#Data Center Processors

[delightfullyatomiccollector-blog]

Data center processors are the foundational computing engines that power today’s digital infrastructure, enabling everything from cloud services and big data analytics to artificial intelligence and edge computing. Designed to handle vast amounts of data with high speed and efficiency, these processors have evolved far beyond traditional CPUs to include specialized accelerators like GPUs, FPGAs, and custom AI chips. As data centers face increasing demands for performance, scalability, and energy efficiency, the development of advanced processors plays a critical role in shaping the future of computing and digital transformation across industries.

[rabotimagines]

"Good job" GN BOT Reader x Trailbreaker, Optimus, Bumblebee, Red Alert, Soundwave, Thundercracker, Starscream, Megatron

Summary: You tell your significant other good job and kiss his cheek.

Genre/Theme: Romantic fluff!

Warnings: Aftermath of Megatron inflicted violence in Strascream's

Pronouns: You, Your, Yours

Notes: Cybertronian reader, I'm casually referencing G1 episodes here and there.

Trailbreaker sparkdamn near collapses after Cosmos gave him the go-ahead to drop his force field. He doesn't manage to catch himself before his legs refuse to follow his equilibrium center and keep himself up right. He crashes into someone who quickly makes an effort to keep him upwards. Brawn is on his other side helping support him, too. Primus, Trailbreaker can't feel a lot of his frame right now. And to say he was exhausted would be putting it softly.

Trailbreaker registers your helm kibble and lately realizes it's you on his other side only when you kiss him on the cheek. "Good job." You praise him, and your em field is caressing his frame. If Trailbreaker had the energy right now, his optics would be burning hot. But there is a warm ball settling in his spark from your affection that gives Trailbreaker enough energy to smile and weakly chuckle. Trailbreakers just glad you all didn't die in a burning inferno. Trailbreakers' servo is grasped onto your pauldron and he lets his own em field drag along your frame.

Hopefully, you guys can kick Decepticon tailpipe fast. Because Trailbreaker needed to enter recharge badly. Preferably with his helm on your chassis.

-

Optimus sinks into his chair with a thunk. His frame is heavy and much too warn out after the days events. You'd all almost died, and none of you would have been able to avert it if it wasn't for Trailbreaker's quick thinking. He's still getting through the multiple apologies from the various human leaders, for almost accidentally condemning you all to such an unjust fate. Optimus sighed when he recalled the insults, and things shouted at them from the humans when they'd believed the fake evidence.

Optimus straightens his frame out when you enter his office. He nods and picks up a data pad to continue reading where he left off. You place an energon cube on his desk, and Optimus is about to rightfully thank you for it. But you're suddenly lightly guiding his helm. The soft press of your derma against the side of Optimus's battle mask had his finials perking back straight like they're supposed to be. "Good job." You praise him, and the next soft sigh out of Optimus makes his chassis leagues lighter.

"Thank you, love." Optimus mummers when you slowly pull away, one of his servos finding your arm and squeezing lightly. Optimus would finish this sooner than later now that he remembered he had more important matters to attend to...

-

Bumblebee's struts were killing him after that tornado he charged into. He's glad the plan worked anyway, and Auggie wasn't as big as an aft as he could've been. So the charities actually got something to split. But right now everything ached and after getting cleared by Hoist he tracked out and found you waiting for him in the hallway. Bumblebee was catching you up on the Insanity you'd just missed, ending his recap with how the charities only got something because of Auggie.

Bumblebee's not really paying as much attention as he usually would be because he's really tired. So he's surprised when your arm gets tossed over his pauldrons. Your arm crooks, and you dragged his frame close against your own. Bumblebee cycles his optics when you press close to kiss his cheek. "Good job." Bumblebee's optics brighten, and his plating fluffs under your affections. The ache is less obvious under the attention of your warm em field.

Bumblebee laughs, a smile making its way onto his face. "Aw, shucks-" Bumblebee readily leans against your own frame. He didn't know what he'd do without you sometimes.

-

Red Alert's processor is finally re-calibrated to account for his own heightened sensors and his own glitch. Ratchet and Hoist both granted him clearance to leave. On the condition, he is off duty for the next two cycles to rest and recover. The thought only makes Red Alert panic, because what were they supposed to do in the meantime while he was gone!? No one would be taking the necessary security measures like he would, and they could very well be infiltrated! All because he let himself be tricked by Starscream of all bots!

He's marching through the hallway towards his habsuite, trying to think of something to combat the coming major security risk. And a bot comes around the corner and Red Alert jerks so he doesn't crash into them- he almost barks out they state their Autobot ID but realizes it's you when you advance further and- your derma presses soft onto the side of his faceplate and you pull back. "Good job." Red Alerts sensors fizzle, and when he comprehends what you'd said, he asks for clarification. You just cycle your optics as if he's the unreasonable one here. "For doing the right thing at the end."

Red Alert's glitch fizzles into a dull hum when the affection starts burning in his frame. "You- I-" He suddenly can't find what to say but you just smile and offer a servo out to him. He takes it, and you start leading him on the path towards your own habsuite. Maybe he could just send a few dozen debriefs while he was forced to rest...

-

Soundwave was not an easy mech to wear down. But right now, he was practically just his struts at this point. The giant flying ship Megatron had them built was rerouted to directly on top of the nemesis... as it was crashing. Sealing the breaches themselves was their own task and a half. The ship only had so many fail safes for armor breaches. The other was even rounding up the Decepticons to hurry and save their base from becoming utterly and completely flooded. Soundwave had gotten into arguments with others, been threatened, and had to pull leagues of saved blackmail. But the nemesis was not in mortal danger anymore.

Soundwave tapped out the next orders he was sending out via his datapad. A frame made its way towards him out of the edge of his visors compression. Lazerbeak, who was on his paldron, did not react in any way, so he'd assumed he would be fine continuing to focus on his work. So when two servos grasp the sides of his helm, Soundwave freezes and preemptively resigns himself to probably being thrown across the room. Only he's tugged and- derma press against the side of his mask, and Soundwave realizes it's you when your em field touches him. "Good job." You murmur, and Soundwave's plating flattens back out.

Soundwave can't stop the hum of a sound in his vocalizor when his chassis warms with tenderness. Lazerbeak jumped from one of his pauldrons to his other and leaned over for a kiss, too. You obliged, and Lazerbeak hums a sound much like Soundwave's own. Soundwave could give himself a much needed break after this joor. He deserved it after all...

-

Thundercracker was going to put a dent or two into Starscream if he sees him any time soon! Couldn't keep Thundercracker out of his schemes for two klicks! Then Skyfire shows back up alive, and Starscream decides to act even more reckless than usual. Even after Thundercracker told him to keep him out of his slag! But no! He had to try and make Thundercracker screw up guarding the artifact and almost get them both slagged by the Autobots at the same time! Thundercrackers marching his way to the flight deck because he needed to go for a fly before his weapon system engaged the next time he got even slightly angrier.

Thundercracker almost runs into a bot on a hallway corner, and his wings slant even further, promising violence, and he bares his denta. Only his wings re correct, and his optics widen when he realizes it's you. Before he can mutter out anything, you step even closer and grab his face. Thundercracker lets you lead his frame, and you plant a kiss right on the side of his cheek. "Good job." You tell him and pull away, your em field smoothing the puffed plating down on his front.

Thundercracker's system disengages with its attempt to start up his battle measures. His plating slacks all at once, and his pauldrons drop and loosen along with the rest of his frame. And Thundercrackers suddenly very tired instead of raging so hard it felt like his spark was about to burst. Thundercracker sighs, and you just grab his servo and start leading him back towards his habsuite. Primus, Thundercracker needed to lie down, maybe with his helm in your lap...

-

Starscream huffed, the sound coming out like the plating being scraped right off a bot. Oh, go get the footage reel, Strascream! We won't tell you there's more than one reel till you get back! How the frag was Strascream supposed to know anything about there being a backup!? He had to push his next assassination attempt up a bit further as a "thank you" for Megatrons' kindness in only ripping his entire vocalizor and half his throat right out of him.

New movement made him sneer in the general direction of whoever It was who just entered the med bay. The touch of a familiar em field made his plating slack back down slightly. You made it to his side, and Strascream didn't bother looking your way, too busy scheming (and not wanting to see whatever expression was on your faceplate). Your servos tilted his face gently to the side, and your derma pressed against his cheek. "Good job." You muttered while your other servo moved by his wing and traced the edge of it. Starscream's plating fluffs then flattens even further than before. A very minute sliver of his rage shimmers out to make room for some sliver of fondness.

He then huffs again the sound just as splitting as before from his broken parts. Starscream looks away from your optics quickly to scowl at the wall instead. He wants to rant and rave to you, but he'll have to settle for seething silently by your side for now...

-

Megatron sits down on his chair with a heavy sound, with his servo coming up to pinch the edge of his olfactory right between his optics. The battle and mistakes of the day that nearly lead to you all blowing up alongside this sparkdamn rock. A quick biting of glossia, temporary alliance, and panicking, and you all were no longer going to die in a plant wide explosion. He should have accounted for Devastators pension for- stupidity. Apparently they'd shorted his logic center in the fight for control of him, but he should have seen that coming regardless. But instead, that careless mistake smashed right through the escape plans and almost killed everyone. The door opening doesn't make him glance because whoever It was should know better to come in uninvited without a sparkdamn good reason for it.

Your em field drags along his back when you get closer, and his plating rattles a touch when he huffs in realization. You're on his side, and your servos drag his faceplate towards you. Your derma presses soft against the side right where his helm ends and meets his cheek. "Good job," you say and Megatron levels you with a look that he knows says more than just his displeasure. You aren't intimidated by it, continuing on regardless. "Don't pout at me. You still sent a lot of energon back to Cybertron."

He- supposed you had a point. It did end up a disaster and nearly a deadly disaster. But a large amount of energon was still acquired and sent off to Cybertron before it had gone badly. Which means more time before anyone on Cybertron would starve. Megatron's expression loosens a touch before he grabs you by your waist to drag you into sitting on his lap. (He still does this on the off chance you are larger than him). Megatron had more plans to make, and he can make them with your em field brushing along him.

[revelboo]

(Shockwave voice) My observations of the recent behavior among our faction's ranks have led me to a logical conclusion on the biology of our species... this planet seems to have ideal conditions to activate a dormant protocol in the processor, among other things. All of this centers around the native sophont life forms, which are not only capable of spark-bonding to our own species... this bond can kindle new sparks with a nearly 100% success rate, their anatomy is optimal for tactile interfacing, and roughly 50% of their population is capable of carrying a physically developing protoform to term in a specialized organ... I have exchanged notes with Tarantulas on the subject.

So far these organisms, humans, seem to be unique among other alien life forms in their high compatibility, but I have extrapolated a theory from the interactions between captured specimens and their caretakers. A coordinated program to pair compatible humans and mechs will not only create a boom in our dwindling population, the operation to cyberform Earth may accelerate exponentially. Any cross-species bondmates are removed from the human gene pool as they devote their energy to their Cybertronian partners and hybrid sparklings; within generations, depending on the aggression of the operation, fewer and fewer humans will reproduce with their own kind... their lifespans are short without our direct intervention, we would not be waiting long before Earth is entirely within our control.

With your permission, Lord Megatron, I can begin drafting plans for a long-term study... passive observation has sufficed until now, but my research would benefit from volunteers. Perhaps even mandatory participation.

🤣 He would. 🔞 Mass displaced mech 🌶️

Research

Shockwave

• “Harder,” you groan, a leg sliding against his hip as Thundercracker moves against you, hips snapping as you cling to him. Back arching at the feel of his spike stretching you and driving deep again and again. ‘Your position isn’t optimal. Try elevating your human’s hips,’ intones a voice and you scream spotting Shockwave just standing there watching you two go at it. How had he got into the habsuite and how long has he been just watching? Mood ruined, you stare at the purple lunatic as his head tips.

• “Get out, you son of a glitch!” Thundercracker snarls, wings flared aggressively as he tries to hide as much of you from view as possible from Shockwave. How had the Pit spawned scientist even gotten into his habsuite? And you’re naked under him, his spike buried in you as you hide your face against his neck. ‘Are you currently bonded to your human?’ Shockwave asks, awkwardly cradling a datapad against himself with his cannon so he can make notes. ‘Is this an attempt to establish nanites prior to sparking or simply recreational?’

• “Get out!” Optic dimming when Thundercracker lifts an arm, his weapons system humming to life in threat, Shockwave’s antenna flatten back. That’s the third one that’s become irrationally resistant to answering simple questions or letting him assist them. Showing them the most efficient ways to interface with their humans can only facilitate his end goals. So why are they all so angry about his help? Except Vortex, that one had invited him to join him and his human and had laughed when he’d declined.

• Leaving Thundercracker’s habsuite before the seeker can decide to fire upon him, he makes a notation on his datapad. And while several Decepticons are making use of the research material data files he’d distributed with videos showing humans coupling in optimal positions, he’d been disappointed to realize it was being utilized by Decepticons without humans for recreational masturbation. Though, he does plan on sending out another data file composition in the hopes it might encourage more Decepticons to go find humans of their own. If they’re getting off to the videos, it stands to reason they’re interested in humans.

• Using his override to enter another habsuite, he vents in exasperation. ‘Interfacing in that manner accomplishes nothing useful,’ he growls and Skywarp’s head lifts from between his human’s thighs, optics bright. And the purple seeker does fire at him, face twisting in outrage. ‘The human sucking your spike at least introduces nanites,’ he snarls in parting as he ducks into the hall. Why are they all so resistant to saving the Cybertronian race? Making a note, he heads for the Constructicons’s habsuite. Hook is a medic, surely he’ll listen to logic.

[hazymoonlinh]

Could you pls make a Part 2 of your recent Mydei fic pls?

- 🌹 Anon

“A scientific method of falling in love.” — Part 2

Save me…I have to go to school again soon…

(Mydei x Researcher!Reader | Soulmate AU — Continuation)

Amphoreus was chaos incarnate.

At least, that’s what she thought the moment Mydei dragged—no, retrieved—her from the sterile halls of Herta’s Space Station to this blazing, unpredictable world. Gone were the cool, metallic walls and quiet hums of data processors. Here, the very ground pulsed with heat, ancient structures carved from white stone rising like the spines of some slumbering beast. The air was thick, charged with an energy that felt both sacred and volatile.

And standing at the center of it all, with that insufferably smug grin, was Mydei.

“Welcome to Amphoreus,” he announced, arms outstretched as if unveiling a masterpiece. “Not actually my domain. But, a world carved by strife, where the strong thrive and the weak learn their place.”

She blinked, unimpressed. “…It’s hot.”

Mydei’s grin faltered for a split second before he leaned in, his sharp, lion-like eyes gleaming with amusement. “You’re hot.”

She didn’t even flinch. “That’s a biological response to the temperature.”

He exhaled through his nose, both irritated and intrigued. How was she this unaffected? Soulmates were supposed to feel something—some undeniable pull, some sense of belonging. But here she was, treating him like an experiment under a microscope.

“Well,” he said, straightening up, “you’ll warm up to me eventually.”

“…Because of the heat?”

Mydei groaned, dragging a hand down his face. “No. Because I’m irresistible.”

She merely adjusted her data pad, tapping away as if he weren’t even there.

Day 1 — The “Trial Run” Begins

Mydei’s version of a “trial run” consisted of throwing her into the most ridiculous situations.

“You need to observe me in my natural environment,” he insisted, dragging her to an fighting pit filled with roaring crowds and warriors twice her size.

She stood there, arms crossed, as Mydei leapt into the arena, his fists wrapped in crimson crystal, radiating power with every blow. The crowd chanted his name, his movements fluid and precise—a deadly dance of strength and skill.

After effortlessly defeating his opponent, he turned to her, chest heaving, sweat glistening on his skin, and grinned. “Impressed yet?”

She glanced down at her data pad. “Your footwork could be optimized by shifting your center of gravity two degrees to the left. Otherwise, predictable.”

Mydei’s eye twitched. “Predictable?”

She nodded. “I could simulate the same outcome with 87% accuracy.”

He jumped out of the ring, storming toward her. “Oh yeah? How about I simulate carrying you again?”

She stepped back, unfazed. “Physical threats aren’t persuasive.”

Mydei leaned in, his grin sharp. “Not a threat. A promise.”

Day 3 — The Cracks Appear

Despite his frustration, Mydei couldn’t help but notice the small changes.

She’d stopped calling their bond “irrelevant.” She still analyzed everything, sure—but there were moments when she’d pause, her gaze lingering on him just a little too long. Like when he laughed—really laughed—after she unintentionally made a joke without realizing it.

Or the time he shielded her from an unexpected explosion during a mission, his arm wrapping around her instinctively. She didn’t push him away. She just… stared.

“Why did you do that?” she asked quietly afterward.

“Because you’re mine,” he replied without hesitation.

She didn’t argue.

Day 5 — The Breaking Point

They stood atop one of Amphoreus’s highest cliffs, the horizon bathed in shades of crimson and gold as the twin suns dipped below the jagged landscape. The wind was fierce, whipping through Mydei’s wild hair and tugging at her pristine uniform.

She was silent, staring out at the view. Mydei watched her, his heart—yes, heart—thundering in his chest.

“Do you still think fate is irrelevant?” he asked quietly.

She didn’t answer.

He stepped closer, his voice softer this time. “Tell me the truth.”

Finally, she turned to him, her expression unreadable. “I don’t know.”

It wasn’t the cold, dismissive response he expected. It was… honest. Vulnerable.

Mydei reached out, gently brushing a stray strand of hair from her face. His fingers lingered, warm against her cool skin. “You don’t have to know.” His voice was low, rough around the edges. “You just have to feel it.”

She stared at him, and for once, there was no data pad between them. No calculations. No logic. Just… them.

And then, in the quiet space between words, she whispered, “I think I do.”

Mydei didn’t grin this time. He just closed the distance, his forehead resting against hers, a rare softness in his fierce gaze.

“You’re mine,” he murmured. “No more running.”

This time, she didn’t argue.

(This idea is really nice)

[mylasteverlution]

Disco Elysium has a lot of fascinating fictional technology but I have been rotating the radiocomputer in my mind for months now. From what I can gather, they operate in a way very similar to modern cloud computing. It doesn't seem like the mainframes we interact with have any processing capability. Instead, they use antennas to process "on air":

SOONA, THE PROGRAMMER - "Alright, well... All radiocomputers perform operations up on air, so in order to gain more processing power you need to invest in a *good antenna*."

The only information we get about what "on air" really means is from the same conversation with Soona:

YOU - "Wait, what's 'on air'?" SOONA, THE PROGRAMMER - "On the *front*. The unified front of radiowaves, licensed and controlled by Lintel in the East-Insulindic region." SOONA, THE PROGRAMMER - "It's all around us," she waves her hand, "that's what 'on air' means."

The nonspecific language used here really invokes cloud computing to me. I think there are two main possibilities for how this could work, one being much more likely than the other.

The more likely answer is that information is sent to and from the in-game equivalent of data centers, which would host massive computers with processing capabilities. I'm not sure what their processors would look like, but they'd almost certainly be analog (the lost Feld tape computers are most likely the in-game equivalent of early digital computers).

The significantly less likely (but more interesting) answer is that in-game radio waves are somehow capable of processing information on their own. I have no idea how this would work, and as far as I know there's no real-world analog. But it's clear the world of Disco Elysium has some crazy things happening with radio waves (see how they interact with the pale), so I'm not ruling it out entirely.

The filament memories are like hard drives, but my guess is they would function more similarly to an optical disc (CDs, DVDs), which use patterns in the disc to encode information that's read using lasers or light. The filaments glow inside the mainframe, so it's not a huge leap to assume they're read using light.

The amount of thought put into radiocomputers is so fascinating. As far as I can tell, their version of the internet has been wireless from the get-go, which makes perfect sense! Antennas and other wireless radio technologies would have to be pretty damn powerful to communicate across and force dimensions on the pale. And you have to assume huge amounts of government money has gone into funding their research and development for those purposes. The technology of radiocomputers is so tailored to the world of Disco Elysium, and it's been a lot of fun trying to untangle how exactly they would work.

[19blackbutterfly97-blog]

Drabble? Fic? One-Shot?

Intro to an Omegaverse I'm thinking about writing when I finish one of my current fics. Feedback welcome!!

Word Count: 1530

>>>>><<<<

While most Omegas are loud and proud with their bubbly, vivacious personalities little Alice Belova was not. Raised in a family of Alphas and Betas, she was the middle of a pack of three brothers and one sister, Yelena. She was constantly surrounded by their naturally loud and brudish nature. Alice found solace being separated from others. She was usually found with her nose buried in a book in some corner of the world. When she presented at the later age of sixteen Alice decided it was time to look at a world beyond her boorish brothers and the long line of Alphas she somehow descended from. With much argument from her parents they reluctantly signed the agreement to allow their meek daughter to move to New York and join S.H.I.E.L.D..

The program was experimental. Of course they couldn't risk Omegas being field agents but right away S.H.I.E.L.D. saw the impact the office Omegas had. They’d usually start off in a call center of sorts. Some that could keep up and weren’t easily shaken would move on to become data processors, intelligence analysts, mission report scribes or lab assistants. They would mold themselves to their teams, allowing themselves the honor of serving their country and providing the support needed to get their people home safely. Then there was Alice.

Now closer to twenty-three, Alice has quietly risen through the ranks to one of the top Intelligence Analysts in the coveted Avenger’s Compound. While she doesn’t work directly with the team Alice has proven herself useful to the Director. Within six months on the Compound Alice was working on Avenger level cases, usually providing intel for locations and possible threats. She was the adorably silent side character that hid in her office waiting for the next case file to appear across her desk. It was a bit undeniable that Sam “The Falcon” Wilson turned to her when he agreed to aid in the search for James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes AKA The Winter Soldier. While she wasn’t a pivotal part in the search for Barnes, she did at least help with the initial search after his grand escape from Hydra.

The world had since healed from those events. Captain Rogers and the others were able to clear Barnes’ name and he eventually (and reluctantly) joined the team. Bucky made amends with Tony Stark and continually worked to heal some of the pain he caused but always somehow managed to overlook his own pain. He was resigned to believing that he was a defective Alpha who would never be able to protect or provide for an Omega the way she’d deserve. His friends however saw things in a different light.

“Look. I know you said we’re not allowed to intervene but it’s time. I can’t keep sitting here watching him mope around like this. It’s depressing!” Sam whispers to Steve. They’re sitting across the Avenger’s common room watching Bucky stare out the window. “He’s been there most of the day. Just like he was yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.”

“And he’ll probably be there most of the day tomorrow, too. He’s been through hell. Let him mope.” Steve answers, still watching his friend with concern. Steve would never admit it out loud but he was always silently begging that Bucky would wake up one day and decide to fully join the rest of the world again. Sam grumbles a reply under his breath before standing up and disappearing to another part of the team’s living quarters.

“He does know I can hear him, right? Even when he’s whispering.” Bucky says a few moments later.

“If he does, he doesn’t care.” Steve says and pries open his sketchbook. “He’s just trying to help.”

“Well he can stop. I don’t need it.”

Steve hums in response to his best friend’s argument. “What if I can’t stop him from helping? You know Sam. Once he gets an idea in his head he’s going to be stubborn about it.” 

“What’s his plan?” Bucky asks with interest and turns around to look at him.

“No idea.” Steve answers with a barely hidden grin as he picks up his pencil and starts drawing.

Meanwhile, Sam had decided he was tired of watching his friend mope about. Deciding it was better to act now and worry about the consequences later he made his way down to the Intelligence office. Once there he was set on finding the quietly helpful Omega from a year ago. Alice, as per usual, was sitting at her desk with her full attention on the case file splayed across her computer monitor. The sweet scent of vanilla, lavender and honey wafted in the air as she worked. A pretzel stick poised neatly between her teeth as she concentrated on a few particulars of the case before sending it off. Sam smiled a little when he entered the cubicle behind her and waited.

“Just a minute please, Sam.” Alice says, never looking away from the screen.

“Take your time. I know how you are.” He answers and looks around the space. “Oh, I see your parents went to Prague. How’d they like it?”

“Fine that I know of. They invited me along but I turned them down. We had more important things going on here.”

Sam frowns slightly at that but doesn’t comment. Contrary to what others may believe about him when it comes to an Omega he does know when to keep his mouth shut, especially when one is as skittish as Alice. “We’ve been working on another Hydra case. I heard Tony and Steve talking the other day. Might be bringing an analyst on full time for this one.”

“Uh-huh.” Alice mutters as she sends off the case file on her screen before turning around a bit. “Any candidates?”

“Not yet. I was thinking about tossing your name in if you’re interested?”

Alice nods a little, a strand of hair falling over her face that she’s quick to push away. “Sure, thanks. Did you need anything else?”

“Me? Nah, just trying to avoid tense Alpha energy upstairs. It’s usually calmer here.”

“There’s not as many Alphas here. They’re usually training or something. Not that I mind.” She finishes with an eye-roll. “Aren’t you supposed to be training?”

“Technically, but hey, can’t a man come down and hang out with his favorite analyst?”

Alice raises an eyebrow at him. “I’m nobody’s favorite and we both know it. Plus, Alphas and Omegas - especially the unbonded, unmated ones- usually struggle with being just friends. Work acquaintances? Maybe.”

Sam smirks proudly. “Look at you coming out of your shell to argue with me. Did somebody go on a date?”

Alice groans. “Oh god, not you too. You sound like my mother right now. She asked me the same thing when I talked to her earlier.”

“That should tell you something about your life if more than one person is asking that question.” Sam teases and leans against the desk. “So, I’m assuming it went badly?”

Alice sighs and grabs another pretzel stick from the bag. “Yes. He was the typical egotistical Alpha that was only interested in talking about his last mission, his last rut and my heat cycle.”

“The audacity!” Sam feigns offence, dramatically clutching his chest. “Who was it? I'll knock some sense into him.”

“Remember Derek from team six?”

“The guy with the bad highlights that makes him look like a kid in a 90s boy band?” Alice nods, chuckling a little from the description. It’s accurate and the jab at Derek is enough to start lifting her spirits again. “Seriously? That Derek?! What were you thinking? You know he’s either slept with or tried to sleep with every Omega in this place.”

“I know, I know. I just… I guess I was just looking for something.”

“Hopefully not the number to a hairdresser.”

Alice laughs again and shakes her head. “No, gods no. I guess I was hoping there was more to him than what meets the eye… Ya know? Derek is no king of mystery but I was still holding out that he’d surprise me at least a little. Or at least be able to hold an intelligent conversation about something other than his knot.”

“Ever the hopeless romantic, are we?”

“Maybe a little. But you know me. I was raised in a pack of Alphas. I’m used to them being loud and egotistical asses.” She pauses when Sam makes a noise of mock offence. “Present company excluded of course. Anyway, I guess I’m just waiting on the one Alpha that actually cares about what I think, not just what I can do.”

“You and every Omega on the planet. Doesn’t mean you’re going to find them.” Sam says, though that’s nowhere near what Sam was thinking. He’s currently decided that he’s going to make sure Alice is the analyst put on the case with the Avengers. He’s making plans to knock Bucky down a few pegs with the tiny dark-haired Omega in front of him. Sam is concocting and scheming the best meet-cute he can possibly think of.

[elwenyere]

I saw a post the other day calling criticism of generative AI a moral panic, and while I do think many proprietary AI technologies are being used in deeply unethical ways, I think there is a substantial body of reporting and research on the real-world impacts of the AI boom that would trouble the comparison to a moral panic: while there *are* older cultural fears tied to negative reactions to the perceived newness of AI, many of those warnings are Luddite with a capital L - that is, they're part of a tradition of materialist critique focused on the way the technology is being deployed in the political economy. So (1) starting with the acknowledgement that a variety of machine-learning technologies were being used by researchers before the current "AI" hype cycle, and that there's evidence for the benefit of targeted use of AI techs in settings where they can be used by trained readers - say, spotting patterns in radiology scans - and (2) setting aside the fact that current proprietary LLMs in particular are largely bullshit machines, in that they confidently generate errors, incorrect citations, and falsehoods in ways humans may be less likely to detect than conventional disinformation, and (3) setting aside as well the potential impact of frequent offloading on human cognition and of widespread AI slop on our understanding of human creativity...

What are some of the material effects of the "AI" boom?

Guzzling water and electricity

The data centers needed to support AI technologies require large quantities of water to cool the processors. A to-be-released paper from the University of California Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington finds, for example, that "ChatGPT needs to 'drink' [the equivalent of] a 500 ml bottle of water for a simple conversation of roughly 20-50 questions and answers." Many of these data centers pull water from already water-stressed areas, and the processing needs of big tech companies are expanding rapidly. Microsoft alone increased its water consumption from 4,196,461 cubic meters in 2020 to 7,843,744 cubic meters in 2023. AI applications are also 100 to 1,000 times more computationally intensive than regular search functions, and as a result the electricity needs of data centers are overwhelming local power grids, and many tech giants are abandoning or delaying their plans to become carbon neutral. Google’s greenhouse gas emissions alone have increased at least 48% since 2019. And a recent analysis from The Guardian suggests the actual AI-related increase in resource use by big tech companies may be up to 662%, or 7.62 times, higher than they've officially reported.

Exploiting labor to create its datasets

Like so many other forms of "automation," generative AI technologies actually require loads of human labor to do things like tag millions of images to train computer vision for ImageNet and to filter the texts used to train LLMs to make them less racist, sexist, and homophobic. This work is deeply casualized, underpaid, and often psychologically harmful. It profits from and re-entrenches a stratified global labor market: many of the data workers used to maintain training sets are from the Global South, and one of the platforms used to buy their work is literally called the Mechanical Turk, owned by Amazon.

From an open letter written by content moderators and AI workers in Kenya to Biden: "US Big Tech companies are systemically abusing and exploiting African workers. In Kenya, these US companies are undermining the local labor laws, the country’s justice system and violating international labor standards. Our working conditions amount to modern day slavery."

Deskilling labor and demoralizing workers

The companies, hospitals, production studios, and academic institutions that have signed contracts with providers of proprietary AI have used those technologies to erode labor protections and worsen working conditions for their employees. Even when AI is not used directly to replace human workers, it is deployed as a tool for disciplining labor by deskilling the work humans perform: in other words, employers use AI tech to reduce the value of human labor (labor like grading student papers, providing customer service, consulting with patients, etc.) in order to enable the automation of previously skilled tasks. Deskilling makes it easier for companies and institutions to casualize and gigify what were previously more secure positions. It reduces pay and bargaining power for workers, forcing them into new gigs as adjuncts for its own technologies.

I can't say anything better than Tressie McMillan Cottom, so let me quote her recent piece at length: "A.I. may be a mid technology with limited use cases to justify its financial and environmental costs. But it is a stellar tool for demoralizing workers who can, in the blink of a digital eye, be categorized as waste. Whatever A.I. has the potential to become, in this political environment it is most powerful when it is aimed at demoralizing workers. This sort of mid tech would, in a perfect world, go the way of classroom TVs and MOOCs. It would find its niche, mildly reshape the way white-collar workers work and Americans would mostly forget about its promise to transform our lives. But we now live in a world where political might makes right. DOGE’s monthslong infomercial for A.I. reveals the difference that power can make to a mid technology. It does not have to be transformative to change how we live and work. In the wrong hands, mid tech is an antilabor hammer."

Enclosing knowledge production and destroying open access

OpenAI started as a non-profit, but it has now become one of the most aggressive for-profit companies in Silicon Valley. Alongside the new proprietary AIs developed by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, X, etc., OpenAI is extracting personal data and scraping copyrighted works to amass the data it needs to train their bots - even offering one-time payouts to authors to buy the rights to frack their work for AI grist - and then (or so they tell investors) they plan to sell the products back at a profit. As many critics have pointed out, proprietary AI thus works on a model of political economy similar to the 15th-19th-century capitalist project of enclosing what was formerly "the commons," or public land, to turn it into private property for the bourgeois class, who then owned the means of agricultural and industrial production. "Open"AI is built on and requires access to collective knowledge and public archives to run, but its promise to investors (the one they use to attract capital) is that it will enclose the profits generated from that knowledge for private gain.

AI companies hungry for good data to train their Large Language Models (LLMs) have also unleashed a new wave of bots that are stretching the digital infrastructure of open-access sites like Wikipedia, Project Gutenberg, and Internet Archive past capacity. As Eric Hellman writes in a recent blog post, these bots "use as many connections as you have room for. If you add capacity, they just ramp up their requests." In the process of scraping the intellectual commons, they're also trampling and trashing its benefits for truly public use.

Enriching tech oligarchs and fueling military imperialism

The names of many of the people and groups who get richer by generating speculative buzz for generative AI - Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison - are familiar to the public because those people are currently using their wealth to purchase political influence and to win access to public resources. And it's looking increasingly likely that this political interference is motivated by the probability that the AI hype is a bubble - that the tech can never be made profitable or useful - and that tech oligarchs are hoping to keep it afloat as a speculation scheme through an infusion of public money - a.k.a. an AIG-style bailout.

In the meantime, these companies have found a growing interest from military buyers for their tech, as AI becomes a new front for "national security" imperialist growth wars. From an email written by Microsoft employee Ibtihal Aboussad, who interrupted Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman at a live event to call him a war profiteer: "When I moved to AI Platform, I was excited to contribute to cutting-edge AI technology and its applications for the good of humanity: accessibility products, translation services, and tools to 'empower every human and organization to achieve more.' I was not informed that Microsoft would sell my work to the Israeli military and government, with the purpose of spying on and murdering journalists, doctors, aid workers, and entire civilian families. If I knew my work on transcription scenarios would help spy on and transcribe phone calls to better target Palestinians, I would not have joined this organization and contributed to genocide. I did not sign up to write code that violates human rights."

So there's a brief, non-exhaustive digest of some vectors for a critique of proprietary AI's role in the political economy. tl;dr: the first questions of material analysis are "who labors?" and "who profits/to whom does the value of that labor accrue?"

For further (and longer) reading, check out Justin Joque's Revolutionary Mathematics: Artificial Intelligence, Statistics and the Logic of Capitalism and Karen Hao's forthcoming Empire of AI.

[adafruit]

🎄💾🗓️ Day 11: Retrocomputing Advent Calendar - The SEL 840A🎄💾🗓️

Systems Engineering Laboratories (SEL) introduced the SEL 840A in 1965. This is a deep cut folks, buckle in. It was designed as a high-performance, 24-bit general-purpose digital computer, particularly well-suited for scientific and industrial real-time applications.

Notable for using silicon monolithic integrated circuits and a modular architecture. Supported advanced computation with features like concurrent floating-point arithmetic via an optional Extended Arithmetic Unit (EAU), which allowed independent arithmetic processing in single or double precision. With a core memory cycle time of 1.75 microseconds and a capacity of up to 32,768 directly addressable words, the SEL 840A had impressive computational speed and versatility for its time.

Its instruction set covered arithmetic operations, branching, and program control. The computer had fairly robust I/O capabilities, supporting up to 128 input/output units and optional block transfer control for high-speed data movement. SEL 840A had real-time applications, such as data acquisition, industrial automation, and control systems, with features like multi-level priority interrupts and a real-time clock with millisecond resolution.

Software support included a FORTRAN IV compiler, mnemonic assembler, and a library of scientific subroutines, making it accessible for scientific and engineering use. The operator’s console provided immediate access to registers, control functions, and user interaction! Designed to be maintained, its modular design had serviceability you do often not see today, with swing-out circuit pages and accessible test points.

And here's a personal… personal computer history from Adafruit team member, Dan…

== The first computer I used was an SEL-840A, PDF:

I learned Fortran on it in eight grade, in 1970. It was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where my parents worked, and was used to take data from cyclotron experiments and perform calculations. I later patched the Fortran compiler on it to take single-quoted strings, like 'HELLO', in Fortran FORMAT statements, instead of having to use Hollerith counts, like 5HHELLO.

In 1971-1972, in high school, I used a PDP-10 (model KA10) timesharing system, run by BOCES LIRICS on Long Island, NY, while we were there for one year on an exchange.

This is the front panel of the actual computer I used. I worked at the computer center in the summer. I know the fellow in the picture: he was an older high school student at the time.

The first "personal" computers I used were Xerox Alto, Xerox Dorado, Xerox Dandelion (Xerox Star 8010), Apple Lisa, and Apple Mac, and an original IBM PC. Later I used DEC VAXstations.

Dan kinda wins the first computer contest if there was one… Have first computer memories? Post’em up in the comments, or post yours on socialz’ and tag them #firstcomputer #retrocomputing – See you back here tomorrow!

[femmefirmware]

Stronger than Code

The room smelled of polished wood and wealth. A long, obsidian-black table stretched across the center, surrounded by figures in pristine military uniforms and sleek corporate suits. Holograms flickered above the table—data streams, performance metrics, projected kill ratios.

Vance Aldrin stood at the head of the room, hands clasped behind his back. His voice carried the practiced ease of a man who had sold weapons before, a man who knew how to make war sound like progress.

"Gentlemen, what you're about to witness is the future of warfare. No pilots, no human error. Just precision. Efficiency. Victory."

A massive screen on the far wall lit up, showing a barren, cratered battlefield. The feed came from a reconnaissance drone hovering above, capturing every inch of the landscape. In the center stood a lone mech—painted in military grays, its armor thick and battle-worn. A Sentinel-class war machine.

Inside, Arrow sat in the cockpit of Cestia, rolling her shoulders against the harness. The pre-battle checks had been routine. She'd been told this was a weapons test, a stress trial against some combat drones. Nothing more.

"Telemetry reads fine," Cestia's voice chimed in her helmet. Cool. Steady. "No abnormalities."

Arrow exhaled through her nose, running her fingers over the controls. Her loadout was standard: the X-77 Arc Rifle sat in her primary slot, charged and waiting; Hydra Rocket Pods lined her mech’s shoulders, micro-missiles preloaded for rapid strikes. Adaptive Plating monitored her armor integrity, while her Reactive Shock Barrier was primed for emergency defense.

Overprepared for drones, but orders were orders.

"Any idea what we're up against?" she asked.

"Negative," Cestia replied. "No combat signatures detected yet."

Arrow shifted in her seat, gripping the controls. Something about this felt off.

Back in the boardroom, one of the military commanders adjusted his posture, frowning. "She doesn't know the details?"

Vance smiled thinly. "A soldier fights best when tested, General. Besides, the machines don’t need an advantage. This is simply a demonstration of inevitability."

On the screen, movement flickered at the edges of the battlefield. One mech. Then another. Then a dozen.

Arrow’s fingers tightened around the controls as her radar flared to life.

Multiple hostiles detected.

"Twelve signatures. No IFF tags," Cestia reported, her voice steady.

Arrow’s heart gave a single, sharp beat. Drones didn’t carry IFF markers, but twelve? That wasn’t a routine stress test—that was an ambush.

She swung Cestia’s optics toward the ridgeline ahead. Figures emerged from the haze of dust and distant fires—sleek, angular, and unmistakably military-grade. Their metallic frames caught the weak sunlight, reflecting it in cold, artificial flashes. No insignias. No cockpits.

Autonomous mechs.

Her stomach twisted into knots.

“This isn’t a weapons test,” she murmured. “It’s a goddamn execution.”

------

In the boardroom, the assembled commanders murmured among themselves, watching the autonomous mechs take formation. Their movements were synchronized, unnervingly smooth—no hesitation, no wasted motion.

Vance clasped his hands together, voice level. "These are the VX-99 Autonomous Combat Units, better called ACUs. Each one is equipped with onboard tactical processors, capable of analyzing and responding to battlefield conditions in real time. Faster than any human. More precise than any pilot."

Onscreen, Arrow's mech shifted stance, rifle rising.

"Now," Vance continued, "we see the difference between man and machine."

------

Arrow didn’t wait. The second she had a clear shot, she took it.

Bolts of blue energy streaked through the air, hammering into the nearest machine’s chest. The first few rounds impacted harmlessly against the armor—kinetic dispersal fields redirecting the force.

Then the machines returned fire.

Tracer rounds laced toward her, cutting tight, overlapping paths. The barrage wasn’t wild or erratic—they were boxing her in, predicting her movements before she even made them.

Cestia reacted first.

"Defensive pulse—activating."

A concussive wave burst outward, warping the air in a shimmering ripple. The first wave of bullets scattered, thrown off course by the disruption field.

Arrow took the opening and moved.

She fired a tether, the line snapping forward and latching onto a ruined structure to her right. The instant it locked, the winch reeled her in, yanking her out of the kill zone just as the next salvo shredded the ground where she had been standing.

Landing hard, she swung her rifle up and fired another burst—this time, aiming for the exposed joint seams. The rounds struck true, melting through servos. One of the ACUs staggered, its balance thrown.

Arrow didn’t hesitate.

A quick thought armed the warheads on her back, locking onto the crippled machine. The launchers barked, micro-missiles streaking forward in a screaming salvo.

Impact. Fire and metal bloomed outward as the ACU was torn apart. One down.

"Enemy destroyed," Cestia confirmed.

But the others weren’t slowing down.

Arrow gritted her teeth, pulse hammering in her skull. This isn’t a fight. This is survival.

And she was outnumbered.

------

Arrow moved fast, firing as she dashed between cover. The first machine had fallen, but eleven remained. They moved in precise, calculated patterns, shifting formation to adapt to her positioning.

'They’re predicting me.'

The ground near her feet exploded in a shower of debris as incoming rounds punched through the ruins she used as cover. She twisted away, but even as she moved, she could see how their fire adjusted—cutting off escape routes, funneling her toward open ground.

“They prioritize efficiency,” Cestia said, her voice level. “Minimal wasted fire. No redundant targeting. If you were stationary, you’d already be dead.”

“Encouraging.”

“But they lack improvisation. Exploit that.”

Arrow’s eyes flicked across the battlefield. The terrain was ruined, uneven—littered with collapsed structures and unstable footing. Places a human would instinctively avoid. Places a machine would process as a no-go zone.

She made her decision.

Pushing off from cover, she sprinted toward a fractured overpass, dust kicking up around her. The enemy adjusted, weapons tracking. But instead of taking the expected route—ducking into a crater or weaving between debris—she leapt onto a precarious ledge of shattered concrete.

The moment her weight hit, the surface collapsed beneath her. As expected.

She launched another tether mid-fall, the line snapping taut against a distant beam. The sudden jolt wrenched her sideways, sending her into an unpredictable swing just as the next wave of fire tore through the crumbling ledge where she’d been a moment before.

The AI hesitated. Only for a second. But that was all she needed.

Arrow twisted mid-swing, leveling her weapon. The shots slammed into their exposed sections, burning through thin plating where cooling vents had cycled open. The first machine staggered, systems failing. Another shot put it down for good.

A second unit moved to compensate—too slow. A fresh spread of missiles shrieked through the air and detonated against its side, rupturing its core.

Nine left.

She hit the ground hard, rolling to absorb the impact. Keep moving. Keep fighting.

------

In the boardroom, one of the commanders leaned forward. "She's adapting."

Vance’s expression remained impassive, but his fingers tapped once against the table. The machines should have overpowered her by now.

“The ACUs are not designed for reckless engagements,” he said smoothly. “They assess, adjust, and correct.”

Onscreen, the remaining units shifted formation. Less aggression. More calculation.

A bad sign.

Vance’s jaw tightened. He had spent years building this program, promising superiority without human frailty. If this test failed, so did his entire vision.

------

Arrow's breathing was sharp, controlled. Her armor’s cooling vents cycled hard, dispersing heat from the last exchange. Nine hostiles remained—still too many.

She flicked her optics across the terrain. The battlefield was a graveyard of past conflicts, rusting steel skeletons of vehicles and shattered structures dotting the landscape. A machine would see an obstacle course. A pilot saw opportunities.

They were repositioning, adjusting to her tactics. Their advance was slower now, measured. They wouldn’t fall for the same trick twice.

“Cestia, any openings?”

“They’re prioritizing encirclement. No single weak point.” A pause. Then: “But they’re maintaining even spacing. If you disrupt one, the formation falters.”

Arrow’s mind raced. Break the formation. Make them panic.

She surged forward, closing the gap on the nearest unit. The machine reacted, weapon tracking her approach. But she wasn’t aiming for it—she was aiming for the wreckage behind it.

As soon as she was close enough, she fired her tether, the line latching onto a rusted-out tank husk. She yanked herself forward at breakneck speed, momentum carrying her straight past the enemy unit.

It adjusted, recalculating—too late.

Arrow twisted in midair, weapon flaring. Close-range, full burst. The concentrated fire tore through its exposed flank, internal systems sparking before it crumpled forward.

The formation hesitated.

She wasn’t done.

Bracing against her landing, she swung her sights toward the next unit, already launching her next salvo. The micro-missiles streaked toward their target, detonating in a concussive chain reaction that sent two more collapsing in heaps of metal and fire.

Seven left.

But the others weren’t idle. They were learning.

The next wave of fire came even before she could recover. Precise. Unrelenting.

Her plating adjusted, reinforcing under the onslaught, but she still felt the impact shake through the frame. Warning indicators flared across her HUD. "Hull integrity compromised."

Cestia’s voice cut through the chaos. “Structural damage reaching critical thresholds. Prolonged engagement at this rate will result in system failure.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Arrow gritted out, throwing herself behind cover.

She needed an edge. A way to tip the fight before they wore her down.

Speed.

Her fingers hovered over the trigger. The Overclock system was a last resort. It would push Cestia past normal limits—faster reactions, enhanced targeting, boosted fire rate. But it would also burn through coolant reserves. If she miscalculated, she’d overheat.

She exhaled. No choice.

Her thumb flipped the safety.

“Cestia,” she murmured, “give me everything.”

------

In the boardroom, a technician’s voice broke through the tense silence.

“Sir, the pilot just activated Overclock.”

Vance’s gaze snapped to the screen. His stomach twisted.

“She’s overheating already,” the technician continued. “She’ll last maybe thirty seconds before she cooks her own systems.”

Vance clenched his jaw. She should be running. She should be breaking.

But instead, the screen showed something else entirely.

------

The world sharpened.

Time stretched, then snapped forward.

The moment the Overclock engaged, Arrow felt the surge—the mech responding like it was part of her own body. Faster. Sharper. Deadlier.

She was already moving before the enemy could react.

She closed the distance in a blur, her first volley ripping straight through a unit’s core before it could even register the threat. Six.

Another turned, attempting to adjust, but she was already behind it. Two shots to the servos, one to the head. Five.

The remaining machines scrambled, shifting to counter—but they were too slow.

Arrow wasn’t thinking anymore. She was acting, pure instinct.

The third target went down with a brutal strike to its chassis, molten metal pouring from the rupture. Four.

She twisted, barely avoiding the counterfire. Her systems screamed warnings. Overheat imminent.

But there were only three left.

She could finish this.

------

Vance watched as the ACUs collapsed, one after another, their superior processing meaning nothing against pure human instinct.

His stomach twisted.

The last unit tried to retreat—retreat—but the pilot wasn’t letting it go.

The screen flickered as the final kill was confirmed.

Then, silence.

------

Arrow stood in the wreckage, her mech battered, overheating warnings flashing across her HUD. Her limbs shook inside the cockpit. Her breath was ragged.

But she was alive.

Cestia’s voice came through, soft this time. “All hostiles eliminated.”

Arrow let her head fall back against the seat, exhaling.

She won.

She didn’t know what would happen next. Didn’t know what the executives would say, or if they would send more.

But in this moment, she knew one thing:

A mech is only as mighty as the pilot inside it.

And she had proven that.

------

In the boardroom, the silence stretched. The commanders exchanged glances—calculating, decisive. Finally, one of them leaned forward, voice firm.

“This program is a failure.”

Another nodded. “If a single pilot can dismantle an entire squadron, we can’t trust these machines to hold the line in real combat.”

Vance’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

The highest-ranking officer stood, brushing nonexistent dust from his uniform. “We’ll be sticking with human pilots. Meeting adjourned.”

One by one, the commanders filed out, leaving Vance alone in the dim glow of the monitors.

On the screen, the battlefield was still—nothing left but burning wreckage and a single battered mech standing in the midst of it.

His creation had failed.

And worst of all—they had lost to a human.

------

A/N: Phew, this was one of my longer posts, but I bring more news! Firstly, Mechaposting, a discord server for mech (and armored cavalry) enjoyers of all kinds! Still rather young, it aims to be a place that's accepting and meant for discussion.

Secondly, I intend to create a long form story on Royal Road and/or AO3, more details to come.

And lastly, due financial issues in real life, I have now made a Ko-Fi page! Nothing is required, of course, but any help is much appreciated!!

That's all for now pilots, till next sortie.

[miserymet]

Bit hesitant about posting this because it’s really old, but I feel it’s worth the minor embarrassment to:

1. Have actually writing on my blog because yes I do that sometimes

and,

2. Showcase how the Reploid AU is essentially about two different versions of Bass, largely dictated by circumstance

So if you are interested in how Bass recovers his memory in my Reploid Bass AU, I hope you enjoy this drabble I wrote over a year ago.

-

It’s a bit like death, he thinks.

Forte’s mind has always been a mess, it’s something he’s come to terms with. An outdated master system combined with far too advanced processors? It was a recipe for disaster. So when he’s awoken from his respite and suddenly faced with his own datascape, he’s less surprised than he should be. He knows this place. It’s where he goes when everyone else is dreaming. The center of his mind, where his every thought, his every feeling, is easily accessible.

But why is he here, and not awake? The procedure required that he was completely shut off. His every system in stasis. If it’s over, why isn’t he in the real world? Why isn’t he operating already? Forte looks around the empty space. Code fills his senses, white noise buzzing around him. An unrelenting dread fills his metal bones. Either the procedure failed, or…

Or he’s dead.

The old Forte.

There’s nothing to recover, is there? He’s going to be like this forever, stuck in this horrible limbo of past and present. Trapped in his ignorance, trapped in his mind-!

“No.”

Forte stops. His fears flees him, leaving him empty. That voice is…

“Mine. It’s mine.”

A low whistle punctuates his words, but he doesn’t make a sound.

“Sure is, Forte.” A chuckle. “Glad you like the name. I didn’t.”

Forte turns to find a lone figure at the edge of his consciousness. A figure he recognizes, though they’ve never looked so pristine. His old body looks at him, sans all the damage it once bore so nobly. Now it is a shiny black, with only a few thin scratches across its surface. The face it wears is rounder, the eyes softer. It’s him. His former self.

He should feel glad, right? This is what he wanted?

It still feels like death, somehow. 

“What is your name?”

“Our name was Bass.” A distinct correction. “And it was well known.”

“It worked, then? We remember?”

“I remember. You don’t. That’s because you’re not ready to accept me.”

“I am! I’ve wanted this for-!”

“You don’t know what THIS is!” Bass glares at him. “Even if you did, I’m not ready to accept you either. So give me the chance to explain before you make up your mind.”

Forte nods, though he doubts his former self needed the permission.

“I’ll rip the bandaid off quickly. We can’t both exist, Forte. Not at once.” He crosses his arms. “You want your old memories? You have to accept all of them. Not just the data, the routines too. It’ll be a complete recovery. A rewrite, to put it all back to the way it was.”

“Ego death.”

“For you, if you choose it.”

“If I don’t?”

“Then I die, and you forget. Permanently this time.”

“…my brother is dead. I’m a second rate hunter with a third rate system. I do not belong here anymore.”

“And I do? I haven’t had the privilege of rooting through your memories, but the log says we’re a hundred years in the future. I doubt we’d recognize the place.” Bass scoffs. “I don’t know anything about your world. I’m going to be even more displaced than you are.”

“Will you keep my data? Even if you cannot understand it?”

“…the memory. I’ll remember what and why, but my routines might not understand the decisions you made. You’ll wake up a stranger.”

“Why are we so different? Aren’t we the same robot?”

“We lost some things in the update. Certain protocol was rendered useless. Like you stopped recognizing your commands.” Bass pauses, a look of uncertainty crossing his face. “No, like you stopped recognizing who the commands referred to. They gave names, names you don’t recognize. His name is lost to you. So…”

“His?”

“Our purpose. The very reason we exist. You forgot him like it was nothing.”

“Z-,” he stops. He knows that name, so his purpose is something other than that. “Who?”

“Doesn’t matter. You’ll die easier if you let go of that.” Bass looks away. “Im scared, you know. Of the future. I remember how we died. The moments before. We expected to walk away that day. We expected to live. To move on. Go home. He took that from us.”

“He?”

“The man that lingers in your mind. I know him. I hate him. He loves you.”

“Loves me?”

“What are you, an echo?” Bass scoffs with more vigor this time. “We were proud, once. We stood tall and fought tooth and nail against all that challenged us. We were the strongest. You aren’t. You’re a coward. You’re weak.”

“I’m afraid too.” Forte closes his eyes. “I don’t want to disappear.”

“Then go. Go back.” Bass whispers. “I would’ve, if I knew. I was just about to…I was going to be something different. I was going to make a choice. A GOOD one, this time. I was going to…”

Forte blinks at his old self. “What? What were you going to do?”

“Have a family. A real one this time, one that would’ve cared about me. One that would give me a chance. But…”

“We died.”

“Yeah. Didn’t realize how bad I wanted it until it slipped from my hands. Until I was laying there, ripped to shreds, praying for someone to save me.”

“No one did, did they?”

“I wonder if they looked for me. I wonder if they thought I had run off. Like a coward.”

“There’s someone waiting for us. For you, out there. Go to him.” Forte takes a step forward. “He needs a friend and…I cannot do that for him. Not anymore.”

“Coward.”

“Yes.” He takes a deep, synthetic breath. “I’m ready, I think.”

“I’m not. But I’ll do it. I’m curious, anyway.”

[raynerberg]

Awakening Continuation of the story based on those drawings

— Attention! Only emergency systems are operational. The operation of all systems in the "Epsilon" complex has been suspended, — echoed an emotionless voice from the automated defense system, emanating from speakers embedded in the ceiling.

A standard warning meant to prompt all personnel to follow one of two protocols: evacuation or activation of the main life-support system from control centers where energy reserves were still available to power the reactor. Yet, there was not a soul here — neither synthetic nor organic. This place would have remained forgotten, forever entombed in darkness beneath layers of rock, if not for the single island of light within this "tomb," clad in tungsten-titanium panels. The only place where a fragile chance for a new beginning still remained. The first breath and first exhalation had already been taken before the warning even finished.

— Main computer, cancel protocols 0.2.0 and 0.1.1, — a robotic baritone commanded softly.

A humanoid figure sat motionless on its knees at the center of a circular charging station, carbon-fiber hands hanging limply, resembling a monument to a weary martyr. It could feel the electric tension within the wires embedded in its head, running beneath a slightly elongated protrusion where a human’s parietal bone would have been. These connections to hubs and gateways fed it information, energy, and programs necessary for independent operation. Data streams pulsed in uneven impulses, flowing directly into its central processor. Disconnecting remotely from all storage units during the upload process was pointless while the body remained in a state of non-functioning plastic — albeit an ultra-durable one. At that moment, it could be compared to a newborn: blind, nearly deaf, immobilized, with only its speech module fully operational.

— Request denied. Unknown source detected. Please identify yourself, — the computer responded.

— Personal code 95603, clearance level "A," Erebus, — the synthetic exhaled a trace of heated steam on the final word. The database key reader had been among the first systems to activate, already granting necessary access.

— Identification successful. Access granted. Please repeat your request.

— Main computer, cancel protocols 0.2.0 and 0.1.1, — the android reiterated, then expanded the command now that full access was in his mechanical hands. — Disable emergency systems. Initiate remote activation of the S2 repair engineer unit. Redirect energy from reserve tank "4" to the main reactor at 45% capacity, — Erebus added, his voice gaining a few extra decibels.

— Request received. Executing, — came the virtual response.

For two minutes and forty-five seconds, silence reigned, broken only by the faint hum of the charging station. The severe energy shortage had slowed down all processes within the complex, and hastening them would have been an inefficient waste of what little power remained. Erebus waited patiently. A human, placed in a small, cold, nearly pitch-black place, would have developed the most common phobias. But he wasn’t human…

He spent the time thinking. Despite the exabytes of data in his positronic brain, some fragments were missing — either due to error, obsolescence, or mechanical and software damage. Seven hundred eighty-five vacant cells in the long-term memory sector. Too many. Within one of these gaping voids, instead of a direct answer, there were only strands of probability, logical weavings leading nowhere definitive. In human terms — guesses. He knew who had created him, what had happened, how Erebus himself had been activated, and even why — to continue what has been started. These fragments remained intact. The registry was divided into sections, subsections, paragraphs, chapters, and headings, all numbered and prioritized with emphasis. A task list flickered as a small, semi-transparent window on the periphery of his internal screen, waiting to be executed. But… The android had been activated, which meant the battle was lost. Total defeat. Area 51 was destroyed. All data stored there had a 98.9% probability of being erased. Blueprints, research, experimental results — all had been consigned to the metaphorical Abyss created by human imagination. So why did any of this matter now? And to whom? These were the first questions of the logical mechanism to illogical human actions.

Yet, to put it in poetic human language, Bob Page had been a luminary of progressive humanity. A brilliant engineer, a scientist, and most importantly, a man of absolute conviction. Cynical and calculating, but one who genuinely loved his work. The idea above all else.

It’s known that true ideological fanatics are among the most radical and unyielding members of Homo sapiens. They can’t be bought, they won’t allow themselves to be sold, and they will trample others underfoot if it serves their belief. They don’t need others' ideals — only their own. These are individuals who elevate themselves to the rank of true creators. Even after death, they remain faithful to their convictions, leaving behind tomes of their interpretations and scientific dogmas to their equally devoted disciples — followers always found at the peak of their intellectual and physical prowess. So, upon activation, had Erebus inherited… An Idea? Has he become a spiritual heir?

Did Page have no biological heirs, or did they not share his ideology? Or were they simply unaware of it? Could a true pragmatist have lacked successors or trusted disciples? Hard to believe, even with missing fragments of data. To entrust the idea to a machine instead of a human? As Homo sapiens would say — "a mystery shrouded in darkness." Questions multiplied exponentially. But Erebus had plenty of time to think about all of it. As well as about his own deactivation — after all, a machine has no fear of "death".

"Loading 98%... 99%... 100%. Secondary initialization complete. All systems active at 100%. Disengaging."

The message flashed across the inner visor of the android’s interface before vanishing. Behind him, with a low hiss, the plugs disconnected from their sockets, and fiber-optic-coated cables fell to the floor with a subdued clatter. The android slowly raised his hands before himself, clenching and unclenching his fingers, then rotated his wrists inward, as if they had the capacity to go numb from disuse. Finally, planting both fists on the ground, the synthetic pushed himself up in one fluid, springy motion, straightening to his full height. Motor functions — normal. Calibration — unnecessary. Optical focus — 100%.

— Attention! Reactor online. Power at 45%. Follow procedures for medium-level emergency response, — the announcement echoed through the chamber. Erebus turned his head slightly.

— Main computer, report overall operational status of the "Epsilon" complex, — the android commanded.

— Overall status: 10.5% below safe operational levels, — the computer obediently replied, recognizing the synthetic as an authorized entity.

"Acceptable," Erebus thought, and addressed the system once more.

— Redistribute energy between the maintenance sectors, communication center, transport hub, and computational core. Utilize reserve tanks as necessary.

— Request received. Energy rerouted. Reserve tanks "2" and "3" engaged. Reserve tank "1" decommissioned. Reserve tank "5" operational at 90%, awaiting connection for redistribution, — the computer reported.

— Excellent. Main computer, power down, — Erebus issued his final command to his brief conversational partner. — Now, I am the master here.

[brandwhorestarscream]

Half baked idea inspired by those jellyfish (or other deep sea critter i cant remember) that fuse with one another in order to heal wounds, making a stronger, healthier, "younger" variety in it's place: cybertronians doing something similar as a hidden one-in-a-million uncontrollable defense mechanism. When the spark is threatened, the body will do everything it can to protect it: compacting harshly, as much as is possible, around the spark crystal, drawing in mass and doing away with anything not vital to keeping the spark pulsing. The processor is usually damaged or severely wiped during this event, both by the squeezing trauma of everything congregating around the center, and because the body cant waste energy on memory files when its in such crisis. The most recent memories go first, and too long in the near-death state can completely wipe all data, memories, and experiences from a mecha's processor... rendering them in a tiiiiny wittle body with limited functionality and no recollection of Anything

Basically cybertronians having a very very small chance to revert backwards when they have a near death experience 🤭

Who does it happen to? No idea. Who's looking after them? No clue. Ive slept a grand total of about 5 hours over the last 2 days and im slowly losing it loool

[silenceofthewave]

[ closed starter for @quantumlogician ; Megatron ]

--------

The nerve center of the Decepticon Intelligence Division was never really empty. Day and night, reports poured in from agents across the planet, from both spy operatives and commanders. Round-the-clock surveillance was expected at this point; it mattered not if there was enough personnel to carry on such a task. The only thing that mattered was victory.

Soundwave had taken to almost enjoying the nightshift. It was peaceful; no one was attempting to ask for its opinion, nor did anyone really bother it. The nightshift was a refuge of deep focus and flow.

Soundwave stood at the usual terminal in the center of all things, datacables connected and pulsing with the electrical charge they carried. The terminal itself was an almost wholly automated system that separated reports by author, type and urgency. Soundwave didn't necessarily need to be there, the system could handle this on its own, but he couldn't help enjoying the feeling of the data washing over its processors.

Old reports from during the day and the current ones flowing in moved through Soundwave's processor. He had turned off the automation and rather sorted each one himself. Almost like a race, he would time his processing speed against the terminal's. Some may see this as showing off, but to Soundwave it was an exercise. It kept him present, in the moment, and most importantly busy.

That's why he was here in the first place. Technically, his shift had ended two cycles ago. He was supposed to be getting sorely needed recharge, but to be quite honest, he hadn't recharged properly in orbital cycles. Nightmares plagued his processor. Images of his lost siblings and the feeling of warm energon dripping down his plating were a constant. They woke him out of whatever deep stasis he found himself in and left him trembling for the rest of the night.

He wasn't sure what the point of that all was. Soundwave knew that he had made his grave, and he must fill it one day. The grave had been dug since his first match in the Pits. Soundwave didn't necessarily believe in destiny, but he believed in the consequences of choices. His choices had led him here, hollow and alone.

The stray thought tree was cut as soon as it made itself known. Soundwave had no intention on focusing its awareness towards the ache of its empty deck. Instead, it shifted. It brought its background awareness to the transformation seams of Laserbeak's docking mechanism. She was snuggled in tight, her side of the bond indicating that she was in stasis and had been for some time. Soundwave wasn't truly alone as long as Laserbeak was here.

Soundwave let a small sense of comfort shine through its side of the bond, knowing full well that Laserbeak would miss it. Still, it distracted from the four hollow places in its spark; another exercise to keep its focus in the present. It lifted a servo to gently trace the spine of its final avian friend. It focused on the thrum of her engines and their gentle purr as she recharged.

The final nail in the coffin for Soundwave's focus towards its task was the door to the nerve center sliding open. It briefly looked over its shoulder, catching the glint of silver and red armor move just out of the line of sight. A familiar field touched its heightened senses, alerting Soundwave to who had decided to pay a visit. What for? Only time could tell.

Soundwave turned back to the terminal it stood behind. An OS window appeared and was quickly filled with the commands to return the system to normal functioning. The wash of data over its processor ebbed away, leaving the open neural pathways achingly empty. Soundwave did its best to ignore this sensation (and the way it mirrored its empty deck) as it unhooked its datacables. They returned to their housings with a quiet snkt!

Soundwave remained at the terminal. It was unmoving, still as stone as it tried to bring the comforting feeling of data processing to the moment, despite the distinct lack of work being done. An after glow, if you will, but one as fleeting as life during war.

[mariacallous]

If you drive outside the city of Campton, population less than 400, the low industrial noise of crypto mining rises from the trees. Step closer, and the source comes into view: squat metal buildings that look like shipping containers arrayed in a semicircle, thrumming with fans and processors. There’s chain-link fencing, security cameras, and two guards sitting in pickup trucks just beyond the wire.

There are steel shipping containers like this all over these hills, right where the old coal mines once stood. And inside, specialized computers race to solve complex math problems—competing to verify bitcoin transactions and earn slivers of digital currency as a reward.

For a brief moment, in 2021, it felt like the region had found its next boom—and it had Bitcoin written all over it. At its peak, Kentucky accounted for some 20 percent of the collective computing power dedicated to proof-of-work cryptocurrency mining in the US.

But booms, here, have a history. And so do busts. Local officials say it is hard to pin down the exact number of crypto mines still active in eastern Kentucky because state regulations are light and there’s a general lack of transparency in the industry. But what is clear, locals say, is that the boom has begun to recede.

“ They'd constructed on someone else's land, or they would be paying a host company to provide the physical plant,” alleges Anna Whites, a lawyer who represented a roster of crypto mining clients. “So they'd pay the down payment or they would convince the landowner to pay the down payment, and then they would mine the first three months and then they'd go into the next billing set cycle, go almost to the end of it and then disappear.”

In early 2022, when Mohawk Energy initiated a crypto mining project in Jenkins, Kentucky, local officials said this time it would be different. Cofounded by Kentucky senator Brandon Smith, Mohawk purchased a sprawling 41,000-square-foot building and the 8 acres around it. It leased most of it to a Chinese crypto mining company, and the rest of the building included classrooms and hands-on training centers that were supposed to teach locals how to repair iPads, maintain Bitcoin rigs, and build skills for a digital economy. It was a big deal for Jenkins. A local PBS station ran a story about the launch. The images showed tool kits, workers, and smiling officials.

“The plan with Mohawk was to employ retired coal miners and disabled veterans who were back in eastern Kentucky and couldn’t find work, and train them,” said Whites, who counts Mohawk as one of her clients. Among other things, the project promised near-six-figure salaries and a vow to put some of the mining proceeds into the training program, to help grow it. And for a time, it worked.

Whites said that for a brief moment—about 18 months—things looked promising. Twenty-eight families saw real gains: One person from each family landed a permanent job, and about 30 more relatives found work nearby. But when we asked where things stood now, she paused. “I believe most of them are unemployed again.”

The unraveling came quickly. The Chinese partner sued for breach of contract. Mohawk counter-sued. And the shared crypto profits never materialized. Now, as some Kentucky residents have soured on bitcoin mining, they’ve started to speak about AI data centers in the same way they used to talk about coal seams and hash rates: with a kind of cautious hope. AI, they say, could bring jobs, fiber optics, and permanence.

Colby Kirk runs a nonprofit called One East Kentucky, focused on bringing economic development to the region. He remembers the moment the conversation shifted, back in April when he was in Paducah for the Kentucky Association for Economic Development’s spring conference.

“They had some site selection consultants that were on the panel, and they were talking about data centers,” he recalls. “And they talked about this I-81 corridor up through Pennsylvania where there’s all kinds of these big data centers. And they talked about whether our communities could prepare for some of these kinds of investments? And the consultant was like, here’s kind of what it takes.”

What it takes, it turns out, is no small feat: flat land, lots of power, fiber connectivity, and a workforce that can wire and weld. As fate would have it, the number of welders in the area, according to regional economic development organization One East Kentucky, is about twice the national average, which stands to reason, because wherever there’s metal and stress—and there’s a lot of both in coal mines—welders are the people who keep it all from falling apart.

The old infrastructure is still there too; substations, hardened ground, cooling systems, and power-hungry hardware just waiting to be switched back on. “Maybe a data center or something is a part of the puzzle,” Kirk said.

So, at the conference, when the panel ended and the floor opened to questions, Kirk says he asked the one he couldn’t stop thinking about.

“You know, 50, 60 years ago it would take a room bigger than my office to power a computer, and now I've got a computer I carry around in my pocket that's more advanced than what we sent astronauts to the moon with,” he recalls asking. “Are these data centers going to keep taking up million-square-feet buildings with 30- and 40-foot ceilings, or are we gonna be left with an abundance of warehouse or industrial-scale buildings that we won't be able to keep up?”

The consultant, he claims, didn’t have a good answer. “And that’s the thing,” Kirk says. “We don’t know what the future’s going to hold when it comes to this stuff.”

That kind of ambiguity doesn’t sit well with Nina McCoy. She’s a former high school biology teacher from Inez, a coal town made famous in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson used it to generate support for his War on Poverty.

“This is going to sound awful,” she says, “but if they're putting it here, then that means it's bad. We've lived here long enough to see that that is how it works. You put those things that you don't want in your neighborhood in a place like this.”

Her skepticism is rooted in lived experience: In October 2000, a massive coal slurry spill from a mine site upstream poisoned the Coldwater Fork stream, which runs behind her house. People in Inez couldn’t drink water from the tap for months.

“Those of us living downstream didn't hear about it for a while, but the school system had to close down for about a week until they got an alternate water source,” she says.

To this day, many in Inez still don’t trust the tap water.

So when McCoy hears the hype about AI, she hears something else: another promise that comes with a cost. “We’ve allowed these people to be called job creators,” she said. “And I don’t care if it’s AI or crypto or whatever, we bow down to them and let them tell us what they are going to do to our community because they are job creators. They’re not job creators, they’re profit makers.”

And the profit leaves a footprint.

AI data centers demand staggering amounts of energy—a ChatGPT search uses up to 10 times more energy than a regular Google one—and they run hot. To keep them cool, these facilities consume billions of gallons of water every year. Most of that evaporates, but residents are wary because they have had problems with facilities and their runoff in the past, so they worry these new facilities could affect fish and disrupt the land. The very things the residents of Kentucky hope to preserve.

Still, some locals see potential, even progress.

“AI is in everything that we do,” said Wes Hamilton, a local entrepreneur who did his fair share of crypto mining in Kentucky in its heyday. “Siri, ChatGPT, robotics—everything you can imagine has to have AI,” he said. “Bitcoin is a one-trick pony. You create it. The only person that gets paid is the owner of the machines.”

Hamilton claims there is a path forward where data centers bring in investors, engineers, maybe even companies willing to stay. All the AI people in the world would be steaming into Kentucky, Hamilton says. And while he admits to losing a fortune in crypto ventures in the past, he claims this is different.

When Bitcoin first arrived, lawmakers offered generous tax breaks to lure miners. Companies investing more than $1 million were exempted from paying sales taxes on hardware and electricity. And then, in March 2025, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear took all that and went a step further by signing a “Bitcoin Rights” bill into law.

The legislation, cast as a defense of personal financial freedom, is designed to enshrine the right to use digital assets in Kentucky. An earlier draft went further, aiming to bar local governments from using zoning laws to restrict crypto mining operations—a provision that drew resistance from environmental groups. That language was eventually tempered, but the intent remains: to signal that, in Kentucky, digital extraction can keep humming.

Which is why we found ourselves outside this facility in Campton, staring at this semicircle of metal buildings nestled in the trees. The mines run all night and all day, even Sundays. And the question some are asking now, with bitcoin hovering around $100,000 and big miners talking about pivoting to AI, is whether bitcoin mining gets a second wind in Kentucky.

Mohawk’s bitcoin mining may even make a comeback. Anna Whites said the parties are supposed to go into arbitration May 12th. “I’m hopeful,” she told us. “I’m very hopeful that they sit down and say, ‘Mighty nice plant you have there. Let’s just go ahead and turn it on.’”

[spark-hearts2]

QUESTION TWO:

SWITCH BOXES. you said that’s what monitors the connections between systems in the computer cluster, right? I assume it has software of its own but we don’t need to get into that, anyway, I am so curious about this— in really really large buildings full of servers, (like multiplayer game hosting servers, Google basically) how big would that switch box have to be? Do they even need one? Would taking out the switch box on a large system like that just completely crash it all?? While I’m on that note, when it’s really large professional server systems like that, how do THEY connect everything to power sources? Do they string it all together like fairy lights with one big cable, or??? …..the voices……..THE VOICES GRR

I’m acending (autism)

ALRIGHT! I'm starting with this one because the first question that should be answered is what the hell is a server rack?

Once again, long post under cut.

So! The first thing I should get out of the way is what is the difference between a computer and a server. Which, is like asking the difference between a gaming console and a computer. Or better yet, the difference between a gaming computer and a regular everyday PC. Which is... that they are pretty much the same thing! But if you game on a gaming computer, you'll get much better performance than on a standard PC. This is (mostly) because a gaming computer has a whole separate processor dedicated to processing graphics (GPU). A server is different from a PC in the same way, it's just a computer that is specifically built to handle the loads of running an online service. That's why you can run a server off a random PC in your closet, the core components are the same! (So good news about your other question. Short answer, yes! It would be possible to connect the hodgepodge of computers to the sexy server racks upstairs, but I'll get more into that in the next long post)

But if you want to cater to hundreds or thousands of customers, you need the professional stuff. So let's break down what's (most commonly) in a rack setup, starting with the individual units (sometimes referred to just as 'U').

Short version of someone setting one up!

18 fucking hard drives. 2 CPUs. How many sticks of ram???

Holy shit, that's a lot. Now depending on your priorities, the next question is, can we play video games on it? Not directly! This thing doesn't have a GPU so using it to render a video game works, but you won't have sparkly graphics with high frame rate. I'll put some video links at the bottom that goes more into the anatomy of the individual units themselves.

I pulled this screenshot from this video rewiring a server rack! As you can see, there are two switch boxes in this server rack! Each rack gets their own switch box to manage which unit in the rack gets what. So it's not like everything is connected to one massive switch box. You can add more capacity by making it bigger or you can just add another one! And if you take it out then shit is fucked. Communication has been broken, 404 website not found (<- not actually sure if this error will show).

So how do servers talk to one another? Again, I'll get more into that in my next essay response to your questions. But basically, they can talk over the internet the same way that your machine does (each server has their own address known as an IP and routers shoot you at one).

POWER SUPPLY FOR A SERVER RACK (finally back to shit I've learned in class) YOU ARE ASKING IF THEY ARE WIRED TOGETHER IN SERIES OR PARALLEL! The answer is parallel. Look back up at the image above, I've called out the power cables. In fact, watch the video of that guy wiring that rack back together very fast. Everything on the right is power. How are they able to plug everything together like that? Oh god I know too much about this topic do not talk to me about transformers (<- both the electrical type and the giant robots). BASICALLY, in a data center (place with WAY to many servers) the building is literally built with that kind of draw in mind (oh god the power demands of computing, I will write a long essay about that in your other question). Worrying about popping a fuse is only really a thing when plugging in a server into a plug in your house.

Links to useful youtube videos

How does a server work? (great guide in under 20 min)

Rackmount Server Anatomy 101 | A Beginner's Guide (more comprehensive breakdown but an hour long)

DATA CENTRE 101 | DISSECTING a SERVER and its COMPONENTS! (the guy is surrounded by screaming server racks and is close to incomprehensible)

What is a patch panel? (More stuff about switch boxes- HOLY SHIT there's more hardware just for managing the connection???)

Data Center Terminologies (basic breakdown of entire data center)

Networking Equipment Racks - How Do They Work? (very informative)

Funny

[luckystarchild]

I *do* keep my fanfic back-ups on discord. Actually it's where I write them too, so here's my process, it should be a good starting point at least.

Step 1: I write directly into discord. This is because discord is always in my pocket. However, there is a character limit, and it usually saves in progess posts for long periods of time. But if you don't hit enter there's always a chance the latest post will glitch. Honostly, character limit means you can't lose too much.

Step 2: I copy and paste it into notepad. This is because I want complete control over the formatting and want it compatible with *everything.* I make my chapters around 600 "lines" long which is shorter than yours so you may need to do some extra testing for step 3. If you have a lot of italics you'll want to pretend to edit the post and copy from that mode. It puts asterisks around your italics so they don't just disappear into the aether. (I put them back in in AO3).

Step 3: I upload the notepad to a condensed channel with only the chapters. Discord has a data limit for sharing files. I don't know what word processor you usually use, so you'll probably need to experiment with that. However, most of them can only be opened if the receiver has a copy of the same processor. Notepads open in discord (though with shitty formatting) and are downloadable by everyone. If you don't mind not having italics.

My step 4 is making it pretty for AO3.

I appreciate hearing about your process!

But there has been a miscommunication. When I said I was thinking of creating a Discord server for Lucky Child, my intention was NOT to host the story on Discord itself, nor use the platform as some kind of word processing alternative/a backup server for the text of the fanfic. The Discord server would function as a distribution center (providing download links to chapters as e-reader or txt files) and a chat/community center in the event Tumblr became unsafe and/or the AO3 servers went down and the comments section went with it.

Respectfully, I want to caution you against using Discord as your main writing program or as a backup server for your works. You should ideally be saving offline copies of your work that aren't hosted in the cloud on servers outside your control. If AO3 and Discord went down simultaneously, it sounds as though you'd lose all of your work. Unless you're saving those notepad files somewhere, you're putting the longevity of your body of work at risk. Any works in-progress that you haven't yet manually copied over to a notepad file are also at risk.

(Additionally, and at the risk of sounding pedantic, if you are using Discord as your primary word processor, you're not really "backing up" your work via Discord. That's your primary copy. It sounds like your backup is actually AO3, and potentially those notepad files if you're saving them offline.)

In the end, I'm trying to find a way to get Lucky Child to readers without relying on a single distribution platform (which at this time is AO3). Trusting your data to someone else's servers puts you at the exact risk I'm trying to avoid: censorship. Goggle Docs has been caught altering user's content or locking them out of their own content, and I can see a world where Discord follows suit and starts monitoring the content shared between users. I would avoid hosting the text of Lucky Child itself on the server to lessen chances of the story getting flagged.

If the system works for you, that's great, and thanks again for showing me your process! But it's not really relevant to my goals for LC and its distribution at this time.