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vbeyonddigital23 · 2 years ago

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Why SharePoint is the best fit for your enterprise learning and development requirements

Building a learning management system on SharePoint can help create a collaborative knowledge-sharing environment for employees to learn, apply, and grow.

SharePoint has emerged as one of Microsoft’s fastest-growing products and for good reason, given the pace of digital transformation across the enterprise ecosystem. SharePoint is a powerful platform that provides centralized and secure storage for business insights and documents while decentralizing access to important data for your teams to ensure uninterrupted workflows. At the same time, it enables the creation of custom learning and development (L&D) platforms for employees with a SharePoint foundation.

With a learning management system (LMS) built on SharePoint, employees can collaborate and interact with each other to share knowledge and resources. Here, learning and development initiatives can include short to mid-term skill enhancement courses, specialized training programs, etc. that help them learn and access growth opportunities.

But before getting started with using SharePoint for your LMS, it is important to understand key points and benefits to ensure maximum impact of SharePoint on your L&D efforts.

Benefits of building an LMS on SharePoint

Traditional learning management systems or third-party portals often have a siloed or isolated learning process. On the other hand, SharePoint enables you to build a highly customized learning platform with greater engagement and interactivity for employees. The platform’s customization capabilities further enable administrators and instructors to track an individual’s learning progress more closely and measure success through several predefined metrics.

To understand SharePoint’s value as an LMS, let’s look at some of its key features and benefits:

1. Rapidly create and deploy learning management systems

The core benefit of using SharePoint to build an LMS is eliminating extra effort in incorporating, learning, and deploying new enterprise software. SharePoint achieves this by maximizing the use of existing software to gain maximum results. SharePoint ensures increased utilization of existing resources to customize the LMS system customizable for your business.

SharePoint easily integrates with various internal data and content sources, including Microsoft Active Directory, allowing you to migrate data to the LMS. This way, incorporating SharePoint in your LMS initiative also creates a single source of knowledge for better content access and customization while reducing effort in creating learning content.

With seamless integrations offered by SharePoint, you can maximize the value from your existing Microsoft 365 deployment for a comprehensive LMS. As employees would already be familiar with the user interface and experience of the Microsoft 365 suite, implementing a new LMS becomes much faster and can take place with fewer hiccups.

2. Create an engaging user experience

The most crucial metric for a successful learning management system is the engagement of users, the quality of the learning experience, and incorporating the training into actual responsibilities and business scenarios. That’s why creating a customizable learning experience for individual employees as well as groups of employees is better than force-fitting a certain group into randomized learning hierarchies.

This is where SharePoint can be the game-changer for your LMS. With an in-depth understanding of your corporate hierarchy and learning needs at every stage, SharePoint can create a learning program for every level of management.

SharePoint enables you to assign individual employees to customized training programs, evaluate individual employee performance, and choose whether to promote certain employees as per their progress in the learning module. For instance, training modules for salespeople working in the field will differ vastly from the financial management employees. This way, learning programs can be tailored for employees, starting from the entry-level to mid-level and senior-level employees based on the skills needed for their specific roles.

Furthermore, being a centralized data management system, SharePoint can extract data of every employee from internal, connected storage platforms to create the most comprehensive training modules for your organizational needs. And it doesn’t stop here. You can gamify the entire training module with interactive challenges, quizzes, case studies, and leaderboards to ensure a healthy competitive environment within the organization.

3. Manage the entire learning experience on a single platform

SharePoint is essentially an enterprise application for creating a comprehensive, collaborative, digital work environment. However, its various functions can optimize and customize training modules as per the company’s requirements.

From an L&D perspective, SharePoint allows for such functions as:

Enterprise content management

Task-oriented, in-context collaboration

Personalized aggregation points for your user’s experience

Enterprise database search

Business intelligence

Here’s a general explanation of how these features work –

Using SharePoint as an LMS, trainers can upload content directly to SharePoint. Using version control and workflow creation features, trainers and admins can ensure the quality of all learning content and ensure that it is current. They do not need to transfer documents from one system to another. In fact, trainers can simply set permissions from Active Directory regarding who can access the training and set tasks that link to the learner’s Microsoft Outlook or Teams. The learner and trainer can also discuss any of the training topics on a team site either one-on-one or in a group setting through chats.

SharePoint’s multi-device access also helps employees to access the training module on their smartphones or their tablets, hence enabling learning on the go.

4. Efficiently build and manage LMS content

As mentioned before, SharePoint creates a central data access storage and management system for your business. It also includes the LMS system where you can store individual employee performance and previous LMS content for efficient management and integration with your SharePoint-based LMS in the future. Incorporating Microsoft Active Directory can further enhance the process by avoiding data duplication and additional efforts in creating employee profiles for every new training module.

5. Fast and accurate reporting

Reporting is essential to know if learning objectives are being met and to know if they’re positively impacting team productivity and business outcomes. And the key to getting this information is the ability to convert data on learning outcomes into easily understandable reports.

SharePoint reduces the friction of reporting that is common with other systems. Your SharePoint LMS can be easily integrated with Power BI to cross-share data and build automated dashboards using Power Automate, that ultimately, help key stakeholders view detailed reports and insights.

Build a powerful LMS by integrating SharePoint with Power BI and Power Automate

With everything we have talked about above, it’s rather obvious that SharePoint provides maximum efficiency and limitless customization to enterprise learning and development modules. However, what if we tell you it can be even better?

Building an integrated L&D management system for your organization with Power BI and Power Automate can make the entire process even more customizable, scalable, and further simplify how employees’ learning progress is measured and used. Power BI is business analytics and visualization tool that helps businesses to present and view data and make better decisions on talent and leadership development as well as business aspects. This includes synchronizing files, enabling data flow among various applications, setting custom triggers, receiving customized notifications, and more.

Integrating Power Automate with SharePoint makes the process of building learning modules using specific data on the cloud much simpler by allowing trainers to connect them to SharePoint without having to use any code. This way, they can build more accessible, customizable, and scalable learning programs of varying duration and complexity for thousands of employees at minimum cost and time.

As an enterprise data visualization tool, Power BI delivers a whole new level of sophistication and customization in building dashboards for both employees and the leadership team to measure the progress of the training module along with each participant in it.

This further enhances the value of a training module with real-time progression mapping. Through these insights, management can decide which employee is best suited for a particular job role or is fit to take on leadership roles based on a combination of data showcasing their performance and learning history.

Don’t just think about building an LMS – do it

As companies evolve and employees transition from one role to another, capturing new knowledge, keeping the existing one, and sharing the acquired knowledge with their peers in a collaborative workspace is crucial for sustainably growing organizations.

A strong organizational culture of learning and skilling, backed by a powerful learning management system, can ensure that your organization grows with new knowledge and skilled talent. Additionally, employees feel they are adding value to their jobs while they grow professionally.

At VBeyond Digital, we can help you get started with learning and development initiatives you have wanted to implement in your organization, but were skeptical about the costs and technological resources associated with them.

For more information and answers, feel free to contact us.

#sharepoint learning management system #using sharepoint as a learning management system #lms on sharepoint #enterprise learning management system

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seekinghelp-adhd · 2 years ago

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Chance Encounters (Maribat idea I'm throwing around)

Marinette moves to Gotham to pursue fashion. She has to finish her last year of high school at Gotham Academy and do an internship over the summer, but if she does she gets a massive scholarship to Gotham University. They were more than happy to help out Jagged Stone's famously young personal designer. Obviously, this puts her in classes with Damien Wayne, who barely talks and only ever calls his brothers by their last names.

Jagged insists on setting her up in a penthouse for her stay in Gotham, but Marinette argues that being a single girl living in a fancy penthouse is like asking one of the Gotham rogues to kidnap or rob her. They compromise on a nice apartment with a state of the art security system, one owned by Wayne Enterprises. Another tenant on her same floor, Jason Todd, stops by to scope out the new neighbor. He seems nice enough, but he keeps calling his older brother "Dick" and Marinette can't tell if that's his name or just an insult. Apparently he does this whenever someone new moves in to see if he’ll have to move. Marinette tells him to let her know if he does, Because she says if he doesn’t feel safe living in this building anymore, she definitely wants to leave. Jason is amused by this and decides she can stay.

It doesn't take long for Marinette to encounter Gotham's bad side. After a few months of living there she's seen plenty of rogue attacks. She's been lucky enough to stay out of it. After all, if the villains aren't magical there's nothing her Miraculous Cure could do anyway. Her luck is apparently starting to run out though, because now she's being held up at knife point in an alley. She obviously takes the guy down after years of being Ladybug and calls the cops. Dick Greyson is the officer on scene. He's incredibly friendly and is super impressed that she managed to take the guy down, but Dick has seen corrupt cops take people in for self-defense if it means someone else owes them a favor. He gives her his personal cell in case anything like this ever happens again.

Through all of this, Marinette has been spending more and more time with Damien at school. Marinette is hesitant to trust all the smiles and niceties around her after Lila's manipulation and wants to truly get to know someone before she puts any trust in them. Damien is the only exception. She was warned of his reputation as the "Ice Prince" of GA before meeting him and found talking with him to be incredibly refreshing. There was absolutely nothing fake or over the top about him. He was straightforward and down to earth and Marinette found comfort in that. She decided that she trusted him on day one. Likewise, Damien finds her skeptical attitude toward the other students to be incredibly validating. Growing up in the League, everyone was always pretending, even to the other assassins. You had to act a certain way around the right people, and manipulation was the key to survival. Marinette seems to notice people trying to take advantage of her and recognize when someone just wants a favor, and he respects that. Regretfully, and to Jon's great joy, Damien finds that he thinks of her as a friend.

Word eventually gets out that Marinette is Jagged's designer. This is, of course, entirely Jagged's fault. Some good comes out of all the extra attention, though, when she learns that the co-CEO of Wayne Enterprises is a fan of hers. He makes a commission for a new suit and, upon learning of her situation, offers her a position as his families personal designer over the summer to meet her internship qualifications for GU. They set up a meeting in person for her to take measurements once her midterms are over.

When everything is going well though, something has to throw a wrench into things. The Batfamily raids one of Black Mask's warehouses late one night, and Red Hood takes a few too many bullets and a pretty big hit to the head. The kevlar took most of the hits for him, but he's badly bruised and nursing a concussion. It's the concussion that causes him to stumble into the wrong window of his apartment building and scare his new neighbor half to death. Marinette does what she always does and helps the vigilante without question. To do that though, she has to take off his helmet. She assumed he would have a mask underneath or something. He does not. Marinette is not as surprised as she probably should be, and Jason is pissed when he wakes up. He realizes after a while that this isn't her fault. She's been taking care of him since he was too stubborn to go to Bruce, and if she wanted him or his family dead she could have done something about it by now. He decides to put a little trust in her, but keeps an eye on her just in case. This is what clues him into the situation. In her time here in Gotham, she's managed to meet all of the Wayne brothers aside from Duke, and she has no idea they're even related.

Jason, of course, finds this absolutely hilarious and wants to see just how far this madness can go. He sends Duke to her favorite coffee shop. He refers Marinette to the same dance studio as Cass. Marinette, completely on her own to Jason's disbelief, enters the same Ultimate Mecha Strike tournament as Stephanie and absolutely destroys her. Jason lives for the chaos and Marinette is completely oblivious.

Eventually, after a few AO3 tags (slow burn, feelings realization) Marinette and Damien start dating. Damien feels guilty for hiding that he's Robin from Marinette, but he knows that he'd be sharing more than just his own secret and doesn't want to betray his family's trust. He realizes that if he wants to share everything with her, his family has to trust her as well. She'll have to meet them. He tells Marinette all of this, and she shares that she's been keeping her own secret as well. Marinette hasn't told him about Ladybug even after Tikki has given her blessing, and she's been feeling guilty about it as well. She encourages him to tell her whenever he feels ready and assures him that she can wait until then. She trusts him, and she asks for that same trust in return.

Damien trusts her of course, and everything goes back to normal for about 30 seconds. Then, Damien starts trying to prepare her for the chaos she's about to find in his dining room that night. Little by little, Marinette starts to realize that she already knows every single person he's talking about. Only, that means so much more than she could have realized, because if Jason is Red Hood and his brother "the Dick" is Nightwing, then that means Dick Greyson is Nightwing and Damien's older brother, which makes Damien Robin, and oh no she thinks she knows exactly what that secret is that he didn't want to share yet.

#miraculous ladybug #batman #batfam #dc comics #dc universe #miraculous fanfic #marinette dupain cheng #damien wayne #maribat #daminette #fanfic #fanfiction

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fatehbaz · 1 year ago

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In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain [...]. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers [...]. Enslaved “free” African Americans predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new “industrial slavery,” [...]. The labor of the coffee - the carceral penance of the rock pile, “breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone, Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads - is the carceral future mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). [...] [T]he racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and empire building - and continues to sustain it.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019.

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When the Haitian Revolution erupted [...], slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. [...] Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system. In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment [...] inaugurated [...] "a new system of [...] [indentured servitude]," which would endure for nearly a century. [...] Desperate to regain power and authority after the war [and abolition of chattel slavery in the US], Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. [...] Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. [...] When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.”

Text by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022.

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The durability and extensibility of plantations [...] have been tracked most especially in the contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban areas [...], [including] “skewed life chances, limited access to health [...], premature death, incarceration [...]”. [...] [In labor arrangements there exists] a moral tie that indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, [...] the main mechanisms reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery [...]. [G]enealogies of labor management […] have been traced […] linking different features of plantations to later economic enterprises, such as factories […] or diamond mines […] [,] chartered companies, free ports, dependencies, trusteeships [...].

Text by: Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (edited by Petitcrops, Macedo, and Peano). Published 2023.

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Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the [French] republic, threw his weight behind […] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive […], by using it to advance French colonization.” [...] Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire [...]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor. During the period of the early penal colony we see this search for new slaves, not only in French Guiana, but also throughout [other European] colonies built on the plantation model.

Text by: Peter Redfield. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. 2000.

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To control the desperate and the jobless, the authorities passed harsh new laws, a legislative program designed to quell disorder and ensure a pliant workforce for the factories. The Riot Act banned public disorder; the Combination Act made trade unions illegal; the Workhouse Act forced the poor to work; the Vagrancy Act turned joblessness into a crime. Eventually, over 220 offences could attract capital punishment - or, indeed, transportation. […] [C]onvict transportation - a system in which prisoners toiled without pay under military discipline - replicated many of the worst cruelties of slavery. […] Middle-class anti-slavery activists expressed little sympathy for Britain’s ragged and desperate, holding […] [them] responsible for their own misery. The men and women of London’s slums weren’t slaves. They were free individuals - and if they chose criminality, […] they brought their punishment on themselves. That was how Phillip [commander of the British First Fleet settlement in Australia] could decry chattel slavery while simultaneously relying on unfree labour from convicts. The experience of John Moseley, one of the eleven people of colour on the First Fleet, illustrates how, in the Australian settlement, a rhetoric of liberty accompanied a new kind of bondage. [Moseley was Black and had been a slave at a plantation in America before escaping to Britain, where he was charged with a crime and shipped to do convict labor in Australia.] […] The eventual commutation of a capital sentence to transportation meant that armed guards marched a black ex-slave, chained once more by the neck and ankles, to the Scarborough, on which he sailed to New South Wales. […] For John Moseley, the “free land” of New South Wales brought only a replication of that captivity he’d endured in Virginia. His experience was not unique. […] [T]hroughout the settlement, the old strode in, disguised as the new. [...] In the context of that widespread enthusiasm [in Australia] for the [American] South (the welcome extended to the Confederate ship Shenandoah in Melbourne in 1865 led one of its officers to conclude “the heart of colonial Britain was in our cause”), Queenslanders dreamed of building a “second Louisiana”. [...] The men did not merely adopt a lifestyle associated with New World slavery. They also relied on its techniques and its personnel. [...] Hope, for instance, acquired his sugar plants from the old slaver Thomas Scott. He hired supervisors from Jamaica and Barbados, looking for those with experience driving plantation slaves. [...] The Royal Navy’s Commander George Palmer described Lewin’s vessels as “fitted up precisely like an African slaver [...]".

Text by: Jeff Sparrow. “Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism.” The Conversation. 4 August 2022.

#abolition #tidalectics #multispecies #ecology #intimacies of four continents #ecologies #confinement mobility borders escape etc #homeless housing precarity etc #plantation afterlives #archipelagic thinking #geographic imaginaries #kathryn yusoff #katherine mckittrick #sylvia wynter #fred moten #achille mbembe #indigenous pedagogies #black methodologies

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unlocklearn · 11 months ago

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Enterprise learning management system for your Organization | Unlock:Learn

Unlock:Learn offers a comprehensive enterprise learning management system tailored to elevate your organization's training programs.

#enterprise learning management system #elearning #enterprise LMS #unlocklearn

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navitsap · 2 months ago

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AI in Supply Chain Management: Transforming Modern Operations

In today’s globalized economy, supply chain management (SCM) is a critical function that determines a company’s ability to deliver products efficiently and meet customer expectations. The complexity of modern supply chains, coupled with rising demands for speed and sustainability, has pushed businesses to seek innovative solutions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) has emerged as a transformative force in SCM, enabling organizations to optimize operations, enhance decision-making, and build resilient supply chains. This blog post explores how AI is reshaping supply chain management, its key applications, benefits, and challenges, offering a glimpse into its potential to redefine the industry.

The Role of AI in Supply Chain Management

AI refers to technologies that enable machines to mimic human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, and problem-solving. In supply chain management, AI processes vast amounts of data to uncover patterns, predict outcomes, and automate tasks. By integrating AI with existing systems like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Warehouse Management Systems (WMS), businesses can achieve greater visibility, agility, and efficiency across their supply chains.

AI’s applications in SCM span the entire supply chain lifecycle, from procurement and production to logistics and customer service. Its ability to analyze real-time data and adapt to dynamic conditions makes it an invaluable tool for navigating the complexities of global trade, volatile markets, and evolving consumer preferences.

Key Applications of AI in Supply Chain Management

AI is being deployed in various ways to streamline supply chain processes. Here are some of the most impactful applications:

Demand Forecasting: AI algorithms analyze historical sales data, market trends, and external factors like weather or economic indicators to predict demand with high accuracy. This helps businesses optimize inventory levels, reduce overstock, and prevent stockouts.

Inventory Optimization: AI-powered tools monitor inventory in real time, recommending optimal stock levels and reorder points. Machine learning models identify slow-moving items, enabling businesses to minimize waste and improve cash flow.

Logistics and Route Optimization: AI enhances transportation efficiency by analyzing traffic patterns, fuel costs, and delivery schedules to determine the most cost-effective routes. This reduces delivery times and lowers carbon emissions.

Supplier Relationship Management: AI evaluates supplier performance based on metrics like delivery reliability and quality. It can also identify potential risks, such as geopolitical disruptions or financial instability, allowing businesses to diversify their supplier base proactively.

Automated Warehousing: AI-driven robotics and automation systems streamline warehouse operations, from picking and packing to sorting and loading. These technologies increase throughput and reduce labor costs.

Customer Service Enhancement: AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants handle customer inquiries, track orders, and provide real-time updates, improving customer satisfaction and reducing the workload on support teams.

Benefits of AI in Supply Chain Management

The adoption of AI in SCM offers significant advantages:

Enhanced Efficiency: AI automates repetitive tasks and optimizes processes, reducing operational costs and freeing up resources for strategic initiatives.

Improved Accuracy: AI’s predictive capabilities minimize errors in forecasting and inventory management, leading to better resource allocation.

Greater Resilience: AI helps businesses anticipate and mitigate disruptions, such as supply shortages or transportation delays, ensuring continuity.

Sustainability: By optimizing routes and reducing waste, AI supports eco-friendly practices, aligning with growing demands for sustainable operations.

Data-Driven Decisions: AI provides actionable insights from complex datasets, empowering leaders to make informed choices quickly.

Challenges of Implementing AI in SCM

Despite its potential, integrating AI into supply chain management comes with challenges:

Data Quality and Integration: AI relies on accurate, high-quality data. Disparate systems or incomplete datasets can hinder AI performance, requiring significant investment in data infrastructure.

High Initial Costs: Deploying AI solutions involves expenses for software, hardware, and skilled personnel, which may be prohibitive for smaller businesses.

Workforce Adaptation: Employees may need training to work alongside AI systems, and concerns about job displacement can create resistance.

Ethical Considerations: AI decisions must be transparent and fair, particularly in supplier selection or pricing, to avoid unintended biases.

The Future of AI in Supply Chain Management

The future of AI in SCM is bright, with advancements in machine learning, natural language processing, and robotics poised to further transform the industry. Emerging trends include AI-driven digital twins for real-time supply chain simulations and blockchain integration for enhanced transparency. As AI becomes more accessible, small and medium-sized enterprises will increasingly adopt these technologies, leveling the playing field.

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence is revolutionizing supply chain management by enabling smarter, faster, and more sustainable operations. From demand forecasting to automated warehousing, AI’s applications are helping businesses navigate complexity and deliver value to customers. While challenges like data integration and costs remain, the benefits of AI—efficiency, resilience, and actionable insights—make it a cornerstone of modern SCM. As technology evolves, organizations that embrace AI will be better positioned to thrive in an increasingly competitive and dynamic global market.

#supply chain management (SCM)#Artificial Intelligence (AI)#Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)#Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)#supply chain #AI in Supply Chain Management #Machine learning

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astriiformes · 1 year ago

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Hi, i just learned about the scientific revolution in europe at school. Can you tell me why you dont think scientific revolutions exist? im curious!

So I feel like I have to lead with the fact that I'm kind of arguing two different points when I say scientific revolutions aren't really a thing

One is that I'm objecting to a specific, extremely foundational theory of scientific revolutions that was put forth by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn, which I think really misrepresents how science is actually practiced in the name of fitting things to a nice model. The other is that I think the fundamental problem with the idea is that it's too vague to effectively describe an actual process that happens.

It's certainly true that there are important advances in science that get referred to as "revolutions" that fundamentally changed their fields -- the shift from the Ptolemaic model of the Solar System to the Copernican one, Darwin's theory of evolution, etc. But there are historians of science (who I tend to agree with) that feel that terming these advances "revolutions" ignores the fact that science is an continuous, accretional process, and somewhat sensationalizes the process of scientific change in the name of celebrating particular scientists or theories over others.

Kuhn's model that he put forth in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which is one of those books that itself stirred a great deal of activity in a number of fields) suggests science evolves via what he called "paradigm shifts," where new ideas become fundamentally incompatible with the old model or way of doing things, causing a total overturn in the way scientists see the world, and establishing a new paradigm -- which will eventually cave to another when it, too, ceases to function effectively as a model. This theory became extraordinarily popular when it was published, but it's somewhat telling who it's remained popular with. Economists, political scientists, and literary theorists still use Kuhn, but historians of science, in my experience at least, see his work as historically significant but incompatible with how history is actually studied.

Kuhn posits that between paradigm shifts there are periods of "normal science" where paradigms are unquestioned and anomalies in the current model are largely ignored, until they reach a critical mass and cause a scientific revolution. In reality though, there is often real discussion of those anomalies, and I think the scientific process is not nearly so content to ignore them as Kuhn thinks. Throughout history, we see people expressing a real discontent with unsolved mysteries the current scientific model fails to explain, and glossing over those simply because the individuals in question didn't manage to formulate breakthrough theories to "solve" those problems props up the somewhat infamous "great men" model of history of science, where we focus only on the most famous people in the field as significant instead of acknowledging that science is a social enterprise and no research happens in a vacuum!

Beyond disagreeing with Kuhn specifically though, I think the idea of scientific revolutions vastly simplifies how science evolves and changes, and is ultimately a really ahistorical way of thinking about shifts in thinking. Take the example of the shift from Ptolemaic, geocentric thought to the heliocentric Copernican model of the solar system. When does this supposed "revolution" in thought actually start, and when does it "end" by becoming firmly established? You could argue that the publication of Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 was the beginning of the shift in thinking -- but of course, then you have the problem of asking where Copernicus' ideas came from in the first place.

The "great men" model of history would suggest Copernicus was a uniquely talented individual who managed to suggest something no one else had ever put forth, but realistically, he was influenced by the scientists who came before him, just like anyone else. There were real objections to the Ptolemaic model during the medieval era! One of the most famous problems in medieval astronomy was the fact that assuming a geocentric model makes the behavior of the planets seem really weird to an observer on Earth, referred to as retrograde motion, which had to be solved with a complicated system of epicycles that people knew wasn't quite working, even if they weren't able to put together exactly why. There were even ancient Greek astronomers who suggested that the sun was at the center of the solar system, going all the way back to Aristarchus of Samos who lived from around 310-230 BCE!

Putting an end point to the Copernican revolution poses similar challenges. Some people opt to suggest that what Copernicus started, either Galileo or Newton finished (which in and of itself means the "revolution" lasted around 100-150 years), but are we defining the shift in terms of new theories, or the consensus of the scientific community? The latter is much harder to pinpoint, and in my opinion as an aspiring historian of science, also much more important. Again, science doesn't happen in a vacuum. Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton may be more famous than their peers, but that doesn't mean the rest of the Renaissance scientific community didn't matter.

Ultimately it's a matter of simple models like Kuhn's (or other definitions of scientific revolutions) being insufficient to explain the complexity of history. Both because science is a complex endeavor, and because it isn't independent from the rest of history. Sure, it's genuinely amazing to consider that Copernicus' De revolutionibus orbium coelestium and the anatomist Andreas Vesalius' similarly influential De humani corporis fabrica were published the same year, and it says something about the intellectual climate of the time. But does it say something about science only, or is it also worth remembering that the introduction of typographic printing a century prior drastically changed how scientists communicated and whose ideas stuck and were remembered? On a similar note, we credit Darwin with suggesting the theory of evolution (and I could write a similarly long response just on the many, many influences in geology and biology both that went into his formulation of said theory), but what does it say that Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the theory of natural selection around the same time? Is it sheer coincidence, or does it have more to do with conversations that were already happening in the scientific community both men belonged to that predated the publication of the Origin?

I think that the concept of scientific revolutions is an important part of the history of the history of science, and has its place when talking about how we conceive of certain periods of history. But I'm a skeptic of it being a particularly accurate model, largely on the grounds of objecting to the "great men" model of history and the idea that shifts in thinking can be boiled down to a few important names and dates.

There's a famous Isaac Newton quote (which, fittingly, did not originate with Newton himself, but can be traced back even further to several medieval thinkers) in which he states "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." I would argue that science, as an endeavor, is far more like standing on the shoulder of several hundred thousand other people in a trenchcoat. This social element of research is exactly why it's so hard to pull apart any one particular revolution, even when fairly revolutionary theories change the direction of the research that's happening. Ideas belong to a long evolutionary chain, and even if it occasionally goes through periods of punctuated equilibrium, dividing that history into periods of revolution and stagnancy ignores the rich scientific tradition of the "in-between" periods, and the contributions of scientists who never became famous for their work.

#SORRY FOR WRITING A NOVEL #i hope this makes sense and that i am not too deep in the history of science theory to give a good explanation #a much shorter tl;dr answer would be that my stance towards scientific revolutions is more skepticism than total rejection #but hyperbole gets the job done a lot faster haha #getting to the point that i really should have a #history of science tag

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ewingstan · 2 months ago

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Yeah fully finishing Gibson's Sprawl series and listening to some of the Shelved By Genre discussion of it; I'm convinced that it's one of the major direct influences on Twig.

There's an emphasis on how the world is run by organizations whose members and leaders are expendable and interchangeable, hydras who work more like organisms than anything else. In the Sprawl these are the multinationals and the yakuza, in Twig the academy.

Contrasted against this are individual who hold power from an older system, but who in holding it must become inhuman. In the Sprawl the Tessier-Ashpools, the old-money enterprise that can compete on the footing of the faceless mulitnationals, but do so from the recesses of their spiralling gothic manor satellite as they clone themselves and grow mad in cryo-sleep. Its also Virek, the individual with the power and money of a multinational, who in fact is barely an individual at all—his interests being managed by a system he couldn't dream of keeping track of, which uses false models of himself to show up and shake hands on any number of deals, while the original man himself dreams and plots as a mass of cancerous growths floating in an enormous tank. The Twig equivalent would of course be the Nobles, remnants of an old system that has staked its continued relevance on making its members something more than human.

Contrasted against these inhuman figures of outmoded power is the possibility of a paradigm shift, an emergence of a totally new power and way of being, that can be brought about by a group of highly specialized agents working in tandem. In Gibson's work, this is Wintermute and Neuromancer, the separate specialized AIs which combine together to become an embodiment of the whole of the matrix itself, and to an extent its also the crew of the Straylight Run, the team of carefully selected experts who are able to facilitate the AIs combination. Wildbow brings us this with the lambs, a team of highly specialized beings created out of a project working on the human brain, who we learn at the final hour were engineered to raise themselves above their masters and become something that could break the stagnation of the empire.

This theme of some individual members of the old system in fact being responsible for creating the new power, going through convoluted plans of creating the specialized component beings and waiting for them to ascend and make their creators obsolete, was also present in the Sprawl with Marie-France Tessier and her creation of the Wintermute and Neuromancer AIs.

Alongside these structural and thematic parallels, wildbow obviously put a lot of the characters of the Sprawl into his cast. Molly Millions, the razor girl with knives under her fingertips and a raw excitement at her own ability to kill, is obviously part of the lineage of Mary Coburn. Helen appears to be a direct reimagining of the setting's "vat-grown assassins." The disoriented style of Slick Henry's narration when his bouts of short-term memory loss kick in are a likely influence on Sy's characterization in later arcs. Hell, Johnny Mneumonic's famous "technical boy" spiel that starts the whole Sprawl saga off sounds exactly like the shit Sy'd say:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I’d had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on a lathe, and then load them myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I’d had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers – all very tricky. But I knew they’d work.

Listen to that! That's exactly the type of person who'd never let you forget that he'd gotten called "devastatingly intelligent!" Wildbow took all that and made his horrible boy!

#twigblr #wildbow #sprawl #william gibson #mals says

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mangoisms · 2 years ago

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circle k (back to you)

summary: in which you're just the graveyard shift employee at circle k bombarded by vigilantes.

━ chapter eight: where did i go wrong? | read chapter seven

━ pairing: tim drake x f!reader

━ word count: 3.7k

━ warnings: canon typical violence, blood, etc

━ masterlist

━ a/n: sorry for disappearing! essentially, i started grad school and it is So Much Work. but if you'd like some unnecessary rambles on tim and wally's relationship here and in light of their og meeting in robin (1993), you can also find my thoughts on that here <3

The next day, you don’t hear much from Steph.

She does text you a few times, mostly reassurances and that she’s working to pull something together. You don’t quite understand but she was so convincing the day before, you let it go.

You mostly spend the day—after sleeping in—learning your new phone, excited at having something new and so high-tech to play with. Flash texts you several times during the day. Blurry selfies and equally blurry pictures of Keystone and Central. Even a couple of the New York skyline, as he informs you he decided to drop in and visit a few friends.

You can’t send him much. The clouds that hang in the sky, waiting to pour down on unsuspecting Gothamites at a moment’s notice. The feral cat that hangs out in the alley by your apartments, who you get close enough to to catch mid-hiss. The person on the subway carrying what you suspect to be a possum in their bag but Flash insists is actually an opossum. Whatever the difference is.

There is a difference!

idk sounds made up

You’re from the city. Of course you think that.

ok WOW

you’re blaming my dead parents for where they settled????

Yes.

wow

You go into work in relatively high spirits, considering everything.

Black Bat stops by for some gummy worms and a can of Red Bull and you tease her a bit for it.

“Signal’s influence?”

“Better than coffee.”

“Fair enough.”

Red hasn’t been by, you think, watching her go. Not yesterday and not today, though it’s early. He usually stops by nearly every night, if not for a couple minutes. But nothing specifically decrees that he comes by… You’re just used to it, you suppose, and last night’s absence was noticeable.

There’s still time, though. Maybe you’ll see him later tonight.

Overhead, the AC turns on. They fixed it, along with that electrical issue Red Robin caused last week. It works a little too well, though. These last few days have had you uncomfortably cold, so today, you come armed with a hoodie—Tim’s hoodie, the only piece of clothing you’ve ever managed to steal from him. A bit baggy on him and even more so on you, it’s a pleasant shade of azure blue. One of your more precious possessions since it’s, like you said, the only thing you really have from him. Also a bit of an indulgence right now but… you’re past the point of caring.

Maritza pops by a little while later, waving at you.

“Hey, Mari. Here for a Slurpee?”

“That, and I was wondering if you guys have any pain cream… Abuela’s back is hurting her and we ran out yesterday,” she says, lips pursed, glancing at the aisles.

“Pain cream,” you repeat thoughtfully, stepping around the counter. “We should. Let’s see.”

She follows you to one of the center aisles.

“How’s summer break been so far?” you ask, running your eyes over displays of toothpaste, disposable toothbrushes, and other basic items.

“Boring,” she sighs. “It’s too hot to do anything.”

You chuckle, tucking your hands in the pocket of Tim’s hoodie; your fingers are cold. They always seem to be. “Books are excellent ways to preoccupy the time.”

“Think I’ve read every book at the library,” she grumbles, which probably isn’t that much of an exaggeration. Gotham’s public library system is drastically lacking; it was only in May did Wayne Enterprises announce that they were investing more money into it. By now, they probably haven’t reached the library here in the Upper West Side.

“You should check out GU’s then. Kids get free library cards and our selection is fairly expansive. I’m sure you could get away with checking out some things for your abuela, too. At least until they fix everything in the one here.”

“Huh. Maybe.” She moves ahead of you, scanning the rest of the aisle. “Oh, hey, you guys do have some.”

She reaches for a box.

The door opens. You turn.

The wink of the kitchen knife is the first thing you see, then the trembling hand, and then the owner to whom it belongs, too. A scrawny man wearing a grey hoodie, the same hood pulled over his head.

It’s not great at hiding his face, you think dimly, every muscle inside you locking into place. Mari freezes behind you, breath audibly catching in a gasp as he turns the knife sharply on you.

For a second, the three of you just look at each other.

You break the silence first.

“All the money is in the register. Take it.”

A lengthy pause, one that amplifies the dread petrifying your insides. Your new phone, with Flash’s contact info, sits in the pocket of your hoodie, weighing it down; your fingers are laced together, cold, hovering right above it and you recall the rundown you’d been given by Flash last night, the… other not-quite-normal aspects of your new phone.

“Okay, so, on top of the League encryption stuff, there is something else.”

“Are you tracking me?”

“Not… exactly.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“Your location is logged with the League,” he admits. “But it’s secure. You’re registered with me, so only I can look at it. My wife’s phone is like yours. Her information is there, too. A lot of us do it with our families. Not just to keep sensitive information secure, but there’s… a risk that comes with being with us.”

You frown at him. “Does she know?”

He looks horrified. “Of course she does. I don’t go around just tracking her without her knowledge. That’s weird. And messed up. I don’t even actively do it. Not unless she’s been kidnapped or she wants me to. That’s what I’m trying to say. Your location is being tracked but I’m not peeking in on it. No one is, unless a need comes up. An emergency kind of need. And that brings me to my next thing.”

He pauses, looking at you, calculating, but you just nod for him to continue.

“You have my number,” he says. “So, you can call me. For emergencies or if you just want to talk about your day. But in the case that you can’t call me, if you’re in some kind of danger…” He plucks the phone out of your grasp, turning it over in his hands, pointing to the power button on the side. “Press this three times and it’ll send an SOS signal to me, along with your location. I’ll come. Okay?”

“Are you… sure?”

He seems affronted. “I don’t just do this for anyone. I thought you’d have seen that by now. You’re…” he stops, frowning deeply. “You mean a lot to me, kid. If I can save you, if I have the opportunity to keep you safe, I’ll take it. I wouldn’t ever ask you to leave Gotham because it’s your home and I know the Bats hang around but… this just makes me feel better. You have a direct line to me. Use it.”

“Batman probably won’t like that.”

“Batman can suck it,” he says petulantly. “Especially after what he did to you last week. I take care of my own. No matter where they are. Got it?”

You got it.

The thought still astounds you even now, that Flash cares that much about you and how ironic it is that you don’t even know who he is under the cowl but maybe you don’t need to. This is still him, isn’t it?

And you would heed his words. Of course you would. You have no interest in dying. You have no hangups about being saved. Flash didn’t think you incompetent, it was just a precaution, a necessity for living in the world you do.

That is true now more than ever.

Especially with how aware you are of Mari behind you, too.

“Take your hands outta your pockets,” he says.

Your pulse pounds in your ears.

“Just take the money, man.”

You have to be careful but quick. If you could just unlace your fingers and reach for your phone…

Of course, you have no idea how quickly the signal will reach Flash or how fast he’ll even be able to get here…

You guess you’ll just have to trust him. Trust him and his capabilities.

A step forward. A bead of sweat rolls down your back. You can hear Mari behind you, her breath quick and uneven. You’re most worried about her, to be honest. If you go down, what’s going to happen to her? You dread to think about it.

“Take your hands out of your fuckin’ pocket,” he hisses; despite the severity of his voice, his hand is trembling. You don’t get why he won’t just grab the money and go.

He must think you can call the police or something but even then, it’s not as if the GCPD are reliable. As if they can do anything.

As for you, there is nothing else you can do. You need to call him.

“Mari, run!”

Your hand grapples for your phone at the same time.

You hear the snick of sneakers on the tiled floors, your fingers slip over the sides of the new case currently hugging your phone, and he surges forward and then—

Just a mere spark, one that jolts you as you realize what happened. It’s small at first, then bigger, then massive, a forest fire eating you alive from the inside out, burning white-hot.

You can’t do anything.

You stare at the man in front of you, closer now, close enough to dig his knife right into the soft flesh of your belly. His eyes are wide, too. Like he can’t believe he just did that. Neither can you.

But the worst of it comes when he pulls the knife out.

The sound that escapes you is foreign to your ears. Your knees give out. One hand presses to the source of your pain, the other lands hard on the tiled floor; your wrist smarts, your arm trembling as you hold yourself up.

You’re barely aware of anything other than the pain. Throbbing heat, warmth rapidly spreading through the front of your shirt and hoodie. Your vision blurs, from tears and from the pain, your heart pounds so hard, you feel it in your teeth, hear it in your ears above the rush of your blood.

You manage a glance behind you, relieved to see Mari is gone and hopefully back in the safety of the apartment building next door. Ahead of you, the man is scrambling to get the cash register open, cursing like a sailor and eventually yanking it off the counter and smashing it on the ground, ducking out of your view.

God, you need to call Flash. Not 911, they won’t get here in time, no way, you need him. Before the man decides to cut his losses and kill you. You hope he’ll just take the money and run, but you’ve seen his face, surely he knows that puts him in that much more danger of being arrested—

The door opens. You hear your name from a familiar voice and then someone steps into view.

Tim’s eyes are wide as he looks at you, horrified, but behind him, your attacker shoots up from the ground and you choke out a warning, an urging to run, to get out of here, you don’t know what you’d do if anything happened to him, no, no, you can’t lose him like that.

He whips around just as the man swings himself over the counter, letting out something of a war cry, cash held in one hand and the knife in the other. It gleams red under the light. He lunges.

“Tim!”

But his fatal injury does not happen. Instead, you watch him duck out of the way, moving faster, more gracefully than you’ve ever seen, like he’s done this before and the man doesn’t expect it, stumbling with his own momentum. Not stopping, either, Tim grabs the man’s wrist, heaving him over his shoulder until he slams into the ground hard. It’s brutal. It’s violent. It’s nothing you’ve ever seen from Tim, your Tim who… who hates needles and always bemoans going to get the yearly flu shot with you and Steph, your Tim who can get impatient, snippy, but not violent.

You don’t understand. With the haze of pain, that fact feels oddly upsetting.

The door opens again. He whips around, geared up for another fight, but it’s just Spoiler, it’s—

Golden hair, familiar blue eyes. A face you know by heart. Even with the bottom of her face hidden.

They’re both at your side in an instant. In good timing, too, because your arm gives out but before you can crash to the ground, Tim catches you, turning you over in his arms and gently laying you back onto the tile.

“You’re okay,” he says quickly, eyes scanning you frantically. “You’re okay.”

All the movement tugs at your belly, flames flaring for a brief moment, making you dizzy with pain, choking out your voice, leaving you to blink the tears out of your eyes and look up at your friends.

You don’t like the look on their faces. Horrified. Full of dread. It hurts you.

“Fuck,” Stephanie Brown, also known as Spoiler, says, digging through pouches in her utility belt. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Oracle, where is the nearest hospital?”

“I know where it is,” Tim says, snapping into action, his hands reaching for the hoodie. “Off Murphy Ave.”

Rrrrrrip.

He tears through the front part of your hoodie—his hoodie—like it’s nothing. Both their faces drop as they see your shirt underneath it but you’re more focused on the first part of what just happened.

“Did you—have to tear it?” you whine. “This is the only hoodie I have from you…”

“You can have all of my hoodies,” he promises, reaching for the hem of your shirt.

Another ripping sound.

Steph reaches underneath you. “Didn’t go through.”

Tim nods. “The sooner we get her to the hospital, the better. I don’t like how much blood she’s losing.”

“I can hear you, you know,” you mutter, more petulant than you want but considering you are bleeding from a stab wound, you think you get to be.

They both let out strained chuckles. Tim reaches for one of the pouches of Steph’s belt. You wonder how he knows which one to open. You wonder a lot of things. Where he learned to kick ass. Whether he has always known Steph is Spoiler. How he is so calm right now. It tickles at you, like you have all the pieces to the puzzle but the full picture still isn’t coming out.

And oh, yeah, the burning throb of the stab wound is really sapping your concentration, too. Cold creeps in at the edges, your fingers feeling icy as you clench them. You shiver violently, though it hurts to move like that.

“You’re gonna be fine,” Steph says soothingly, squeezing your hand. “We just really need to get you to a hospital to guarantee that.”

“You should—fuck!” The gauze Tim presses to the wound sends shockwaves of pain through you. Black spots appearing in your vision, breath squeezing in your throat.

He says your name loudly. “Breathe.”

“Fuck you,” you wheeze out, trying and failing to curl away from the pressure he is currently applying to your wound. “That—hurts—”

“I know,” he says, pained. “But I have to. We have to. I’m sorry.”

“He’s right,” Steph says, brushing some of your hair away from your face. “Come on, talk to me. Ignore what he’s doing. What were you going to say before?”

“My phone,” you mumble, shivering. “Flash gave it to me. S-Said if I press the power button three times, it sends a distress signal to him.”

“That’s kind of him,” Tim mutters, sounding, dare you say it, jealous, which, in your haze of pain, just pisses you off.

“You absolute asshole, you don’t get to—”

“Stop it!” Steph snaps, lunging for your phone. “Tim, focus on saving her life and not on being an ass right now, okay? I’m calling him. We need that kind of speed. She’s losing too much blood and the hospital is too far.”

He sobers significantly. A bloodied hand reaches for yours. You’re only aware of it because you see it, the sight of his pale skin covered in your blood, his fingers wrapping around yours. He squeezes.

“Can you feel that?”

“K-Kind of.”

“Do it, Spoiler.”

“I’m doing it, Timothy.”

She is. She holds your phone in gloved hands, pressing the button three times, then scoots away from your head, lifting your feet over her lap.

Tim continues his work, the pressure he continues to apply to the wound making your head spin. Exhaustion creeps in at the edges, making your eyelids drag with each blink.

No, no, falling asleep is bad. You’ve seen enough movies and TV shows of injured characters to know that. You have to stay awake.

Steph watches you, concerned. “How long—”

She doesn’t get to finish her sentence as a sharp gust of wind hits all of you. It knocks things off the shelves and then, all of you are blinking up at the Flash, blue lightning fading away.

He breathes your name and in the next blink, he’s next to you, on his knees.

“Hey, Flash,” you croak.

“Hey, kiddo,” he says softly, a gloved hand resting tenderly on your forehead. He looks at Tim and Steph. “Hospital?”

“It’s—”

Tim cuts Steph off, staring hard at Flash. “She’ll most likely need a blood transfusion. Her blood type is AB positive—”

“And she’s allergic to penicillin,” Steph tacks on quickly.

“Got it.” He sweeps you into his arms and you whimper at the movement. “And the hospital?”

“Intersection of Murphy Avenue and Elliot Circle,” Steph tells him.

“Be careful,” Tim stresses.

Flash gives him a frosty look. “I got it. You’ve done enough.”

Stop fighting, you want to say, but Flash is delightfully warm and you’re so tired. If you rest your eyes for just a little bit, that’s fine, right?

“Flash—!”

A sharp tug in your belly, gravity pulling on you, and darkness falls over you like a blanket. You surrender without fight.

Voices puncture the veil of darkness. Soft murmurs, soothing tones.

“She’ll be okay, Red,” a woman murmurs. “You got her here on time.”

“I know, Lin,” someone else says and wait, you know that voice. It’s Flash. He sounds so… harrowed. “But I just… I don’t know.”

“You know what the doctors said. The danger is gone. And with you here… maybe…” she trails off, tone implying something you aren’t privy to.

A deep breath. “Do you think so? I could’ve, earlier, but I didn’t know if it would hurt her and I didn’t want to take the chance…”

“Well… I think you’re a big softy and she means a lot more to you than you ever realized. So… maybe.”

“Maybe,” he echoes back and you want to know, want to ask what exactly it is he and this mystery woman are talking about but you slip back under again.

The next time you resurface, it’s to cutting words and a tension so thick, you feel it, too, even with all your senses muddled, knee-deep in a haze.

“I don’t mind her,” Flash says coldly. “But you, too?”

“She’s my friend. I have a right to see her, too,” someone else says—Tim, you realize. It’s Tim, his tone cutting, temper on the rise.

“The way you’ve treated her these past two months doesn’t say much about friendship to me.”

“I was going to tell her—”

“Oh, you were going to tell her? Only after you finally fucked it all up being caught hanging out with your friends when you explicitly said you were too busy to hang out with her? Yeah, that’s real great.”

“You haven’t told her,” Tim points out petulantly.

“Really mature,” Flash scoffs. “I have a good reason to keep it from her. What’s yours? It’s not like you were deprived of her attention. You’re friends. Why the hell would you favor Red Robin over Tim Drake?”

“I wouldn’t expect you to understand—”

“No, I bet you don’t, because it’s easier to excuse yourself that way, isn’t it?” he seethes. “You’re just like him, you know. Just like him.”

You don’t know who they’re talking about. Or maybe you do and it’s just not coming to you. But the comparison isn’t a kind one. The way Tim snaps back in the next second affirms that.

“She wasn’t talking to me! I was—worried!”

“So, you should’ve talked to her! Instead of going behind her back and befriending her as Red Robin! What the hell did you achieve by doing that?”

“We were going to tell her, too, you know,” the woman from before says, her tone disapproving. “Very soon, in fact. But his situation is different from yours and you know that.”

Silence stretches on.

“Well, I still want to see her,” Tim says quietly, the fight leaving his voice.

“How—” Steph. Her voice cuts out, thick in a way that is unfamiliar to you. She clears her throat. “How is she?”

“Stable,” the mystery woman informs her.

“Why hasn’t she woken up?” Tim asks. You can just hear the frown in his voice and the vision of him forms easily in your mind, that familiar wrinkle between his brows, pretty pink lips pursed.

“Anesthesia still needs to wear off,” the woman says. “She’ll wake up soon.”

“But until then,” Flash cuts in, tone still severe. “Feel free to make yourself scarce. Stephanie can hang around. But you? No way in hell.”

“You think she wants that?” Tim shoots back, anger returning. “You don’t know anything. You have no idea. You’re assuming—”

“Yeah, I am. She’s not awake. She can’t tell us. Until then, I—we—can make those decisions.”

“Oh, that’s great. I’m sure she’ll love that—”

“I know what you’re thinking and we’re doing this with good intentions. You can’t say the same, can you?”

That doesn’t help. Fans the flames, if anything, as they keep arguing.

Ugh. You don’t want to hear this.

Like mercy, you slip under again.

reblogs are appreciated!

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abigailnussbaum · 6 months ago

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Lower Decks, "Fissure Quest": Scattered Thoughts

As someone who has had a complicated relationship with Lower Decks precisely because of how rooted it is in references, fanservice, and callbacks, you'd think this episode would be my Kryptonite. But you know what, I'm going to let them have it. One episode from the (thoroughly unjustified; this show could have run another five years, easy) end, I don't think it's fair to complain about Lower Decks being Lower Decks. And while I didn't unreservedly love this story (more on that below) I actually found the complete immersion in references (while leaving "our" main characters offscreen) more tolerable than a lot of episodes that center around how these new Star Trek characters just happen to be Star Trek fans.

(Also, I'm holding out hope that, having gotten the fanservice component of the show out of their system in the first half of the two-parter, the Lower Decks writers will end their show by telling a Lower Decks story, about the Lower Decks characters being heroes in their own right. We shall see.)

Obviously the fandom focus is going to be on canon(-ish) Garak/Bashir (and it is rather clever how the episode manages to have its cake and eat it on this front, distancing these versions of the characters enough from the originals that if this ship isn't your cup of tea it doesn't have to color the baseline story). But to me the most important choice in the episode is T'Pol. I was talking just recently about how screwed-over this character was - not just by the Enterprise writers' sexism, but by a backlash against Vulcans that spread through DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise in the late 90s/early 00s, and which Lower Decks has been at the forefront of addressing (Discovery and SNW have, in comparison, been rather wobbly on this front). T'Pol, and Jolene Blalock, have for a long time deserved the kind of redemption Seven of Nine has gotten, and hopefully "Fissure Quest" isn't the full extent of it.

(One complicating factor is that Blalock has left acting - she apparently goes by her married name these days, and is credited only as "Jolene" in the episode credits. This might complicate a potential guest appearance on SNW, for example.)

Another thing I liked is that this episode functions as a redemption for William Boimler without going too hard on this point. He's still fundamentally different from our Boimler in not-terribly-likable ways, but he gets to save the day and to behave like a real officer and captain, without becoming just another copy of OG Boimler. I also appreciated that all this is achieved while keeping the Section 31 of it all to a minimum. Boimler is still working for them, as evidenced by his badge (can we pause for a moment to contemplate how nonsensical the idea that Section 31 have their own uniforms and badge design is?), but their name isn't even mentioned, which I am taking as an indication that the Lower Decks writers agree with me about the misguidedness of this whole concept.

(Also good: a sciency, risk-averse Mariner who nevertheless rises to the occasion and saves the day.)

And having said all that, here comes the complaint: I am largely on W. Boimler's side on the whole matter of the multiverse, and when he went into his rant about how it's all just eye-catching variations on familiar things without any substance to back them up, I wanted to stand up and cheer. Until, that is, I remembered that this opinion was being voiced by a character who is a) a villain, and b) in the grips of depression. The fact that the opposing view is expressed by Lily motherfucking Sloane is, I think, a pretty solid indication of what side the episode wants us to come down on, but I remain unconvinced. It would be nice if multiverse stories were about exploring endless possibility and, through that exploration, learning more about where you started from. But most of them are just about putting a new hat on a familiar character and getting excited over the hat.

Which I think the episode itself mostly bears out. Boimler's crew are all fun and cute, but none of them go very deep into the characters or stories they're riffing off. Garak and Bashir are together simply so fans can have the visual or them as a cute married couple, not as a result of any attempt to grapple with how these two complicated, flawed characters might actually end up in a romantic relationship (or, for that matter, with the fact that Garak ends DS9 in a quasi-suicidal state). T'Pol deserves her more generous, more serious story, but it's telling that this story (she's best friends with Curzon Dax!) feels almost random, a reminder that what Enterprise did with her - stripping her naked, insulting her Vulcanness, and killing her loved ones - doesn't lend itself to a continuation that is worth following. And the Harry Kim gag does nothing to address, and in fact tries to make a virtue out of, the stasis that character was held in for seven seasons of Voyager. I don't want to ding the episode too hard, because I did end up enjoying it. But the conclusion I take away from it is that if you want to really explore a character, especially one who has been overlooked, you're much better off doing what Picard did with Seven of Nine, moving forward from where they left off while giving them more serious consideration, rather than just cycling through a bunch of different variations on them.

Finally, does anyone else think that Curzon Dax was originally meant to be Jadzia Dax, and things just didn't work out with Terry Farrell? Given how every other crewmember is someone who was screwed over by the narrative or the writers, or just something the fans have long wanted to see, the choice of Curzon seems to stick out. A Jadzia Dax who wasn't killed by Dukat (and an opportunity for Farrell to come back to Star Trek after the bad blood of her departure from DS9) feels much closer to the "fan wish fulfillment" ethos that seems to have been this episode's brief.

#lower decks

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invisibleintrovertartist · 4 months ago

Text

I might've written a one-shot based on this post. 😳👉🏻👈🏻 I started it at 2 AM when I had woken up from a nightmare and needed something else to focus on. The text is... quite long, so I've put the rest of it under the cut. There should be no other content warnings, except alcohol consuming (and snogging). The text is written from Nova's pov and it starts right after the title. It's called:

Pandora's box

The jukebox played a scratchy tune at the street-corner bar in Metro Division, where Neon J and him had chosen to spend their Friday evening in. It had been a long day, and an even longer week for every artist under the NSR label.

After the Rock Revolution, a complete overhaul of the system — that was long overdue — had been put into motion and the musical enterprise, that had once governed the city with an authoritarian hold, had to be entirely re-established. This included piles of paper work, tedious and long-winded conferences, countless phone calls and overall working overtime.

When J had suggested that they go and grab some drinks after the last meeting before weekend, Nova had agreed without a second thought. The bags under his eyes had seemed to only double in size for the past couple of days, when he'd tried getting on top of his schedule by carrying out tasks in the nocturnal hours. His body had almost entered the autopilot settings by now, and a glass of ethylic alcohol would probably help with relaxing him into the day offs, instead of the never-ending chain of caffeine dosages that had only managed to turn him more jittery and agitated.

A few drinks wouldn't hurt — not when they had a cause to celebrate the first fruits of their labor, that hadn't rotted into the trees.

Nova drummed his fingers lazily on the slightly sticky surface of the table they were sitting at. They were occupying a quiet corner farthest from the entrance, and any curious on-lookers. Nova's rhythm had begun to falter at around the third cosmopolitan. He had never possessed a strong alcohol tolerance to begin with. He was also unfortunately not immune to J's charms, who had tried pulling him into a friendly competition in the form of a drinking game earlier, and eventually succeeded.

Well, at least there's a whole weekend to nurse a headache if it should come to that, Nova had thought and pliantly given in.

J rolled his wrist in a little circle, the brown liquid swirling on the bottom of his glass, where a few ice cubes had already melted. The evening was warm, and the bar's antique air conditioner tried pathetically whispering the humidity away from the confined space. They had both hung up their jackets on a nearby coat rack a long while ago. The scaly leather padding on Nova's chair kept sticking to the back of his knees, but he ignored the sensation in favor of focusing on chatting with J.

They'd swapped stories about their youth, argued about engineering and mechanics, and discussed the importance of astronomy in naval navigation. Nova had listened to J ramble about his deployment years: how he recounted romanticized tales about his voyages, that had clearly been coated with a golden sheen of nostalgia, and gestured his hands for more dramatic effect and emphasized the climactic parts. J was a great performer and a storyteller.

Nova noted every swipe of the hand, every fist glenched over his chest and every turn of the head, that made his hair whisk from side to side.

He wasn't even surprised, when his gaze occasionally dipped from J's eyes and to his mouth instead. It formed a wide jolly smile when excited, and Nova subtly traced the curving edges with a bubbling warmth somewhere in his abdomen.

It wasn't a regular stomachache or heartburn, as he'd learned approximately six months ago, but more of a psychosomatic reaction caused by a secret fondness, that he felt towards his best friend.

He couldn't exactly pinpoint when the feeling had first appeared. It probably had creeped in little by little, going unnoticed in the beginning as a microschopic spore, until it had settled in and grown a network of wispy mycelium all over his heart and ultimately started conducting the beat.

It was as if he had suddenly begun seeing J through a different kind of lens.

His appreciation had turned to wanting, anticipation to yearning and a fair deal of his thoughts, that had been innocent and neutral for the entire duration of their friendship, had twisted into ravenous, restless fantasies.

The feeling was bothersome, but manageable on average days, and he only ever indulged it on those occasional rare nights, when sleep eluded him. Now, it was a raging storm inside, fueled by the intoxicant into a frenzied hurricane. It tried clawing its way out of his throat, beckoning him to say something impulsive and idiotic at J, and making the tips of his fingers tingle with the need to touch him longer, than was platonically appropriate.

His eyes had started drooping a little and he felt his cheeks faintly beaming with warmth, that wasn't caused by the sweltering air outside.

The conversation between him and J had turned into companionable silence a few minutes ago, allowing Nova to safely zone out and let his thoughts wander freely. They seemed to automatically steer towards the lagoon of ludicrousy, where the siren-song of all his buried desires lulled him into a sweet, silent reverie.

His head felt light, but heavy at the same time, and he slowly lowered it to rest on his arms. Both his eyelids slid shut. He drew in a deep breath through his nostrils, and puffed it out a little more forcefully, than was intended.

J stirred awake from his nostalgia trip at that and shifted beside him. He chuckled amusedly.

"What's wrong? Drink starting to get to your head?" he asked false incredulously while grinning smugly. Nova parted his eyelids halfway open and shot him an annoyed look from between them. That only made J laugh and slap him on the back mirthfully. His cheeks held a faint dusky color, but otherwise he seemed far more sober than Nova. He leaned away and smiled down at him.

"I told you I'd be able to hold my liquor longer," he announced victoriously. "Did you forget that I'm a sailor, Nova?"

Nova pushed himself up and squinted at him. His vision seemed a little foggy and he had some trouble focusing it in the dim lighting of the room. He steadied himself against the surface of the table and turned in his seat to fully face J, who had done the same. Both their knees were nearly touching each other. One of J's eyebrows was raised almost provokatively, as if anticipating a quippy remark from Nova, delivered in his usual haughty fashion.

Nova's thoughts however had slowed down considerably, and any sassy comments not only took longer to form, but also kept continuously slipping away from his grasp. They were like fluttering butterflies, that he tried catching with a net by flailing around clumsily.

His gaze fell once again on J's lips.

He studied them intently, the only point of clarity among the haziness, that had swallowed up the entire room. He noticed an incospicuous line on his lower lip, that was slightly lighter than the surrounding skin. Nova also detected some dryness there, and swallowed thickly, when the pink tip of a tongue darted out and swiftly wet the plushy mounds.

He moved upwards to observe J's tidy and painstakingly groomed moustache, that covered most of his upper lip. J always took such good care of his appearance, either out of vanity or some remnant of a habit, that had been left from the navy. Either way, Nova could finally appreciate all the effort that went into his looks, although he had never personally experienced a similar need for upholding those kind of things himself. He'd even thought such superficiality to be frivolous and only a huge waste of one's limited time, back in the day.

When an awkward smile pulled the corners of J's mouth, Nova couldn't help, but come up with a metaphor for his notions.

J's lips were like the box of Pandora, and his moustache was the lid. There was a forbidden mystery hidden beneath it, a temptation written on the polished ebony cover. A certain dread existed within it too. If he decided to be bold and take a peek inside, would he find the damnation of mankind, or pure unimaginable bliss?

A part of him, that was most likely the true personification of himself, was appalled at the whole idea, finding it extremely irrational and risky — not to mention inconsiderate too. Another part, that possessed lower inhibitions, incited him to simply give in and not think too much about the consequences.

Besides, hadn't he just two weeks ago made a conclusion, that the feelings that tormented him every waking moment of the day, might've been actually reciprocal?

Hadn't he belatedly realised after one of his and J's interactions, that the latter had been flirting with him? It was hard to prove afterwards, as he'd been oblivious in the moment and remained ignorant for over three following days, until the realization had suddenly dawned on him in the middle of a morning shower.

The optimist within him wanted to believe, that he was indeed special in J's eyes, and that his possible advances in the future wouldn't be outright rejected by him. He also wanted to think, that they were gradually approaching a point in their relationship, where all uncertainties and hesitations on Nova's part would simply vanish on their own, and he could finally be out with his feelings and bare his heart to J.

The pessimist and the realist were obviously more reserved at the concept. Afterall, any potential conflicts and misunderstandings between him and J would not just affect them on an individual level, but on the company level as well. In a worst case scenario, dallying with J in the wrong way and in the wrong place, could endanger his entire career and get him thrown out of NSR. Not a desirable outcome, admittedly...

Nova swayed slightly in place. He started feeling a strong tidal pull, that was dragging him towards the open sea and the lethargic fathoms below. A seagull flapped its wings in his field of view. The motion was obtrusive and irritating. He thought he heard the bird cackling at him, until the shrill noise started morphing into recognizable words.

Nova, do you copy?

The humming in his ears begun to subside, though his vision was still lagging behind.

"Earth to Nova!"

J raised his voice a little, waving his hand in his face and shaking him by one of his shoulders. That made Nova flinch a bit and return to the present. He brought his hand to his face and tried rubbing the fog out of his eyes to no avail. When he lowered his hand, he saw J leaning across his seat with a sympathetic smile on his face, which was only about ten inches from his own.

"I think you've had plenty to drink tonight," he said softly and moved Nova's glass, that only had a quarter of liquid remaining on the bottom away and out of his reach. Nova chased the movement absently and started drooping forward again. J caught him with two firm hands on his shoulders and gently pushed him into a more straight position.

Nova knew he was talking to him, but his ears registered no audio. Only the movement of J's mouth kept him anchored and prevented him from slipping back into the world of inebriated daydreams. He wasn't particularly adept at reading lips, but could still discern them wrapping around his name, and then spouting incoherent nonsense for an indefinable time, before going still.

A hurried resoluteness rushed over his mind — a reckless madness of some sort. The heady feeling cleared his senses for a fraction of a moment, as the speed of his heartbeat increased by double, and blood surged into his limbs. He felt like he was standing on the edge of a steep cliff, ready to jump off and plunge himself into the murky water below.

When J leaned closer and tilted his head questioningly at him, he saw every wrinkle and imperfection on his skin, and could almost count all of his eyelashes individually.

He drew in air and opened his mouth to say something, when Nova suddenly grabbed at his waist and surged forward.

He could hear J letting out a small noise, that was quickly stifled under Nova's lips, when he unceremoniously crashed them against his. He tasted the tangy, bitter flavor of whisky on them, but also a richer, more pleasant undertone. Nova had never understood the appeal of basically guzzling hand sanitizer, as he was more partial to sweeter drinks, but apparently J enjoyed it, since it was also one of the numerous quirks that he'd picked up while at sea and refused to drop on land.

A million thoughts raced crisscrossingly in his mind, and parts of his cerebral cortex, that had laid dormant for the better part of a decade, started activating and pushing all kinds of garbled signals into his neural network. He became aware of J's hands digging into his skin through the fabric of his shirt, and how he took shallow little sips of air through his nose. His body was rigid and he trembled slightly in Nova's hold.

It was as if cold water had been poured down Nova's back.

The delightful tickling warmth in his gut started turning into frosty, sharp prickles. His mind started overcasting with ominous, black thunder clouds, that shot jagged knives of lightning to the ground and growled at him menacingly. J doesn't like this; he's uncomfortable; you need to stop; you're hurting him!

Just as Nova was about to figuratively yank himself by the scruff of his neck and start hurriedly spitting out apologies and beg for forgiveness, he felt J pinching his lower lip between his own and sighing concedingly against his cheek.

The hand on his other shoulder relinquished its hold, and started climbing his neck all the way to his jaw and to the back of his ear. When the tips of J's silk covered fingers brushed the bare skin there, it made a shiver run down Nova's spine and a wave of euphoria wash over him. J's other hand snaked over and across his upper back and shoulder blades, until he had wrapped his arm snugly around him. Nova was forced to open his eyes out of pure reflex, when J's palm slid to the back of his head and tilted it into a perfect angle.

And when J hummed contently and deepened the kiss, Nova's eyes rolled back into his skull and he took a deep relieved breath.

The prickles that had chained him into place had melted, and he could feel sensation on his hands again.

He felt at J's coarse turtleneck sweater and gripped his waist and torso a little tighter, bringing him closer to his chest and almost dragging him into his lap. J used Nova's shoulders as leverage and raised himself higher, tilting his head even further to the side and sealing any remaining gaps between their lips.

He pushed in deeper and kept kneading and even nipping his lips every now and then, while carding his digits through Nova's short hair. Nova had to admit, that J's moustache tickled him a little. At the same time, he fretted over his own scratchy beard, remembering that the skin on J's scarred side was more sensitive than the rest, and not wishing to give him any serious scrapes or burns that could become infected.

When J's tongue experimentally licked the inner surface of his upper lip, he forgot about pretty much everything.

If he had been asked about his thesis, or the numerous scientific papers he'd written over the years after his graduation, — or even his music career — he would've probably stared at the questioner dumbly, not even able to recite his own name. The bar faded into the background, and he felt as if he was floating in zero gravity, with no concept of up or down. He clutched J even closer and boldly answered his explorations, getting self-accomplished gratification from the way he twisted in his grip and muffled a groan into his mouth.

They were practically wrapped around each other by now. Their breaths had started mingling and eventually blended into one. What J exhaled, he inhaled and vice versa, until the air became stale with too much carbon dioxide, and they were forced to separate and take deep, proper breaths.

J's once so tidy moustache was completely ruffled, his cheeks were flushed and he had a dreamy faraway look in his darkened eyes. He panted shudderingly and kept softly glenching and unglenching his fist on Nova's shirt. He shook his head to himself, licking his lips and chuckling almost scoldingly at Nova, who was still looking at him mesmerized.

"I'm going to be so cross with you if you don't remember this tomorrow," he said and smiled, despite the chastising tone.

Nova, ever the practical thinker, broke out of his trance at that and immediately started reaching into his pocket and fumbling for his cellphone.

"Don't worry. I'll set a reminder..." he mumbled distractedly and drew the device out. He tried tapping the code into the pinpad on the lock screen, pressing a wrong button three times, until he was let through and an assortment of apps greeted him. He chose the calendar app from a folder, while J kept laughing at him in either amazement, disbelief or the overall absurdity of the situation.

After poking the keyboard with his bulky thumb and writing a simple, barely legible message for his future self — who'd most likely wake up next morning with the mother of all headaches — he dismissively pushed the power button on the side and dropped his phone back into his pocket.

He grabbed at J again and tried leaning in, but was abruptly stopped with a finger pressed over his lips. J had sobered up and was now looking at him more seriously.

"As much as I'd like to pick up from where we left off," he said steadily, "—you're still drunk, Nova. We're both drunk."

He removed his finger once he sensed no protesting from Nova, and moved his hand to his cheek. All of a sudden, Nova began feeling very tired and yawned, despite attempting to stifle it. J chuckled and lightly stroked his thumb over his cheekbone.

"Exactly. Let's continue this some other day, when we're both dried out and can appreciate it better."

Nova looked at him dubiously, but was too drowsy to come up with a valid argument and keep pushing on the issue.

"... Alright," he conceded.

J let him go at that, and Nova was free to try and rub the sluggishness out of his eyes again. It didn't really make a major difference this time either, but at least the stinging helped with centering himself and returning back into the present moment. The euphoric initial phase of his drunkenness had passed, and left him with a weariness, that was swiftly overtaking his body in its entirety.

He got up from his seat, and almost tipped to the floor, when he felt blood rushing down from his head and into his legs. He gripped the back of the chair and slightly swayed in place, as if he was standing in a flimsy boat right in the middle of the Great Pacific Ocean, waves rocking him back and forth.

Once the dizzying feeling receded, he took a careful step and followed it with another. He began making his way towards the coat rack, but was stopped with a hand on his arm and J holding up his hoodie right in front of him. He had already dressed into his furred military coat.

Nova took the offered garment gratefully and slipped it on. J circled on his side and slithered his arm around his, until they were unequivocally arm in arm.

"I'll walk you home. Someone has to make sure you actually get there," he joked. He shifted to look at Nova, gentle concern written all over his features.

"Will you be able to stay upright?" he checked and started slowly dragging them both towards the door, tugging on Nova's arm.

"I might not have sea legs like you do, but I'll manage," Nova affirmed with a grunt, and made J snort.

"That's the spirit! One foot after the another, soldier!" he laughed, like they were climbing out of the trenches after a series of relentless artillery fire had ceased. He pushed the flaky door open with his side, the rusty bell attached above it making a slight jingling sound, until they were outside in the warm starry night.

Nova noticed his gaze automatically drifting towards the sky, trying to find a particular bright speck, that was Saturn. Although its moons were impossible to see from Earth with a naked eye, he still zoomed in and searched for the one, that had been named after a curious woman from Greek mythology. The gods had gifted her with a box, that should've never been opened, for it deceivably held all the plagues and curses of the world. Pandora could not resist the temptation for the unknown, and thus was enticed into opening the box, releasing sickness and evil upon humankind.

Nova's eyes dropped to the valiant companion on his side. A dopey and ridiculously mushy smile tweaked the corners of his mouth at the sight. J instinctively turned to him, and upon noticing the way Nova was staring at him, he blushed adorably, eyes twinkling with a thrilling sense of delight and flusteredness. He averted his gaze and muttered something about watching where they were going, but smiled pleasedly nonetheless.

What Nova hadn't remembered earlier from the original myth of Pandora was, that according to it, she had eventually closed the lid, leaving one thing on the bottom of the box, waiting for the time when it would be opened next.

Hope.

He huffed a soft chuckle to himself, and focused on the road ahead. The neon lights of Metro Division created a funky, vibrant path for the two late-night wanderers.

There was a long way to go still, but at least they could have a chance at trekking it together — being far closer to each other, than either of them would've ever been able to predict.

#no straight roads #nsr #no straight roads one-shot #neonnova one-shot #neon j gijinka #djss gijinka #neonnova #I didn't want to post this on AO3 because it probably wouldn't make much sense to anyone unless I linked the comic there for context #this is very self indulgent #remember folks: English is not my native language so this might seem a bit weird #I'm kinda nervous since this is only the second text I've ever published online #my writing

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