every time she drew close to it. Was it something the whole Coven truly believed? Everyone in the Coven? What about Anne? What about Mary? Had everyone been talking about her behind her back all these years? And right at the heart of it all – was it true? What did it mean if it was true? The questions kept coming, and she had no way to answer them. It was too painful. Better to concentrate on the practical for now. The existential could wait.

[kingofterrors]

[kingofterrors]

the plot of thunderbolts looks sooooooooo good <3

[kingofterrors]

[kingofterrors]

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

[kingofterrors]

I'm in a silly mood so spin this wheel and tell me

Tell us in the tags!

[kingofterrors]

on endlings, and despair

Hey, y'all. It's...been a rough couple of weeks. So, I thought--better to light a single candle, right?

If you're familiar with wildlife conservation success stories, then you're likely also familiar with their exact polar opposite. The Northern White Rhino. Conservation's poster child for despair. Our greatest and most high-profile utter failure. We slaughtered them for wealth and status, and applied the brakes too slow. Changed course too late.

We poured everything we had into trying to save them, and we failed.

We lost them. They died. The last surviving male was named Sudan. He died in 2018, elderly and sick. His genetic material is preserved, along with frozen semen from other long-dead males, but only as an exercise in futility. Only two females survive--a mother and daughter, Najin and Fatu.

Both of them are infertile. They still live; but the Northern White Rhinoceros is extinct. Gone forever.

In 2023, an experimental procedure was attempted, a hail-mary desperation play to extract healthy eggs from the surviving females.

It worked.

The extracted eggs were flown to a genetics lab, and artificially fertilized using the sperm of lost Northern males. The frozen semen that we kept, all this time, even after we knew that the only living females were incapable of becoming pregnant.

It worked.

Thirty northern white rhino embryos were created and cryogenically preserved, but with no ability to do anything with them, it was a thin hope at best. In 2024, for the first time, an extremely experimental IVF treatment was attempted on a SOUTHERN white rhino--a related subspecies.

It worked.

The embryo transplanted as part of the experiment had no northern blood--but the pregnancy took. The surgery was safe for the mother. The fetus was healthy. The procedure is viable. Surrogate Southern candidates have already been identified to carry the Northern embryos. Rhinoceros pregnancies are sixteen months long, and the implantation hasn't happened yet. It will take time, before we know. Despair is fast and loud. Hope is slower, softer. Stronger, in the end.

The first round may not take. We'll learn from it. It's what we do. We'll try again. Do better, the next time. Fail again, maybe. Learn more. Try harder.

This will not save the species. Not overnight. The numbers will be very low, with no genetic diversity to speak of. It's a holding action, nothing more.

Nothing less.

One generation won't save a species. But even a single calf will buy us time. Not quite gone, not yet. One more generation. One more endling. One more chance. And if we seize it, we might just get another after that. We're getting damn good at gene editing. At stem-cell research. In the length of a single rhino lifetime, we'll get even better.

For decades, we have been in a holding action with no hope in sight. Researchers, geneticists, environmentalists, wildlife rehabbers. Dedicated and heroic Kenyan rangers have kept the last surviving NWRs under 24/7 armed guard, line-of-sight, eyes-on, never resting, never relaxing their guard. Knowing, all the while, that their vigilance was for nothing. Would save nothing. This is a dead species--an elderly male, two females so closely related that their offspring couldn't interbreed even if they could produce any--and they can't.

Northern white rhino conservation was the most devastatingly hopeless cause in the world.

Two years from now, that dead species may welcome a whole new generation.

It's a holding action, just a holding action, but not "just". There is a monument, at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy, where the last white rhinos have lived and will die. It was created at the point where we knew--not believed, knew--that the species was past all hope. It memorializes, by name there were so few, the last of the northern white rhinos. Most of the markers have brief descriptions--where the endling rhino lived, how it was rescued, how it died.

One marker bears only these words: SUDAN | Last male Northern White Rhino.

If even a single surrogate someday bears a son, we have erased the writing on that plaque forever.

All we can manage is a holding action? Then we hold. We hold hard and fast and long, use our fingernails if we have to. But hold. Even and perhaps especially when we are past all hope.

We never know what miracle we might be buying time for.

[kingofterrors]

Severance - two in one

With the developments in the Mark S / Helena relationship in 204 we've seen the debate begin to really hot up regarding the ethical questions of having two people inhabiting one body - what that means for bodily autonomy, consent and freedom. All of which are nuanced and complex, and despite how hard we might want to boil them down to a binary good/bad explanation, I don't think it's actually possible. These questions are way too big for that.

But one reflection I wanted to offer is around the conscious / subconscious dichotomy presented in the show. Ben Stiller, Dan Erikson, and all of our actors talk about how both the Innies and Outies share a subsconscious. That this is where things bleed through - and Irving B's dreams are the key example of that. When he falls asleep in the office, these are the moments when elements from his Outie life bleed through - most catastrophically (or wonderfully depending on your perspective) in 204 following a full night of sleep and that incredible nightmare that pushes him into action. The subconscious could also be understood as the seat of instinct, personality, and drive - and again, we see this reflected in the behaviour of both Innies and Outies.

However, alongside this conscious / subconscious separation (in which we might better describe the status of the severance procedure as creating two consciousnesses in one person), we also have an memory / emotion separation. Petey talks about Mark S coming into the office with red eyes. He describes the process as "you carry the hurt with you, you feel it down there too. You just don't know what it is." So the concept is that severance cuts out memories - specific ones to the person, not the memory of which US states are which, or how to tie their shoelaces - but not emotions. So emotional hurt is carried from Outie to Innie and vice versa. But this also will extend to other emotions - love, fulfillment, satisfaction.

This rings extremely true to me as someone who works with elderly people, and often people with dementia. This is only a very superficial description of how some dementias can work, but in general terms these people are increasingly cut off from their memories, firstly short term memory, and then those longer term memories all the way back to forgetting how to die their shoelaces. This is why you might speak to a person who can't remember what they had for breakfast, and yet can remember in crystal clarity the picnic they had with their brother when they were seven. For these people, similarly to our fictional Innies and Outies, emotional memory isn't similarly cut off. These two parts of the brain are separated already. The hippocampus (memory) is separate from the amygdala (emotion), and feelings can be retained while the source of those feelings are forgotten.

This is one (of many) reasons why it's so important to continue to support, visit and love those we know who have dementia. Because although the source memory may immediately fade, the love remains. The feeling of safety and stability stays.

I just love that we have a show out there right now doing what Science Fiction can do best, exploring a real world concept in a fictional world that allows a new perspective on that exploration.

So severance might be:

Two identities / one person

Two consciousnesses / one subconscious

Two memory stores / one emotional core

Or an interesting combtination of all three. And the core question remains of course, as it always has, 'what makes a person'?

Bring on the nuance.

[kingofterrors]

I cant stop thinking about this absolutely brutal takedown umberto eco wrote about dan brown

[kingofterrors]

Spin this wheel of the top 50 fastest growing relationship tags of 2024 on AO3!

here's a link to the ships list

[kingofterrors]

Print in my shop :) https://emilyscartoons.myshopify.com/

[kingofterrors]

so, little vent under the cut

[kingofterrors]

Am I ever going to stop rewatching that final scene by the pool from 204? No. The answer is no. Holy shit.

I'm feeling vindicated - I knew it couldn't be Helly down there on the severed floor - and that reveal was something else entirely. Britt Lower deserves all the flowers, all the awards.

And now I go cry for Irving B.

[kingofterrors]

You have betrayed your coven.