#-processor range. and just senses in general

[banyanas]

man if i had an actual plot structure to use as scaffolding (because i can’t really do slice of life or things like it) i could write so many N and Uzi words that are just the actual practicalities and obstacles (varying in size and some seen, some unforeseen) of an interspecies relationship

[sam-out-of-energy]

OKAY OKAY IM NO WRITER BUT

This AU has consumed me, ok ok slay

Again @keferon 's mecha pilot jazz au

I thought about prowl and jazz on earth and Prowl being captured by humans and yeah yeah okay okay SO IMAGINE

Jazz wasnt fast enough to realize what the others had done with prowl

Prowl frees himself, prowl escapes by himself because Jazz comes in just. Too. Late.

Thats what i wrote lmao-

__

Prowls optic flickered in a dim light. Well, the one he had left anyway. A gaping hole now where his left optic had been before, circuits and wires exposed and tangled in a human scientists pathetic attempt at gouging out Prowls eye.

TacNet had been screaming error in his audials for the past few kliks, a blur of scenarios in his processor and a whirr of his engine told him he wasnt dead. Not yet.

"-because with this technology, we will be able to not only improve our mechas, but to create our own army." A frustrating, squeaky voice came to Prowl once he regained his sense.

Technology. That was all he was to them, to Jazz. A machine.

The organic was boasting about their achievements, about how with this technology they would create the perfect self-thinking robot. Ha.

A loud crunch rang out in the hall. Then another. Prowl lifted himself to sit where he had once been pinned down by metal, now torn off and dropping to the floor with a loud clatter.

"What in the-"

The general, or any of his subordinates had barely any time to react as Prowl whipped around, slamming his arm into the scaffolding they stood upon and bringing it down in a moments notice.

"I am not-"

He tore himself out of the restraints, standing. His arm plate would shift and move to make way for a blaster. Prowl aimed it up at the suprised organics.

"-your technology."

_______

Jazz had been running around frantically. Where's prowl, where's prowl, he'd asked everyone. They'd all told him no clue.

No clue his aft! It wasn't exactly like Prowl looked alike to any of the other mechas!

Did he run away? Why would Prowl do that??

Jazz had stopped in the hangar when it happened. A loud boom echoed out in the entire base. And another, and another. The floor trembled, concrete cracked the walls above.

He saw his comrades rushing for weapons.

No, no. It was exactly what he had feared.

Jazz was too late.

He'd arrive to a mess of metal, steel bars and concrete. Injured soldiers and bodies littering the floor where he stood, at the entrance of the hall.

"Prowl! Stop!" He'd yell.

Prowl would turn, looking over his shoulder and down at Jazz.

Well, down in the literal sense too, but down in a way Jazz had never seen him look before.

His optics- optic- was glazed over with a look that frightened Jazz to his core. Parts unreadable, like Prowl always was, but his lip curled down into a frown. Betrayal. His stare screamed betrayal and...

Anger.

Fury like Jazz had never experienced before. Not from Prowl. Never from Prowl. He'd been mad at the other before, sure, but it was always more like frustration, not pure hatred.

Now, Prowl looked at him like he looked at Jazz's comrades. Full of hatred for what they'd done, for what Jazz had done.

Jazz felt his own brain slow for a few minutes, but when he came back to Prowl had gone and he and any other surviving pilots were rushing for the mechas to give chase.

______

Jazz caught up to Prowl, late behind his brothers-in-mechas, staggering. This was all so sudden, he found his connection to the mecha a struggle at best.

"Halt! Put your weapons down and surrender!"

A mecha called out. Four- maybe five of them were stood on a highway in the desert, surrounding Prowl.

He can't put it down you dunce, it's attached to his arm, Jazz found himself thinking.

He saw Prowl's heavy venting, the drip of bright pink liquid from a surgery not-well-done, coming down from the underside of his face plate where it had been torn open.

It hurt him bad. If Jazz wasn't already struggling to keep it together, seeing the other looking like this didn't help him in staying connected.

Prowl's battlemask closed over the rest of his visible face with a sshink! and clearly, he was not coming easy.

Jazz watched, all he could do, as the other mechas charged in, trading blow for blow with Prowl, trying to grab or hit what they could to restrain him or to injure him beyond battle-condition.

Prowl grabbed one mecha, throwing them over his shoulder pad before another was already at his side. He turned and shot at them with his blaster, a blast through the underside of the right chest plate.

His optic frantically searched for the next target.

TacNet was still faulty, confusing and unintelligible gibberish ran circles in his processor as he tried to focus on keeping himself from being overtaken.

Unfortunately, Prowl now had a blind spot. A mecha came and swung around his left side when he was turned, grabbing onto his wing and with a loud wrUNCH-noise bent and tore half of it almost completely off.

Jazz's gut turned. The sound of everything else faded out when he heard Prowl scream in what Jazz could only imagine was fraggin' agony, ringing in his ear long and hard.

Jazz felt frozen. He watched the other curl in on himself and the opposing mechs surround him.

But that wasnt the end. A quick, muffled out communication between the boss and the other pilots, one Jazz wasn't paying enough attention to until he saw his fellow mechas begin to tear prowl apart.

Prowl had already been forced down into supine before the others began taking and pulling. First his blaster came ripping off his arm, his armour plates cracking as pieces snapped off in mechanic hands. His screams quickly became struggling, violent and heavy croaks of pain.

Something blasted through one of the mechas.

Then another.

"Gwen! What the fuc-"

The mechas turned as Jazz charged them, swinging his fist into the underside of ones chest, tearing out wires when he pulled back, to make sure he damaged something. He swung back at the next one and fired on the third.

"Dont touch him!"

Jazz yelled to the mechas lying on the ground, before flipping around and promptly rushing to Prowls side.

Jazz bent down and looked at Prowl, calling out his name as he did.

Prowl's optic was barely lit. His face engraved by his pain, straining to keep his systems running while barely avoiding an overload on his spark.

Jazz's mecha's chest opened and he crawled out, climbing down and landing on Prowl's chest.

"Prowl, prowler"

He called, leaning down and watching the other, eyes wide in desperation.

"Prowl! Y'gotta- y'gotta open up"

He was yelling, even if he didn't realize, slamming his palm against the others chest plates.

"Please! Please, Prowler, I'm gonna get you outta here-"

He watched the others unmoving face. Prowl's optic wouldn't even glance his way.

Jazz bit his lip so hard it bled before he dug his fingers into the crevices of the others chest, starting to pull, kick and struggle to open one of the latches.

He heard Prowl's venting get more rapid when the other finally looked his way, only to grimace from the ache Jazz was causing.

"I'm sorry! I'm sorry Prowl! I ain't gonna leave ya-"

Jazz kept pulling, starting to dig into his pocket to see if he could use a torch and melt the locks open.

He heard a click and a fshhh as the latch he had been tugging on began to crack open.

Jazz didn't have time to thank Prowl for his co-operation, cramming his way inside the others cockpit. He heard Prowl's ventilation whirring fast and uncontrollably, noting also the spark and crackle of broken mechanisms in the cockpit.

He magnetized himself to the floor, dropping down to sit in the pilot seat, turning the controls on manually since everything else was basically fragged.

Prowl lurched up a little bit, letting out a loud yelp as he did.

"Sorry! Work with me here-"

Jazz pulled, fighting Prowl's failing systems together with him.

Prowl staggered, but slowly managed to get up on his feet, Jazz's control pushing him to move through the pain.

"I know where to go, follow me."

Jazz barely spoke out loud, focusing intensely on keeping Prowl moving so they could escape the other mechas before reinforcements would arrive.

________

Thats all teehee

[lets-try-some-writing]

Absolutely adore seeing all the bits of writing on the bots reactions to the kiddos 🤣 Fr makes my day, just scrolling though feed and BOom your writing! So I randomly thought of the kids doing barbecues or picnics and sharing all their grubby food like Oo try this and maybe not as it’s spicy. What I mean is I’m sure the bots wouldn’t understand how human food can have so many flavours.

Glad to brighten someone's day! I am honestly startled by how enthusiastic people are about TFP bots reacting to things. I haven't gotten this many notes in like, three months. Its crazy.

Anyway, lets roll with this.

Cybertronians do have a degree of flavoring involved in their fuel. However due to the nature of energon, there is only so much flavoring that can be added before it loses its nutritional value, turns into high grade, or explodes in some fantastic display. Not to mention their ability to taste is severely limited, partially due to the simple fact that their sensory systems are more focused on external stimuli or processor function. In fact, most Cybertronians can hardly taste, if they have an intake at all. It simply isn't part of their biology. They have no need for it. Of course some get modifications in order to have a wider range of taste, and some are forged with heightened senses, but as a general rule most do not have the ability to note much.

At most they can read sweetness, bitterness, and anything that is metallic in nature. But spiciness, savory flavors, and most of the finer flavors humans experience are simply out of their range. Fueling can be enjoyable, but for most of their kind, it is merely a way to keep on going. But humanity? They eat for FUN, and that is odder than the team expected it to be.

Watching the children swap food around for the sake of flavor is... strange to the team. Seeing Miko give up what they can tell is vegetation that is highly nutritious to humans for a bag of chips soaked in all sorts of chemicals left most of them in a state of confusion. Jack offered up a sandwich, the arguably healthier dish, for a handful of gummies. Rafael passed over some sort of meat in exchange for Miko's rice. The exchange of nutrition was not orderly or equal in any way or form. Then sometimes the children would just eat each other's food without regard for the nutritional value.

The team couldn't understand it. Sure Cybertronians would trade fuel at times, but rarely was nutrition a concern. Humans swapping fuel left and right was just a tad strange. Not incomprehensible, but strange nonetheless.

Smokescreen has tried to eat human good once just to see if he could taste it. He could not taste much at all and ended up purging for the next day due to the food not going well in his tanks. Bulkhead also made an attempt once when Miko offered him food. He was stuck with cheeto dust in the grooves of his jaw for almost a week before he gave in and went to the washracks to handle it. Wheeljack made direct optic contact with Ultra Magnus and purposefully ate an apple that was offered to him, just to watch the commander squirm of course. He had to purge it all up an hour later, but watching the reactions of those around him made it worth it.

Ultra Magnus was tricked into eating human food when it was put into his energon once (by a certain wrecker). Magnus tried to hold it together, but ultimately he too ended up needing to purge. Ratchet has given the "do not eat organic fuel" speech far too many times to be happy about it.

[wifetomegatron]

you flare, you flicker, you fade (and in the end, all your tomorrows become yesterdays) [ megatron / reader ]

" I don't have a heartbeat,” She sighed sadly.

He regarded her, standing by the window. Under the half-light, her limbs look almost translucent, pale if not a little blue. That's what happens to organic skin when it oxidises to rot: tearing at the seams.

" Neither do I."

In which Megatron believes the personification of his guilt against humanity has come to haunt him in the late hours of the night.

rating: not rated, sfw! + themes & mentions of death relationship : megatron / f!reader fandoms: transformers (idw generation one) / idw 2005 / mtmte & lost light characters: megatron (transformers), ratchet (transformers), terminus (transformers), rodimus | rodimus prime, minimus ambus (transformers), rung (transformers) additional tags: angst, tangst with a happy ending, pov third person, idk how to tag this, refrences to edgar allan poe, references to ancient greek religion & lore, inspired by corpse bride by tim burton, the reader is referred as she and there's no usage of you but she/her , mentions of myth & folklore, euthanasia warning, death warning This is reposted from ao3 as it’s quite long (3,171 words)

" She said: when will we meet? I said: A year after the war ends. She said: When will the war end? I said: When we meet" — Mahmoud Darwish

01. After Trepan — after everything — Megatron doesn't dream. He can feel his processor spin and think during recharge, but he never dreams. And so when he dreamt for the first time, he almost forgot it was possible. Almost. 

His dream was a kaleidoscope of images, a flurry, a blur. His body was moving, but he remained still, watching a memory that didn't belong to him. And he knew this because he could hear the sea.

The universal translator is too gentle. There wasn't a word to describe the great ‘seas’ of Cybertron. Back when he toiled under Nova Point, he assumed — like everybody else —that liquid water was a rumour. And then he saw it, deep, silver mercury, unlike anything, roaring beneath the horizon. Yet he dreams of a sea he never saw, dark and vacuum, sealed under a storm.

Rodimus banged on his door. He was forcibly woken. Even when they were talking by his doorway, Megatron could taste salt in his denta: so foreign his intake nearly rejects it. 

02. It started with the humming. It was so quiet that Megatron wouldn't have registered it if it wasn't for how foreign it sounded: non-mechanical and soft. Too soft. A glitch in his audials was likely, with the fool's energon slowing his processor. Yet he remained sharp, vigilant the moment the sound rang from down the hall. As he tried to listen to the silence, the ship thrummed underneath his pedes. Everything else was in the right place: electric, electronic, the usual clicks from the coolers, the vents drumming above. And yet the tune remains, faint if not fading. Drift was soundless. And he was trying to focus. So when the mech asked him what was wrong, Megatron blamed the startle on the fool's energon.

03. She watches him from the corner of his peripheral. Playful. Shy. His optics drifted from the PADD — carefully, to not alarm Minimus — to make sense of her. Ratchet said internal hemorrhaging of the wires could lead to hallucinations, where the cyberium that lined his cables would inflate and leak; poisoning the Energon.

Behind him, she waved, wrist and elbow sharp and jutting, in contrast to the smooth, metal backdrop of the office. He diverted his attention to the conversation just in time. And when Megatron raised his helm again, she was gone.

Ratchet gave him the clear; he wasn't in any way incapacitated. And when he tells the CMO about tasting salt in the back of his intake, all he gets is a funny look. 

04. Cybertronians don't have taste receptors for sodium chloride: ‘salty’ doesn't exist in their vernacular, only recently introduced through the translator. The closest word they have to describing Energon is that it burns. Just a little bit. Alkali and acid dissolving against the dentae: bubbling like sea foam against the sand.

05. She is the name of the unknown. She died in Cybertron many, many years ago — in a time before him, in a time before the war. So those who walked after her used the pronoun to describe the unfounded. Those without dichotomy, those without truth. The Lost Light is she, and so is the vastness of space. Nautica — who is she, herself — refers to her unsolved equations as her, and so does Perceptor. She is the graveyard of hypotheses, waiting to be kissed alive.

So it’s only natural for Megatron to think she 's lab-made. An experiment went wrong, a failed refraction of light. Brainstorm did say he was experimenting with holoforms. And yet the scientist never recharges in his room down the hallway: always too busy and never wanting to be alone. So Megatron observes her like she is a creature out of a petri dish.

The ghost blinks. Once. Twice — eyelashes, batting against her rotting cheeks. 

It's rude to stare. She laughed. The sound was an airy, feathered thing. 

She doesn't seem perturbed by the fact that the left side of her jaw is hanging by the threads of a torn muscle. With the epidermis of her chin loose and gorged, he could inside her anatomy.

Dark red and wet, not even Brainstorm would replicate something like this.

Forgive me.

She held the wilted bouquet in her hands a little bit tighter.

It's usually bad luck for the groom to see the bride before the wedding. Do you believe in that?

Megatron doesn't know what he believes. He lies on his slab with her sitting by his window, and he thinks of the question as recharge swallows him whole. He was on a ship, lightyears away, and all he could think of was the texture of her throat as it flakes and cracks.

He doesn't believe in bad luck, yet humans have many names for it: karma, kismet. Megatron wonders by which name he should call her.

06. It takes him milliseconds to learn. Everything he needed to know about humans was handed to him on a silver platter, convenient and superior. Is this why he had thought of himself so high compared to them? Self-fulfilling prophecies who were so Darwinian and slow and stuck in their ways.

 (Yet, in the end, weren't they like that as well? Eons to live for, and yet they waste it on killing one another. He wasted it.)

He has lived through the birth of her first rivers, the christening of her people, and the rise and fall of empires as they pile atop one another. The passing of thousands of eclipses that humans can only dream of witnessing once within their finite lifespans — and yet here he was.

The humans would call him Icarian; held together by wax and pretending it was metal, plunging to his hypocrisy as he strays further from the sun.

07. Why a thing so innocuous? So naive and so docile.

A girl in a wedding gown. 

Even when his mind tries to conjure up something beautiful, he still finds a way to corrupt it. Maybe that's why she's undead, ribcages peeking out of the tear of her dress yet never heaving to breathe. He buried his guilt, and she decayed. It's perverse and he loathes himself for it.

Megatron tells himself that's why she's here. To make him answer for corrupting her soil, and even if his pillage on Earth felt like a lifetime ago, he remembers.

The only bride that he could think of was a dead one. What does that say about him?

Without Soundwave, at least not directly, he was safe in the knowledge that no one aboard the ship could spy into his thoughts. They would find him appalling — more than they already did.It was a good thing that she very rarely approaches him when he’s outside his quarters. And in the rare instances she did, no one would acknowledge her.

The end of her dress, dragging across the floor.

Ravage tries to convince him he’s been tampered with, that it’s shadowplay. He threatens to tell Soundwave and Megatron lets him. He tells him to do whatever he wants, as long as he leaves them alone — unless, of course, he’s content with listening to an invisible orator. And so the panther slinks back into the dark resentfully, muttering to himself about how the mighty Megatron’s gone mad.

He has, hasn’t he? 

08. She remembers nothing except the ocean, cold and majestic. Where she emerged from the tides — and he notes that her predecessor, their goddess of love, was also born out of foam — flush with the sheen of the sea. 

Then is grief born out of the sea? Megatron thinks. Did the Olympian create it at the same time she created love?

No. But people fight for love and love to fight. So love married war. She explained. The dyads then became synonymous.

And is that what we are? He asked her. A sequence of two, bind together to marry?

She smiled at him — bright enough to distract Megatron from the bone of her jaw that shifted from the movement. Until death do us part.

He wanted to laugh.

09. Terminus told him the ancient world was pitch black, and if anyone from today were to travel back in time to witness it, the emptiness would blind their optics if not drive them mad. A shadow so greedy that it crowds the air with its emptiness. That time, Megatron had briefly wondered if such nothingness existed. Yet, the same darkness had forged Solus: intelligent and beautiful, she was one of the first, flares of light. 

He thinks of the Prime as she offlines at the hilt of Megatronus' Star Saber. And even in her death, the last words she spoke were about love. Was that the start of the chain reactions that lit up Cybertron? Which of the two sparked the lucidity that charged life into the millions of dormant sparks? Her death or her love? 

(He has to remind himself that the same love killed her.)

10. The truth is symmetrical, cogs in the right places. Perceptor argued. 

Nautica rubs the side of her helm with both servos. Her tools, messy on top of the table.

Yes, but you see, we won’t be travelling in linear time. We’re planning to break free from that. If symmetry is your truth then where will that leave us once we go on a loop?

Something inside him hitched. Oh.

All optics were on him.

What? Rodimus urged.

Nothing. He lied. I didn't know we could get stuck in time.

That’s what happens when you don’t move on. Brainstorm shrugs. Time freezes you. So you have to learn how to melt it.

11. She says she feels cold. He assumed she felt nothing, numb as she fluttered her fingers experimentally on the shell of his armor. Numb with the same indifference she had with the lack of oxygen aboard the ship.

He didn’t stop her, trying to etch the feel of her curious touch. It felt like nothing, feather-like and ghosting across the surface like a stray draft of wind. He has to mentally fill in the gaps himself, and if Megatron thinks hard enough, he can pretend the warmth exists. That it lingers and clings to him.

Her fingers run along the ridge of his chin and the underside of his palm. Yet he's still not enough to chase away the cold. 

No matter how hard she tries, her kindness has no source in his stout and unyielding world. And so he is left to wonder what it would be like if she didn’t oscillate in and out of time and space. To feel her, whole and alive, would be mercy. That would be unfair.

Time and time again, he'd ask her: why are you here?

I'm waiting for my husband. She'd tell him, small against his open palms. We're going home.

Megatron feels as if the air compresses when she speaks.

Where is home? He'd ask her. Intake dry as he swallows salt.

The darkness of his habsuite doesn’t seem to touch her features, which appear bright, as if a private sun were hanging above her brow. She'd motion for him to come closer and brush her tiny lips against his. It felt like nothing. She was a shadow that had casted herself across his face.

The sea.

12. Megatron observes the little trinkets littered across Rung's office. They were tidy and upright, great big ships, each marking well-known voyages and exoduses. He imagines them cutting through the galaxy's undercurrent, great, metallic sails, reeling through the vortex of nothing.

Then he catches it, the small, black figure tucked away at the top-right corner of his shelf. 

Rung turns around in his chair to follow his line of vision.

The humans call it a raven. Of course, they don't come in the same size. They're small, as are all things Earth.

Laserbeak is sleek and sharp. Sentio-Metallico down to his core. Yet this bird — the real one — is a void with shadows. Slender beaks made of meat, and bone for claws.

Humans called them omens. 

And who would gift you a warning?

The psychiatrist looks out the window, round-rimmed glasses, clever under the light.

I don't remember. He lies, and the next time Megatron enters his office two days later, the bird is nowhere to be seen.

13. If she is born out of the sea, then that must make her a siren. She still hums a tune he’s never heard before. And it did lure him. And when Megatron tells her this, she shakes her head.

But a mermaid has no tears, and therefore she suffers so much more.

Cybertronians don’t cry either. He told her. And the look she gave him was withering as if he had trapped all the light and left her to sit in the dark. He was, after all, empty if not made of black holes. Is that why his spark feels heavy all the time, dense with the magnitude of his sins? And when the weight becomes unbearable, he tears himself apart, and with it he cuts through the fabric of space. The anti-matter was now leaking out of his optics, crawling past the sutures, wringing him iode by iode. 

Someone was calling him, but he couldn’t hear. The forcefield was cracking, shattering with him.

It was excruciating. Yet amidst the throes, he feels it, the light-headedness, the gradual rise and lull — in a way, he was crying. Maybe he was also made of oceans.

14. Megatron found a flaw in her story. Love didn’t marry War, and before they eloped, Love had married Creation; Solus has always been fond of metallurgy. That was her alchemy. And Venus used to seek refuge in the fire of her husband’s forge. Yet she was unhappy — why is that?

Why was he?

You could have been a creator. His corpse bride mused. That’s why you wrote.

I still do .

Do goddesses feel remorse? He thought maybe she didn't. War seduced her. And she had let him corrupt and penetrate and ravish. Megatron reminds himself it was symbiotic; she loved his wrath and his power. The Sun was their witness, and he claims she was unhappy because Creation was unkind to her. So she stared into the abyss.

And Megatron understood.

He thought of staying idle and evanesce under the mines, private and forgotten, without having dented the surface of his homeland. Now they tell stories of him, and his name is forever carved into the macrocosm. If not by words through wounds. And as the universe ages into senescence, will the pain — which echoes and expands like the gases under Croteus 12 — continue to bleed through generations to come? 

Outside, he could see the field of flowers. Ebullient blue, swaying gently with the wind. With the sun on the horizon and dusk to chase away the chaos of the night, Megatron stared at Terminus, worn and confused — and refused.

This won't be my legacy .

15. In another life, she promised, you could be a creator .

And what will I create ?

She was small, so small that he had to lift her up to his face, where she could make a motion to hug the side of his cheek with her body.

(Destiny had always made him feel small, she even more so.)

Love. You will love me.

He supposed that’s possible. He wanted, once a very long time ago, to be a medic. And maybe he could even be an explorer as he was aboard the Lost Light. Searching for lost things. Searching for her.

The blue, luminescent light above him flickered. And even higher above — two, three levels up in the sentencing chamber — the jury was deciding his fate. Footfalls chased away the sound of the sea. And so he pulled out his Rodimus star, crumpled and yellow, sitting in the middle of his palm. 

She smiled sadly at that.

And will I love you well ? He asked.

You know you will. 

16. It’s like falling asleep. She promises.

He was falling into recharge, but the word sounded garish, rough. Sleep sounded more like drifting. Sinking. She was there when he laid across the slab, where the monitors beeped and chirped as they pumped fluids into his cable — and he let them, drawing the curtains close.

She tells him to inhale, teaching him how to breathe. (The juxtaposition of it all made him smile inwards.) And when the air rushes past his intake, he could taste it again. The pull, the push, the hum of the great, big tides. They roll and crash into the sand, disappearing into froth. He dreams of standing across her, now at the same height, face to face.

No longer was he her resting ground to haunt. 

On the branch of a tree that appeared above him, a raven swooped down. The beating of her wings, tumbling through the mist.

My dear , the creature spoke.  He belongs to the gardens with the rest of my brother's creations . You belong to the sea. With me.

His bride was pleading, telling her that life has parted them, so it would only be right for them to be joined here.

And as if pausing to give her words a thought, the Raven turned to the west and crowed. Though you may not remember it, we have been here before. It will only be fair if I would send you both back. But know that the end stays the same. What is mine is mine, and what is my brother's is his.

Megatron doesn’t dream, but now he lives in one — where reality is no more than a distant memory, an echo from another, linear time. And so the ferryman lets Megatron guide his bride atop the boat, so they can sail out together, into the sea. 

17. De ja vu , she called it. A memory she had lived through before, even if it wasn't hers.

We are traveling in a loop. It's true. The quantum jump had worked, and now they all live in a forever dream, conjured up by Brainstorm and Perceptor's simpatico. The Earthling ran a nervous hand down the creases of her clothes, hesitant with her next question. Yet, Megatron was patient. (Waiting, it was as if they were both used to that.)

I think we met in a previous life. 

The glass atop the tabletop gleamed, and in the space of Swerve's bar — where the bartender was too far away to intrude — Megatron could hear the song of the ocean. There was no point in lying. He did come looking for her. And here she was, whole.

I think we did.

"And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea." — Annabel Lee, Edgar Allan Poe

[earthstellar]

A lot of mini-bots (and quite a few other bots) have what might be considered neurodivergent traits (or have been confirmed as such), and I wonder if certain frame types or classes --or Cybertronians in general-- might have physically type-specific processor structures which allow for greater diversity of thought, and if some frame types or spark types might be more or less likely to have or develop neurodivergent traits

We know the Quintessons fucked with the Well of All Sparks in the Aligned Continuity which had unknown effects, and in IDW 1 given the spark as the core of a person's individual spirit (for lack of any better phrasing), it would make sense for Cybertronian sparks to imbue individual personality etc. while the processors are physical hardware with software flexibility to permit and adapt to those unique aspects of self

For example, in the continuities where spark development influences protoform development and therefore what type of frame a bot might ultimately have, it is still simultaneously possible to alter a frame to some degree with armour changes, mass manipulation, etc. (and in most continuities, alt-modes can be altered as well, to at least some degree within the range of someone's core specs)

But the processor and spark are the two things that generally (although we have seen some exceptions to this) cannot be physically altered without incurring significant damage-- Making them some of the few constant components in a species designed to physically change

Sparks have significant individual variation in terms of the personality etc. that evolves from each unique spark, so perhaps processors have some physical elements designed to best accommodate a certain frame type, while also allowing for individual experiences and perception etc. to form unique thought pathways for each individual -- This would allow for any Quintesson or Functionism-related frame alterations or requirements, while also still enabling a spark to produce a unique person as it forms and as experiences accumulate

Sort of like genetics vs epigenetics in human beings; Some things are physical and structural, but some things are informed by environment, experience, etc.

It's interesting that we do seem to see a lot of mini-bots specifically who might fall into a neurodivergent category or exhibit behaviours or thought process that might reasonably fall under the category, but of course it's not universal so there is still greater variation

Although characterisation varies from series to series, here's a couple examples:

Cliffjumper tends to have impulse control problems that are sometimes similar to ADHD impulse control problems, and he sometimes has difficulty prioritising or hyperfixates on one aspect of a situation, leading him to reach the wrong conclusion or focusing on the slightly wrong thing; He also struggles to manage frustration. This could all be related to something similar to executive dysfunction, as it commonly manifests in humans with ADHD.

Bumblebee seems to be conflict-avoidant to some degree in most continuities, and aside from that being part of his friendly nature and kind disposition, it might also hint at something similar to rejection sensitive dysphoria, or a greater sensitivity and emotional response to perceived interpersonal conflict or perceived failure. Some versions of Bumblebee have particularly struggled when faced with high stakes/high risk of failure scenarios, and he has a tendency to internalise blame, directing it towards himself even when a failure is not necessarily his fault or even truly a failed mission. This is often comorbid with Autism and ADHD in humans, but it can also exist on its own.

It's not just mini-bots; Misfire canonically has ADHD in IDW 1, Geomotus in IDW 2 is Autistic and his neurodivergency is even highlighted by other characters, and so on.

So all of this (and how it might work) varies from continuity to continuity, but I just like thinking about how neurodivergent bots do exist, and how that happens and how it manifests and how it is perceived by others and by society at large is interesting

In IDW 2, neurodivergency seems to be viewed in a more understanding and positive light. But in IDW 1, neurodivergency may be viewed in a more ableist way under the Functionist system, and in the Aligned Continuity, perhaps neurodivergency is seen as a potential indication of Quintesson alteration of the Well or of the individual themselves (this would depend on a bot's age).

We don't have too many details on Cybertronian medicine in general, but it's interesting to think about!

It's 8 AM I'm gonna go have a tea now lol

[sphnyspinspin]

The General

— — —

The fight was over…this stranger that came out of nowhere got the jump on them. Arcee was pinned down underneath the newcomer’s left pede, Bumblebee was being held by his neck by only a singular, huge, servo, and Breakdown was decommissioned, as he was practically hurled across clearing. This stranger wore a decepticon badge across their chassis, and with that in mind, guess it would make sense for them to attack a seemingly defenseless autobot squadron when the opportunity arose. Despite one member of the group having a decepticon badge, that didn't stop them from being attacked by someone who was from the same faction apparently.

And then the stranger finally spoke, “Now that that’s settled…so tell me…how, and why, are you here?” staring straight into Bee’s optics as he was too banged up to properly escape the decepticon’s grip on his neck.

With gritted dente and a wince from the yellow autobot, he was just about to speak up until he was interrupted by Arcee’s strained reply, “Who wants to know? I-I take it that you’re not-ugh, from around h-here. Are ya?” as she was struggling to find some sort of bearing, she kept trying to hoist herself up, but the big pede connected to an even bigger bot kept pushing her back into place.

Looking down at the pink autobot underneath their pede, “That’s confidential. And I wasn’t asking you.” Then the weight underneath their pede suddenly shifted as they slowly added more of their weight onto Arcee’s already beaten up frame.

There might as well be a large footprint embedded into her chassis after this. As the pede lowered down, compressing Arcee slowly, until the weight was taken right back off of it, so that the autobot could appropriately answer the question. “Now let's try this again. And some quick advice, stay down and quit getting off topic, or else your friend here will have to face the consequences.”

A jolt of pain was being sent into Bee’s processor as the behemoth holding him up, tightened their grip around his neck cables. The big bot however, seemed somewhat internally agitated, almost as if they just wanted to get this whole thing over with.

The big bot in question was large. They were probably taller than Megatron. With dark gray faceplates connecting to a piece of dark plating covering where their lip-plates should be, limiting the amount of emotion they could express. Optics as bright and as red as any other decepticon’s empowering gaze. Armor colors ranging from a strong magenta, being the most apparent color of their chassis, to a bright yellow, covering their servos and the helmet decoration on the back of their helm.

The bot eased up on both their grip and the weight on their pede, and let out a grunt with a heavy sigh, “Listen…just tell me this, are there more of you guys on this planet? Are there more decepticons on this planet?”

“Like we would tell you that-hrkk-” Bee confidently replied.

“Let me guess, is it because I hurled your friend back over there? He's a decepticon you know…he was just going to use you-” then before they could finish their statement, Breakdown charged out from the horizon and chucked a large rock at the con’s head.

The heroic action backfired as their servo met the rock, catching it just as it was about to hit the back of their helm. What they didn't realize was that the second rock was being hurled right after, making a strong enough impact to their helm. Startling the stranger enough for them to drop Bumblebee.

Bumblebee took to nursing his neck, feeling new dents as he was practically strangled. Not wasting another second, he transformed his servo into his stinger and aimed it at the con while getting some distance between them.

Like it was just going to be that easy.

The con released their pede from Arcee’s armor, grabbed her by the shoulder, and threw her at Bumblebee, electrocuting them both. With Breakdown going as far as to hurl himself at the perpetrator, and taking another swing. Which was dodged immediately.

As the stranger roughly elbowed Breakdown in the back of his neck, he was knocked out. And while the con was occupied with finishing Breakdown, they kicked his body towards Arcee and Bumblebee. Colliding with the two, making them tumble even further from the enemy. Officially rendering them all beaten to a pulp.

Until the stranger finally had enough. They decided that these guys just weren’t worth it. Admittedly, they put up a pretty good fight, but it was almost too obvious that they hadn’t taken on anyone with their amount of strength in a long time. At least not recently that is. It was strange though…why in the name of Primus would three unlikely bots, one of which was a con, be on patrol together, on this dingy dirt-rock planet; far away from any cybertronian-colonized planet?

Right as the stranger was beginning to take off and leave the three bots for scrap, a blast was shot at the stranger—nearly avoiding their faceplate.

“Bumblebee! Are you and the others all right?” Called Optimus.

Bumblebee didn’t respond with words, but instead groaned and shakily held a thumbs up. And that was more than enough for Optimus.

The stranger was only stunned for a split second. Until they equipped their own ray gun. But they were more than just stunned at the opposition—they were absolutely shocked.

The Optimus Prime?! And Elita-1?! Alive?! But their peers said—

Before the stranger could properly absorb their newfound information, they saw something flying right towards the fight. Landing right beside Optimus and transform into…into…

Aiming and readying his canon Megatron began “Stand down! Or else—!” Megatron was prepared to face off this cruel stranger. But…he wasn’t prepared to see a familiar face. He lowered his canon and with anguish ridden optics and his vocaliser resetting he started.

“…Strika?”

“…Megatron?”

— — —

Context: Oh boy…I started writing this like MONTHS ago. Like, before the rest of season one came out, but the whole story takes place after the events of everyone saving the world and junk. If that makes sense? Also the ending is kinda rushed so…yeah.

[sunaleisocial]

New chip tests cooling solutions for stacked microelectronics

New Post has been published on https://sunalei.org/news/new-chip-tests-cooling-solutions-for-stacked-microelectronics/

New chip tests cooling solutions for stacked microelectronics

As demand grows for more powerful and efficient microelectronics systems, industry is turning to 3D integration — stacking chips on top of each other. This vertically layered architecture could allow high-performance processors, like those used for artificial intelligence, to be packaged closely with other highly specialized chips for communication or imaging. But technologists everywhere face a major challenge: how to prevent these stacks from overheating.

Now, MIT Lincoln Laboratory has developed a specialized chip to test and validate cooling solutions for packaged chip stacks. The chip dissipates extremely high power, mimicking high-performance logic chips, to generate heat through the silicon layer and in localized hot spots. Then, as cooling technologies are applied to the packaged stack, the chip measures temperature changes. When sandwiched in a stack, the chip will allow researchers to study how heat moves through stack layers and benchmark progress in keeping them cool. 

“If you have just a single chip, you can cool it from above or below. But if you start stacking several chips on top of each other, the heat has nowhere to escape. No cooling methods exist today that allow industry to stack multiples of these really high-performance chips,” says Chenson Chen, who led the development of the chip with Ryan Keech, both of the laboratory’s Advanced Materials and Microsystems Group.

The benchmarking chip is now being used at HRL Laboratories, a research and development company co-owned by Boeing and General Motors, as they develop cooling systems for 3D heterogenous integrated (3DHI) systems. Heterogenous integration refers to the stacking of silicon chips with non-silicon chips, such as III-V semiconductors used in radio-frequency (RF) systems.   

“RF components can get very hot and run at very high powers — it adds an extra layer of complexity to 3D integration, which is why having this testing capability is so needed,” Keech says.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) funded the laboratory’s development of the benchmarking chip to support the HRL program. All of this research stems from DARPA’s Miniature Integrated Thermal Management Systems for 3D Heterogeneous Integration (Minitherms3D) program.

For the Department of Defense, 3DHI opens new opportunities for critical systems. For example, 3DHI could increase the range of radar and communication systems, enable the integration of advanced sensors on small platforms such as uncrewed aerial vehicles, or allow artificial intelligence data to be processed directly in fielded systems instead of remote data centers.

The test chip was developed through collaboration between circuit designers, electrical testing experts, and technicians in the laboratory’s Microelectronics Laboratory. 

The chip serves two functions: generating heat and sensing temperature. To generate heat, the team designed circuits that could operate at very high power densities, in the kilowatts-per-square-centimeter range, comparable to the projected power demands of high-performance chips today and into the future. They also replicated the layout of circuits in those chips, allowing the test chip to serve as a realistic stand-in. 

“We adapted our existing silicon technology to essentially design chip-scale heaters,” says Chen, who brings years of complex integration and chip design experience to the program. In the 2000s, he helped the laboratory pioneer the fabrication of two- and three-tier integrated circuits, leading early development of 3D integration.

The chip’s heaters emulate both the background levels of heat within a stack and localized hot spots. Hot spots often occur in the most buried and inaccessible areas of a chip stack, making it difficult for 3D-chip developers to assess whether cooling schemes, such as microchannels delivering cold liquid, are reaching those spots and are effective enough.

That’s where temperature-sensing elements come in. The chip is distributed with what Chen likens to “tiny thermometers” that read out the temperature in multiple locations across the chip as coolants are applied.

These thermometers are actually diodes, or switches that allow current to flow through a circuit as voltage is applied. As the diodes heat up, the current-to-voltage ratio changes. “We’re able to check a diode’s performance and know that it’s 200 degrees C, or 100 degrees C, or 50 degrees C, for example,” Keech says. “We thought creatively about how devices could fail from overheating, and then used those same properties to design useful measurement tools.”

Chen and Keech — along with other design, fabrication, and electrical test experts across the laboratory — are now collaborating with HRL Laboratories researchers as they couple the chip with novel cooling technologies, and integrate those technologies into a 3DHI stack that could boost RF signal power. “We need to cool the heat equivalent of more than 190 laptop CPUs [central processing units], but in the size of a single CPU package,” Christopher Roper, co-principal investigator at HRL, said in a recent press release announcing their program.

According to Keech, the rapid timeline for delivering the chip was a challenge overcome by teamwork through all phases of the chip’s design, fabrication, test, and 3D heterogenous integration.

“Stacked architectures are considered the next frontier for microelectronics,” he says. “We want to help the U.S. government get ahead in finding ways to integrate them effectively and enable the highest performance possible for these chips.”

The laboratory team presented this work at the annual Government Microcircuit Applications and Critical Technology Conference (GOMACTech), held March 17-20.

[k00289929a]

’Assembly ; Artist Research ‘

William Kentridge, from Johannesburg, South Africa, is an artist with a huge range of mediums and expressions, from opera and film, to drawing in charcoal, collage, printmaking and more. His work often takes on a political and/or philosophical stance, likely due to his and his parent's involvement against South Africa's apartheid.

With my artist research, however, I am choosing to focus on his gigatic charcoal diptych of typewriters, drawn in 2003. These works obviously connect into my own via the direct primary source, though the diptych depicts different models of typewriters, which I could not conclude either way as Imperial Company models.

I particularly enjoy the difference and usage of tones between the two halves of the diptych, given the rightmost image is more stark to the eye with its darker tones. The background of the darker image, however, is balanced with the streakier, muddier background, which still keeps the leftmost image in its balance. I also particualrly enjoy the notebook-esque background of the first image, as it does heavily envoke the power of the written word, in all its versions and facets, though the notebook's lines imply this occuring in a more organised and premeditated fashion. The lines also help break the image, and generate interest as such, especially when coupled with the lettering so cursive it destroys its own legibility, generating a sense of curiosity in the viewer.

Another interesting contrast is the fact the leftmost typewriter is depicted either in use, as there is marks on the inserted page but their purpose as implied lettering or markmaking for the form is unclear, or just about to be put to use, whereas the other is absolutely stationary. Given the rest of Kentridge's catalogue, this could be some commentary on the relaxation in recent years of expressing one's voice in written format against political figures who do not widely represent the attitudes of the people they serve, or perhaps a simple commentary on the degradation and fall from grace of certain technologies as they become replaced. As with the case of the typewriter, by word processors and computing.

https://www.kentridge.studio/kentridge-biography/

[laptopexprime]

Unlocking Value: Refurbished Dell Latitude E5470 i5 and the Best Second Hand Laptop Deals in Jamshedpur

In the bustling city of Jamshedpur, finding a reliable and cost-effective laptop solution can often feel like navigating a maze of choices. Whether you're a student gearing up for the academic year or a professional seeking a dependable work companion, the refurbished Dell Latitude E5470 i5 from Laptopex stands out as a beacon of value and quality.

Embracing Value: Why Refurbished Laptops Make Sense

The appeal of refurbished laptops extends far beyond their affordability. At Laptopex, we specialize in offering top-tier models like the Dell Latitude E5470 i5, meticulously restored to meet A++ quality standards. Each device undergoes rigorous testing to ensure optimal performance, backed by our comprehensive three-year warranty and a hassle-free 20-day replacement policy.

Discovering the Dell Latitude E5470 i5: Power and Performance Redefined

Equipped with robust Intel Core i5 processors and generous RAM configurations, the Refurbished Dell Latitude E5470 i5 strikes a perfect balance between efficiency and power. Its sleek design and durability make it a preferred choice for users seeking reliability without compromise. Whether you're tackling intensive tasks or enjoying multimedia, this model delivers seamless performance.

Jamshedpur's Best-Kept Secret: Second Hand Laptops Tailored to Your Needs

For residents of Jamshedpur, accessing high-quality laptops is now more convenient than ever. Laptopex not only offers the Dell Latitude E5470 i5 but also ensures local availability and dedicated support. Our commitment to customer satisfaction shines through with flexible payment options, including pay-after-delivery, and a swift 20-day replacement window, providing peace of mind with every purchase.

Trust Built on Excellence: Why Choose Laptopex?

Our success lies in prioritizing customer satisfaction above all else. By importing commercial series refurbished laptops of unmatched quality, we empower our customers to make informed choices. Don't just take our word for it—read the glowing reviews from satisfied customers who have experienced the Laptopex difference firsthand.

Unlocking Value: Your Journey Starts Here

Whether you're upgrading your current setup or diving into the world of laptops for the first time, Laptopex invites you to explore the possibilities with the Dell Latitude E5470 i5. Embrace affordability without compromise on performance. Visit our website today to discover exclusive deals and embark on a journey towards smarter computing solutions of Second Hand Laptop in Jamshedpur.

Conclusion: Empower Your Choices with Laptopex

In conclusion, choosing a refurbished Dell Latitude E5470 i5 from Laptopex isn't just about acquiring a laptop—it's about investing in a reliable companion for years to come. Join countless satisfied customers across Jamshedpur who have unlocked unparalleled value with Laptopex. Explore our range, make an informed decision, and redefine your computing experience today.

This blog content aims to highlight the unique benefits of purchasing a refurbished Dell Latitude E5470 i5 from Laptopex while catering specifically to the interests and needs of readers in Jamshedpur.

[mobilebazarspecs]

Vivo NEX Dual Display: A Comprehensive Review

The Vivo NEX Dual Display is an audacious leap in smartphone design and functionality, pushing the boundaries of what a modern smartphone can achieve. Launched in December 2018, this device brings an innovative dual-screen concept to the forefront, aiming to offer a unique user experience that blends cutting-edge technology with versatile functionality.

Design and Build Quality

The Vivo NEX Dual Display is a visual and tactile marvel. The primary display is a 6.39-inch Super AMOLED screen with a resolution of 1080 x 2340 pixels, offering vibrant colors and deep blacks that are typical of AMOLED technology. The absence of a notch or a punch-hole camera enhances the immersive experience, providing an edge-to-edge viewing experience.

On the back, the secondary 5.49-inch Super AMOLED display is equally impressive. This screen serves multiple purposes, from providing an alternative way to interact with the device to facilitating high-quality selfies using the rear cameras. The inclusion of this secondary screen necessitates a robust build, and Vivo has delivered with a sturdy glass-and-metal construction that feels premium and durable.

Dual Display Functionality

The dual-display setup is the NEX's standout feature. The secondary display is not just a gimmick but a functional element that enhances multitasking and usability. For instance, it can be used to mirror the main display, making it easier to show content to someone else without handing over the phone. Additionally, it serves as a dedicated gaming control panel for some games, freeing up the main screen from on-screen controls.

Another innovative use of the secondary display is for photography. By leveraging the rear cameras for selfies, users can achieve higher quality self-portraits with the same level of detail and color accuracy as regular photos. This dual-screen arrangement also allows for creative photo compositions, with the ability to see the live preview directly on the secondary display.

Performance and Hardware

Under the hood, the Vivo NEX Dual Display is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset, a flagship processor of its time, ensuring smooth and efficient performance. This is paired with up to 10GB of RAM, allowing for seamless multitasking and handling of intensive applications and games without any noticeable lag.

Storage options are generous, with 128GB of internal storage. However, there is no option for expandable storage, which might be a drawback for users who require more space for their media and applications.

The device runs on Funtouch OS 4.5, based on Android 9.0 Pie. While Funtouch OS offers a range of customization options and features, it does have a steeper learning curve compared to stock Android, and users transitioning from other Android skins might need some time to adapt.

Camera System

The Vivo NEX Dual Display features a triple camera setup on the rear, consisting of a 12 MP main sensor with optical image stabilization (OIS), a 2 MP night vision sensor for improved low-light photography, and a Time of Flight (TOF) 3D camera for advanced depth sensing and facial recognition.

The absence of a dedicated front camera is ingeniously compensated by the dual-display system, allowing the rear cameras to be used for selfies. This not only provides superior image quality but also ensures that users have access to all the advanced camera features for their self-portraits.

The camera performance is impressive, with the 12 MP sensor capturing detailed and vibrant images in various lighting conditions. The night vision sensor significantly enhances low-light photography, reducing noise and bringing out more detail in dark environments. The TOF 3D camera adds depth-sensing capabilities, improving portrait shots with more accurate and pleasing bokeh effects.

Battery Life and Charging

The Vivo NEX Dual Display houses a 3500 mAh battery, which, while not the largest in its class, provides sufficient power for a full day of moderate to heavy use. The power efficiency of the Snapdragon 845 chipset, combined with intelligent battery management features in Funtouch OS, helps in maximizing battery life.

For charging, the device supports fast charging with an 18W charger included in the box. While this isn't the fastest charging technology available today, it is still capable of providing a significant charge boost in a relatively short period.

User Experience and Software

Funtouch OS offers a unique take on the Android experience, with a focus on customization and additional features. The interface is heavily customized, with a layout and design that differs significantly from stock Android. It includes various gesture controls, app cloning, and a game mode that optimizes performance and blocks notifications during gameplay.

One of the standout software features is the Jovi AI assistant, which integrates deeply with the system to provide contextual information, smart scene detection in the camera, and various other AI-driven enhancements. However, users who prefer a more traditional Android experience might find the customization and additional features overwhelming at first.

Unique Features

Apart from the dual-display system, the Vivo NEX Dual Display packs several other unique features that set it apart from the competition. The Lunar Ring, a circular RGB LED ring around the secondary display, provides customizable lighting effects for notifications, music, and other alerts. This adds a visually appealing and functional element to the device's design.

The in-display fingerprint sensor on the main display is another notable feature, providing a convenient and secure method for unlocking the device. While this technology was still relatively new at the time of the NEX's release, Vivo's implementation is fast and accurate, contributing to a seamless user experience.

Conclusion

The Vivo NEX Dual Display is a bold and innovative smartphone that challenges conventional design norms with its dual-screen setup. It offers a unique combination of features that cater to a variety of user needs, from high-quality photography to enhanced multitasking capabilities. While it may not appeal to everyone, particularly those who prefer a more traditional smartphone experience, it undeniably represents a significant step forward in smartphone innovation.

With its powerful performance, versatile camera system, and a host of unique features, the Vivo NEX Dual Display stands out as a pioneering device in the competitive smartphone market. Whether you're a tech enthusiast looking for the latest innovations or someone who appreciates functional design, the NEX Dual Display is a compelling option worth considering.

[beastwithsixcapezios]

I’ve seen like 3 posts on my dash today all being like “If you’re a writer, you should be doing this or that” or “Don’t do this or that or your writing will be shit forever” and…

Guys. Just… stop it. Please, just stop.

The only writing advice anyone should be giving is “Just fucking write.”

Because the magical thing about the world of art in general is that it’s so vast and diverse. That even in the worst books there can still be moments that grab our souls and stick them in a food processor with the soul of the author that bore it there for you. Death of the author can never be a thing because art comes from the carnal emotions inside of us. We create because something in our chests is taking a nail file to our ribcage and threatening to burst out if we don’t give it another escape. The moment you start putting limitations on yourself and start taking the advice of tumblr writers telling you “You shouldn’t even think about beginning a first draft if your story is outlined” or “Don’t write fanfiction it’s bad for you!!!” That thing inside of you is going to get scared. It’s going to see all of the beating you have planned for it and decide to stay cocooned inside of you until you’re driven (sometimes literally) mad.

But if you give it a wide open range, free of intense initial judgement, and you nurture it as it spills out rather than trying to force clay into shape that’s not even on your wheel yet, suddenly the pathways of creation will become SO MUCH clearer.

The only advice I give at the start of writing classes before we go into shaping what we’ve already made is this: Set aside at least 5 minutes a day to sit in front of paper and thought vomit. Just full stream of consciousness writing. Don’t start with an idea, don’t start with a prompt, just start with what’s running through your head at that moment. Sometimes you’ll be in the mindset of fiction so you’ll start throwing out snippets of characters and plots that don’t fit anywhere or make any sense. Sometimes everything that comes out will sound like it’s being read from a 5 year olds diary and that’s okay! You can burn the paper afterwards if you want to, you’ll never need it again. The point is to clear the mental block that’s keeping you from expressing ideas.

As you grow, you might find that creation for YOU does happen during planning stages, and that’s great! You might also find that trying to plan a plot ruins writing for you and that’s also great! Do whatever works for YOU specifically. Put down the Stephen King ‘On Writing’ book, it’s not going to save you, nothing will except genuine self exploration.

Your writing style will develop no matter what you’re writing. Your understanding of world building and characters will develop no matter what you’re writing. You will hate your first pieces but they will be creations born from you, and that’s still beautiful. Your Thomas the Tank engine fanfic is beautiful. Your Onceler fanfiction is beautiful. You created SOMETHING while everyone else only thought about doing so. That’s AMAZING! Maybe not to anyone else, and that’s okay because you shouldn’t be writing for anyone else in the first place!

[tatatechnologies]

How AI/ML applications are transforming the automotive value chain

AI driven ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) technologies are definitely going to be a ‘standard feature’ in each vehicle that would come out from production line very soon.

Five to six years ago, we used to find AI/ML applications mostly in web and e-retailer domain from the tech powerhouses like Google or Amazon. Then slowly people started thinking about the of possibilities of taking it to the engineering and manufacturing domain and leveraging the power of AI. This became a reality when businesses got a sense of the power of data insights and decided to capture critical information in a structured and disciplined manner. Today we find most of the research and innovation projects are powered by AI/ML, not just because the complex algorithm libraries became the open-source but also because of sheer computation ability of GPU/TPU (graphical processing unit and tensor processing unit) powered infrastructure quickly churning huge amount of data, giving multiple possibilities of configuration and optimisation.

Autonomous Vehicles and ADAS

Today, car manufacturers are racing to develop the technology to make fully self-driving cars a reality. Advances in processors, camera technology and AI have brought us closer than ever before. Developers of self-driving cars use vast amounts of data from image recognition systems, along with machine learning and neural networks, to build systems that can drive autonomously. Though the ‘full driving automation’ where the driver does not exist anymore and the human being becomes a passenger, may not be realistic or very popular in countries with huge traffic congestion, but the AI driven ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) technologies are definitely going to be a ‘standard feature’ in each vehicle that would come out from production line very soon.

Automotive Safety

A lot of work has already been done in automotive safety, starting from automatic emergency braking, pedestrian detection, surround view, parking assist, lane departure warning, and so on, and it seems that the sky is the limit. AI algorithms can analyse sensor data to identify potential dangers in real-time, which mitigates the risk of accidents. AI-based safety features, such as blind-spot detection and adaptive cruise control, use sensors and cameras to detect vehicles in the driver's blind spot and monitor the distance between the car and the vehicle in front. Various safety features starting from “driver distraction/drowsiness/rash driving alerts” to “advance road irregularities notification” (potholes, speed breaker, etc.) are also part of AI-powered safety systems.

Personalisation

Driver and passenger comfort through personalised experience is also an emerging area of application of AI where successful use cases range from interactive voice command to configuring a seat relaxation function, altering the interior lighting, music, air-conditioning, illumination intensity etc.

Product Design and Development

Having talked about product (vehicle) specific and customer (driver, passenger) experience centric applications, AI is also revolutionising the way product design, development and production are carried out. The Auto OEMs are extremely concerned about the cost optimisation and productivity improvement to stay ahead in the market and hence, using AI extensively to improve underlying processes, saving on material resources and improving on time to market.

And no regret, AI has not disappointed them. It is going to be a reality soon when Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) will start throwing multiple vehicle concept sketches basis a few input requirements for quick evaluation. Various cognitive models are already in action to bring down NVH (Noise, Vibration & Harshness) in the vehicle, thus improving overall vehicle quality. A driver assistance system scales Real Driving Emission (RDE) trip validity from existing 35% to 80% and thereby reducing RDE testing expenses by 44%. Predictive failure or underperformance of components has led to consumers to stay alert and helped in informed decision making to reduce overall turnaround time, particularly in commercial vehicle space! For example, Tyre wear and engine nozzle failure issues during the warranty period are reduced by 20% and 35% respectively, thanks to real-time field data made available through ‘Connected Vehicle Platform’.

Manufacturing

AI is redefining manufacturing practices with implementation of Industry 4.0 that are otherwise impossible to achieve. IoT and AI are truly revolutionary technologies that use real-world data to improve business practices and help companies make better decisions. Below are the ways that AI help automotive companies reduce costs and optimize manufacturing processes:

a.         Quality Control

b.         Predictive maintenance

c.         Production optimization and integration

d.         Digital twin

AI analyses historical operational data of an equipment and compares with its current state of operation to forecast whether the equipment performance is optimal or needs maintenance. It can even establish relationship between equipment operational data and failure instances to predict Remaining Useful Life (RUL) of the equipment or its components. Avoiding unplanned downtime, reducing maintenance cost and improved asset utilisation are the key business benefits here.

Total Cost of Ownership

TCO has always been a concern for the fleet owners and fuel economy remains a universal expectation. To address that several models are being worked upon incorporating manufacturing parameters, powertrain calibration as well as consultancy on driving patterns and behaviours. 

Sales and Service: AI is being imbibed into sales and marketing, giving a boost to retail prognosis, customer propensity, and likelihood of deal conversion. Service and warranty are the two major areas where there are lots of scope for AI driven decision-making, automation in claim validation and brining out actionable insights for all stakeholders like suppliers and engineering and plant quality teams.

NextGen Generative AI and Foundation Models

Traditionally, people used to build ML models using historical labelled data and used it for prediction purposes. Now with the introduction of Generative AI, the new trend has become working on huge unlabelled data on a self-learning mode and let thus created Foundation Models adapt to prediction and other decision-making tasks. Clearly, there is a shift from traditional ML models to Foundation models.

Advancements in AI, such as reinforcement learning and deep neural networks, will continue to shape the evolution of autonomous vehicles and connected cars. Further integration of AI into the automotive ecosystem will result in enhanced safety, improved energy efficiency, and a seamless driving experience.

Original Source: https://www.tatatechnologies.com/media-center/how-ai-ml-applications-are-transforming-the-automotive-value-chain/

Avijit Santra, Program Manager at Tata Technologies.

[zody77-blog]

Vivo X100 Pro+ Release date, Price, Specs

Fixed Focus Digital, a tipster, has provided an imagined depiction of the next Vivo X100 Pro+, revealing its appearance based on leaked information. According to the depiction, the vivo X100 Pro+ will include a camera module on the left side, encased within a rectangular matrix area. This design looks to be comparable to the Vivo X80 series, implying a continuation of aesthetics rather than a dramatic divergence from the Vivo X90 series. A Closer Look at the Aesthetics of Vivo X100 Pro+ The Vivo X100 Pro+ is expected to be released early next year, according to another tipter, Digital Chat Station. The lower-end variations, notably the Vivo X100 Pro and vivo X100 basic versions, are expected to be launched before the end of this year. According to reports, the MediaTek Dimensity 9300 processor will power the Vivo X100 and X100 Pro, while the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile platform will power the X100 Pro+. This implies that vivo believes the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 outperforms the Dimensity 9300 in terms of overall performance. It is worth mentioning, however, that Vivo and MediaTek are apparently working together to enhance the Dimensity 9300 chipset in order to maximize its performance. According to reports, the vivo X100 will include a rear camera combination that includes a 50-megapixel Sony IMX989 primary sensor, a 32-megapixel ultra-wide-angle lens, and a 12-megapixel periscope telephoto lens, as well as dual optical image stabilization functionality. The final edition of the vivo X90 series, the vivo X90s, is slated to be launched prior to the debut of the vivo X100 series and will serve as the official gadget for the Hangzhou Asian Games.

Vivo X100 series to get a major camera upgrade with a periscope lens The Vivo X90 series was just introduced in the worldwide market, and leaks about the next-generation lineup have already begun. The Vivo X100 series will most likely include the X100, X100 Pro, and X100 Pro+ devices. The Pro+ model is expected to be released early next year, after the release of the other two models later this year. While we wait for its arrival, a source has revealed that the series will have a considerable camera update, featuring a periscope zoom lens. Here are the specifics. Vivo X100 continues to focus on cameras Rumors on the Chinese social media site Weibo claim that people are divided into two groups when it comes to the Vivo X100 series. One states that the Vivo X100 will not include a periscope lens, while the other insists that the series will include a periscope camera. Since the release of the Vivo X70 Pro series in 2021, Vivo has included a periscope telephoto lens in its flagship phones. As a result, it doesn't make sense for the X100 range to be without this capability. According to a recent source, the X100 will use a Sony IMX9-series 1/14x-inch main sensor, a 12-megapixel Sony IMX663 ultra-wide lens, and a 64-megapixel OmniVision OV64B telephoto lens. The primary camera is claimed to be an improved form of the IMX9-series sensor and an updated version of the IMX866. The X100 Pro, on the other hand, is said to include a 1-inch primary camera, a new periscope zoom camera, and potentially the 12-megapixel IMX663 ultra-wide lens. The Dimensity 9300 chipset is reported to power the Vivo X100 and X100 Pro. Both smartphones are scheduled to be released in China as early as November of this year. The X100 Pro+, which is expected to be paired with the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 CPU, is expected to be released in the first quarter of 2024. Read the full article

[caparrucia]

Dog whistles and you: why the words you use matter.

You've probably heard of them, but you have definitely heard them. Dog whistles are a problem in the modern internet, with our hyper focus on respectability politics and social media's aggressive push to simplify all concepts and erode all sort of nuance.

When people use them and when people point it out, people get really fucking angry, both ways, and it can be a little hard to understand why and what people are actually angry about. So let's try and untangle that a bit.

Content warnings! We're gonna be talking about Nazis and other genocidal groups, so that's always fun. We're also gonna tangentially discuss misogyny, antiblackness, antisemitism and sexual assault, sexual abuse, pedophilia and zoophilia. The tangential warnings are only applicable to non-explicit discussions of dog whistles in section 3. Sections 1 and 2 do not go into detail about specific dog whistles. I will reiterate the content warnings in section 3.

1. What are dog whistles?

Dog whistles are not actual, literal dog whistles, but it does help to know what an actual, literal dog whistle is, to understand the metaphor. A dog whistle is a whistle designed to be heard by a dog, but crucially and most importantly, not by a person. When you toot on the thing, it makes a quiet, almost imperceptible sound, but if you've trained a dog with it, the dog will go fucking bonkers. The science of it is actually really cool and has to do with the range of intensity of stimuli that different animals can perceive. You know how dogs have an infinitely better smelling sense than you or me? Their hearing is different. That whistle you and I can't really hear, they hear loud and clear.

So what are the metaphorical dog whistles about then? They follow the same principle. Metaphorical dog whistles (I'm gonna call them just dog whistles for the rest of this thing, because I'm lazy, but you're smart and we already defined the terms, so I trust you to keep up) are words with different meanings depending on the audience. That's not inherently malicious, or unique to dog whistles. 99% of the crude humor of humanity comes from that sort of thing: cock is a male bird of a domestic fowl species, and also a bad word that will get you demonetized from Corporate controlled internet if you say/type it anywhere a payment processor can see. So there has to be more to them, than having multiple meanings.

Specifically, dog whistles have "Jekill and Hyde" style meanings. One of them is pretty harmless, benign even. Completely innocent and not at all suspicious. The meaning equivalent of that scene in Snow White with the forest animals being all cute and soft and nice. But then there's the other meaning, and that meaning is not so nice. It can be a shorthand for a slur, or one of the highlights of a conspiracy theory, or represent a shorthand for something genocidal in nature. I'll go in more detail in the next section.

This is where most people stop talking about dog whistles, but I'm not gonna do that, because I think the next two things, that are also required for a dog whistle to be a dog whistle, are actually the most important. And the fact most people never stop to think about them is why dog whistles are so effective. So let's say the quiet part out loud now.

The third characteristic of dog whistles is that their nefarious meaning is in fact a nefarious secret meaning. That means this meaning is part of a closed system of belief. It's like the secret wizard password to enter the forbidden tree house club, except the wizards are Nazis, members of the KKK and other assorted genocidal fucktwits. It's not a nice club to be in, is what I'm trying to say, and the people in that club are generally acknowledged to be not very nice themselves. You might think I'm being glib here, but this is the important bit. Socially speaking, these clubs for genocidal dickheads are considered bad to some degree. There's at least a modicum of societal pressure to discourage people from belonging to these groups. If you're a Nazi and your boss finds out, they will fire you. If you're a Nazi and you walk into a bar, you're likely to get beaten up and told to never come back. Blatant, open membership to these groups is discouraged*, and therefore they need to come up with language and symbols that they understand to be supporting their ideology, but which might not get immediately recognized by outsiders, thus prompting that social retribution they're trying to avoid.

*This is why people are really freaked out by the rise of extremist social and political movements in today's world, because every time an alt-right dudebro feels comfortable just spouting the N word or beating a random trans person in the subway, and they're not immediately and swiftly punished by anyone from bystanders to the actual legal system, those social pressures start letting up and the scum starts to float up into the surface. This is why the punching Nazis rhetoric works. It's a 0 tolerance policy that keeps genocidal ideologies marginalized and out of public consideration.

And let me just say this on its own, yes, genocidal ideologies should be marginalized and kept out of public consideration. Because they're genocidal. There is nothing of value to be found in genocidal ideologies, and extending them any kind of consideration makes you complicit in the very real, actual genocide they're working towards. Yes, really.

The last characteristic of a dog whistle is also the most important and the one people get tripped by the most: It refers to a dog whistle's ability to launder the philosophy of the group that created it, planting the seeds of it in the public sphere and priming people to be radicalized. One of the most common, and frankly distressing, reactions I see whenever someone gets called out for using dog whistles is "it's okay, I'm not a [insert relevant genocidal group here], it's okay if I use it, because the idea behind the word is actually useful!" Intent does not change the nature of a dog whistle. Dog whistles are in fact designed to trick you into doing their work for them. Dog whistles are bad, because when you use them, you lend your credibility to them. So the next time your friends/family/followers see an actual Nazi use them, they will use you as a frame of reference, and give the Nazi a pass. "My friend/relative/fave uses this word all the time, and THEY aren't a Nazi, so what are the chances that this guy is? Besides, all Nazis wear swastikas and like, shaved heads or something. Nah." Congratulations, you have become complicit in the breakdown of the system that's supposed to keep those Nazis out and allowed one of them to walk in and make themselves at home in your community.

Hearing people constantly use dog whistles desensitizes people and erodes their ability to see them for what they are. It makes it normal to use loaded language - and all dog whistles are loaded language - and makes it hard to police and expel those who use that loaded language for its actual nefarious intent.

It's also important to know a lot of dog whistles are "ship of Theseus"'d into sounding reasonable, for the purpose of making people more receptive to extremist ideas and concepts. By that I mean, they start from their very obviously genocidal talking point, and then slowly replace bits and pieces, laundering it until it sounds... you know, reasonable. Understandable. Most of the time they achieve this by targeting strong emotional responses and priming people to accept concepts that are fundamentally against their best interests, but presented in a way that appeals to emotionality and discourages thinking through the implications.

2. "If you hear the whistle, you're the dog" and other bad takes that need to go die in a fire.

So now that we're all on the same page about what dog whistles are and what purpose they serve, we need to talk about what to do about them. Yes, I'm gonna go into that before going into a not extensive and definitely not exhaustive list of dog whistles, because I love you and also because this is tumblr and you guys have a habit of trying to turn everything into a fucking standard rule to then beat up people with. No-nuance, all-outrage mentality in social media is the thing dog whistles are designed to exploit. So let's do our part to not... you know. Do that.

My least favorite rule that people have come up with to try and deal with dog whistles while doing the least amount of critical thinking ever is the infamous witticism "if you hear the whistle, you're the dog." This means that if you understand the dog whistle, you must be its target audience (you know, the Nazi one) and therefore you're a bad person. This is extremely stupid if you spend two seconds thinking about it, so let's do that: if the ideal is for people to "not be the dog", ie, "not hear the whistle" and therefore not understand the second, hidden meaning of the dog whistle, that would mean the ideal is for the dog whistle to work just as intended. Which is a bad thing, need I remind you, since the thing dog whistles are working towards is normalizing and encouraging the acceptance of explicitly genocidal ideologies. Which are bad! And you know they're bad! Because they're explicitly aiming for genocide! But this stupid nugget of stupidity goes one step further and also penalizes those who are being targeted by the dog whistle's users. Remember, genocides target people. Groups of people, to be precise, that the genocide promoters have built an entire ideology to justify why they get to commit genocide against this specific group of people. The justifications and reasons don't have to be very good - they can't, in fact, be good at all, because genocide is never okay, and if you find yourself trying to argue, you might want to take a few steps back and figure out when you got poisoned by genocide ideologies - in the sense that they don't need to be logical or reasonable. They just fill in a gap in the thought process. Whenever people do something, someone will ask them why, and genocide is surprisingly no different in that regard. So the justifications and reasonings are all salad dressing. They're all bad and meaningless and stupid, because they're being used to justify genocide, and genocide is unjustifiable by definition. The point is don't try to argue about the reasons, the reasons are fake and don't matter and they're there only to trap people into perpetual argumentative sinkholes which often only create more net harm by virtue of putting all that genocidal rhetoric in your public space. Incidentally, this is why deplatforming and denying the space to defend/argue/discuss genocidal ideologies is the preferred method to deal with them, exposure to them is in itself inherently harmful and there's nothing productive to come with allowing them the chance to explain why they think genocide is actually a good idea.

ANYWAY, the point is: if you're a group that has been targeted by these genocidal ideologies, you need to be able to decode and understand the secret, hidden meaning behind those dog whistles. You have to. Otherwise you're gonna end up a gruesome statistic some dipshit politician will try to use to two-side the issue on Fox News. You can then see how it's incredibly stupid, not to mention unspeakably offensive, to tell people who are being targeted by genocidal dipshits, that if they understand what the genocidal dipshits are really trying to say (remember, that THEY specifically should be genocided), they might in fact be the genocidal dipshits themselves.

Yes, "if you hear the whistle, you're the dog" is a very witty, very snappy, very catchy phrase. It's also incredibly fucking stupid and also goddamn insulting. Stop using it. Stop rewarding people who use it. Be fucking better.

Okay, so. What now? What to do if you catch someone using a dog whistle? Well, the most important thing to do is to not immediately accuse them of being a Nazi or belonging to the assorted genocidal dipshit group of choice. Super not do that in public. I know, it sounds counterintuitive, specially since we just affirmed that "punch the Nazi" is a perfectly valid and effective rhetorical device to get rid of Nazis. But the thing with dog whistles is that they're also bait. They're juicy, tender bait almost lab designed to get normal people - you know, people who don't hold genocidal beliefs and in fact think genocide is super bad and forever unjustifiable - frothing mad. Remember that dog whistles have two meanings, and that allows the genocidal dipshits to go "see? These people are mad! They're insane! They are the real reactionaries, they see malicious evil in every little thing!" and they will use every single dogpile to punctuate their statement and justify themselves. That's what dog whistles are designed to do, remember? They condition people to find genocidal ideology acceptable even when they rationally would not.

Ideally, if you know this person and you have the emotional and psychological bandwidth to do some education, you should reach out in private and offer to explain why the seemingly innocent thing the person posted is actually super bad. And I do mean explain. You need to explain on the history of the dog whistle, the purpose of the dog whistle, and emphasize that it's not an indictment of their character or an attempt to imply they're nefarious or malicious themselves, but rather that they've fallen prey to a scam by literal genocidal dipshits. This is... a lot. It's hard. People are very defensive at the smallest insinuation that they might be spewing Nazi talking points. It's often demeaning and exasperating work, and while it does work, it's just a sinkhole of resources that could be better spent in other, more pressing causes that also need attention because we have a bit of an epidemic and these genocidal dipshits keep popping up everywhere. It's also very exhausting for actual targets of the genocidal dipshits to have to argue with people that "that thing you said is used to call for the genocide of people like me, no really, please stop" and have to spend time pampering and reassuring people who go into literal hysterics trying to prove THEY are not the bad ones, how DARE you.

So what DO you do? Realistically? No one knows for sure. There isn't a wide-spread, peer-reviewed, fits-all-sizes solution. This is exactly the kind of thing dog whistles are designed to get around: there's no dogmatic, stringent rule that will make it so you can always tell if something is a dog whistle and how to make people stop using them. But that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. You can be critical and thoughtful about the content you consume and platform in your spaces*. You can prioritize the voices of those being targeted by the openly genocidal dipshits and listen and pay attention when they tell you "hey, this thing? this thing is BAD." Encourage self-reflection in yourself and your social circle. When you foster a culture that welcomes people making mistakes and being corrected/nudged into being better about things, the emotional tax of finding out you've been platforming hate speech in disguise is significantly less.

*Being critical and thoughtful about the content you consume doesn't mean falling into purity culture rabbit holes where you must only consume and platform THE PUREST AND MOST UNPROBLEMATIC OF THINGS, but rather understand that the framing of content is important and you can do your part to minimize harm by extending simple courtesies like adding trigger or content warnings, and being critical about the sort of thing you platform and put in your followers' feed. Sometimes the Nazis are being obtuse on purpose, hoping you will get angry enough to dunk on them in public and therefore grant them and their toxic rhetoric access to your entire platform. Their bait is very tempting, but you're better than that.

And when private/polite/off-screen attempts to get someone to stop using a dog whistle inevitably fail, stop engaging with that person entirely, and instead platform the fact the dog whistle is a dog whistle and why. I don't mean "cut that person off your life entirely", though you might have to, if you eventually realize that not only did they knew they were using a dog whistle, they were doing so purposefully all this time. And that's heartbreaking and awful, because no one likes to find out someone in their social circle is a literal genocidal dipshit. But that's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about larger scale education that robs the dog whistle of its most valuable asset: plausible deniability. When you make a post explaining that a certain word or a certain phrase is a dog whistle, and explain the history and weight of it, you break the dog whistle. The more people know to recognize it, the less it works for its intended purpose. And the most effective way of doing this is by focusing on the dog whistle itself, and not the people who use them. Don't single out individuals, because then your informative post has become a call out and be dismissed as drama or grudge wank. Focus on the fact that it's not the people who say these words that are the problem, it's the people who keep insisting they should use those words.

See, the thing about fighting genocidal ideologies is that you're not targeting individual people. Or even groups of people. This is not about starting a morality crusade against X or Y. It's about dismantling the tools of genocide. It's about reinforcing those societal pressures that keep them hidden in the corners and denies them power and influence to actually enact their genocidal goals.

They are a fucking fringe minority at the very edges of society, is the point, and they should never be allowed to forget it.

3. What are some dog whistles you should keep an eye out for?

So there's a lot of them and there's not enough time in the actual universe to cover all of them. That's the shitty thing about genocidal dipshits and their dog whistles. As soon as you demystify one, they've come up with another one. Any list will by necessity be incomplete. Resist the urge to turn this urge to categorize things into your personal white whale, and remember a dogmatic, rigid approach of "acceptable vs unacceptable words" is precisely the kind of system dog whistles are designed to get around.

I will not be covering anti-black or antisemitic dog whistles. Because I'm neither black nor Jewish, and as we just discussed, you should be listening and platforming THOSE voices whenever attacks at them come up. I'm going to focus on the dog whistles in this post, which is what sent me down this rabbit hole in the first place. I replied to that post to comment on an unrelated situation but I made a point to mention the dog whistles and several people came back and asked me about it.

I'm linking to my own reblog chain of it, because OP has deleted the original post. I wanna make clear this is not an accusation or an attack on OP. I don't know OP from Adam and I don't feel qualified to say if they're using these dog whistles in any harmful way, beyond the inherent harm that comes with giving credibility to dog whistles at all. I can't believe I have to say this explicitly in this year of our lord 2022, but please do not harass, abuse or otherwise inconvenience OP. We literally just went over how that doesn't work when it comes to deplatforming dog whistles. I'm just giving context and full disclosure, okay?

Okay.

Let's go.

Content warnings! Again! We're gonna be talking about Nazis and other genocidal groups, so that's always fun. We're also gonna tangentially discuss misogyny, antiblackness, antisemitism and sexual assault, sexual abuse, pedophilia and zoophilia.

"Cancel Culture." Cancel culture began - and this is extremely common - as a term within the black community to refer to the tactic of using social pressure to force racist bigots to face consequences for their racist bigotry. It was also in use within the #MeToo movement, to sort of crowdfund consequences for people with too much social, political or financial capital, which allowed them to just... not face consequences for their behavior. And yeah, ostracizing bigots is an excellent way to get rid of bigots or at least minimize the effects of their bigotry. It's so effective that's what dog whistles are for. The thing is, Cancel Culture has now been appropriated by the very people it was meant to be used again. Racist white people decry Cancel Culture when they are faced with the consequences of their actions, labeling them instead as abusive or unwarranted. The term has been thoroughly poisoned and the only people you hear talking about it seriously, phrasing it as this big, evil thing that must be stopped, are the right wing pundits who make their money out of making people feel threatened by changing social mores. Most people think that "less net bigotry in the world" is a good thing. But if your entire grift is based on bigotry, then this is a personal attack on you. Cancel culture is being used now as a short hand to express how very obvious consequences to one's actions are in fact malicious targeted abuse. This prioritizes the bigots over their victims, makes it nearly impossible to have conversations about actual reparations and presents the notion of "hey, if you're a bigot people won't like you" as if it were an outlandish, unnatural position to take. You can tell OP is actually using the dog whistle version of this in their post, because they're not talking about consequences to someone's actions, but explicitly framing a disproportionate, malicious and unwarranted harassment campaign as "Cancel Culture." OP themselves defines "Cancel Culture" in their post, and this is actually a huge problem when it comes to the proliferation of dog whistles. When you assume you know the root of an idiom and you define it in the context of your own usage, you may be inadvertently mainstreaming something that you shouldn't. Maybe you heard this from a trusted youtuber or a friend, and you understand the way THEY use it, and you use it THAT way, you don't mean it in the weirdo way. But you should make a habit to track down the history of idioms before you use them. For one, because everyone could stand to use their words more precisely and make sure that the words they're using actually mean what they want them to mean. But for another, because understanding the history of idioms is a very good way of avoiding boot in mouth syndrome.

"Purity Culture." This is also a dog whistle! And I used it in the text of this post! Except not really. In this post I'm using the original sense of the phrase, OP is using the dog whistle version. (Are you starting to see why if you look too hard at dog whistles you're gonna end up going a little bit insane?) Purity culture originally refers to misguided, reactionary rejection of the slippery slope fallacy that "nothing is pure, therefore, there's no point." Purity culture refers to this idea of treating every single slight, infraction or "taint" equally across the board, without any space for nuance or context. There's two dog whistles around this term, actually! One of them is from the pro-censorship camp, who treats purity culture as an ideal and dresses it up in "responsible media consumption" and "child-appropriate spaces" to try and gloss over the fact they're pro-fascist censorship tools and restrictions, they just think the problem is they're not targeting the right people and concepts. You can identify this lot very quickly because they love to use the word "freak" in a derogatory fashion. They're also real bad at nuance and super fond of historical revisionism. The other dog whistle is, hilariously, the exact opposite of this. This is coming from the actual, no joke, pro-sexual abuse corner of the internet (think, pedophilia, zoophilia, incest, etc, anything that it's reasonably considered indefensible because it's predicated on forcing sexual concepts and acts upon people and living creatures who do not and cannot consent to it). Their version of purity culture is framing any negative criticism of their actions and interests as an attempt to censor and unjustly ostracize them. I need to be very clear here that I'm definitely not talking about fiction here. We're not talking about people who like to read stories about this sort of content. We're talking about people who are actually committing these acts in real life, to real people, children and animals. We need to make that distinction, because that's what the dog whistle is arguing. They infiltrate groups that are staunchly anti-censorship and frame themselves as victims of prosecution but the things they're being prosecuted for are not art, text or other materials rooted in trasgressive fiction. They're really annoying and really detrimental to the fight against censorship, because every time one of these idiots is outed for the miserable fucking monster they are, pro-censorship folk immediately rush in to reframe the conversation as if anti-censorship groups are unquestionably supporting and defending the indefensible.

"Virtue Signaling." I unironically love this dog whistle, personally, because it betrays the massive chasm within the worldview of the people who use it. Virtue signaling is the concept of doing good things, for the sake of other people thinking you're good. It's the cry of alt-right pseudointellectuals who posit that people don't actually care about racism and sexism and transphobia and homophobia and xenophobia and religious intolerance and any of the other social evils they've decided they want to champion instead. No! People secretly support these things, it's just that it's socially unacceptable to do so, so they must pretend. They must play their part in the social farce, and make sure everybody knows they have done so, waving a flag that signals all who see it that they are one of them. I genuinely love this one because they always use "virtue signaling" as a derogatory term, it is always framed in a negative way, like this is evidence of the social contract falling to pieces. The thing is, this is a feature, not a bug. Yeah, you have to publicly decry bigotry and fall in step with the social mores of your community, and yeah, we want communities that see bigotry as some sort of social suicide. Society should actually ostracize and push out bigoted, disruptive individuals, because bigotry itself is a betrayal of the social contract. If you refuse to participate in society by abiding its rules, yeah, you don't get to be part of society. And yeah, we don't care about thought crime. Be a bigot in your head all you want, I want a society that punishes you severely if you ever decide to ACT on those thoughts, tho. That's a functional society. That's a good thing. The people who use "virtue signaling" unironically are trying to grapple with their own hypocrisy, with the fact they spew out hateful, genocidal nonsense but they know damn well they would be utterly destroyed if they tried to act out on it, so instead they've come up with a way to say "society decries and rejects everything I stand for, and I refuse to be a martyr to my ideals so I'm just going to be a cowardly, hateful idiot and pretend that makes me better than everyone else."

The post itself is pushing a fairly reasonable message: harassment = bad. The problem is that in utilizing dog whistles the message is muddled, and a pretty straightforward message becomes twisted enough to allow spaces for the beneficiaries of those dog whistles to misappropriate and excuse their actions. That's literally what @jabberwockypie and myself were doing in that post, in response to Flamethrower's reply.

Notice how Flamethrower conveniently used the definition of "cancel culture" that matches the dog whistle, in an attempt to shield herself from criticism and then frame the consequences of her actions as abuse and harassment. THAT is why dog whistles matter and why it's important not to engage with them. Because they open the door for bad actors to justify themselves and skirt responsibility for their actions.

Don't let them.

4. Yeah, okay, Rie, but that's like 5K worth of words, do you have any sources for all that?

I'm so fucking glad you asked!

What’s wrong with dogwhistles

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/08/21/racist-roots-dog-whistle/

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26529439

@innuendostudios's The Alt-Right Playbook is an excellent resource in identifying the tools of radicalization, but most importantly his sources are an excellent way to familiarize yourself with all this nonsense.

5. Now what?

IDK, do your best. Keep trying. Forgive yourself for fucking up and commit to learning from it.

Mostly, be kind. To yourself and to others, but specially those who are being targeted by genocidal dipshits.

And remember, if someone tells you the solution to your problems is the complete extermination of a group of people... that person is not your friend, that's an asshole looking for an alibi. You deserve better than that.

[local-fanfic-addict]

The Never-Ending Echo

Part One | Next>

Destiny Forsaken angst. Can be read as a self-insert, but was written with an OC. Not an X reader. If anything, it's a vent since I'm still not over what they did to Cayde.

Inspiration: Jungle - Emma Louise

Trigger warning - Obsession of revenge, major character death, unhealthy coping mechanisms, general angst.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Vlairyn-3 had given and received condolences, donned dark colors, as you were supposed to, and stood before the long silver slab covered by the Vanguard’s flag; smooth satin and gold that molded to match the curves of Cayde’s body as he lay unmoving, and yet the concept of his death lay beyond her immediate grasp. She wished he was simply sleeping, his face obscured by the banner as if it were a blanket, how easy it was for her to fall into such thoughts until the fatal echo of a gunshot rang in her head again, as it had been doing since she had returned with his body in her arms. 

It pulled her thoughts back to that moment when all she could hear were her own footsteps sprinting down the metal hallways of the Prison of Elders, her ghost keeping stride next to her as the faint sounds of a battle could be heard getting closer from below them. The tell-tale sign of destroyed light flooded her senses seconds afterwards, blinding her with a sudden burst of loss as the energy faded into nothingness between one breath and the next. Cayde's ghost was gone and he was alone. 

The silence that followed was jarring as Vlairyn took the last jump onto the floor below them and her feet carried her to the final door, having to pry it open with her hands before she could actually move through the threshold. Coolant rushing through her artificial veins, heart racing, she only had time to register the piercing shot of Ace as it rested in the hands of the hooded Prince of the Reef, not Cayde’s.

Without thought she drew her own gun upon him with a scream and emptied its clip with reckless abandon despite his immediate exit via transmat. The empty weapon then fell from her hands with a metallic clang and she slid down onto her knees before the wounded Exo in front of her, almost too afraid to touch him in any capacity until he reached for her.

Wires were detached, sending small sparks up from their tips. Metal was bent and mangled, and his eyes flickered with each racking cough that flooded his lungs, the gaping bullet hole that sat in the center of his chest just adding to the growing panic that the Exo could feel swell within her. 

“How’s… How’s my hair?” 

Her audio processors nearly missed his question, of all the things for him to say to her and he leads with a joke about his nonexistent hair. It should have been a good sign, but she could see the damage done to his body as she took up his head in her autumn colored hands, the ring of the gunshot still fresh in the forefront of her mind. 

“Speechless. Typical.” He chuckled, followed by another set of coughing. 

“I’m sorry Cayde, I’m just- I- Goldie! Please!“ Vlairyn couldn’t find her words as she averted her gaze from him, a shuddering breath escaping her lips as she called for her Ghost.

“I’m sorry, Vlairyn. There’s nothing- I can’t do anything…” Goldie’s voice was small and sad as he hovered over the Vanguard, the beams of his light scanning his body but to no avail. 

“Okay. Okay look at me Cayde, we’re gonna get you out of here, we’ll get you back to the Tower. You have to hold on, alright?” There was no use trying to hide the panic in her voice as she lifted his upper body onto her lap, cradling him in her arms. 

“You have to stay awake. Think of your job! You hate it so much, would you really want some other poor hunter to have it if you die?” There was a joke in there somewhere, some attempt to get him to focus on her and to do anything but close his eyes. 

He laughed. It was strained and made him cough, but he did focus on her, his hand grabbing her upper arm for stability as if he was going to sit up.

“You’re- you’re right, they’d probably… give it to you and- and I couldn’t do that to my…” He didn’t finish his sentence as another fit of coughing overtook him. His breathing was getting worse, short gasps in between metallic coughs. It was Vlairyns only hope to send a message to the Tower and keep Cayde awake long enough to get back, but they both knew that fixing an Exo this badly wounded was… impossible.

“Listen Val. This… This ain’t on you, okay? This… is what I get… for- for playing nice.” His laugh, however pained, still came through his fading voice. His labored breathing became even more shallow.

“Cayde I can’t lose you, you have to fight it, please. Cayde I-“

“It’s okay, I- I know.” He cut her off, his grip on her arm tightening. “It’ll be- be alright. You tell Zavala… and Ikora…. The Vanguard is the best bet… I ever…. Lost.”

“Cayde no, please!” Vlairyn shook him by the shoulders gently, but she could already see that the lights of his eyes were gone, dull and dark as he lay in her arms. 

The solar flare that overtook her was epic in proportions, acting on the unrestrained scream that left her body as his body lay unresponsive. The light was brilliant, gold and orange flames licking at the metal of the ceiling and floor alike until it was red-hot and sizzling, practically melting around her. 

She was pulled back to the present by the overwhelming feeling of heat spreading through her body, the memory of his death consuming her thoughts to the point where it called up her solar light on its own. His last words, the light literally draining from his eyes, and the echo of the gunshot that killed him all swam in her mind's eye. His own gun, now in the hands of his murderer. She wouldn’t stand for it. 

She resigned herself to stay in her mourning clothes, blue was all she had as opposed to the standard black, but it fit her. She moved slowly around his body, keeping to the back of the room as other Guardians gave their respects and condolences to his fireteam, her processors picking up bits of the Vanguards conversation until she heard that name again.

Uldren Sov

She could hear her fan growing louder as it worked to cool the red hot rage that immediately rose within her at the mention of his name. She would hunt him down to the ends of the reef and beyond. Make him feel the same pain. Anything to see him dead.

She advanced upon the two remaining Vanguard with glowing eyes. She didn’t care who saw her, or what kind of person she looked like at that moment. Her anger could be felt radiating off of her in waves, hot and stifling as her solar light seemed to condense into her feelings and bring them out into the world in a physical aura.

“Uldren Sov is mine.” Her words caused a visible show of golden flames to consume her eyes for a split second before she was gone, gun slung over her shoulder and mind overwhelmed by the burning sensation of rage that was ever fueled by her solar light, by the Traveler’s gift; the echo of Ace never ending in her mind.

The Traveler would help her see this through, for she had faith in him and the power he granted her.

[inklingofadream]

6, 18, 19, 25, and 35 for the weird writer asks!

What is your darkest fear about writing?

My mom finding it, wildly missing the point, and deciding that enrolling me in talk therapy is non-negotiable lol

Choose a passage from your writing. Tell me about the backstory of this moment. How you came up with it, how it changed from start to end.

Gonna scroll it back to Till Things Are Brighter, which no one whose followed me in the past year has read because I last updated in ~February 2021~ but which is still the work I'm most determined to finish

I hadn’t meant to tell you so much. [Growls] There’s too much of a risk of Magnus pulling it out of you and accelerating his plans, or out of my dreams since you’ve made it a proper Statement , but apparently knowing when to stop asking questions isn’t a power granted to any Archivist. Next time you can’t stand not Knowing, just ask me to write it out. Statement fucking ends.

(From the end of chapter 9, for any who want to read my beloved magnum opus bc of this passage lol)

(cut because I am at heart a rambler)

So I knew that in order for various plot events to work I needed Daisy to meet with Gertrude, and I realized that it didn't make much sense for Gertrude to meet with this mysterious lady telling her all this stuff with little if any context to why it's important and not eventually getting fed up and taking a statement by force. That wasn't in my original plan, because it introduces a couple complications, but I actually ended up with a lot of affection for the chapter as a whole.

The handy thing about forcing a statement out of one of your characters and including it in the narrative is that it's an excuse to break the writing rule that people almost never just state their emotions in plain terms. The format by definition requires honesty and usually some explanation of the character's emotions either generally or at the starting point, sometimes complete with their assessment and feelings about those feeling in hindsight. So I got to use it to incorporate stuff I couldn't otherwise!

But Daisy gets pretty mad about having her statement taken every time it happens in canon, she just doesn't have the full details for Jon and can't take it out on Elias. She can't afford to take things out on Gertrude, either, other than peacing out. And I don't generally like including swear words in my writing but... nothing else fit. So Daisy got One Swear, for a treat!

Tell me a story about your writing journey. When did you start? Why did you start? Were there bumps along the way? Where are you now and where are you going?

Ahahaha, I started writing in second grade. My best friend and I were going to make a novelization of the Rankin-Bass Santa Claus in Comin' to Town Christmas special with her doing illustrations and me writing. It was never finished and lost to time because my family moved the summer after second grade :( I wrote other things throughout elementary school, but sadly never found such a willing cowriter. The draft of the story that made my mom point out that people might not be interested in reading a story that interrupts the action every time a character is introduced to tell you their age, hair and eye color, favorite color, height, and hobbies is a happier loss X'D I did Nanowrimo for the first time in 7th grade, and did finish the story (it's still around... somewhere...) but it was handwritten so I don't know the wordcount. Probably more in the 20k range, but whatever. Did it again successfully on a word processor in 9th grade (also around... somewhere... in printed form even though the computer it was saved to is long gone). Those would probably be better if they were Mary Sue stories, I think if I reread them they'd probably be mostly very boring.

There's a local day event thing for teenage writers in my area called Teen Author Boot Camp, my best friend since toddlerhood got me into it and the first year we went we got 1st (her) and 2nd (me) place in their first chapter writing contest (year redacted bc you could def dox me from their FB). That was probably the last gasp of me successfully writing as a teen. I went again as many years as I was eligible, because it was hugely fun winning aside, but never won again lol. I started reading fic around the time I started high school, and wrote some a few years after that (it's all MCU/Marvel fic, don't go that far back on my AO3, some of it I probably still stand by but some is for sure Bad). I spent most of high school with major burnout writer's block. I started writing again slightly before listening to TMA, but that was what got me back into writing recreationally in a big way. Since I think 2019? maybe 2020 idk, every year I've had an end of year wordcount on AO3 that's... honestly a big embarrassing lol.

I have a fistful of original ideas (fiction and non) that I want to get around to, but right now those are on hold until I finish the final paper for my Bachelor's, which has sadly NOT been blessed by the inspiration gods... fic gets to happen because on a conscious prioritization level I can post it for instant gratification which original writing can't do and on a less conscious level because the chronic health issues that blessedly got me accommodations on that paper interfere enough with my brain on most days to make academic writing hard where fic just isn't. I'm finally in a decent enough place that I'll hopefully be able to get past that, and once that's out of the way original writing (and hopefully improvements in health once that stress is gone) here I come!

What is a weird, hyper-specific detail you know about one of your characters that is completely irrelevant to the story?

My Daisy Tonner is femme but mostly can't express it because it's impractical at work. She always painted her nails because it lasts decently and doesn't detract from how her colleagues view her. She has a bunch of more feminine clothes that she doesn't wear much because she doesn't spend that much time not working. Basira doesn't really know all that about her because by the time she was in the picture Daisy was too Hunt-influenced to pay much attention to unrelated things, which got worse over time.

Or for an OC, Cece who shows up in Little Archive is biromantic asexual and has freckles and moles because projection thy name is Ink

What’s your favorite writing rule to smash into smithereens?

When I was a baby teen writer I would absorb anything that seemed to have a decently informed source and for a long time I had this quote from Elmore Leonard hang on

Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.

taped to the side of my bedside table where I saw it all the time. Anyway screw that guy, I love exclamation points! Avoiding them outside of a non-personified distant third person POV is janky! It sounds weird! It distances you from the character! What about dialogue?! Anyone transcribing mine would have to use a bunch, that's how lots of people talk!